Archives week 37 of 2004

After more than 2 full days the KDE 3.3 upgrade is still compiling. Has another 8 or 9 packages to finish, but I'm beginning to suspect that when it finishes I'll have a totally pooched system.

The bash prompt went a little wacky when the first attempt to update didn't complete as expected. Works fine ...

So, as I settle in to using Linux, I'm actually reading my email in Thunderbird. Like 99% of the email-using public, I often get links sent in URLs to which I would like to go. That's why mail-readers (including Thunderbird) make things that look like URLs in mail messages clickable links. Every mail reader should ...

Booted up my shiny new KDE 3.2.3 install this morning to see if the dratted bugs in Eric would go away with the new version. However, on loading, the sound was gone. That is, though every mixer I could find (including all the command-line ones) said that every channel was enabled, there was no sound ...

This is somewhat of a milestone for me. My first day of doing real work (i.e. not work-that's-setting-up-Linux-or-learning-how-to-administer-Linux, but actual paying work) on my Gentoo workstation. I missed having "The Daily Show" on while I worked (gatos still won't install), but I kept at it.

I've filed about 5 bug reports today. Most of them ...

I almost managed to get some real work done while in Linux. I finally figured out how to create projects in Eric, and once I figured out that it was crashing because it had somehow created a literal '~' directory in my home directory, it seemed to work fine for editing files, and I could ...

Had a little Windows sysadmin gig this afternoon. Mostly just figuring out how the network worked so I could poke at the right spot in the dyke :) . Was refreshing to walk around downtown and look at all the pretty people going about their purposeful and important lives.

Spent some of this evening doing ...

I've mentioned the "magic" feeling that sometimes pops out of the emerge system on Gentoo. Last night it happened again. I realised I hadn't emerged any cron daemon yet, so I stopped the emerge -U world, quickly emerged vixie-cron, then restarted the world emerge.

Having done that, I settled down to my normal pattern of ...

Much of yesterday was taken up fixing a design flaw in the EFT server. In essence, I'd modelled transactions as abstract objects to which messages should be attached. That's fine, but it's overkill for what we're actually doing, and makes everything rather slow.

The solution was to make the messages themselves model the transactions. That ...

I'm back to the point where I can trust Gentoo again. I was burned badly by that whole "setting -march and building world turns the entire machine to chutney" thing. Still, just an hour or so ago I once again made the leap of faith and emerged the world for the new server.

Moved a long way forward on Cinemon this evening. The two data-importers are now working with in-memory models of the geographic entities (instead of database-based ones). Reduces load times to a second or two. Haven't got the hierarchy importer actually kicking-off the watchers or spitting back a cleaned up version of the file, but that ...