Day: April 5, 2003

I forgot to enable devfs in the kernel I compiled yesterday.  The system booted fine but told me that it would be much happier with devfs compiled in.

I’ll make it happy this afternoon.

Update: Kernel is recompiled, I rebooted the box and it came back up SSHable.

Mental note: when running a Gentoo machine that will never run X, change your USE statement to USE="-X" which will make sure that stuff like Xfree86 isn’t installed when you try to install PHP.  Oops.

OSNews reports that Steve Jobs is the highest paid CEO in the US.

Of course, in 2001, he got paid $1 and a jet.

Slashdot:

The director of the Army’s simulation technology center said that Ender’s game influenced how and what they will build for future training.

Scary, but at least it comes from some great sci fi.  For the record, I haven’t had a chance to read Shadow Puppets yet, but I will as soon as I stumble upon a hardcover deal or it comes out in paperback.  I’ve read everything else in the Ender series.

I’m also looking forward to reading Darwin’s Children, the sequel to Darwin’s Radio by Greg Bear.  Darwin’s Radio was a bit technical but read as quick as a Crichton novel for me and was great.

eWeek:

Microsoft Corp. unveiled on Wednesday its planned six-SKU lineup for Office 2003.

The six editions on tap are Professional Enterprise, Professional, Standard, Students and Teachers, Small Business, and Basic.

Computerwire:

IBM Corp is to work on behalf of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) to build a 1 petabyte data storage grid that will support CERN’s efforts to better understand the particle physics behind the Big bang theory.

InformationWeek via Google News Sci/Tech:

The pending launch of Windows Server 2003 will be a milestone not only for Microsoft, but for the other half of Wintel, too. It’s been eight years since Intel got into the server market and two years since it shipped a 64-bit processor, the Itanium. On April 24, a 64-bit version of Windows that takes advantage of Intel’s 64-bit design will become generally available.

Erik Hatcher keeps us up to date about what’s going on with Ant 1.6:

Ant 1.6 is trundling along, nobody is in a rush to ship anything, as Ant 1.5.x is good for most people’s needs. You can get on the developer mail list if you want to take part in the next generation of Ant.

Ant 1.6 will be different internally from Ant 1.5. It has reworked its classloading, parses big build files faster, and, by popular vote, will only run on Java1.2 or later. Supporting Java 1.1 was getting too painful: it was time to move on. You can still build Java 1.1 code using <javac target="1.1"> and setting up the classpaths to point at the appropriate runtime. Same for <java>; you can run on 1.1 by requesting a different JVM and pointing to the other version of Java 1.1.

Ant1.6 in CVS has some experimental new features for big projects, an <import> task to import build file fragments from other files, the nice feature being you can now use Ant properties to select the files to import. While <subant> is lining up to be a bulk means of calling a target in sub-project – imagine ant with fileset support.