What's it all about, Alfie?

An interesting thing happened yesterday that I, unfortunately, did not catch in time to correct. It turned out that the Weather Channel's web site wasn't updated at 7 AM and the previous day's data was still there. So... my INSERT failed. That's really pretty good news. The problem was that had I retried it a few minutes later, it probably would have worked. So what I did was put in the same kind of retrying I had in the beginning of the code when no HTML could be found, and this should work much better. It's interesting how this code is evolving - partly because of the moving target of web page scraping but also as error conditions arise how they are handled. It's interesting.

I also took the time to update sparky with the latest patches from Sun. Now that I have the script working pretty well, it's really pretty easy to do this and just watch for errors. The most common problem is that Sun doesn't allow free downloading of some of their patches - you have to be on their maintenance program. There is an occaisional patch that doesn't fit the hardware profile, but I haven't spent a lot of time trying to figure out how many of these are really applicable. I suppose I could, but that's not a high priority to me right now.

I put in a few new things into CIA this morning for Joel. I'm not sure if this is total folly or good, hard work. I guess if Joel pulls this off, then it'll be good hard work, if he doesn't then it's all been folly. Hard to say right now, but I'm not betting anything on it.

Anyway, the changes are pretty simple - count the number of pixels in the image that beat the filter and a few localization #define constructs so I don't have to do anything once I move the code to the ISP that's hosting it. Nothing major, but it's nice to not have to hassle with the relocation and Joel is convinced that this is the thing that's going to make it all happen. More power to him...

While reading up on my newsgroups this morning an interesting thread came across my path in one of the SGI newsgroups. It was talking about the GTK+ themes and how the default GTK look-and-feel is so much different than the Irix default window manager. Well... as it turns out, someone at SGI decided to take it upon themselves to make a GTK theme that made the GTK apps - gEdit, gimp, etc. look like they fit in the Irix window manager. The theme engine is called Buffy and has several pre-built themes corresponding to the different color schemes in Irix's 4Dwm. Interesting...

Now I'm no look-and-feel bigot. I like a lot of different UIs - in fact, there probably isn't one that I dislike, but I have to agree that the GTK apps just seem to stick out - and that's not optimal. So I decided to give this a try. Very interesting and very easy to get to work. Simply build it and then put the appropriate theme gtkrc in your home directory as .gtkrc and it's ready to roll.

No functionality change here, just a little more consistent look for the apps that use GTK. Nice.

I put in a new filter into CIA for Joel yesterday... basically, his idea is to have a user pick a representative pixel and then based on some quantization of that pixel (Hue, Red, etc.) create a filter based on that quantization centered around the value for that pixel. Nothing that earth-shaking, but it's certainly a nice addition to CIA. I put it in, and sent the code up to the web site where, it appears, Joel runs his data through. Interesting.

With the problems CIA is having, I'm really wondering if I need to hide it on the CVSweb display. I mean really... who's looking at this stuff? I've suggested it to more than a dozen people, but it doesn't seem to matter. I'd show the web site I built for Leslie, but that contains sensative information that I think we shouldn't have running loose in the world. But CIA is a good example of C and I might just open it up...

I decided that today might be an interesting day to start digging into PGP and making it available for folks to send email to me encrypted. So I did a Google search and then hit on the MIT PGP page and got the code seemingly working fine from within Outlook 98. Not too bad. The only problem is the issues of how to get/accumulate public keys from other folks, and how to distribute my public key.

Interestingly, the easiest thing they could have said is to run PGPkeys... that did everything I need. I generated a key pair of the right length, with my own passphrase, and then sent it to the PGP public key server. Very clean, very nice - but also very non-obvious. Had they put one little phrase on the web site, or in the downloaded docs, it would have saved me quite a bit of time.

Anyway... now I have the PGP stuff ready to roll and it's clear how to get public keys for other folks from the servers. Nice. Don't quite know that I'll need to use it, but it's nice to have learned a little bit more about this today.

Well... I finally got all the information I needed from WebPipe (and Leslie) to get their web site up and running on the production host. What a wonderful group of folks! They have top-notch servers, darn good response time and the price is just too good to be true. With the database information I built the database and set the constants on the server-side PHP scripts to the proper values and Voila! it worked like a charm.

Well... I did notice a few style problems that were easy enough to fix, and I finally did a proper job of making sure all the references to North Hollow Farm were in the singular, but that's something I should have done a long time ago. Better now than wait for this to go live and have to worry about fixing them while it's live.

More good news is that the site seems to work fine with the counter from SoVer.net - which was a concern for me. I'm sure that WebPipe would have something to handle the page hits, but it's nice that we don't have to hassle with that for the time being. Lucky break we cought on that one.

I also mailed off to someone who sells SGI hardware a question I have about the maximum RAM I can fit into my Indigo². I have read conflicting reports, and I wanted to get the straight story from a good supplier. SGI says the max is 384MB, while I've read it can go to 640MB. If this is the case, then I can certainly see getting a memory upgrade from 256MB to 640MB to make things a lot faster. Right now, Netscape and CVS are a lot slower than I want, and I'm looking for something to give them a boost.

Then again... it's not going to be anything like the Blackbird x4 I get in a few weeks...

I started the process of moving naturalmeat.com from Cydian to WebPipe by going to Network Solutions (their registrar) and starting the move. I changed the technical contact to Leslie and then told her what to do with the email Network Solutions would be sending her. So it's on the way!

Leslie has checked on the web site, and likes it, so it looks like we're ready to go. Once the domain is changed, I'll go in to the constants and put naturalmeat.com in place of the WebPipe tag, but that's only cosmetic. The WebPipe site is up and ready to go, and I've done 98% of the work myself. No need to worry about this anymore... I can certainly handle it.

I was thinking that since I had most of GNOME built, I'd get gnumeric going as well... well... that turned out to be a significant addition. Here's what I had to do to get it going:

• gperf - from the GNU mirrors, it's a nice hash function (so they say).
• gb - GNOME Basic which is of marginal use in that gnumeric doesn't work with all versions, and so this can really be left out without any real loss.
• libglade - this was an upgrade as I needed the latest version.
• glade - ditto - upgrading one means getting the latest of the other.
• libole2 - linking and embedding library.
• libxslt - maybe not necessary, but since I was there getting stuff, I got it.
• libgtop - profiling library for GNOME.
• gtop - app to profile a system.
• Error 0.13 - this is a perl module needed for ORBit's CORBA::ORBit interface.
• CORBA-ORBit - this is a perl interface for ORBit.
• GNOME-GNORBA - this is a higher level interface for GNOME and ORBit.
• gnome-python - this is the python interfaces to GNOME.
• gnome-objc - these are the Obj-C interfaces to GNOME.
• gnome-utils - these are general utils from the GNOME collection.
• libgda - the GNOME Database Adaptor for generic database access.
• gnome-db - the Access-like tool for GNOME databases.
• gnumeric - the spreadsheet.

Maybe if I have time I'll look into writing CORBA plugins for gnumeric just to see how it goes together.

Today I went downtown for an interview with Bank of America. It took several hours, and here's hoping that I hear from them tomorrow with good news. I could really use some good news.

I got word from Leslie on the WebPipe.net hosting and moved the files up in preparation for the hosting. Looking very good... They left out the information about the PostgreSQL database - how to connect to it, accounts, etc. so I had Leslie ask them. Once I get that I'll be able to go in and set up the database and get the site rockin'. Then it's a simple matter of telling Network Solutions to use a different DNS for naturalmeat.com and it'll be live. Very nice to be so close to getting it working.

I thought it might be nice to get gEdit running on sparky and since I had built ORBit and gonme-libs for another tool, I thought it would be relatively easy to get it built. Boy, was I wrong. But in the end, it was a good thing to do.

The building took a few days and most of this was seeing what had to be accomplished and then doing it. Lots to do and no place that wrote down the build order. Too bad.

• bzip2 - while you can get this from SunFreeware, it doesn't include the libraries and the headers that are needed. Build it as both static linked and dynamic for greatest flexibility.
• guile - easy to build not much to say about it.
• popt - useful library as I've come to see, and it's pretty easy to build.
• indent - useful pretty-print routines for ORBit and many other tools - used as an additional service.
• ORBit - essential CORBA GNOME services.
• Oaf - services built upon ORBit and popt.
• GConf - important libraries for GNOME.
• gnome-libs - useful stuff and pretty low-level. Not many dependencies here.
• gnome-print - printing utilities for GNOME, very low-level.
• gnome-common - common docs and a few scripts, not nearly as much as one might think.
• libxml - important XML libraries.
• libxml2 - second generation of the above library.
• bonobo - component model built on ORBit.
• libunicode - low-level unicode support for GNOME.
• gal - the GNOME Application Library - quite useful and essential for GNOME tools.
• gtkhtml - a GTK HTML widget that seems pretty nice, but as a sister tool in gnome-core.
• scrollkeeper - a documentation tool.
• gnome-vfs - virtual filesystem support for GNOME.
• control-center - essential libraries and goodies for GNOME including the CApplet library.
• gnome-core - the essential applications and applets for the GNOME desktop.

After all these are built and installed correctly, the system is ready to roll... you can get the gEdit source and it builds cleanly and works like a charm. I did most of this on Friday and the in the evenings over the weekend. I'm glad it's done as it bring sparky to almost a complete GNOME system along with my other recent Unix machines which is nice. gEdit is fast and doesn't show a significant load on the machine, so it's nice to have gone through the trouble to figure out the dependencies and built everything for this box.

This morning in the shower I got an interesting little idea that I wish I could have done. I was going to get the First Chicago stock prices for as long as I was there - and then get the BankOne prices after the merger. Then I was going to highlight the ups and downs with events in my career and notice the correlations. As I recall, when bad things happened to me the stock took a tumble :). OK... maybe not every time, but often enough, and sometimes quite dramatically.

Anyway, this was thwarted by the lack of historical records on First Chicago stock prices on the web. Dissappointing. I saw it all in my head... nice little comic prose with an honest historical account of the stock price... Ahh well... too bad. But it still leaves a smile on my face.

Yesterday I finally got an email from the web hoster that's running the existing North Hollow Farm site. He said they could not comply with my request for PHP and PostgreSQL, so we need to look for another hosting company that will. Thankfully, I had looked into this before and the one that I checked into was WebPipe which uses Linux and now Windows boxes to host sites. They include in their $12.95/mo package SSL support, database, PHP, CGI, and more. This represents a really good value. All we really need is Apache/PHP/PostgreSQL so we should be able to get this for the $12.95/mo price. There's a wrinkle in the database, though - they want to offer MySQL by default and PostgreSQL for an extra fee. I'm checking with them to see if they can swap out the database server without additional cost. We'll have to see...

Other than that, and laying out a few logic gates - 2-input NOR, SR flip-flop, and reading a book, I haven't accomplished a lot. Oh sure, a few calls from headhunters about positions, but not a lot. I think today I'll spend some time really trying to dig up something to do. Anyway... I think I'll try...

Today I took the time to check for updates for sparky and mao. The former is with the script I created to check with Sun to see what patches are new, updated, etc. and the latter is with Ximian's Red Carpet. The Red Carpet upgrade went very smoothly and mostly the things effected were the Nautilus file manager, but it's nice to check everything just to make sure. The Solaris updates were a lot more in number and I needed to add a few checks to the code to allow for some new Sun hardware platforms that I hadn't planned on when writing the initial code.

In the end, everything went well and the result is that both machines are up-to-date and that's important.