Category: Personal

Despite being at work all the time, and being constantly busy, I am still a human. I am social. I have a life, family, and friends. I have thoughts and experiences. Once in a while I share them, and when I do, I do so in this category. If you don’t know me personally, chances are you’ll find posts in this category particularly boring.

Java, CVS, and documentation

Last few days were pretty active. First of all, I was playing with apache, JBoss and resin setup. I managed to get them to work together, although failed to make resin handle web apps from the /.

I also spent a fair amount of time on CVS, mutt+gnupg, CA with openssl and some other stuff. CVS makes me happy. I’ve read about some BSD application called arch, which is supposed to be even better then CVS, though the port for Linux is not complete yet, so be it :) Mutt was pretty easy to set up with gnupg. Actually, it happened so, that I had pgp support compiled in for ages, and gpg.rc configuration file was kindly provided with the distribution of mutt package.

Now I am about to write several technical documents for our company internal use, so I was looking for the right way to do it. Office suits were not even thought of, after I remembered my Final Year Project preparation in MS Office. Yuck, that was a pain in the … Hmm.. Mkay. So, I went off to the direction of XML and SGML, but that land is a bit confusing. DocBook followed with recomendations from Linux Documentaion Project (aka LDP). All roads lead to Rome, though and I ended up with TeX idea in my head. I will live it through over the weekend and I will decide finally what to use.

Back from Malta

Happy New Year and Merry Christmas to all of you reading this! I just came back from my vacations which I’ve spent on Malta (small island not far from Italy). Nice place. Lots of castles, fortified walls, musiums with knights and all that staff. Plenty of places to see. Some pictures from the trip are here.
Unbeleivable, but I haven’t touch a computer for 10 days. Have seen plenty of Internet caffees though. Basically, every place where you can eat or drink has a sticker with “Internet inside” and at least 1 computer. Expensive though.
Came back to a huge mailbox and a long todo list, so had to sort out some priorities. Found out a new policy on backup tapes and offsite storage: now everything is in a really secure place with water-, air-proof bags used for transportation. Excellent!

Christmas updates

Long time no updates again. I have put the reminder in my ical, so now updates should really be more often.
Meanwhile, I have been busy with few things and here we go:

  • OpenOffice.org office suite appeared to be VERY much like StarOffice – same code base, help and printing available, etc. Good alternative if you want to stay free and open.
  • Running different online game servers may be fun. In particular Quake III Arena servers with Rocket Arena and/or OSP mods. For those, seeking log analyzer’s for games.log – the only one I managed to force to work was Q3LA (Quake 3 Log Analyzer). My samples are http://games.thunderworx.net/q3osp/ (OSP) and http://games.thunderworx.net/q3ra/ (RA).
  • I spent some time with perl/tk programming. Tk appeared not bad at all for something more advanced than xmessage type of things. Clear, object-oriented, readable code, especially when done for Tk perl module (check out CPAN for more information).
  • Coming to surprises: it was a big one for me to find out that xsnow actually has a manual page and a handful of options. Thanks to certain someone I can now nostalgie about real winter with winter background and xsnow with -notrees and -nosanta options on.
  • It looks like finally one of my old dreams will come true and I will be working during the night time, being additionally a techical support guy during that time. Nice anyway.

That looks like all. Last thing I wanted to mention is that I will be out of the island for the first time in several years – Christmas holidays is a good time to visit my mom and bro in Malta (another small island in the same sea…hehe). I will be out from 24th of December until 3rd of January, so I guess there will be no updates during that period.

Linux, Quake III, and Nvidia

Long time no updates. That is because I wa busy with Quake III ;). Actually, making it run was much easier then I thought it will be. What I did was downloading of NVidia drivers from NVidia site and installing them. For those, running Red Hat-based distributions, drivers are available in rpm format. Everything works fine after changing driver from “nv” to “nvidia” in /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 (video card: Riva TNT 64 for the record).