Older blog entries for mascot (starting at number 28)

Er, oops. This morning I typed 'halt' into the wrong window, and brought down my server :-P My uptime! Noooo!

Well, you know you haven't rebooted in a while if your bootup scripts don't actually work any more. It took a fair amount of hacking and two further reboots before the thing came back up again. Apparently, mount doesn't like me running

mount / -o remount,rw

any more, no idea why (no, I haven't deleted the root fs from my fstab!). But this works (or at least, it seems to):

mount /dev/root / -o remount,rw

Ah well...

Ten days?! Is it really ten days since I last posted here? Seems like only yesterday! Oh well...

Let's see now... what's happened within the last 10 days...

• MyAddressBook v0.1.1 - this is a security release, which mainly fixes some HTML quoting (i.e. it does some now!) plus a couple of other big-ish bugs. No new features; they're waiting for 0.2.0 . On the slight chance that someone downloaded 0.1.0, though, you're very much recommended to upgrade to 0.1.1 (or the latest CVS version).
   
• Intranet Menu - wrote a MySQL-and-PHP-based intranet menu system for our favourite supermarket company (i.e. my Dad's work). It does some IP address / subnet checking, so machines only get menu items relevant to them (i.e. on machines in stores with 'Existing Web Based App X', that will get displayed on their menu). Now if this was for me, I probably wouldn't bother with writing an admin site, and I'd do it all via phpMyAdmin. But in this case, it's got to be User Friendly (or at least, Non-Unixey, Non-MySQLey IT Admin Friendly) so I had to write an extensive admin interface. The admin interface is probably about 20-30 times the size of the front-end :-)
  
  This is hardly a large project - I wrote it in odd half-hours here and there, in evenings and at lunch-times - but it marks another conversion to Linux. It looks like my menu system is set to roll out across their WAN within the next few months, served from a Linux server centrally - and this will be this company's first on-site Linux server. Yes, really. (Incidentally, they had two off-site servers at a local ISP, hosting their web site (before they moved to a Managed Service, and NT.... grrr....) - and I set up one (the firewall), and knew root's password and performed routine administration (and on one case, emergency administration) on both. They really should start paying me for this.)
   
• 486-based Debian box - it turns out that that box might be useful after all, since The Powers That Be were persuaded that it probably was a good idea to turn on IMAP, otherwise they'd have to buy thousands of new machines just to run their snazzy Java-based iNotes client.
   
• University admissions - just like buses, I wait ages for acknowledgement of my application, then three arrive at once :-) At least something's happening... although I've got to wait till next January before I find out where I'm going. And, for the record, I'm the 4020th person in England to send in their application this year. It pays to be before the rush...

Resuming downloads

Grr.... I've been trying to download the latest Mozilla source code (30Mb) in chunks over my ISDN line. Fine, except what I didn't realise was that Mozilla use multiple DNS records to load-balance between a few servers which contained different versions of the file!. (I was downloading the "latest source", and one server had a different idea about what "latest" meant.) So I managed to download a stripey tarball... a section of one file, then a section of the second, then back to the first again... and so on. Oh well... I'm going to download using the server's IP address in future.

Moving goalposts

Remember my attempt to make a 486-based Linux box which I've been talking about for a few days? Well, apparently (now they tell me!) it's got to run Lotus (IBM) iNotes - a Java-based, IE-specific Lotus Notes client, which needs a 400MHz processor. So I won't get that on Linux on my 486 then.

Actually, it might end up useful, if I can persuade them to turn on Notes's IMAP server. But the chances of that are rather close to zero. ("We have paid for iNotes! We *will* use iNotes!" etc. Sigh.)

Electronics homework (lots)

Well, I like electronics, but there is a limit! It didn't help that I only rememered it fairly late. No time for further hacking...

Responses

Stevey: I was using Konsole, which does seem to resize when you run 'reset'. xterm doesn't. That's useful to know; thanks for the pointer.

salmoni: a novel way to block ads (quite literally!). I'll try that. Thanks. (Unfortunately, it doesn't reclaim the wasted space for browsing...)

MyAddressBook

Oops, I found some security holes in MyAddressBook today (not dissimilar to those which were until recently in Advogato!). They're mostly fixed now, thanks to PHP's very useful htmlspecialchars function.

Oops...

I'll have to be careful what I link to from Advogato in future. It turns out my university personal statement got spidered by Google. This is not good. People (presumably those who, like me, need to write a good personal statement to enter university) were finding it by searching for "personal statement computer science" amongst other things. I just hope no-one was stupid enough to copy it... :-(

Whiptail, and ponderings on C

Thanks for the Whiptail hack, Stevey, that's great. Only one minor problem - because I have to run reset after I've finished, my terminal window jumps back to being 80 columns wide. Never mind, though, I can live with that - definitely a huge improvement over not displaying anything :-)

I suppose I'd better start learning a useful language myself soon... I don't think I'll be able to get by without C for much longer. The reason I haven't learnt C beyond the basics yet is because C is so fiddly. I don't want to have to compile every time I run! I probably need to find a decent IDE that I like...

Still shrinking Debian...

In my ongoing quest to shrink a Debian install, I've decided to ditch Metacity for that old favourite, WindowMaker. WindowMaker is a lot smaller (since it doesn't need Gnome) - and a huge amount faster on a 486. This has saved me a lot of hard disk space.

Browsers: Phoenix was far too slow (a number of seconds between typing text and it appearing), so I've gone for Opera. Shame about the adverts though.

Shrinking Debian

I'm getting there... I've used 180Mb, and I now have X, Metacity, a couple of program launchers, and a couple of 3270 (IBM mainframe) clients. Still no browser, though, and 30Mb left to work with. The browser will probably be Opera or Phoenix. (Not Galeon; no room for all the Gnome stuff it needs!)

gene

Further artwork for the Gene website today... a brand new logo should appear there any day now :-) A big improvement over my incredibly tacky temporary logo.

dialog and whiptail

Thanks to Stevey for volunteering to have a look into the fault I mentioned yesterday.

Shrinking Debian

I tried Debian for the first time today (what took me so long, I wonder?). Not as my main distro for my PC - I remain firmly attached to Gentoo - but on an ancient machine I'm trying to set up as a sort of thin client containing only an X server, a web browser, and x3270. This is a demo of something that might end up replacing a load of dumb terminals at my Dad's work, since they're changing e-mail system from a mainframe-based one to a web-based one.

My mission is to create a Linux installation with the above-mentioned features, on the lowest-spec machine possible. I'm starting out with a 486 DX/2 50 MHz machine with 24 Mb of RAM and a 255 Mb hard disk (this was my first computer, incidentally, but upgraded from its original 25 MHz / 4 Mb / 129 Mb configuration!).

The main barrier at the moment is disk space. The Debian base system takes up half of my 215 Mb data partition - and that's without X etc. I'm still trying to get the absolute bare minimum of packages, but I may have to end up swapping disks. I'm thinking about using the e2compr disk compression patch, but I think that might be terrible on a 50 MHz machine....

dialog and whiptail

A gripe about an annoying bug in these two programs.

Firstly, some background info: these programs display dialog boxes in text mode, from shell scripts. They have a number of modes of operation, e.g. a yes/no box, a message box, an input box, etc. And an "info box" - which is different in that it's supposed to draw the dialog on the screen and then exit immediately, leaving the dialog on the screen, but allowing the shell script to continue executing and to display another dialog when it is ready. E.g. an infobox could be used for a "please wait" message.

But the infobox mode only works when TERM="linux", i.e. on text consoles. If you try and run it in xterm etc, then no dialog appears, just a blank screen. (I suspect that actually the dialog is drawn, but the screen is blanked on exit, i.e. immediately afterwards!) This is annoying, and I can't find a way around it.

If anyone knows a workaround, or an alternative dialog program which has the feature I need but doesn't suffer from this problem, then please tell me. Thanks.

Mailing lists or forums?

Further work on the MyAddressBook website today. The current dilemma is this: to use mailing lists, or to use forums? From the end-user's point of view, mailing lists are obviously better for quick responses (not many people will check the forum regularly), but mailing lists are much more fiddly than forums if you just want to ask one question.

The ideal solution - which SourceForge claims to do, but it doesn't appear to work - is a combination of mailing list and forum. I.e. an archive interface to a mailing list which you can also post from. Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to be achievable, since although the text says you can post, there is no Post button! (I've filed a support request on SF to try and get this resolved.)

So it looks like I'll have to settle for one or the other (since having separate lists and forums would be very confusing). But which one?

Yesterday

I didn't submit a diary entry yesterday, because I went to London for the day with school (me, a few friends, and our form teacher) to visit the Science Museum, the Faraday Museum at the Royal Institution, and to listen to a lecture (entitled "Mathematics, Magic, and the Electric Guitar") at the Royal Society. And we saw the original Newton's Principia - scary to think how many problems in maths this one book had caused us :-) Great fun, but I got back very late and very tired. London is exhausting...

Today

Today was almost as hectic - it was the school's "Founders Day", which meant transporting two-thirds of the school (probably about 700 pupils) across Bradford. And since I'm a prefect, I got the privelige of carrying lots of chairs, and managing the scrum of 700 people all trying to crowd into a corner to try and find their bags at the end... :-P

Grr. Perhaps I'll have time for something interesting tomorrow. Homework just stacks up...

Yet another important addendum...

Now, the Advogato Virus guy (tttt) has found a way to forge certifications. He used a few accounts, including mine and raph's, to gain himself Master status. What happens in Advogato accounts now may or may not be caused by the owner of the account...

KDE

Still trying to compile KDE 3.1 from CVS. I think it wasn't working because my two versions of Qt 3 were conflicting. Hopefully I can get away with running the CVS version of Qt in place of my old (stable) one.

I wish I had a faster connection :-P So much CVS work is leaving my ISDN a little exhausted...

Life

Went to a nature reserve near Barnsley (about an hour's drive away from where I live) which I'd never been to before - Old Moor Wetland Centre. I thought I knew all the good nature reserves within range, but it turns out I was wrong. This one is really excellent; if you happen to live close, and you're interested in that kind of thing, I recommend it. Plus I saw a Spotted Crake (that's a rare bird, for less-informed readers).

[It does have an official website, but it's not particularly useful since it refers to images on someone's C: drive, and the links are all dead :-) ]