Just for giggles and grins, I decided I would start recording what really nifty Open-Source Toys I have been playing with. It'll almost be like a history of my goofing off!

There were enough complaints about the pi ISO being unavailable to all the poor firewalled college students out there that I decided to help. Find an eBay auction for the pi ISO and bid if you can't get it otherwise.

I'm just trying to help. ;-)

It's been a lifelong dream that I've finally realized. Now I feel like sharing it with you. Here is the bittorrent for the iso image of a CD that contains 1.7 billion digits of pi. It also contains a few Cygwin tools to make DOS navigation easier for you that are not converted to the True and Living OS, yet. I have also generated SHA1 and MD5 sums for your verification needs.

Now we see the depths of my geek depravity.

Heh. I just came across a sig that had a link to one of the most intelligent posts on Slashdot, ever. I spent most of my first time reading the post thinking, "Nuh-uh! That's not me!" Then I re-read the thing and realized that the post is more accurate than I previously though.

So, when I need an attitude adjustment, I can come here and take a peek.

Looks like ObviousGuy got it. Find it here.

Well, do I have a story to tell...

That USB 802.11 network device that I have been struggling with. You know. The one that I have been beating myself up over because I cannot get a simple device to work properly.

I managed to get the 2.4.18 kernel sources to build and installed. After I rebuilt the USB network drivers and installed, I gave the drivers a load. Voila! Network! I could now download security patches and whatnot. I'm so happy!

That is, until I reboot. I'm a little install-shy with this stupid network card, so to make sure I'm not completely stuffed, I reboot the machine and try the drivers again. By reboot, I mean shutdown the machine and turn it back on again. Well, for my troubles I got another kernel panic loading the network driver, and nothing seems to help.

So, it's almost working, but not quite...

As I was browsing the 1,000th webpage of information, I came across a little unknown line of text that says there might be problems building the driver with kernels older than 2.4.20. Since this is a desktop machine, I have been trying my hardest to stay on the Debian stable branch. Unfortunately, the Debian stable branch only has kernel versions up to 2.4.18. OK, I gave in, I upgraded to testing. Like magic, there's the 2.4.24 kernel (BTW, the 2.6.0 kernel made its way from unstable to testing. Seems the Debian folk are getting warmer to the idea of the new kernel). I install the image and source, build the source using the image config file, install the build and rebuild the USB network drivers. They load and work!

Well, that's a shock! So I try to reboot again. After everything comes up, I get another kernel panic. It's intermittant stuff like this that will end up killing me. But I've begun to notice something. Each time the driver works, I find that I recently booted to WinXP (I'm dual booting), then softboot back to Debian. If I coldboot, the driver panics the kernel. So, at this moment I suspect that the Linux Atmel drivers have a fit on an uninitialized USB adapter. Guess what, I'm going to play with it again tonight. This time, though, I will probably attempt to fix any driver bugs I find.

Damn me and my wont to write code!

Still blowing chunks on that stupid USB Wireless card. I've rebuilt and installed the Debian kernel, rebuilt the drivers and tried to load them this morning. All I got for my troubles was a stupid Kernel Panic.

Maybe tonight...

It's been a busy year for me so far, technically. I've come back (after several years away) to Debian and, as is obvious to all those Debian users, it rocks. I forgot how glorious apt-get was (or perhaps it was so long ago it wasn't very glorious). Now I run a laptop and two desktop machines on Debian.

Also, one of the sites that I do little odd-n-ends for has asked for spam filtering. That's something I haven't played with much, so I decided to stick SpamAssassin on their e-mail server. I've even written a nifty little shell script to help train the filter. Now I just have to find some magical way to train the e-mail users to forward their message to the filter. Eh, they're busy in their own little world. I'll give 'em time (like, when they start complaining that they get too much spam).

But that's such a little problem, compared to the e-vile monster that sits at home. I've taken it upon myself to convert my loving family from WinXP to Linux (Debian, of course). My wife is the major stumbling block here, as she despises change. Fortunate for her, I've had her using the Mozilla browser and e-mail program for nine months, now. Since those are the only programs she really uses, it should be a piece of cake to transistion her.

So clearly that is not my problem. The problem is that I am using a Netgear MA101 Rev B USB network adapter. Worked great on a Gentoo machine, but it has been hell trying to get this thing working under Debian. The last month has been spent rebuilding the driver, loading it and trying to get a ping to my wireless router. Isn't happening. One strange thing, though. Seems that depmod reports there are unresolved symbols in the driver. Odd, that it seem to load without any complaints. I found that just this morning, so when I get home tonight, I'll install the complete kernel sources, build 'em, install 'em and try to build, install and run the Atmel drivers again.

Because I imagine myself to be a good netizen, I'll post the result of my attempt tomorrow. Stay tuned.

Oh, yeah, got my diploma. I've spent my nine years prostrate before the higher mind and now I'm free.

To do what, I wonder.

Perhaps I'll take up piano.

WooHoo! Seems the folks at /. thought one of my postings was worthwhile. Check it out here.

Now, I must clarify my position regarding my post. There has been comments to the fact that I was posting in a rather trollish manner. Let me set the record straight on the matter. I like Novell, for obvious (to me) reasons. Novell has some of the best technology from some of the most intelligent architects and talented engineers. These guys can create pretty sweet stuff like eDirectory, DirXML and NMAS. I have no gripe with the engineers, they're not destroying Novell.

My gripe is with those who make decisions for Novell. For years Novell has either created or aquired kick-butt tech, just to have that tech wither and die for "political" reasons. I cannot imagine that the same technical marvels that I previously described could simultaneously destroy other tech, so the management is now suspect.

Now, word has eminated from the Big Red N that things are different. Mr. Jack Messman and Mr. Chris Stone have told everyone that they have Novell's future at heart and do not plan to build their golden parachutes and jump at the first possible moment. I hope this is true, and so far they seem to be true to their word. Time will tell, but slowly hope is being restored.

So, while I may be bitter toward the suffering caused by Novell in the past, I am starting to see positive results with the current leadership. But then, I thought I saw the same thing with Dr. Eric Schmidt.

If I were to have a deciding stake in Novell, I would really like to see the OSS culture become the standard for engineering. My hope is that Miguel, the Ximian and the Suse crews can help lead Novell to the light. Not necessarily as a pure OSS shop, but allow the engineers to drive the technology and not the political manoeuvrings of the upper managment.

So, in the final analysis, I like Novell, but I am yet to trust them to treat projects like Ximian with due respect. Yet, I haven't given up on Novell to change it's iniquitous ways and make us all proud.

WooHoo! Last final of the semester! Complete! I'm not confident that I did well but I'm done!

Now I wonder what I'll do with my summer...

WooHoo!!! 1.5 down, 0.5 to go! And apparently noone will have to suffer (much).

One of the more interesting discussions of the evening was that of how the movie Tron has many references to the subject of Operating Systems. Although I personally would have chosen "dealloced" instead of "derezzed". I guess film people gotta make it interesting (and fun to pronounce) to the average J[oe|ane].

Too bad I can't do the same thing with these stupid journal entries.

H0ek - Boomshanka!

What?!? Slashdot allows for journal entries? Damn! And I thought this was a wonderful, passive media.

Perhaps now I can slowly leak bit of overly simplistic information about myself so that everyone can spend hours attempting to figure out if I am that idiot they've been forced to deal with recently.

Or perhaps I'll mislead you all. Bwahahaha! (cough!)

H0ek - he's the one with the zero