last weeks update.

well last week has again not been very productive. I made however one change. I found myself a copy of devtodo. It’s a console program for linux that basically makes a nice colorfull todo list. And ofcourse: the colors mean something!! This hopefully will help me to generate some usefullness in knowing what I need to do getting on with.

So far so good however, I managed to have a good clean through my /usr/local/src/ directory and cleaned out a lot of junk that I have but really not use. If it was important, I am sure I run into it again. The upside is that it’s gone down to about 136 different applications in total. I also made some other changes. In short it looks like this:


/usr/local/packages@ --> /usr/local/src/pkgs/
/usr/local/source@ ----> /usr/local/src/build/


this makes sure that my packages and source builds keep nice seperated. Now when I build new packages, I can easily update them by issueing an: OUTPUT=/usr/local/packages/... TAG=_mvw ./AppName.SlackBuild And the package will be build automatically and the resulting slackware package will be dumped neatly in its directory.

The only thing left to do now, is to go through all slackbuilds that are there and make sure they are actually up to a minimal SlackBuilds.org standard. It’s gonna be a bit of a pain, but looking back at some of the earlier things I have written, I can see I have come a long way and that much of it has improved.

So once that is done, I need to get clued up on GnuPG for signing submitted packages. It’s a slow start but a start nonetheless in finally getting my butt into gear and moving ahead of things.

On the family front: My dad has gone in and out of hospital and is recovering nicely at home at the moment. I have spoken a couple of time and it seems that the operation was a sucsess. I am by all means, greatly relieved to hear that.

note: liz her blogsite, is on the blogroll at the left ==>

actually getting her site up and running was a bit of a pain. WordPress wouldn’t accept her site from some reason, but it would from me. So I had to get the blog for her. Then add her as and administrator and remove myself. Weird stuff but hey: it works .. don’t knock it ;)

Somethings are just too weird

The mixture of playing Unreal Tournament, while listening to “So Happy Together“, while thinking back of watching bits and pieces of “Imagine Me & You “, certainly makes for a whole surreal experience, featuring a combination of cute lesbian girls, skipping hand in hand while body parts splatter left right and center.

I am seriously disturbed and actually slightly amused by this.

[1] – This is the 1967 version. Allthough amusing in itself, for obvious reasons this one (which features clips from the movie itself), is much more entertaining to watch.

sometimes it just doesn’t go as planned

For some reason, everything just doesn’t seem to work as it should since yesterday. Perhaps it’s a remnant from the storm, that upset my computer.

Since I took some stuff apart and installed the CTX 1995UE monitor on my system and moved the old IBM E-74 monitor to Liz her system … things have been slowly degrading.

It began last night with trying to get my Xorg.conf written properly. For some reason it just kept showing the refresh speed as 50Hz but on a very stable picture. When I thought I had things sorted the next problem started.

UT2004 not wanting to load. Well not load. It actually *did* load, it just didn’t show anything. It took me all evening to get that sorted and set back to normal. In between that while trying to sort this out, Liz her box decided to play silly wonkas. There was the next problem

First Firefox, then Kopete and then KMail did all kinds of silly stunts. Firefox was reasonably quickly sorted. Kopete as well. Kmail however decided decided to pay homage to the fuck-up fairy visit and pretended to have about 26 as many mails as there should have been (and that was just for the inbox!)

After quickly grabbing and showing a couple of copies of her maildirs to an undisclosed location. I decided to call it a night. Main reason was that I actually started to make errors.

I had needed to test something and had booted a 2.4.33.3 kernel on the next reboot it refused to see my 2.6.17.13 kernel. However, this was rather quickly sorted without to many problems.

At that time I decided to reinstall the old 8776 Nvidia drives (it seems that apperantly my GeForece4 MX 400 iGPU is now considered legacy *pooh*) and UT worked again. Before I had a chance to actually properly test it, I decided that I was going to get some sleep.

This morning after plenty of coffee and all, and with Liz out of the way to do some shopping I decided to freshly attack her KMail problem. I deleted her old configs, setup kmail again. and once that was sorted copied her old Mail back into $HOME/Mail.

Of course KMail thought to be funny and happily ignored that. Some grep later I found the problem and some quick sed-fu (see the amazing power of sed -i s#something#another#!) later, kmail worked again. Without any data loss I must say. KMail itself needed some tweaking to set it up just the way it was.

When I finally got around to testing UT, it seems it actually works but it is buggered in some way. I can’t choose any gametypes either in local matches or on the join games. My cross hairs are gone and all the weapons apart from the practice ones have dissapeared. *Argh* I have put everything back the way it was, but it still behaves like there aren’t any maps installed.

Overall I am feeling pretty crap and “geekily” useless at the moment. I think I need to put some serious time in the different kind of projects (as outlined in my todo list) and really stop faffing about with myself and just get on with stuff.

Combine this with the fact that I haven’t actually done any work for the SlackBuild.org project, with me being away for the new year and with everything that going on since we got back (hardly believable we only been back a week), I need to actually put some serious work in over there and do atleast some slackbuilds.

Of course it doens’t help with the general forementioned feeling.

More about Monitors:

I am current in the luxurious position of having two 19″ monitors. Both i have gotten of freecycle.
The bigger question is now: which one shall I choose for my workstation.

Monitor Specs are as follows:

Model:	CTX 1995UE	Dell M990
Size	19″	19”
TCO Cert.	TCO95	TCO99
Dot Pitch	0.26 mm	0.26 mm
H. Sync	30-95 kHz,	30 – 96 kHz
V. Sync	50-160Hz,	50 – 160 Hz
Max res.	1600 x 1200 x 75 Hz	1600 x 1200 x 75 Hz
Connector	VGA (mini DB15) -> BNC	VGA (mini DB15)

As far as the above table tells me: Both monitors are pretty much the same.

Currently clueless :D

Random geekness

Now I am back home again,
and with the new year started
perhaps it’s time to have a good look at what I want to achieve / need to be doing in the time to come.

I have various projects that I need/want to get on with. Several of them, just excist of me geeking out on my boxen and learning various stuff. Others are projects I really should get around cleaning up.

• webserver stuff
• wiki’s
• coding
• random stuff
• todo list

To begin with; I want to have a bit of a play around with apache for various reasons. I need for myself to get to better grips with apache and various parts around it (think php / mysql / mod_rewrite). Probably I can’t play around with vhosts due to the way my ISP is set up. Still it will be interesting to see what I can come up with. At current my mind is a bit in a state of confusion about what to do with the side. I am leaning towards a a combination of static php pages with wiki’s as more dynamic content.

On the subject of wikis. I have been looking around at the different kinds of wiki software that is out there. At current I am leaning towards either pmwiki, dokuwiki and twiki. All 3 of them seem decent enough, and support so far all the features I want, not to mention they all write the wikipages into flatfile support instead of a mysql database. Considering my box has not to much memory at current, I don’t want to overload it with less than usefull mysql stuff. Besides on the small size I probably keep my wiki’s, flatfile databases are quicker than mysql. Most likely it will be pmwiki for my personal things, and a dokuwiki for the more slackware orientated documents.

There is several project I need to set my teeth in. Above others, I really should get a start on with learning and getting to grips with Perl. It actually quite annoys me that I don’t seem to get very far with my learning perl. But who knows :).

Also, I have plans to start some knowledge building in the area of php-fu-ness. I have made a moderate start by reclaiming my PHP4 book, which hopefully will help me to learn things a bit easier. I also need to pour some time in finishing slurpy, or atleast bring it to a place where I can release it to my general public as an alpha version

Some other things I want to get up to speed with; Reading up on iptables, read through the bash advanced scripting shell, and catch up with that before doing actual work on slurpy. Plus there is some other general reading I need to be doing on the various things.

A more compressive and a breakdown of things I need to get on with can be found on my todo list.

I think all in all .. there be plenty to do to keep me busy

Back Home

Right, we are back home and the last day has been as chaotic as the days before we got to the Netherlands. Suffice to say, the time we spend at my parents was pretty good. Lots of good food, good company and joy . I think the holiday was pretty much something liz and I needed to get away from our current situation at home. Now that we are home, I am more determined to keep this mood going.

We met up with my youngest sister and her husband and her two daughters and I have to say: the newest sprog is even more adorable when holding her than on the pictures.

New years eve was actually quite nice and I really enjoyed being in the company of family. I actually did miss that. It was fun and I enjoyed myself watching the fireworks and messing about with them as well *grins*

All in all the holiday was a sucsess with the additional presents of receiving a wonderfull long blue wool coat and a some new and much needed combat boots. They are a pain to walk in; but dry feet are worth something

so all in all it was a pretty good holiday.. but as with all holidays .. it’s damm good to be home again.