I have an ultra10 here that was, until today, running Solaris 10 and was my desktop. Now, I have opted to install FreeBSD on it to see how it runs. I now have X running happily. Documentation on the specific pieces of information I wanted was sparse, so here's what I know now:

• If your sparc64 is old and lacks USB, the mouse will show up as a serial device. The mouse device is the uart device immediately following the keyboard one:

  uart0:  on puc0
  uart0: CTS oflow
  uart1:  on puc0
  uart1: CTS oflow
  uart2: <16550 or compatible> addr 0x14003083f8-0x14003083ff irq 41 on ebus0
  uart2: keyboard (1200,n,8,1)
  uart3: <16550 or compatible> addr 0x14003062f8-0x14003062ff irq 42 on ebus0
  

  Here, uart3 is my mouse.
  This means that /dev/cuau3 is my mouse. So I add this in rc.conf:

  moused_type="mousesystems"
  moused_port="/dev/cuau3"
  

  Run /etc/rc.d/moused start, and the mouse works.
• X needs to be told what keyboard map you are using. I used X -configure to generate my xorg.conf. A few changes are necessary:

  I have a Sun type5 keyboard, so, in my xorg.conf:

  Section "InputDevice"
     Identifier  "Keyboard0"
     Driver      "kbd"
     Option  "AutoRepeat" "400 30"
     Option "XkbRules" "sun"
     Option "XkbModel" "type5"
     Option "XkbLayout" "us"
     Option "XkbKeycodes" "sun(type5)"
  EndSection
  

• X needs to be told about the monitor and what proper resolution:

  Section "Monitor"
          Identifier   "Monitor0"
          VendorName   "Monitor Vendor"
          ModelName    "Monitor Model"
          HorizSync 31.5-110
          VertRefresh 75
  EndSection
  
  Section "Screen"
          Identifier "Screen0"
          Device     "Card0"
          Monitor    "Monitor0"
          DefaultDepth 16
          SubSection "Display"
                  Depth     16
                  Modes "1024x768"
          EndSubSection
  EndSection
  
  

Thanks to Sean Graham for pointing out a few typos and suggestions on the vim slides. Fixed!

I've finally got some small free time, so hopefully I'll have something productive coming out of tonight.

I almost always listen to music. I've mentiond this before, but I was reminded tonight of how music seems to make projects happen quicker; especially school projects. Tonight I was working on my Algorithms class project (spanning tree stuff) and found that I was working better than normal. This is due to my finally having found some music to put in my laptop and listen to.

Rochester radio is the absolute definition of excessive repetition. Of the 11 stations I have programmed into my receiver, none of them were playing a refreshing list of songs I hadn't heard in a while. So I put in a Nightwish cd and listened to that instead. Productivity increased.

Assuming the following theories:
Music = Productivity
Xterms = Productivity

If you increase xterms and the quality of music, how much can we increase productivity by? ;)

Music may work well for me because I tend to get distracted or bored easily when doing required tasks such as school work. If there's music playing I like, then I'll end up distracting myself momentarily with the music instead of other more time-consuming tasks such as reading news/blogs. Either way, music works.

Makes me wonder how many other people do the same thing?

I drank one of those Sobe No Fear GOLD things earlier, so I'm still wide awake. Waste not productivity? However, I'm going to be quite dead for classes tomorrow. Though, my classes aren't particularly important to me anymore. My philosophy of "learn what you want" landed me a dream job with Google, so there's no sense in turning away from it now. My algorithms class is getting cooler now that we're doing graph and tree algorithms like spanning trees, red-black trees, and other things. Beyond that, my interest in my other classes is very much dwindling. Only 4 weeks left.

The past few months have let little time for fun web projects. Web javascripty stuff is almost always an extremely fun endeavor, despite it often being a frustrating adventure in non-compliance! Looking at Opera 9's new fancy widget system makes me want to get back into web programming again.

The most fun project I've done recently has definitely been working on Pimp and pseudo-helping with jQuery development. I wrote more javascript during BarCamp NYC than I had in ages, and it was a great time.

This year's Bawls Programming Competition at RIT should be more fun this year now that Resig, Darrin, and myself are *much* more experienced with JavaScript, CSS, et al. Look forward to whatever project we come up with ;)

So what project should I start or work on next? I'd *love* to get working on Pimp again. Maybe I'll work on that or something similar soon. Now that jQuery has AJAXey support, it's almost worth it to rewrite the whole web interface with it. I'm also hoping to find time to work on my sysadmin time machine project - web-based searchey-goodness for logs and events.

Definite todos:

• Fix newer xmlpresenter code to work in all browsers (mostly css issues?)
• Update xmlpresenter project page
• Write "magic database" thing for storing logs and events
• Write happy web frontend

Not that many people read this site, but if you've got ideas for projects I'd be interested in, Let me know. I'm always up for ignoring structured book learning in favor of more educational adventures. After all, that's why I run this site: to catalogue my research adventures. Notice how (almost?) all of the content here is lacking in relation to my academics?

Today was my 2nd open-to-campus seminar at RIT. This time it was on how to use Vim. I made pretty handouts and stuff.

Slides can be found here: /presentations/vim

I haven't updated the codebase available from the xmlpresenter project page in a while, but development still continues on it as I do more presentations.

Today's update was to add printability to the slides. This is done by using the media="print" part of the <link> tag.

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="screen,projection" href="presenter.css"/>

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="print" href="printview.css"/>

When you print, a different css will be applied than 'presenter.css' - very cool.

Specific changes are:

• all slides are shown
• slide titles use a smaller font, and lack borders
• slides with no titles are not printed

Useful, I suppose, if you want to print out your slides in "outline" form.

Check out the Unix Basics slides and look at it with "print preview" - Unix Basics slides

I use cindent in vim. cindent is very useful. However, it breaks a lot of the time, especially when not in C-style languages (perl, etc). It indents "how I want" 90% of the time, the other 10% it does it incorrectly or when I don't want it to so.

If I can find time tomorrow, I'd like to write a few magic-indentation keybindings so I can easily do certain kinds of indentation the way I want, and only when I want. Most of the time, autoindent is all I need anyway.

I'll post any scripts I come up with here when they're done.

Read about text objects in vim with :help text-objects

Text objects are basically direction macros for simple deletion/copy/changing. For instance, diB This will delete everything between the nearest { and closing }. That is:

static int update() {
	if (u) {
		printf("Update\n");
	} else {
		printf("No update\n";
	}
}

Paste the above code in vim. Put the cursor on the first printf (line 3) and, in command mode, do diB - undo that and try ciB. The d command will delete the code block, where as c will do the obvious and delete the code block and leave you in insert mode.

These text object direction things are quite neat. Again, check out the help page on it (:help text-objects). Neat little shortcuts.

Firefox, by default, seems to be very braindead about horizontal scrolling. It goes back/foreward by default. I want it to scroll. To do this, you need to make two changes to your configuration.

Go to 'about:config' in your URL bar in Firefox. If you've never done this before, literally type 'about:config' in the URL bar and hit enter. This will bring up a list of user settings. In the search bar, type 'mouse' and change the following values:

mousewheel.horizscroll.withnokey.action - Set this to '1'
mousewheel.horizscroll.withnokey.numlines - Set this to '1'

The action defaults to 2, which means go forward/back. Annoying.

The numlines defaults to -1, which scrolls left when you use the mouse to attempt scrolling right. Setting it to 1 will make it scroll left when you scroll left, as it should.

Voila! Horizontal scrolling should now work properly.

Lots of hours were spent today preparing the new moused and psm code for import into the FreeBSD source tree. I don't have a commit bit to CVS, so I'll have to wait on having it committed. This wait time will probably be spent fixing bugs, writing a decent rc script, and improving configuration options.

This update is only known to work for -CURRENT. The patch can be found on the newpsm project page. I had a friend test the patch against 6.0-RELEASE, and it seemed to apply cleanly with the exception that patch(1) got confused about sys/sys/mouse.h. Tell patch to not attempt to reverse-apply the patch, then tell it yes for trying the patch anyway. No guarantees if it doesn't build.

You can find almost all the information you need on the newpsm project page. If you find bugs, are interested in helping test, or have questions or comments, please contact me :)