I just ordered myself an EeePC 4G 701 (not Surf) which should arrive tomorrow. I will be installing Gentoo with the filesystem extended over the internal SSD and an external SD card with lvm2 for 6GBs of encrypted goodness. Stay tuned.
Things that have piqued my interest as of late:
“Gentoo done right”.
Exherbo is an upcoming distritrbution based on
some of the ideas of Gentoo to create a more focused distribution
honed to the needs of the small development team.
According to the site these are the main
problems with Gentoo as it stands.
Portage. The code can’t deliver the changes we need in the timeframe
we need. Portage haven’t delivered many features needed by Gentoo;
for what we’re trying, it’s completely out of the question.
Management — We see the need for management which will make
necessary decisions within an acceptable timeframe and provide and
ensure that there is direction.
QA. We would rather have a small number of developers working
carefully on a few things, and fixing each other’s mistakes, than
working prolifically on a great many things without such attention
to detail.
The users. Many other distributions attach a lot of importance to
the community, to the detriment of the distribution’s technical
needs. We’d prefer to focus on meeting both our own needs as
developers, and the needs of the real users — a solid community
follows on from a solid product.
The developers. A developer base polarised between those who make
thousands of changes every month and those who make perhaps a dozen
each year does not make it easy to push forwards the sort of
improvements we want.
Lack of overall design and direction. This problem is widely
recognised by Gentoo but at the same time enforced by policies
allowing everybody to start their own subprojects without disussing
it first. The idea is that volunteer work shouldn’t be prevented but
rather encouraged. We’d rather focus on a few clear goals and
provide solid solutions in those areas rather than trying to do
everything at once.
Despite practically begging people not to use it I will definitely be
setting it up in UML soon
and start experimenting.
I’ve been looking for something to replace my broken (beyond
reasonably priced repair) VAIO ultra-(super-dee-dooper-)mobile PC. I
did have my eye on an EeePC, and it is still a viable option. But I
really can’t choose which model. I did have my heart set on a 701, but
then the 900 trundled along with it’s big screen and bigger storage,
even if it is £100 more.
Then I started looking at the Eee “alternatives”, things like the HP
MiniNote which
is certainly a lot sexier than the Eee and not much more than the 900
(even if it is a little close to the $400 mark).
Then I got looking at PDAs, and I just bid on a Zaurus SL-5000D on
eBay, which may lead to me either helping develop
Ångström to work, or just
using OpenZaurus. It is exceedingly cheap (≤£35 inc. p&p if I win),
which means I will probably end up pining for a proper laptop with my
left over money.
Suggestions are more than welcome. I’m not looking for some desktop
replacement thing, just something I can easily carry around in an
already full backpack.
I am learning to drive, at last, and I need to get myself a motor. I
think I have set my heart on an MG Midget (pre 1500 (chrome bumpers
ftw)). I have about a grand to spend, and I might be able to
convince my parents to go halves on one. Wish me luck.
I wouldn’t really call this a “recent” interest, I have been dabbling
in Haskell ever since I discovered XMonad. I
have myself a book (The Haskell Road to Mathematics, Logic, and
Programming) which is excellent. I have been steaming through
Euler with it at my fingertips. It is
certainly my favourite language to date.
I have also began to become more confident in Lisp, but more on that
another time.
I have been having some trouble with the latest Firefox 3 beta, in that some PNG images weren’t displaying properly. Sometimes they didn’t display at all, or went completely mad. This has been confirmed with various X.org configurations and drivers. To fix it, you need to add this to your xorg.conf:
Section "Device"
# ... Your existing configuration
Option "XAANoOffscreenPixmaps"
End Section
Then restart X.org and it should all be working fine.
I’ve been looking for a markup language to make presentations for a while now. I don’t want to just make a series of HTML pages and print them off, I want a proper piece of presentation software which will layout my pages for me, paginate them (postscript, or PDF) and let me export as a more friendly format like an SVG for each page and possibly HTML if needs be.
After my fruitless search I decided it would just be best to write it myself. It will be based on the XML specification, loosely following:
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Nam suscipit tincidunt dolor. Vestibulum ante ipsum primis in faucibus orci luctus et ultrices posuere cubilia Curae; Vestibulum ante ipsum primis in.
I am hoping to also implement global stylesheets at some point in the future to avoid having to specify style preferences for every identical page.
I’ve nicknamed it rpoint for the time being, as it is being written in Ruby. It will use XML as a base, and at the moment is using a self‐modified version of ruby‐svg. You can check on development at darcs.fophillips.org/rpoint, there’s not a lot happening at the moment due to exams the like. I have a basic text wrapping function, although I would prefer it if it wrapped by letter count rather than words. I will hopefully get time this week to perfect it.
I also want to add LaTeX support using mts in the near future too for displaying equations.
If you get hold of the repo just run ruby square.rb to output some Lorem Ipsum in a square, do ruby square.rb > square.svg to save an output file. If you would like to help with the development get the darcs repo and hack away at your tree, then drop me an email at my nick which is also in the domain name of this blog, then an “at” symbol, followed by the actual domain of this blog so I can pull your tree.
I’ve started a weekly programming challenge over at teenlug.com. I am
hoping this will spark some interest the community as it has been
waning as of late. This first installment is one the challenges I got
when taking part in the BIO last year. Any teenage reader should head
on over to teenlug.com and take part.
A little thing I am hoping to integrate into this blog. It uses MediaWiki’s texvc to generate a PNG from an equation in LaTeX.
function mts {
tex=$(texvc /tmp $1 $2 iso-9559-1 | tr -d "\0" |
sed -r 's ^.(.{32}).* \1 ')
if [ "$3" = 'hash' ]; then
nm=$(print $1 | md5sum | awk '{print $1}')
else
nm=${2// /_}
fi
mv "${1}/${tex}.png.png" "${1}/${nm}.png"
}
Now I have permanently switced to Mutt as my MTA (Mail Transfer
Agent), embedded HTML in emails has started to become a hindrance. So
I devised a simple procmail recipe to pipe all my HTML messages to text-only links2 so all the useless
formatting and images are removed, yet the messages are still readable
(if not more so).
:0:
* ^Content-Type.*text/html
{
file = "/tmp/msg.dump"
:0 fbw
| cat > $file && links -dump $file
}
Just run this inside the directory where you have filenames that
resemble: 01-5 Wish You Were Here.ogg. It renames them to: Wish You
Were Here.ogg
`ls | sed -e 's/[0-9][0-9]\s*[\-]*\s*[0-9]*\s//' -e 's/\ /\\\ /g'
-e "s/'/\\\\'/" -e "s/.*/mv \*& &/" | sh`
