Brandon's Blog

1/13/2006 #

No More FreeBSD

So, FreeBSD is a great OS. Really great. Better than I remembered, naturally, when I bumblingly installed it back in high school (installed the X package and didn’t know to put a window manager on … ah, to be young). However, the ports collection doesn’t exactly scream “Brandon, this will make your server configuration project easy.” In fact, it tends to do what it does and then I go and fix it to do what I want.

So, I’m rolling my own binaries from a baseline Slackware install and pristine sources from the likes of Postfix, Dovecot, Cyrus SASL (may it forever burn in Hell or at least until Postfix can perform its functions in-house), and Apache 2.2. Yes, I’m a hippy for using the 2.x series of Apache.

It’s going well, and I think I finally understand SASL and all its inconsistencies (documentation: “use passwd!”, reality: “you can’t use passwd unless you’re suid root! install pwcheck, run it as root during booting, and interface with it as an unprivileged user through a config file!”). I’ve got an award-winning Postfix main.cf file that doesn’t exactly do what I need it to do in the long run, but it at least performs as intended.

I’m planning on ninja’ing a nice (well, not really, but fast) P4 laptop Kristin’s P4 laptop up at school and actually making Slack packages to create a smooth install.

This sysadmin stuff is kind of fun. Good fun thing to keep as a hobby and not a job.

1/13/2006 #

Dizang

Thunderbird 1.5 is beautiful, perfect, flawless (well, I’ll reserve that word until I’m a few weeks into the install). The best thing about it is that it actually can come out of a laptop full hibernate without taking a complete dump. It also checks spelling within the compose window with the little beloved red underlines.

For the two seconds I used Konqueror, I really liked the inline spellchecking within TEXTAREA HTML tags. Then I realized the Synaptic package manager was apparently … oh … so … broken and I up and got my butt out of there.

Why not calculate MD5 hashes during an apt-get? And if something goes wrong, do not recommend I run dpkg. Look: I’ve been configuring mail servers all week, and I’m frightened of dpkg. The manpages kind of send that message, “Go ahead, pansy. Try to pick this up.”

Kind of like procmail. Glad it’s not necessary to even have a .procmailrc file for what I’m working on.

I don’t want to mis-categorize, so the above post will be server-related.

1/11/2006 #

Defying the Impossible

Facebook … and thinking ...

Together?

1/5/2006 #

Tae Bo

Well, I dusted off the old VHS set of Tae Bo tapes this morning and decided to give it “one last try,” which would amount to a third overall try in about three years. Not that I’m looking to get a sexy butt or anything, but I really just miss DDR and failed to bring my PS2 home with me for Christmas (big mistake). It sucked just about as much as last time, and not really because of strenuousness.

My big issue is the whole “left-right” mirror image thing, which is a big pain in the butt, especially since ol’ Billy seems unable to make a call for the next exercise any more than 30 microseconds before inception of the motion. You hear right, see left shortly thereafter, and are then expected to respond with a mirrored right action. Not good, even to an experienced band marcher (in band, there was always a left-turn, left-turn, pause, go kind of thing to let you process the instruction in advance of the move).

On the physical side, it’s really an ingenious system of moves to work several muscle groups, assuming the motions are done properly (which they rarely are in double-time reality). However, it really just reduces to a practiced, confused jumping around setup. I would much prefer DDR for simple gerbil-wheel activity.

DDR Max2 is now selling for $30, which is encouraging, but certainly is not $20 (my reservation price, as economists say).

This keyboard is so resistive. I can’t do my normal pound-to-oblivion 70 WPM on it. It would take a good year of *nix shell frustration to get this to proper spec.

With that bit of nonsense complaining, back to Thank You notes.

1/5/2006 #

Sigma Combat System Specification

TeX is not the way to make a rough draft, and I really want to get that combat system done. So, I think I’m going to drop the whole TeX thing and just create a (gasp) Word document with the nitty gritty of it all.

It’s really just at the point where laziness and reluctance are getting in the way of my finishing a fairly important and interesting aspect of a project. If I can pull myself away from pleasure reading and household duties long enough I should be able to whip out a basic document in “no time flat.”

12/28/2005 #

Blah, Why?

Taken from a bio on the DQ8 website:

Despite her casual dress and her inquisitive expressions, Jessica is actually the daughter of a famous family of rural aristocrats. Hidden away within her are the seeds of powerful magic, so she currently studies magic in the hopes of unlocking that power. Jessica is also trying to hunt down Dhoulmagus, and this is why she eventually joins up with you and Yangus. What happened between her and Dhoulmagus to make her want to leave such a comfortable life behind?

Of course, we all know what “casual dress” euphemizes in video games, but, more importantly, how many times are we going to see this archetype rehashed in video games?

Hero with unknown origins to save world.
Buxom rich chick with romantic interest can cast spells.
And on, and on.

Gotta go, pick up on this later.

12/26/2005 #

Ninja'd

Well, everyone’s heading to bed to prepare for an early morning, and I was getting ready to do some combat system finalization (yes, I said it!) only to discover my dad ninja’d the last Guinness Extra Stout from the fridge. I’m having trouble being motivated now.

However, things are coming along well. I’m finally getting happy, and there aren’t a whole lot of “if” statements involved in the system. This makes me very happy. As it is, it’s 90% mentally complete and 0% LaTeX complete. I’m going to get a fresh start (no figures, probably) on that soon. I want it all good, though, because otherwise I’ll abandon it before I finish writing it down. It’s on steno pad now in scrawled Greek letters.

I will really want comments on this. It’s pretty innovative, if you ask me. Shouldn’t be too hard to implement, either.

Well, I’m going to scratch a bit more down now. Gosh, this early BNL stuff was crazy.

12/26/2005 #

Fair Trade

Well, no combat system work, but I do finally understand Ctrl+Alt+Del’s plot. That took a lot of reading.

12/25/2005 #

Hasta Luego, STL

Yeah, std::list is pretty cool until you start to use it. Iterators are a great idea, especially their emulation of pointers. However, I stood on the precipice of OOP Hell, and I turned tail:

svn revert

I think I did a pretty good job with my linked list implementation, so we’re going to leave it like that. What iterators would require (outside of the class scope) is a GetFirst() and GetLast() function per list per class. That is a mess, and the whole point was to reuse code, not create Java-esque wrappers around everything.

So, I’m off to look at my last “hit list” post to figure out what to do next. Dang, these new makefiles run so smooth.