10:20pm
[Br]DSL
It's amazing - you actually can categorize people by their ISP. For some reason, Flashcom had to get rid of some users or something. For some reason unknown to me these users now are coming to my ISP (speakeasy) - I guess SE had a deal with Flashcom, or Covad or whatever. Anyway, so now there are zillions of Flashcom users joining and they post inane messages and really stupid questions all over the local newsgroup (speak.easy). The flashcom users all seem to be complete morons, no exception. The signal/noise ratio is right now officially unbearable - and I still follow it, why axactly?

5:30 pm

Code
Spent most of last week working on "ls" for my Unix-class. Yesterday I finally fixed the main problem: when using malloc to allocate the memory for the strings I print I got garbage and segfaults when I ran the program on big filesystems, such as "ls -R /". Using calloc fixed this problem - I;m not sure why exactly, but hey, it works now. I assume it's b/c I strcat a lot and calloc initilizes the memory to 0, while malloc doesn't.
Anywho, it's working quite nicely, and only uses double as much memory as "the real thing", even if run on "ls -R /". Now I just gotta implement the whole dammn thing with ftw as well, for IRIX. Blargs.



Hardware weirdness
So the other day my machine died. Just like that - it's been running for something like 40 days or so, and I sit here and suddenly I hear this sound "kickknack crunchyknackmunch", my HD starts spinning and everything locks up. Totally dead. I have to reset. Ok - reset, boot... "Couldn't find primary disk".
Arrrgs - I had that last summer some time, the machine suddenly decided that my primary HD was gone. I turned it off for a couple of minutes and eventually it came back up, pretending nothing ever happened. That's scary - and weird. Anybody got an idea what's going on with that?

Movies
Est/Ouest - last night. Pretty good - kinda scary to imagine that things were actually like this.

The Pledge - saw it on Friday. That was quite good - a little lengthy in parts, but in general very good. Beautiful landscapes - too bad one can not live there, b/c everybody around you is a complete moron. Anyway, Jack Nickolson was very good. It's after a book by Dürrenmatt, who I always liked a lot.

12:45

Code
Been spending most of my days writing either C or Java. Java for my project which is easy and fun. C for another class, which is hard and fun. I think I mentioned that I have to write "ls" - man that's quite a tedious task, I realized. Now I have to working quite neatly so far, only to find out that IRIX does not have fts.h, while NetBSD does not have ftw.h,
Now I have the choice of re-writing most of the code in lots of ifdefs or writing my own fts-like library. What a pain in the ass. Also, I have not yet thought about how I format the output - just plain white-spaces and tabs don't do it, so I guess I have to print all the info into a string which I format at the end?
I shouldn't look at the ls-source, I guess - but I might take a peek.

Movie
Saw Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon on Friday. That was fun. Very cool and stylish, though not that fantastic as people say it is. I mean, 10 Oscar nominations?

Cheap Plug
Linux Journal published an article of mine on their website: Usenet is still a strange place. That's neat.

10:20am

Movie
Saw High Fidelity last night. Enjoyed it. When it came out last year, I didn't think I would want to watch it, because the previews looked kinda stupid and didn't really tell you what the movie was about (it's not about this guy and his record-store and him being funny), but it actually was very entertaining. Easy entertainment for a mellow evening.

School
I really like this class "Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment" - it's nice to finally have a class where we do what I like. Our midterm project will be to write "ls" as specified by the NetBSD man-pages. Actually looks like quite some work - you never really appreciate these little programs...

My Senior Design Project is coming along well - did a lot of Java hacking and we are actually a little ahead of schedule with respect to our first milestone. It's fun to have a "real" project and do all these meetings and code-review etc for school.

Misc
taj: if you want to learn to program your Palm, get O'Reilley's "Palm Programming - The Developers Guide", it's a good book. Also, palm has a lot of documentation on their website. I myself wrote some documentation when I programmed for the palm last summer, you can check it out here.

mrorganic is right - USENET is a fun (weird) place to spend some time. And, yes, one does need some good filters.

And I also want <code></code> tags...

2pm

School
This school is a complete mess. Yesterday, classes were calcelled due to the snowstorm. Ok, that's neat. Now this morning, I get up, it's a bright and shiny sunny day outside, so I go into school, and guess what? Morning classes were cancelled up until 10am. And the email telling me this was sent out at 10:30am. *sigh* they always do that.

Movie
Saw Heat last night. Pretty good, I must say. In the beginning there were a bunch of scenes that were hard to understand, context wise, but in general a pretty good movie. I still don't get over it how old Pacino is - compared to The Godfather!

JServ and Webmail
Made some progeess: all the default servlets coming with JServ are working, no prob there. When configuring Webmail I do get a lot to work, at least as far as the error-log is concerend (a lot of "checking xyz... ok" etc), but then it complains about a JavaException "MethodNotFound". Great, methodnotfound even though CLASSPATH and all that crap seems right. I don't know, maybe I'll put the project on ice for a few days - got some Homework for thie Network managmanet class to do - some SNMP stuff.