yay, bugfixing.

I suppose there's a quiet benefit to getting .0 revision open source software... you get the joy of finding bugs in the damn thing and fixing them.

OpenSSH released it's 4.0 rev, with the 'Basic Security Module' support for Solaris that we've been waiting for, since we've been running on a crappy patch for a while. So I made a new package, tossed it onto jumpstart, and found out that when you jumpstarted using the package, it didn't install the RC scripts to automatically start it on boot.

A lot of rifling around later and I figured out it wasn't honoring the 'INSTALL_ROOT' when it was getting a source for the hard link, so it was trying to hardlink to a file that didn't exist and would have been on a different partition if it was, anyway (a big no-no with hardlinks).

So I jimmied my package build script, and then got to learn some of the joys of Bugzilla. I wasn't expert, certainly, but at least I got something fixed for the next poor fucker who wanders in.

Whee, job satisfaction :p

Oh, and i love my new icon.

Displaying my ignorance and insular nature for all to see.

This evening's amusing moment was when I plunked myself down on the bus for home.

It was the first time I sat down right next to a guy who I've shared the evening bus with since I got here - he works in the same building. I never asked what he was doing, nor even tried to communicate with him. He keeps well away from the rest of us waiting at the bench, for which I don't blame him - most of the people waiting for the bus are a little strange - the gal who never stops monologuing, the guy who always smokes his cigarette, is a little monologuish himself, and eventually one gets around to noticing he only has three fingers to a hand, which is a little strange, and the guy who I _think_ is high-functioning autistic. He seems completely normal until he opens his mouth.

In anycase, I'd always assumed he was Spanish of some kind. He looks the part relatively well. Mm, nope, wrong - he's teaching Farsi at the Defense Language Institute - he's a linguist - and he's a native of Iran. He has a great accent. Of course, I only learned this after he asked me some trivial question - what bus to I take to get to work in the morning - and we struck up conversation.

I never do things like that, and I generally assume people are of one of three cultural backgrounds when I see them - American, Mexican, Indian. Those're who I deal with day-to-day. Weird to be made to think about it, how I'm unconsciously separating people by culture, as opposed to race. *shrug*.

Finally decided that the problem I've been chasing at work was a firmware bug and sent a WTF message to support.

Frankenstein's Monster.

For the last few weeks, in my spare moments, I've been working on getting a new personal webpage up. My old page was a shitty mess that I'd eventually scraped it down to the one script that was worth a damn - the comics list.

So, I decided to start anew. Picked a different content management system, and decided to make a nice new design.

Lo and behold, pretty layouts nowadays are made with CSS fine-tuning the coarse layout HTML grants. I don't know CSS.

Well.... didn't. I've got a pretty good idea, now, how to use it. Unfortunately, my webpage looks like Frankenstein's monster - a bunch of different fonts and borders and spacings that would make a graphic designer scream.

*sigh* So technically, I've got the layout sorted. Now it's time for the hard part: being creative.