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.