Monthly Archives: March 2005

Poor Scrappy

Our cat Scrappy seems no better. He just lies on our couch, completely zonked out. I got him to eat and drink a little, but his leg is still obviously hurting him. Vet appointment at 10:30. Update later..

Update: Well, Scrappy was running a fever of almost 105, which is indicative of an infection (probably got a bite on his leg from another cat, and it got infected). The vet gave him some fluid and an injected antibiotic, and he’s gonna be on oral antibiotics for a week, but he should make a full recovery.

The little guy does not like being in the cat carrier, and I literally thought he was gonna hyperventilate on the way to the vet, but the return trip was much less traumatic, and he’s resting comfortably at the top of the stairs. It may just be me, but he seems to be a bit more alert, if a bit tired. I’ll let him sleep.

Minor Project Success

Well, I figured out why my attempt to create a LiveCD for FreeBSD was dying: init was compiled with shared libraries, and something was apparently screwy. I replaced it with a version of init which was statically linked, and then found out that all my other binaries were also still dynamically linked, and they failed too, but when I added /libexec/ld-elf.so.1 to the boot image, all was well and I was able to successfully boot my miniaturized, stripped down version of FreeBSD without any further difficulty.

When I’ve created some better scripts to generate these images, I’ll post a link to the resulting toy .iso file.

Scrappy in a Scrap

Our sometimes-feral cat Scrappy has been fiesty lately. The previous two nights I’ve heard him picking a fight with random cats which stray into our yard. Last night he didn’t show up for his regular night time meal, and this morning he was in our garage (through his cat door) and meowing pitifully. He’s favoring his left front paw. I picked him up and checked it. It does seem a bit swollen, but not noticeably hot or anything, and while it’s sensitive, he did let me touch it without very much squawking. He didn’t take any food or water, but still yeowls periodically. I’ve moved him back onto his favorite blanket in the garage, and made sure he’s got food, water, and a litter box.

I don’t think it’s broken, but if he’s still not walking tomorrow, I’ll take him to the vet. Other than what I’ve done, is there anything you can do? Are any kind of drugs like aspririn or tylenol appropriate for cats?

Poor little guy.

New Cholesterol Numbers

Congratulations and huzzahs for me. By dropping 67 lbs and exercising over the last year, I managed to cut my total cholesterol from 262 to 200, with my LDL going from a high 202 to a much more reasonable 138. Still got a ways to go on the weight loss, but things are looking good!

Towards my own LiveCD…

Well, I’ve bit the bullet. I’ve decided that I have a couple of projects that could benefit from my own ability to produce a customized version of Unix that can boot from a CD (or alternatively, a flash memory device), so I’ve embarked upon trying to follow the path of others who have gone before and produce one.

I’ve thought about using Linux and following in the fine tradition of DSL or Knoppix, but I really am more comfortable with FreeBSD, so I thought I would give it a go. I went into /usr/ports/sysutils/freesbie and installed the scripts there, and then tried to figure out what they were all about. They put a bunch of files in /usr/local/share/freesbie including a directory called miniBSD. Ahah! I’ve seen mention of this project before, where someone produced a small version of BSD ready to run on some small Soekris boxes. I thought I might start there.

Well, there are a few problems. The kernel config file that it uses (MINIBSD.5) isn’t really set up for booting from CD, so if you use their scripts to build an ISO and burn it on a CD, it really won’t work. I know, because I made four coasters playing with it last night before I stumbled upon the idea of using a system emulator. I compiled the one I knew about, bochs, but it died while running the emulated boot loader in a way that my real system wasn’t. Now I’ve got qemu compiled and running, and it gets through the boot all the way to running init, which it thinks dies with a signal 6. That’s just what the real CD does currently, so I’m happy I won’t need to make so many coasters to debug this thing.

After that, I had to go to bed.

I’ll keep you posted when I get it to work. This .iso image won’t be much bigger than a typical podcast. 🙂