Sitsofe's diary for March 2002

28 March, 2002

University is effectively closed and I'm off home for the Easter weekend. See you on the flip-side I guess.

Yet another day and yet another library fine. I really hate short term loans - they just don't give me the time I need to get comfortable with a book. I need to have it just hanging about for a bit before I can read it.

Fiddled about on the box and installed the latest Galeon, which meant by extension I've installed the latest Mozilla and all the things the Mozilla RPM needs (they all seem to be updated at the same time so there is nearly no point having them in separate packages).

Galeon now has gesture recognition. While not quite as smooth in comparison to what I used in Black and White it is still very novel - one can traverse to the successive pages on well designed sites with ease. I think I'm going to have to adjust a few XSLT stylesheets to take advantage of this very nice feature. Also got anti aliasing up and running in Mozilla. At the moment it feels a bit over done but I not sure whether the TrueType library or Mozilla is to blame for that. I hope that Nautilus' news sidebar moves over to using a library (i.e. freetype) to do its aliasing...

vim doesn't wrap paragraphs automatically any more :(. Looks like I'll be setting shiftwidth=80 in my vimrc.

gq} (which readjusts formatting up to the end of the current paragraph) is pretty much the motion I've been looking for since I learned that gqap did a whole paragraph but if you have a line at the beginning that you want left alone it is still considered part of the text and is formatted along with it.

The urpmi database seems to be acting up.

Why don't I know about any good Opensource projects being developed in Swansea University? Is it because I'm chronically out of touch or is it because they just aren't happening?

Do I want to spend the rest of my life doing this? Like everything I've ever done, I know I'll live to regret it if I do... but I'm not leaving myself much choice.

26 March, 2002

Got OpenOffice and the gb myspell libraries working. I now realise that the StarOffice 6 beta expected you to press the middle mouse button to paste stuff that you've merely highlighted rather than copied (which is very much in keeping with the Unix way of doing copy and paste).

I guess this Slashdot post summarises what Mark Jones thought a sophisticated answer would contain for last year's graphics convolution coursework would be.

Picked up another library fine.

So very tired. I just don't have the energy any more.

25 March, 2002

Swapped the NE2000 in the router for a 3com 3C905b. Ok we might not notice a difference in speed but I'll feel a whole lot better knowing that decent hardware is being used.

DaveB went home today so I'm the only one left in the house now. I still can't concentrate properly though - nothing seems to be helping.

Ouch. Library fines on short term loan books are incredibly steep.

Managed to see Anton Setzer. He seems to be always busy these days. At least the dependent type theory derivations make a bit more sense now.

I really should have grouped the widgets on my Internet Computing coursework together properly.

22 March, 2002

Noticed that emacsagda was not performing type checking and was instead bringing up error messages... Looks like it's incompatible with the newer version of Emacs rather than being miscompiled.

What a day.

Found that it is possible to make window titles useful when I'm sshed to SUCS by adding the following to my .bash_profile: . /etc/bashrc I've got to thank Mandrake for that obvious tip.

21 March, 2002

Twiddle, fiddle got round to putting dnetc back. After more fiddling I re-downloaded the Java 1.4 SDK for Linux.

Looks like DaveB and Sonic have decided to do the backlog of washing up. Truly an epic task given that there was so much it was being stacked up on the floor.

20 March, 2002

Yesterday evening I backed up all my data in preparation for the install of Mandrake 8.2 (I'm was still on 8.0). At least that's what I thought - looks like I forgot to copy the archive of /etc/ over before I did the fresh installation. Doh! Still I have an older backup and most of /etc/ will have to be recreated rather than copied back anyway.

I finally have ReiserFS :). I figured I'd go for it over Ext3 given that it's meant to be a bit faster.

I think I have gone quite insane. That is the only way I can explain my current behaviour.

It's Alfie's Birthday today.

19 March, 2002

It's hectic trying to finish algorithms coursework and go shopping for presents and food at the same time. And then there's problem of how to wrap the gifts...

17 March, 2002

A new fridge was delivered ludicrously early this morning. Thankfully I wasn't the one who had to get up and answer the door.

Fiddled about with GnuPG and checked to see whether it was possible to use it to send encrypted messages using my old PGP 2.6.2i key I made on my Amiga. Turns out that with the version Mandrake ship fails with the error "gpg: selected cipher algorithm is invalid". I guess I'll have to migrate over to a new key if I want to actually want people to be able to send me encrypted messages (and then be able to decrypt them on a machine I actually have regular access to).

I didn't know that Melody Maker had closed down / merged with NME.

Sonic has found a poorly translated support site. The winner of the craziest sentence goes to "Check whether there any broken wires or short circus" but "Dose the inner rack able to change its outer frame?" comes a close second.

The router mysteriously stopped working again today. The first weird thing was when Sonic said he couldn't do any lookups but things were working fine for all the other computers in the house. Then suddenly even pinging the router's IP address stopped working (along with everything that had been working for everyone else). The really strange thing is that when I went up and rebooted it I noticed that the lights on the network card facing the LAN weren't on. When I swapped the cable to a different network socket lo and behold the lights came on. Could it be that the router hadn't crashed but that it was a physical hardware problem that was to blame? Who knows.

Looks like Mandrake 8.2 is out tomorrow. I'll have to run the backups in preparation of the upgrade (I'm still on Mandrake 8.0).

16 March, 2002

Woke up and noticed that both ears are functioning correctly. I think it goes without saying that it's preferable to be able to listen to music in stereo, pinpoint which direction sound is coming from and not keep saying "What?" so often.

Once again it turns out QoS isn't quite perfect. Under the current scheme, when all the upload bandwidth is used up, everyone is told to send fewer packets rather than just the main offender. A fairer way past this would be reserve a quarter of the bandwidth for each machine and allow borrowing of other people's quarters when they are not using them (as is currently done with downstream traffic). Unfortunately, I can't seem to find a way to do packet marking in AltQ under OpenBSD the way one can with iptables and tc under Linux. I need to do packet marking because I want to queue packets based on the IP address they have come from but by the time they reach to outgress of the NE2000 (the network card facing the Internet) they have gone through NAT and all have the IP address of the router. This means I can't use class based queuing on the NE2000 network card which in turn means I can't easily reserve a part of the upload bandwidth for each machine.

Spent the bulk of the day washing, tidying and hoovering. Now my room is slightly less of a mess I don't feel like such a slob.

15 March, 2002

Woke up and realised I've gone deaf in one ear again.

YES! QoS has stopped sucking on the router! It looks like some of the uploading flows weren't responding to rate reduction and went on to chew up all the remaining bandwidth as others backed off. Now that flowvalve has been turned on large flows that do not moderate themselves are punished by having just their packets dropped (rather than stochastically dropping all flows packets).

Noticed the book that Martin Otto authored in the glass cabinet on the third floor of engineering. Phew...

Watched WarGames with DaveB and Sonic.

13 March, 2002

Unblocked the shower before going to lectures this morning because I was fed up with the way that the water was threatening to spill over the rim of the shower base. I've found over the years that the best plunging technique is to let some water drain down (or not in today's case) put plunger over plughole, push down and then pull up in one smooth motion. This generally dredges up loads of dead skin and slime after which water will begin to drain away. Repeat until water drains sufficiently quickly and then wonder what you are going to do with the slime.

I am convinced that there is, in fact, something in the mug that Faron brings to lectures. I had long ago dismissed the idea that he filled up the mug in the department and would then take it to the lecture theatre. Too far and too risky. Yet there was definitely steam rising from it and unless he's been putting dry ice in there... No, the cup probably empty when he enter the science tower and he must go and fill it up at the coffee machine on the first floor.

DaveB - Effervesce: to bubble, hiss, and foam as gas escapes. I was almost right.

12 March, 2002

Stumbled across an incorrect redirection whilst searching my bookmarks for a telnet vs SSH article for a link. The bookmark now redirects to a story titled "Revealed! Why geeks love scooters". Pah, how annoying...

...according to the Internet Archive, the link changed sometime at the start of this year. I really can't give enough praise to the Internet Archive site - it adds vital stability to the ever changing surface of the web.

Well I've found the correct new home of the original article - OpenSSH's Cinderella story. In retrospect I think the article I originally linked spends more time discussing the development of OpenSSH than the merits of SSH in comparison to telnet which isn't really what I'm looking for.

One of the technicians asked me what the X server which was installed yesterday actually did. Well it basically allows me to display graphical programs that may be running on a remote computer. The remote computer can even be far away (just as long as it's accessible from the Internet). So I can start a program like gv (Ghostview) in the Linux lab (or my home machine) and have the result displayed on the Mac I'm currently sitting at. It doesn't even matter if the machines are running a different operating system.

However, an X server by itself does not put decorations around windows which means without a window manager you won't be able to move/resize the windows that X displays. That's why I asked another technician to install OroborOSX today. Not quite as easy as XDarwin to install but reading the README answered all the problems we encountered.

If I put a link to Scripting News will Dave Winer ever read my diary? Doubtful.

11 March, 2002

I reckon the reasons why I always look a fool when Faron asks me something are: * Poor preparation. Too often I'm caught in the situation of talking about something that I don't completely understand. Once I end up in this situation, it's easy to crowbar the problem and show up my lack of understanding. * I don't ask Jon to bail me out enough. Unlike me he doesn't go to pieces when asked questions he knows the answer to. * The guy is just to darn smart. It's difficult to bluff your way through with rubbish when the person you're talking to knows what you're supposed to be talking about.

Paul the technician kindly put XDarwin on two of the Macs for me. Now all I need is a window manager and I can do all my Linux work from the Mac lab which will be supremely cool and easier on my eyes.

People, use SSH instead of telnet! Telnet is not encrypted and often needs messing about in order to get X to work properly. SSH does it all for you. There are very few good reasons to use telnet over SSH where both are available - there are good SSH clients for every active OS out there (when I say active I mean that a vendor/group are still developing its source code).

Oi, first year with geek T-shirt! Yes, the one which says Bow before me, for I am root. - join SUCS! Maybe then you can qualify that phrase with power somewhere that matters :)

10 March, 2002

More Java threading. It's kind of fun and tedious at the same time really. Strange things (like incredibly pings of several seconds to the cable modem) have been happening with the rate limiting so I've turned it off for the meantime.

Marathon Street Fighter Alpha 2 session. Man that game rocks.

9 March, 2002

Went off to see Ocean's Eleven at the UCI. I was very surprised by the length of the queue when we got the cinema. In fact the showing we were originally going to catch had sold out which was a bit of pain but it gave me a chance to waste two quid down the arcades whilst we waited for the next one.

All in all it's quite a light film with a very light plot but very glossy cinematography and relaxed but jazzy background music. I'd go as far as to call it a caper which which manages to be enjoyable and untaxing. You're never really left in doubt as to the end result but it's interesting to see how everything worked anyway.

Another surprise was finding out that it appears to be a remake of an old ratpack film called Ocean's Eleven...

8 March, 2002

"...if Pepsi had come out before Coca-cola then no one would drink Coca-cola. And Santa would have been blue." - Jason Bees.

More fiddling with the router. When it's under heavy stress even my interactive connections cease to be responsive. Maybe things need to be tuned a little more.

7 March, 2002

Tools are a means to an end therefore all tools can be used for corrupt ends... It may be called Google Bombing but I prefer to think of it as Scamming Google myself :)

Hmm the more I think about the QoS the more I think "What a crude setup we've got". I need to think more about upstream, downstream and packets going straight to the router.

I wonder if I can bargain with Tucker? I'm running out of time...

Finally managed to fiddle about and use TOS to arrange it so that my SSH packets are reserved enough bandwidth. So even if I have a big download my interactive sessions won't become slow. Of course, none of this addresses my previous paragraph.

6 March, 2002

Recompiled the router's kernel and now QoS seems to be working.

5 March, 2002

I'm going to switch to note form for this. Remarkably sunny day. Got to hob nob with people but had to miss Internet Computing. Rushed about but managed to get a digital camera. Good talk by Alan, interesting Ximain technology demo by Dick (I wish you had emphasised that Entourage was more than email). Should have gone to LUG meet up afterward but was trying to get digital photos and write everything up. Sparc had hardware crash whilst typing (weird). Most pictures were wobbly and washed out :( (very strange picture of Doug)

4 March, 2002

Turns out that the altqd crashes on the OpenBSD 3.0 router are due to the kernel needing to be compiled with: options ALTQ_NOPCC on non-pentium systems.

3 March, 2002

Finally (after a year and a bit) got round to watching Jaws. I thought I'd become completely desensitised to shocks in films but whatdya know? Jaws still managed to surprise.

2 March, 2002

Twiddled with diary creating programs and fixed a few small problems. Also introduced a simpler and far better movie tag. I have XML.com to thank for showing me how to copy elements (intuitive but I was having trouble finding it in my XML book).

I think I won't wait so long between shopping trips to town. I was in agony carrying those bags back to the house. My pocket may be lighter but I feel like I've got enough food to last for at least three weeks.

People still don't want to rate me on Advogato , ho hum. I guess this is a combination of not knowing enough people (and them not knowing me) coupled with not having done enough for open source.

Finally got around to watching Jackie Chan's Police Story, which I had seen advertised at the start of the videos that Dave (Little) has been lending me. It pretty standard Jackie Chan fare which generally means the plot's merely there to string the Kung Fu scenes together. As always, the outtakes really add something to this movie and I think they really do make the physical agony that the performers went through to achieve the stunts clear (there is one where a bus which is meant to stop in front of Jackie doesn't and he is forced to leap out of the way).

1 March, 2002

I think the reason why I don't like theory as much as I like programming is partly because:

I am weak at Maths and don't really enjoy practicing it.
When you are programming you are getting direct feedback from the computer. You can write down wrong theory and you don't know it's wrong until it's too late.
I am better at programming than I am at Maths (this is not saying a lot sadly).
I don't like asking people for help (I think I can trace this to my upbringing). An example of this is that I will try to completely search a supermarket several times before I ask one of the staff where a product I can't find is. Sometimes I just give up.

I would like to make it clear that I think that theory is vital and those who can understand and advance it should be supported to do so. Also those who are going to go and actuate (I'm not a happy with the way Tucker uses the word implement like it's something dirty) things in the "Real World" need to understand at least a little theory so that they can do their jobs better. This is one of the reasons why I am at university.

In many respects I want nothing more out of life than to be a good programmer and to be paid fairly for the work I do. Since I do not read widely I would not pick up the theory that I have (and am being) taught out in the field. I am pretty much restricted to using books as a reference because I just do not take in the information contained within otherwise.

Theory can prove that things are correct. Theory can save you time. These two things alone make it worth understanding some Theory even for the non-academic.

Noticed that the Linux lab PCs seem to be running web servers at last with the notable exception of csio...