Finally, there’s a way to convert DocBook XML to PDF. Petter Reinholdtsen describes the tool he used and the simple process involved. I pulled dblatex from Debian Unstable and it essentially just worked. The PDF output looks quite professional and the DocBook XML conventions are followed as you’d expect. Nice.

I almost missed it, but 2.6.16 shipped with an NFS update that makes me happy. It’s now possible to kill those nasty processes hung on RPC calls when your NFS mount point goes away. Previously, you could umount -l with some success, but this is better.

Read the rest of “2.6.16 ships with IFB for QoS and NFS RPC client SIGKILL” »

Now, this is just simply cool. It’s a Solar Cooker.

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That’s what I was reminded of, this morning, hungry and tired from arising early to park on campus, when I went up stairs and discovered a plentiful bounty of fruit, orange juice, and doughnuts for waiting students seeking guidance from the building’s only counselor. I snagged some cool, fresh orange juice, then some pineapple and honeydew slices and consumed them, slowly. Finally, I snagged a few doughnuts on the way back downstairs.

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This is just too good to pass up.

Read the rest of “Telemarketers, I luv you” »

Still undergoing playtesting, my recent Perl foo on parsing Silent Hunter III’s random campaign mission layer has resulted in the ImprovedConvoys mod. With a few more changes, I’ll move on to modify the few task forces represented in the random layer such that they’re seemingly more realistic, or at least less boring. Task forces were rare and varied enough that there’s no one magic template to use for their organization, but the current model of five destroyers and one to three battleships is simply boring.

Read the rest of “Silent Hunter Perl Foo Spawns Improved Convoys!” »

Trying to ssh into a box with dropbear I am finding no joy:

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How cute. The Gregg Reference Manual contains a decoder for the basic online acronyms.

I finally found a reason to mess with Perl’s sprintf for pretty reports. The result is easy to display output for the contents of the England to Murmansk convoy for 1941 to mid 1942. I only have about two dozen convoys left to research.

Read the rest of “More Silent Hunter III Perl foo” »

Of late I have been working on a campaign file processor in Perl so I can redefine the convoys in Silent Hunter 3 to be far more realistic in composition. With the tool essentially finished, I have begun research into convoys during War War II.

Read the rest of “Silent Hunter 3 Campaign Convoy Rewrite” »

ifupdown 0.6.4-4.12 has problems if /etc/network/run exists, breaking installation of itself and any packages that depend on it.

Read the rest of “Debian ifupdown issue 0.6.4-4.12″ »

Ivn Software has released version 0.6 of their bw_mod for Apache 2. It compiles quite easily on Fedora Core 1 using apxs. I configured it for a specific directory and restarted Apache.

Read the rest of “Bandwidth Limiting for Apache 2 has Arrived” »

Finally, a reason to install Sun’s Java on my box with java-package under Debian.

Read the rest of “Useful Java Financial Calculators” »

I just test installed Gallery2 Beta 1. The installation is very slick and Gallery2 is quite featureful. I am quite pleased.

Jesper Dangaard Brouer has written an awesome thesis on something that has plagued those of us stuck using asymmetrical network connections for ages and ages now. What’s more, he has patches which will soon be available for the Linux kernel.

Read the rest of “Thesis Paper on Traffic Control over ATM links!” »