Category: Technology

I work in technology sector. And I do round a clock, not only from 9 to 5. It is my bread and butter, it is my hobby, it is the fascination of my life. And with the current rate of change particular in information technology (IT), there is always something new to learn, to try, to talk about. I often post news, thoughts, and reviews. And when I do, this is the category I use.

CVS and bugtracking with Mantis

All the small things to close working week. Rest of the day I’ve spent education myself on CVS again. :) I’ve came across CVS book at red-bean.com which I now want to order hardcopy. All my today CVS practise was around a wonderful piece of software called Mantis. It is simple yet powerfull bugtracking system, which I have adopted as technical support tool for our company. All of my changes were based on version 0.16.0, while mantis went to version 0.17.0. So, I’ve been porting all my changes to the new version. Tried both ways with traditional diff-edit-patch-repeat and cvs ways. So far, I enjoy the cvs way of doing things, and I haven’t yet tried branching and merging. Oh, I sound like a developer, don’t I? :)

Boring day

Nothing much happened. Learned few things about mpeg4 and divx. Also, possibly, found a bug in xscreensaver. I will have to verify it tomorrow. Strange thing: popup windows from ical are visible even when screensaver is running.

In other news: Q3 lan party postponed for one week. Sad…

Linuxalization of the home network completed

Installed Red Hat Linux 7.2 on my girlfriend’s computer. Now I have clean pure Linux network at home. I used the chance also to make few changes to home net organization. Mainly, I moved all computers to use dhcp and have /home directory nfs mounted from the server. Very convenient. I also synchronized all /etc/passwd, /etc/group, and /etc/shadow on all machines. Dirtly temporary hack. I am trying to figure out how to make OpenLDAP work. Another thing to remember for home net setups is -R option for dhcpcd. This option will prevent DHCP client from overwriting /etc/resolv.conf and messing up info.

I am still deciding on which icq client to use. These decision cannot stabilize for like 4-5 years now ;) . Basically, I am down to choice between Licq (X), and CenterICQ (console). Both are very nice, flexible, and stable. CenterICQ seems to be more up-to-date though, using newest ICQ2000 protocol, with SMS support. It also provides a tool to convert all you history and contacts.

Meanwhile, I am also getting ready for Quake3 LAN party next Saturday. It’s my first LAN party, so I feel kinda excited :) . I’ve spent the whole night today tweaking my config file. It will be up here in the nearest future. Off to bed now…

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).