With fine timing, Chris Petrilli posts a pointer to freely available online Smalltalk books. A perfect opening for some Smalltalk web scraping. Mission: Download the PDF files for the book Smalltalk By Example. Sketch of approach: 1. Fetch the page. 2. Parse the HTML. 3. For each link that is a downloadable file, download it. Tools: Smalltalk/X...

For a Windows project I need to do UDP sockets. I could hardly believe it when I discovered that LispWorks, my usual Windows doodling board, doesn't support it out of the box. Boo-hiss! Anyways, I've been meaning to play with Smalltalk, and this is as good an excuse as any to start. I decided to look into Squeak and Smalltalk/X, each of which...

Death of Internet. "Sri Lanka's high court has ordered the seizure of an Indian cargo vessel which allegedly cut a submarine cable connecting the island's telecommunications subscribers with the rest of the world. "The court ordered that the vessel, State of Nagaland, be held at the Colombo port where it berthed on Sunday after accidentally...

Scsh, pronounced "skishhhh" (rhymes with "fish"), is a Scheme shell. That is, it is a Unix shell which uses Scheme as its scripting language. Here's an example script, from the scsh FAQ: (define (executables dir) (with-cwd dir (filter file-executable? (directory-files dir #t)))) (define (writeln x) (display x) (newline)) (for-each writeln...

Picked up a copy of CrossOver Office 3.0 for Linux at a computer show yesterday. Special offer, good discount. ;-) Installs fine on FreeBSD, but doesn't work, though: wineloader dumps core, I think because of missing emulated system calls. So I've put up this page to collect information on same. In related news, SVISTA seems to be coming along.

With all that automated ssh scanning going on, someone thought to set up a honey pot to see what the scanners are up to. (Well, I guess he already knew what they were up to, but wanted to see the intruders in action.) In his words, he "set up a debian woody fully patched with both accounts activated, and got rooted some days later..."...

This blog is powered by COREBlog, a Zope product. Blog entries are persistent Python objects stored in Zope's ZODB. Let's say I wish to keep a copy of each entry in a separate file in the local filesystem. One way is to fetch it through the web: $ curl -o 1.html http://sandbox.rulemaker.net/1 This saves blog entry '1' into the file 1.html. To...

Just installed Firefox 0.93 using FreeBSD's "ports" system. Fairly straightforward, other than the issue of outdated or broken patch files: to wit, for any given port, as the origin software distribution evolves, a patch that previously applied cleanly may stop doing so. I've taken to simply moving an inapplicable patch file out of the way to...

In this entry I described how to access a Common Lisp REPL running inside a remote FreeBSD jail over ssh from within your local Emacs. (Fully buzzword-compliant it is! ;-) For managing jails, I use Kirk Strauser's JailAdmin. Here's a snippet of jailadmin.conf: jaildir=/usr/jails server1 ip: 10.1.1.10 hostname: vs-1-10.netmemetic.com The first...

This is a trackback. For many years already, the following username/password pairs have been used for this purpose. It's a convention that originated from the Cypherpunks mailing list. ("cypherpunks" "writecode") ("cpunks" "writecode") ("cypherpunks" "cypherpunks") ("cypherpunks" "cpunks") ("cpunks" "cpunks") I just tried one of the above on...

Bugzilla keeps prompting me for my password, even though I've accepted its cookies. After some email back and forth between Heikki and I, it transpires that the reason is probably my ISP's transparent proxying, which causes my HTTP requests to carry a different source IP address each time, which confuses Bugzilla. That's the hypothesis, anyway...

This site's RSS feed now contains each entry in full, instead of an excerpt. Just a one-word change in the feed generator script, really, replacing the reference "excerpt" with the reference "body". Thanks to Klaus Alexander for the hint.

This site's RSS feed now contains each entry in full, instead of an excerpt. Just a one-word change in the feed generator script, really, replacing the reference "excerpt" with the reference "body". Thanks to Klaus Alexander for the hint.

FreeBSD's "jail" facility provides the ability to partition the operating system environment, in effect, to create multiple FreeBSD virtual machines on one FreeBSD host. A jail virtual machine has far less overhead than full hardware virtualisation ...

FreeBSD's "jail" facility provides the ability to partition the operating system environment, in effect, to create multiple FreeBSD virtual machines on one FreeBSD host. A jail virtual machine has far less overhead than full hardware virtualisation ...