Monday, November 27, 2000

Ok, so I am a terrible geek, both computer and Star Trek.

I use those free AOL CDroms that I keep getting as coasters. And when they aren't keeping hot stuff from my computer desk, I fiddle with them, spinning them, flipping them, etc., etc.

Well, I also have a TRGpro with a HotSync cradle.

Suddenly an idea occurred to me. I put the CD into the cradle and thought, "Sure, luv. What's library?"

For those with a low Star Trek quotient.

Tuesday, November 21, 2000

Believe this if you dare: This morning I washed last night's dinner dishes, made 2 dozen cookies (Mmmm, snickerdoodles .) and washed those dishes as well!

Is this just a brief burst of industry, or have I perhaps awakened from my deep slumber of personality?

Don't answer that.

Monday, November 20, 2000

Ah, life's little vicissitudes.

If you have been following these notes you may have noticed several mentions of work stress. Well, the bell tolled somewhere around October 6, 2000. About a week and a half later I was given the final word that no help would be available before February, 2001. Since I started doing two people's jobs back in January, 2000 and had been asking stridently for help since April, 2000 and had been given the "3 more months" routine twice, I decided that it was time to cut my losses.

Since I've had no time for socializing and since I'm an unattached single male with simple tastes, I happened to have a good sized chunk of moola hanging about, so this was an excellent time to take a break. I'm feeling no pressure to look for work any time soon, which is an amazing luxury.

It was also desperately needed. I mean just look at the date. My last day of work was Halloween and it's taken me 20 days to even think about making a note of it on my web page. Tomorrow marks the end of my third week without work and I am just now becoming a conscious human being again.

And I'm living more like a human now too. It is true that I haven't washed tonight's dinner dishes yet. But last night's got done and that's somewhere between 7 and 14 days better than I had been doing. In point of fact, the week before I submitted my resignation I came home Friday night and I could smell my dishes from across the kitchen. When did I wash them? Two days later. And only then because I needed something to cook with that night.

I have to admit that that "unattached single male" thing means that I am frequently willing to leave the dirty dishes overnight. But I like to be reasonably clean. Clean clothes, clean dishes, even the occasional vacuuming of the floors and believe it or not stirring up the dust with a California Duster-- these all happen normally around my house because I do appreciate the resulting environment. While I was using all of my personal will power to cope with my work environment, I let my personal life degenerate to the point where pigs wouldn't want to live with me.

Today, I made my bed before noon, for the second time this week. In all of October I made my bed once-- on laundry day.

Friday, August 4, 2000

What is it with people giving directions these days? Last summer, in early September, I was being treated to lunch at the Boulder Dushanbe Teahouse, but because of my work schedule, I was going to have to make my own way there.

I hadn't been there before, so I asked the person treating me for directions. He told me that it was across from the field where they hold the Flea Market in the Spring.

So, after finding the Teahouse, I would know where the Flea Market would be held next Spring.

Today, we were going to be holding a farewell luncheon at the Oasis. Again, I asked for directions.

I was told that it was across the street from where the Library used to be. And it was two blocks down from something else that doesn't exist anymore.

So I looked it up on the map. For the record, take Broadway north to Canyon. Turn left on Canyon. The Oasis is two blocks down on your right. Parking is just behind the building.

After the luncheon I wasn't in any hurry to get back to work, so I took an alternate path back to work, just to see if it was any nicer than trying to bicycle on Broadway in Boulder. I took a wrong turn off the creek path and ended up, TA-DA! at the Boulder Dushanbe Teahouse.

Friday, June 16, 2000

I haven't the faintest idea what I'm going to type. If that's not exciting, I don't know what is.

Life has been a long list of troubles and a short list of minor pleasures that I've had to savor with much conscious effort, because there haven't been any major pleasures to savor.

I guess the biggest of the minors is that I've decided I like my PDA. I spent much time stripping PalmGear HQ of everything I thought was potentially useful. Out of 4300 listings there, I evaluated 600 and some programs, and kept about 70 of them, nearly all freeware. Of that 70, perhaps 25 I am still evaluating, most of those being shareware or commercial software.

Here's a hint for you. Buy one of the good database programs. Many, many, many of the programs on PalmGear fit into similar classes and a lot of these are essentially databases. I would guess that there are probably more than 100 check register programs available on PalmGear. I bought HanDBase and made a database check register which is better than half the programs out there, as good as another quarter, and though there may be better check registers among the 20 or so more programs, A) mine is tailored to what I wanted to do with it and B) I didn't have to wade through 100 programs to find the 20 really good ones and then evaluate each of them.

I did the same thing with auto mileage programs. One HanDBase database that does only what I want, no added features that I couldn't care less about.

Of course, this scheme doesn't work for everything. Games, doc readers, stopwatches, clocks, calculators. There was still a load of things to evaluate.

Well, surprise! My black mood didn't really dominate today's entry. I got some really bad news at work today, but a couple of hours relaxation has at least pushed it back off the top of my mind for now.

Saturday, May 13, 2000

After a couple of weeks of comparison shopping, I bought myself a digital camera. No one had any kind of deal going. Each store had the same selection of models at the same price down to the penny. Talk about annoying. What good does it do to comparison shop if you can't find a deal?

But I found a little bit of a deal. I ended up buying a little more of a digicam than I really needed because one store had an open box special on a camera that was beyond my range normally. The special dropped it down to about $30 above my limit and I gritted my teeth and bought it.

Probably the nicest feature of the camera is that it uses Compact Flash memory cards, just like my TRGpro PDA. Which, by the way, arrived a little over a week ago. I've already changed the batteries in that sucker once. Of course, the "Runtime" program that I installed showed that I had run it for 26 hours between Sunday and Thursday. I sort of had new toy syndrome.

Of course, I now get to play around with moving stuff back and forth to the Compact Flash card. That should eat my batteries some, too. I hope that I will eventually tail off on the high usage and my batteries will start lasting something more like the advertisements, as I start using more like the mythical "typical" user.

Friday, April 14, 2000

I was stressing out at work yesterday, as usual during this period while my department's other Unix sysadmin is on maternity leave. I came across something on a newsgroup while taking a brief break to try to relax. (I think that most people would call this lunchtime.)

The posting purported to be a report from Sony about them replacing the Windows error messages on the new Vaio with more user friendly, haiku error messages.

Well, this really tickled me. It appealed to me to consider the possibility of answering all of the department's trouble mail in haiku.

Unfortunately, my department is slightly humor impaired, so actually instituting such a policy probably wouldn't go over very well.

But the idea persists, so in order to find an outlet for it I decided to add a computer haiku page. These are for the most part not deeply meaningful, nor are they necessarily meant to be humorous.

Friday, April 7, 2000

I succumbed to my geeky nature last weekend. Though I am not 100% committed to having any good reason to have one, I ordered a PDA. Specifically, I ordered a TRGPro Palm Pilot compatible PDA.

Now, I have never been a Datebook sort of person and in fact I simply don't have a complicated enough schedule to need a datebook. But I do have a lot of things that could be organized into task lists. And there is the fact that, as a System Administrator, I am always being stopped in the halls by people who want to report problems, but haven't learned to send email to our trouble queue.

Of course, there is always my grocery list, which at the moment I write up on a note pad and carry in my checkbook. And lose half the time and have to wing it when I get to King Soopers.

I do have another excuse/reason. I always wanted an RPN scientific calculator. About the time I stopped being a poor student and could actually afford one, HP stopped making their RPN scientific calculators. "What do you mean 'they discontinued the HP15C?'"

Since then HP has started making RPN scientifics again, but they are all graphing calculators. I never wanted a graphing calculator. I've always viewed that as a calculator trying to be a computer and not really doing a good job of it. To a certain extent, I can visualize equation graphics and when an equation exceeds my visualization abilities, well I jump onto a real computer and use IDL from Research Systems, Inc.

IDL is an interesting programming language that has fantastically optimized array/vector operations and a very simple plotting interface that encourages you to make one-off plots just for the hell of it. On the other hand, you can work carefully and make publication quality plots.

But getting back to the Palm PDAs, there is what appears to be a very good RPN calculator available, RPN 2.57 It's programmable, extensible and who knows, might get graphing functions put into it someday, at a screen resolution better than the HP graphing calculators today.

It's all right. I do see the inconsistency of objecting to graphing calculators for having pretensions of being a computer, while accepting PDAs. The cases are enough different that I can get by it. Using a PDA as a calculator strikes me as no different from using "xcalc -rpn" under Xwindows on my Linux box. It's not a case of trying to work at the limit of the PDA's abilities.

Thursday, March 16, 2000

I liked the look of Robert Cringely's web page so when his most recent "Pulpit" announced that the look was going to change, I figured I had better get my thieving done soon.

So here's the new look for Swimming Upstream of Unconsciousness.

Web design, the classical way. I.e. find something you like, then steal it.

Saturday, March 4, 2000

So many things claim my attention. Work to do, errands and tasks around the house, projects that I want to work on. A seething mass of things to do awaits me every time I stop doing something.

On the other hand, there is that glorious sunshine coming in the windows. I could lay down on the floor in the sun and bask. There is no other word for it.

Work or bask? Bask or work? No contest. Picture me flat on my back, eyes closed to the brightness, arms wide. Picture the stress leaking out of my extremities, puffing away in little clouds of steam.

Sunday, February 20, 2000

Busy, busy. Yes, my work has been using me up recently. A really good sign of too much stress at work is waking up at 3 in the morning and not being able to get back to sleep because you are thinking about your task list at work.

Well, contrary to the optimistic prediction in my last installment (Jan. 16, 2000), I may have to write a driver of some sort myself. Yikes!

What happened? Everyone is as busy as I am. And the guys working on the next version of XFree86 have been completely rewriting the input model for X. This means they aren't too interested in creating a module for the old version of X, since it probably won't work with their new input model.

Here is what I want to do:

• There already exists a USB driver that talks to the Graphire and translates its information onto an input device.
• There already exists an XFree86 module that can read from a serial Wacom Graphire.
• I want to write a program with listens to the input device and emulates a serial port Graphire.

Here is what I am capable of doing:

Bit of a mismatch there at the moment.

Well, I have started trying anyway. I've begun converting xf86Wacom.c into a program which opens a serial device and simply reports to the screen on the data it finds there. This is solely a test program so that I don't have to bind my X pointer to the output of a program under development.

The reason I opted for this route is because I didn't want to write an X module. But I am finding that in order to get my test program working, I need to download a huge chunk of the X sources, just to get the defines that xf86Wacom.c uses. Yuck. I have MITophobia, the irrational fear of the X consortium. I don't want to dig into their source code.

So doing the dishes and the laundry are looking a lot more attractive and I haven't even begun thinking about the real program yet. I have a feeling that before this program is done, I will have turned my compost heap.

Sunday, January 16, 2000

Profundity has completely avoided touching my life for the last several weeks. It's not that I have been completely without thoughts, but they just haven't seemed to require expression.

I have been reasonably busy both at work and at home and I expect that it will continue for the next few months. See at work, we have 3 system admins, one of whom is primarily concerned with the PC class machines. We other two maintain the Unix workstations in the department. Well, my partner is going on maternity leave starting this week. So I see myself doing as much of two person's jobs as I can get through each day for the foreseeable future (i.e. several months).

I'm not really worried about it. I'm far more interested in getting my Wacom Graphire USB tablet working on my RedHat 6.1 Linux system. Perhaps that is an appropriate topic for thoughts: the development cycle under Linux.

In this case, trying to get my tablet working depends on the efforts of at least two separate development groups-- those working on getting USB support built in to the Linux kernel and those working on adding support for new Wacom devices to the XFree86 Xwindows server.

Since returning from my wonderful Christmas with my tablet I have discovered that the tablet will never work with Windows 95 since the most recent driver from Wacom won't let you select USB under Windows 95, even though there is some support for it.

Also since my return, there have been at least half a dozen development kernel releases for Linux plus at least two versions of a backport of the latest USB support into the stable kernel. The latest of the backports has reached the point where when I watch the raw device associated with my tablet, it spews a ton of garbage whenever I wave the stylus over the tablet. So I know that Linux has found my tablet and is listening to it.

The next task is to see if I can figure out why the xf86wacom driver only reports "tcgetattr: Inappropriate ioctl for device" when I tell it where to find the tablet.

Now your first reaction to this might be to shudder and quake at the prospect of having to keep up with a development cycle that releases stuff every few days. "Do I really have to live on the bleeding edge just to run Linux?"

The answer is "of course not". During all that development I downloaded stuff exactly twice. The first time I grabbed A) the newest stable kernel, B) the current backport of USB from the development kernel, and C) the most recent xf86wacom driver. After I had determined that this setup was not going to work, I sat back and checked on the development cycle every few days. I read the documentation they provided on their web pages and after just two weeks I realized that the USB support had reached the point where it had fixed the problem that I was seeing. So I downloaded A) and B) again. C) had not been updated yet.

There the matter stands for the moment. My tablet isn't working yet, but I have an understanding of what needs to be done and I know who is doing it. I haven't written any drivers myself and I don't expect that I will have to. I'm not sitting on the bleeding edge of the Linux kernel development cycle, though I've been watching the National Geographic special "Survival in Wilds of the Linux Kernel" so I know who's eating whom.

Say what you want about the development of Open Source software, but understand that the information is there for the interested to dig out. And the work is going on under your eyes. If you want you can check up on the builders and make sure that they are using the right mix in the concrete and putting in enough rebar. If Linux or any other Open Source software project fails it won't be because the building collapsed.