Some how its ironic, mine is a gneration that may be best noted for ‘dis-functional’ familes. But mine tends to work on the un-functional side…

Sigh, back to code I guess.

Dang

Made to feel like a floor flushing heel just because I’m trying to learna new library and toy with an old program. Well, new library for me if not for the likes of people like Bill Joy….

Is it my fault that I couldn’t work on stuff during the day after work? Well I knew she was gonna change her bloody mind about not going out shopping today. So I didn’t start any thing, sure enough she did. Ya get a feel for it after awhile !

So, out of the store by 2215Z (1715 local) and home to what? Chores x 3 different fields. Few spare moments before dinner to type of the ncurses version of hello world, didn’t even have a chance to compile the puke. So after dinner, after putting the leftovers away with a chaptor of R6 in between. And being stuffed full of leftover pie she wants to get rid of (from Christmas/NYE). I finnally got some time, so I boot my laptop. I had been doing the leg work on Vectra from ssh on SAL so I could use Vi and GCC without that vile cmd.exe, worthless terminal emulator imho. Ma’s watching the soaps, lucky for me I have zsh set not to beep a lot…

Ya know its not exactly my fault that Vi does not give you the greatest warning that your at the EOF other then a BEEP. Sheesh man, I’m trying to _L E A R N_ some thing and I’m made to feel like a crimenal. What the heck… Oh and of course since its not my ‘School work’ it doesn’t matter worth a damn eh? Well pluck you – people used to go to college just to get access to a frigging compiler years ago !!! Let along having the internet to help learn about such things. Dang gum it.

She’ll raise all hell, tackle a bison to the ground if it denies her Respect but you so much as make a sound while the soaps are on and your on top of Amercias Most Wanted. Shes watching TV, some thing I as a former couch potato must of my younger life admit. I don’t do often – I’d rather learn some thing. Does she care? Not a fricking damn bit. If it was in the name of my over due biology test rather then trying to learn my way around ncurses. And skim threw a few files in /usr/src. I think she’d still treat me like this…

Its a sad fact I’ve been learning these days. That a man can starve tp death on a full belly. Some times I wish, I didn’t know that Luke 4:4 was right in more ways then I first thought.

I try to be respectful of others, I’m sorry for the beeps. I even asked if she wanted me to switch to the desktop. I was using a TTYV or ‘Virtual Console’ instead of KDE, because all I needed was my shell, ssh client, vi, lynx, and gcc. No need for a big GUI for accessing a box w/o X11 eh?

I think, I hate my life…. dispair out rules joy I think, for me any way. To her Michelangelo’s Pietà and David are art. And yes it is very greatly so. But to me, so is every bit of what I see in the FreeBSD sources, some thing I want to study and learn from. Just as Michelangelo had once learned from the working of human bodies how to better create sculpture. To me, source code is a work of art if its done right. For me, things such as FreeBSD, Linux, Vim, are all works of art. I’d yern to study under a master programmer…..

Ysterday, we got a tornado warning. About 20 minutes heads up to get to cover. Two dogs /w collars + harnesses, ma, me, bird, newt, and fish in the bathroom with supplies.

Since Mikey (parakeet) has his cage on a table, a playpen on a few boxes (my old school books haha) and a close rack turned into a toy rack full of perches. All netted in with a thin mesh. We had to get him caged and out of there. I yanked off the computers, pulled the cordless phones/networking gizmos closer to storm time.

I’m glad that I got to stick to my operational doctrine. Leave no one behind, I’d rather blow away trying then leave them. The storm passed within about 7-15km so we where fine. Where we live we usually get no damage, trees sway but hold hehe. Mostly had rain but no wind/hail.

Prayer beats fear, and although I don’t think I quite learned it in the context En4cer ment. I get the idea that you don’t just sit there and take a dump. You keep going, firing, aiming, engaging, or you die.

Upgrades

I tared and bziped all the files I wanted to save from my home directory and
copied my /etc directory and /boot/loader.conf file to my recovery partition.

I opened konqueror and navigated to my smb shares to copy the 660MB.tar.bz2
file over. Thats not to bad for 800+ MB of files hehe.

Booted off the 1.3 install disk (disk 1) and slected an upgrade for my 1.3
install. Yes to allow NTP and BSDStats. THen it stated with the update.

Reboot whent without problem, it generated a new ssh keys e.t.c. I was unable
to login, I wasn’t sure if KDE wasn’t starting or if the update broke my login
database or some thing because I had rebuilt it after making some
configuration changes or what. I switched to a ttyv and tried to login, I got
as far as the new motd and bombed out back to getty with the error message that
/usr/local/bin/zsh didn’t exsist. Ok no problem there, logged in as root and
did a portinstall of shells/zsh

Desktop was mostly normal the only changes being my icon set and wallpaper was delted so I got the defaults. Even Vim which Iinstalled from source was removed. Aramroki.pbi is broken by this update:

Amarok could not find any sound-engine plugins. Amarok is now updating the KDE configuration database. Please wait a couple of minutes, then restart Amarok.
If this does not help, it is likely that Amarok is installed under the wrong prefix, please fix your installation using:
$ cd /path/to/amarok/source-code/
$ su -c “make uninstall”
$ ./configure –prefix=`kde-config –prefix` && su -c “make install”
$ kbuildsycoca
$ amarok
More information can be found in the README file. For further assistance join us at #amarok on irc.freenode.net.

Gee thanks PC-BSD.

My USB stick does not automount when I plug it in. I don’t really mind since I tend to leave it in and have to mount it by hand. Now look at this:

Terry@Dixie$ mount /mnt/da0s1 17:24
mount: /mnt/da0s1: unknown special file or file system
Terry@Dixie$ mount_msdosfs /dev/da0s1 /mnt/da0s1 17:25

EXACTLY the samerly thing that was in the RC, fixed my ass. The onyl difference is it failed to mount the drive. On my fresh install on the desktop it auto-mounted to /media/LEXAR a temp mnt point that bypassed the documented /mnt/da0s* all together. On here I have to mount it specifically as a fat32 fs from the CLI.

Now very strangely every thing that was installed into /usr/local/ is gone. Yet for example wmclockmon and blackbox. They are no longer in the database /var/db/pkg according to pkg_info but they are still installed into /usr/X11R6/ so I think they did a booboo here. I’m very interested in just what exactly the installers upgrade feature does to my system.

The end result is that every PBI must be reinstalled from Seamonkey to Java. The least they could’ve done if they wanted to erase every thing installed into /usr/local period was to rm all in /Programs too. So now if I ever have a problem installing a new version of blackbox or any thing window maker before the translition is comlete. They will here from me directly !!

Even the entire linux compat was FUBAR. Realplayer.pbi made by Kris Moore RPM’d in its deps but they are gone. Yet the 1.3 upgrade installed a FC4 Linux ABI. Complete with linux flashplugin wrapper. Since I need gmake to build most stuff I know of using GTK, if QT needs any thing other then qmake probably you need gmake for QT/KDE apps too.

Luckly my gkrellm2.pbi is ran from my Autostart directory stright from the PBI in /Programs rather then my path. So no problem there. Copied over my wallpapers and its good I have the old icon sets as part of my KDE icon sets PBI that I was working on. It would auto install any of them if not detected and delete them all at removal if one wanted.

THANK GOD the new Kaffeine is more stable it was driving me crazy. At least I have some thing that will play .ogg files now danke !

Since my install of the allcodecs PBI installed to /usr/lib I don’t expect any problems with media playback unless I install some thing from ports. Personally I think I will just cut up the pbi db and rm most of /Programs/* and start over. At least my system seems stable. I see changes in /PCBSD/cardDetect but as long as I don’t have to screw around to get my resolution back I’m happy enough.

It seems they didn’t meddle with /etc to much good because I lost my backup of it. I fixed /etc/login.conf and a few fles to spec and rebuild the db. Think I lost al changes in /etc/ssh but I can borrow a copy from Vectra.

So far the half assed job of uninstalling software before hand and breaking most of my PBIs aside and making me have to type 2x as much to mount my USB stick aside. I’m happier with the upgrade then with the fresh install. I see they owned my loader.conf file so is it a wonder my Atheros card is not detected ? I’ll merge these real quick after checking the diff. I don’t know what they did that I see no sound drivers being loaded at without using loader.conf or defualts/loader.conf but hopefully it will help people getting sound working.

I loaded my wlan and ath modules and got back online in a snap. Unpacked my always on hand copy of the vim source code in /tmp and began to configure and gmake it with gtk20 support. The changes made to konquerors profiles were lost on me since I customized most of them in my home directory. I usually use PersonalBrowser and SmallExplorer or Kommander the ones I made any way.

To clean up the PBI problem I removed all broken PBI directories from /Programs.
I removed the scripts in /Programs/.sbin that they used. I removed the entries from /Programs/.config/ProgList after backing it up just in case. It says not to edit by hand but I don’t think I can do much damage with a backup in hand. Still I don’t trust any of the PC-BSD utils as far as I can throw a 100 Ton Atlas. I removed a few things in /usr/local/share that were left over. I changed over to /usr/local/share/applnk/My Programs where the K-Menu entries for PBI are kept. And eracticated the ones left.

I removed the borken links in /usr/X11R6/* and /usr/home/Terry/.kde/share/applnk/M Programs/. Of course I could have used PC-BSDs software manager to do most of this but I would rather keep that strong connection with my system that I have from regular usage. So far life is good, I’ll just make an alias or a script for mounting my USB stick and assuming that the Amarok.pbi is totally incompabible with PC-BSD 1.3 I will half to make some packages on my desktop and jet them over. Hopefully there won’t be much problem with it

So far the update looks to have gone good. Stabiltiy may be better then it was
before, software is up to date without me having to compile it all for 24
hours. BSDStats should now track my system and it seems the denyhosts stuff was
setup but I don’t think PF was, good I’ve been needing to read the manual on
that any way.

What was the cost? Downloading the install disks ISO and burning it to a CD-R.
Having to reinstall much software, most of which was installed via PBI or
stright from sources, having to clean up after the upgrade broke/remove it all
(I did it the harder way), Loosing my many icon sets and wallpapers. Lucky for
me I keep my wallpapers in my home directory and copy them over to KDE hehe ^_^
and I was working on a PBI full of icon sets. The highest price, Amarok my
favorite music player. Also my /usr/local/projects folder with the files for my
KDE icon sets, Amarok styles (lucky I have this one in my home dir), Ogle, Vim,
Blackbox, xmss and others that I forgot to backup before PC-BSD wasted it by
mistake.

Oh wells theres always ports 🙂

Well it approches new years… I don’t have any thing I wish to say about the holidays at the moement. SO far, I feel as if I’m ready to spread out but I’m told to wear shoes two sizes to small. I could go so much further given what I need.. yet I’m stuck shoveling $|-|1+. To day at work I thought up an interesting project, one that I could use to teach me a lot more about Object Oriented design and implementations. Some thing I could sit down and attack it till I learned every thing I’d need to finish it, then vim around till it was a master peice some day. The end result? I don’t ph|_|{|<1||6 have the bloody time to do it. Ether to program it all or to learn what I need and would love to learn to do it. Finnally this weekend I get some time off, four days and I’m spending it on the servers. Get my fat NCO arsch back to duty. Even my studies for a new language have been going slow. I wanted to work on learning a word a day, complete with the words sex, spelling, and pronouciation.

Nutz

I’m going crazy… Positively crazy. Its like no matter what day it is, I get a
headache around the 2200-0100 GMT range, maybe its because thats the time ma
gets active again on her days off..

Driving me nuts. Sucks to live with a headache, can’t take aspirin
e.t.c. For it all the time because then you kill your stomach.

Labor

Ok been working on a Vi user how to, I want ot ge that finished by monday. Note to self disable my word wrapping settings before editing the file.

I tested the *.desktop files a bit and I’ve tweaked the program accordingly. getInput now asks for a K-Menu name for the program, should it run in a terminal or not (with a function to handle that). The mkXML file now is ready to handle the new data and sets Startup Notifications on for every thing. MIME types, Web links, and Doc links aside I think mkXML is read op.

One thing I have learned is that Regular Expressions are fun things, makes life very easy at times 🙂
Really using a mix of unix util in the shell I think one could bypass a text editor all to gether but the slide-sling of file redirection makes me understand how editors like ed and ex became standard programs in UNIX before vi was created.

Need to get out more

Dang it I’ve just been examining my to do list…. I really need to get out more, chase a few lushious babes across the beach e.t.c. Dang it I can’t even remember how many years its been since I’ve gone to the beach and I grew up in south Florida !

Oh well time to play Spider Solitare and some KDE Games.

XML

Ok so sue me I took a day off 😛

Set up the mkXML function to create our *.desktop files which is a good thing because it shows me I have more testing to do with them. As well as editing the getInput function to make a few changes namely.

Should we run the app in a terminal ?
Do not create link option
Test a few entries in the file
Set MIME type(s?), using a real MIME not a *.ext !

I’ve added “/usr/ports/packages/All/” and the current directory to where to look for things entered on the CLI so hopefully we could call it as “program packageToAdd.tbz optionalBatchJobFile” and find it. I’ve set the foot holder code for the fkBuild function which makes the PBI file. Thats going to be a tough thing to do, hopefully Tim will be able to help me there. I’ve set up our little main loop to breach off into fkBuild + a comment that it should never return to our main loop of events. Because once fkBuild and sub-routines are finished it’s supposed to exit the program !

I need to add stuff to the getLibs function for binary hunting. Because what I want is for the user to be able to enter the binaries name as one would to run it. Which is easier on Joe Newbie and faster for a CLI without tab completion. Since getLibs relaies on the information gathered from getInput. We’ll then have to test it logically checking to see if it’s located in any of the usual spots in the path. Once we find where it is we append that and pass it to the section that actually gets the libs. If it’s some thing not in the standard path the user will have to give us full path which we will need to strip off at the start of mkXML.

Line of execution is pretty simple so far, I’ll worry about the world of Object Oriented Programming another time – like after this works. Every thing is done in seperated routines rather then a huge main function.

mkHome - prepair programs projects directory (/usr/local/Projects) if it does not exist.
mkProject - make the current projects directory if does not exist. Then copy our pkg over to the project directory.
mainLoop - ask how many K-Menu entries we need to make and loop that many times, then call fkBuild.
getInput - get all the information needed to write the *.desktop files and any script details
getLibs - gather all the libraries required from the program given to us by getInput
mkXML - using the data from getInput make our *.desktop file
fkBuild - make the *.pbi file

Of course its not done yet so its not all working yet. So far it looks quite promising as long as in the end I can make a working pbi file. I need to add greater error checking, path stripper code for getLibs, strighten up getInput for a few extras and colate with the mkXML routine. I don’t know if XML is the right word for the file style but hey its short, discriptive, and bloody close enough! I also need to get the stuff fixed up for creating the PBI.*.sh files.

To day I rest, let the stream roll off. I’ve mostly kept my self busy as a beaver to get my work done and also not blow up over at www.pcbsd.org

I need to get the code to handle swaping the data out to file thus creating the *.desktop files to day. I’m moving it to a mkXML function for neatnesses sake even though it’s likely to need tweaks. The only bad thing is I can’t do the multi-language fields of it and I’m sure as heck not writing a translator to use as a filter app!

Also got to get the stuff setup before going back to work. It’s nice to be able to rest for a few days, even if I’ve more or less been in front of the computer tinkering on some thing for 2 or 3 days stright. BF2 is also good for a break.

For some very od reason I’m having an urge to create a GNU/Linux distro… Console based Live CD /w plenty of rescue stuff, optional X startup /w a minimal WM and an install script then setup the system for install.

Working on my German a few words at a time too.