This part of the site is now only being kept for hysterical raisins, and I'm now using the blog on the main part of the site. Y'know, the bit you came in through...

Updated x1
Earlier this morning, I got OpenBSD 4.6 to boot on the Octane2. It installs fine and boots from the hard-drive as well as can be expected. I get all the way to logging in and trying to ping another machine before I notice the problem.

It has no network. This is rather irritating. I shall explore further, and report my findings.

OpenBSD boron.tamber-krain.homeip.net 4.6 GENERIC-IP30#23 sgi

No, I'm not dead yet. Nor do I have a job yet. So I don't really have an excuse for not updating my blog in a while, other than I've not really had anything to say. (Y'know, not that that stops a lot of folk, but…)

And now, for the actual 'content' of this post:

Harlie

Documentation Updates

The README has been gathering dust for a while, and I still need to update that in light of all the changes I've been making. However, I've started adding POD to my code, so hopefully it should be easier to keep the documentation up to date.

I'm using Perl's PoCo::PluginManager module for plugins in Harlie's plugins and unfortunately, whilst the documentation on CPAN covers all the code necessary for a plugin, it does not give an example of how to write the code for the application side (E.g. The program loading/unloading a plugin.), and it seems the author has gone missing. So, I have written an example to help anyone who hasn't managed to figure it out. (It took me a day of dismantling the module to figure out how it worked, I know, I'm slow.)

And now, it's time for an irregular status update on what's happening with Harlie, that damned bot.

I've fixed all but one of the bugs in the bug-tracker, and have been updating the wiki (Once I scraped all the spam out of it.). However, in the process of trying to use heap memory in the commands (To save copying data around everywhere when there's no real need to do so.), I discovered that the way I'd originally written the commands parser (and the commands functions) made this a little… difficult.

I listen to a lot of music whilst working, and I'm currently having a few… issues with my media players. Namely that I can't find one that's supported and doesn't have issues that make me want to scream at them.

Below, I'll list the media players I've tried, and a brief review. [Updated]

I used Akregator for my RSS reader, right up until about 10 minutes ago, when hotplugging a drive (yes, in a hot-plug port.) caused the PC to reset. Upon starting, I made the delightful discovery that Akregator had eaten the feeds.opml file (Where my rss feed links are kept.).

After a long time of seeing a livejournal aggregator in the logs, looking for the old RSS feed (this is due to the migration from Wordpress to Drupal), I've finally fixed up a working redirect to the new one.

RewriteCond %{query_string} feed=rss2
RewriteRule ^/blog/ /index.php?q=rss.xml [R]

Hopefully, that should fix that. (Although, I'll have to wait and see.) And now, to get on to adding module support to Harlie, like I originally set out to do about 8 hours ago.

Noun (Singular) bonus (plural bonuses)

1. Something extra that is good
2. An extra sum given as a premium, e.g. to an employee

The employee of the week receives a bonus for his excellent work.

It is not something you are entitled to. It is something that you get if you exceed expectations. And for RBS, I really don't think they exceed expectations. This is the bank that posted a £2.2billion loss pre-taxes[1], and is selling off branches because it can't afford them. It is also planning a scheme that will increase the government's share in the bank from 70% to 84%, by dumping £282billion of it's assets into a program for toxic assets.

And what, you may ask, prompted this rant? The news that the board of RBS is threatening to walk out if they don't get their bonuses.[2] And you know what the worst part of it is? Either get their 'bonuses' or they'll walk out and straight into another cushy job where they get paid huge 'bonuses' for doing nothing.

Anyone wonder why I hate management staff already?

[1] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/8345922.stm
[2] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/8392147.stm

Okay, we now have a stable v0.2 of Harlie, and you can pull this from the branch "v0.2". (You may get a warning about it being ambiguous. This is because I was stupid and named the branch the same as the tag. Please go easy on me, I'm slowly getting the hang of git.)

Or, if you hit the downloads page on the wiki, you can grab it there.
http://www.furryhelix.co.uk/wiki/index.php/Downloads

EDIT: Just wanted to clear a few things up… There are a lot of things missing, and this is more of a preview of where Harlie is headed rather than a fully functional release. There's a list of things that need to be done, after the break.