[LMH]Still alive and stuff

[James A. Crippen]

Hi all, I'm still alive. I just wanted to say that. ^_^

I'm going back to school and cutting back to part-time at my current
job with SAIC. I'm taking general ed requirements (this semester:
Japanese and Cultural Anthropology) so I'll start to have a little bit
of extra time to go back to doing fun things instead of passing out
from exhaustion after working all day with astoundingly awful
code. Thus maybe I'll actually start working on the project again!

First things first I really want to get Nyef a working public CVS repo
and web space for the Exploiter. Then since the web page for E3 has
basically atrophied (as has most of the work on E3) I'm going to do a
fairly extensive overhaul on the publically available stuff.

That's the good news. Now for the 'bad'. Kappa has become woefully out
of date with its heavily cruftified Hed Rat 6.2 installation. I'm
going to be replacing it with a brand new Gentoo SPARC install, with
new Apache, mod_lisp, SBCL, ECL, CLISP, and Postgresql. Also Mailman
will be upgraded, an IMAP server will be added, and a web mail client
will be installed (probably Squirrelmail with Binc IMAP since they
both like qmail). Most importantly, I'm going to implement (drum roll
please) SPAM FILTERING. I'm getting about ten or fifteen a day right
now and it's driving me nuts.

Kappa is also going to be getting a bit of a hardware upgrade. We're
not running out of disk space so that's not going to change although
I will be adding an NFS (or maybe Coda) mount to my workstation with
like 40 or 50 GB of free space. But I've gotten a 333 MHz UltraSPARC
IIi processor to replace Kappa's existing 220 MHz pokey, as well as
256 MB of the weird EDO DIMMs that UltraSPARCs seem to use. So those
using Kappa for occasional compiles and testing on Linux/SPARC will
find improvement. No bandwidth increases but I'm going to be talking
with my neighbor about them chipping in $10 per month to bump my
bandwidth up, which should improve things quite a bit. Also I'm adding
QoS to the router and will be setting some limit on bulk data transfer
to improve remote interactive sessions, so finally you'll be able to
download and upload on Kappa while having a useful telnet session.

All these changes should take a couple of weeks. The OS and hardware
upgrades are happening first, and I'm building a temporary Kappa
replacement to be standin while Kappa is down. The switchover should
be hot, ie it shouldn't be noticeable. That's what I'm hoping anyway,
although there will probably be a few things broken but I'm focusing
on mail and CVS working perfectly.

Oh yeah, and my XL1200 is working again and I'll mounting its
filesystem via NFS to Kappa, so those with accounts who are curious
about Genera can browse around it. Also telnet and supdup will be
externally available so people will be able to log into it remotely if
they want to play with its Lisp interpreter (no useful Emacs tho since
ZWEI is a TV app). Not terribly worried about security, since no
cracker will understand what to do with it and it doesn't have much
problem with 'buffer overflows'.

That's the news from Anchorage, where Ship Creek is full of rotting
salmon, the days are getting shorter and the nights are getting
longer, and the tourists and geese are finally starting to leave.

'james

-- 
James A. Crippen <james at unlambda.com> Lambda Unlimited
61.2204N, -149.8964W                     Recursion 'R' Us
Anchorage, Alaska, USA, Earth            Y = \f.(\x.f(xx))(\x.f(xx))