1 Jun 2000

Thu, 1 Jun 2000 12:51:20 GMT

Heh, pretty mental day at work.

Started well with the arrival of a iBook. My boss had already installed linux [you didn't see that coming :)] so I was tweaking the yaboot dual boot stuff. Didn't make much progress until I realised I was addressing the partitions as hdaX instead of hd:X. Fine after that. The iBook, although not a perminent addition to my desk, increases the number of computer on or under it to 4. Slightly excessive, perhaps, but will go down to 2-3 when I move over a new Linux machine [Athlon 650] and my current machine becomes an NT box.

The real comedy occured when our main web hosts decided a game of 'delete DBI and claim it was never offically supported' would be fun. They suggest installing the module ourselves. I was _really_ looking forward to adding -I/home/foo/PModules to every perl script, but now they appear to be getting their act together.

Surfed starting at Willey's homepage and ended up at the MIT wearable computer crew. Seriously cool stuff. Chorded keyboards seem a pretty good idea, but at $200 a pop I don't want to be buying one as a toy. Anyone use one of these day to day?

Plundis certifying me (cheers btw) made me think about my certification. The guidelines say an apprentice should have contributed to free software, and be mentored by working on a larger project. I haven't contributed anything solid yet, and I'm putting off finding a project to help on until I know enough C to not be a hinderance. So I sort of fall between Observer and Apprentice. I can't really see the point of certifying myself tho, and I've already written far to much about something I claim to have little interest in so I'll just leave it.

Someone who has now left the recentlog [doh] wondered how I could "know I should be using Debian". The comment was interesting because it made me realise how I was writing in defensive way in order to preempt flames and holy wars. The precise meaning was "I believe that Debian is superior both practically and ideologically and I intend to switch to it as soon as is practical. And don't flame me". Maybe I've read /. for too long.

30 May 2000

Tue, 30 May 2000 12:30:59 GMT

Spent this weekend installing RH 6.2 so that I can stop using windows as my desktop. I'm now able to sign up for a advogato account [I've been reading here for a few months now], without feeling like a hypocrite. Maybe I'm trying too hard.

I know I should be using Debian but I'm not going to start now, it would take weeks to update itself over my 28k modem. I'll wait for potato and/or my Janet connection.

My distribution history is quite entertaining, to me at least.
RH 5.0 -> SUSE 5.2 -> REDHAT 6.0 -> Mandrake 7.0 -> RH 7.0

Spent the whole of Sunday recompiling my kernel. SCSI problems, unresolved symbols, and strangely unstable kernels that rebooted my machine when compiling a replacement for them. Very amusing. I think including PII speed enhancements and forgetting to change processor type from 386 probably didn't help.

Figured out that changing the kernel version so that modules get put in a new /lib/modules/* directory is a good idea. So I'm now running linux-2.2.14-stu, nice :) Feel free to tell me why this is Wrong, because I'm sure it is.

Now I've just got an arms length list of stuff to do before I can get stuck into the fun stuff (Digiclone and learning C).

So, nice to be here and I hope that I can be a fraction as inciteful as some of you are.

Advogato blog for sturob

1 Jun 2000

30 May 2000