Pretty fun life. I received a message about why I received this gift from this girl. Hmmm... Yes, that's very kind of her. I think. She is very polite, and knows the way of life, I guess. I kinda need to get to doing these kinds of things; providing gifts at the right time in the right place.
I've been studying but decided to give up. I don't need to study. Not for this exam tomorrow (or rather, today). I need to look at the imminent future.
I've upgraded the kernel to 2.4.1 with low latency patches from Andrew Morton. So far so good. It's been up for about 10 minutes, and I've tested basic audio capabilities. Testing for printers, CDRs, and other components are going to follow. ppp seems to be working okay, and I guess, this is all so good. I have not checked the latency yet.
I've been hacking the most itching part of sylpheed for the last 2 hours. Trying to implement list-replys to Sylpheed. I think it would work fine, I have no idea. And I got it working. There are some portions like menu activation not being done properly, but I think in general it is doing quite fine.
I've been playing with mpich configuration options, and some benchmarking, but apparently it seems like --disable-devdebug has no effect in ./configure. This is contrary to what the documentation says. I really don't understand what they want to do with their documentation. I fail to understand their documentation; but I think there is a large gap between the current status of mpich and its documentation. I've only been reading the source, and the documentation seems very much out-of-date.
I'm rather more depressed than usual. Girls are difficult, I must say. When you think about them too much, things will not go very well. However, when you are thinking too much about them, it is usually the case that you can't help thinking about them. That's bad news.
experimental cvs distribution? : I thought it was rather interesting that cvs should be used in Debian. But then, I thought about other uses of CVS. CVS is currently used in many projects, and it is getting more and more popular. Say, there exists an autobuild daemon to build a cvs check-out every night to build debian packages out of it. It would be rather interesting. I think there could be a central repository like that in some of the Debian machines. I think; I don't know. This is rather interesting. The implication is that there is a "cvs" distribution that is far more unstable than "unstable". There is an update every night. It would be rather impossible to keep up for every architecture for sure; it would not be available for m68k... no one would have enough m68k resource to build them all. This came up in my thought pondering about the method of packaging ecasound. ecasound is quite actively developed, and is in cvs. Development versions are released, and these are now included in Debian. The question comes up; what should I do after the initial stable release gets released ? Should I go and include the stable release in woody, or should I get the next random development release of ecasound rolled into woody. This sounds like; does the developer want to have a development version included in a stable distribution that is released so infrequently as Debian ?
I want to split out MPE from MPICH, and checking things to make it work. It seems like currently upshot contains my own directory. That's bad. It won't run on any other machine than the one that was used to build. Maybe I should call the fixup from my fixup.sh. I wonder if setting the exec_prefix would solve any problem. --enable-mpedbg seemed to have massive problems on build, and it looped "ed" real hard. This caused so much memory consumption (it seems like ed has a memory leak), and ed died after using up all the memory. kernel 2.4.1 seems to be alive, but the GNOME multiload-applet has died. Interesting behavior. This caused Emacs to play strange. Something is wrong. It has not recovered completely. Maybe something was really wrong.
The Linux kernel 2.4.1 with low-latency patch seems to be very stable, and good. Its disk caching mechanism is amazing. I can't seem to be able to enable DMA access to /dev/hda from hdparm, but I should not worry. I think the machine has gotten very kludgy and slow for some reason and in some aspects, but running this kernel is so much more quieter than before. Disk does not scratch.
Life is malicious, I will sleep. Soon.
I had a serious lockup using ext2 loopback on a Fat filesystem running unstable. A process "rm -rf"ing /var/lib/dpkg/tmp.c stopped responding, and I tried "ls", and ls didn't come back. umount did not come back. In fact, the kernel started acting weird. Sync did not come back, and thus I could not reboot. This was bad news, and I hard-rebooted the machine. Hmmm... I have heard that chroot/loopback/fat/ext2 combination was going to cause problems, but having had this.... People are experiencing this in 2.4.1, and this is about 2.4.1 and its weakness against low-memory situations. 2.2.x was more graceful about low-memory, I think. Doh.
Project/Orphaned in Debian is going to be removed by James Troup. This has a lot of implications. GPL requests that for 3 years the archive of source be available when the source-code is not distributed along with the binary. Many CD-distributors are not distributing binaries, and they are giving written offers for free download from ftp.*.debian.org. That's not quite right. They don't maintain these ftp sites, no. I see many people who are selling CDs of Debian, and not being able to provide the full CD-set, and I have every doubt that they would care to provide a FTP site for the next 3 years. I do not know how they would be, if the company goes bankrupt: who then will be responsible for providing the source?
I went out with my girlfriend to Nipponbashi. She wanted to buy some Notebook PC. She won't be installing Linux, so she bought a NEC with proprietary everything included.
I noticed that sshd takes an argument "-p" to specify which port to bind to. This is an interesting thing. I can provide access to the chrooted systems from ssh. I like the idea. I might go and install ssh into my chroot system.
I have configured and have set up my 486 machine as an IP masquerade server. I configured the kernel, and installed pppd etc. I will need to configure DNS etc, I suppose, but I think I can just use my ssh to connect to the outer world from it for sure. This is getting more interesting. I'm rather annoyed by the ssh security problems. Whatever it is, this is annoying.
My girl is not going to meet me tomorrow, but I will be going to University. I need to solve some tasks. I like life in general. My father has bought a J-Phone KEITAI (portable telephone or mobile phone or whatever you want to name it). He mails me. He wants some keyboard to go along with it too. It's insane.
Kernel 2.4.1 with DMA is good. 32-bit access doubles speed without DMA, but enabling DMA seems to quadraple access, and when DMA is on, 32-bit access does not affect. Good, This is nice to know.
I am now creating a CDR multisession writing software. It's easily used from the command-line. This is great. The program which does the job is found here.
In debian-devel, there is a thread about ps2pdf, and the option dvips -Ppdf. It's rather interesting. I have never tried it. Does pdflatex support Japanese? Is one thing I would like to know. I only ever used platex. pdflatex seems to be an interesting option. pdflatex can handle png files apparently.
I cannot form a voice. I caught some virus (in the physical world), and one of the side-effects seems like that I cannot speak. This is bad. I need to install festival. Wow.
Played around with the HURD a bit. It's quite interesting. settrans is quite good to play with. I like the idea very much. Apart from settrans, things are quite the same as Linux without pthread support. It has cthread or whatever that is. ext2 driver needs a rewrite.
Been talking with wolfie about mpich buliding. broonie was there. It's rather good. Pretty interesting to talk with wiggy too..
Set up masquerading firewall ppp daemon machine, so that the machine xiaoling can play with the modem while my main machine "uekawa" can do anything from running the Hurd to running windoze 95.
This secretary at Uni is driving me nuts. But, maybe this is because I don't have a very big portion of my mental health back.
Latex: pslatex and textcomp packages seem promising. I need to check them out.
ntop is interesting tool. ntop -i eth0 -w 2000 gives me a webpage. I can think of so many ways this can cause a problem, but this is fun.
The kernel crashed on me, very hard. I think it is due to the FAT filesystem and ext2 and loopback and chroot. When it did a ranlib in the build process of ecasound, it took down everything else too. This is bad news.
The project to create CD jewel boxes from latex, cdlabelgentex, is available for public consumption now. I think I am not the first one to think about it, but I did not have the power and ability to make an i18n extention to cdlabelgen (which is driven by PostScript). I needed a latex version of cdlabelgen, so here it is. I have realized that the parameter to dpkg-scanpackages was ". .", and thus I can do things like; dpkg-scanpackages . . | gzip -9 > Packages.gz. I am not quite sure about using "." as the override file, but it seems to do the job quite well. /dev/null seems to be more appropriate, but any file that doesn't want to work is fine, I guess. Maybe someday someone will implement a more amazing error detection in dpkg-scanpackages, and make my life worse. wow.
I created a potato(stable) chroot image today. It was rather good and quick. It's rather entertaining to find out how quick it can be done. I really want to be able to log in to this image, using ssh... I probably just need to do things this way and forget... I have created a ssh-able image. The root password is set to "root". This is interesting. slogin localhost -l root -p 2001 lets you enter this image. Fun. The most important bit about chroot setups is to use the tar option p to preserve the permission, and do it under root. Or, the device files will be wrecked. It's not really necessary to have the device files, but using CDROM under chroot is nice.
I have built new mpich packages, 1.2.1-5. I have made it policy-3.5.2-compliant. This is good. Gives a false impression that I am working. I added some man pages too. It shows how much clue I need.
I was quite annoyed by the recent dpkg, but it seems to look at an environment variable COLUMNS. COLUMNS=1000 dpkg -l gives out a good list, with the version number not truncated. Good.
I created a plain telnet clone, which does what I want. It just plain opens a port, and allows access from the keyboard. This kind of thing is good. I am calling it teranet. I doubt it will go out into the public tho'. It's useless program. It uses pthreads, and it is quite nicely written, IMO.
I've almost processed all my mail backlog. I only have 100 more mail to read, or kind of. This is good. Exciting.
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