Hey folks. The new place to find me is http://www.kjwcode.com/. The new blog is http://www.kjwcode.com/blog/. squeakfan.com is now redirecting to the new domain.

I simply can't keep up with mirroring my blog to LiveJournal, so I'm throwing in the towel.

Here's where to find me:

• http://www.squeakfan.com/blog/

squeakfan.com will be expiring soon, so I will update here once more for people that miss the new domain announcement. The new domain is pending, but I don't want to announce it until I actually have it in hand.

If you want to comment, use the e-mail address on the bottom of any page on squeakfan.com. I do still welcome communication from LJ folks.

devkb.com

devkb.com got a little bit of loving today, as I managed to get out of work at a somewhat-regular hour. It'll be the last time I get to do that for the next five days, at least.

I added some information on C, mostly books and notes on GCC. I also added some book links and comments on the books. I added some sites for most of the other languages, too. Quick and dirty, but it's there.

Beer

Big Rock's McNally's Extra Ale tastes great, and only bumps my blood glucose by about 0.6mmol/L. I like that in a beer.

The calm before the storm

Spent the last two days enjoying days off. These will probably be my last days off for at least a week, given the expansion of the store. I guess the sooner it's over, the happier I'll be...

devkb.com

devkb.com is coming along slowly. There should be zero 404s now. Added a little bit of point-form information to the information on the C programming language. That's going to be the way things work -- information comes in as point-form, and gets expanded once I have enough to work with. That way if someone is in a rip to get the information, they can. Otherwise, those who want the pretty prose can get that when it's ready.

devkb.com scaffolding

The scaffolding for devkb.com is filling in. I have basic scaffolding for the language sections well underway, and will begin to fill in some real information when I get the scaffolding done.

On the whole, I'm pretty happy with how it's coming together. It needs work before it'll look its best, but I see the potential.

Naps

Naps are a double-edged sword. On one hand, they are a great way to pass time and feel more alert. On the other hand, when that alertness extends past bedtime, it can be a bit frustrating.

I was hoping that scaffolding the website would help bore me to sleep, but that didn't work. Time to try counting sheep.

devkb.com

Progress is coming slow and steady. At this point it is all infrastructure that's going in -- menu pages, basic outlines, and the likes.

I'm really looking forward to getting to the point of adding content. I'm planning on having a certain layout for each language, editor, etc., and really trying to be as consistent as possible. Consistency breeds speed and a minimum of vgrepping.

Days off

I get Sunday and Monday off this week. This is fortunate, because I work very long hours from Wednesday until at least the following Saturday, if not longer. If I'm not around or not responding to e-mail, IRC, or IM, don't worry -- it just means that I'm at work, asleep, or somewhere between the two.

devkb.com

I've started development on devkb.com. After building up the to-do list to proportions that would make a medium-sized web design firm cringe, I decided it would be far better to start small and work towards my goal. To that end, work has begun.

That being said, if anyone would like to contribute, please get in touch. I can use all the help I can get.

Docserver on sec

Got documentation for several things on sec (the iBook), and will be adding more to it. Some of it is stuff that changes every now and then, and some of it is stuff that's pretty much fixed in stone. I'll probably figure out a mirroring system that's not a bandwidth hog. This is one of those times I wish that rsync was as widely available as the web.

Seasonal differences

Ah, spring is near, if not here. Gone for now are the days of blizzards and freezing walks to work. Instead, we have only slightly cool nights, and idiot drunks stumbling around and threatening people at the top of their lungs. Now I can see why air conditioning is so popular up here -- you don't have to open your window and listen to the morons.

Another day...

Another "svn ci". Or a few of them, as it usually goes.

RST is slowly taking shape. Very slowly. It's just something I'm working on as I think about other things. It is a nice, relaxing sort of project, though.

Another dollar

A drunk at the supermarket asked me if I would give him a dollar. Twice. The first time it was for a bag of chips, the next time it was for a package of cigarettes. He tried to be intimidating, but failed miserably.

I'd sooner take the dollar and use it for postage, to mail a letter to my MLA asking for public intoxication laws to actually be enforced.

iBook bits

It looks like a new hard disk and battery for the iBook will run me about CAD360 after GST, but before shipping. With shipping I'm likely looking at CAD400 or more. That's almost half the cost of a new laptop, but it's all I'm likely to be able to afford before I go to Vancouver. We shall see.

At the very least I will get the new hard disk (about CAD110 after GST) -- I can always plug it in to use it if I have to.

iBook unhappiness

I get things stable on the iBook, and now it's doing a little dance that involves the hard drive clicking and dropping IO. This is not a happy thing. I need to see about getting a new hard disk for the little critter.

I had considered getting a new laptop, but there is no way I'll be able to afford it before I go on vacation, when I'll need a laptop the most. I'm going to shop about on-line and see what it would cost to get a new hard disk and a new battery for the iBook. With any luck, I'll be able to afford that without too much trouble.

Soda-licious

I thought it interesting that the bottles of soda at one store in town all had a similar pattern near the top of the bottle. I made the guess that the bottles had been frozen while in transit. I didn't buy any of the potentially-frozen soda, and didn't think much of it -- until today, when I discovered I had put a bottle in the freezer and forgotten about it, and it now had the same pattern.

I wish I could say I had planned this little experiment, but I'll take what I can get -- a hypothesis confirmed for CAD1.59 plus GST.

LiveJournal

A friend signed on to LJ again, so I've taken my old account out of dormancy and have started mirroring my blog there. For those reading it on squeakfan who want to read it on LiveJournal, check out user kwoo. For those reading it on LJ who would rather read it on squeakfan, check out my main blog.

RST

Got some new initial documentation done for parts of RST, and tweaked a little here and there. The big picture is starting to come together, but this is definitely going to be a longer-term project.

RST

Got some planning and rough cuts of option lists done. One of the goals of the project is simplicity (in operation, code, and design), and that gets somewhat difficult at times, but I think I'm balancing it pretty well.

Drinks

Had drinks with a friend tonight at the sports pub. It was nice -- not for the least reason that she had iced tea and I had diet sodas. We caught up on what each other has been up to in the last six months or so, and had a good conversation. Definitely worth leaving the house for.

OGR

Unless I am mistaken, the distributed.net client is running about 25% slower on Linux than on OS X. I'm going to play with the various cores tomorrow in hopes of remedying the situation.

Debian

Got backed into a corner with Darwin (not yet a system for someone not working on the system itself), so I've bootstrapped sid via woody. (No, the preceding statement was not sexual -- go to http://www.debian.org/ if you're confused. :) )

Things are working as expected, and the machine is 99% installed and 50% configured. The machine is now contributing to OGR-25 computation for distributed.net in the background. My other machines do it, too, and I figure it's a good cause until I have computations of my own I want to do.

Computations of my own

This is a topic I haven't looked at in a while. My last cycle-sucking project was your run-of-the-mill exhaustive prime search that focused on optimising data storage in memory and on disk. I came up with some interesting stuff, but nothing terribly unique -- the most I have to show for it is a fairly novel way of storing the list of primes compactly, in a format that relies only on very cheap operations to reconstruct the list. Whee.

I'm wondering what's next for me in this area. OGRs are fine for now, but eventually I'll get the urge to do my own thing again.

Sometimes I think that when I have questions like this with no answers, it means I'm not doing enough reading. I'll have to fix that.

Darwin

Things are going slowly, but surely. Had to back out a few ports today to change from XFree86 4.5 to Xorg 6.8.2. It will save me some trouble, as I run Xorg on my other systems.

Lazy boy

That would be me. I haven't done much at all with RST in the last couple of days. My attention has really been taken by making the iBook happy again. I'll definitely spend some good time on it this weekend, and probably start work on another chunk of it, as the chunk I've played with most over the past little bit is nearing the good-enough-for-now stage.

Evolution

Peachtree is kind of cool, but it occurred to me that because Tiger has been released, there might be a new version of Darwin...

Sure enough, there is a brand-spankin'-new ISO for Darwin 8.01 on the Apple open source website. A reasonably quick download and some fiddling about later, I've got it up and running.

The installer now gives you an opportunity to create a user -- too bad it doesn't work. Nor does rebooting. A cold boot and a replayed journal later, I've installed DarwinPorts from CVS and am installing XFree86 4.5.

The other big thing is that HFS+ journalling is on by default. I like this. HFS+ does not give me warm fuzzy feelings. Neither does HFS+ with journalling, but it does make it a bit better.

DarwinPorts

Looks pretty good so far. A smattering of C and some Tcl holding it all together. Things are laid out quite like the FreeBSD ports tree, which is nice. My only real complaint so far is that there's not enough feedback during the download and build phases. That's not a show-stopper, though.

No surprises here...

If you actually thought that I got to bed during the download of Peachtree Linux, you're crazy. If you actually thought that I could wait until tomorrow night to do the install, you're crazier. Or I am, I guess. Whichever.

The install is pretty straightforward and mostly manual, which isn't a bad thing. The starting environment reminds me a lot of early Slackware, which is not too bad at all.

First up is getting Lynx installed, as I'm not much of a w3m boy. After that comes zsh. After that comes installing the updates to the system itself, and then it's time to get Xorg up and running.

Now that can wait until tomorrow.

Torrents of Peachtrees

To those who claim that BitTorrent has no non-infringing uses, you must admit now that it has at least one -- it's the only distribution medium for Peachtree Linux.

I'm about half an hour from having the PPC version downloaded. I won't get to it tonight, but I will post at least first impressions sometime soon.

svn log

One thing that frustrated me about Subversion is that it seemed to arbitrarily cough up entries when I ran "svn log". I wanted to see the log messages for each version of the project. It seems that I was missing a step.

I found out by way of messing about (is there any other way to find stuff out, really?) that one only has to do a "svn update" to bring the log entries in sync, and then it will print out one entry for each version when executed in the base directory of the working copy.