HowTo

Sometimes we spend a lot of time fighting with something that is of relative importance to us. Each time I win a battle of epic proportions, I document for myself some of the lessons that were learned the hard way. Feel free to laugh at my ineptitude.

While looking through some entirely unrelated information, I discovered that HP has released some patches which will let HPUX 11 and HPUX 11i read ISO-9660 Rock Ridge CDs without having to resort to the pfs tools. Look for PHCO_26449 and PHKL_26450 for 11.00, and PHKL_26269 and PHCO_25841 for 11i. 10.20 and previous users are stuck with the pfs tools.

I don't have any HP systems available at the moment, so I cannot vouch for the accuracy or usefulness of the information, but with all the hits on my other page I figured there would be some people interested in it.

These are some potentially useful things to know when fighting with gcc on Solaris (Solaris 8 in my case). I keep having to go off and learn this, so this time I'm writing the damn information down.

Read More:Always More.

A style gude for writing perl. Blessed by Saint Larry himself.

My new employer has issued laptops to its sysadmin corps (that would be me, hoss). My main concern was that I get something small and light, and after expressing said concern, was encouraged to go out and pick the spec laptop. I selected two, both of them Dell Latitude systems: the C600 for the power users, and the L400 for those wanting something light. My preferences being what they are, I picked the L400. The rest of the team picked the C600, since they came with the larger screen, integrated optical drive, more powerful CPU.

Anyways, I've managed to install Linux on this beast. Keep in mind as you read this that I have had the thing less than a week at this point.

Read More:more complaining

Here is the flops.c that was compiled to produce the benchmark numbers we so enjoy. This code was written by Al Aburto and all rights, credit, etc are due to him.

Read More:Pretty C Code

Interested in the relative performances of various types of computers? Me too. Since I amuse myself with the notion that I am a computer-generated-image artist, the floating point performance is what matters most to me. These numbers were gathered by repeatedly and randomly running flops.c on various systems. Distributed.net claims flops(3) is the best all-around real-world test of floating point performance. Since these people have no greater reason to be wrong than anyone else, my numbers are generally sorted by this value.

Remember that these numbers were not gathered under any sort of controlled circumstances and are best treated as completely fictional.

Read More:I love speculative fiction.

A fight against KDE on Solaris. Sun doesn't make anything needlessly easy, do they.

Read More:./configure ; make ; make install

Dealing with two framebuffers in an Ultra5.

Read More:multiple monitor nirvana.

After too many abusive trips to an HP to mount a rock-ridge CDROM, I sat down and spent three working days hammering out the details of the process. It isn't perfect, the machine still wins the mount-the-cd game occasionally.

Read More:the gory details