Font sizes

Now this is pissing me off…. Almost every website I use, seems to set the font size in Pixels.

sasclan.org — 10px (for crying out loud)
pcbsd.org — 12px
daemonforums.org — 13px
sas-spidey01.livejournal.com — The Under Fire theme I’m used has a selectable but sets it in ‘px’ 🙁

At least though, It’s not a total wash out. Live Journal itself does decent by fonts in it’s main theme. Wikipedia respects the browser, and my LJ’s theme is very configurable hehe. I think, if I ever had tons of cash to spare, a paid account + working on themes here would be a fun time killer lol.

I managed to fix it fairly quick, wlel have way. I fixed it for [SAS] but broke it for non [SAS] lol. I’ve still got to wrap my head around that bowl of soup before I can be sure it’ll work right along side the new code.

I would’ve had it done much faster, if it wasn’t for the stupidest of typo’s… I really wish the difference between

$foobar = some value;
if ($foo_bar) {
... do something;
}

Was an error (or at least a warning) about an undefined variable on our setup, rather then creating a new one called $foo_bar. Maybe, I’ve just been using statically typed languages to much lately :.

More work to do today, but I did managed to install SWAT 4 and TSS without problem. It’s very good to return to the Proving Grounds, but I still miss some of the old gang… Alas, that’s the way things are and there still is work that remains to be done in the department.

Oy what a week…

I can’t wait for next weekend!!! By then, I’ll be off work.. bu at least, this weekend I’ m only working lightly.

Tonights primary objective is to work on the website, for me at least. It is a very tiring subject, I like the languages involved of course, but I’d rather be hit by a truck then write code like what we’ve inherited lol.

I’m no brilliant programmer, but hell, at least I try to write robust code. Not stuff that’ll make the next poor sap to maintain it, want to fly over and kick ya ass. Hmm, oh man, what I would do if I could >_>

Omni-tasker bound by honesty

Oh why, did I have to promise one of my friends I’d put myself on equal priority?

I could just go straight thought and finish (most of) this tonight, skip sleeping for then a half hour, and go to work without trouble. Haha, just kidding, I’m not that crazy ^_^. I’ll need sleep to get up on time, but thankfully tomorrows just more time consuming then stressful. So my plan is to:

Make like a Spider now, get done what I can, then hack like a son of a bitch at it tomorrow… Until the project falls, and with luck! A project over 3 and a half years in the making, will be complete soon !!!!!!

My poor baby…

Installed Netbeans on my laptop to give it a test drive, and between top and the massive change in performance in flock, I can’t help but think that my system is in pain as it fights with flock for system resources :

last pid:  2235;  load averages:  2.04,  1.50,  1.00    up 0+01:08:22  03:52:09
86 processes: 4 running, 81 sleeping, 1 stopped
CPU: 83.8% user, 0.0% nice, 16.2% system, 0.0% interrupt, 0.0% idle
Mem: 298M Active, 18M Inact, 96M Wired, 12M Cache, 53M Buf, 1888K Free
Swap: 860M Total, 100M Used, 760M Free, 11% Inuse

PID USERNAME THR PRI NICE SIZE RES STATE TIME WCPU COMMAND
2195 Terry 30 44 0 387M 137M ucond 0:00 77.25% java
1498 Terry 1 99 0 715M 139M RUN 25:43 13.87% flock-bin
1358 root 1 44 0 119M 63776K select 1:56 0.00% Xorg
1403 Terry 1 45 0 18616K 4796K select 0:51 0.00% gkrellm
1504 Terry 1 0 0 715M 139M linuxf 0:19 0.00% flock-bin
1500 Terry 1 0 0 715M 139M linuxf 0:04 0.00% flock-bin
1499 Terry 1 44 0 715M 139M select 0:03 0.00% flock-bin
1477 Terry 1 44 0 30940K 6832K select 0:03 0.00% Terminal
1887 Terry 1 44 0 34752K 8020K select 0:02 0.00% xchat
1174 root 1 44 0 3264K 564K select 0:02 0.00% moused
1404 Terry 1 44 0 45900K 2944K select 0:01 0.00% pidgin
1402 Terry 1 44 0 14280K 2256K select 0:00 0.00% fbpanel
1509 Terry 1 0 0 715M 139M linuxf 0:00 0.00% flock-bin
1405 Terry 1 44 0 9080K 1340K select 0:00 0.00% blackbox
1515 Terry 1 0 0 715M 139M linuxf 0:00 0.00% flock-bin
1481 Terry 1 20 0 4640K 0K pause 0:00 0.00%
1399 Terry 1 44 0 8172K 724K select 0:00 0.00% bbkeys

The fact that I’ve got flash7 running in one tab and only a small set of 5 tabs open in flock, ain’t that bad I guess. It seems that my system has almost adapted to this load, because the stats in top have gotten even worse but FreeBSD has gotten almost as responsive as normal when running these programs.

I love my darlin’ Dixie 😉

Busy of late and more to come!

oy, what a time the past week has been!

I’ve managed to fix several issues on the website, create a few more,a nd fix them lol. One was a typo, the other was a logic error that slipped by me. In the latter case, it wouldn’t have happened if I wasn’t more worried about *breaking* old code that predates my membership then beign wide awake >_>. I also had to fix a really, really, really old line of code today. That seems to have been broken by one of the site upgrades yesterday.

I’ve been screwing with Services For UNIX, The Korn Shell (various implementations, ranging from SFU to the official ksh93). Shoe horning Windows into a usable system, and trying to keep a steady presence on the RvS servers… but I’m still longing for SWAT !!! It’s been so long since I’ve had a solid game with my teammates (other then in RvS). I’ve also had to update my vimrc file while I was at it, I’ve vastly improve it but still thinkit it could be better. I also tested a few plugins and colo’s as well, the only headache is making sure it works on all of my systems lol. SFU, however seems to be the cause of most problems!

Tomorrow will probably be another monster of a work day, I’m not looking forward to it… There will however be a *lot* of stuff to deal with when I get home, I’m sure of it. At least though, we seem to be moving into a very positive direction for the future (long term). I can’t say that I am happy with some of the things I suspect may have to be done, but I pray it goes well… For the sake of all. I can’t say the same for everyone else in the world, but for me, I only know one thing about myself:


LOYAL TO THE END

The long and tiring road

I’ve been very weary of late,

Perhaps even more so now that I’ve been off work for a bit. I don’t think I go back to work until Wednesday, hope it’s not tomorrow lool. The only time I generally know what day it is, is when I’m at work. What I really need is something like Lothlórien. When the Fellowship of the Ring stopped in the beautiful Lothlórien, they were able to find a time of great rest before continuing on with their quest (after just losing Gandalf the gray in the mines of Moria and a long march to flee from the orcs).

I’ve been very busy, little sleep, no real R&R,and it’s almost time to go back to work :-(. I really need a dang gum vacation !!! It seems that no matter what I do, the things I seek are always on the edge, just beyond my grasp.

Gaily bedight,
A gallant knight,
In sunshine and in shadow,
Had journeyed long,
Singing a song,
In search of Eldorado.

But he grew old,
This knight so bold,
And o’er his heart a shadow,
Fell as he found,
No spot of ground,
That looked like Eldorado.

And, as his strength,
Failed him at length,
He met a pilgrim shadow;
“Shadow,” said he,
“Where can it be,
This land of Eldorado?”

“Over the mountains
Of the moon,
Down the Valley of the Shadow,
Ride, boldly ride,”
The shade replied,
“If you seek for Eldorado!”

— Eldorado, Edgar Allan Poe, 1849.

I Always did like that Poem

Chronicling the Failures of DRM

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/features/218559/the-online-music-ripoff.html

Take yourself back to the days when everyone bought only CDs. Imagine what you’d have thought of a store that sold discs that might work on your CD player now, but weren’t guaranteed to work on next year’s models. Imagine that some required you to phone the music store on a regular basis to reassure them that you were the legitimate owner, and were that store to go under, all the CDs you bought from it would one day cease playing. And once you started buying music from this store, you found yourself locked into a system that discouraged you from buying from a rival store down the street. Why, you might think, would you have bought anything from a place like that? Well, if you’re like millions of people in the UK, there’s a strong chance you already have.

All I can say is, “Burn, baby burn !!!”

I wouldn’t call MP3 an open format by any chance, but the article is interesting. DRM in my humble opinion is just a load of crap. Because anyone it is meant to actually stop, is more then smart enough (or equipped to) circumvent it one way or the other. That’s actually one reason why I rarely buy music, my opinion that the companies making the most money off of it. Won’t be happy until they’ve eventually figured out a way to charge someone four times for the same thing, then work on the next big thing, PayPerPlay hahah !!

I generally preer to have music on CD, because it lasts longer. Heh, I’d probably prefer vinyl if it was practical, but that’s a different story ^_^. Generally when I listen to music, it’s always on the computer. And I’m much to lazy to flick Audio CD’s around all day >_>

Yippie-Kay-Yay Micro$oft SFU !!!

Test one: I wonder if Console is a decent replacement for cmd.exe ‘s terminal emulator — It is

Test two: I wonder if the SFU pdksh can do completion? — It can, just had to find the ‘bind’ commands for it

Test three: I wonder if SFU’s pdksh will work with my %PATH% — it did

Problem one: SFU pdksh seems to require the formal name, e.g. ‘foo.exe’ for programs outside of it’s regular path and runwin32’s search path — That’s ok, I don’t mind much and can alias out stuff like flock.

Problem two: Because SFU follows the unix-style of open it, see if there is a she-bang line (e.g. #!/bin/sh) saying what to run it with, else pass it on to the shell…. It feeds .bat files into it’s pdksh unless they are manually executed, e.g. ‘runwin32 cmd /C foo.bat’ — that is bad, several programs I use wrap themselves in ‘batch’ files on Windows and ‘shell’ scripts on Unix.

Problem three: My universal bourne-based shrc (~/.${USER}_shrc) sets itself to the current Bourne-style shell (e.g. sh, bash, ksh-family, zsh) and Operating System (e.g. BSD, Linux, generic Unix) needs to inspect the $SHELL environment variable to determin what shell to set stuff for. — For some odd reason the SFU pdksh doesn’t seem to set SHELL !!!! To top it off, $USER is not set, but at least the Windows var: %USERNAME% is converted to $USERNAME.

Fix for problem one:

$ mkdir /dev/fs/P/bin      # creates P:bin
$ touch binmaker.sh && chmod +x binmaker.sh
$ vi binmaker.sh
#!/bin/sh
BINDIR=/dev/fs/P/bin

for CMD in `echo $PATH | sed 's/:/ /g' | awk '{ print $0 }'`
do
for EXE in `ls $CMD`; do
echo $EXE | grep -E '.*.exe$' > /dev/null &&
ln -s ${CMD}/${EXE} ${BINDIR}/`echo $EXE | sed 's/.exe$//g'` && echo "made link for: ${CMD}/$EXE"
done
done

$ ./binmaker.sh
.... # symlinks all foo.exe in $PATH to /dev/fs/P/bin/foo

Fix for problem two:

Launch a new session of cmd.exe through windows (e.g. not via SFU; use the run dialog, start menu, or desktop /or quicklaunch icon).

U:Terry> echo %PATH% > mypath.win

Return to SFU korn shell (pdksh):

$ touch batmaker.sh && chmod +x batmaker.sh
$ vi batmaker.sh

#!/bin/sh
BINDIR=/dev/fs/P/bin

make_wrapper() {
[ -e $2 ] && return # file exists, no wrapper needed
local MYFILE=`basename $2`
cd $BINDIR && [ ! -e $MYFILE ] && touch $MYFILE

echo '#/bin/sh' >> $MYFILE
echo 'exec cmd /C "set PATH=`cat ~/mypath.win` && `basename $0`"' >> $MYFILE

echo "${BINDIR}/$MYFILE created"
}

for CMD in `echo $PATH | sed 's/:/ /g' | awk '{ print $0 }'`
do
for EXE in `ls $CMD`; do
echo $EXE | grep -E '.*.bat$' > /dev/null &&
make_wrapper ${CMD}/${EXE} "${BINDIR}/`echo $EXE | sed 's/.bat$//g'`"
done
done

$ ./batmaker.sh
... makes wrapper shell scripts in /dev/fs/P/bin/ for all foo.bat in $PATH

The wrapper scripts this creates look like this:

Terry@SAL1600-$ cat bin/irb
#/bin/sh

exec cmd /C "set PATH=`cat ~/mypath.win` && `basename $0`"

Terry@SAL1600-$

it’s neccessary to set the Windows %PATH% before launch, so it can execute the program — using the path from the invocation environment won’t work, e.g. /dev/fs/P/Devel/Langauges/Ruby/bin/irb in SFU Shells but this woudl translate to CurrentDriveLetter:dev/fs/P/Devel/Langauges/Ruby/bin/irb which won’t work. Note, the program must be executed as P:DevelLanguagesRubybinirb.bat in Windows cmd shell, as that is where it is located on my system.

Fix for problem three:

I modified my ~/.profile from OpenBSD to take care of the $USER and $SHELL issues, which is also nice enough to load my custom initialization file.

$ vi .profile

export TERM HOME
USER=$USERNAME; export USER
SHELL="/dev/fs/P/Utilities/Services_For_UNIX/bin/ksh"; export SHELL

echo "Waiting for screen repaint...."
sleep 2
echo 'Korn power !!!'

ENV=${HOME}/.${USER}_shrc

I set the path to the physical rather then the /bin/ksh ‘shorty’ in SFU, so that if I later find any compatibility issues, I can always work around it ‘specifically’ if necessary.

I’m not sure if it is a problem with the Console2-Devel build I’ve installed or with how SFU’s korn shell expects to run. But a few seconds after startup the prompt disappears as if from a ‘clear’, giving any I/O that results in a line being drawn causes a fix. Since I haven’t figured this part out yet, I’ve just ‘side stepped’ the problem. It takes roughly the amount of time to sleep and echo the message before I am returned to my prompt. A quick parse of my $ENV and we’re ready to rock and all the output on the Console tab is from my ${USER}_shrc file.

I copied an old version of initialization file and made a quick edit. In the file I check for the systems unix name and use it to record the operating system type. The Services For UNIX subsystem still identifies itself as ‘Interix’ even though it’s been under Microsoft’s thumb for a bit.


case `uname -s` in
'FreeBSD') isFreeBSD=1
LSCOLORS='CxGxxxxxBxexExcxdx'; export LSCOLORS
;; # FreeBSD
'OpenBSD') isOpenBSD=1;;
'NetBSD') isNetBSD=1;;
'Linux') isLinux=1;;
'Unix') isUnix=1;;
'Interix') isUnix=1;isSFU=1;;
esac

I want to make a few changes to my shrc, but I don’t think they will work *properly* with SFU. My shrc file also pulls in a local ‘extension’ of itself, called ~/.site_shrc that makes things specific to the current system, for example adding the TexLive binaries to my $PATH on FreeBSD and noting the IP address or doing things that won’t work in the shells/v7sh that I use for testing. It looks like I’m going to have to write a site_shrc for Windows hahaha !!!

There’s more then one way to skin a cat, and this bloody hoge-podge of an operating system ain’t gonna best me !!! I will have a decent CLI interface if I’ve got to invoke a hex editor…

You know, the more I try to give IDEs a fair chance, the more I find. That in the end, THEY ALL SUCK !!! Either that, or it has proven impossible to find something with even so much as a decent editor that’s worth more then notepad or /bin/ed, is it really to much to ask; a decent editor?

Even on Windows XP, where cmd.exe has proven to be the worst damn CLI I’ve used, *my way* still seems to beat any IDE I’ve tried, and that is pretty damn sad lol. And so far I have found nothing that bests my personal combo of term+zsh+vim+tools, and tending to the more ‘IDE like’ features myself >_>. The only bad thing about cmd.exe, is it doesn’t have emacs based line editing out of box lol, that and the tab completion works like a kinder garden program compared to bash/tcsh/zsh/pdksh.