For those using a typical US keyboard layout, but with the need to use the Euro sign. I used the Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator to make a copy of the US-International keyboard and remove all the dead-keys. So basically it’s a normal US keyboard layout, with all the Alt-Gr goodies with it.

United States-AltGr layout available now.

My blog has migrated to a server with a new IP address (this is being served off the new server). I had to upgrade WordPress too, which means I now have shiny new 2.5.1. Go me!

I’m busy developing the irc-transport for xmpp.py and the debuging output is coloured via ANSI escape sequences. This works great on a linux terminal, or via PuTTY, but not so great in a win32 console. I searched quite hard on Google for a ‘modern’ ansi.sys or ansi.com replacement, but couldn’t find anything.

So here’s my attempt at making something work in win32.

The executable will spawn a copy of the default command shell (from COMPSEC), unless you give it something to run on the command line. Basically it pump’s stdout and stderr, and parses the ANSI escape codes into win32 console API calls. For quick development I wrote it up in c#, but it looks like some of the .net console async pipe handling code blocks badly, so I may end up porting it to plain c.

Last week was holiday time. We went to Magalies Park in JHB. Bevan and Kim came up to visit us last Saturday and we stopped by the Cheese Farm *yummy*. We also popped into Sun City and the Valley of the Waves later in the week.

One the way back, we stopped in at the parentials, and did some cleaning up. They’re preparing for the eventual task of having to move into a smaller house, so my sister and I have been sorting out all the things we’ve accumulated while we’ve been at home into the keep and throw away piles. The keep boxes will eventually have to find their way to Cape Town, but not for now.

All-in-all a good deserved rest

Friday night was well ‘wasted’ at one of the Claremont Dramatic Society’s Members’ Evenings. The performers sang pretty much the full collection of Tom Lehrer’s songs from his original performance. Including my favourite: ‘Poisoning Pigeons In The Park’

On Saturday night we found ourselves at Mike’s Karaoke 21st (mike, mike, mike, mike – see Finding Nemo if you don’t understand). The songs were dodgy, the videos more so – having zilch to do with the actual words. Only a few lucky songs had original footage.

All-in-all an entertaining weekend. I even managed to check-in a few changes the the xmpp.py irc transport.

I registered my new domain yesterday (rasmussen.co.za). Currently it’s a 301 redirect to my old domain, but over the course of the next week or so I will be reversing that. Hopefully all the search engines come by in time for them to get the new url.

The move was mainly motiviated by the fact that christian of rasmussen.org has finally throw in the towel sighting cost and time needed to maintain a reasonable service. So I’m losing email fowarding and probably the dns entry too. I’ve spent the last few weeks trying to mak-’n-plan and finally I realised I should just get the same domain in South Africa. Lucky for me it was unregistered

If Rasmussen’s in South Africa want an email forward, they can contact me, and I’m sure I can set something up for them.

I setup MRTG to monitor my ADSL connection, but what I was really watching was the network card on the pc with the pppoe client. Unfortunatly mrtg doesn’t seem to have a way of monitoring an ip that can change, you have to go on MAC address (pppoe mac is undefined), or interface number (which increases every time you connect).

So I’ve written a script that takes an ip address regular expression, and will report statistics on the first interface found that matches. Basic usage example:

Target[myrouter]: `/usr/local/bin/netstat-snmp-regex public myrouter ‘10\.10\.’`

will report on the first interface that matches 10.10.*.* on myrouter.

After serveral phone calls I’d practically given up, but just after 9pm the ADSL installation tech phoned to ask if he could come and install. Thanks to Mr. Sampie and Mr. Molab I now have ADSL, YAY!

It rained (and hailed apparently) a lot on Sunday, so on Monday morning work was without power. So I got to spend the day at home harassing the ADSL installers for my ADSL that was supposed to be installed on Friday (8th April 2005). If I’m luckly i might be able to get someone to come and install it soon, but it looks like tomorrow is going to be out, because I have to be at work early to fix machines in the US (assuming we have power)