April 2004 Archives

Today's music is Evanescance. It seems very goth/rock. I like it. 'Nuff said.

Most people think that you can only mount a directory onto another file system, which is true most of the time. Most file systems have code to prevent you from mounting a filesystem on a file,

not the loopback file system under Solaris (I've not checked on linux). With this lovely beast you can mount a file on top of another file.

Say you're on an unsupported operating system
, and every time you try running a script it moans at you using a dialog that the OS you're running on is not supported. You copy the file locally and make the changes to it. Then through the magic of lofs you issue:

then when you issue a /dist/brokenfile it runs your new /tmp/fixedfile, without you having to copy anything else to the new location.

This comes in handy when you're trying to install a machine over NFS and you can't write to the /etc/default/login file which has a

you fix the file, use the mount -f lofs /tmp/login /etc/default/login and then you can telnet to it with ease to do some last minute checks before rebooting the machine from the comfort of your home.

It looks like the power consumption on 0.16 of Pocketcity is very high. I'm going to have to figure out why that is and work out how to reduce it. Someone complained about having used up 3/4 of their battery life after an hour, which is not good.

It's an M130 and doing a quick google shows me that it should have a typical battery life of 4 hours.

I was at home for the weekend. The weather was nice and I got some photographs of some flowers. Sad, I know. I need to get a new digital camera, as my current one is really poor, that and I want to take more prefessional looking shots.

Something is rotten in the state of Denmark. I wasn't feeling the best so I decided to head home; unfortunately my stomach didn't want to last the entire journey so by the tme I got to Landsdowne station I needed to escape really quickly. I barely made it to a bin in time.

I just received an offer to translate the Pocketcity into Catalan; which I appreciate. He's mentioned that he'd like to have the .po files which tells me that I'm probably doing the translation of the application all wrong.

Currently I'm using the lang attribute of the .rcp files to split up all the separate languages that are used, and I realize that I could miss strings using this method. I have found that during testing I have missed strings so the ould is a bit of a misnomer.

I've got to put in an entry to the keyclick hack, becuse people have started to look for it. I have a search form, but it's not linked into the other elements of the site. By adding this entry, linking to the keyclick hack I'm ensuring that it will be findable when people go looking for it. There have been a minimum of 2 searches for palm related stuff.

Anyway the keyclick hack is at http://www.petesh.com/palmos/. I'm sure I'll put some more stuff in there.

{p}

Music today is by an artist called MC 900 foot Jesus. It's interesting and quirky and just old school enough to be enjoyable. Mind you some people think it's a load of crap, but what do they know?


Another round of applause to Ed P. who's introduced me to a lot of interesting music.

Well, I just spent about 2 hours installing 3 Toshiba Portégé M100 laptops with the latest build of Solaris. Quite easy once I figured out that one of the network cables was a POS and was causing all the NFS traffice to fail. Video was a snap - configure the XF86 i810 driver. It recognized the network card immediately. The only thing is the sound. The drivers are at tools.de, which covers that.

A wonderful article about what might happen if you subscribed to the new google mail service (gmail).

I took this picture a few weeks ago and didn't put it anywhere. I suppose now would be as good as any other to put it up.

Well I just had a tired half hour discussion about teams and what constitutes a good team and the various roles that are needed to allow a good team to function.
Of course what was missing was any mention of the general problems that tend to occur when the members are not in the same place, or even in the same timezone. I've been a member of a team that has always been a minimum of 8 hours from me. I recently got a change of manager, who is only 7 hours away. Normally it's a struggle to talk to my manager before 5.30pm local time, which is a bit on the annoying side as my energy levels are really low, now I get to call him at any time after lunch. He's in the office at a decent hour. I'm scared that I might have things to talk to him about other than the fact that I'm shattered from yet another long day of fixing problem.

One of today's beautiful problems was the removal of a CD from the drive. It's UNIX and you don't want to do something stupid like reboot the computer. It's teaching time. To find out what processes are using a file system issue a fuser command. You get a groovy output containing the PIDs that are using the mount point. You could check them using p(s)tree; just in case it's something important (like vold :-). Then you kill them. But what's best is that fuser allows you to do that by passing in -k, so if you didn't care...

Tirivia about the fuser command. When you get the list of processes that are using the file system, it will indicate whether they are tied to consoles by having a c after the ID. Great, ahother thing that needs filtering, but no! all the non-pid information is output to stderr, while the pids are output to stdout so a simple 2>/dev/null filters out all but the process ids.

I've Ed Pil to thank for that piece of trivia which he informed me of while working on the layered driver effort for Solaris.

Sometimes people tend to say something that seems quite innocuous, but it turns out to be quite insulting. How about this pearl:
It turned out that the worm exploited three or four different holes in the system. From this, and the fact that we were able to capture and examine some of the source code, we realized that we were dealing with someone very sharp, probably not someone here on campus." --Dr. Richard LeBlanc, associate professor of ICS, in George Tech's campus newspaper after the Internet worm

Every morning for the last week it's been really nice. I've been able to wear my sunglasses, which is quite an occasion. However as soon as I've got to the office the weather starts to deteriorate. Clouds roll in and the wind starts howling. By the time it gets to the end of the evening and I'm off home it's still like that.
Stranger and stranger.

I'd like to know what people think this is

This is the first test entry for the blog

Ok,

We have the X position:
- getMapXPos()

this is a fraction of the overall display:

(getMapXPos() / getMapWidth())
multiply by the width of the display.

Making sure to order them such that there is never a zero value
for the multiplication.

the high resolution support for the PalmOS5 is driving me nuts.

little new pieces of the API seem to appear every now and again that make older code stop working. The testing matrix looks like:

• pre palmos 3.5 device
• palmos 3.5 device
• grey
• color
• palmos 4 device
• grey
• color
• palmos 5 device (simulator)
• 320x320 resolution
• palmos 5.?? device (simulator)
• collapsible display, reorientable display
• 1, 1.5 and 2x resolution
• palmos 6 device (simulator)
• all the 5.?? matrix

How difficult is it for a music playing application to remember where the
hell I was during the last run? I have a pile of long running files (lectures,
audiobooks) and I can't bookmark a piece within them.

Still not used to the 'bring it back the way I had it before' concept then
are we?

The distribution algorithm results in some silly output. There are times
where zones that are adjacent to power plants have no power.

I need to flag power shortages as well.

It looks like wasps find me sweet...

It's merely a month after he retred and he's passed away. I am not happy
that this has happened. He was the one true constant in the world.

Today could have gone better in the office. I feel like I've been done over by Bill Hick's goat boy.

Need to work on the GUI for pocketcity.

Implement the scrollbars on the Palm. I am in the undesirable position of having the scrollbars makes the screen usage lopsided (grrrr). The tiles are 16 pixels in size. Scrollbars are 7/14 pixels depending on the resolution of the screen.

so the questions are:
1. redesign the drawing routine to clip on a partial tile?

2. Change the tile size?

3. reshape the screen?

Quote from http://daringfireball.net/2004/04/spray_on_usability:

Oh, I see: the problem is that Linux developers are just so fucking smart that they overlook the problems faced by "dumb users" such as dear old A.T. But everything will fall into place with just a little attitude adjustment.

I need to use a smaller font for the default pocketcity UI. The 16x16 tiles
are using too much space.

Need to get the scroll bars working (and not lying).

The housemate's car was broken into last night ina lovely part of town

Lost the DSL router and the installation CDs

needs the Netopia CD again.