2 Bit Hacker

Ended up hanging around the apartment for most of the day. Went out once to buy a stapler and some foodstuff, and ended up cooking for the first time in this new apartment. Yeah, almost a month, and I’ve only cooked once, I’m a slacker, I know. Ended up making some chili, which was pretty tasty. I also ended up reassembling the I-Opener, though I’m thinking of ripping it apart again to put Gentoo on it instead of Slackware.

Also, I took some more pictures of the place. They’re in my gallery, mixed in with the pictures from when I was first moving in. The first new on is here.

Also, it’s snowing out now, which is just weird. I heard we’re supposed to get 3 to 10 inches or something crazy like that.

Been a pretty quiet weekend. Yesterday Dave came over and we got the futon setup, I’ll get some pictures posted later today. It’s fairly comfortable, and now I can watch TV in something other than my computer chair. After that I went over to George Gordon to try and get their VPN stuff fixed again. I still can’t get the damn Netopia router to pass GRE packets correctly, I’m convinced now that it needs a firmware upgrade, or we need to stop using it for NAT, and enable NAT on our own router. I think the latter is what we’re going to end up doing. After that, Dave, Don (our contact at George Gordon), myself, and all of the Don’s and Dave’s and some other people’s kids went to dinner at Ground Round in Nashua, there were 12 of us in all. I kindof felt like an outside observer for most of the evening, but it’s better than sitting around doing nothing.

Today I havn’t done much of anything except tinker with the I-Opener some more. I’ve got it to boot Slackware Linux now, with a little help from some forum postings. For my next trick I’ll be working on getting X running on it. Shouldn’t be too hard, I’m sure someone has posted their config files somewhere. I also need to cut a hole in some of the RF shielding, for which I need to either improvise some tools, or maybe just go out and buy a Dremel.

The futon was delivered last night. It’s a little bigger than I expected, but I think it’ll fit in just fine. I got most of it assembled last night, just need to move the piece that holds the mattress onto the rest of the frame. Dave said he’d come over tonight to help me with that. Once that’s done, I’ll have a nice new futon to sit and watch TV on. That’ll be nice, since at the moment the only vaguely comfortable thing in my apartment is my computer chair, and it’s not that great for doing things other than using the computer.

So, once the futon is complete, I’ll be taking some pictures of the apartment and getting them posted, probably tomorrow, since I have a bit of trash to take out, and I’d like to have a clean apartment to take pictures of.

In semi-apartment related news, I got the I-Opener hacked. This means that’s it’s now got the older BIOS revision on it, so it will boot from something other than the onboard flash, and it will load an OS other than QNX. I tried getting NetBSD to boot on it, but it hangs after loading the kernel. I’m going to try Slackware Linux next, and see how that goes.

Since I switched over to MT for my journal and started using the Textile plugin with the SmartyPants plugin, I’ve been kindof tossing around the idea of using the same Textile markup to write the rest of the pages for my site. Currently the pages are either static HTML, or generated out of a MySQL database. The static pages are somewhat messy to update in some cases, and the SQL stuff, while being a good exercise at the time, is really not terribly useful.

So I’ve been thinking of writing a Mason component to do Textile filtering, and another to do SmartyPants filtering, and combine the two to generate my pages. Recently I got to thinking, “Hey, if I’m going to mangle them into Mason, I might as well just make normal Perl modules out of them to benefit the general community.”

It turns out that the author of MT-Textile is already working on a module for his stuff, to be released whenever he gets around to it, which I’m basically happy to wait for.

The author of SmartyPants on the other hand, had been tossing around the idea, but feels it would be annoying to maintain both the module and the plugin. So, that’s kindof where I fit in, I guess, to update the module when he updates the plugin, which works out just fine for me. I plan on getting to work on it once I get home tonight. Should be a fun exercise in module writing, and I’ve never tried to get anything submitted to CPAN before, so this should be interesting.

Trying counts for more than success.

(I’ve decided to start posting my fortune cookie quotes whenever I get them.)

I had forgotten about the fortune I got from the cookie when Matt and I went out for chinese food last week. I thought it was kindof ironic at the time, and although some irony has probably been lost since I didn’t post it when I got it, I would like to post it now.

An aura of glamour and mystery surrounds your events of the week.

Matt had something meaningful as well, but I no longer remember what it was.

Found out why my futon hasn’t been delivered yet. Apparently they guy who was supposed to deliver it was out last week because he (and his wife) had a child. Supposedly he returns to work tomorrow, and should get around to delivering the futon sometime this week. Then my apartment will be complete! (at least furniture-wise)

Back in the no longer quite so frozen North, after spending far too much time in my car. I got back around 8pm last night. Not too much to come back to, really. I stopped at Dave’s apartment to get back my spare keys, including my only mail key, but there really wasn’t much point, since I had only one piece of mail waiting for me. The TiVo saved up a good amount of programming to go through, which is nice. The drive home was fairly uneventful, though traffic in NYC was very annoying.

The only terribly interesting thing about the drive home happened right at the beginning, trying to pull out of my parking space at Matt’s apartment. After having sat there all week with the emergency break on, one of the rear wheel locked up and didn’t want to turn anymore. I called Ford Roadside Assistance, they sent a guy out who basically just hit the gas to pop the break out of place, and everything was happy. My dad says that it’s nothing to worry about really, that, as I understand it, the break basically rusted in place, and it may take a couple days for it to get back to normal. Ah well, that’ll teach me to leave my car alone for a week.

Back at work now, a couple of problems cropped up while I was gone, involving a couple of the hydro stations and their voice synthesis software. One of them also has a busted water level sensor, so it’s not a massive priority to drive out there and fix it yet, which is kindof nice.

I also get to start playing around with DVD writting under NetBSD. One of our customers, the one up in Vermont, wants to have the RS box write out a DVD of it’s accumulated video files from time to time. We think it’ll use about one disc every hundred and something days. That should be fairly interesting to play with. I’m hoping we can write it as a real video DVD, so it can be popped into any player and viewed.

Other than that, it’s pretty quiet here. Still no futon in the apartment, I’ll be calling them up tonight when I get home to see what’s going on. I’d really like to get that taken care of. Once it’s delivered and assembled, I’ll be taking some more pictures of the apartment with all the happy furnishings.