What's it all about, Alfie?

Well... this morning has been very interesting. I saw again that I had several copies of the quip solver going, and I was amazed to see that I had about 15 copies going full-steam. Several of them looked as though they had been run from the command-line. This seemed hard to believe because they all were run by nobody and yet they were run with options that my PHP code would never have generated. Very odd...

So I got to thinking - could it be that someone came in as nobody and started running it from the command line. Or someone could have built a new PHP script, placed it in my system and run it. So I checked last to see who's logged in - clear... then I searched for all possible PHP files - none that shouldn't be there. Very odd...

Then I noticed that the CPU usage didn't add up. In Solaris 7 there's an applet that shows CPU utilization and disk usage and it showed at least 20% usage when a ps -ef | sort -r -k 4 didn't show anything nearly that high. So I got to wondering if there might be a connection - in any case, things were looking very, very odd on sparky. So I did a reboot.

It took a long time to shutdown - there was clearly a serious problem with the machine. I then got him back up and saw that GAIM posted a new version that supposedly fixed a bug in the code that caused problems with X servers. This could certainly be part of the issue. So I got the latest GAIM and built it. The CPU utilization seems more under control and I can't imagine why the other quip-related stuff is happening. Maybe I'll put in a trap in the code to long who, what, when and then have a look at that. I can't imagine who might be doing this, but I was really surprised that I had all these quip solvers running when I know that they naturally timeout after 15 sec. Something must have been doing something kinda odd.

I also think I got crawled this morning. I looked at my web access log and there was someone trying to access robots.txt which is a dead give-away. Interesting... I've been hit by a search engine. It'll be fun to look in a day or two to see if it's been updated to Google or some other search engine.

Well... I found a little problem in the 0.11.0pre13 version of GAIM and posted a question regarding it to the SourceForge board. Eric responded quickly saying that it was indeed his fault. No biggie - it's just good to know that it isn't me.

Also, I've added a logging feature to the quip solver to hopefully fill in a few gaps in who's doing what when with these quip runs. Now I don't mind that someone wants to run the solver, that's why I put it up there, but I do want to make sure that someone is not trying to hack into my system and do serious ill.

There are a lot of people looking for a VC++ IDE for platforms other than Microsoft. I've gotten another one today for GTK/GNOME, and while it looks OK, I don't quite understand the operation well enough, and there's not a lot that it can do for me that I can't do in the tools I already have. Let's face it... gvim, make, and ddd are about all you need to edit, build and debug applications. Sure, when you have a GUI, it's nice to have a GUI designer, but that's what Glade is all about, and I've got that too. I guess I've to the point that fancy tools don't make a lot of difference to me - I've learned how to cope without them. And for that, I'm thankful. While I like a well done IDE, a bad one is a pain to slug through and doesn't help the development process one bit.

While I'll use a good IDE when I'm offered one, I find that Unix with gvim, make and ddd/gdb are all I need to do even the most serious development. Anything more is nice, if it works, but this IDE today was clearly not in the working camp. I'll keep it for now, and maybe play with it more. Who knows, maybe it's time for me to get involved with this Open Source project and fix some of the problems...

Last night I was down in my office and saw that someone was having at the quip solver. I also realized that there was a problem when the quip solver would take too long to return it's answers. So this morning I decided to fix it. What I did was allow for an optional time limit argument to the program and then check with the solver routine after each word. It's not precise, but it is very reasonable. I then put the default of 15 sec. into the PHP3 code and tested it.

Great! It works fine on the example because it takes only a second or so to run that quip, and on simpler quips the code runs and returns a ton of responses. In either case it doesn't hang the browser, and the user will always get a response. There's also the point that I won't have a run-away process anymore - which is good news for me.

It was fun... that's enough.

Interesting thing happened this morning - GAIM/Oscar started working again. I saw that the TOC connection had been paused by AOL and at that time I decided to try the Oscar connection again. It worked. What can you say? When it works, I'll use it, when it doesn't, I'll use TOC. Goofy stuff... AOL. Really goofy.

I was looking at a finite element modeling package today and realized that I didn't like the fact that sparky didn't properly view PNG files. So I spent most of the rest of the day digging into Plugger and it's associated configuration and helper apps. Plugger is really just a configurable plug-in stub. I still need the programs to view the PNG files, but Plugger allows me to put what that program is in it's configuration file and handle all the communication with Netscape for me. Nice, but not terribly wow because almost all apps can be put in directly on the Netscape Helpers page, but this is nice in that it handles it for me.

Anyway, I got xli because I had not xloadimage and I got several viewers, a few movie viewers, and even a MIDI player. All very nice, all work fine with Plugger and now I have not only working PNG viewing, but also Quicktime movies and MIDI files. Very nice.

Well... it seems as though AOL is doing some kind of blocking once again. So I got the latest GAIM 0.11.0pre12 and built it. No dice. The word from the GAIM folks is that only the CVS repository is going to be working. I guess as long as AOL can keep changing things the GAIM folks want to keep the changes in CVS and not generate a ton of releases. Too bad... it'd be nice if they could simply encapsulate the required code into a network resource. Come to think of it... they do. There's a PHP-based server that's dishing out the MD5 checksums but still they need to have code changes. Oh well... I'll stick with the releases because I'm a little conservative.

It's interesting to think of it... AOL is giving away their code. If I were using their code, I'd be OK and ready to go. But that I'm using someone else's means they want to shut me out. Very interesting... AOL will have to give in eventually. There's too much for them to loose.

Interesting thing happened this evening. I was down here catching up on some reading and I noticed that I had two cryptoquip solvers running full-tilt on the processors with very simplistic quips. I think it's clear that someone is running a quip but they aren't aware of the search space issues and so they're getting lots of possibilities. Interesting that someone is running this, too bad that they're not running it well so as to get a good feeling about the results.

I've added something to the page to say "try hard examples" to keep people from putting in bad data and getting too much results. We'll see how it goes.

This morning I found out something that I hadn't expected to see... that I was probably running both Sawfish and Enlightenment as window managers. I know think that my problems a few days ago with the theme selection were related to this. What I first noticed is that GNOME 1.4 wants to use Sawfish, and that I had Enlightenment as the default in GNOME. So I switched to Sawfish as the default and hopefully things will go much better now. There isn't a significant difference in the window managers - from what I see, but the integration with GNOME certainly tips the scale from my old favorite Enlightenment to Sawfish.

I also was reading a lot in the newsgroups and thought I might be able to catch some reasonably intelligent conversation about SGI and their future. But alas, when I went to a few intelligent-sounding rooms I was greated by the same banter that I've heard time and again in chat rooms. It's too bad, too. Because while I have time to do this, and interesting things to talk about, I can't find an interesting person to talk to. Oh well...

While I was messing around with xchat today I thought I might as well get the latest stable release - 1.6.4 as they are working on 1.7.0 (unstable) now. No biggie, but I think I'll try once more to get them to incorporate my perl fix so that I don't have to hassle with putting it in by hand each time I get the code.

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.