Archives 2007

Since VServer appears to be going in (somehow, for some period of time) I spent quite a bit of time while not emailing today reading up on the technology. It's basically some capability bits and somewhat improved chroot implementation AFAICS.

The most disturbing issue VServer seems to address is a trivial escape provided for ...

I've now had 4 different planned tax accountants "drop through", one turned out not to be able to do corporate tax (duh! wish I'd known that before waiting until she was free), the one recommended by her used to do taxes for big corporations but doesn't touch taxes any more, and two others (recommended again) ...

Spent the evening trying to entertain Soni's mom. We're still working on the language barrier there (and we already did quite a lot of that today), so I was looking for a few Albanian-language elements she could read/listen-to/watch during the down-time.

BBC Albania is okay, but the audio-streams don't work with RealPlayer 10 (on Linux, ...

I spent the largest fraction of my walk home thinking about "what nexts"; what to do after I finish building provisioning and billing systems, after I finish helping build a community to raise a laptop.

I want to go back to thinking deeply. I want to spend my days exploring really complex things, things that ...

Been thinking a bit about how to handle multi-application environments, and one case that comes up immediately is the command shell (i.e. bash). With the overlay approach, we could start bash in an empty workspace, but then how do we get access to the files we want to manipulate?

We could alter bash to allow ...

Been trying to get csound built on my workstation since midnight or so. So far I've got the ebuild to the point of compiling everything, but I can't get it to properly install the _csnd library. The install.py file seems to assume the wrong file-name for the .so file, but I can't seem to get ...

We had a presentation down at Linux Caffe on the weekend regarding a number of Jack-based collaborative applications. Basically you can have 2 or more applications communicating audio across the Jack bus. This allows for some very elegant loose coupling of applications.

Where would we put those applications in a Bitfrost system? Would we allow ...

Seneca is currently in the midst of trying to get CSound's Python binding to build. She's going to try to have a presentation ready for Tuesday on how to use the library, particularly her experiences in trying to put together a Theremin-like control mechanism for the laptop.

Hit 8 hours billable again today (took 11.5 real hours), with an hour's presentation of the laptop to a gent from Bell. All in all this is shaping up to be a very good week in billables, even with Tuesday producing a mere 3 hours. Also got a contact from Amy at the caffe, a ...

Spent the day working on a new project (a provisioning server). It's amazing how much more productive head-down new-code development is compared with maintenance/debugging stuff. No little fits and starts, no breaks, just sit down and get up hours later with the work done. Even got almost 2 hours of work done during UU (very ...