Author: jrwren

Wow, I just read all of this: http://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/brown/

I wasn’t quite sure who “me” was until the very end. Then I was surprised (although I shouldn’t have been) that it was Andy Tananbaum.

Having trouble focusing on work… too many different things going on.

Work Work Work.

I think I’ll escape for the next hour…

OMG LOL

http://www.livejournal.com/users/butt_buddy/27676.html

oh boy oh boy oh boy.

I just read on mandrake.cooker.cvs that kexec kernel module/patch is included in kernel-2.6.6.3.mdk!!! I’ve wanted to play with kexec for months, since I heard about it.

What is kexec you may ask!?! It is totally awesome!!! Especially on shite slow to boot servers like 1/2 the dells with HW RAID controllers in the machine room at work.

kexec turns the machine over to another program. That is, the running linux kernel, turns ENTIRE control of the machine over to another program, such a a boot loader like lilo or grub. This means you can reboot without having to reboot. That is, reboot the OS, without rebooting the system. On machines where POST takes a long time, or Dell PowerEdge 2650’s with PERC and RMC, the PERC and RMC take nearly 60 seconds a peice, and standing in front of a server in a rack in a cold server room is not my idea of fun. I like the comfort of my tiny 6′ by 6′ cube.

So I’ll have to wait a day or two for the rpm to spread to mirrors, but I’m looking forward to using this feature.

This is interesting:
http://www.aiada.org/article.asp?id=12220

I talked with my pops about this the other day. He said he recalls $0.18 per gallon, yes, eighteen cents. And he said at that time, jobs were so abundant, just about anyone could get a job that pays $5/hr. This was the sixties mind you! Lets say it was 1967. Adjusted for inflation, that is well over $40/hr. Now I have some pretty well paid friends, but I don’t know anyone getting paid that, certainly not 16 year old high school drop outs!

Where is this nation going? How long did it take Rome to fall?

I had a fun walk lunch.

The most remarkable was that our conversation went from what did you do this weekend, which involved playing Legend of the Green Dragon, to the learning methods of introductory programmers in the 80’s.

It was most ammusing. The conversation stemmed from LOGD being a port of the old Legend of the Red Dragon BBS Door game. So it was breifly mentioned how poor the php code of LOGD is and how poor the Pascal code of LORD probably is. From there we of course went into a few 80’s video games for Commodore, which I never played because we were too poor to get carts. It was mentioned how cool it was because anyone could do it with ASCII art on a C64. I mentioned that I loved the Basic on my Atari much better because it had drawing primitives for line, box, circle, and options for filled or unfilled. The reply was “no Pokes and Peeks”.

While mentioning love for nice primitive basics, I had to mention the Microsoft made Amiga Basic on my Amiga1000. It actually didn’t use line numbers. It was my introduction to structured programming, and at the time, it was awesome, and truely a revolutionary basic. There were function calls, and variables actually had scope. It was about this time that the demerits of GOTO were brought up, but I suggested that GOTO and line numbers are not all that different than the branching instructions in assembly, and memory addresses.

We concluded that for a top down learner, the structure of line numbers and GOTO would not make much sense, but to someone learning bottom up, it would. The bottom up learner would have known what microprocessor instructions look like, and line numbers would correspond to instruction addresses, and GOTO to the common jump instruction. Primitive BASIC then becomes a natural abstraction.

that didn’t work very well… but I posted it anyway, cuz I suck

can you say moody?

Well, tonight was fun fun fun… while doing laundry at my dad’s, I messed with his computer a lot.

He had 4 more virii, and 69 spy ware thingies.  Ugh.  But I
upgraded his stupid netscape browser from 6.2 to 7.1… Newer mozilla
engine is faster, but no where near that of 1.8a nightlies.

So while doing that, and trying to do a defrag on windows 98, I used
putty to update his debian firewall.  I finally got a new debian
kernel on that thing… 2.6.5 is much nicer than 2.6.0-test9. 
Named stopped working in debian and I needed some kernel module called
“capability”.  Its an odd one, but I’m guessing it gives the named
user account ability to listen on port 53, like a delegation of
privilege.  Then I started messing with snmp and mrtg.

After going home and putting away the laundry, I dove back into the
snmp and mrtg.  It was a bit more challenging than on Mandrake,
but this is probably due just as much to my inexperience with snmp, as
it is to the wonders of Mandrake.  So Debian’s snmpd is tcp
wrapped, but Mandrake’s is not.  Worse yet, Debian’s doesn’t like
“localhost”, it requires the IP of 127.0.0.1… sheesh… talk about
picky.  I must have blew 1/2 and hour just on that!  OUCH My
wrist is hurting typing all this.  I guess that MS Keyboard at
work has spoiled me!

So the end result is cfgmaker and indexmaker working like pie, and my
mrtg showing up at http://little.xmtp.net/mrtg/  Neat eh?

The today today part was just some bad arse scrpting and automation I
did for work.  Not to mention some cool Linux 802.1q VLAN stuff I
did.  Man it is turning out to be quite the week.

hurray! finally got through chapter 2 of “Creating Applications with Mozilla” – i don’t know why the stuff in the last section wasn’t working… but it wasn’t 🙂