random neuron misfires

VICTORY!

I have now tamed the 8-headed hydra of a beast which calls itself cross-gcc. After beating my head against the wall tracking down bugs deep into the guts and bowels of gcc and glibc, I figured it all out.

In the spirit of open source (“Release Early, Release Often”), I’ve whipped up a single-pass-build-script to make this all incredibly easy for anyone else to take advantage of.

Seems that every VA box I’m aware of (and many Andover boxes also) is/are down, except SourceForge. I would have personally preferred the opposite, but hey, that’s just my opinion (these include themes.org, linux.com, slashdot.org, newsforge.net, linuxgram.com, andover.net, OSDN.com and others).
Some people believe it has to do with VA’s recent financial troubles.

Personally, I don’t get into the politics of any of this, but here’s the official Quit Slashdot.org Today page for those who want a laugh.

I just tried to do a whois on each of these servers and noticed some interesting things:

# date
Sun Jun 24 05:41:54 EDT 2001

# whois slashdot.org
[whois.internic.net]
Whois Server Version 1.3
SLASHDOT.ORG.SUCKS.COMPARED.TO.JIMPHILLIPS.ORG
SLASHDOT.ORG

# whois linux.com
[whois.internic.net]
Whois Server Version 1.3
LINUX.COM.NEEDS.TO.RUN.FREEBSD.LIKE.HCCTRC.COM
LINUX.COM.IS.KINDA.COOL.BUT.RUN.FREEBSD.LIKE.JIMPHILLIPS.ORG
LINUX.COM.ALONETRIO.WAS.HERE.WITH.ALTAVISTWAP.COM
LINUX.COM

My current bet’s on more hacking going on. Nobody asked me to investigate this one though.

I ordered DSL finally, and will end up paying way too much for it. $99.00/month for 144k/144k of IDSL, not even real DSL. It’s all there is here, but that beats the 14.4k dialup performance I’ve been getting lately.

URGENT

1. 1. I need to find someone in the Bay Area with a decent solid network connection to allow me to colocate a box on their segment for a few weeks until I can find another colocation provider out here. Mine just folded and is giving me until the second week of July to get my box out and all DNS records routed off (about 20 domains). Does anyone want to earn an extra $100/month or so to let a box sit under a table on

1. 1. their LAN segment for a few weeks? The box supports open source project development and some other domains, nothing heavy-hit at all, nothing illegal, just web, mysql, cvs, ssh.

HELP!

“..there’s still more left to this weekend, isn’t there?…”

kgb, that new Sony would be nice and all, if they weren’t in violation of the GPL..

That device, and others like it from them, will NOT be supported under Linux, not by me (in pilot-link, plucker, or any other application I happen to code or help in the development of) not by my colleagues, not by anyone in the open source community who is aware of what they’re doing with their “Go ahead, try to sue us..” attitude.

I dearly regret spending the $499.00/USD on my Clie.

My full account with one of their employees is here

FWIW.

3:23 am, PST (or “Sleep is for Mortals”)

• I had this book awhile back called Wide Awake At 3 AM” by Richard Coleman, and it was about using a revolving wake period (add an hour each day, go to sleep an hour later) to increase the amount of time you stay awake. Supposed to be a behavior mod to enhance productivity. Most people aren’t wealthy enough to be able to do that, and maintain a job.

  But what if you don’t sleep AT ALL? I hate what that car accident in 1992 has done to me, and at the same time, it’s the best thing it could have ever done to me.

  Since I only put in less than 5 full hours of rest per week (I’m completely unable to achieve REM at all, lilo believes this is the result of my TBI in 1992, and resulted in what he believes is an undiagnosed overactive reticulum), as long as I stay away from boredom, and keep myself fed, I’m doing good. Very particular splits of mental and physical rest are all I need.

  Found some interesting information here on this whole sleep disorder thing related to TBI.

  “Boredom is the hardest task to concentrate on”

Internet 6.0

• I was working on a new site design today, which actually came out REALLY well. I’m pretty impressed with the result. More on this later, but I found a neat tool while asking the guys in #perl too many convoluted perl questions. In the middle of this madness, I found Bluefish, vi, GyrosCoPe (yes, it’s really spelled that way), and an assortment of browsers, and you can pretty much do anything. Table wizards are a great help.

  “AOL now ships the Internet on CDROM. It’s called Internet version 6.0”

In the Palm® of my…

• pilot-link.0.9.5 errata went out on Sunday. I hope to get enough feedback to get this rolled out within the next week or two. I would have loved to have cut a release by Christmas, but that wasn’t in the cards.

Christmas Passed

• Another Christmas has come and gone. I hope everyone that celebrated some sort of holiday this season got what they wanted. Joy or toys. I should hit the mall one of these days and go shopping for some new toys to outfit myself with.

  I spent the long weekend coding. And coding. And coding. And… ah, enough of that.

8am-8pm

• Work is going to be fun these next two months. Whee. Much to do with the BBC, some non-public internal projects, OLS, Linuxworld in New York, and lots more writing and coding.

RSI

• schoen, I think I can sympathize with you now. My arms have been cramping up a lot lately. No pain associated, but my fingers seem to hit the wrong keys now as I type. It’s that same feeling you get when you’ve been out in the snow without gloves for too long. Stiff. I hope I don’t go into some sort of RSI injury session. Without use of these hands, I am pretty much rendered useless.

Thinner

• I’m done with this severe diet modification. I looked in the mirror the other day, and saw a skeleton looking back. I must have lost 20lbs, and I’m only 175lbs. on a good day.

  On the plus side, I’ve never been mentally sharper, or looked as healthy. I look 10 years younger (and I probably weigh as much as I did 10 years ago). Time to do some real in-depth nutrient research and approach this much more methodically. As hectic as this was, I am convinced.

  I wonder if Erika can help me along this path of self-discovery. Her background is perfect in this area.

  I had a huge bowl of my “Nuclear Spaghetti” today (Dave’s Insanity in the boiling water, 1/2 tbsp of mayonnaise (for a cremier
  sauce), chunky sauce of choice, some other ingredients, boil, eat, burn).

  I definitely miss the taste of good food.

Christmas was productive, work is going to be speedily accelerating, things are looking up with Erika, I’m cutting away at my growing list of projects and overdue tasks… things are looking good. Now I’ll have to get in an accident or get pulled over, or my truck will blow up or something. It’ll balance all this chewy wholesome goodness with some catastrophic act in my life.

Karma is never on my side.

Hey look! I was in USA Today! Note to self: Never talk to anyone at PalmSource. He never presented himself as a reporter when he was at the booth talking small-talk to me.

dhd: I feel your pain wrt telecommunications companies. I can make long-distance calls, but not local calls, because my “local long distance” charges exceeded 75% of some threshold I was never told about. Even to this day, they can’t tell me what that threshold is.

ianmacd: I think something “odd” has happened to my access at the Palm Pavilion. I now no longer have access to anything with my login that I can’t get publicly through the normal seeding pages. It would appear as though I now have less access than before. johnm Did I piss someone off?

jpr: I saw your abstract. If I can finagle it from work, I’ll try to make it to OLS to catch your talk. I promise I won’t heckle like I did over there. I have way too much on my plate right now, so I don’t think I’ll be submitting any papers this year for that.

New Years

Boring.

I coded my butt off.

The results of the new Plucker Portal will be live soon. The Perl major hurdles are done. I might start playing with Text::Template soon too. Looks promising. I hope they’re not just shrouding eval in a module though.

Some of my slurped ViewCVS redirection:

  my $redirect = substr $path, 5; # drop "/cvs/";
  my $cvs_info;
  my $loop = 5; # nuke the redirect loop

do {
 local $ENV{SCRIPT_NAME} = "$script/cvs"; 
 local $ENV{PATH_INFO} = $redirect || '/';
 $cvs_info = $CVS_PATH 2>/dev/null;
 ($redirect) = $cvs_info =~ m{  
    ^Status:s+301s+Moved

    Location:s+Q$ENV{SCRIPT_NAME}E/(.*)
    }x;
 } while (defined $redirect and $loop--);

  for ($cvs_info) {
 if (m#^Content-Type: text/plain#) {
    $_ = (split / /, $_, 2)[1];
    s/&/&/g;
    s/</</g;
    s/>/>/g;


 $_ = "<pre>$_</pre>";
 } else {
    s#.*<body[^>]*>##is;
    s#</body>.*##is;
    s#"$script/cvs/~checkout~/#"$CVS_URL/~checkout~/#g;
 } 
 }
 print $cvs_info;

Airlines

Looks like these are my plans for January:

• 1-13-2001 to 1-22-2001: Fly from SF to Colorado for vacation with Erika
• 1-22-2001 to 1-29-2001: Fly from Colorado back to SF for training at Linuxcare SF facility
• 1-29-2001 to 2-3-2001: Fly from SF to New York for Linuxworld Expo

“How Do You Eat An Elephant?”

Somewhere in here, I have to find time to get the BBC cvs up and working for public development, prepare my slides for LWE, release pilot-link 0.9.5, get my Sony Clie kernel module finished, complete two lingering HOWTOs (perhaps I can do these on the airplanes?), shim in JogDial and MemoryStick support into Plucker, and lots more.

And that work thing. Lots of projects there too. Have to get the final report out for $PROJECT[1], the $PROJECT[2] serial alarm daemon, and $PROJECT[3] for the Wine stuff. Can’t say any more at this point.

Dysfunctional Family Life

I managed to find my dad on the net.

That’s oddly surreal. He left me when I was 3 years old. I wonder if he even knows I exist. Or does he even care. I was talking to a guy in #perl on irc, and he said my last name seemed familiar, and that his stepfather’s last name was the same as mine. After some digging, I realized that this guy’s stepfather was my father’s brother. Weeeeeird.

I have a brother and a mother somewhere too. I wonder where they are.

Pilot Goo

If anyone has any ideas for conduits for pilot-link or gnome-pilot, let me know. I’ve posted my wish list here. Consider it an ad-hoc TODO list.