What's it all about, Alfie?

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.

Today I went back to a little playing with Magic - the layout tool. I've had it built on sparky for a long time, and I've used it a lot in my days at Auburn, but I haven't done a lot with it lately. So I decided to brush up on my chops and layout a few gates. Specifically, an inverter, a two-input NAND, another 'folded' two-input NAND, and a four-input NAND. Nothing really earth-shaking about this, but it's nice to keep the eyes sharp and the skills fresh. While I can't imagine laying out a complete chip, it's interesting to think that if I had the dough to go to a foundry, I could lay out a chip and have it fabbed. It'd be kind of interesting... Oh well... just a little diversion.

I also got a few calls from headhunters and it's looking good for Bear Stearns and Bank of America. Hopefully we'll know in a few days. It'd be nice to have a job again, it's too boring to be doing nothing for so long.

No word from Joel on CIA today... wonder how that's going...

This morning I looked to see the status of AOL's blockage of the Oscar protocol from GAIM. As it turns out, there aren't a lot of issues left, but as AOL finds a bug in libfaim that doesn't break their client, they exploit it. As one would expect, they are working hard to find as many bugs as possible in libfaim. However, the authors know that and they are busy taking care of them. It's an interesting problem. At some point AOL is going to have to just let go and forget about it. It's a loosing battle fighting reverse engineers... they have your product, can see what it's doing, and have the benefit of being able to architecture the best system to mimic that behavior.

Anyway... I downloaded the latest GAIM and will build and install it to see if the Oscar protocol works. If not, I'll use TOC until a release does work and then stick with that.

Big interview today... gotta stay frosty...

Now that I've moved out two machines from the office, I needed to spend a little bit of time getting the global services that they served back on-line. Thankfully, it only took an hour or two to get the DNS changes propogated around the world, and I was easily able to redirect The Man from S.P.U.D. home page to barney. Nice that Irix handles DHCP as easily as it does. Well... so does Solaris and Linux, so I guess that's not too terribly surprising.

In any case, I had to move some services around and that didn't take too long. I was slightly disappointed that Apache on barney and sparky didn't default to using the extended API, which would have allowed me to easily compile mod_ssl, but that's not too terribly bad either. When I get another fast Linux machine in to replace tux I'll have it do the SSL stuff, and serve the main Man from S.P.U.D. page. In any case, it would have been nice, but it's not a serious problem.

I've emailed the ISP for Leslie again as she's getting ready to go live with the eCommerce site I created for her. We'll see if he comes around or if we have to move the site to another hosting company. On that note, I got the site into CVS before the move of services just to be safe. It's nice to have it under CVS as I feel much more secure and on good solid footings for this.

Tomorrow is an important interview with Bear Stearns in Chicago - hope it goes well...

Today is an historic day for me. I've decommissioned tux to be removed from my office. He's been an incredible asset to me and I will certainly miss him. However, there are other folks that need him more, and he's off to be re-tasked for some greater purpose. I'm sure that whereever he goes, a little bit of me will be with him. I will certainly miss him.

This does give me a chance to significantly reduce the noise in my office and I will take this opportunity to do so. When I replace tux it'll probably be for another high-end Linux box and hopefully that will be soon. Until then, I'm one machine down.

At the same time, I had to ship off peabody... I've got another NT machine, and I don't use it much these days anyway. Mark off another from the office.

This morning we had a problem with the weather scraping off the Weather Channel site. It seems they have done something that makes the wget 1.5.x fail on the grab. Interestingly, the getPage program I wrote based on the GNOME libghhtp library works fine. Wow... I'm impressed. Well... the latest wget 1.6 works fine and so for sparky I've simply removed the old wget I got from Sun Freeware and grabbed the source for wget 1.6 from the GNU archives. I built it and it works fine. On tux I've simply gone back to using my version and it works fine.

Interesting... very interesting.

On a somewhat related note I've been working for a while on a new feature for CIA. When I 'paint' a region I use a recursive function that does the job. Well... in some cases the recursion migh go very, very deep. On the CellAnalysis web site machines it causes a core dump. So, what I wanted to do was to un-'dig' the routine and make it an iterative one. Very similar to a loop for factorial as opposed to recursion. Well... it didn't quite work out that way, but almost as nice. The trick was to implement a looping algorithm that utilized a stack to save the points I was visiting, and in doing that we achieved what was desired - minimal system stack usage.

Interestingly enough, the routine is faster in that there aren't the overhead calls, and it uses less memory since only the relavent values are on the stack, so it's a pretty good win all around. Sure, the complexity goes up a little, but that's a reasonable trade-off for not having to worry about stack implosion.