Uncategorized

Most of the day was totally absorbed, and the evening rather wasted. I was up so late last night, that I slept late this morning, but still had time to do some reading before it was time to leave; ma’s followup with the doctor was today.

So, much like November 2nd, I ended up sitting around the community medical centre, in the next county lol. This time howeber, I was smart enoguh to bring along my laptop. Unlike last time, it was only about a two hour affair, so there was ~40min of charge left by the time we left. After booting the computer, I chose to enable powerd in the hopes of prolonging the laptops battery life. While I’ve tried powerd over the years, most times I’ve had to give it up, either due to to high a level of performance loss or stability issues with my laptops ACPI.

One great perk of my great wealth of experience with computers, other then when I actually need a graphical program, I can function quite adeptly in text mode. Running the computer booted into text mode, rather then a fancy X11 desktop with transparency  and stuff, puts much less strain on the hardware. X pulls plenty of processor power, and should we say a windowing system requires quite a bit more use of the graphics card then drawing an 80×24 vtty !!!

Stability was good, and my CPU spent most of it’s time running just below 1Ghz, or approximately half of full speed. Repsonsiveness is much better under the newer hiadaptive power mode, then the regular adaptive mode, which takes care of my only other beef. According to FreeBSDs dmesg, I have a CPU: Mobile AMD Sempron(tm) Processor 3300+ (1994.21-MHz 686-class CPU) which according the dev.cpu.0.freq_levels sysctl, is able to scale itself as low as ~99Mhz, or roughly the clock rate of a sexy Pentium from the time of Jurassic Park :-P.

In text mode, I spent my time with a screen session open: one window for testing software, one with vim for editing software, one for the language tools,, and another window for looking up documentation as needed. During the wait, I was able to get four git commits fired away on the Encapsulated Installer (EPI) project. My parters approved the use of Git for our implementations SCMS/VCS needs, much to my joy :-).

Currently I’m focused on a topic branch that seeks to develop “Extras” for epi-unpack and epi-verify, that can have wider usage throughout the toolset, not to mention make EPI management easier to script for system administrators and developers.

The ideals of maing the EPI system powerful, flexible, and easy, are very much at the heart of it’s design: and I have taken the influence of UNIX to heart in my development habbits.

It’s been a bit of a busy day, managed to complete importing all the LiveJournal entries from 2007 into Blogger, as well as taking the time to properly study Blogger templates, and spruse up the place ;).

Sadly, the highlight of my day, was getting to watch a few episodes of Stargate SG-1 while doing it lol. Beyond that, it’s all been kind of acline to torture…

Well, so far my family has managed to annihilate any chances of enjoying TV, or getting work done tonight, so I took some time to study blogger themes.

Managed to get most of my Live Journal entries from 2007 transferred here, and I’ve some what an idea of how I want this blogger page to look. Tomorrow, I’ll likely strip out the templates code and design something more to my taste. Two things that I do like about Blogger, is that most trivial things can be changed without touching the code, and you don’t have to pay up to modify the code! Live Journals S2 system, has always interested me, but I’ve never dug into it, due to the feature splits they employ.

Now if I could actually get some sleep before dawn, it might help… *sigh*

It’s been quite a day, lol. When I was at work, I was looking at the bottoms of my shoes for a moment, and I’m sitting here like, “Since when did they start making sandles with screws in the bottom?”. I had to look at my other shoe to be sure, lol. Sure enough, there was a screw stuck into the bottom of my shoe, less then a centimetre away from the bottom of my foot.

On top of that, when I was loading the car, who should greet me in the front yard, but the bosses dog that had just gone out in the back yard—the bloody gate was open! I said thank you LORD, and whoever’s watching, and thank YOU for small miracles!

The misserable part of the day however, ma decided to buy a 22 lbs Turkey (that’s nearly 10kg). I hate turkey, when you’re eating it until the cows come home from their seventh voyage 🙁

Despite a lot of interrupts, I’ve managed to complete a doc that’s been on my list for months; and happily checked it off my Categories Uncategorized

Hmm, as I was saying before I was interrupted, I’ve been learning more about DocBook, and as should be obvious to anyone following this blog or my microbloging outlet, I have also been learning XSLT.

DocBook is a good format, it seems to have all the attributes from LaTeX and troff that I desire, it’s as easy as HTML (in which I am generally fluent), and just like it, is available in XML-based variants ;). Personally, I consider RST the easiest method of preparing documents. The principal problem with RST, being the available formatters: it works good for generating HTML output for the web, but not quite ready for manual pages just yet.

Some people might have issues with writing in XML/SGML like markup languages, but I do not; in fact, I feel more comfortable with DocBook, because there is *no* real presentational crap bloated into it, not to the level that HTML has been mutilated beyond permanent scaring… so yeah, I like it. Even better is being able to use DocBook with XSL/CSS related data to control the outputs. I’m a freak, I like to have central sources for documents, that I can keep under version control, unlike Word docs; and preferably a document that I can read, either in my text editor, a document viewer (ala PDF & PostScript), or copy/paste into a web page. DocBook is a very highly structured way of describing the contents of a document, which further mates well with my insane mind.

Likely I’ll be writing new HOWTO, guides, manuals, reviews, and so on in DocBook; any pertinent documents in existence now, will likely be converted over to DocBook. I will probably write suitable stylesheets for creating posts on my Live Journal here, and forum posts in BB Code.

Today has been a fairly nice day, managed to get some stuff sorted on the net; helped a friend with her blog; finished reading an article on DocBook. Along the way, I also found a cool page on creating rounded corners in CSS, and remembered to add A List Apart to my feed reader, after stumbled across it again.

Ahh, foooooood time!!!!

Q: How hard would it be to find collisions in SHA-1?
A: The reported attacks require an estimated work factor of 2^69 (approximately 590 billion billion) hash computations. While this is well beyond what is currently feasible using a normal computer, this is potentially feasible for attackers who have specialized hardware. For example, with 10,000 custom ASICs that can each perform 2 billion hash operations per second, the attack would take about one year. Computing improvements predicted by Moore ‘s Law will make the attack more practical over time, e.g. making it possible for a wide-spread Internet virus to use compromised computers to mount such attacks as well. Once a collision has been found, additional collisions can be found trivially by concatenating data to the matching messages.

— source

I dunno about everyone else on planet earth, but I feel safe enough with that probability, at least until Independence Day arrives.

Shared from Google Reader

A Stick Figure Guide to the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES)—hubertf’s NetBSD blog

The was strangely enjoyable!

I sneezed and Willow took off, as usual lol. After a while I looked and she wasn’t back on the bed, our the couch, so I started looking all over for her.

Checked under the step stool, in ma’s bedroom, under the dining room table, in the kitchen, the bathroom, next to the couch, on ma’s couch, heck even under the Parakeet! Guess what!!! Willow was under the covers on my bed, and that was the first place I had looked…. even moved the covers! Yet, sure enough when I walked back into the room it was her head looking quizzically at me, as if to say what the heck are you looking for idiot!

Oy vey!