My Western Digital drive went from intermittantly bad to intermittantly good, so I replaced it with a venerable Quantum 850Mb that has been in almost continuous use for the past 5 years. Sadly, the software I use every day consumes more than 850Mb, and NFS mounting the drive in my server was just too slow, so I bought a new Maxtor 160Gb. This was a completely ridiculous purchase considering that I barely used the 10Gb capacity of the drive that died, but with things like CRPM and the CBDTPA looming, I thought I should get the largest drive I could afford while unrestricted drives are available. So that's in the server and the server's 60Gb drive is in my desktop. The kernel only sees 137Gb of the drive's capacity - apparently I need a new controller to see the entire 160Gb. Sigh.

Work has been interesting lately, with talk of a merger with "a medium sized Montreal computer services firm". I know the name of the firm but it hasn't been released publically. This has led to a good deal of Fear and Uncertainty at work.

I am currently trying to eliminate the need to restart X between users for our software. This is required to disconnect all X clients and generate a new MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE-1 key for the new user. Killing all X clients without restarting is easy, but generating a new key seems to be impossible. The documentation led me to believe that you could delete the key from the .Xauthority file, shared between client and server, then add a new one, but doing so does NOT remove it from the server's access list, which seems to only get read at startup. X11R6 defines a security extension that allows you to generate and remove keys. But generating a key does not add it to the X server's list, and you can't even do so manually, so the XSecurityGenerateAuthorization function seems nothing more than a cumbersome PRNG. Ah, but with the ..RemoveAuthorization function I could generate a few thousand keys before the Xserver starts, dole them out one at a time to users, and revoke old keys when the user logs out, right? Well yes, except that Revoke requires an auth_in identifier for the key that is only available from Generate, which generates keys I can't use! Finally, I thought of a kludge: X has an -audit option that prints a message when clients connect and disconnect. I could watch for "invalid" clients and kill them. Sadly, an exhausive search of the X documentation reveals no way to translate the number -audit prints into something actually useful, like a Window XID. If I am wrong about any of this, please let me know, but after a lot of experimentation it really looks that way.

My USB DAC project is progressing slowly. I need to etch a circuit board for the USB controller since it's surface mount. For practice, I have been trying to etch a 24Cxx EEPROM programmer, but many of the traces end up being too thin. For something as simple as the programmer, I can retouch them with a resist pen, but the USB controller board is too complex for that. Also, PCB is possibly the most user-surly application I have ever used. Very few commands work as documented, and many don't work at all. Several times, I have been reduced to randomly pressing function keys until I select the tool I want to use. If there was a suitable Free vector graphics program I would use that instead, but I haven't been able to find one.

On a sadder note, I haven't worked on the Polegame in so long that it should be declared legally dead. For now.