cat slave diary

25 Sep 2000 »

Netizen

I feel sad for Kirrily (Skud) to have her company go down the gurglers. That’s pretty damn shitty. I remember when Kirrily was running rainbow.net.au (IIRC) out of her garage in a northern Melbourne suburb. Well, at least it sounds as she’s going to have some fun somewhere else.

cla’s cats

Cats love keyboards. They are terrible typists, however. My advice is buy keyboards you can rip the keys off and suck out with a vacuum cleaner and put back in. My flatmate’s laptop went into a spin after Meebles slept on it yesterday. The fake numeric keypad had kicked in and wouldn’t go away. A reboot was required.

Hackery

Working on porting XFree86 4.0.1c to the NetBSD/alpha 1.5ALPHA2 snapshot. This has already occurred once, but I believe as a static server. I’m working on ensuring that 4.0.2 will have a decent X server for NetBSD/alpha where 99% of the things in x86 are present in the alpha port. DRI will take a bit longer; DRI is not ported to NetBSD yet.

14 Sep 2000 »

Today I conducted the largest single transaction I’ve ever done over the net - buying a new Dell Inspiron 4100 via the Dell web site.
So in a few weeks, I’ll have a nice shiny Dell sitting at home to replace my aging HP XU 6/200 dual PPro 200 and its busted 17″ monitor. The new box is fast with all the right bells and whistles - 800 MHz PIII, 32 MB GeForce2 GTS DDR, 12x DVD (I’m hoping its a model that is firmware upgradable), 128 MB of RAM, and a 40 GB 7200 RPM UltraATA 100 drive of some description. I chose not to get a wasted copy of Windows Me and instead went for Win2K as there was no Linux choice. Ripped off. Well, at least it didn’t cost the earth. In fact, it cost 27% of my HP’s cost (without cost adjustments for four years of CPI) for more than twice the processor speed. I had to get in before the Australian peso got much worse.

At least this time, the box is mostly standard. The HP has a HUGE motherboard which is probably as custom as you can get them.

I’m going to install a few operating systems on this new baby; RedHat and NetBSD and Win2K. It should be fun, especially as not every single device is yet supported.

14 Sep 2000 »

My Win2K box had conniptions this morning. Something had been in and munged a system file or two, and System File Protection was not having a bar of it (SFP is like tripwire on steroids). Frantic tearing around the house looking for 2195 installation media didn’t turn up my original holographic CD. I did find the 120 day limited trialware CD. SFP was happy with that and things worked okay… until I used Outlook, which quickly barfed.
ARGHHHHHH

I thought it might be a virus, but I’m one of the most cautious people I know. So I tried offloading all my files to Dan’s alpha, which already had Samba running on it. But softdep has this annoying habit of not immediately freeing space until the inode has been reused. So the disk was full when it wasn’t. I installed Samba onto blossom via pkgsrc (gee, it’s so hard doing this stuff: make install). The toughest part was getting a workable smb.conf in a hurry. So after a few run-ins with swat, I scp’d Dan’s and modified it to protect the guilty.

Bought a copy of NAV 2001 over the net from Symantec and installed it from their site. They get it - for a commercial vendor. Media is not needed in this day and age of fast cable connections.

Not a (known) virus.

The laptop is still a little flakey, and I don’t know what’s causing it. It’s probably up for its 3 mth re- install.

11 Sep 2000 »

Been meaning to post. Honest.
Been very very busy.

Went to Hobart to present the Win2K Security tutorial to what might have been a very hostile audience (it was run by the Australian Unix User’s Group- Tasmania and SAGE-Tas coordinator.) However, 33 people turned out, and they were cool. I’ll put the pictures up soon.

Did I mention that I bought myself a Canon Digital Ixus (aka Powershot S100 Elph in the US)? V. v. cool. So small and cute! It’s about 170 gms, and about the size and weight of 50 business cards sitting in a neat rectangular pile. Still 2.1 million pixels (1600×1200). V. impressive color and options. The supplied Windows 2000 software is way cool too - the USB just kicks ass!

Trying to get through the SAGE-AU exec stuff is a major drain on time. I have sponsors to look after, a newsletter to put out, etc, etc.

I have just been appointed as one of the technical geeks on the auDA DNS Competition Policy Panel (see http://www.auda.org.au for more info). This will drain even more of my spare time away. I have to fly to Canberra on September 27 for the kick off meeting. Should be fun at any rate.

hackery

Installed NetBSD-1.5/alpha ALPHA2 on my pc164. Sick of Linus and his stupid idiotic unbelievable mediocre software engineering (NOT!) decisions. No kernel debugger. No CVS tree. No proper integration of new and useful busses (such as PCMCIA or proper tie in for USB in a standard way). No modularization of code that is shared between different busses. Two distinct sound subsystems, with the superior one not integrated. Code freeze - heard of it, but doesn’t apply to some people. Regression testing? Happens to other operating systems. I’m sick of all that crap. I’m sure 2.4 will be enjoyed by many, but I think the 2.4 event horizon is showing Linus’s inadequacies more than ever before.

And now my cheapy FM801 sound card works just fine as the sound works without freezing the dang box. However, XFree86 doesn’t work as NetBSD treats 64 bit platforms as proper workstations, not just as a 8 bit PC grown up. So we have to add the 8 bit stuff back in (carefully) to allow inb() and outb() to initialize the card into MMIO mode so we can use 64 bit operations once more.

Just wish there were more *BSD developers and more sharing between the three major forks.

18 Aug 2000 »

Not much happening.
My 17″ monitor is still dead. Long live the 17″ monitor.

11 Aug 2000 »

hackery
Not much happening - I want to work on a project management tool for KDE (I can’t wait for C++ wrappers for Gnome and/or much better IDL support that hides the C braindeath that passes for emulating C++ (badly)).

However, we got infected by a Java zealot as developer #3. Developer #1 wants to project manage. I’m developer #2. I don’t have time for this. Unfortunately, the Java Zealot is correct - most PM’s use Win32 and coding something for KDE or Gnome will knock them out of contention. However, my argument to that is very simple: MS Project 2000 is Very Very Very Good(tm) - it’s like version 10 and they’ve had over 10 years to get it right, and they did. If your daily rate is >$800 why skimp on a $400 tool?

life

Been invited to research, write, and present an in-depth Windows NT/2000 security tutorial for the Tasmanian Australian Unix User’s Group (AUUG), whose members missed out when the AusCERT-supplied speaker didn’t mention anything about NT when he was there in April.

This should be interesting. Most unix users take a very contrary view to Win32 security - you’ll be a rare Advogato reader if you are aware of the Win32 security model and actually like it. The audience will either be administrators resigned to working with NT/2000 or people interested in validating their (mostly wrong) views on NT/2000 security. A tough crowd in both cases. I hope that people will be able to take something away with them, even it is simply a greater appreciation for NT’s security model, which is actually quite decent when you get down and dirty with it. Very deep and fine grained once you accept the security model’s basic thrust, which is VMS-like and not Unix like.

27 Jul 2000 »

Opened my second SourceForge project today. I’m working on the secret project architecture. As soon as I have the High Level Architecture and Overview done, and as soon as the fantastic SF people approve my new project (pretty please!), I’ll post more details.
I’m going to undertake a social experiment with this project. The primary aim of the project is a bug free, high quality, CMM level 3 or 4 open-source project to replace an ancient but beloved tool on many Linux-like and Linux platforms. It will be architected to the nth degree before vi is opened or make invoked. By necessity, this requires a small or single person team to finish this part of the process before getting like-minded developers on to the job of actually cutting code. However, the process of developing the entire thing (besides the initial HLA) will be completely and utterly open in true bazaar style. I want to see if open source can produce a better tool when well known and well used software engineering practices are dolloped on top.

Software engineering best practice will be applied from woe to go to see if the defects in this tool, the MTBF and uptake are better than (say) fetchmail, which will be the reference project. I’ll write the experiment up for Linux Journal once 0.1 is released as source code to judge if it is a success. I’ll call the article “Post-bazaar software engineering” or something lame like that.

20 Jul 2000 »

Went to the Compaq GS series launch today. Big Iron. mmmm. 1-32 processors today, 1-48 processors soon. Kicks ass.
Made contact with Compaq Australia to try and get some eval kit to test multiple bus alpha boxes.

life

Watching Springer. A guy just grotted a nose booger on the show - without a hanky or anything. The audience don’t like him. Of course, he’s sleeping with his girlfriend’s roomy and some guy. Lots of bare breasts and beatings tonight too.

What a classy show. I love it. BLEEEEEP.

18 Jul 2000 »

Received some hate mail from lkml weenies after another of my semi-infamous I18N outbursts. What’s the problem with I18N that sends certain types scurrying for the lowest form of flamage?
To all those who sent me hate mail: FUCK YOU and grow up.

I’d like to see you grapple with your ASCII-only code and blinkered mindset if you spoke and wrote only Hindi or Arabic.

The fans are still annoyingly loud.

17 Jul 2000 »

This room is like being next to a small jet engine. Does anyone have a supply of ATX DC connectors and a 5 or 8 port 48 VDC output somewhere in Australia? I’m sick of all the damn fans. I have (count em!) 12 fans in four active PC’s. CPU fans, case fans. Back end fans because the case fans suck and cause the dang thing to overheat.

I need quiet fans, ones with low friction and noise bearings or preferably no fans. Fans fans fans ARRRRRGH

I need to lie down.