Well, the van is dead. It proved to be a good vehicle and had a good life. In the end it just couldn’t keep up, and in the words of my Dad, I was supposed to “shoot it and put it out of it’s misery”. With $500 of engine repair and $1300 or tranny repair and more costs to get it licensed in Pennsylvania, I had to give up. It had a lived a nice good life.
Posts
One of the more interesting things about living in Pittsburgh is that we’re a lot closer to the coast and mountains (or hills, or bumps, whatever you call the Appalachians) and as such we get weather from the coasts. Last year I had to try an fly out while the remnants of Hurrican Isabel were bearing down on Pittsburgh. This year, we get the remnants of Hurricane Frances. It appears that it’s coming right for us.
Like most people, I find how both parties are using September 11th as a political device morally apalling. I also find the purple heart stickers that republican delegates are wearing a disgrace and shameful. But back to the main topic. The New York Times has an interesting article about the lives of a lot of the former workers at Windows on the World, the restaurant on the 107th floor of the World Trade Center.
Hot on the heels of me starting to use Log4Net in OSSim, comes my first code addition to the project. The original ColoredConsoleAppender only works on Windows because it calls Win32 APIs. I don’t really like that fact because I use Mono under Linux. However, I remember from my good old BBS days that you could use ANSI escape codes to do fun colors. These also work under Linux as that’s what you use to colorize your prompts (something I’m a fan of as it allows me to easily see what system I’m on).
I’ve decided that finally need a nice logging framework in place for OSSim. Without it, it’s going to be hard to track down what is going on in the application. Being as it’s written in C# I’ve decided to use log4net. Which seems all nice, but there is one major problem, I can’t actually build the software.
You see, in order to build log4net, one needs to use NAnt, which is basically Ant for .
For some reason I got an uncontrollable urge to force OSSim to use autoconf, automake, and assorted friends. It’s kinda nice knowing that I know have a real set of make files for the project. Unfortunately, it still is written in C# which means I’m limited to the ever increasing set of platforms that have a C# implementation.
Anyway, it proved to be more of a challenge than I thought. However, RedHat has the entire autobook online.
So rather than doing work today, I decided to write a nice little tutorial on how to use PyGTKMoz. It is basically a mirror of Erik Dasque’s similar C# tutorial.
But that was only half the fun. In true overkill style I felt that I had to create my own XML dialect for this little project to automatically number figures, create hyperlinks, and do all sorts of other fun stuff. So, as a result, there is an xml and html version.
Last week, Kenneth decided to try and coin a new term, “Luddition Through Economics”. Such a term basically means that someone is a luddite because they don’t have the money to not be one. I guess that describes me fairly well. Well, actually, it was coined to describe me.
Anyway, the discussion progressed to see if he could become the top hit for such a phrase. It shouldn’t have been hard because “Luddition” isn’t really a word.
Today the Ninth Circuit court of appeals, which serves the western 1/5th of America, begins work on Gilmore vs Ashcroft. A brief summary is in order.
John Gilmore made millions as one of the original programmers at SUN. He has since retired and become a full time philanthropist. He’s also one of the founder of the EFF. On July 4th, 2002 he dared to challenge the ticket agent and refused to produce ID for a flight he was scheduled to take.
I’ve gotten ill and passed out on more than one occassion in my past. At one point, it was so bad that I needed to seek lots of medical help and wear a heart monitor in hopes of tracking down what it was. I think I almost passed out last Friday when I was sick, I didn’t, but it felt like I could. Today, I read that a Pennsylvania law requires physicians to notify PennDOT about such issues.