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Richard's Blog

PAD Files

Working on a utility to generate PAD files from a configuration file so that the file sizes can be auto updated, the description fields can be easily edited in separate files, and all of the URL\'s can be checked automatically. This is because I have to generate so many of them that I\'ll probably come out ahead on the first run. I am writing it in C++ using the Xerces C++ library from Apache.org.


Rqal Update

I released a new version of Rqal (Richard\'s Quality Assurance Library) Rqal is a handy library for logging, debugging memory problems, doing nice assertion handling, handling some common portability issues, and doing file I/O in a convenient way that does not depend on the Endianness of the platform. Changes to rqal since last release: Basically I added a lot of happiness to work with << operators for logging. I also fixed some problems with the memory debugging. It did not work correctly on MacOS/OS X, and it now attempts to disable itself in multithreaded environments since it is not thread safe. I added some very minimal unit testing code based on it\'s unit testing. It is pretty simple but it checks for failed assertions and uncaught exceptions to mark the test as failed. There is know an object called RqLogInhibitor that prevents logging until its destructor is called so you can declare it on the stack to stop annoying or unwanted logging for blocks of code. I also added a Makefile and got it working and ported to Linux using GCC, not that it wasn\'t very close anyway.


Old school

I have been working on scripts to remotely upgrade FreeBSD systems from 4.x all the way to 6.3 and maybe 7.0 at my job. Upgrading between major releases is not officially supported by the FreeBSD installer so you basically have to roll your own. So I have been writing lots of shell scripts that do fun stuff with sed, etc. Ralf S. Engelschall\'s site gave me an excellent start, but I have had to make quite a lot of modifications. Will probably write up some info on doing this when I get finished either at my site or at work.


Delicious links

Well, I went through some of my links and work and added the ones I considered useful enough to del.icio.us. They are mostly to do with Cisco,Juniper, and Netscreen configuration and various authentication stuff like Radius and TACACS+. I will have to go through my endless pile of bookmarks at home to get most of the useful.


Site updated

Well, I have finally gotten around to updating my site. Now I have a blog which I intend to keep up, and I am adding a wiki where I can post some useful content. But most spiffy of all I have added a browser so that you can see pretty source highlited versions of the individual files within the archives for all my programming projects/source I have posted.



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