gregoa's blog

... the first leap second in seven years!

thanks to jwz for this enlightning blog entry.

holidays (i.e. reducing overtime hours).
two weeks.
finally.

sleeping.
playing guitar.
reading (newsgroups, feeds, newspapers, ...).
some coding & some bugreports.

outside temperature: -14°C.

finally I managed to get reading PGP/MIME messages in slrn working. cf. my article on this subject.

tried again to work on the named pipe for randomplay (cf. my entry from last weekend). the current status is that I know when randomplay writes to the pipe & when it doesn't, & that my small (reading) shell script can handle the results in a sane way. zombies are left only when I go to the next song; but they are cleaned on exit, & the named pipe is removed as well. - in fact I hardly changed anything — maybe just waiting for 7 or 8 days was enough.

better than nothing. & — oh yes: my ion3 status bar tells me what I'm listening to, too ;-)

update 1: I slowly seem to get rid of the zombies with some $SIG{CHLD} magic.
update 2: & later they re-appeared again.

lying in the bath tub for over two hours is healthy. what I did:

• I read "der knochenmann" by wolf haas. my first novel by this author. summary: now I know him, using more verbs would definitely help his language, and: appropriate reading for bath tubs & holidays.
• I tore the splinter out of my foot after the latter was macerated enough from soaking ...

went to bed at 03:07. woke up at 09:38. went to the toilet. went to bed again. woke up at 14:44 again.

failure

what I like about xmms is the named pipe (provided by xmms-info) that can be used to read informations about the currently playing track. so I tried to implement a similar feature into randomplay; sometimes success seemed close & sometimes it seemed far away. finally I surrendered - being not able to reproduce phenomena makes debugging meaningless. - I guess I should learn more about named pipes, fork(), zombies, maybe threads, kill signals, and stuff like that.

success

to make up for the failure with randomplay I created an RSS feed for my movie database. - I'm sure it will be read & syndicated by a great many people :-)

I like to go to the movies. I like to have the schedule of my favourite movie theatre in my communicator's calendar. unfortunately they still haven't managed to publish it as a simple CSV file (although the manager has promised me to offer such a thing & it should be a matter of some minutes to create a PHP script for this purpose - cf. the URLs on their schedule page.)

anyway, today's a holiday in austria, so I used the time to write a little script that creates a nice CSV file with some wget/html2text/recode/grep/perl/sed magic.

having some linux tools around often comes in handy ;-)

at 3:13 a.m. the door bell rings. once. twice. I get curious & open the door. - the young woman in front of the door shudders horrified & mutters "sorry". - wtf?

yesterday my computer suddenly shut down without any warning or beeps or anything while I was rendering a video; obviously the cpu overheated. after opening the chassis I knew why - the cpu fan was hardly visible under an enormous dust cluster.

after cleaning everything my good belanna is working like a charm again.

update: installed lm-sensors & sensord afterwards, compiled a new kernel including the lm-sensors-modules, & I hope that I configured everything right.