Complications work much better with WatchOS 2 (I’m on 2.2). No more rebooting the watch to get the sunset time. But Apps are still slow. WatchOS 2 brought color to the complications on the Utility face. Most complications look nice with color, but the Sunrise, Stopwatch, and Timer are a hideous orange, which forces me to set the second hand to match. So instead of using my favorite yellow second hand:

Yes. Oh yes. This is the best thing ever. I downloaded Crystal and probably buy peace soon too. I can’t say enough about the web on my iPhone with these things turned on.

After five weeks with apple watch, here are some thoughts on the various faces. Note: when I refer to a half complication, below, I’m talking about the one which will only show the date, the day of the week and the date, or nothing. Chronograph The chronograph face allows four-and-a-half complications and is one of my favorite faces, thanks to discretely small hour-indicator numbers, beautiful hands and layout, and one-tap access to start the chronograph (which is mission-critical on my wrist!

I’m looking forward to the day when apple allows all iOS apps to show information in their icons, like the apple calendar and clock apps do. Just a number badge is so boring in our modern world!

I’ve had trouble with one of my macs not syncing to iCloud. Specifically, if I update a document on my second mac, it goes to iCloud just fine (I can see the updates on iCloud.com, my iPhone, and my iPad) but I don’t get the update on my first mac. The best workaround I’ve found is to make sure both macs are awake and online when a document is modified. it seems if a mac is offline and misses the new data push from iCloud, the mac never requests new data from iCloud.

I’ve now turned off background app refresh for all apps. I didn’t realize, at first, that background app refresh could be disabled. It can, though, on a per-app or global basis. so I turned it off completely.

I noticed my phone having shorter battery life and staying warm when I wasn’t using it. In Settings > Privacy > Location Services I disallowed the Facebook app from being able to use my location. Problem seems to be solved. My iphone now stays at room temperature when I’m not using it. How did I decide to turn off location services for Facebook? iOS 7 added a feature allowing apps to occasionally update in the background.

With the 7.1 update, I’m much more comfortable with iOS 7. I no longer miss iOS 6. The updated lock screen and phone apps are the best touches. I especially like the new effects when waking up or turning off the screen: a subtle, super-fast zoom in on wake and zoom out on sleep. Making the transition animations shorter is also nice, everything feels snappier because of it. The new calendar app looks nice but is still clunky from a usability perspective.

FAA is finally going to allow electronics during takeoff and landing. I’ve been cheating with my iPhone, iPad, and laptop for as long as I’ve had said devices, so I’m glad to hear I’ll soon be able to stop looking over my shoulder for nagging airline attendants while doing so!

Welcome to the new DMZ.

I’ve been quite thrilled with the new 15” macbook pro I got at work, with one hitch … it often goes to sleep randomly when running on battery. Even while I’m typing. I finally figured out why. My new money clip wallet has an inordinately strong magnet in it.

A GTD FAQ OmniFocus on the iPad

I never cared about having a “to-do list”. My style of “task management” used to be to keep in my head the most important things I needed to do and not worry about the rest. A nice, simple system. Unfortunately, I’d often find myself driving to work, realizing I’d left something at home I meant to take with me. Ever have that feeling where you sit down at the computer, ready to look something up you were excited to research, only to realize you forgot what it was?

I set up mail.app on Mountain Lion with all my accounts, including the Apple ID I used with MobileMe. The result was nearly every operation in mail.app resulted in a minute or two of the spinning beach ball. After much wailing and gnashing of teeth, I noticed errors in the Console.app referring to my MobileMe’s apple id, so I deleted that account completely from Mail.app and now it all works great!

MacVim now supports OS X’s full screen mode! Awesome.

Did you get the iPhoto app for iPhone and iPad yet? I did, and was disappointed at first. Until I read this iPhoto review. Now I love to use iPhoto to winnow my multiple shots of the same scene down to one and only one photo. I favorite the winner, then delete all of them from camera roll. iPhoto saves its own copy of any photo you favorite or edit.

Apple maintains a table mapping your Apple ID to your iOS devices (probably by serial number but possibly by SIM card). When you sell an iOS device, you should first turn off iMessage before restoring the software. If you forget, though, or your iOS device is stolen, an alternative way to disable iMessages on the device is to go to apple’s support page, log in with your Apple id, and you’ll see all the devices apple has associated with that Apple ID.

In an attempt to plan more laptop-less trips, I wanted to get a few critical spreadsheets onto the iPad: the budget spreadsheet, and the car fuel-and-maintenance-tracking spreadsheets. I exported them out of gnumeric in the Microsoft Excel 97/2000/XP format and imported them into Numbers ‘09 on my MacBook. Numbers threw open a sheet saying it didn’t have the fonts referenced in the spreadsheet and allowed me to pick new fonts. I spent a bit of time cleaning up formatting.

A coworker’s mac just suffered a hard drive failure, causing me to urgently want to plug in all my Time Machine backup drives again. I recently plugged a new external drive into my mac mini, to store movies on to be streamed through the apple tv. the mac mini only has two usb ports, and the other port was in use for the keyboard and mouse. so I unplugged the keyboard and mouse and plugged in the time machine drive.

Flickstacker is the best flickr iOS app I’ve found yet, especially for uploading.

I got a call out of the blue today from a head hunter trying to fill a job opening. I’ll take this as a good sign.

Modern internet routers contain so much buffering of packets they defeat TCP’s congestion algorithms. The end result is high latency on your broadband connection. If your home router runs linux, you can mitigate this latency using QOS (i.e., traffic shaping). My home broadband connection is rated at 12Mbps down, 1Mbps up. Using the CBQ script from the Linux QOS howto (linked above), I set the upload speed parameter to 3⁄4 of my available bandwidth, and the download speed parameter to 13⁄16.

I think my cablemodem is wearing out again. this one is about 1.25 years old. youtube and netflix streaming performance has deteriorated rapidly over the last month, and is now unusable. here’s the current speed test:

long story short, replacing just the screen wasn’t sufficient. the home key was still activating spuriously. I went back to the apple store and they finally gave me a new phone. I had only 22 days left on the warranty!

I got another appointment at a genius bar. after telling the long story, and heading him off at the pass when he started to tell me to reset it to factory defaults and not restore, he replaced the screen. I think the phantom home key presses are gone, but it might have happened during a phone call once, last night. we’ll see.

I dropped my iPhone on a sidewalk in December, shattering the screen. Apple sold me a new one for $200. After I restored my backup to the new phone, within a couple weeks the iPhone started pressing the home button by itself. That is, it would jump out of whatever app I was in, then jump back and forth between the first page of the home screen and the search page.

My experience with the iPad was surprising. Some of the things I expected to not care about turned out to be impressive, and some features I was excited about wound up as letdowns. Enough generalities, let me get down to details. First, I was prepared for heft after reading many comments castigating the mass of the iPad. I found the iPad to be just right! For its size, I think its weight speaks of solidity and perhaps even quality.

oh, I almost forgot something fairly important… my mercurial I installed in my home directory still works, and X11 apps I installed via fink (like gnucash and gnumeric) still work in Snow Leopard without having to recompile them. I suspect as long as the binaries you have were compiled with an x86 target at all, it will probably still run without recompiling, just in 32-bit mode.

I updated my macbook to Snow Leopard tonight. I went to run my little C-type sizeof program, and found out that I hadn’t recompiled it since I was running on a PPC. rosetta doesn’t install by default in Snow Leopard. so I went to re-compile it only to find out gcc had gone missing. all I had to do was install the new XCode on the Snow Leopard DVD, and then download the iphone SDK 3.

I needed to write some code to find out my local machine’s IP address. I wanted to tell another machine my IP address so that other machine could open a socket connection back to my machine. A little googling turned up some sample code which works on both Linux and Mac OS X. Also I fiddled around with that code and condensed it down a bit.

A new version of Debian stable has been released! My firewall machine, entropy, is currently running the “old” Debian stable (etch). Sometime soon I’ll update to the new stable release, Debian 5.0 Lenny. Just for reference, here is how I will update: edit /etc/apt/sources.list, change all occurrences of etch to lenny, then run these commands as root: aptitude update aptitude install apt dpkg aptitude aptitude full-upgrade when it is done, then I’ll have to reboot to start using the new kernel.

I’ve been looking for some programs to restore functionality I lost when I left kde 3.5. glipper is an ok clipboard history application. although each entry only gets 99 characters. liferea is almost as good an RSS Reader as akregator-kde3 (and MUCH better than akregator-kde4). evolution is a mixed bag. it’s great for contacts, calendars, and imap, but LDAP won’t work, so no corporate address book, which is going to be a problem.

the first one I tried, liferea, has most of the good points from the kde 3.5 akregator: feeds with unread articles stand out with bold text, and the number of unread articles is tucked up next to the title. if there are no unread articles, there is no number. simple yet effective and readable at a glance.

I can’t believe I’m typing this. I’m logged in with gnome as my desktop. I’m going to use it on all my computers for the next few days or a week and see how it goes. KDE4 bothers me this much. KDE4 keeps getting better, but I believe it will take at least another year to reach the polish of KDE 3.5. and I’m finding that in ubuntu, gnome is actually MORE polished than my beloved KDE 3.

Let me start off by saying that CVS and Subversion are both outdated systems that no one in their right mind should use for a new project. (If you are starting a new project, I would recommend managing your source code with Mercurial). Unfortunately, I have in the past been forced to use CVS, and I am now forced to use Subversion. I had hoped that Subversion would truly be an upgrade over CVS, since Subversion promises merge tracking.

I’ve gotten in the habit of playing music on my big stereo via iTunes running on my Mac. A handy remote control for this is the Apple-created iPhone app called “Remote”. it looks like an ipod on your phone, but it’s controlling an iTunes running on a Mac over the network. It works well enough, but not perfectly. Lag time between waking up the iPhone and being able to control iTunes is in the neigborhood of 5 seconds, which is an eternity when you’re used to instant digital gratification.

I would like to switch away from using quicksilver to using spotlight for all my searching; it will be simpler to use one interface instead of two. QuickSilver does quite a few things that spotlight will not do (and vice versa). but most of the things I want to do are covered by spotlight, with one notable and nearly fatal exception: searching for saved Terminal.app session files. I ssh to other machines often, and I set up a saved terminal session for each machine.

I unfortunately have some songs I bought from the itunes music store using the FairPlay DRM. I know, I know, that was a mistake. well now I’m stuck with about 55 songs I can’t play in linux, and I have to worry about making sure I don’t run out of the 5 auths for my macs (which is a much more serious and likely scenario) some songs can be ‘upgraded’ for 30 cents to a non-drm version (and a higher sampling rate too).

I’ve been trying to display stuff in full screen mode from my mac on my television which accepts VGA input. After plugging in the cable, going through setting up the display in system preferences, I was easily able to make the TV be a second screen sitting next to my macbook’s built in lcd. So then I moved a preview.app window over to the television (drug it over using the mouse).

I’m running Mac OS X version 10.5 (leopard), and I’ve install xcode 3.1. I need gnumeric and gnucash, which I use to track my finances. The current stable rsync version of fink contains gnumeric 1.8.1-3 and gnucash 2.2.5-52, both of which are close enough to the versions I have in Ubuntu Hardy Heron and Intrepid Ibex to be useable. gnumeric and its dependencies compiled and installed fine. the gnucash2 package, however, failed building some dependent library.

I bought a new cablemodem. Each morning this week, the cablemodem was down until lunch time. last night it went down too. today it never came back on. From what I hear, they actually wear out slowly and sporadically… they will just start getting flakey, rather than die all at once. The old cablemodem was still flashing orange lights when I unplugged it and put the new one in. it took a couple minutes for the new one to get all

I was doing stuff on my computer tonight at home, then I realized I had updated my calendar at work but hadn’t pushed the changes to the server (I did a git commit, but not a git push, I was in a hurry to leave to pick up aiden from school). no prob, I thought, I’ll just log in to the vpn, get on my computer at work (fission), and push the changes.

now I’m thinking about re-building my server too, after the successes with my workstation and laptop. for this one, I would get a new, big hard drive, and do the install on it, then copy all the files over. first step will be to shop for hard drives; they are cheap now, but I hope they still make the kind I need for my server, which is a turn of the century model.

I finally did something I’ve been meaning to do for years…. my computer desk has a shelf on it to put the monitor on. which means a person sitting at the desk is looking up at the monitor, rather than slightly down. which meant I couldn’t sit at the desk for more than 10 minutes. Tonight I spent an hour and half, moving the monitor, re-routing a dozen cables, and taking the shelf off.

I decided to go ahead and do a fresh install of kubuntu gutsy gibbon on my work laptop too. the main motivation was to utilize the disk space better. I wanted to eliminate some little or not-at-all used partitions, and I was almost out of space in my /work partition. this install went almost as smooth as on Jupiter, but the laptop has a lot more software on it and a lot more requirements.

upon reading that the newest ubuntu release, gutsy gibbon, had support in the installer for encrypted partitions, I decided it was time to do an install from scratch on my workstation, Jupiter. Jupiter was running fiesty fawn, and the whole disk was encrypted, but I practically had to roll my own initial ramdisk to get it set up, and I doubted that would make it through a dist-upgrade to gutsy without some serious intervention.

so debian etch is totally rocking. It was a fun experience just reading the installation manual. The manual was impressive, I’ve not seen a work which conveyed so much information in so little words. Let me explain what I mean by that; I, as an expert Linux user, found the directions extremely helpful, easy to follow, with just the right amount of hints along the way. However, a Linux newb would be hopelessly lost.

got debian etch booted on entropy. the only problem I had was I tried at first to use lilo. several years ago, grub wouldn’t work on this machine, and I had to use lilo. Rembering that, I tried to install lilo from the get-go. but the complication of installing lilo into the second hard drive on the system so it would later boot as the first drive were a bit much.

My 90Mhz pentium named entropy has been my firewall machine (running iptables and a dns server) for quite a while now, without any trouble. unfortunately, it’s really been bothering me. why? because it was running Gentoo Linux, and had become un-upgradeable. it was at the point where nothing could be upgraded without first upgrading gcc, but the gcc build apparently requires 2gb of memory and/or swap space. Entropy has 128MB of ram, and a 4GB disk, not enough space to make a 2GB swap file without re-partitioning and doing a re-install.

Installed an Audio Link in my car. this adds an ipod dock connector in my glove compartment. It keeps the ipod charged, and also pipes the music through the cd change connector on the back of my head unit. The car thinks the ipod is a cd changer! (which has cd with thousands of songs on them) the steering wheel controls will change tracks, and the head unit itself can select between the first 5 playlists on the ipod, as well as fast forward and rewind within a song.

you, too, can upgrade to edgy

edgy eft was released today! (Ubuntu Linux version 6.10) my thinkpad is downloading about 996mb spread amongst 1500 new software packages right now as part of the dist-upgrade! for the curious, a photo of an eft

well, it’s been 3 weeks, and the new ups I exchanged has worked perfectly so far (no sudden computer shutdowns). I’m ready to tenatively declare success. my first one must have been bad.

the optical drive on my ibook is dead. I was going to burn a cd today. the drive opened normally, but when I closed the door it didn’t want to latch. once I finally got it to latch, it wouldn’t see the blank cd I had put in. then it wouldn’t eject. got out a pin, stuck it in the manual eject hole, and the display went dark. hmm. eventually got the disc out, and booted up again.

the Tripplite OMNI1000LCD UPS which I had raven (my server) plugged in to was still shutting off on me. at this point, I had one computer, 1 ethernet switch, 1 ethernet hub, and a kvm switch plugged into the battery. it should be able to handle that. then I moved the little stuff off battery, leaving only the computer. Even then, I’ve had it power off. Today I exchanged the UPS for another one (same model) hoping that perhaps the one I got was bad.

I like KDE, and one of the reasons I prefer it over something like GNOME is the IOSlaves framework (fish is one of my favorites). basically, any part of kde can interact with any type of data or protocol as long as someone has written an IOSlave to handle it. a very powerful paradigm, which gives you lots of functionality in suprising places, much of which is unduplicated on any platform (yes, including Windows and Mac OS X).

in the last few years, I’ve not had a power outage last more than a second. but that second wreaks havoc with the kvm switch, and also Raven (AMD Athlon Thunderbird 1.33GHz, server) tends not to boot after a power outage because of the kvm being weird. so a 1 second (or less) power loss usually results in nearly an hour of unplugging and replugging kvm cables to get the kvm going again.

my poor ibook g3, after 5 hours of surgery last night and this morning, is a changed computer. the ibook had long suffered from a bad gpu connection on the logic board, resulting in a mostly unreadable display. now, thanks to some web insight, a nice slab of copper (thank you, Chelby), and a cabinet door bumper, the ibook display is perfect again. I took advantage of the disassembly requirement to replace the hard drive, with a slightly fast and larger capacity drive.

As I’ve mentioned previously, I’ve switch Linux distributions, from gentoo to ubuntu. I was having too many hassles with gentoo. anyway, I was searching the gentoo forums to try to solve a problem on one of the left-over gentoo machines at work, and stumbled across this thread (don’t bother reading past the first page). sounds like others are leaving too.

turns out nine inch nails is tied with depeche mode as my favorite band. here’s my top 10 highest rated bands. the number is how many songs by that artist made it into my top 82 songs: nine inch nails: 8 depeche mode: 8 madonna: 5 van halen: 4 tori amos: 3 beastie boys: 3 alice in chains: 3 aerosmith: 3 the white stripes: 2 prince: 2

my wife’s ibook suffered a fatal hard drive failure. last time we backed it up to the imac was in december. :( among the data lost was her calendar (ical) and addressbook. I had a copy of her calendar (so I can know when she’s busy :) but not the addressbook. fortunately, we were syncing her contacts and calendars to her ipod, and that had last been done only 2 weeks ago.

it seems like I won’t be a Gentoo Linux user for much longer. My server (Gentoo Linux) has suffered a lot of problems lately. I think that Gentoo now has too many packages and too few developers. pretty much any update I’ve done in the last 6 months on any of the 6 or so computers I maintain has caused non-trivial problems. I’ve now changed my server, my work machine, and my desktop machine over to ubuntu.

I’ve had an ipod for a while now and knew about the ‘my highest rated’ smart playlist, but it was just a few days ago that I actually looked at it. sometimes while listening to the ipod at work, if a good song came up I’d rate it somewhere between 1 and 5 stars. I’m pretty conservative with the 5-star rating; to get five stars, you have to be a song that I expect I’ll never get tired of.

Gentoo is my favorite Linux distribution. However, I recently tried out ubuntu which bills itself as Linux for Human Beings''. Ubuntu definitely has that OS X feeling ofit just works”. if you want to try out Linux, or you are a hard-core linux geek tired of fiddling with settings, ubuntu is definitely nice. since it’s debian based, you only have to install once, and upgrades are typically painless. out of all the obscure programs I use, I’ve only run in to 2 which weren’t available in ubuntu.

I’ve spent way too much time playing with gnu arch (tla) and git lately. if you are simply tracking source code, I’d recommend using git. if you are making changes to a project someone else maintains, and you periodically want to submit patches to the upstream maintainer, and so are constantly needing to re-sync and re-apply your unaccepted patches, git is again my recommendation. if however you have gone off the deep end like me, and you are maintaining multiple branches of a project, you routinely merge some patches in some of the branches, but some patches must not end up in the other branches, then gnu arch (tla) is the only way to manage that.

oops, turns out stat has been rolled into GNU coreutils, and the version there compiles and runs fine in OS X. oh well, it kept me entertained at the airport.

I got the linux ‘stat’ system call wrapper working in OS X. Here it is

today is the anniversary of my birth. The best part will be going to see the Zoo lights wife my wife and son. The stable linux kernel 2.6.0 was released late last night, just in time. I installed it on most of my computers today. [caption id=“attachment_19002” align=“alignnone” width=“300” caption=“ocotillo running Linux kernel 2.6.0, and KDE desktop”][/caption] I even have moderator access on slashdot today! Can’t get any better than this.

now aol.com won’t accept email from me anymore either. oh well, just added aol.com to the paranoid domains list

I’ve just started using mediacom’s cable modem service. Sprint Broadband has been quite slow for the past few months, and are taking on no new customers. I could see the writing on the wall. So far, so good. mediacom is definitely faster. The DNS change seems to have propagated much quicker than expected. Only around 4 hours for me to see the change, and for email to start arriving at desertsol.

roadrunner (rr.com) just started a global policy that all email originating from a residential'' IP address is rejected, the assumption being that it's an open relay or virus infested. My IP of course isresidential” so all emails chelby sent to her friend in San Diego (san.rr.com) were bounced. Now my exim setup has a special rule for ``paranoid domains”. Mail to be delivered to any of the domains in that list are relayed through my ISP’s SMTP server rather than being delivered directly.

All partitions (except /boot) are now reiserfs on my ibook. I’ve seen a huge increase in performance for ‘qpkg’, and ‘emerge’. qpkg is faster than epm now! Also, someone just created a patch for the ppc linux kernel so the touchpad can emulate a scrollwheel like in OS X.

synergy is a great app! When you have multiple computers and they each have their own monitor. It’s even cross-platform, so I use it at work. My main machine is for development and runs gentoo linux. I also have a windows 2000 machine for outlook and project central. Synergy allows my to cut and past between the two machines, and use my linux machine’s keyboard and mouse to control both machines.

I’ve been slowly migrating all my file systems to ReiserFS, away from ext3. I haven’t bothered to do any benchmarking of my own, I’m trusting everyone else’s benchmarks. the scary one is my ibook; there are rumors of ReiserFS instability on ppc. So far I just switched the /data partition. I keep pictures, mp3s, and my ccache there, all data which is expendable or also resides somewhere else. I’m doing some emerging on the machine lately, as well as development for work, so ccache is getting lots of access.

just switched all my systems to use metalog rather than syslog-ng for system logs. Once you take the time to read the metalog docs, it’s much more straightforward than the other loggers I’ve used. plus it buffers all the output for ‘high performance’. the only real benefit I hope to achieve from that is that perhaps my laptop hard drive will stay turned off longer. when you need to debug something, you can turn off the buffering with ‘killall -USR1 metalog’ and back on with ‘killall -USR2 metalog’

Somebody in the army had a great idea for using some of their advertising budget. They created a combat simulation video game called America’s Army! Apparently it’s so good that all West Point cadets are issued a laptop with the game installed. and of course you can play over the net. and it’s free since it’s an advertisement! They just created a linux port of the game, and an OS X version is on the way.

so having used zsh for a while, I’m definitely glad I changed. my only irritant is that when I hit ‘escape’ then the ‘/’ key to search in my history, I have to pause for 0.4 seconds between the two so zsh uses the search history meaning for that key combo rather than the generic completion meaning. There is a shell variable that allows you to adjust the interval: KEYTIMEOUT. have to try that with 0.

so I just dropped tcsh in favor of zsh. I’d been thinking of doing it for a long time, mainly because I knew that zsh’s command line vi mode is much better than tcsh’s. the ‘.’ for repeating your last command works, the cut buffer works (so the classic ‘xp’ for transposing characters works), and you can even use ‘marks’ in your history. But I haven’t even looked into all the completions that zsh is famous for, and I’ve already found lots of nice features tcsh didn’t have.

we’re flying home in the morning for my wife’s baby shower number 1 (or baby shower east if you prefer). We decided not to bring our laptops since it’s only a few days and taking it on the plane is a big hassle. I spent several days psyching myself up to this idea. Now I’m excited about reading on the plane rather than playing with my laptop. But today Chelby realized she needs to bring her laptop so she can show pictures to everyone at the shower!

I’ve solved all my backspace problems! it turns out that all my earlier attempts to fix the backspace key eventually became the problem. modern terminals all handle backspace correctly. Once I removed all ‘stty erase’ commands from all my rc files, the backspace began to work correctly in all environments, windows, linux, OS X, console, ssh, etc. I worked very hard to give myself so much trouble!

I have an excuse this time for not updating in so long: my wife got tired of me using her laptop and got me one! So I’ve been quite consumed installing Linux on it and setting up Mac OS X.

I’m trying out a new version of KDE. I try to dabble with different environments, just to see what they’re like. I still haven’t found anything to lure me away from blackbox, but this new kde has come the closest yet. First off, this is by far the fastest KDE I’ve seen! It feels an order of magnitude faster than KDE 3.0.3 was. Usually, KDE has been slow as a dog for me, but calling it ‘snappy’ now enters the realm of possibility.

For some reason, the backspace key has been a persistent issue for me. At first, the line ‘stty erase ^h’ in my .tcshrc file gave me a good backspace, instead of the ‘^h’s showing up when I hit the backspace key. Then when Redhat 7.1 came out, my backspace wouldn’t work in vim anymore, when I ran it in an xterm. It turned out that in /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/app-defaults/XTerm they put this line: *VT100*backarrowKey: false when I changed it to true, my backspace key worked again.

I really dig cryptography. It’s quite a concept that I can scramble some data in such a way that if I got electrocuted tomorrow, no one would be able to read the data for at least a few decades (and that’s assuming a fundamental mathematical breakthrough). The main two algorithms I use to explicitly encrypt data are RC4 (in the form of my own ciphersabers) and rijndael (AES) in the form of a kernel loop back device.

At my new job, I have to learn VAX assembly language, in order to port an app to C++, linux, and even (shudder) windoze. I have done a bit of assembly programming before, but never on a VAX. the VAX has instructions for handling linked lists!! can you say ‘Complex Instruction Set’?? But the reason I’m posting this is to record the feeling I’ve been getting this week as I learn the new language.

gentoo also has another client with it, called ‘kluje’. Despite the name, I like it better than logjam.

this entry is in logjam. After I followed the link from the livejournal page for gtk+ clients and saw the client was called logjam, I checked to see if gentoo had an ebuild for it with ‘emerge -s logjam’. for some reason there were two, so I picked the newer one and installed it with ‘emerge net-misc/logjam’. I’m amazed every day at gentoo linux

I can’t believe my account still works! time to go download a client.

there is finally an rpm up for gnumeric-0.65 on www.rpmfind.net. Getting it to install took several trips back to rpmfind to fill in newer or missing rpms. Beware! the liconv and libgal7 ximian rpms installed all their stuff in /opt/gnome instead of /usr like a sane rpm should. I made /opt be a symlink to /usr, and then symlinked the libraries in /usr/gnome back to /usr/lib. My main spreadsheet program used to be the one from star office, but it was annoying to put up with star office’s HUGE memory footprint just to get a spreadsheet.

A new version of jpilot for syncing your palm pilot in linux is out.

got the new mozilla working today (0.9.1) in linux. This release is a tremendous step forward! Renders html as fast as opera, but the result looks better. I had trouble getting the java plugin to work at first, it turned out I had an rpm installed of an earlier milestone. Once I removed the old version, the new version worked fine. Here’s my resulting install process: Download the newest binary (here).

here’s a url: the perl script I’m using to post this with