Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in eheil's LiveJournal:

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Friday, May 25th, 2007
4:21 pm	OK, everyone This is just to let everyone know that I'm all right here. Presently, I'm now using a GTK-based client to update my journal. many of you have probably heard of it, its called Drivel--a very easy-to-use and most importantly, a a fuctional client which is actually usable. it is actually accessible. As I reported earlier, I think that we are now fully running a Gnome 2.18 desktop. What I have to figure outt though is how to automate the building of packages from retrieved Sugversion packages. Ideally it would probably be named gnome-orca-snapshot and it would be included in Sid--but the trick here to create a package which does not depend on any particular distrubition--could we use LSB to somehow make this a rality? Obviously we will be dealing with Debian packages, but it would be nice to have one upstream snapshot repository and have the packages built locally on the target machine--could this be done? (Comment on this)
Tuesday, May 1st, 2007
9:06 am	Ok, this is just an update. I guess a lot of you have been wondering where I've been. Well, finally got Orca V 2.18 and part of Gnome 2.18 installed on one of these boxes here. Oh yeah, did I mention that my UPS died? Yup, it did. So now I have to get another one. Also this month, I might just reat myelf to some XM hardware. Actually, I have half of it. You get a $50 rebate, but you know how that is. Finally also fixed a locale problem. For some reson, dpkg-reconfigure locales insisted on generating all of the locales for the world. That wastes a lot of disk space. Actually on one of my machines, the entire /usr filesystem was totally filled up. so I just blew way the Linux 2.6.20 source tree in order to free up some space. Also, noticed that a lot of apps are actually pretty well accessible under Orca. I don't by any means have the latest version--that's maintained in a svn repository but the next thing to do is to automate the building of Debian binary packages from svn snapshots. Ideally what I would want to do is make it non-distrobution specific. i.e. I do know a lot of people are actually using Ubuntu, and the two distrobutions do seem to be quite similar in some respects. I've received reports though that its difficult to perform a speakup installation with Ubuntu. This is due to Ubuntu shipping a fully modularized kernel. It wouldn't be difficult, say for Speakup not being a boot target. In other news, I'm about to compile Gnome SVN on my Sparc64 workstation. In theory, this build should not take more than four hours, because this is a SMP machine. To ease dependency hell, I'm going to use jbuild in order to build it. What I'll have though is a extremely optimized and most importantly, fully 64-bit environment. I should actually invest in some dedicated build machines. Get a rack cabinet and make them all headless of course. I don't know where I'll put them, as I'm am presently running out of space. (Comment on this)
Friday, November 10th, 2006
4:27 pm	Sun SPARC Ultra II Workstation Arrived! Hey guys! Sorry I haven't updated this for a while, but I've been very busy here. On a positive note, the title says it all. My new Ultra II workstation finally arrived. It didn't come with a monitor, keyboard, or mouse, but these are items that I can easily get on Ebay or other sources. Anyone of you know where I can get a cheap Sun Type 5 Keyboard? Or a Sun monitor? it came preinstalled with Solaris 8 (SPARC Edition), but I can easily install Solaris 10 if I choose too. Or I could install Debian Ech and just upgrade to Sid if I prefer. Current Mood: ecstatic (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Thursday, July 21st, 2005
11:19 am	I'm back! ybe no.OK guys, this has been such a long time. I'm afraid that I'd lost all my subscribers, whether they use RSS 0.9.1, 2.0, or LJ's support of the Atom API service. Anyways, yes, its been a while. Finally got time, and I got one of my *nix boxes configured. i've also got more boxes coming in here, so now tis going to take some time to figure out where they're all going to go. Cosndiering the fact that I don't have a lot of space, its can be a problem. However, that's what great minds are for. Figuring out what needs to be done is just what I'm here for. One good posibility is to get something like a Rack mountable system. Though what yo8u'll need is some cacapability to mount them in the rack cabinets, that's if I an cactually find one for a decent price. Any comments? Anyways, I figured that I would let you know the purpose of thse boxes. The intention here is to create boxes that participate in a distcc cluster. For those of you wyo don't know what this is used for, discc is a distributed compilation cluster. OpenMosix is different, as distcc and its friends are specifically for compilation work. distcache caches previous results and stores them in a globally accessible cache. Subsequent builds of stable and development trees are faster, as most autoconf-style systems use the standard ~/.config_cache to cache discovered values. This speeds up the configuration uite a bit, as autoconf tools don't need to discover cached values. Current Mood: accomplished (Comment on this)
Sunday, April 3rd, 2005
5:10 pm	Can we say Yay? Ok guys. Sorry for such a long update here. Well, I'm finally back here. For once in my life, I'm using a real operating system, not that dreaded Windblows which you all knows holds your hand and is full of security holes. Well, not the first time, but you know thd deal. OK, so I have a lot to do here. Right now, I'm in the process of getting all my services back up and running. I may have to run Sendmail, because I haven't received any encouraging reports about successfully configuring it. I do know for a fact that Alex did get it running. So I'll at some point want to contact him and get the gory details. Next, installed openvpn, though its not configured. However, its running, which is a good start. Will have to read documentation on it. Its man page looks promissing. It seems robust enough--certainly for my purposes. Next, will have to eventually upgrade my distro to FC 3. Anyone of you know about when FC 4 is coming out? Because if its so near, what I may do is just wait untill its out, and when things are settled down. Got the latest stable version of Epic stable code here. Previously, I have been using a CVS snapshot wnd haven't gotten a hance to update it properly. So I just said fuck it, I'll just get the binary from apt.sw.be and be done with it. It was, however built very recently. So I guess RPM packages can be good after all. Anyone of y ou know what's up with usound? B/c it hangs on startup. To my knowledge, this wasn't an issue when I last used FB. Now yesterday apt updated a lot of packages--nearly 11GB of them. This may have been related to some libs been updated, not really sure. Though its very aggrivating. Well, will update later. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Saturday, January 1st, 2005
3:58 pm	Happy New Years guys! hey guys. OK, I appologize. I haven't updated in a while. but buts allright. Well, I can see its finally 2005. So waht I'm going to do is I'm going to try and do a little flashback of all of the events here. As many of you loyal readers may know, this year marks my first year at ITT Technical Institute. Prior to this, I've attended a community college in NJ, commuting from Brooklyn. This worked out for a while, but I discovered to my dismay that their courses had too much a liberl arts slant. So I started investigating other options. ITT Tech seemed to have a good set of coruses, and appeared to be one of the best schools in the country. the only thing I didn't agree with was simply the price of tuition which is a complete and utter ripoff. OK, drumbrool please. For two years, you end up paying $38000. On top of this, their's also interest. What I'm hoping to do is simply find a compnay for employment which will either pay all, or a hefty percentage of the tuition fees. Now whether this will actually happen, this is the most important question. If it doesn't, OK, well, guess I'm screwed. Also, it should be worth metnioning that or an intro class to programming, they make you take Visual Basic. Now, maybe I'm biassed here in a way, but I think that C++ or C would be a much better introductory language. I'm not trying to say that Visual Basic is evil (which is certainly is), but Microsoft has one again decided to invent teir oown language. Now if it was portable across other platforms (specifally non- Windows in particular), this might be a different story. but its not. Now before all of you guys start bitching about how you can get VB to work under WINE, tthis doesn't work. IMHO I uess that the execution environment is too tightly integrated into Windows. Accordin to the Microsoft people, you chouldn't be alble to do this. But wait a minute. If meory serves me correctly, their's something called the antritrust litigation, and it dealt specifically with the issue of exclusivity and integretation. Now with the .Net language and the CLRI, their may be a lot of hope for truly cross-platform interoperatibility. Their is at least one open source project which is designed to bring the .Net system to Linux and other POSIX-based systems. It should be interesting to see where it actually goes. Sure their's a lot of potential, but not all things live up to their very potential, which is a sad thing. OK, sorry i got on a tangent ere, but I guess it was necissary or something. Not sure about that. You guys who actually read this, let me know how your Xmas was. Oh wait, I forget. Their aren't any readers anymore, b/c of the lack of updating. Well, this has been long enough, so I guess I'll let this go for now. You all take care, and I'll update later. Current Mood: bored (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, October 16th, 2004
7:13 pm	Digital Cable Interupted again? Ok guys. Well, apparently we're doing the ComCrap thing. Or, I should rather say, lack of cable services. At least that's how it appears. I'm now in another state of software disconnection. Note that attempts to manually give myself an authorization have failed, due to the protocol being revised. From preliminary analysis, it would seem that the data is now encrypted end-to-end, and their are now more verification checks implemented between the head-end servers. I wish that the software that was used was open-source, that way I would probably recompile it to not use the box's addressable features. Something like this is probably implemented via a software device driver. Anyone know what can be done with these Motorola boxes? (Comment on this)
Thursday, October 14th, 2004
8:06 am	New Apartment Possibly?? New aparment finally? Well, it looks like that very well be a possibility. At 12:30 UTC, I will be involved that only can be described as another application process. The problem is, I have no data on the aviability of actual apartments within the complex. This one though is about two blocks from Magnolia Avenue, which has bus service provided 7 days a week. Not sure how close the transfer point is, but we'll worry about it when, and if I do get this apartment. I have, for all intensive purposes gathered what's required as proof of income, but I can't for the life of me find my ComCrap er. oops. I mean Comcast bill. They're way to expensive for what you acutally get, but I suppose taht this will have to wait for another day. Knowing me, I can go on ranting about them for pages. But in my usual spirit, I won't bore you, my loyal readers with those details at the moment. Watch this space for pending updates of Operation ApartmentFind 2004. Current Mood: anxious (Comment on this)
Tuesday, October 5th, 2004
7:21 pm	OK Ok guys. I'm here at school, SSH'ed into my box here. Apparnelty the cable came undone which would explain why my SSH connection decided to die. Worse, I was in the middle of doing some work remotely. So that's mpre time down the tubes. Oh well, we all have our faults. On the upside, everytghing is going good. I have to figure out how to configure squirrelmail so that I have a more elgant way of accessing mail remotely. Sure, there's always good SSH, but there are times when, for some reason, the port is blocked. I can always run private ssh daemons for different purposes, but that's not the point. It becomes a game of cat and mouse, and that's not very fun at all. So what the ideal sollution would be is to have the traffic be tunelled over HTTP. so what would happen is that the data would look like encrypted HTTP traffic. Hopefully, the people at different locations aren't very good at analyzing packets, or their is a slight, but rather mote chance that they would discover that its actually SSH traffic being sent over the wire. Which is OK, because its not like they would be able to see what's going on over the encrypted connection. Which is always a good thing. Oh yeah, while i'm at it, I really should really consider joining the Linux community here on Live Journal. So much to do, but not enough time to do it in. Well, I'll update later when time permits. Current Mood: amused (Comment on this)
Friday, October 1st, 2004
1:13 pm	Updated Finally? Is it already Oct 1?? OK guys, sorry for such a delay in updating this. Things get started here, and well, you know how thing are. Well, finally got a chance to update some packages. I'm seriously considering upgrading this box to either Debian SID or Sarj when it gets released. hell, at the time of this writing, it may even have been released. So anyone reading this, forgive me. Anyways. Correction: I just checked out ftp.rednote.net and their is indeed Speakup modified installation ISO images available. Now whether they have been updated to use the latest installer, I have no idea. Ditto for the kernel that's on the media. Anyways, when I get a chance, going to burn myself a minimal ISO image which networking support. B/c by design, pretty much the entire distro can be installed via HTTP via the cleverely designed apt tools. i.e. apt-get, dpkg, debconf, and all you Debian heads know the drill. Current Mood: accomplished (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, August 15th, 2004
11:23 am	Not much Ok guys. This is just a little update here. Apparently nothing's new here. Well, at least I got my self saved from possible problems with KUB which is the energy company here. Apparently, I didn't have enough common sense to realize the tampering with electric meters is a federal offense. Well, let's just say that I called one of the reps they're like well, since you didn't know about, we're not going to rpess charges. Which is always a good thing. So apparently no jail time for me. For dinner me and Greg had hamburgers, steak, and mixed vegetables. Oh wait, French Fries too. Can't forget that. Guess its good that he's a resident cheff. After all, we wouldn't want any problems, or the fire department of Knoxville coming over here. Which if you all know, my cooking isn't the best. But hey its OK. I'm thinking of working on a new rpmbuild script that will automatically, or at least somewhat automate the process of building packages from source and figuring out the build parameters, and passing the results into a speck file. That way, I can just use rpmbuild to build bianry or source packages. Or at least generate source ones. That way users can automatically generat RPM packages, say if they want to enable features that aren't compiled in default. Note to RPM builders: Include every option possible in compiled binaries if possible. It doesn't matter if the size of the binaries increase, because a lot of people have sufficient space to hangle it. If not, or you have a small amount of inodes, that's not my problem. Anyways, update later. Current Mood: anxious (Comment on this)
Friday, August 13th, 2004
12:42 pm	Hey, not much Ok guys. Long time I haven't updated. Been busy with college and stuff. ut anyways. things are going really good. I'm back to using the integrated client in Centericq. Speaking f Centericq, they just released a new version. So now we're on the 4.11.X branch of code. 4.11.0 to be precise. Lots of bugfixes so far, and the ability to associate certain contacts with different sounds. So in all very good. Current Mood: blah (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Thursday, July 22nd, 2004
5:17 pm	Hey guys. Sorry for the delayed updates, but you know, I've been busy here. As you all know, I'm using a new GTK-based client to make updates. Which is a lot nicer, because it doesn't require me to go out to the LJ website to make updates. In any event, life is good. Money is hard, but I don't see that changing anytime soon, unless I get a job or move into a more afordable apartment. I've still been taking to Jessica and things are fine. yes, we're doing wonderful, if I may say so. So tomorrow oficially starts the weekend. As usual, I don't think I have anything planned. I'll update you all later. (Comment on this)
Friday, July 16th, 2004
11:40 am	Ok guys, this is the second time I'm updating this journal usin my new GTK client. So far its pretty fun, and I think it may be useful. I might write an e-mail to the article of this client just to let him know that its accessible. I would suspect that he's aware of this, but it wouldn't hurt to let him know how much I appreciate it. OK, enough of the technical geeky side of me. On another note, Mom leaves today. Her bus is scheduled to depart at 19:45 UTC and will arrive in New York at 12:50 UTC. So its not the shortest trip, but not the longest either. In all, we accomplished a lot of stuff, but I don't think she really wanted to leave. So she told me that Dad might come in another three weeks. I was going to call Jessica, but I fell asleep and when I returned to my box, I found out that I had missed a lot of messages on AOL instnat messenger. But will call her today. I just had my coffee and it was pretty nice. It was a little strong, but very good indeed. Last night i didn't have a lot to eat, but it was really good never the less. So just trying to get an update here before I get into my work I have to do. Am not sure what I'll to do, but this is probably getting messed up, so I'll go for now. (Comment on this)
Thursday, July 15th, 2004
10:06 pm	This is a test using a new GTK-based LJ client. i'm not sure whether it will work, but I have to see if I can find the equivelent to the Send To Journal option. So far, it seems pretty accessible, since its being developed within the GTK 2.X framework with has native accessibility bridge support. Update later. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, May 4th, 2004
5:37 pm	Well finally actually payed rent. That leaves me with a paltry $140 for the month. Not very good. But hey, at least I get food stamps, which is cool. Nothing else new is to report though. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
3:13 pm	Not much I'm finally back. Sorry I haven't updated in a while. A lot has happened since that time though. Well today for the first time, my LD phone service was suspended. so I had to find a new way to pay at least the past due ballance of my bill. First time I went to the Web site in Lynx, it apparently used JavaScript. As we know, Lyn's implementation is flaky at best. In other words, broken. so I had to resort to using Windoos to try and pay. Well what do you know? Some scripting on the site made it impossible to actually conduct business. So I edited some script, then tried it again. While at it, I decided to try and change the price in the price variable of the form. When I submitted the form to the server, it apparently didn't like it. B/c it resulted in an Internal 500 server error. So much for modifying prices. Next month, I'll have to come up with another means of modifying it. It would be cool if I found a way and the server actually excepted it. That way I could pay less but as far as BellSouth is concerned, they're all payed up. Will have to find a good proxy to go through before actually attempting this. Don't want my IP address showing up in any logs. No, that would be a very bad thing, indeed. But now I have to give BellSouth the Heads up. Their on-line billing site is perfectly accessible. As I can actually view my bill without any problem. Its just rendered in plain text, not any graphical shit. Hey, if all providers could do stuff like this, then the world would finally be a friendlier place afterall. Next, the online class problems continue. I'm not sure if I actually letyou all know about this, but RFB&D has some serious quality control problems. Since i'm in college they send me tapes on-demand, which means that as soon as their done, they're sent. Well their's just one problem with this method. The stuff that they sent me is unusable, due to the fact that the tapes are produced with such low quality, not to mention they jam. And no, its not just this particular machine. BC tapes that are of godo quality play fine. I wish they would send me the DAISY version of this stuff, b/c we wouldn't be having this discussion right now. Sometimes, life just really sucks! Did I mention that? OK well update later. Current Mood: angry (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, April 29th, 2004
9:36 am	OK Sorry for the late update, but got a lot of stuff here. Well, I was able to get Gnopernicus working finally. Getting it to work was not difficult at all, just read the documentation. They practically tell you how to do everything step-by-step. You just create a .gnome2 directory, then manual-session, put some contents into it wich are on the webpage, define some environment variables in your.bashrc and then start the instance of the X server. It will come up talking using Festival which is a nice free softsynth. Yeah, I know its huge, but Viavoice Outloud is no longer free and its much better than flite. So before you guys go bashing Festival, its not that bad. Now a lot of Gnome applets aren't accessible, but then again some are. Gnopernicus isn't ready for a production-level environment, but at least you can access some f the applications. Update later. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, April 27th, 2004
9:26 am	Ok Guys Ok Guys. Just checked my account and I found out that i only have $2.17 there. WTF! Well on the upshot, I'm getting a little help from my parents here. so It can't be that bad. Next month will really be a test of my temperment b/c I'm really going to be hanging by some strings. Oh, and did I mention I hate bills? Hate them in all their incarnations. Talked to Leona last night, she's doing fine. Though a little tired. Turns out that her dorm assignment has no air conditioning plus she's on the 3rd floor. Sounds like fun. I'm just lucky that its not me. Not that I couldn't deal with it, but you guys get what I mean. Today I gotta see about doing some laundry. Its not an immediate concern, but it has to be done. Yesterday's math class was a total waste of time. Next quarter, I'm seriously going to see if I can test out of some of these stupid general ed courses. As far as I see it, its a waste of money. I didn't pay all this money to take stupid general courses. Plus the Internet connection their really needs ramping up. Problem is that their T3 is fractionalized in too many points and frankly doesn't at all meet the demand of the school, let alone over 30 of them. Plus their proxy server blocks a lot o ports, not to mention they have some kind of filtering mechanism in place. i viewed one of the source HTML docs to try and determine the filter that was in place, but it didn't work. No comments were in the code at all. Funny thing was when I accessed http://www.asstr.org that wasn't blocked at all. I've seriously came to a little conclusion: filtering proxies don't work and the algorithms they use are severely flawed. Well update later. Current Mood: bored (Comment on this)
Monday, April 26th, 2004
7:48 am	My rant against Cerotech Corporation Ok guys. Now I know it works, I'm using the integrated LJ client into Centericq. For those of you who don't know, its an ncurses-based IM client for *nix boxes. It supports Yahoo! (which is broken in the current build), MSN, Jabber, AIM, and one other protocol which I totally forget. Today's the borring math class, so I'll probably update from there. Greg is in Sacremento b/c of his mom who doesn't really have a clean bill of health. I hope she makes it through, but quite honestly, I'm not sure which course events will take. Finally got the Freedombox client installed on my Linux box but noticed something very disturbing. Every so often, I'll lose speech and lines of text will be cut off. What eventually happens is that I have to kill the X server then restart with with ./fbstartx which is basically a script that starts the usound daemon, puts it in the background, starts an X server on display 0 and loads the client. All in all, Matt's done a very good job. One complaint I have is that you don't have access to the underlying browser. Since content is rendered, you don't have access to the menus and the core Mozilla UI. And another thing, Matt won't release his API to the Mozilla community. Or at lease the Gnompercus developers. Here they are, busting their ass and here what they've tried t do has already been accomplished. Maybe Michael Calvo will cave in if we as a community get the Mozilla/Gnomipercus developers on their tails. OK, update later Current Mood: angry (Comment on this)