Mine the Harvest

I rather get off on making apps run on things they were never meant for. It’s just good fun.

Last semester I had to use this “Windows only” program called Visual Logic for a class. I got it to run under wine easily enough and used it for the duration of the class.

Now Sydney is taking that same class but she wanted to run it under OSX on her Mac. Okay, no problem – mostly.

Using X Forwarding I set up a script that sets her local $DISPLAY variable (which does not get set automatically in OSX terminal), sets up Xquartz rather than the regular OSX X11 server to run correctly, logs her into my Linux box (using ssh key authentication) and then runs wine and the Visual Logic program which is in turn X forwarded over SSH and displayed on her OSX screen. Bwah ha ha . . .

I turned this into an executable script on her OSX Desktop – learning that OSX needs a .command suffix to make such click executable.

And viola – it actually works, well – mostly. The Windows “File Open” window is rendered without text (nice) and the screen refresh in Visual Logic itself is pretty crappy when you X forward it. But it does actually run.

And here is the little beastie. Should you need to X forward any apps to OSX you may find it useful:

$cat VisualLogic.command

#!/bin/bash
export DISPLAY=:0.0
/usr/X11R6/bin/Xquartz -xinerama&
ssh -X [email protected] wine /home/paracelsus/Desktop/VisualLogic-Course-2.2.exe

In order to make wine run automatically I just appended the remote command to run onto the end of the ssh command.

I found this site, which held the secret to the Xquartz server secret. Also, here is a good Apple site on X forwarding and the X11 server in OS X. You have to install Apple’s X11 server from your OS CD or download it for any of this to work – I have a bit more info on that on my OSX Darwin wiki article.

Even though it is a bit clunky, it was still fun taking a Windows app, running it under Linux and X forwarding it to OS X. Now that is just kind of fun.

School started this week so I am back to being very busy. I am taking four classes this semester, two in class and two on line:

Building Scalable Cisco Networks (Advanced router protocols: EIGRP, OSPF, ISIS, BPG) and IPv6. More in depth with the protocols, load balancing and designing networks for scalability.

Cisco Wireless Networking and Security

Advanced Web Site Design (Yes, some day it is possible that timelordz.com will actually have a home page, though I make no promises. WordPress, Sugar, Splunk, Torrent servers, Mediawiki, Cacti, etc. all hide happily behind that blank home page – perhaps that will change now that I can have some time to make some pages for class.)

Intro to Business

The two Cisco classes are some of the four total needed for CCNP certification, they should be pretty interesting but there is a lot of material to cover in them.

After this semester I am pretty sure I would be able to finish my degree on line if I chose to, though a few of the classes I wouldn’t mind doing on campus. But the flexibility to move if needed, etc. it very good.

Next semester I am looking at perhaps taking a PHP/MySQL class or some C programming classes, just for fun.

Syd is also taking three classes this semester. Advanced Web Designs, a Computer Technology Overview class and another Web Design / CSS class. She is doing great in her web design side projects and should have a site up soon to showcase her digital portfolio of graphics design projects she has been doing for people.

No rest for the wicked . . .

Wanting to feel a bit nostalgic I decided to fire up Gopher and see if there were still any Gopher servers running out there. Back in the days before the Web had yet to be consolidated from the spinning mass of the proto-planetary internet mass, Gopher was one of the Gems of the Net. Using it you could seamlessly glide from server to server in a more or less hierarchical directory structure. No longer did you have to telnet to individual servers, you could just hop around. This was how surfing really started. Often you really had no idea where you where. And Gopher also allowed you to search – holy crap, this was hot stuff.

Sure – today I could just find a gopher server on Google and connect with Firefox to something like gopher://quux.org/ but this misses the point really as Gopher pre-dated browsers. Hardly nostalgic enough for a purist.

No problem – I’ll just install a gopher client on one of my Linux boxes and use it. Humm, they don’t have one installed by default anymore. Oh well – I can just install it from the repos. Oops, it’s not in the Base, Extras or RPMForge Repos for CentOS. Wow, seriously? Okay, I will just get the rpm for one real quick. Humm – that is not too easy either, dependencies blah blah. Oh – here is one for Debian, I guess I could make it into a RPM with Alien – oh why bother, it is so tiny I will just compile it locally.

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I have really been having some fun with the new OpenSolaris 2008.05 release. It actually prompted me to break down and get a new 500GB SATA drive and do a fresh install of Suse 11 with LVM so I could have more room for virtual machines. My old install was just running out of room and I could not add more VMs, plus hdparm showed the old drive performance was pretty horrid (17MB/sec).

Installing VMware Server 2.0 and getting OpenSolaris to run was a bit challenging though. There are pages on my wiki discussing both and some of the issues I encountered.

Getting VMWare tools to work was a bit challenging. After installing it and restarting X the screen would go black and you are unable to get to a virtual terminal. Quite annoying. I finally found the solution courtesy of a comment by Ankush on this blog.

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Woot! Today I was contacted by my credit union and informed I was one of 5 people being awarded a $2,500 cash scholarship!

GTE Federal Credit Union posted a notice on their website a month or so ago announcing a scholarship contest. It was open to all members and required applicants to submit an essay on the role of credit unions and what effects would be caused if legislation were passed to remove their tax exempt status.

Being in school at St. Petersburg College perusing my degree the idea of a $2,500 cash scholarship to help with tuition seemed quite an appealing idea. And the subject itself, of why it might not be a good idea to remove the tax exempt status of credit unions was of interest too. Someone could actually give me money to be opinionated and write about it – how alluring . . .

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