by

I’ve had a lot of rolling about on [SAS] related business today, generally productive as far as the NCO and RSM matters go. I also posted a file with my ‘musings’ on a few tactical matters in an appropriate place. Not sure if it was a good idea to share my thoughts in this case but I’ve never really cared much about what others think of me, no point starting now 8=).

I’ve had some time to play with my little music management toy hehe. Basically the idea is to track filename changes in my music collection and then update my playlist files. It’s not meant to be pretty or optimal, just effective. If I ever get it finished I’ll probably leave it running on the file server so it can look after my music files. Every now and then I do like to rearrange files in ~/Music and it always breaks my playlists, and even when using Amarok for the excellent playlist editing… It kind of sucks to have to redo them manually through Amaroks collection browser, it’s a great system but my playlists can some times get quite large.

I’ve also managed to get my server and laptop set up to use NFS instead of SSHFS. Since it seems I can’t count on SSHFS, it has already incured a ‘price tag’. Samba’s mount_smbfs is to much bother on FreeBSD atm, the program that comes with the fusefs-smbnetfs port seems to be as good as KiA if you want to know any thing more about it beyond the sample config file and source code… That leaves NFS and AFS, not familiar very greatly with AFS but NFS a bit more so. The BSDs seem to do things a bit differently with the exports file then what I’ve encountered before, the fbsd handbook / obsd faq also leaves a little to be desired compared to some nice BNF notation ^_^. I might be able to do some thing with a SSH tunnel later, right now some thing that works is all that is important…

My allergies have been tremendous lately but it’s that time of year again. One thing I really did like about living in Fl. It was to damn hot for most of the stuff that makes me sneeze! It was kind of one of those places you are soaked to the bone just crossing the parking lot to get to the car lol.

Time to get some rest, tomorrows another day… Primary objectives for the near future are getting more work done on the SOP Rewrites and trying to fix my laptops problem with Linux GTK+ apps..grrr.

Tactical Wonderland

by

An old friend appeared before me with a question before my new orders come, in each hand he held a pill. One Red, one Blue, each representing a course of action. Towards service or my own ends, my reply?

Loyal to the end

days rumble

by

Well I’ve put a few thoughts through LaTeX and even discovered that at least the version in my MiKTeX install on WinXP, some times pdflatex.exe/latex.exe will have an endless loop rather then die with the normal error message if you accidentally delete the end{document} at the end of a doc ^_^

I think I’ll probably post the file tomorrow in the members forum, I zipped it with a simple password chosen at random. The question is will I remember what it is later rofl.

I like using tex/latex quite a lot so far, works much better then XHTML+CSS at giving decent output without *eventually* getting annoying to edit and maintain. I’ve been slowing building up a .sty file for things I use a lot so I don’t have to worry about finding the last document I did some thing to when I can’t remember a specific.

Probably will pass out in a few hours next to learning perl, glad I’m off work tomorrow… need some rest: Maybe I can even catch up with the 30++ messages in my in box haha!

I’ve done enough for the night, in the future Ineed to play around with the Linux ABI on my laptop and NFS. I have a FreeBSD 7 partition, I think I will see if I can use that to help fix the PC-BSD one… Either way it would probably take less then 2 hours to reinstall my laptop and restore files once I’ve got a set of PC-BSD v1.5 disks handy…Most of the time of course spent transferring and extracting files on low end hardware lool. NFS, I’ve always avoided and OpenBSD seems to use a different syntax for /etc/exports then I learned on Linux but as long as it works… SSHFS and SMB/CIFS seem to have failed me, the only remaining options I know available to me are NFS and AFS, nether of which I’ve had time to test fully yet. I guess that can wait for later.

*passes out*

by

It is kind of amazing, I posted a review of PC-BSD 1.2 and people occasionally still post comments on it lol. I think I’ll do some thing similiar when PC-BSD v2.0 is released, will be a good chance to take a look deeper into KDE4.

Hit over the Library today and checked out the Lama book (Learning Perl), I figure I’ve been using Perl for a lot of odds and ends lately. And I may as well inhale the book a bit since I’m usually finding myself skimming manual pages, perldoc’ing, and STFW’ing for any thing I don’t remember. Hmm, I think Perl was my second programming language but I never went to deep into it back then.

Also pulled a few on PHP, dunno if I’ll have time to read them and I *hate* PHP even through it is a language I’ve had to employ on more then one occasion. I was also lucky enough to find a copy of the Art Of Computer Programming, Volume 4, Fascicle 4. That will make for a bit of an interesting read. If I had the cash, I think I’d love to get all of the volumes that have been published. Considering that Donald Knuth is like 70 years old and the first volume was published ~1968, I don’t see how he can possibly live long enough to finish TAOCP when there are at least 2 or 3 more volumes left… but I’d love to read’em some day!

Never really been a big one for computer related books, I’m more of a Science Fiction kind of guy. But hey, I could live at the library xD.

Writer’s Block: Lost & Found

by

What have you lost that you wish you still had?

Live Journals Writer’s Block

I could go on for paragraphs about what comes to mind … wouldn’t do me much good.

Since I recently ‘lost’ it, I’d settle for my web browser back !

As to the other matter, well maybe it was for the best.

exhaustion mounting

by

Oy..

I’ve spent most of the week with an almost constent headache, barely been on the computer the past few days and even then mostly AFK. Managed to get some training in today and some work on the SOP rewrites as well but it’s still a very tiring week.

I’m looking forward to the time off coming up so I can catch up with stuff, about all I have gotten done this week so far is talking to Noer and Rasa lol.

A crashing BSD

by

Ok, now I dunno what is worse that my very stable laptop has gone nuts or that I’m not surprised by it at all.

mentally back tracing events:

using urxvt with zsh
vim running in background during perl file editing session
linux-flock playing my favorite radio station via linux-mplayerplug-in and native mplayer
mv ./myfile.mp3 /tmp/ -> trying to move a file off a sshfs mount to /tmp
system locked up with sound stuck replaying a single note
tried to switch to vtty1
system auto-rebooted, never saw the vtty

On reboot I restarted flock and tried to move the file again, system locked up and rebooted when I tried to switch to vtty0…

Now linux-flock segfaults when I run it and the only other linux app I know that is handy, realplayer also segflauts. I ain’t seen any thing informative in /var/ yet either.

Now, my Windows XP machine Blue Screen of Deaths and occasionally Black Screens of Deaths! On me all the time when listing to music while using the server browser in Raven Shield, if I use any thing other then WMP: trying WinAmp == instanto death and often same with MPlayer using the usual DirectX related sound/video opts.

So why do I find it sad that for me it is not so much of a shocker that with a third party kernel module installed from pre-compiled binary (fuse) that was ported from another OS, moving data from a mounted network file system (sshfs) to the local hard drive through SSH and said driver, while running binary programs designed for an entirely different system (linux flock+mplayerplug-in), could possibly cause a system to crash?

At least it’s got a better damn reason then Windows XP has got looooool

I’ve tried fsck’ing the drive but the Linux ABI still seems FUBAR.. All things considered with SSHFS and SMB/CIFS, I am seriously considering putting both NFS and AFS into testing here to see if either will fill the gap.

by

Some musings from ~/Music/Playlists/manager/ideas.outline. The file outlines a format for the stored records and as much of the scripts operation as my mind can think of right now, it is 0420 already…


tags file format
| every song listed as 'file := checksum'

daemon/script
| for all files in collection loop
| | if md5 == known then
| | | if filename == known then
| | | | continue
| | | else
| | | | if md5(filename) in file then
| | | | | generate new entry in file
| | | | else
| | | | | update file with new name
| | | | | update playlists with new name
| | | | end
| | | end
| | end
| done

I like to outline my ideas every now and then for later reference, especially when I’m very tired it helps me make sense of my notes next week.

There is a vim plugin for outlining but that is kind of over kill for me. Vim has a ‘listchars’ setting that alters from Vi’s behavior how and what it displays things when ‘list’ is set.

I have a function named My_OutlineMode() and an automcmd that calls the function whenever creating a new file or reading a new buffer with a file.outline

setl listchars =tab:| " Mark t's with |'s
setl list

That makes each level of indentation be highlighted and displays a pipe symbol ‘|’ at each tab stop (e.g. indentation level) without inserting it into the file. I find it a tad distracting while coding — indentation is used in programs for a reason after all! But for outlining ideas, I find it really helps to visually display the collation of ideas to indents. Maybe because I use blank lines and tabs to order thoughts in my outlines but what ever works hehe.

I remember I first learned about list/listchars when trying to help someone in #vim that wanted code to display each indent level with leading dots, kind of like how KATE can be set to show a ‘.’ at each tab stop. So I made a note of it in case I would want to do something like that myself later.

by

After looking at Vim 7.x’s omni completion during a conversation in #vim on irc.freenode.net I got an inkling to try making Vim auto complete the end of HTML tags without pressing ctrl-x + ctrl-o each time.

I’m sorry to say, it only took about 3 minutes:

imap </ </<c-x><c-o>

which tells Vim to enter </, press control+x following by control+o which is the insert mapping vim uses by default to do auto completion.

Yes I’m that bored… Haha

Hmm, I did think of an interesting idea which would a ‘collection monitoring playlist updater’ that would use MD5 checksums (or a faster algorithm due to the size of some of Wiz’s mixes). The idea would be a sort of tags-file / flat-file database that maps MD5 checksums of all known files to current file names. If a file name of a checksumed file has changed, update all playlists with the ‘new’ file name.

An interesting idea, especially since I use a mixture of XMMS and MPlayer these days rather then ol’Amarok.

As it would probably take more then ~15 minutes to md5 1.9GB of music files over a sshfs mount on my laptop, it’ll have to wait for another night but what an interesting idea xD

a python filled sigh

by

Some how it makes perfect sense…

While every one is sound asleep, even the dogs…

I’m spending my time with the music blasting and digging into code on my laptop and being quite happy during the duration.

Until Ma is off the couch, then I’m already miserable 8=)

At least I’ve managed to finish most of the work I was trying to do on Neo Ports Manager. Just committed changes to how it handles port build options, I’m still not happy with it from a design stand point… But it should be suitable for being activated in NPMs Beta Release whenever that occurs.

Actually getting any thing else done in the next four or five hours is questionable.