I bought a new camera yesterday, Sony DSC-P100 (info). It's very fast and the image quality is excellent.

Unfortunately, the camera is currently not supported by the Linux kernel, so I had to hack the drivers/usb/storage/unusual_devs.h file (v2.4.24) and add the following code:

UNUSUAL_DEV(  0x054c, 0x0010, 0x0500, 0x0500,
		"Sony",
		"DSC-P100",
		US_SC_8070, US_PR_DEVICE, NULL,
		US_FL_SINGLE_LUN | US_FL_MODE_XLATE ),

Now it works fine.

Hacking

I released IMM 0.3 today.

Roadmap to GNU Anubis 4.0

v3.9.95
the maintenance release.
release target: July, 2004.
v3.9.96
will introduce Dixie's new testsuite.
release target: September, 2004.
v3.9.97
after this release, no considerable changes will be added to the CVS repository.
release target: October, 2004.
v3.9.98
after this release, we will focus mainly on removing all critical bugs first.
release target: October, 2004.
v3.9.99
the final test!
release target: November, 2004.
v4.0 is out!
release target: December 15th, 2004.
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blogRight! is ready, Sir.

I'm moving my blog to my home page, here, but for a while I will still be doing some updates on advogato.org. This blog uses the blogRight! engine, the code I wrote.

A long time ago I mentioned about writing my simple educational compiler. Well, this is still true and the work is in progress, but very slow progress. I hope to finish it by the end of this year. In the meantime I wrote a tiny, mini intro-example to a few basic compiler techniques, uhm. Send me the feedback if you like it ;).

There is one missing feature on Advogato.org site; it is when you read some old people's diary entries and you want to go forward in time. There is no a convenient way to do that (there is only an X older entries... link :/). Sigh.

Tired a bit (am both studying and working as a programmer). I'm glad the weekend has finally come. Recently metaur discovered some vulnerabilities in GNU Anubis. This was the first serious (and hope the last one) bug report since the last stable release in Dec 2002. Now heading the v3.9.94...

Finished a major reorganization in the Mailutils documentation. It's still not up-to-date and there is missing a lot of stuff, but I believe it should be now easier to complete it.

Watched Jackass: The Movie... yuck. Where is my brain?

Not much... just a little mailutils hacking. We now support the maildir format, which is very cool, the file: auto-detection url is great, and all from-like utilities now use rfc2047 decoding. We have also a new tool, called movemail.

And yesterday I went to listen to the 2,5h lecture on LaTeX. I already know Texinfo, which is obviously similar, but has different goals and is less powerful.

Today it was a hardware hacking day ;). I have moved my old Amiga hard drive (Seagate 1.7 GB) to my current workstation. There were six AFFS partitions, so I had to compile AFFS support into Linux kernel. I made several back-ups (old source codes, images, documents, etc.) and reformatted the drive using a common ext2 file system.

Not much to do... Savannah is down. This means no CVS write access.

Now reading an interesting article about the MSIL Assembly Language. Huh, this assembly language is even object-oriented, kinda funky ;). I was also googling for a document which shows the difference between .NET 1.1 and 1.2, but couldn't find anything. Then I finally started reading the C# 2.0 specification, which looks quite promising.

Hacking

Sergey and I made a lot of progress on GNU Anubis... :). The Ident protocol will be superfluous soon, but this still requires a lot of work to be done. I expect that version 4.0 will be released in Q1/2004.

Released a fresh new memory testing tool, designed as a wrapper around the standard libc memory allocation routines malloc, calloc, realloc, and free. It is called IMM and it's licensed under the LGPL.

Today I downloaded GNU Hurd image for Bochs. At last! Now I must find a real machine where I will be able to try GNU/Hurd as a native OS. Check out my homepage (hurd) to see the screenshots with Hurd running under Bochs.

Learnt some parts of C# and, as a usual exercise, wrote a simple stack and queues implementation. Now I am writing (just for fun ;) a simple RPN calculator with variables and function definitions. All on my home page. Today I also discovered a silly bug in Mono, which makes Ahead-of-time compilation disabled while using mono foo.exe instead of mono ./foo.exe (of course after doing previous mono --aot foo.exe). At the beginning I couldn't find the reason for this strange behavior, but lupus on #mono pointed me the solution.
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Saw Once Upon a Time in Mexico at the cinema last Friday. Not bad, even funny, but Desperado (1995) was much better (thanks to Steve Buscemi and Quentin Tarantino). Fortunately, Depp's performance was solid (memorable CIA t-shirt :)).

"I dreamt music."

I just watched Welcome to 2019 with an alternative music for Blade Runner. Yeah, it's a fan fiction videoclip, but very cool, and Pink Floyd's Welcome to the Machine alongside BR movie -- outstanding! Although I am a big fan of Pink Floyd music, I still think that the original soundtrack by Vangelis is one of the best ever made and the only one right for this great movie. I also hope that "BR: Special Edition DVD" isn't only a rumor...

Eureka!

I think I've found a good solution for my recent problem with the authorization mechanism in GNU Anubis. The idea is quite innovative and requires adding a new special mode. Probably it will take an extra 3 months to implement and test the solution. Right now, I won't write any details about it. Be patient.

Movies

Recently I saw Pirates of the Caribbean with an excellent performance by Johnny Depp. This is good and very entertaining movie. Johnny is cool. I can't wait to see Once Upon a Time in Mexico, here in Europe. I also saw a beautiful movie called Hero, which IMHO is good as or even better than Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

I am thinking about a new authentication mechanism for GNU Anubis, i.e. without the auth service (Identd). Running an Ident daemon is not always possible. The ESMTP authentication is also not the answer. It is so frustrating, why the creators of socket interface did not think about the remote authentication while using AF_INET? What a pity... Unix(7) says that there is a solution with SCM_CREDENTIALS (SCM_CREDS?) and SO_PASSCRED, but only for AF_LOCAL, and even this isn't much portable. The mechanism for sending unix credentials over the AF_INET would help me a lot!

Hacking

In a last few days I made several hacks in GNU Mailutils. And today GNU Anubis 3.9.93 has been released. This version is a maintenance release over the previous one. Today I also took Mailutils entry at Freshmeat.net.

Music

I just found a nice piece of sound: Every You Every Me by Placebo. I like this band, but weird is that I didn't know this song before. It is really good. This Saturday Placebo will give a concert only 120km away from me, and I won't be there :(.

Hacking

GNU Anubis 3.9.92 has been released. As usual, each new version is much better than the previous one. Because of the problems with GNU servers, it is not available at alpha.gnu.org. Read more from bug-anubis archives.

E-mail2

In my opinion, so called E-mail2 would be a bad idea. Mostly because of the problems with backward compatibility. It would be very hard to convince people about the new standard. Current e-mail (SMTP) is the right thing. I do not see many of its flaws, but I see many advantages and simplicity. Many people say that the primary flaw of e-mail is its weakness of malicious usage, like spam for example. I don't agree with this. In this particular case our law is to blame for this. The law should be more restricted for spamers. I mean not less than 2 years in prison for sending a huge amount of spam. Besides that, there must be a better anti-spam software built-in on every public mail server.

Books

Right now I am reading the classic book called Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools by Aho, Sethi, and Ullman (1986). This book is also known as the dragon book. Quite good.

It's been more than two weeks since I do not have an access to my primary mail server at gnu.org. All because of fencepost is temporarily down (FYI, because of recent crack of the GNU FTP site). I'm really unhappy about this. I know that this is a serious problem, but still it takes too long...