APT is my bitch

Had a problem printing simple text to an HP DeskJet 940C. I hate ink jet printers, primarily because they’re so cheap and they seem to have so many problems. I’d prefer a dot matrix, especially when I’m mostly printing text. Anyway, the printer was attached to a RH 7.0 box. I had APT on it, so I pointed it at the RH 7.3 repositories. A few apt-get install LPRng and apt-get install foomatic and such later, I had a printtool that listed a driver for the 940C. Everything seems to be working fine from this end, but it was a big upgrade. I’ll really find out if it worked correctly when the customer arrives in the morning and calls me to tell me their printers don’t work at all.

Been doing some coding tonight. Finished another unit test, unfortunately for a class which was already written (I extracted it and didn’t think to write the unit test first). Trying to get ChangeLog and CVS commit messages to play nice, too, but that’s next to impossible.

I think I just realized that ChangeLog shouldn’t be kept in CVS. Oh, duh. You can generate ChangeLog with things like rcs2log when you’re ready to make a release. I’ll have to try this later.

I’ll expound on what I did WRT ChangeLogs that didn’t work, anyway. I originally was trying to figure out how to keep a CVS commit from Emacs from giving me the last log message. (Incidentally, this requires using the C key (upper case) instead of the c key (lower case) in the *cvs* buffer.) In the process I found log-edit-done-hook, which runs when you’re done editing a log message. There then exists a function, log-edit-add-to-changelog which claims to add a message to the ChangeLog for you after you finish with the message. First, I’m noticing that the log edit window, which splits the frame with the *cvs* buffer, does not disappear when you accept the buffer (C-c C-c); I’m not sure if this is related to log-edit-add-to-changelog or not. Second, if I commit multiple files with the same message, it adds the message multiple times for each file. I can’t even figure out where it loops through each file being committed, though I didn’t look very hard.

Then I’m playing around with vc-update-change-log. It works well enough, but it inserts messages that have already been inserted! I find out later this is because of how rcs2log works: it reads the lines near the top of the change log, tries to figure out a date, then basically queries log entries for all dates greater then or equal to that date.

I’m pretty sure the way I thought of above is probably the better way: don’t keep the file in CVS, and when you make a release just rcs2cvs the whole thing from the first release on.

Set up web stats for this web server. I don’t really want to share the URL, especially since it’s not accessible under this domain. Maybe I’ll add an alias in Apache for the directory tomorrow. I’m getting hits from people that seem to be referred by Google, if I didn’t know better, but I can’t find my page by doing the same searches on Google. Additionally, site:www.codefu.org darkness doesn’t show any results for me. Huh. (BTW, I escaped the above query with the Perl code: use CGI::Util qw(encode); print encode ("..."). I can never remember where that damn URL-style encoding function is. Indeed, CGI::Util says it has no public functions.)

Firewall still up and looking good. No complaints from the office today, or anyone else for that matter. Still need to set up a customer outage notification list; didn’t get around to that today.