Mark J Cox

mark :: blog :: north carolina

29 Apr 2004: This is the longest day....

I was away for a few days to go to Red Hat HQ - the whole thing felt like an episode of 24, trying to fill every minute with some activity or other. Only Jack Bauer doesn't have to wait for an hour for an Airport shuttle to the hotel; or a five minute queue for the gents toilets. Those would be pretty unexciting episodes. Fortunately everything went to plan and on the last day was able to fit in exchanging my laptop (from an old Dell to a new IBM T41), doing two interviews, attending various sessions, receiving a long-service award, packing, and making it to the airport with time to spare.

Anyway, I normally put on a ton of weight when I visit the US so I weighed myself before and after my trip. I actually ended up losing 5 lbs because the food was dreadful and we didn't have time to go get alternatives. Fortunately I'd taken a gift of English chocolate for a friend and ended up keeping one of the bars for emergencies.

18 Apr 2001: North Carolina

So it turns out the guy who wrote libxml and libxslt works for Red Hat too as I was in a phone conference today with him. I've also been looking at the Perl module that links in libxslt but it's having teething problems with glibc 2.2.2.

Finished off my Guide to ApacheCon 2001 and my ApacheCon photos

16 Apr 2001: The blue-ridge mountains of...

My last week here so decided to go up to the mountains with Bryce who for some reason decided to take his laptop. After my recent fun with cars and Durham Police I let Phil do all the driving, which I don't think he appreciated.

I found a new xsl parser, libxslt and libxml, part of the gnome project, seems to be quicker than Xalan and has the advantage of being in C and not C++ (I'm so used to release engineering for 30 platforms where even a working C compiler is sometimes a stretch). Spent a good 6 hours on Saturday failing to get it working right with Perl the way I want it to, seems to be a strange memory problem that goes away everytime I turn on debugging.

I was going to buy a Earthmate GPS receiver for my laptop until I read that it doesn't output standard NMEA format data so it won't work with Autoroute. I'm still looking for a GPS solution so the next time I'm coming back from Scotland and get stuck for 4 hours on the M6 without a map I can find an alternative route.

06 Mar 2001: Frequent Flyer

Worked out my schedule for the next weeks, I fly to England next week for 4 days, then to Raleigh for 4 days, then Reston Virginia for 4, then Raleigh for 3, then Santa Clara for ApacheCon for 5, then Raleigh for a week, then back to the UK. All economy too :-(

Finally got a spare few hours so finished updating the XML database of news stories about Apache. Used it to update the apache.org in the news page.

FInished "The Longest Journey". Best interactive fiction I've ever played.

My DELL laptop wasn't suspending to disk, found out it was because the suspend partition had to be in the first 8Gb of the drive. Took that time to re-install Linux (it had never been installed right) and decided to use the latest Red Hat rawhide. I was pretty amazed when it detected and worked with my Wavelan card and random PCMCIA modem without having to download a thing. These Red Hat guys are great *grin*

22 Feb 2001: Fizzy Sour Candy Sweets

Back from the UK armed with fizzy sweets (US translation: sour candy) which seem to be popular in the office. When we got bought by Red Hat last year I gave a short presentation on Stronghold to all the developers. There was a large collective groan when they found out bits of it were Perl based and that all our developers knew Perl and that we didn't like Python. Actually, I shouldn't have said I didn't like Python until I'd actually read about it because after spending the flight learning it I think I'd prefer it for most of my scripting needs. So I'm back in the North Carolina snow for a little while, although I don't think Tracy back in Glasgow is too pleased at that thought.

Meanwhile I converted my photo album scripts to output XML (index.xml) with stylesheets (index.xsl) as the old system wasn't very flexible

Hi! I'm Mark Cox. This blog gives my thoughts and opinions on my security work, open source, fedora, home automation, and other topics.

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