both the english word hazard
and the portuguese word azar
sounded so similar to me, when I first heard that word used by my Love,
so that I considered them to mean the same.
that’s incorrect, as I had to find out very soon,
when we looked up the dictionaries on Sunday evening.
what a time for looking up dictionaries?
but what else would adults do beyond 23:00 on Sunday evenings?

but me being a little strongheaded I finally found out,
that both words go back to the same root,
which is the arab word “az-zahr” resp. “al-zahr” meaning “the dice”.
weird, isn’t it?!? same root, opposite meanings. wow.

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The customer’s project (the little lightweight green car) is a little delayed, and the boss wanted a few guys including me, to spend some time on Saturday on fixing a few problems and adding a few minimal features.

The customer’s site is 400km away from Berlin,
the family (version 2) is actually currently traveling in Brazil,
so I spend the weekend in that fabulous town in Western Germany,
facebooking, office working,
listening to Frank Sinatra’s music,
shopping, working out in the gym,
chatting with Rolf,
…

Actually, that music is copyright-cleared, I think,
so if anyone is interested in it,
I can put the MP3-s on a disk attached to my router,
and you can download it from there.

My friends know how to contact me,
and I am quite willing to give away the appropriate URL.

Can you imagine,
that Frank Sinatra’s music is quite in conflict with pidgin, the instant messenger?
Well, both of them use harp chords,
So I keep wondering, who is entering and/or leaving …

I am quiet curious to use busybox in one of our cars,
or just to understand better, how I can make advanced use of the busybox in my DSL router.

I recently came across Catalyst,
an MVC web application framework, written in perl,
let’s say it’s competing against Ruby on Rails and Grails.
But (as it’s written in perl) it can make use of the vast resources on CPAN.

To be continued.

Do you know, where you can get ready made freeware packages to run on Solaris from?
I got a few from sunfreeware.com recently.

Do you think, you can only install Solaris packages as root?
Of course, it’s simpler and just better to do so,
but what if you can’t?

Solaris packages from sunfreeware.com come as gzipped files,
and I use pkgtrans in order to get pkginfo, pkgmap, and a subdirectory reloc created below my $HOME/PACKAGES/ .
pkgmap is described in the manual page protype(4) ,
it defines details like file mode, symlinks, and much more.
Within that subdirectory reloc you find the package’s executables, library files and man pages.

The sys admin would use pkgadd for installing a package,
but pkgadd only allows for execution by root,
so I developed a shell script (JHread_pkgmap.sh) imitating pkgadd.
It reads pkgmap and does jobs like adopting the file mode specified within pkgmap.
I don’t plan on implementing pkgadd‘s full functionality,
but just that subset, that is seriously required in order to get the packages installed, that I really want to install.

Of course, executables and libraries, that depend on hard-wired absolute file or directory pathnames will experience a little grief.
But most of the utilities, I am working with, don’t complain about such problems.

Now e.g. I am able to download and install ready made packages (wget, curl, …); and you know, how much nicer it can be to use wget and curl than downloading within a web browser.

Update 2013-01-02:
Please find it here: http://Jochen.Hayek.name/Computers/Software/Operating_Systems/Unix/Shell/JHread_pkgmap.sh