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Hmm, arguably I have my bad days, and then I have my worse days…

Tomorrow can’t get much worse in terms of work, I hope : Nearly 0500R, so no time for a proper days log; I really need to stop staying up so late.

At the moment, I’ve nearly got nail configured to my needs. The addition of macros and IMAP support is a real improvement over the old Berkeley Mail program. With a little more adjusting, I just might be able to dig into my back-log of mail sometime lol. So far, I only have one major complaint – no line editing at the prompt beyond the most basic level (provided by the terminal). That’ not really a problem though, it allows that old ed like terseness, it’s easy to keep the commands short.

Software, like physical tools should empower users to get work done efficiently, A little bit of learning how to use the program, is worth it when the reward is productive.

One thing I’ve also come to enjoy, is a useful trick for generating HTML manual pages. The mail/heirloom-mailx port installs as /usr/local/bin/mailx on FreeBSD, corresponding manual page being /usr/local/man/man1/mailx.1.gz. Because nail has a big manual page, it’s worth while to use a web browser or a text editor with tabs, in place of the usual $PAGER used by man.

$ zcat /usr/local/man/man1/mailx.1.gz | groff -Thtml -man > ~/mail.1.html
$ firefox3 ~/mail.1.html &

which is much more fun then my shell alias:

alias   man-nail="man -M /usr/local/man mailx"

PC-BSD, 3 years of PBI corruption continues!

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Username: mrhbit

Hi@

This is available in FreeBSD ports.

Here some screenshots.
—
http://www.ultimatestunts.nl/index.php?page=1&lang=en
—

regards Soeren

Username: mrhbit

Or a package for PC-BSD 7.x ?

Username: Gon

have done it. Gimme a week and i will approve it into pbidir.com

_________________
Gonzalo Martínez-Sanjuan Sánchez
PC-BSD Core Team Member

Problems with this:

  1. Getting a PBI approved is supposed to involve community testing, and review by those in charge of our PBI’safety (e.g. Gonzalo and a few others on the team page), which should also be impartial auditors – it’s called common sense.
  2. This would make Gonzalo a repeat offender in by-passing the normal approval procedures for his own PBIs, if he does what he says he will do.
  3. If he does as his record and choice of words suggests, this is a conflict of interest, which I deem unethical.
  4. This is not the first time. someone involved in the PC-BSD project has “bent” the PBIDir rules, or endorsed doing so… when they are supposed to be enforcing them, for everyone including themselves!
  5. In the past a number of PBI’s that have “skipped approval”, and have resulted in stinging users or violating the rules of the day (ref: Kris (Realplayer, Java, BSD4Win), Charles (Firefox, Thunderbird), Gonzalo (Gnome, …)), or just had half assed [lack of] testing that didn’t catch obvious problems (ref: the 2nd Amarok PBI, Gnome 2). Considering the state of Documentation (how many general users know how to extract PBI w/o install, or how to reach the scripts before they are run), users will not see the code executed when they install a PBI (and most woulnd’t understand it, or the implications), which IMHO is a major security risk — unaudited PBI.

Is it a wonder, that I never send patches to these people… I wouldn’t want my name associated with PC-BSD in any such capacity, period and end of quote. I remember I once compiled a list of the PC-BSD projects deficiencies, and took it up with one of the team members…. That was quite a while ago now; but no actual changes seem to have occured, beyond referencing revisions in the changelog for 7.0.1.

I think, if Gonzalo doesn’t go by the book, maybe I will just happen to go public with them this time — and expand the list!

I’ve had about enough of watching this chicken shit project. I may have mellowed in my increasing age, but not that far just yet.

Miscellaneous ponderings

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/bin/ed isn’t so bad after all, but hey… knowing how to use ex, vi, and vim helps lol.

The old Berkeley mail interface is very interesting, but seems to lack mutts infinite configuration. Most of the time, I just use webmail. Google Chrome (Windows) or some thing from $BROWSER (*nix) is always open, so typically use that; but some times I do like to work from my terminal hehe. It even looks like the nail/heirlom-mailx program might add the stuff I desire.

TODO: inhale /usr/share/doc/usd/07.Mail (the reference manual), inhale nail documentation.

days objectives

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  1. finish room
  2. get to / finish work (zzZZZzzZZzz, cake walk)
  3. get dragged out shopping after work (grrr!)
  4. dinner
  5. finish room (if not compelte) / hit the net
  6. work on DBus

with luck, I can get my room mostly done before It’s time to leave.

EDIT

What’s left to do:

0/ go through the old strategy guides — anything to a game I don’ have anymore goes out, anything I can’t find room for goes out; I don’t use strategy guides and there is the internet if I get stuck.

1/ continue sorting books by priority.

2/ move to auxiliary storage point, based on priority.

3/ figure out where my laptop will be stored when not in use

4/ figure out what to do with the pictures from the hallway, which are stuck sitting in the place for my school books (and laptop)!!!

5/ Anyway to get ma’s dolls out of here? She’s burning up _my_ book space!

6/ sort through the last dresser draw

7/ throw out the trash

8/ dust it all to the max

9/ vacuum

10/ organize the last shelf, side Alpha, right of the A/C

11/ figure out where to put the spare PC (unused), mmm wish I had time to get a spare NIC dirt cheap – could get her online xD

12/ reassess the situation, where do we go from HERE?

ok, list noted, now to get dressed for work, before I get driven more nuts – just for wanting to quickly write my notes at the speed of thought.

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Ahh, finally some time to R&R, or should I say as close to it as I actually get.

I’ve been getting drivin out of my mind, so… I flushed all thoughts and forked a new idea for my day. I’ve spent most of my day ripping stuff apart and throwing crap out. Heck, I’ve chucked a few things that are /older/ then I am. I’ve changed around a lot of things in my room, including dismantling the desk since it was in the way of moving the bed. Due to the change in positioning, I no longer have my usual electicral outlet. So I’m sitting at the foot of the bed, with the dog lol. I think I’ll like this new arrangement, one thing I like – rolling to face the wall is on the other side. Often, when I finally do go to sleep, I usually turn away from the rest of the room so my mind doesn’t try to focus on it. As it was, doing that would be rolling onto my heart-side, this way it isn’t.

It also allows me to walk into the room, without tripping over shit lol.

Well, it will once I finish lol. Got a ton of crap piled up, mostly books that need to need to go out. Namely about ~40 pounds of old school books I’ve been forbidden to dispose of for years. I’ve had about enough of this crap, it’s _my room_, shouldn’t it store _my stuff_ ? The rest is books that used to be in the desk, and have no where else to go for the night. eally, I could finish tonight, would only take 2-3 hours more; but that would require going in/out the front door. And Ma would kill me if I made that much racket while she’s trying to sleep lol.

If I’m going to be driven nuts all the time, prevented from getting work _done_, well I am bloody well going to do something constructive !!!!!!

While I’ve cleaned out most of my stuff, I’ve kept a fairly minimal amount of things (those that have value, and those that I want). Amazingly, despite the fact that some of my personal belongings go back to before I can remember life, I can still remember virtually each and every piece of crap I found lol. I have a very good context-sensitive memory; I might not know whether to turn left or right at a fork in the road when setting out on the journy, but by the time I get there, I’ll know which way to take. Maybe in some ways, i am trying to distance myself from the past, I dunno.

But I know, I do feel much better — working on stuff beats sitting one ones duff doing nothing, but passing time; that should be spent with a purpose.

Of all of the things I’ve gone through, I’ve managed to ge a few sets of things in order, that have had pieces missing for 10-15+ years. Found a reminder of the last time I was in a doctors office (heck, what was that? About 1991?), some old books I should read. Another thing I found was an old “paper weight”, that has been sitting in a dresser draw for many years. At least, for as much as my mothers told me it’s a model pistol that my father had put together for me. Examining it, I found something rather odd for a model – it has a working single action! I cocked the hammer, that as a boy, I had always thought was fused into place… only to see the cylinder rotate, making ready the next (empty) chamber. To top it off, the rammer along the bottom of the pistol even works. A quick look around the Wikipedia would suggest it’s a replica of the M1851 “Navy” Revolver, but on the side of the octagonal barrel it says “.44 Caliber” and notes to only load it with black powder (M1851s were .36 Cal). I can’t help but wonder, just how much is model and how much is replica… lol. Even in the civil war though, I couldn’t imagine loading one of those things [properly] in a combat situation, then again it was an era where 3 aimed shots a minute was the ideal with an infantry mans musket :. Hmm, for some reason one of John Waynes comments in True Git comes to mind, hehe.

Tomorrow I need to finish moving stuff, dust, vacuum, and sort the remainders. Work for Monday is gonna be quite light, so hopefully I’ll have some peace, I’d kinda like to get some homework done some time this century !!!

Reboxing the box

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To go with the changes in my working environment, a new style for blackbox 😉

Image Hosted by ImageShack.us

Since I left KDE in favor of more compact systems, I’ve found that I tend to change my layout of things less often. Most of the arrangements are calculated for muscle memory, and my visual patterns, and have become a set of very quick reflexes.

I don’t miss a taskbar at all, and have still yet to find an excuse to use the slit or dock in Blackbox lol.

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I love this thing….

Laptop is under abusively heavy load compared to what my much more powerful windows machine does, but it’s still in a very usable state. If this system ran Windows XP instead of FreeBSD, it would be slow’n to a crawl lol.

currently running: 155~165 processes, 6 shell sessions, 1 x session, temperature is at 64.0 Celsius

  • X.Org is up and I logged in from GDM.
  • Blackbox is running with bbkeys, dcopserver, gkrellm2, and two rounds of fbpanel in support.
  • Psi, Pidgin, and XChat are running, with a total of 7 networks going between them (1 of which is freenode, with 3 channels open)
  • rxvt-unicode + gnu screen is open with 4 windows
  • linux-flock is running with 5 tabs and the mplayerplug-in streaming music
  • The www/firefox3 port is compiling
  • My vimbuild script is fetching/building a newer version of vim from cvs
  • I am csup’ing my systems copy of the FreeBSD source tree
  • And doing the write/compile/test rinse & repeat in vim 😉

This kind of workload, is fairly typical for me when running FreeBSD. On the windows machine, I don’t even bother – doesn’t take well to it :.

Strange behavior with this bit of C++

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It has been a long time since I’ve had time to do anything in C++. So I figured it would be a useful way to limber up my memory, by implementing a little bit of my favorite Python classes/modules in C++. The only crazy thing, is the result this code has yielded.

// minimal program, using the code involved
#include 
#include 

extern "C" {
#include <sys/param.h>
#include <unistd.h>
}

namespace os {
    bool link(const std::string& src, const std::string& dst);
}

bool 
os::link(const std::string& src, const std::string& dst) {
    if (link(src.c_str(), dst.c_str()) != 0) {
        std::perror(NULL); 
        return false;
    }
    return true;
}

int 
main() {
    std::cout << "link()t" << std::endl;
        os::link(std::string("./test"), std::string("/tmp/test"));
    return 0;
}

compilation: /usr/bin/g++ -Wall -ggdb3 os.cpp test.cpp -o test

I compiled on FreeBSD 7 with the systems GCC 4.3.1 and get a segfault, then tried the code on my OpenBSD 4.4 machine. The OpenBSD 4.4 release has shipped with a patched GCC 3.5.3 (propolice) – on OpenBSD it ran perfectly! Trying to feed it through the debuger on FreeBSD wasn’t pretty either:

  • FreeBSD 7, system GCC 4.3.1 -> test program dies with a Segmentation Fault.
  • FreeBSD 7, system GDB 6.1.1 -> Endless stepping when used with a break point, or SIG SEGV in libc’s malloc() when run.
  • OpenBSD 4.4, system GCC 3.5.3 -> prints proper message from std::perror() as expected, when the program is executed.

If I change os::link to os::link_x and recompile on FreeBSD, it works the same as it does on OpenBSD, when unmodified that is. In a few tests on FreeBSD, When I run the program under GCC, it tells me

Program received signal SIGSEGV, Segmentation fault.
0x281fabc3 in malloc () from /lib/libc.so.7

if I set a break point in test.cpp on the os::link() call, and step through it into os::link() in os.cpp. If I keep stepping after the link(), I get returned to the os::link() call in main and can step through it all again. Like an endless loop of stepping into/out of the os::link() function call in test.cpp’s main(), and the if-conditional in os.cpp’s os::link(), geeze.

At least looking at the results I’ve had tonight, I know I’m not freaking nuts… lol. I still shouldn’t write code when I’m half asleep, but hey… It’s the only time I get :, Oh well… unless my family is late as usual, I need to be up in a few hour.

*head hits laptop, snores loudly until morning*

TODO FRIDAY

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Adapt header to i386/amd64
Adapt header to supported compilers
Finish implementing the module
Test module with (puke) MSVC++