Friday, November 21, 2008

Hmm, arguably I have my bad days, and then I have my worse days...


Tomorrow can't get much worse in terms of work, I hope :\ Nearly 0500R, so no time for a proper days log; I really need to stop staying up so late.


At the moment, I've nearly got nail configured to my needs. The addition of macros and IMAP support is a real improvement over the old Berkeley Mail program. With a little more adjusting, I just might be able to dig into my back-log of mail sometime lol. So far, I only have one major complaint - no line editing at the prompt beyond the most basic level (provided by the terminal). That' not really a problem though, it allows that old ed like terseness, it's easy to keep the commands short.


Software, like physical tools should empower users to get work done efficiently, A little bit of learning how to use the program, is worth it when the reward is productive.


One thing I've also come to enjoy, is a useful trick for generating HTML manual pages. The mail/heirloom-mailx port installs as /usr/local/bin/mailx on FreeBSD, corresponding manual page being /usr/local/man/man1/mailx.1.gz. Because nail has a big manual page, it's worth while to use a web browser or a text editor with tabs, in place of the usual $PAGER used by man.

$ zcat /usr/local/man/man1/mailx.1.gz | groff -Thtml -man > ~/mail.1.html
$ firefox3 ~/mail.1.html &

which is much more fun then my shell alias:

alias   man-nail="man -M /usr/local/man mailx"

Thursday, November 20, 2008

PC-BSD, 3 years of PBI corruption continues!

Username: mrhbit

Hi@

This is available in FreeBSD ports.

Here some screenshots.
--
http://www.ultimatestunts.nl/index.php?page=1&lang=en
--

regards Soeren

Username: mrhbit

Or a package for PC-BSD 7.x ?

Username: Gon

have done it. Gimme a week and i will approve it into pbidir.com

_________________
Gonzalo Martínez-Sanjuan Sánchez
PC-BSD Core Team Member


Problems with this:

  1. Getting a PBI approved is supposed to involve community testing, and review by those in charge of our PBI'safety (e.g. Gonzalo and a few others on the team page), which should also be impartial auditors - it's called common sense.
  2. This would make Gonzalo a repeat offender in by-passing the normal approval procedures for his own PBIs, if he does what he says he will do.
  3. If he does as his record and choice of words suggests, this is a conflict of interest, which I deem unethical.
  4. This is not the first time. someone involved in the PC-BSD project has "bent" the PBIDir rules, or endorsed doing so... when they are supposed to be enforcing them, for everyone including themselves!
  5. In the past a number of PBI's that have "skipped approval", and have resulted in stinging users or violating the rules of the day (ref: Kris (Realplayer, Java, BSD4Win), Charles (Firefox, Thunderbird), Gonzalo (Gnome, ...)), or just had half assed [lack of] testing that didn't catch obvious problems (ref: the 2nd Amarok PBI, Gnome 2). Considering the state of Documentation (how many general users know how to extract PBI w/o install, or how to reach the scripts before they are run), users will not see the code executed when they install a PBI (and most woulnd't understand it, or the implications), which IMHO is a major security risk -- unaudited PBI.


Is it a wonder, that I never send patches to these people... I wouldn't want my name associated with PC-BSD in any such capacity, period and end of quote. I remember I once compiled a list of the PC-BSD projects deficiencies, and took it up with one of the team members.... That was quite a while ago now; but no actual changes seem to have occured, beyond referencing revisions in the changelog for 7.0.1.

I think, if Gonzalo doesn't go by the book, maybe I will just happen to go public with them this time -- and expand the list!


I've had about enough of watching this chicken shit project. I may have mellowed in my increasing age, but not that far just yet.

Wednesday, November 19, 2008

Miscellaneous ponderings

/bin/ed isn't so bad after all, but hey... knowing how to use ex, vi, and vim helps lol.

The old Berkeley mail interface is very interesting, but seems to lack mutts infinite configuration. Most of the time, I just use webmail. Google Chrome (Windows) or some thing from $BROWSER (*nix) is always open, so typically use that; but some times I do like to work from my terminal hehe. It even looks like the nail/heirlom-mailx program might add the stuff I desire.


TODO: inhale /usr/share/doc/usd/07.Mail (the reference manual), inhale nail documentation.

A testament to American Stupidity, guilt by web crawl!

Is Google Responsible for Cracking HDCP?

Considering it's been about a year and a half, I wonder how it came out. But the idea that could possibly think of sending a C&D for that, is just a way to prove one thing.....


YOU ARE !@#$ING STUPID!!!




Sometimes, I feel like this country is coming out of an intellectual dark age....

Monday, November 17, 2008

days objectives

  1. finish room
  2. get to / finish work (zzZZZzzZZzz, cake walk)
  3. get dragged out shopping after work (grrr!)
  4. dinner
  5. finish room (if not compelte) / hit the net
  6. work on DBus


with luck, I can get my room mostly done before It's time to leave.


EDIT



What's left to do:

0/ go through the old strategy guides -- anything to a game I don' have anymore goes out, anything I can't find room for goes out; I don't use strategy guides and there is the internet if I get stuck.

1/ continue sorting books by priority.

2/ move to auxiliary storage point, based on priority.


3/ figure out where my laptop will be stored when not in use

4/ figure out what to do with the pictures from the hallway, which are stuck sitting in the place for my school books (and laptop)!!!

5/ Anyway to get ma's dolls out of here? She's burning up _my_ book space!

6/ sort through the last dresser draw

7/ throw out the trash

8/ dust it all to the max

9/ vacuum

10/ organize the last shelf, side Alpha, right of the A/C

11/ figure out where to put the spare PC (unused), mmm wish I had time to get a spare NIC dirt cheap - could get her online xD


12/ reassess the situation, where do we go from HERE?





ok, list noted, now to get dressed for work, before I get driven more nuts - just for wanting to quickly write my notes at the speed of thought.
Ahh, finally some time to R&R, or should I say as close to it as I actually get.


I've been getting drivin out of my mind, so... I flushed all thoughts and forked a new idea for my day. I've spent most of my day ripping stuff apart and throwing crap out. Heck, I've chucked a few things that are /older/ then I am. I've changed around a lot of things in my room, including dismantling the desk since it was in the way of moving the bed. Due to the change in positioning, I no longer have my usual electicral outlet. So I'm sitting at the foot of the bed, with the dog lol. I think I'll like this new arrangement, one thing I like - rolling to face the wall is on the other side. Often, when I finally do go to sleep, I usually turn away from the rest of the room so my mind doesn't try to focus on it. As it was, doing that would be rolling onto my heart-side, this way it isn't.

It also allows me to walk into the room, without tripping over shit lol.


Well, it will once I finish lol. Got a ton of crap piled up, mostly books that need to need to go out. Namely about ~40 pounds of old school books I've been forbidden to dispose of for years. I've had about enough of this crap, it's _my room_, shouldn't it store _my stuff_ ? The rest is books that used to be in the desk, and have no where else to go for the night. eally, I could finish tonight, would only take 2-3 hours more; but that would require going in/out the front door. And Ma would kill me if I made that much racket while she's trying to sleep lol.


If I'm going to be driven nuts all the time, prevented from getting work _done_, well I am bloody well going to do something constructive !!!!!!



While I've cleaned out most of my stuff, I've kept a fairly minimal amount of things (those that have value, and those that I want). Amazingly, despite the fact that some of my personal belongings go back to before I can remember life, I can still remember virtually each and every piece of crap I found lol. I have a very good context-sensitive memory; I might not know whether to turn left or right at a fork in the road when setting out on the journy, but by the time I get there, I'll know which way to take. Maybe in some ways, i am trying to distance myself from the past, I dunno.

But I know, I do feel much better -- working on stuff beats sitting one ones duff doing nothing, but passing time; that should be spent with a purpose.






Of all of the things I've gone through, I've managed to ge a few sets of things in order, that have had pieces missing for 10-15+ years. Found a reminder of the last time I was in a doctors office (heck, what was that? About 1991?), some old books I should read. Another thing I found was an old "paper weight", that has been sitting in a dresser draw for many years. At least, for as much as my mothers told me it's a model pistol that my father had put together for me. Examining it, I found something rather odd for a model - it has a working single action! I cocked the hammer, that as a boy, I had always thought was fused into place... only to see the cylinder rotate, making ready the next (empty) chamber. To top it off, the rammer along the bottom of the pistol even works. A quick look around the Wikipedia would suggest it's a replica of the M1851 "Navy" Revolver, but on the side of the octagonal barrel it says ".44 Caliber" and notes to only load it with black powder (M1851s were .36 Cal). I can't help but wonder, just how much is model and how much is replica... lol. Even in the civil war though, I couldn't imagine loading one of those things [properly] in a combat situation, then again it was an era where 3 aimed shots a minute was the ideal with an infantry mans musket :\. Hmm, for some reason one of John Waynes comments in True Git comes to mind, hehe.


Tomorrow I need to finish moving stuff, dust, vacuum, and sort the remainders. Work for Monday is gonna be quite light, so hopefully I'll have some peace, I'd kinda like to get some homework done some time this century !!!

Sunday, November 16, 2008

Reboxing the box

To go with the changes in my working environment, a new style for blackbox ;-)

Image Hosted by ImageShack.us


Since I left KDE in favor of more compact systems, I've found that I tend to change my layout of things less often. Most of the arrangements are calculated for muscle memory, and my visual patterns, and have become a set of very quick reflexes.


I don't miss a taskbar at all, and have still yet to find an excuse to use the slit or dock in Blackbox lol.

Saturday, November 15, 2008

I love this thing....


Laptop is under abusively heavy load compared to what my much more powerful windows machine does, but it's still in a very usable state. If this system ran Windows XP instead of FreeBSD, it would be slow'n to a crawl lol.


currently running: 155~165 processes, 6 shell sessions, 1 x session, temperature is at 64.0 Celsius

  • X.Org is up and I logged in from GDM.
  • Blackbox is running with bbkeys, dcopserver, gkrellm2, and two rounds of fbpanel in support.
  • Psi, Pidgin, and XChat are running, with a total of 7 networks going between them (1 of which is freenode, with 3 channels open)
  • rxvt-unicode + gnu screen is open with 4 windows
  • linux-flock is running with 5 tabs and the mplayerplug-in streaming music
  • The www/firefox3 port is compiling
  • My vimbuild script is fetching/building a newer version of vim from cvs
  • I am csup'ing my systems copy of the FreeBSD source tree
  • And doing the write/compile/test rinse & repeat in vim ;-)

This kind of workload, is fairly typical for me when running FreeBSD. On the windows machine, I don't even bother - doesn't take well to it :\.

Strange behavior with this bit of C++

It has been a long time since I've had time to do anything in C++. So I figured it would be a useful way to limber up my memory, by implementing a little bit of my favorite Python classes/modules in C++. The only crazy thing, is the result this code has yielded.


// minimal program, using the code involved
#include 
#include 

extern "C" {
#include <sys/param.h>
#include <unistd.h>
}

namespace os {
    bool link(const std::string& src, const std::string& dst);
}

bool 
os::link(const std::string& src, const std::string& dst) {
    if (link(src.c_str(), dst.c_str()) != 0) {
        std::perror(NULL); 
        return false;
    }
    return true;
}

int 
main() {
    std::cout << "link()\t" << std::endl;
        os::link(std::string("./test"), std::string("/tmp/test"));
    return 0;
}


compilation: /usr/bin/g++ -Wall -ggdb3 os.cpp test.cpp -o test

I compiled on FreeBSD 7 with the systems GCC 4.3.1 and get a segfault, then tried the code on my OpenBSD 4.4 machine. The OpenBSD 4.4 release has shipped with a patched GCC 3.5.3 (propolice) - on OpenBSD it ran perfectly! Trying to feed it through the debuger on FreeBSD wasn't pretty either:


  • FreeBSD 7, system GCC 4.3.1 -> test program dies with a Segmentation Fault.
  • FreeBSD 7, system GDB 6.1.1 -> Endless stepping when used with a break point, or SIG SEGV in libc's malloc() when run.
  • OpenBSD 4.4, system GCC 3.5.3 -> prints proper message from std::perror() as expected, when the program is executed.


If I change os::link to os::link_x and recompile on FreeBSD, it works the same as it does on OpenBSD, when unmodified that is. In a few tests on FreeBSD, When I run the program under GCC, it tells me

Program received signal SIGSEGV, Segmentation fault.
0x281fabc3 in malloc () from /lib/libc.so.7

if I set a break point in test.cpp on the os::link() call, and step through it into os::link() in os.cpp. If I keep stepping after the link(), I get returned to the os::link() call in main and can step through it all again. Like an endless loop of stepping into/out of the os::link() function call in test.cpp's main(), and the if-conditional in os.cpp's os::link(), geeze.



At least looking at the results I've had tonight, I know I'm not freaking nuts... lol. I still shouldn't write code when I'm half asleep, but hey... It's the only time I get :\, Oh well... unless my family is late as usual, I need to be up in a few hour.



*head hits laptop, snores loudly until morning*

Friday, November 14, 2008

TODO FRIDAY

Adapt header to i386/amd64
Adapt header to supported compilers
Finish implementing the module
Test module with (puke) MSVC++

Thursday, November 13, 2008

I put Stargate on and decided I would lay down for a few minutes before getting online; last thing I remember is O'Neil and Jackson being captured and about to be brought before Ra. Next thing I know, I wake up out of a sound sleep to see some show on depicting a 2 on 1, like wtf!? I slept through Stargate!!!

That's what I get for taking a nap, instead of camping out in front of a computer lol.


N I'm wide awake and glad that unlike the rest of my family, I don't set my TVs volume loud enough to be heard from Kansas..

Wednesday, November 12, 2008

Hooah a stroke of luck!


Just caught Top Gun starting a few minutes ago, usually I always find it on after the first halfhour r so; but my favorite part is in the beginning. They're dancing with the MiGs, when Maverick and Goose end up inverted above the MiG, almost canopy to canopy -> Mav gives'em the bird while Goose takes a Polaroid of the look on the other pilots face xD --> Priceless !



Managed to get through work today in one piece, singing a song in my head to keep my mind else wheres; but not to bad a day overall, I guess. I don't really have a problem with working a lot, it's having to scrimp and scavenge my time whenever I'm /not/ working. My family drives me nuts at times.... and after work tomorrow, I'm expecting a headache with what's planned.


I did get to have sme fun today though, joined PG#3 for a few games of SWAT 4. My custom skin is labeled 3.x.x beta, but I think unless I find any visual bugs of interest that it will probably be going gamma soon. I really like how the last take on the NWN BDU came out. The no armour vest didn't come out as intended, but I kinda like it, really might pass as "no armour" if it wasn't for the dang games design.


I can't wait for the weekend.... I outa be off Sat/Sun/Mon, and I've got a projects meeting n Sunday. Hopefully it won't take forever to pull off, but I might get some of the other days to actually get stuff done on, hopefully anyway...

Tuesday, November 11, 2008

Just a little bit of time left until it's time to leave from work, and odds of getting any work done before are dismal. (be lucky if I get time for lunch :\). I was up to after 0500R, getting woken up at the crack of dawn, and dragged out on a shopping expedition around 1000R. Tomorrow is 2 jobs, so that's the end of getting anything done then; but luckily one is short... it's just the margin-time on pre and post op that's the killer.

sigh
I really need a vacation..............


but that's not likely to happen, before the next ice age lol.


Been wprking on several things when I can, and playing a mixture of games whenever I can't work on crap. *SIGH*

Sunday, November 9, 2008

TODO: compile a more detailed analysis on all possible solutions (and their implications) to the meetings point 0 topic.

sounds like mental fun, if it wasn't for family to drive me nuts and reck my train of thought every chance they get lol.

QTOD

While ProgramName always endeavours to protect its users from unnecessary harm, it will not stop you from ignoring the big red warning signs.

Saturday, November 8, 2008

Some day :\

My brother finally showed up around 1230R, to bitch at me for nt being ready - my response being, "Your late, so you can wait". Good sized headache helping him ove crap around, I tell ya... family are the only creatures alive who have the balls to ask for help and insult you all the way through it!

Ducked into a few levels of F.E.A.R. to pass the time until he finally shoved off and Ma found something to do, not involving driving me nuts.


I managed to sort out the meeting, it's either tomorrow at 1800GMT or next weekend lol. I still don't think we'll be able to get everyone present by then, but w/e works for most of us. Tomorrow, I also need to take some time to catch up with my email lol.


I also eventually made it into Proving Grounds #3 to join Chester, Decapi, and Duke for some great games. Pardoning my mother trying to shipwreck the highlight of my day, but it was still good to get the games in, even if I was last to show and first to leave :-(. One thing that did bring a smile to my face though, on the angels of mercy mission; I called for a reload before we continued on, b/c I had 18 rounds left and we were moving into 2 small rooms, followed by a hallway and 2 very large rooms without much time to reload if things hit the fan. When I completed our reloading drill, (EL) Duke stepped out of formation and asked us if we had ever seen this before, leaving all of us flabbergasted to figure out what he meant lol -> every thread angel was covered perfectly by the element, from gun down to gun up.


That made my day :-)
Just once, I wish someone else in this family knew how to keep a schedule... dang nab'it. Well, o be fair there is at least one besides myself; but Uncle Pat was a coast guard captain, if he's late, ya start to worry lol. Otherwise I'm about the only one who knows how to manage time... in a manor that approximately works.


I woke up around 1028R, my brothers not here. I was woken up around 1156R to find out he called a few minutes ago, to say that he was just starting out; our mothers been up since 0800R. And the other day, he said he was going to be here early [in the morning]... Well, I'll probably be out of battery charge on my laptop before he even gets to the city limits... the putz !!!



Was dreaming several things, but I remember dreaming that I was going through CQB training before I was woken up. The last thing I remember, was 2 man stack, kick it in, he moved left, I took right. Tango across my sector, 2 to the chest with a single action revolver; made it to my corner, then sliced the pie around. Two more tangos, put a quick shot in the right ones chest, then the left while advancing, then cycled back and put a head shot in each, right to left. Then dropped to one knee shouting "GUN DOWN" and started reloading the revolver as my teammate took up a cover position from his point of domination; 6 in the can, "GUN UP" and moved out...


Something like this:
|--------------------------|
|  y                       |
|            T           T |
|   /--------------\      T|
|   \______________/       |
|                          |
|               ___x___x___|
|Y             x|          |
|--  -----------|----------|
X=Spidey01's way point
Y=teammates  way point
T=tango position



Which reminds me, there are supposed to be some team games on PG#3 today hehe :-)

running off the deepend

Well, finished one portion of my docs (Grrr... wasting time in #kde-chat and #vim lol); even got one of the manual pages written out.


Ya know, with the mdoc.samples(7) and mdoc(7) manual pages + a few simple manual pages for reference (head, cat, pkg_add) the process of writing a manual page is actually much less painful then I remember it being. I've only got one small problem so far, thin I'll post on daemonforums later and see if anyone has an idea; if not I'll probably have to adjust the man pages wording a lit' bit.


nroff/troff is also strangely addicting once you start playing with macro packages...

Scientists turn Tequila into Diamonds

http://www.physorg.com/news145255770.html

Me thinks the next fourty years or so will be interesting, hehe :-)