sajith: (Default)
How foul does "JFS Translator for the GNU Hurd" sound? :)

Lately Manuel Menal, hurdextras maintainer, had been putting a lot of effort to gather disparate Hurd projects scattered all over the web together. My ol' academic project is one of those that got checked into the repository last week, in addition to mboxfs, memfs, notice, pith, run, xmlfs, etc. Manuel has also made the patches to make them work with the current Hurd on GNUMach.

I am away from the Hurd as well ever since releasing this stuff during the Christmas of 2002, and I do not have a way to check the state of affairs right now. But I am verrrry happy to see that it has just not gone into the usual bit rot.

Here's to those sleepless nights spent gluing JFS and Hurd code together. And here's a kick to the arse of the idiot that said I can blog from anywhere on the world now that I have a notebook computer. As if blogging is life's major purpose. Bleh!
sajith: (Default)
So I got a ThinkPad yesterday. Nothing fancy, it is the entry-level, cheapest thing in the lineup, one that comes without an operating system. (At the shop I salivated a lot over the X41 Tablet, but that is, of course, waaay beyond what I can afford. Sigh.)

I wanted to bless the baby with some Debian GNU/Linux holy water. The only installation source I had was a Sarge DVD that came with PCQuest Magazine in December 2004. I am away from Debian for the past few years after my old desktop machine conked out and so was expecting to spend a whole night getting stuff to work. (That, after keeping myself awake through Monday night. And all Saturday night at Fireflies, with silent snoring intervals.)

To my surprise, everything has worked without hassle, so far. It booted, X worked, sound worked, and all that without much of an effort. No idea about wireless since I don't have a network. There is a usable yet somewhat oldish-looking desktop. That's okay, I am not a fan of the latest and greatest and I don't give much of a hoot about the desktop as long as things get done - as in, say, as long as Emacs works fine.

But I still haven't got over the shock of not having edited a single configuration file yet.

Big news, the world has changed a lot since 2002.
sajith: (Default)
Speedbar is Love.

Suddenly noticed that speedbar displays the current stack when you are within the GUD mode inside Emacs. And you can walk up and down the stack from speedbar, with the source and debugger buffers in the other frame. Wooohoooo!

Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping may be older than I am, but it never fails to spring up a surprise. Everyday.

Folklore.

Nov. 11th, 2005 09:20 pm
sajith: (Default)
NerdTV interviews Andy Hertzfeld:
"Bill (Atkinson) - who was the author of MacPaint - wasn't there. Don Knuth repeated his request to me and I thought, "Boy, that's Don Knuth asking me for a favor, I'd better do as much as I can to fulfill this. So as soon as I got home I called Bill and said, "You've got to have a copy of the MacPaint source lying around somewhere." Nope. He had it on an old Profile hard drive that went up in smoke 10 years ago. I said, "Come on, Bill, it has got to be on a floppy somewhere."
So they recreate MacPaint out of rotten bits.

PS. Okay, first read about it (and experienced this hair rising feeling - that is called fanboyism.) at Aaditya's.

PPS. I think pretty soon I will die of inferiority complex and this feeling of total inadequacy. Three bloody working years and I look at myself everyday to feel disgusted all over again. Talking to certain university students doesn't help at all. OTOH, it leaves you with a completely crushed ego.

PPPS. But do you know what Bill Atkinson is doing these days? ;-)

Speaking of which, do you know where to buy a Hasselblad, and more importantly, how to make all that much cash to buy one?

Kidding, of course.

RFC 2324

Sep. 7th, 2005 08:16 pm
sajith: (Default)
RFC 2324 - Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol (HTCPCP/1.0):
There is coffee all over the world. Increasingly, in a world in which computing is ubiquitous, the computists want to make coffee. Coffee brewing is an art, but the distributed intelligence of the web-connected world transcends art. Thus, there is a strong, dark, rich requirement for a protocol designed espressoly for the brewing of coffee. Coffee is brewed using coffee pots. Networked coffee pots require a control protocol if they are to be controlled.
I thought this RFC was bloody brilliant. Then it turned out that there is a whole lot out there.

***

Most of the city was on holiday due to Ganesh Chaturthi. My place wasn't, since we opted for holidays closer to weekends. Anyway, the streets were un-effing-believably peaceful today morning. Even the hell that is the flyover construction site at Airport Road.

I wished things were this way, every day.

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