Older blog entries for uweo (starting at number 23)

Junta was the next game, and a funny one, again.

Continued to work on the news server today. Work? Rewrite of almost anything. Fixed a few bugs, added a few test cases. Spent most of the time thinking about some major design problems (like how to get a moderately fast history without needing lots of memory). No conclusion yet, but a few ideas:

1. move the history to an own daemon process.This should take care of the ever-changing API problem :-)
2. leave the group index as it is for now.
   can use a daemon for that, too, but later ...
3. the history stuff will be accessible through a udp socket, just the commands will have to go through a pipe or unix daemon socket.
4. not having an overview is fine, except for performance. Possible speedup: move the article header caches from the nntps daemons to a cache daemon.
   Is it worth the pain? (not that performance is _so_ bad, but the whole stuff is slower than i like it. The parsing isn't the problem, it's the article read time.)

Apart from that: i'm not feeling well. Am i catching a cold or is it because i didn't sleep enough? (the later is true, anyway)

Gaming evening. And today is the first time in all the long years that i'm certainly not going to win britannia.
That's what you get if everybody else allies against you. Should i get the lowest number of points i'll choose Junta for the next game.

Since the last diary entry i've worked on ftpcopy (0.3.7 released - a bugfix release only), which now has a test suite. I've spent about 16 hours or so on that, including fixes for the bugs i found during that. The time was well invested.

I also worked on upgpverify. It already had a test suite (yes, i took this project serious). The 0.3.3 version adds the ability to deal with signed news using the X-PGP-Sig header.

Junta will almost certainly be the next game.

Work wasn't funny this week (it wasn't since i came back from vacation).

fefe found another bug in ftpcopy.

And i wasn't even surprised when i saw his mail. In fact i had a bad feeling about the last changes in the handle of the primary target. I wasn't comfortable with initialentity() (too much "magic"), and thought about rewriting it, but then all my tests passed, and i told myself "new code is worse than working code".

Right. Too bad that there was no working code.

Regarding testing: I really need to automate the tests.

mrorganic: i love you merkins. If you don't know how to fly an airplane or to protect your valuable espionage machines then be quiet, but don't call for more military action. (killing a chinese pilot certainly _is_ military action)

A war because you lost your espionage toy? Get real. The world will be a safer place without it.
The chinese usually don't kill foreigners, but war is quite likely to.

End of flame.

olandgren wrote:

It's really surprising how easy life becomes when you realize that you are competent, can get stuff done, and are not something completely worthless. It's very interesting how the positive feedback cycle works.

Yes, but never forget that lesson. And don't forget to help others to get competent, for your own sake.

Q: What happens with this code:

sockfd=accept(fd, (struct sockaddr *)&sin, &sinl);
if (sin.sin_family==AF_INET6) 
  if (sinl<sizeof(struct sockaddr_in6))
   return ERROR;
/* ok */

if it happens to meet a glibc-2.2 / linux-2.2.18 system?

A: The kernel sets sinl to 24. sizeof(struct sockaddr_in6), if taken from netinet/in.h, is 28.

Things like this aren't likely to make me happy.

Back from vacation. 180 hours ago the world looked quite good. Now it's cold, rainy and dark. Oh well.
No, i don't mind rain. It's just that the rain is cold, which isn't really how i like it.
Oh well, i'll return some day. I liked the people.

I released ftpcopy-0.3.6 on tuesday and also update the strhash distribution. I also began to cleanup the udpserver code, but stumbled at the point where i had to update the documentation.

The problem is that pod is not good enough, texinfo can't generate manual pages. Let's sort the important points:

1. i'm not going to duplicate information. It's bad enough that code, --help output and documentation can get out of sync, anything more is just not acceptable.
2. any system i work on shall have all needed tools installed by default.
3. i want manual pages. They don't have to be perfect.
4. i want reasonable html output (this rules out pod).
5. i also like printed manuals.

I feel a temptation to write the documentation in texinfo and use a slightly modified man2html for the manual pages, but that's still not good enough.

It seems that i'm never satisfied with whatever solution i use for manuals. I started with ASCII text, then i used texinfo, tried a number of other documentation systems, went back to texinfo (using a number of wrappers around it, it didn't like umlauts back then), tried html, tried a number of html wrappers, want back to nroff / man, and finally i tried pod. Not a single solution lasted for more than a year.

Work hasn't been funny this week. I'm again at the point i've been in september and october, and that's alarming, meaning that i'm not feeling well here anymore (and judging from what i hear some other people share this feeling).
I'm tired of doing patchwork on other peoples projects, especially since i don't see any chance to finish my own stuff. I'm also tired of getting spam complaints. I'm tired of the misorganisation here. I'm tired of not having the wrench needed to assemble a 19'-rack (it's not the only tool missing).

Almost nothing happened at home. I'm tempted to move. But where to? Simple answer: somewhere near the coast (being able to reach the sea in less than 2.5 hours? Really tempting). But it seems that 99% of the job openings are in the other direction.

To make it short: I'm still totally demotivated and only waiting for the vacation to start, which will happen 2001-03-03.
I'm going to be _far_ away from any computer, i hope.

But still, there are promises to keep and things to be done:

• wrote the qmail-sendmail replacement, which just replaces the commandline sendmail emulation in the qmail package (in case you wonder: you almost certainly don't need it).
• released ftpcopy-0.3.5. There's no really important reason to update.
• released upgpverify-0.3.2 , a pgp/gpg filter for use in .qmail files. It checks the signature, decrypting if needed, and call's another program which can read de-mimed payload on a file descriptor. It shall replace the hackish pgp stuff used in the BBS (i remember having promised to replace that years ago).
• "released" (somewhat) cacco-0.4.0.tar.gz, a collection of tools to summarize cisco accounting files ("show ip accounting"). The documentation is pretty minimal. I packaged that just to keep a promise given almost 10 months ago.
  Besides it's quite a bit faster than the stuff my boss did.

I spent an evening trying to find out why lrzsz was unable to get stuff from a friends computer. It turned out that some piece of hardware at his site "compressed" a series of "@" bytes to just two "@" bytes. I really think his self-made internal communication system is at least a bit broken.

I didn't work on any piece of free software in december, without even noticing it. Motivation is everything, and i'm complete demotivated. Living in a building yard isn't really helpful, and that idiot of a worker who just entered the wrong room and moved a lot of papers into the dustbin ... well, to make it short, i still wonder what to do to him for that. It took me weeks to recover from that.

But the whois server was ready when he was needed (which was a few days later then planned, but that's ok). And it's used in two places by now, and seems to be _really_ stable (in both cases the source of support problems is identical to the source of the data, something which i'm no responsible for. Fortunately).

Released ftpcopy-0.3.4 and iodo-0.2.4 in january (the later is a collection of tools to create sockets and execute some other process, possibly under another user id).

fefe: of course size is important.

It's now three weeks without gas heating and water in my rooms (in all my rooms, though - i originally hoped to have water in the bath room).