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2007-08-30 not a bad night
Well, I got home and opened an email from Hondza regarding a bug in netmon-0.02. This was due to an interface change while the program running would cause a segfault. This is due to there being several copies of byte stats in memory. If the list for the present changes to the list for the past, then the program crashes and it is probably going to have trouble relating the two.
The solution to this was to make the program search the lists, if not found then use the present list in it's absence. A bit gritty, and adds to the work through using string compares, but it's nothing major, and I think it's less work than routing 1mibps traffic, so I'm not bothered in the slightest with this running on a core router (but woe betide those who fiddle with interfaces on a core router!!).
So, with netmon-0.03 looking hopeful, I'll settle down to a cup of tea and forget about sorting the page layout for now, that's tomorrows job should I fail to go clubbing or something. This has put me in a better mood since my car's MOT failure.
Ever wondered how email really works?
2007-08-27 the power of the internet
This morning on TMF they showed 40 of internet viral successes. My favourites from their selection were one red paperclip and Noah takes a photo of himself every day for 6 years.
The red paper clip is a true success story for the author. Through sheer luck and commitment the author managed to trade his way to getting a house. Truly commendable.
Noah taking a photo of him self is a great work of documentary, but I think few people see that as much of an achievement other than that of dedication.
The best thing about these phenomena is that they make use, and broadcast with the best and most popular communities that make what is currently being dubbed web 2.0, eg, youtube, flickr, blogger etc, these were not #1 search hits on google for anything obvious.
2007-08-24 just for fun
Just because it's funny, here's a sex talk generator. Just simply come to this page when you're having sex and by magic, it will tell you what to say.
2007-08-18 passport rant
It's been several attempts now to get a passport renewed. First there were problems with the colour of the ink - using blue rather than black for one section of the form. Now there are problems because my signed section crosses into the border of the box very slightly.
It's really difficult for me to understand why this should be so critical, they have many signature already from my prior passport application. From what I've heard, it would be easier for me to leave the country while I still can, and re enter as an asylum seeker.
2007-08-12 the truth about gnu/linux
This is just a short posting. I bought three "night vision" cameras from ebay, at 0.99 GBP each. I was not expecting proper night vision, as in infra-red, but I did hope for it. Turns out the cameras are just regular cams with 6 ultra-bright LEDs at each edge, not great, but does provide some close range light.
What does this have to do with GNU/Linux? Well, simply, it was easier to install a kernel module to provide the camera device, than to install the drivers on Windows. Enough said. The driver, for 200+ cameras is available, as a single source build for Linux 2.6.11+, what drivers does the Windows kernel provide - good question, not much.
2007-08-10 fresh interface
Through my years of using GNU/Linux systems, I've bounced from terminal to terminal.
First a little history. Way, way back in the day, when I was a BBS Sysop running RemoteAccess 2.02, (and whatever came before that), we had wonderful communications software that would render ANSI codes and allow for funny little effects like fading/blinking letters as they were typed. The terminal would send the character down the modem link to the remote host which would draw the letter first in one colour and then in another, after sending a cursor repositioning ANSI sequence.
Although that had some nice interface glamour, it was so terribly wrong. The input sequences should be sent line by line. The user should write a whole line, press enter, and then it be sent to the remote host.
It's nice that those things were possible, and it's quite workable still, but how do we know if the terminal can support these features? Current C-based systems will typically use fgets() which reads from a file handle until a \n is read into input, places this in memory and returns a pointer to that memory or NULL. Lovely. Works a treat. Having to read a character at a time is incredibly slow, especially over 1meg of input.
So, since using programs like mirror, telemate and communique (probably all still available in shareware archives), but more recently as my primary link, minicom, I've moved to xterms.
Out of all the terminals I've used, aterm, eterm, konsole etc etc, rxvt was great.
The world is not only plain ASCII, there are countries which like to communicate in non-latin character sets, and sometimes, in more than just one set, as a result we have grown to depend more on Unicode, UTF8, and in some cases UTF16/32.
Well, not all terminals support this, but one in particular can, rxvt-unicode. This was great for me, while working in a Latin set I can press both shift buttons and start writing away in Cyrillic.
What's also great is mrxvt supports multiple tabs, so many terminals can be combined into the same window frame - although tabs are a slight problem if one is working in two of the tabs at the same time, but it might be very helpful on laptops where space is tight.
2007-08-06 shockingly short of things to say
I can't say I've been very productive of late. All my efforts seem to go into things that are not very worthwhile. Perhaps there's no one left to impress.
I am currently thinking about putting a QMR archive online. I have some (small) amount of bandwidth to spare, I'm sure the net is in use for about 10% of the time, why not get the most out of it.
Give that some hosts charge the Earth for 5gig/month, I can easily shift that at a slow kibps.
For those who have my GPG pub key, you might (not) like to know that I've added my photo to the key, just incase you have forgotten who I am.
One good thing has come of this month, I have been out for a run in my new trainers, and provided I keep the pace slow, it's possible to have a short run without letting myself know I am in pain.