Muli Ben-Yehuda's journal

a semblance of weekend hacking

Fixed a bug in syscalltrack, where the
kernel module wouldn’t build against 2.4.25-rc3 due to b0rkeness in the Makefiles. We
were defining things that only the build system should define,
when appropriate, such as EXPORT_SYMTAB. Works for me with and
without module versioning, but Amir says that it’s still broken
for him. Waiting for more details.

(later…) Turns out it really was broken. The fact that a
kernel module compiles does not mean it will actually
load. Fixed it after a couple of hours fighting with 2.4’s
kbuild and our convoluted modules structure. Building out of
tree modules is such a pain, every time I do it I vow never to
do it again.

I also gave some serious thought to the 2.6 port while doing the
dishes (some of my best thinking happens then…) and decided
that I’m not going to work on it in the near future. Life is too
short and my TODO list is overflowing with more interesting,
less Sisyphic stuff. If anyone wants to pick this up, I’ll be
happy to help.

Also Spent a couple of hours trying to figure out why the LaTeX
slides from Orna’s upcoming shell lecture slides won’t get
correct syntax highlighting in XEmacs. A verbatim environment
with ‘$’ signs in it, which
font-latex.el parses as starting a math
environment. Eventually gave up temporarily and fired off a bug
report to the author.

Still reading Paul
Graham’s ANSI Common Lisp. That books blows away my
mind. Last ght’s brain food was a ray tracer, and then macros. I
could feel my mind rhythmically expanding and shrinking while
reading.

Colin Watson gave a
status update on debian-devel-announce. I should go look
at the release critical bug list and see if there’s anything I
can fix, because I should contribute more to my favorite
distribution. In fact, I should do that right now.