Computing

Computers have been a big part of my life, going all the way back to my childhood.  Our first "family computer" was a Xerox 820 with dual, 8" floppy drives.  It had a few games, including Zork of course, but was mainly a business machine with a Z80 processor running CP/M.  I can still hear the specific noises the floppy drive made just before I was about to die in Zork.  Later we acquired an Eagle PC-2, which was an 8088-based IBM PC clone.  It had a lot of embedded peripherals, but only had 4 ISA slots for expansion.  Finally we moved up to an AT clone that mostly replaced it.  That machine went through many iterations (286@12, 286@16, 386SX@16, 386DX@32, etc), as it was mostly built out of scrap parts from my dad's work.  The Spinrite screen was a common sight, as we limped the mostly-dead hard drives along.

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subversion-helper-scripts 0.6-1

Posted on December 16, 2008.

Version 0.6-1 of subversion-helper-scripts has been released.

Changes

• Fix naming convention of config files in tools versus documentation.
• Don't use 'source' in non-bash scripts.

site-upload 0.6-1

Posted on December 16, 2008.

Version 0.6-1 of site-upload has been released.

Changes

• Only check the checksum if the modification time changed.
• Really fix stamp updates when there is an upload failure.
• More stamp updating/checking cleanups.

site-upload 0.5-1

Posted on December 13, 2008.

Version 0.5-1 of site-upload has been released.

Changes

• Add --checksum method of change detection.
• Add --force-stamp option to allow stamp file fix-ups.
• Major cleanup of how stamps get updated.
• Continue uploading if something goes wrong, but don't update that stamp.

DAViCal is not quite RSCDS

Posted on December 03, 2008.

At one point I had a working CalDAV store on my home server using RSCDS 0.9.2.  It was a little touchy and the clients were flaky (Sunbird/Lightning and Evolution), but it worked.  One day it didn't, which turned out to be an unnoticed upgrade of the rscds package.  I just recently had a chance to look into the issue.

It seems to have been an issue with the database schema, but I decided to upgrade to the latest package instead, now called davical.  Well that turned into a big mess, as I couldn't even get it to work with a completely clean database.  Everything looked great in the admin interface, even after re-importing all of the events, but the caldav.php interface would return a completely empty response to all clients.  Not even a VCalendar...just nothing.  After fighting with it for several hours, I found that the issue was actually with libawl (Andrew's own little utility library).  Apparently, DAViCal 0.9.6.2 does not like libawl 0.33.  Upgrading to 0.34 fixed the issue.

Hopefully Andrew will fix the package dependency.

Fixed minimopar.net

Posted on November 27, 2008.

Brought the MiniMopar domains and subdomains back from the dead.  I originally registered my domains with register.com.  They got sold-off somehow to an affiliate program and my domain management migrated to this random-sounding "northsky.com" site.  They have since gone away and I couldn't figure out where to manage my domains.  I was getting charged for registration by a completely different company, United Online, which is some conglomerate company for lots of different post-dot-com companies.  They had no idea why they were charging me and register.com claimed no ownership of the domains in question either.  Anyway, I finally found that I could log into yet another completely different site and manage them.  What a pain.