Older blog entries for nelsonrn (starting at number 9)

Lost my iPAQ earlier this month. Sucked big-time. Went out and bought another. The old one had 32M ram / 32M flash. New one has 64M ram / 16 M flash. Also got a pcmcia sleeve, so now I can do wireless. Got myself two Linksys access points. I'm using them as access points now, but I'm expecting to use them to hook up my neighbors by putting them in bridging mode.

Another beautiful day on the water. I'm getting better at the stroke. The catch is the hardest part for me right now. I either get in the water too soon or too late. It's got to be spot-on, within about 50 milliseconds. Anything else and you slow the boat down.
-russ

Many moons have passed since last I diarized. Linux iPAQ (LiPAQ) now has CF sleeve, and CF Ethernet card. It's cool to run x2x. Move the cursor down below the screen, and it appears on your handheld. Enough about me, let's talk about you. -russ

Finished Goblet of Fire a few weeks ago, so I can resume normal life. No, I'm not going to tell you who dies. Got a Kinesis Contour keyboard, in an attempt to address my RSI. It's nice to use my thumbs for backspace and enter, but I don't like the way I have to reach with my thumbs to hold ctrl and enter. The perfect keyboard has not yet been invented.

I've got a Compaq iPaq on order, along with the PCMCIA sleeve. Looking forward to the GPS and camera sleeves, although they're still deep in development. Yes, of course, I'm going to reflash it with Linux. I suppose the Microsoft crap doesn't suck so very badly, but I know there'll be an itch I want to scratch, and no way is it worth learning Microsoft tools in order to do it.

I wish electronic design was easier. I wish that someone made a digitally-controlled motor. I want to tell the motor "Go here and take X ms to do it." It could make a lot of neat hacks much easier to do. Another hack I'm closer to actually doing is to take a PIC or 8051 with an A/D converter, and hook it to a hobbyist servomotor. I'll generate the pulse needed to control it, and measure the motor drive signal with the A/D. When the motor gets driven, I'll command the motor to run in that direction. That way, I could position something by hand, and yet also instruct the computer to move it back to that position.

In my copious spare time, -russ

Diary entry?? You must be kidding!! I haven't finished Boglet of Fire yet!

Sometimes I feel like I'm never getting ahead with the money. First we bought another 143 acres, then we paid our taxes (both cost about the same). Now it's a new car (Subaru Outback), and taxes again!

If I could ever get ahead, just for a few months, I could do *everything* I've been dreaming about doing. Write the qmail book. Write a CORBA interface to qmail. Write a ui to the CORBA interface.

There's a bazillion thing I want to do. I've just gotta quit fooling around and become wealthy, so I can do the things Russ wants to do, not the things my customers want me to do.

Beautiful day rowing (I row crew in a four-oar boat). Did some exercises: pause and hold, cut the cake, and double pause. Almost no wind and moderate temperatures. Hard to beat a day like this one, except that the heel strap on the stretcher for my seat had a loose screw. Said screw put a hole in my heel which hurts like hell now.

Got the Canon BJC-250 printer going on my wife's redhat box. Searched and searched through linuxconf looking for the printer configurator. Oops -- it's in printtool, not linuxconf. Or maybe it is in linuxconf, but I couldn't find it, so it may as well not be there.

Installed Word Perfect because she had been using WP6 for Windows previously. WP was no help -- it didn't have a BJC-250 driver. I had to install ghostscript's bj600 driver using printtool, and configure WP to print postscript.

Thank God for postscript, and ghostscript! Unix printing would be a nightmare without them.

A Turkish customer who unilaterally gave themselves a 10% discount on my bill after the work was done wants me back. Ha! That's too bad, really, because I got to like Turkey. But I can't work for customers I don't trust.

Might actually get back to working on the qmail book one of these days.

Well, I got past the authentication hurdle. Part of the problem of trying to mix two different types of authentication. Java wants to set a cookie, but sqwebmail wants to use a long URL with login information. So I hacked in a special type of cookie-based login for sqwebmail.

Also, sqwebmail currently writes out a lot of its own HTML. Too much HTML. So I'm changing it so its substitutions have parameters. The parameters will be HTML tags. You'll still be able to edit the raw HTML using an HTML editor, although some things might look funny.

Work, work, work, work. Back to work.

No time to write a diary entry. Deadline today on the education.com email system. And authentication still isn't working!

Hacked, replied to email, read slashdot. Just like every other day.

Signed up for an advogato account. Ranted (again) about how badly the autoconf/automake toolchain sucks, and how miserable it makes developers who don't use it every day.

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