i summon one kim

I took some time today to release tcsh 6.13, allowing Christos to spend his time on code enhancements rather than the release procedure. The latest beta had already been out for a couple of months, and I had been using it every day for over a month without problems. This combined with no complaints on the beta testers list would seem to indicate it was an excellent release candidate. The previous release was from July of 2002, so it was about time to get a new release out.

Christos has promptly committed new patches into the code repository, so I’m thinking I’ll try to pick another beta 6 months from now and see if I could push the next release out soon after.

I hadn’t kept an eye on new developments in my favorite PostScript converter, mp for a while. Last I remember, I tracked down its home when I added it to pkgsrc as print/mp. It does a great job at printing mail, news and other documents. It also comes with templates to use with various day-runner formats.

A couple of days ago Hubert relayed a message from Rich Burridge, the author of mpdist, that the version in pkgsrc is really old. He had included the URL to its new home, so I spent some time bringing us up to the latest and greatest.

One upgrade down, a gazillion to go…

Naturally as I am done with an upgrade, a security issue is announced regarding Apache::Gallery‘s use of the Inline module. A new version of Apache::Gallery was released, with new beta state modules as dependencies: Image::Imlib2 directly and Module::Build indirectly. (What’s wrong with good old Make::Maker, I ask!)

After figuring out Module::Build and then staring at strange shared library resolution problems with Image::Imlib2, I simply put in an ugly kludge. I just have a feeling that this will come back to bite me one day.

The new Apache::Gallery comes with two sets of templates: default and new. I’m yet to try them out — I just made the minimal adjustment for now to keep the existing albums working. The folder.png image was renamed to agfolder.png, and it is used in dir.tpl.

I’ve been running a new version of Apache::Gallery for a while (a couple of months, actually) on my on-line photos. It has all been working well, and is easier to maintain than the old one, so I committed the changes to the NetBSD pkgsrc repository.

The complete list of packages is:

• p5-Apache-Gallery
• p5-libapreq
• p5-Inline

While at it, I also committed a fix for tilde expansion in rdist6, and a fix I finally managed to find for Samba DFS support for Windows XP clients.

I’ve been experimenting with Apache::Gallery to start an easy to manage photo album on my pages. The results are now in. Thanks to the template approach it was possible to have the album share the look and feel of my site.

In the process of creating the templates I have also converted my standard layout to a PHP library. I still need to polish it quite a bit, though, but at least now it is easy to change the general look in just a couple of spots for all pages.

The next task would be to rewrite the web log from scratch with a well planned URL scheme in mind. Passing CGI variables as parameters makes it difficult to share bookmarks to articles, and the current workaround is very delicate in its configuration. The support for topic and keyword search is also lacking.

I added a Turtle Beach AudioTron to my stereo system this week. It’s an MP3 / WMA player that fits comfortably in a rack together with all the other hi-fi gear. I have already been storing the best parts of my CD collection on the home network as MP3 files, so I can listen to my favourites on the train (just copy files to a portable MP3 player) and while working on the computer. With the AudioTron all those files can be played on the stereo system. (more…)

I have been using my computer to record TV shows, and watch them later (well, you all know what a VCR can do). But under Windows XP the Media Player cannot keep up with the MPEG decoding. The CPU is pegged at 100% and video/audio sync suffers.

I am running this on a 1.7 GHz Pentium 4 which has 512 MB of RAM, so it cannot be a hardware performance issue. With Windows 2000 there were no problems. Windows 2000 is decoding fine even on a 800 MHz Pentium III laptop and 1280×1024 full-screen display mode. (more…)

I’ve been converted to a Windows XP Professional user! I’ve run XP on my desktop for a couple of months now, and I finally rebuilt my laptop (for the 5th time) in the hopes of making it work better. The install procedure needs some cleanup, but for the most part that will have to wait until something breaks enough to require re-installing.

My laptop troubles began when I tried to install XP on it — the wireless LAN would no longer work for more than 30 seconds. Unfortunately reinstalling Windows 2000 Professional did not result in the same reliable system that I had before.

Since I’m already planning on 802.11a I won’t spend time in fixing the old infrastructure (especially with one of the Airports dying on me), but instead get the new gear running with XP. More about that later…

Running XP on the desktop has been a good experience. It runs faster and smoother than Windows 2000. Some of the major winning points:

• much better CIFS (or SMB) performance
• system snapshots for recovering from bad software installs
• device driver rollback capability
• support for more (modern) hardware

Seems like this was — for once — a worth-while upgrade.