Sitsofe's diary for February 2002

28 February, 2002

DaveB - you're probably right when you say that I always overcomplicate things (this was in reference to the fact I spent half a day programming a random number generator for my User Interface design program). I do enjoy programming things and I just like the idea of writing a program to automate something tedious even if I could complete the tedious thing quicker by hand.

27 February, 2002

Strange weather today - as I look out of my window it appears to be hailing. Never a dull moment in Swansea...

26 February, 2002

Writing a program to help do the questionnaire for user interface design. Need more sleep. Want more time off. Need to rest more.

tr said he'll move to OpenOffice (although the lack of a spell checker was pointed out to be a significant drawback).

25 February, 2002

Looks like tr might have to switch office packages if he wants to upgrade - StarOffice 6 costs money on Windows (and Linux). I can live with OpenOffice personally but tr has been active StarOffice evangelist and I don't think Sun is doing itself any favours by alienating people who support its product. Still, maybe tr will want to pay for it.

23 February, 2002

Spent the morning searching out documents about how to turn TeX documents into non-ugly PDF documents. Turned out my copy of Ghostscript was old but SUCS has a newer version that can embed Type 1 fonts (instead of Type 3 ones); the result is a far nicer document. Unfortunately, due to TeX's fanciness, it also means the documents aren't so nice to search (ligatures and the like get in the way) so I have also learned about pslatex package which use Times everywhere but produces far smaller and easier to search documents (so I think that will be the one that's put on the website so that Google will do a better job).

Aw man! Gamespot don't have MPEGs of their videos any more. Now the only way to save a video is to download it in Windows Media Files format and pay for the privilege to do so. I'm not rebooting into Windows and paying for it just to save a movie :(. At least the streams still work...

I need to add sanity checks to my diary importing scripts. Something along the lines of no dates from the future and no dates earlier than the last imported entry would be good.

Spell checked all my diary entries cleaning up most of the really glaring errors. I would have never have known that I typed "tomorrow" with the double r in the wrong place so many times...

Heh let's throw in a link to DaveB's Wolfenstien 3D site.

Fixed a problem with the redirect which had been appearing in the site logs. www.sucs.org/~sits would be redirected twice (once because the hostname is not sucs.org and again by apache because it's really a directory and needs / on the end). Unfortunately in this redirection /home/life/sits was turning up suggesting that Apache was becoming confused. Wrote an line in to test whether we are in the ~sits case and if so don't change the hostname. Doing this seems to have done the trick.

22 February, 2002

If only Faron had ordered a cheese and tomato pizza like I suggested...

You can swap from using a USB cable to a network card connection to a cable modem without phoning NTL or changing any information there. You just need to wait for you DHCP lease to expire (this happens four hours from when it was last renewed).

So to do the swap, turn cable modem off overnight, swap from USB cable to network card cable. When you turn everything on the next day it should work.

21 February, 2002

There seems to be a packet flap from here to liscat right off the bat this morning.

11:54am - If I had a well read website I would probably put up a page as to why Swansea Uni's computing facilities suck because of intermittent network connectivity. All that bandwidth is useless if all the packets keep being thrown away...

How can two NATing clients make a connection to each other when there is a stateful firewall at both ends? Firefury came up with the best idea which was for both clients to launch UDP connections to each other at the same time. Because UDP is stateless this should work...

Why is it I never write all the important stuff down when people are telling me it? Some of the good advice I've been given has faded so fast that I haven't been able to heed it.

Data mining eh? I'll look in to it over the weekend John. Oh and the document is full of silly errors towards the end because I was tired when I was typing it. The next one will actually have been spell checked and look at. I might even chuck a semicolon or two in.

I noticed my .plan on SUCS hasn't been updated since March 27 last year. I folded the entries there into this diary and I'm currently thinking up a new one.

20 February, 2002

Results finally came out today although not without a large amount of confusion.

Alfie's birthday is in a month.

19 February, 2002

The results have been postponed again.

17 February, 2002

Fiddled with analog so that the my site's statistics were a bit more useful.

An insight into John Carmack.

Fixed two scripts on my website that had mysteriously become broken. The first was a form trying to submit to http://sucs.swan.ac.uk/~sits/mozilla/parse.cgi and being redirected to http://sucs.org/~sits/parse.cgi. Sadly the contents of the post was not carried through the redirection (note to self: avoid fully qualified domains names when they are not necessary). The second script was broken because the environment variables indicating a proxy was available were not being picked up by Perl when it was running wget. I have switched to lynx which has the proxy defined in /etc/lynx.cfg.

Ack, I've remembered why the link was absolute and not relative. It was so I could put the page up at Geocities and still have it work...

16 February, 2002

I finally managed to compile Agda for my home box using GHC.

I used the following so that the trace function could be loaded (without it you get the error ghc-5.02.2: can't find module `Trace'): perl -pi -e 's/import Trace/import IOExts(trace)/' *.hs
(btw: the above is a good demonstration of how to rename the same thing in lots of files)

Of course life can't be too simple. You will also need to put: -package lang
so that GHC knows where to find the IOExts module. The full command line is as follows: ghc -O --make -package lang -o emacsagda emacsagda.hs


Just a quick warning — compiling with the -O option took some time on my Athlon 850...

To actually get Emacs to recognise when it's editing an Agda file and call the interpreter see the README within the Agda tarball. At some point when I have a some free time (yeah right) I may create source and binary RPMs to make this a no brainer recompile/install.

15 February, 2002

Tired, hungry and cold. I've fought the Emacs Agda system and won though. Now all I need to do is compile it for my home box.

Spotted that Alan is going to be speaking at Swansea University next month at the bottom of this interview with Alan Cox. Irony is that I found this out from Slashdot rather from the department. I guess I'll see it advertised more next week.

Heh, interesting thread about the Slashdotting of the itwales server.

14 February, 2002

Had a long chat with postgrad Andy today. It's always cool talking to him because well, he's clever and all but he spins a good yarn with the best of them. I think he has been postgrading the longest of the people I ever get to talk to and now he is at the end of it all, it's interesting to see how his perspective has changed since when I talked to him in the first year.

Peer reviewed Sonic's bathroom cleaning. The problem with getting people to clean stuff is quite simple if you ask me. It's not that they don't want to clean it but rather they can't tell when it's dirty. When I pointed Sonic to a bit that needed doing he would often agree (he might well have been trying to appease me though).

13 February, 2002

The exam results were meant to be out today but it looks like they've been postponed until Monday next week because something broke and a meeting couldn't take place.

12 February, 2002

Still working on the interim document. What with today being shrove Tuesday and all, Sonic decided to make some pancakes. Except he kept mixing up the word pancake with the word pizza. I can say that everything I ate was a pancake though.

Cleaned the oven today and all I can say is that Mr Muscle oven cleaner is potent stuff. I went to scrape off some of the crusty bits and they practically slid off the sponge.

11 February, 2002

Jason is blaming me for telling Tucker his name. All I did was say that Jason had been helping clear up irregularities in my notes, Tucker promptly asked him to write a few proofs for me. I would like to point out that Tucker actually made Jason describe the algebra of money back when we were in the second year so this is not the first time...

DaveB has introduced a new phrase "Up the wonk" (which I later learned he had head on the radio).

My attempts at cooking took something of a bad turn when the middle of the pizza I was baking fell through the shelf and on to the chicken pie below (I've never seen the words "cook on baking tray" on a pizza box before...). Ignorance struck again when I took the chicken pie out early and it went flat (that was supposed to be on a baking tray as well - I think it must be an Iceland thing).

Fiddled with named and set up aliases so we can now get to our computers with single letter names as well as their canonical names.

10 February, 2002

I'm 22 now!

I now have all four Chemical Brother's studio albums :).

I also have an interim document to work on :(.

9 February, 2002

Woke up to a broken router again (tr apparently kicked it for being noisy in the night but logs show that it didn't break until around 2 hours after the incident). I don't think it has managed more than 20-30 days of uptime which is a bit sad for something that that's main purpose is to shunt packets about.

Figured that since the partition was partially corrupted, now was as good a time as any to upgrade to OpenBSD 3.0. Spent most of the day grappling with that. The changes were mostly in the packet filter/address translation so Sonic and I spent most of our time reconfiguring that. Ironically, things have been made simpler so now the rules are shorter, even easier to read and do more (especially network address translation).

In the evening I optimised our firewall rules so now the rules which are used the most are now the first to be accessed so things should be fractionally faster. It almost wasn't worth the effort but I'll sleep better at night knowing packets are being filtered as quickly as possible :).

8 February, 2002

I was woken up by the washing machine at 2:45am this morning. I was so tired I didn't bother getting up until 10 and I missed a lecture that I'm no longer doing that I would have still liked to have gone to. I've been meaning to tell people that it very loud from my room (as is the bathroom actually) but I never got round to it.

Woo - I've got another birthday present! Thanks Victoria.

I can't helping wondering whether technical administration is starting to impact on my education. I do not refer to my own technical administration though - rather that of the Computer Science department. From today's Critical Systems lecture it is painfully clear that the Agda software Dr Setzer needed to be installed has not been and his lectures are being hampered by having to use telnet to connect to his Linux box and use Emacs. As such, the colour and menus he is used to are not being conveyed in his lectures. Why hasn't Cygwin and XFree86 been installed on that computer? If he could SSH to it and post the X back life would be much simpler...

Went down town and picked up another birthday present for myself - The Chemical Brother's Dig Your Own Hole album. Sure it's old but I've been meaning to get a copy of it for some time.

Uh oh, the performance of Shockwave Flash under Linux seems to have become worse in Mozilla 0.9.8, so I filed a bug report on it.

7 February, 2002

I've taken the plunge and dropped Functional 2. I am just finding the going to tough - I love to learn different types of programming languages but I find the theory behind functional programs so tedious I just can't take any more. Sorry Dr Sharp.

I am struck at how the Windows box which is hooked up to the overhead projector in the Robert Recorde room needs to have Cygwin and XFree86 installed on it. It would make lectures with things that only work on Linux much easier for lecturers without Linux laptops...

I discovered that EZ-CD Creator's problem is burning files from a networked drive. It just doesn't like it but says so in such a cryptic fashion that it took me fifteen minutes to find out the true cause of the problem.

I managed to break Philippe's laptop by reinstalling LILO - it would only print up LIL-. I didn't know that you needed to copy the first part of a partition into a file if you are using the NT/2K/XP bootloader. I wish I had but I didn't. All I can say is that I'm sorry.

This raises an important issue - to those who think I know all there is to know about administrating computers (especially ones running Linux) I would like to say I don't. I'm serious. My skill is being to find out what the real problem is and then being able to find answers to that problems - this is not the same as knowing the solution already.

In fact, this more or less applies to all the work I do with computers. I have very little experience of the wide range of problems that it is possible to hit. I have noticed a recent trend which is for people to cut back my experimentation and I don't like it. If I'm going to fix a problem why shouldn't I be able to eke a bit extra out some extra information? Why shouldn't I try to make things continuously better?

Often when something goes wrong I will sit down and experiment until I find a fix. This experimentation is what lets me understand the problem and then go and seek a solution. This experimentation is what allows me to learn.

I do not own NT/2K/XP so I know little about how to fix problems on them. This does not mean I won't be able to fix at a problem at all but it does mean I probably can't give you a solution off the top of my head. This relates to things connected to the NT/2K/XP too.

I often wonder whether it's better not to bother at - it is the path of least resistance after all. I think that the price for doing stuff is always higher than for not doing stuff. Doing stuff can lead to long term trouble (people come to expect it of you).

6 February, 2002

Received a parcel in the post this morning (sorry Sonic). It looks like it's my birthday present from my Mum.

5 February, 2002

Finn has knocked a cool little program which does translation in Haskell. If it works and helps me to understand the bit we're doing I many continue with Functional 2.

I found out that my patches to linux_logo have been accepted! It may have taken three months to find out but I'll but it looks like they'll make it in.

4 February, 2002

I think (when/if) I get around to revamping the website, I will need to use robot exclusion meta tags to get some of the old pages delisted.

Ah perhaps I was unwise to LaTeX Tucker's notes - I've now been officially anointed note monkey and have committed myself to typing all the notes for the course up.

1 February, 2002

Used MacOS X some more today. It appears that the CD burning software hasn't been installed (that or it's nigh on impossible to burn a CD from MacOS X because everything seems to be greyed out). I encountered a frustrating problem when I inserted a blank CD and found that MacOS X didn't bother to bring up an icon for it thus forcing me to reset the machine to get the CD out. Windows 2000 didn't fair much better - it took forever to find a machine that hadn't been forced into a permanent sleep, or locked by a warez dood. On the first two machines I tried, the CD device actually vanished from device manager because I pressed the eject button whilst the CD was still spinning (sigh). On the other two machines when I actually tried to burn/trial burn a CD with EZ-CD creator (give me Nero!) EZ-CD creator would not abort and would eventually cause the computer to be unable to log me out thus requiring a reboot to fix the situation. In the end I took Alfie's CD to SUCS and burnt it there after re-erasing it with Xcdrost.

Anton Setzer said the magic words today - "This course is like programming". What he said really did ring true with me - the feedback I get from compiling and debugging a program is just so much better than the feeling of relief that I receive when I finish a Maths/Logic/Specification problem. I just don't enjoy getting theory right as much as writing programs (seemingly).