Older blog entries for splork (starting at number 7)

I feel unclean. I had to buy a $20 UltraATA66 controller for my new hard drive since my motherboard's controller didn't like it. I never thought I would intentionally buy an IDE controller. What a waste of a PCI slot. Anyways it all works now and I built a kernel with the multiide and reiserfs and usb patches to play around with.

"Did you have a nice holiday?"
"I was in solitary confinement!"
"Oh, its good to get some time to yourself."

Advogato UI suggestion: When posting comments, I sure wish it would leave the original article I'm replying to (or at least its title, subject, author name and headline paragraph) on the reply form page.

As it is now, I have to open a new browser window and pop the article back up in it; then deal with switching windows...

(this wouldprevent me from being "lazy" and referring to "the author" in my reply rather than using their name ;)

What is an Oasis?

Cool. We just hit Oasis 002 on our project at work. We've decided to kill the term milestone and use Oasis instead. Milestones imply regular intervals of progress. An Oasis is a nice place you come to (hopefully quite often) while wandering towards your goal. It's also not a good idea to skip an Oasis and try and head directly for one further down the line, you'll die of dehydration or code failure, whichever comes first.

Thanks goes to my coworker Bram for suggesting the Oasis term.

sigh.. after posting a response to an article I notice the misspelling (so much for checking it three times)...

I got back from the UK on Saturday. That was a great vacation; it was my first time to another country outside of North America. I've dropped off my various rolls of film to at Safeway to be developed and put on a kodak Picture CD so I can webify them.

The first thing I did when I got back was see these instructions on using an Apple Airport without the need for a mac. I went down to Fry's and bought one as well as borrowing a Lucent WaveLAN Silver card from work. Wow. I'm impressed. That was extreemly easy to setup. The airport is acting like a bridge between my ethernet and the airwaves for me.

I ended up using the java airport configurator to change the settings on my airport rather than the mentioned windows based tool.

Now, does anyone out there have any good ideas on howto setup a wavelan card to automatically figure out which encryption keys to use when it gets plugged in? (as in, pick the correct keys from a list; I'd like to use a different key at home than I do at work).

Also, anyone know if Gold cards can speak lowly Silver-style crypto if simply given a small key? (ie: Gold cards hardly cost anymore from techstore.com so I'd rather not buy a Silver card even if thats all I need)

I just publicly posted the first release of my Python Interface To BerkeleyDB 3.0 . Check it out if you're into that sort of thing.

In other news, I'm heading off to the UK for two weeks vacation tomorrow. I wanted to get the py-bsddb3 thing out there before I left in hopes that someone will discover, report and fix a bug while I'm gone. :)

Grr.. I spent most of the day trying to track down a bug that was appearing in my Python interface to BerkeleyDB 3.0 causing the python process coredump (*gasp*)! I believe I finally tracked it down to a bug in the BerkeleyDB 3.0.55 library when aborting a transaction while using subdatabases, it'll be interesting to hear back from them on this one. I sent them a simply example in C that reproduces it on my system.

For anyone interested, I'll be releasing my Python BerlekeyDB 3.0 interface very soon and will post a note here as well as to sleepycat and on freshmeat.

PS if anyone actually reads these, A certification would be cool.

A friend just introduced me to advogato.org today. I'm impressed (and a personal fan of reputation systems). I see much more intelligent and useful technical issue discussions here than that other dot.org will ever be capable of.

More later... Certification would be useful for those who know me from linux-usb or cfengine (perl-cfd).