ronny.haryan.to » TILT

Things I Learned Today

ronny — Fri, 29 Apr 2005 14:24:53 +0000

I finally read this article (which had been sitting for a long time in my thick pile of printed “read-later” articles) from Apple Developer Connection about XMLHttpRequest which plays a major part in AJAX, which has been discussed a lot lately in the web development area and is used by popular services such as Gmail, Google Maps, Google Suggest and many more.
Maybe I should have named this category “Things I Learned Yesterday” since I usually post after midnight.
There are still a lot of people who are so naive and believe everything they got from the Internet or from forwarded emails, especially urban-legend or scarelore kind of stories. I hate those.
CeBIT Australia exists and it will be held from 24 to 26 May 2005 at Sydney Exhibition Centre in Darling Harbour. I’ll be there if I don’t have any exams or anything like that during that time. Free online registration.
Need to put less ginger and more salted fish for my spicy eggplant with minced pork.
A second look on iSCSI and iSCSI on Linux, and a first introduction to Vinum Volume Manager after reading a Slashdot post about Firewire storage.
There are several available options for backup solutions that are POSIX ACL aware, including using star, proper backup program like Arkeia, patched NFS (out-of-the-box with SuSE), rsync with ACL patch, etc. Info from this post, googled after answering a mailing list post.
“IT Research Methods” is such a boring and useless (at least for me) subject. It’s hard to force myself to do the assignments for this subject. I wouldn’t have taken the subject if it weren’t mandatory. Oh, what the hell, might as well make something useful out of it since I’ve already paid for it.
Evolution 2.0.x doesn’t provide an alarm for contact items such as for contact birthdays and anniversaries. I haven’t looked at the source code yet so I don’t know how hard it is to implement this. It’s surprising since I thought many people would have wanted this useful feature.

TILT: Gentoo Runlevels

ronny — Tue, 26 Apr 2005 06:04:55 +0000

Runlevels in Gentoo are meaningful names instead of numbers. However, underneath they are still numbers, and the mapping is done in /etc/inittab. The symlinks are in /etc/runlevels.

    l0:0:wait:/sbin/rc shutdown
    l1:S1:wait:/sbin/rc single
    l2:2:wait:/sbin/rc nonetwork
    l3:3:wait:/sbin/rc default
    l4:4:wait:/sbin/rc default
    l5:5:wait:/sbin/rc default
    l6:6:wait:/sbin/rc reboot

This is different than what I was used to (Red Hat and Fedora). In RH or Fedora, runlevel 3 is the default runlevel with no X, and runlevel 5 will start X and a graphical login manager like gdm. In Gentoo by default the graphical login manager is started at boot when the xdm service is added to the default runlevel with rc-update add xdm default.

As you see from the snippet of my /etc/inittab above, runlevels 3, 4 and 5 all map to the default runlevel. So if I wanted to make runlevel 3 and 5 behave like RH or Fedora, I could change the map for runlevel 3 to, say, console and then create the console directory in /etc/runlevels then start adding the services I want to start in the console runlevel with rc-update add ... console, minus xdm of course.

TILT: A New Category

ronny — Sat, 23 Apr 2005 16:47:24 +0000

I have always wanted to write informative and comprehensive articles based on what I have learned. But being the Great Procrastinator™, most of the times I couldn’t be bothered enough or do not have the time to write longer than two sentences max. So I thought, “Hey, why not just write it down anyway, and stick it together with the other things I have learned today, and call it ‘Things I Learned Today’?” So there it is.

After all this is what web logs were really meant for originally, writing logs on the web.

The first entry is probably longer than the expected average TILT post length because I had some time to spare today.

I decided to combine the items together in one post instead of splitting them into separate posts. It’s not about the length, there’s nothing wrong with short posts. It’s just that I feel that I could include more interesting stuff in the combined post which would otherwise not be included because they might not have been “blogworthy” by themselves.

Things I Learned Today

ronny — Sat, 23 Apr 2005 16:28:24 +0000

SMART hard disk monitoring, emerged smartmontools, and set smartd to run in the background. (Via Slashdot)
The Vigenère Cipher, I knew this from my cryptography class so it’s just refreshing my memory. (Via blogwalking to Mr. GBT)
Next time, put more breadcrumbs for the stuffing. (Via cooking roast turkey)
X.org X11 transparency and shadowing is still not stable, e.g. glxgears caused X to crash even with AllowGLXWithComposite enabled. (Via Gentoo Wiki)
AUD 1 = IDR 7,500++, and rising. (Via Yahoo! Finance)
There’s a Japanese pr0n model/actor named Anna Ohura, not to be confused with Anne Ahira. (Via a dream I had the other night. As if I’d tell you.)
A soda can and chocolate can be used to make fire. (Via Boing Boing)
The notorious TBE managed to screw up my Firefox, again, after an upgrade. I had to make a backup of my Firefox profile, delete the extensions directory and reinstall all of my Firefox extensions. It was strange that after I reinstall TBE it was working fine again. So I stuck with it, for now… but one of these days…
I finally know what Podcasting is about. I’ve heard about it for so long but I couldn’t be bothered to look it up in Wikipedia or Google until this morning. (Via blogwalking to Priyadi)
There’s a Wiki clone written in Ruby called Instiki that seems to be recommended by some people. Not in portage yet, so I haven’t bothered trying. (Via Nat)