Older blog entries for wannabe (starting at number 6)

27 Dec 2000 (updated 27 Dec 2000 at 23:44 UTC) »

Today I finally did a kind of alpha testing of the fidonet to news to mail gate that I'm planning. And it worked :-) Now I've got to do some real testing with it: feeding it with lotsa articles and so on. But anyway, it's a good start :-) I found some more people in IRC doing things alike. It's great that there's such a "movement" in this field. The problem is that everyone is doing it in his own way O:-)

It's getting harder to learn new things in danish :-/ I subscribed to SSLUG's "misc" mailing list, but it seems that nobody wrote today :-m Weird. Anyway, it's Xmas; so maybe in a few days the mails begin to appear. I'm thinking in "parking" danish for a while and dedicate my efforts to swedish or norwegian: they're very similar and maybe there's more active people in IRC ;-) Poor Kenneth must be fed up with my mails O:-) Tilgive mig, Kenneth :-) Today I'll look for a sslug-related channel in IRC. I'm sure there is one, though ... well, GPUL hasn't got one, maybe SSLUG hasn't either :-m

My short holiday ended. Today I've started again to study (there are exams in ... argh! three weeks! =:-m), and that will keep me a little from the other things I'd like to do. Not very much really, because if I said I studied so much that I didn't anything else I'd be lying O:-)

And what else? :-m I think that's all, today has been more of a TV watching day. Understand me: I hadn't seen "Antz" :-) And there's nothing more comforting to me that watching a good movie while having breakfast. Hey, there are people that like wearing black lingery; I'm not that weird ;-P

Argh. I've been discovered. jacobo already knows who I am. Man, I really hate this thing of being famous.

A lot of changes

First of all, I'm now turgon@debian.org - yep, I'm a Debian member! :-) Now I have to solve a few problems with dupload that keep me from uploading my packages. If I don't do so maybe they kick me out of the gang =:-m (ouch).

I've done a mail-news gate. Yes, I know there are already a lot of them. Yes, I know they all work well. It just happened that I wanted to do something with a different approach :-) The program is called YANG ("Yet Another News Gate"), and I'll put a webpage with it soon. It works quite well, though it needs a little "real life" tuning. My first aim with it was reading and writing news with Mutt, and now it seems to do that so well that I thought I'd put it on public domain :-P One of the things that kept me from releasing it is that the code is *awful* O:-) But you'll see when it's out.

I'm learning danish, thanks to Kenneth ChristiƔnsen (kanikus?). He has a LearnDanish-HOWTO that was my first help in doing that. I'm sure you think that, following the tradition, I should put here something in danish. Keep waiting ;-) Learning danish has had in me the effect of having a lot of curiosity for new languages. I plan to learn german and dutch some day. Of course, I won't learn any of these languages to a "master" level; but if I achieve a good practical written level I'll be happy. Maybe I learn swedish too, since it's quite similar to danish; but for now, I'm just playing with the idea. Maybe I stop with all this language thing in a few weeks, maybe I don't. We'll see; it's funny anyway :-) I'll do my own "Learning-Danish-HOWTO" these days, taking the info from Kenneth's doc, another one I found on the Internet and my own personal experience and thoughts. I've tried to hang on some danish IRC channels, but people seem to be quite busy with queries, because when I'm there nobody speaks. I can't believe they already hate me - it usually takes four or five minutes to do so ;-)

The language thing came, besides Kenneth's howto, when a friend showed me the music of Hedningarna, a swedish/finnish "folk" (you'd understand why I put it like that if you'd listened to it) group. Well, and of course the "The 13th Warrior" film: those norsemen just looked soooo cooooool ... :-P

In October the Arroutada Party took place in A Corunna (Galicia, Spain). I was there, of course. I did a shitty web-based inscription engine for the Real Time Battle contest. Since I didn't had any robot in the contest, it was one form of "being there" too :-) And what's more important, I was given an "Organization Person" identity card! Yeah! %-) The network was not as good as I'd wished (my RJ45 plug was awful), but anyway it was great. Funnier than Campus Party, which maybe you heard of. I'm looking forward to Xuventude Galicia Net, another party that will take place in a few months. I'm thinking on taking part on the Quake III contest, because I want to know wether I'm good or not, and the only way to do it is playing with the pros :-) It was not easy to have Q3 running in my computer: it seems that my sound card (with a CS461x chip) is not that well supported in ALSA, and I had to look everywhere to search about it. At last, I found that the familiar "signal 11" error that Q3 gave whenever I tried to run it was due to the driver not doing mmap properly. I found a patch somewhere in the 'Net, and now I put the driver on "hold" status. It was for all this search (and a big but not told here "try and fail" proccess) why I couldn't play Q3 in the Arroutada Party. But anyway, now I'm ready :-)

Today I learned by ear the "MuiƱeira de Chantada", typical folk song here which is played with a bagpipe - though I play it with guitar :-) I'm sure that if some purist listened to it the way I play it he/she will kill me, but it's quite funny to do things in new ways ;-) Maybe one of this days I "commit" something and tape it for you to listen, my dear public. But don't expect anything good: first I would have to buy a real jack, and not the loud-noise-emitter wiring that I have now.

Enough for now. I'll write something more tomorrow.

Back!

Since ... eek, September 10th. Too much time without a diary entry. Now I'm quite tired (hey, it's 2 am here and I'm not as much an "owl" as most programmers), so I'll just say that I'm back (you already read that, I know) and that I have quite a lot of things to tell :-)

Tomorrow I'll tell the details. Now I'm going to bed. Merry Christmas and so on :-)

Once upon a time, someone thought that the best way to measure your knowledge was making you a written test in which you (supposedly) would show that you knew enough to be "apt" (no, not the Debian tool). And so, exams were invented.

That person was evil! :-)

Ok, I shouldn't complain too much, as today was quite a light study day. My stomach, always helpful, decided that it would hurt all day long to make my day easier. Great, isn't it?

Anyway, studying (or more exactly: trying to study) has in me the positive effect of making me think on any other unrelated thing. It seems that the more I need to study, the more ideas pop in my mind. Weird. There must be a scientific reason for that, and I'm sure it's something bad :-)

Today's Big Idea (tm) was play a little with CDK (Curses Development Kit) for Perl. The thing has something to do with the fact that Fidonet (a BBS network, spread all over the world) is quite dead nowadays. I was thinking that maybe if the software used for it in linux was easier to configure, more people would try to put a BBS online. Or maybe not, who knows. But I need an excuse to do something with CDK, and that would be a fine one :-)

And not much more. Heat. Too much heat. Hopefully, next week weather will begin to cool down. I hope so.

Today news: the openbsd box is using the linux box as gateway. It was quite easy, at least when I decided not to use ipmasq and just download the HOWTO and follow what it said. Now I've to know how ipf and ipnat work to do the reverse thing :-)

I don't know what you (the imaginary reader) would think about all these things I tell here. I mean, it seems to me that everyone would read this and just think that what I tell is not very ... well, very proper of Advogato.Org. I don't know, when you read about all this people doing things like hacking GNOME, or being sysadms, or the owners of some high-volume web site ... I feel that what I do is quite boring and lacking of interest r:-) It's like a child trying to imitate the adult ones.

The paranoia pre-exams is beginning. Or maybe I'm just having too much coffee :-)

6 Sep 2000 (updated 6 Sep 2000 at 23:33 UTC) »

Today news: I've got an ethernet card! :-) So I can connect my two computers. Goooood. They're already connected by now, actually :-) Tomorrow I'll begin to try masquerading, both with the linux box and with the openbsd one. And all those things that I thought before having the card but now I can't remember r:-)

And not much more to tell. I've been re-certificated as Apprentice by jbowman, may God bless thee and give you a lot of children. When is the "Journeyer" certificate coming? ;-)

My "Things-to-do-after-exams" list is growing dangerously. Besides tidying up some little scripts & programs I've done for my own use (I hope to release some of then someday, that's why I want to have them clean and well-behaved), I have to learn about LDAP and PAM, I want to do a web for a realtimebattle contest in october, another web for my own stuff, learn more XSL (there's things I can't even imagine how to do) ... quite a lot for the 2 weeks before classes start :-)

Anyway, that's alright. It's fun :-)

And nothing more today. Logging out.

Hey, look at me, I'm an apprentice! :-) Thanks to acme for the certificate :-)

These days I'm studying for September exams, so there's not much to tell. Trying OpenBSD. Nice, though as I'm no security expert I'm sure I'm missing a lot of good things. For the moment, I'm still thinking if I should replace sendmail and put qmail or postfix. I use qmail in my linux box, and I like it; but I think that the way to learn to work with anything is trying to use it "as-is", and not making it a linux clone. And besides, the sendmail that comes with the distribution is audited, and qmail is not.

Another thing I'm planning to do is connect the Linux box to the OBSD thingy, but I've only got a serial cable :-) I tried to buy a NE2000 clone, but I don't live near any shop and also it seems that cards with BNC connector are not as easy to find as before. So, I'll buy the card after the exams and try to use PPP with the serial cable by now. I think that's better that SLIP, isn't it? :-m

Well, this' already too much for a first message. Logging out.

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