this evening (mostly geek stuff)

[kragen@pobox.com (Kragen Sitaker)]

 Still haven't got around to fixing the bootparam problem.  I looked at
     rcw's fixes to the Debian netbase package to let people run 2.2
     on Slink; nothing about listening on broadcast addresses.  I might
     try it anyway to see if it fixes the problem in a way that is not
     obvious to me.

 I downloaded and played with queso.  It's not too badly written,
     although the authors are far too fond of fixed-size buffers for
     my taste.  But it doesn't seem to be very reliable.  It identifies
     gentle as running "Linux 2.1.xx", which is fair enough, considering
     2.2 wasn't out when queso was released.  It identifies thor, the
     Sun3 running NetBSD, as "Cisco 11.2(10a), HP/3000 DTC, BayStack
     Switch", though, and identifies agnostic.ebb.org (which really is
     running Linux, all rumors to the contrary) as Netware.

 Maybe a more serious drawback to queso is that it can't identify machines
     without finding a TCP port they're listening on first.  On machines
     whose primary purpose in life is to connect a human being to the
     Internet, there may be no listening ports at all -- although
     my experience is that there usually are anyway, even though
     there shouldn't be.  But queso doesn't include any support for
     portscanning, and doesn't seem to include any simple way to hook
     it up to something with such support.

 I went in to work this afternoon (pre-queso) and tried to get travel
     reports filled out.  No dice; I got distracted into chatting with
     Brad and Matt instead.  Oh well.

 Anyway, I raked the yard this afternoon, and cooked soup and chilled
     grease [0] sandwiches again with Marilyn.  Then we two watched "The
     Simpsons" and "Futurama", which were both most entertaining.  "The
     Simpsons" was about Bart being diagnosed with ADD and being put on
     psychoactive drugs.

 I managed to record some very poor sound by plugging my speakers in on
     the microphone port of my sound card, and then played it back
     again.  These speakers make spectacularly poor microphones, and I
     am puzzled as to why.  (They're not excellent speakers, but they're
     not *that* bad.)

 I pondered how to generate FM waveforms numerically (so I can play them
     on the soundcard, of course.)  The exercise of finding the integral
     of "k + a sin (v t)" in my head seems to be more than I can
     remember how to do, which alarms the hell out of me.