Speed Learning — m4

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Was on my way to bed (read sitting in front of my laptop <_<) and caught The One on TV just 10 minutes into it. I had seen part of it before but never got to see the second half 🙁

Now in search of something else to watch, I noticed that Live Free or Die Hard starts in at 0140Q, it’s currently 0112Q — so…

Early today I found out that the m4 macro language processor is not a ‘GNU Thing’ although GNU m4 is used as part of the gnu tool chain. Since it’s a language dating back to the 1970s and I could rather use something like m4 from the looks of it.

Let’s see how much I can learn from FreeBSDs m4 manual page before the movie starts hehe 🙂

Tick tock

Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue

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One song on yee old favorite radio station that I felt was aptly appropriate today:

American girls and American guys, will always stand up and salute.
We’ll always recognize, when we see ol’ glory flying,
There’s a lot of men dead,
So we can sleep in peace at night when we lay down our heads.
My daddy served in the army where he lost his right eye,
But he flew a flag out in our yard ’til the day that he died.
He wanted my mother, my brother, my sister and me.
To grow up and live happy in the land of the free.

Now this nation that I love is fallin’ under attack.
A mighty sucker-punch came flying in from somewhere in the back.
Soon as we could see clearly through our big black eye,
Man, we lit up your world like the fourth of July.

Hey, Uncle Sam put your name at the top of his list,
And the Statue of Liberty started shaking her fist.
And the eagle will fly and it’s gonna be hell,
When you hear Mother Freedom start ringing her bell.
And it’ll feel like the whole wide world is raining down on you.
Ah, brought to you, courtesy of the red, white and blue.

Oh, justice will be served and the battle will rage:
This big dog will fight when you rattle his cage.
An’ you’ll be sorry that you messed with the U.S. of A.
‘Cos we’ll put a boot in your ass, it’s the American way.

Hey, Uncle Sam put your name at the top of his list,
And the Statue of Liberty started shaking her fist.
And the eagle will fly and it’s gonna be hell,
When you hear Mother Freedom start ringing her bell.
And it’ll feel like the whole wide world is raining down on you.
Ah, brought to you, courtesy of the red, white and blue.

Oh, oh.
Of the red, white and blue.
Oh, hey, oh.
Of my Red, White and Blue.

— Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue., Keith Toby

They also had a lot of Johnny Cash tunes on hehe 😉

On the war path…

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The !%*)Y!)% !(%Y)! %)! %)! %)&! (%() !@%!#@!% !%! !!!

I’m sitting here working on C++/Qt4 code and my music is cutting in/out and vim starts to lag. Ok, I figure it is either some process gone wachko eating system resources (which top suggested was not the case) or the router is going fuckers again.

Sure enough, everything relating to my network shares hangs -> I do a power cycle on the AP with no luck. Full reboot and still arguing…

pinging my ap gives < 2ms to > 200ms responses and an apparent average of 20-40% package loss +/- an extra 5-7% and things are still getting rat fucked here. One test, standing right next to the aerials I was getting upwards of 10-15% packet loss for crying out fucking loud.

I’m so going to kill something when I get to the bottom of this….

This level of connectivity starvation is proving to be lethal to the whole write/compile/test cycle, hell even the web browser is dying a laggy death trying to write in this text area. Which means I’m likely to loose the nights work.

That means, if I find the source of this interference, which appears to be costing me over 4 hours of optimal work time remaining on this code base…. there will be a Spidey on the war path — hardware or neighborer related.

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Hmm, there is a very fine Italian expression but I won’t do it the dis justice of trying to spell it :.

Day originally was planned as a work day, became a day off, became a job interview — the house from hell so to speak, in terms of having to work in it but otherwise a decent gig.

A friends having a hard time, brings up more then a few… uncomfortable memories but I can generally sympatise.

Spent about an hour talking with Rasa over the colour of the bike shed, only about 10-15 minutes was actually productive 😐

After that, considering that between my family, my work, and Rasa, I was over 2.5 hours behind schedule… On a day I planned to hash through task after task after task. I decided to use some of the time otherwise getting wasted for me, to join the server.

Got in a few good rounds on PG#1, ain’t played RvS in a couple since I’ve spent most of my server time either training Jonsi or camping the SWAT4 server ;-). I was surprised to see that my accuracy is still doing good, each round I did between 70-90% hits and saw most of them through to completion.

After that, I ended up joining Duke for a couple games before I had to drop to finish my chores. Honestly, joining friends on the servers is probably the biggest break from projects I get !!!

Was watching The Abyss after dinner. Pretty good movie but reminds me, you couldn’t pay me to serve on a submarine. At least if a ship goes down, you have some chance if ya don’t freeze to death. But on a sub, it is not quite that easy to get out lol.

One strange thing, while I find the idea of being in such situations some what disturbing. I really think of the idea of space travel as quite fun lol.

Maybe because I never really learned how to swim? I dunno lol. After all, in the vacum of space your dead… In water, well you might drown but you also might get through Point A and Point B alive if you don’t run out of air +S

Wondering if I have any braincells remaining

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Tired ….

Been working on a program for [SAS], was rather hoping to get it finished tonight but, time after work != cooperative. It’s only 0457 Zulu but my brains fragged, can’t concentrate on the code anymore.

Hopefully tomorrow, I can get it finished, it shouldn’t be that hard should it?

I only…

Need to finish testing the parser

Write the network interface

Write the display code.

or something like that. With luck, I’ll be off work so I’ll get to sleep in hopefully. I’m used to nodding off around local 0200-0700 and getting up around local 0930-0945 to get dressed (quickly!) for work. So, I like it when I have a chance to sleep a bit more lol.

Today was fairly good at work but it’s still one of two most strainous jobs of my week. And my family sure as fuck doesn’t help, hmm… Maybe if there was anyone in this rats nest that actually understood a lick of this, they might be less inclined to piss me off while I’m workin’ on something.

*sigh*

For much of the day, I’ve felt like shouting “If you don’t let me code today, I will go insane and I will take you with me!” but I know that would just be childish :.

A sledge hammer would work much more effectively ^_^

Helping people move != for the lazy

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I’m bushed …

My sisters finally moved out, so most of the day was spent helping her. Although I did get ome break time with Dixie to work on a little Qt’coding. After the end of that, I got stuck helping ma re arrange stuff here (oy). Including having to take apart a bed, move a sewing machine, etc.

Had a couple rounds of SWAT4: TSS on PG#3 with Chester before dinner, and a good nap after that! Sitting here watching Tango & Cash,

zzzZzzzzZzzz

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So tired…

The [SAS] Killhouse Redux is coming along nicely, haven’t been able to figure out one of the extra’s I wanted… but level 1A is now feature complete, pardoning the stairs. Level 2A is aout 40% done, the second wing, ladies room, and two more hotel rooms need furnishing + a wee bit of work in the hallway (decorations).

So far, the map is coming along pretty nice all things considered. I’ve also got some plans for a few ‘secret’ area’s just to make things interesting. Hehe, if I’m the smoe making the map, why not have a little fun?

The question is how long will it take the membership to find them ^_^

On another note, I’ve been trying to replace Konversation as my IRC client for *nix. Many KDE apps on my laptop seem to suffer greatly on performance when being run under fvwm instead of a full kde session. I tested out tirc, which is nice and handy — even has Vi based key bindings ^_^. The only problem is the bus error when forcing a nick greater then the 9-char standard and doing a call to the nickserv bot.

So far, it looks like it will probably boil down to learning either BitchX or irssi.

The only IRC clients I’ve really liked in the past have been, Konversation (the best!), Chatzilla, and X-Chat. But I’m not really in the mood for needing a web browser to run an IRC client, nor in using X-Chat again. Nice client but eh, kinda boring.

I really need to get some time to focus on KDE4, between family, life, and work. I’m behind schedule on everything these days :

Dang it… I need a vacation !!!!

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Hmm, all in all quite a fun day.

Us guys went out, knocked over a Gandolfo’s Delicatessen for a couple nathan’s coney island dog (bad sadly without sauce :-(). I’m not exactly a big fan of hot dogs but when it involves Nathan’s famous dogs — I’m up for it >_>.

Three of us wandered around town for a couple hours before Uncle Pat and Aunt Ruth went off to Mass. Me and my brother sat outside, him smoking and I pacing while we talked lol. I wish he wouldn’t smoke but, better sugars then cigarettes I guess :. Afterward he played a bit of BF2 on my PC, he’s a good sniper but heck… Tactically and technique wise, I think if he ever took one of our tryouts in [SAS], he’d probably score below the no retake mark lol.

Once everyone got here, we went out to Red Lobster for diner. In my case, riding with my bro and listing to Nickelback on the way. To be honest, I think I am the _only_ one in this family that doesn’t blast music +S. It’s good music but, I kinda would like to avoid hearing damage >_>

Just like our mother, he blasts it loud as it will go… Me, if someone walks through the hallway I turn it down or mute it when I’ve got music going lol.

The nights travels

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Just got home a couple of hours ago, my mothers GOD parents came down to celebrate my Birthday during their travels.

Another all you can eat night 😉

I probably shouldn’t have had a huge lunch, but I enjoy the food anyway lol.

Looks like tomorrow it will probably be me, my brother, and ma’s GOD father out bowling and then the entire family out for dinner later on. I can’t bowl worth a Russian modem but. Who knows, might be fun.

Since Ma hasn’t been included much in the plans as far a her original plans, she’s a bit pissy. I hate to say it about my seniors but I’d describe it as childish behavior :. Either way, tomorrow promises to be a full day…

I really need a vacation

BSD Forever

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Well, my Darling Dixie is now running FreeBSD 7.0-Release 🙂

I finished last minute backups of files and off loaded them to Vecta, just in case hehe. Unlocked my wireless network and installed from the three CDs I have for FreeBSD 7.0-Release. Since I don’t use the CD sets to install more extras then X.Org, I only needed disk one as usual.

I almost always use a custom installation of FreeBSD because I find it more expedient and very concise. Used sysinstall to finish the last bit of configuration before the first boot: nfs client on, sshd on, dhcp on ath0, set root password.

With the first boot I mounted my backups over NFS, copied the over and unpacked for reference — rc.conf, rc.conf.local, xorg.conf, and wpa_supplicant.conf. I also setup my users and groups via pw and edited loader.conf to load my sound driver.

Merged changes as desired into rc.conf and an xorg.conf file generated via X -configure. Then copied over a small script I had made to automate installing most software I use and started a review of it while running porsnap on anohtr vtty.

While the script ran, I poked around /usr/src with vi to pass the time. All went well until I started getting funky errors from pkg_add. Killing the script, I checked with df and sure enough, / was showing at 107% of capacity! Now that all is said and done, it seems I miscalculated about 600MB of dependencies lol.

mv /root/pkgs /usr/pkgs
sh
for JUNK in `du -ch /usr/pkgs/* | grep 0B | awk '{ print $2 }'`; do rm $JUNK; done

problem solved. I also found out the hard way that the csh is a pain in the ass, hence starting a new shell to handle the removal of empty packages. Used the scroll lock to check the terminals backlog for the last successful package add and modified my script to pick up where it left off.

/usr/pkgs is 834M of packages — just in case I need to reinstall, I won’t have to download them from my $PACKAGEROOT again, I can just bring them over from Vectra and save bandwidth for both my favorite mirror and myself.

I also had a bit of a problem with some port installations failing with strange pkg-descr missing messages, found out today while wrapping up that it was referecin $PKGDIR => /usr/pkgs :.

my packing list so far:

#!/bin/sh

cd /where/ever

# environment / compat
PKGDIR="`pwd`/pkgs"; export PKGDIR
GCC_VER="42"
PHP_VER="5"
MYSQL_VER="50"
pkg_add -Kr compat6x-i386

# languages
pkg_add -Kr javavmwrapper
# manual install needed for JDK/JRE
(cd $PKGDIR; pkg_add diablo-jdk-freebsd6.i386.1.5.0.07.01.tbz)
(cd $PKGDIR; pkg_add diablo-jre-freebsd6.i386.1.5.0.07.01.tbz)
pkg_add -Kr gcc${GCC_VER}
pkg_add -Kr perl
pkg_add -Kr python
pkg_add -Kr php${PHP_VER}
pkg_add -Kr ruby 
pkg_add -Kr rubygem-rtags && pkg_add -r rubygem-rake
pkg_add -Kr guile
pkg_add -Kr scheme48

# libraries
pkg_add -Kr qt4
pkg_add -Kr gtk-2
pkg_add -Kr p5-DBI
pkg_add -Kr p5-DBD-mysql${MYSQL_VER}
pkg_add -Kr p5-DBI-SQLite
pkg_add -Kr p5-DBI-CSV
pkg_add -Kr p5-Digest


# development tools
pkg_add -Kr gmake
pkg_add -Kr ctags
pkg_add -Kr cscope && pkg_add -Kr kscope
pkg_add -Kr webcpp
pkg_add -Kr subversion

# games
pkg_add -Kr kdegames
pkg_add -Kr xgalaga
pkg_add -Kr prboom
pkg_add -Kr doom-data
pkg_add -Kr wesnoth
pkg_add -Kr supertux
pkg_add -Kr chromium

# graphics software
pkg_add -Kr gimp && pkg_add -Kr gimp-gap
pkg_add -Kr inkscape
pkg_add -Kr xv
pkg_add -Kr kdegraphics
pkg_add -Kr dia

# browsers
pkg_add -Kr linux-flock
pkg_add -Kr lynx

# e-mail and news
pkg_add -Kr thunderbird && pkg_add -Kr thunderbird-i18n
pkg_add -Kr mutt

# kontact and related
pkg_add -Kr kdepim


# chat
pkg_add -Kr konversation
pkg_add -Kr pidgin && pkg_add -Kr pidgin-hotkeys 
pkg_add -Kr pidgin-guifications && pkg_add -Kr pidgin-libnotify
pkg_add -Kr pidgin-otr && pkg_add -Kr pidgin-encryption
pkg_add -Kr teamspeak_client

# install vim / emacs
pkg_add -Kr emacs || pkg_add -Kr xemacs 
pkg_add -Kr mg
(bunzip vim-7.1.tar.bz2; tar -C /tmp -xf vim-7.1.tar; cd /tmp/vim71/src; 
  ./configure 
 --enable-perlinterp --enable-pythoninterp --enable-rubyinterp 
 --with-x --enable-cscope --enable-fontset --enable-gnome-check 
 --with-features=huge --enable-gui=gtk2 && gmake && gmake install)

# multimedia
pkg_add -Kr nspluginwrapper
pkg_add -Kr libdvdread
pkg_add -Kr libdvdplay
pkg_add -Kr libdvdnav
pkg_add -Kr cdrtools
pkg_add -Kr mplayer
pkg_add -Kr linux-mplayerplug-in
pkg_add -Kr xmms && pkg_add -Kr xmms-pipe && pkg_add -Kr xmms-skins
pkg_add -Kr k3b
# this is an rpm
(cd /usr/ports/multimedia/linux-realplayer && make install clean distclean)

# documents
pkg_add -Kr gnumeric && pkg_add -Kr abiword
pkg_add -Kr koffice

# personal
pkg_add -Kr zsh
pkg_add -Kr rxvt-unicode 
pkg_add -Kr terminus-font
pkg_add -Kr windowmaker
pkg_add -Kr blackbox
pkg_add -Kr bbkeys && pkg_add -r bbrun && pkg_add -r bbpager
pkg_add -Kr docker
pkg_add -Kr hsetroot
pkg_add -Kr fastest_cvsup
pkg_add -Kr psearch

# misc
pkg_add -Kr bsdstats
pkg_add -Kr amarok
pkg_add -Kr lzma
pkg_add -Kr unrar
pkg_add -Kr zip
pkg_add -Kr e2fsprogs
pkg_add -Kr pdksh
pkg_add -Kr sudo
pkg_add -Kr v7sh
pkg_add -Kr xcb

I had to install the ports manually because of the $PKGDIR thing, did that this afternoon. Which amounted to multimedia/libdvdcss, x11-wm/fvwm-devel, sysutils/gkrellm2, and just for the heck of it, www/linux-flashplugin9 and www/flashplugin-mozilla hehe. I also had the JDK and JRE packages in cold storage from my last installation, so no need for manual fetching them.

Some last minute additions were gdm and trayer — I actually like Gnomes Display Manager. I still need to compile mencoder, maybe install a few Perl/Python/Ruby binndings for good measure, etc but I’m basically done.

One thing that shocked me, The flash plugin v9 is working !!! I installed it just to see if the thing would crash my webbrowser but it works :

I need to get pf, sshd, and my kernel configuration setup and probably play with freebsd-update (I’ve never used it) but I’m essentially ready to rock and roll, it only took about 4 hours, because I downloaded all of the packages I wanted.

Compared to reinstalling Windows XP? Hahahahhahahahah !!!!

If I ever reformated my XP machine, it would take 3 hours to install XP from the vendors disks, 2 weeks to download all of the hotfixes, updates, and patches and crap, reinstall my firewall and ruleset from backup, then systematically install all of my games, programs, and such by manually visiting each website or inserting each disk — then spend time re-shoehorning XP into something livable with all of the little setting tweaks here and there.

FreeBSD, back online in a flash — hehe.