Older blog entries for mobius (starting at number 160)

12 Nov 2001 (updated 12 Nov 2001 at 21:32 UTC) »

Yah, there should be an apostrophe at the end of "users" in my article reply. Oopsies.

Spent a couple of hours today trying to figure out why apache mysteriously stopped after an upgrade. AFAICT, I needed to have the order of two statements switched in httpd.conf. Very confusing. The worst part was that it was completely silent when dying. Ah well, fixed now.

I have now learned to use apt_preferences to pin packages at certain releases. Now I need to code up a cron job to figure out when those are updated, so I can schedule a mass-upgrade session.

I pinned both apache and exim, since I've had problems with both in the recent past(both config file things!), and I'm trying to run a pseudo-production server here. Hmm, I should pin mailman too. [done]. Nothing else is as critical as those packages.

Update: there were(are?) still some problems with my apache configuration. I got images working again, and allowed IDS to be executed. Bah, I say. Does anybody know exactly WTF happened to make apache so unhappy with me? Did it suddenly start obeying some guidelines that it was ignoring before?

Breaking news! Microsoft invents free software!

Has anyone else noticed how a lot of the cool 'new' features of the winXP desktop are copied from Gnome/KDE/every other linux WM. Hmm, those evil linux hippies must have stolen them from the pre-pre-pre-alpha release of XP!

Re my last diary entry: I was on campus and awake for 33 hours, then I went home. I'm back now; hopefully this silly assignment gets done soon.

8 Nov 2001 (updated 8 Nov 2001 at 11:53 UTC) »

I never thought that 35 large pizzas could disappear so quickly. Geez, you'd think we were starving students or something.

JavajavajavajavajavajavajavajavajavajavajavajavajavajavajavajavaSNAPjavaaHAHAHAHA!

Let's see... I got on campus yesterday at about 10am... It's now about 5am. Only 19 hours so far. Not so bad. Tomorrow afternoon will be sleep time, (probably also on campus, but hey), and I have a midterm to study for on Friday. I'm setting myself up to crash, apparently.

Though I'm still awake, and on only one Coke and one Pepsi. And apparently my knee is now shaking due to caffeine. Hopefully I finish this program before the sugarhigh wears off.

The ECE server had a catastrophic failure today. Many, many files, gone. Possibly the backups as well. Crappy. Good thing I slacked last week and didn't start my signals lab.

Still slugging it out with Java. Time to learn how to do morphing.

I had to bend the phototransistor in my mouse a little, and now I have a very choppy x-axis response. Whee.

Bah, gestures. This is why they are not a good idea(IMNSHO):

Let's all play "Guess the gesture"! I just drew some shapes in the gimp, and dutifully copied them into ASCII. Here they are:

     ____
    |__    |___-_
  / |               |
 |                    \
/                      |
|                     /
 \                /
  |               |
  |              /
   \____---'
------------____
|                    |
|                    |
|                    |
|                    |
|                    |
|____             |
|      |____-----
            ___
             /   |
             |    |
             |      \
            /         \
            |            |
           /            |
      __-'              \
     |         ____     \
     |_-----'        `----\

These are the twisted products of my low-quality mouse, which seems to have issues with the X axis. Can _you_ write software to figure out what I was trying to draw?

I just fixed (for Microsoft values of fixed) a friend's b0rken win98 hard drive. It would no longer boot, apparently due to having the boot files deleted and/or win.exe. I dug up my old DOS super-rescue floppy, which contains everything to bootstrap a DOS machine to a usable state. It's been a while since I used edit; I think I need a new floppy with vi on it. It's an interesting project; create a floppy containing everything to make me productive in DOS. I'll be making disk images for general distribution when I'm done.:)

Awwww, I can't upgrade my debian box to windows XP. That makes me Sad(for Happy values of sad). [My regards to the hard-working WINE developers who made this relevation possible. <vbg>] See the screenshot link previously posted if you care.

There's nothing like telling the world about a pet project to make you notice the HUGE bugs in it, and how ugly the code is. I just finished fixing said problems(mostly) in clab(now version 0.1). If you downloaded it, the new version works much, much better. Like, deleting entries when you tell it to, and not having magic options.

Good night, everybody.

24 Oct 2001 (updated 24 Oct 2001 at 05:22 UTC) »

I just spent an hour pissing around with my icewm preferences. I got rid of the 'start' menu on the taskbar, in an attempt to break that bad habit. Key combos are the way to go. Now a button to pop up an xterm owns that real estate. Screenshot of my new background image and nifty-ized taskbar.

I also cleaned out the crap from the global 'menu' file, since debian's menu program handles everything anyway.

What else? Midterm today, I think I did not too badly. Midterm tomorrow night, which is going to suck.

clab(command line address book) now has a webpage here. there's even *gasp* some documentation.

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