Ceesaxp.Blog

There’s been some (usual) neglect of this blog on my part, mostly due to (usual) lack of time, etc. I’ve been traveling a little on business and for pleasure, but also have not had much to say/put up here. Can’t really call this a proper weblog, rerally — it is not active enough, I suppose.

I am still on the look-out for a tool to make this whole thing easier. While BlogMax seemed like a nice tool (and I am still using it) at the start, I am not happy with a few things (most of them were mentioned before):

• It forces me to type this up in a wierd mixture of proper and improper HTML. By proper I mean that I am intentionally typing this up as close to “proper” as I can — I am not relying on BlogMax’s magic of turning plain text (and it ain’t all the plain to start with) into a HTML.
• It’s RSS proc is really bad, and I can’t seem to be able to easily fix it — looks a lot likelier that it simply needs to be re-written.

I’ve given a try to Markdown as a stand-alone thingie (i.e. I’ve piped some text files through it) and results are really good, but does not help to actually maintain a blog — only stroies within one.

As stated before, since this is not an active blog, more of a random notes/opinions/ideas, Norm’s approach seems a lot more fitting here as well, but I am not too inclined to re-implement the whole of his model, since it won’t allow me to really do it from any where (not like I can now either though), and also since it is not trivial technically — there’s lots and lots of dependencies, etc. that need to be addressed...

I guess I keep on barking onto the same tree...

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As for kids, our daughter is growing — and we can’t stop being amazed at what pace! Seems like it was only yesterday (a clichè, I know), that she was just a tiny something that could easily fit onto my forearms, but — no longer... To make her parents happiest couple in the world, she’s so smart for her two and a half years — it is at times scary. The other day, when we were in Vienna, taking a short touristy ride in a horse carriage, when told that we have to get off the carriage when we come to a stop, and no, we won’t be riding more, since horses are too tired and need to rest she replied without as much as wink of an eye: Well, we’ll just ride the next one in line, then.

I’ve been traveling a lot in the last 2-3 weeks, hence very few updates. I may also be moving some time in th e not-so-distant future. Not sure what my destination would be (still working that one out).

I am still looking for a more attractive way of maintaining the blog (you know, lame excuse for not maintaining it properly is difficulty of doing just that). There are a few things about PlannerMode that would need to be adjusted if I were to use it. On a related not — I’ve even thought about going with Blogger-propper...

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I’ve picked up Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver while on a trip to London and am reading it now. I am relly impressed, and might even do a write-up somewhere here about it...

I have not run any remotely formal comparison of the two, but I’m inclined to blieve that EmacsWikiMode is more elegant and natural. I use PlannerMode, which is based on EmacsWikiMode to keep a collection of notes about on-going projects at work and must say that overall I am pleased with it. There are still a few gotchas in terms of overall usability and consistency of the workflow, but by and large it is very usable.

What puts me off a little is wiki stuff itself. It sort of feels silly, and then the name — “wiki.” What’s up with that? Where did it come from in the first place? Turned out it is Hawaiian word, or rather portion of it. Appaarently wiki wiki means quick.

Another little problem is that I’ll need to figure out a way to generate a calendar table if I were to switch. I’d also need to setup redirects to/from older content (well, not like there’s much of it, but...).

Ultimately, I would probably prefer to do content publishing more along the lines of Norman Walsh’s blog, i.e. by writing stories up in a subset of DocBook and publishing HTML/PDF/RSS content through XSL transformation.

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On a slightly different issue: I’ve been trying to turn my old ThinkPad 770E into a WAP for home LAN. Sure, I could find a cheap one in a store and not waste 3-4 nights doing this, but the sheer joy of fiddling with all things technical...

Anyway, the verdict is as follows: FreeBSD 5.x series are a death row for this aincient piece of hardware (It’s from 1998 — nearly six years old!): while standalone it would boot without any issues, the moment PC Card goes into a slot — things get very dicy. It locks up. Something to do with ACPI resource allocation. I suspect that a non-functioning battery is not helping here either.

FreeBSD 4.5 is behaving a lot more gracefully. I just don’t feel like upgrading it all the way to recent -STABLE (is is 4.9?)...

I have been looking at PlannerMode’s RSS code — looks like it could be sort of ported to BlogMax, the question is whether this would be really worth it...

This is, obviously, entirely subjective, but I would find it very difficult not to have a proper winter during the year. On the days like the ones a that happned quite a few times over the last couple of weeks — when a light frost is biting your nose and cheecks and a magical feather-light snow is falling all around....

The air is crisp and sweet — can an air on some sunny beach ever smell like that? If you let the temperature to fall a few more degrees, then snow itself would become crunchy, start squeaking under your feet. Can sand behave like that? I did not think so.

Of course, there are bad and ugly parts of winter as well — like when it is snowing slit, or that same snow that was so clean and pure just a few days ago starts to melt, turning into a terrible mess... But I still am pretty sure that even a couple of weeks of real winter are worth that.

Now, the problem is that there has not been a single real winter in my homeland for the past 10-15 years. And all the joy of real thing this year comes from Prague...

I've been traveling most of the last week — spent two days in Budapest at first, then went to London. Tough — quite a bit of travel and I am feeling a bit tired as I write this entry at 1am on Sunday morning.

The reason for staying up late (I’ve landed around 9pm Sat) is generally due to two items: I’ve finally gotten my hands onto Panther and I’ve bought iLife. There is not really too much to say yet, except that upgarde seems to have gone smoothly (knocks on wooden floor). The look is, indeed, much more subtle and soft. I really love Expose — makes switching actually even easier than Alt-Tabbing Windows-way. Otherwise — it is too early (or late? I’m condused...) to say much.

I have not bought iLife for GarageBand, as a lot of other people around the net seem to claim. My two unsuccessful attempts to muster a guitar in the past has pretty much laid it out for me loud and clear that this is not something I can do well (if at all). No, in m y case it is iMovie and iDVD I was interested in. Again — more later (so far I’ve spotted only a few Title effects (in particular — Star Wars-style “A long-long time ago, in a Galaxy far, far away.”

One thing that impressed (?) me a lot while in London, was a number of people carrying iPods. It seemed like they were everywhere. It was very tempting to pick up one, but I managed to resist the temptation (for how long I wonder). Incidentally, I came across another gadget trying out my will: Palm’s Tungsten T3 PDA. It is a beauty, really. Feels like it really is time to replace my old Palm IIIx...

Have been struggling with trying to access iDisk to setup blogging from my office machine, but it seems like I am a bit out of luck. At least so far. The thing is that I am behind a firewall and can only access outside via an HTTP proxy. It’s been not too bad lately — I can now even SSH tunnel outside (e.g. I can access CVS repositories that have :ext: option enabled). This, however does not help the task at hand: accessing an external WebDAV resource like iDisk.

My first attempt was to try and use My Network Places, but it kept on stubbornly refusing to provide a logon prompt and, naturally was failing to connect (whether I used http:// or https:// URL).

I have then decided to try and use command line tool like nd or cadaver to try and access iDisk. I had some luck with nd — I was able to connect, but only if I:

• Explicitly declared the namespace with -a option
• I had to provide “proper” path — I could not try and read idisk.mac.com/ceesaxp (run like that nd segfaults, actually), but I could idisk.mac.com/ceesaxp/Sites.

I was not very sure what parts of nd are really working, as --help/-h lists quite a few items (like -c for copy remote file) as not being implemented. I’ve also tried to use eldav.el — an Emacs package that provides WebDAV support. It is, basically, an Emacs frontnd to nd, and it did not work for me at all, but this might be due to Windows Emacs, rahter than to any faults of eldav.el. Will have to check it on a non-Windows machine [Update Note: it did not work on FreeBSD either — I suspect that the problem might be with authentication. While it looks like it tries to access resource, it does not display any content, and when trying to savve it seems to try and do so locally.].

The other thing I tried was cadaver. It’s like an FTP client for DAV. I tried it the night before on my BSD machine and it worked. Not pretty, but working. Unfortunately, no such luck on a Win machine. When run with debug it seems to be mishandling the proxy, by trying to pass OPTIONS command through it (and gets rejected).

I will have to, I guess try out some commercial software — but it is a pitty that none of the above seemed to work out for me...

Oh!.. Before I forget — sitecopy was also behaving very funny claiming that remote was fully in synch with local, even though local was completely empty... Hence — no blogging (at least for now) from the working space. Hey — I’ll bw more productive! :)