moving gnumonks.org mail/web/ftp server

After being hosted in the basement of my former office, connected via an SDSL line to KNF, I have now made the decision to move my mail/web/ftp server to a commercial hosting center.

Connectivity behind that old line was becoming increasingly unreliable due to various problems at the University of Erlangen, which is part of my upstream routing path.

Unfortunately the old gnumonks.org machines are all desktop/mini-tower systems, so I now have to buy an expensive 19" 2U server. It will be hosted at noris network, where the netfilter.org machines are hosted, too.

My powerbook is now able to use the external VGA!

After hours of trial+error and reading the XFree86 radeon driver, I now finally managed to get the external DVI/VGA port of my Apple TiBook IV to display something useful. CloneMode didn't work for some strange reason, but I'm now running a multihead setup.

This means, that at the next conference I can give my presentation with just one single notebook, no need for second notebook, crossover cable and remote X display anymore. If that isn't good news...

The netfilter/iptables project is looking for a hardware donation

The project's mail/web/ftp/cvs/list/... servers are highly loaded, and as usual the load always increases. We're getting more list members, more downloads and more page views every month. However, our current hardware is not growing by itself. Thus, we need to buy a new machine soon.

All of the current (and past) hardware was bought from my personal wallet. While I could afford this in the past, I would very much like to see one of our corporate netfilter/iptables users step up and show his support for netfilter/iptables by donating a new machine. This would be an ideal opportunity to show the development community that you are not just using free software, but also putting in your part to make it work.

We have very specific needs with regard to the hardware we use: It has to be a 1U system, and non-x86. This basically leaves us with Sun UltrSPARC based systems, and the Apple XServe line. Both options would cost about EUR 3500 to 3800.

If you are interested in sponsoring such a system, please contact Harald to discuss the details. Thanks in advance.

Evaluating GTK+ / GTK-- for GSPC graphical interface

After not having done any GUI programming for the last five years or so, I'm now investigating the world of GTK+ / GTK--. GSPC will soon need a graphical frontend, running directly on the framebuffer (potentially DirectFB), with no mouse and only a very limited keyboards as input device.

Finding a suitable math parser

GSPC currently uses spar-0.5.10, a quite nice math language parser. However, it is unmaintained, still contains a lot of bugs and is incomplete. Can anybody tell me why in this big world of free software there is not a single simple mathematical parser that can be embedded into an application? I just want to evaluate simple statements like "(X*3.56)-max(y*1.23,z*1.341)".

The author of spar has since started a new project, called Iguana. It is a whole language, not only simple mathematical statements. However, it still lacks some of the functionality spar used to have - and it has a totally different syntax.

Now I face the choice between extending the good old spar with stuff like variable length argument functions, or convert everything to use Iguana (and implement the missing bits from spar in Iguana).