this girl drives a tank

I threw what I thought was my C book into my knapsack on my way out the door to work but was actually an O'reily book on bash, the one with the ugly fish on the cover. So on my lunch I skimmed trough it a little bit and found a neat (at least I think so) script that I put into my .bashrc.

DIR_STACK='/home/orchid /home/orchid/C /home/orchid/cvsbz/bzflag/src/bzfs
 /home/orchid/howto /home/orchid/bin /var/log /var/www
 /etc/apt /usr/share/doc /usr/src/linux'
qd()
{
  PS3="directory? "
  dirstack=" $DIR_STACK "
  select selection in $DIR_STACK; do
    if [ $selection ]; then
      DIR_STACK="$selection${dirstack%% $selection *}"
      DIR_STACK="$DIR_STACK ${dirstack##* $selection }"
      DIR_STACK=${DIR_STACK% }
  cd $selection
    break
    else
      echo 'invalid selection.'
    fi
  done
}

This makes a little menu when you type qd and you can then cd to some of your more commonly used directories.

/home/orchid
orchid@supergrass ~ $ qd
1) /home/orchid/C                        6) /var/log
2) /home/orchid/howto                    7) /var/www
3) /home/orchid                          8) /etc/apt
4) /home/orchid/cvsbz/bzflag/src/bzfs    9) /usr/share/doc
5) /home/orchid/bin                     10) /usr/src/linux
directory? 9
orchid@supergrass doc $ pwd
/usr/share/doc
orchid@supergrass doc $

The windows comp downstairs automatically downloaded and installed service pack two, I didnt pay much attention except now there is only one available video screen resolution, 640x480 and no other resolutions available.

I cant even remember how to fix this, I think remove the card from device manager and reboot, I will try that tommorow. Whilst on the subject, did someoneat MS decide that cartoon dialogs, like the "New updates ready to install", that repeat themselves even if you click the little x, is something we all need? Imagine walking into your bosses office every ten minutes.."hey, Ive got new updates to install"....

The flawless install last night on my desktop has turned out to be less than flawless after all, bzflag will only run at my desktop resoulution (1600x1200) and not at 1280x1024 which I used to use before.

If I change resolutions, the game goes into some freaky video mode and locks X up. So far no luck in fixing it but perhaps i shouldnt be taking gaming breaks anyway.

æc♥

Tonight I decided to install my new 7200 rpm 160gb drive, so I backed up my old system, took out the old 5600 rpm drive and put the new one in. This was the master drive with / being replaced so I had to face the daunting challenge of redoing the OS install, with kernel recompiles to enable 2gb of ram and then install the nvidia driver.

Once the drive was in the base install of Debian sid using the debian-installer went quickly, I kept my root command history file from the old system so It was easy to install all the packages I had before.

Then amazingly, with no irc help ;-) , I was able to recompile my kernel.

make menuconfig
make
make modules_install
ls -l /boot/grub
cp /usr/src/linux/arch/i386/boot/bzImage /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.8
apt-get install vim && vim /boot/grub/menu.lst
 
reboot

There is debian ways to do it but this "old fashioned" way seems to work pretty well for me. I downloaded then Nvidia drivers from their site and that installed fine, and now I am downloading gnome, so all in all this was possibly the least troublesome install I have had to date.

æc♥

My boss suggested to me that I could finish some of my work at home if I didn't want to stay late, but its not something I wanted to do, so I told him that although I'd like to do that, the only computer I have that has MS office on it is Sarahs computer downstairs and she has no networking now that the wireless router is installed. This is not exactly true as she does have an ethernet card which works just fine.

I didn't really want to drag this work home with me as its tedious and not something I can do quickly at home so to me, theres no advantage. So I thought that was a good enough excuse. Then after he returns from lunch, he plonks a netgear wireless pci card on my desk :(

So I ended up having to do my extra work from home after all. The only upside is I get to keep the card. Installing the card was a pain though, drivers went in fine, but then I have to disable windows built in wireless stuff, which despite specifically being told not to configue the card, keeps a persistant icon in the taskbar, and pops up one of those annoying cartoon bubble things telling me the network is not configured..grr.

So then to netgear software, it asked for the network ID which I supply, then asks for the WEP passphrase which I had configured on the router to be 128 bit, I think 26 characters, so I generate this by entering a password which it converts into 128 bit. The router was set up correctly as I tested it with my linux laptop, using the same passphrase, but it woudnt let the windows machine connect.

So after about a half hour of checking all the other available settings, redoing the driver and all the other normal troubleshooting things, I notice a checkbox that says "Enter key code manually"..so then I type in my 26 character password and lo and behold, it only allows 20 characters! So, then on the router and linux laptop, I change to 64bit and use a shorter key and then try that on the windows machine and it finally works. Just under an hour of my time.

On my laptop I placed the network name, and passkey in /etc/network/interfaces then did: ifup eth1 and was on the network.

While Im on the free hardware subject, I had lunch with my girlfriend at the parts distributor and she handed me a 160gb maxtor hardrive! I will put it in my desktop and now only need to get a TV card to get my freevo stuff going.

Mom has decided to stay put this Christmas so I dont think I will be going down east this year which is a drag, Christmas is ok in Ontario but far nicer down there for some reason, I guess less people and more snow makes it seem more like the Christmas's I remember growing up.

æc♥

I did manage to get my /uptime patch for bzflag completed and uploaded, and accepted by one of the devs, he had to fix something I'd done wrong with a char string that would overflow if the server reached x number of days, but I havent done char strings yet and wasn't really aware that you could do such damage :) Anyway, you can now type /uptime and see how long the server has been up. My other other /countdown patch was also accepted so that made me happy too.

I think its time though to learn more and if I need to take a break to ease my mind, try to help bz by looking for bugs or something instead of making new commands that introduce bugs.

The flu is thankfully much better, but it took a weekend of hibernation to get rid of it, theres some sniffles still but the headache and dizzyness is gone.

Noticed on Planet Debian that there is now a Wordpress package for Debian, I might try that out for fun too. Not that Im looking for new blog software, but I need more distraction in my life :P

æc♥

I have had a horrible week, first with flu that I cant seem to shake, so I am all dizzy and achey and of course the sneezing all the time. At work, our department came in way under budget this year and now, my boss has decided rather than be forced to return funds at year end, it is better to spend this money on new cell phone sites.

So, we have 7 sites to build by year end. So, I have to find contractors, make sure they have all the materials, make sure all our equipment vendors can supply radios and antennas within that time frame, book cranes to lift this crap to the roof, aquire all the permits from the city, building permits, crane permits, electrical inspections, fire alarm inspections and then co-ordinate all all sorts of site meetings between us, the contractors, the city and the building owners. Its a lot of work and pretty stressful.



It looks like enlightenment is adding lots more eye candy to its desktop, some of which I'd like to see carry over into other desktop enviroments. I didnt find enlightenment to be the most intuitive DE to use when I tried it last, but it does have some neat features. In the spirit of "trying new stuff just for the hell of it" I will install it and see whats new.

æc♥

I dont know what it is about mailing lists that I prefer them over web forums, perhaps they dont attract the kiddies with the crazy sized sigs and avatars, or maybe its because I can skim through them in mutt, and read what I want to read yet keep the other stuff around if I need to search it for help on something.

Of the dozen or so mailing lists I subscribe to, I find the less active ones can often times be the most useful. The linuxchix lists are probably the most freindly and informative I know of, the vim mailing list is very busy but has amazing tips and scripts, so its worth the volume of mail. I like also debian-laptop and debian-women. I used to subscribe to to debian-user but that brings an unholy avalanche of email into my inbox each day.

I was told mailing lists date back many years and are being superceded by forums and wikis and their ilk, but I hope they dont go away, despite the odd flame war or spam attack, I still find them a great place to lurk.

I have found out from my girlfriend with all the hardware that she can get me a tv card, and a check in irc confirmed its the right chipset for linux, so my next project is to get the card, perhaps get another hardrive as my mp3 drives are over half full, and then install freevo.

The C is still coming along slowly but surely but I have taken a brief diversion to work on a little patch for bzflag, I had thought it would be a fast one to do but we all know that is never the case dont we?

æc♥

I worked last night at the bar again, and then once again decided it would be fun to have just a few glasses of wine after work, which has left me today with a lingering headache, and I find myself wasting time and procrastinating any computer related work I had set out to do.

I wanted to watch the now infamous Jon Stewart appearance on Crossfire, all i could find was a torrent file for it. I have not used bittorent before but I have heard how its supposedly a very fast way to aquire large files quickly over the internet. I downloaded and installed (actually I just used apt- get) bitornado-gui and then used it to get the movie clip. I am now downlading a few tv shows that I would watch if they were available on my cable tv package.

Mom is here with my today, she likes to just come over and hangout, watch tv and maybe cook something for me as a treat (shes making me brownies right now) I think she likes to spend time with me, but also she likes to have a break from Dad and my little brother at home, there is constantly some "situation" she has to deal with in their house and I like having her come over to get some peace and quiet.

æc♥

My blog has a new home now, it is the same ip, and still out in sunny California but just on new hardware, a brand new Dell server with 10,000 rpm sata discs, you can just feel those pages flying off the discs onto your browser..

Thank you Jeff for allowing my little blog to live there!

I noticed someone has been attempting to login to my home server via ssh, they tried about 215 times. This is I am told common nowadays but it did force me to do some reading on what services I am running and how to lock down a debian server as best I can without taking away any of its functionality. I could make apache secure beyond any reasonable doubt, by not running apache :) But where is the fun in that?

I will move sshd to another port which will at least deafeat casual script kiddie scans, and then look into ssh keys and all that fun stuff. It can be very confusing to grasp at first, I have to learn about networking, services and authentification all at once. Oh well, good stuff to know right?

In case you are wondering, my "currently reading" section to your right has remained unchanged for the better part of a year now, it is not the last books I have read, but rather the last books I was reading before I forgot my password to the book site :)

æc♥

There is a linux demo out for doom3, which I decided to download for some reason, anyway, I had to set X to run at 24 bit resolution to even run the game, and got it started up.

You cannot play multiplayer which is pretty much what most of the big games focus on now, so only in the retail version can you even find out if the multi- player component is any good.

I have probably way too little patience for storylines in action games, every few minutes you walk past a character on the map and a little animated vignette pops up of some planet mars commander impressing upon one of his henchmen the importance of the mission at hand...or he is explaining how to use your PDA to check email and open security doors and th like.

I just wanted a gun and to shoot someone, anyone, even the commander. I turned it off after 10 minutes of wandering around the mothership in circles. The game looks good though, but a tad too dark for my tastes, lots of shadowy corners for monsters to hide in.

My IT guy is on my case again at work, this time I had complained that sometimes the fan(s) inside start making high pitched whirring noises, and its annoying. When I said I was able to stop it occasionally he asked me how, and I said by hitting the side of the case with my fist. He said who told you do that? And I replied that I'd read about that technique on a website, to which he said something along the lines of "we have an IT department for situations such as this and you shouldnt get advice from the internet, computers have delicate moving parts...blah...blah...blah"

Him and I have actually not butted heads in a while so it was like the good old days getting lectured again..

æc♥

Thanksgiving was really nice but I did have a lingering headache from the night out on Saturday night, I hadnt planned to drink, but such plans rarely work out and I ended up having to get my boyfriend to come down and drive us back home in my car.

My parents dinner was great with the exception of my dad, bf and brothers trying to coerce me into eating turkey, which I didnt, sticking to the veggies, salad and some quiche that mom had made for me.

Today I am procrastinating working on my C assignments, I did some laundry, then sat down and opened up vim, then went down stairs and cleaned the kitchen, then went back and opened a file in vim, looked at it for 30 secs, then played some bzflag, looked at the file another 30 secs and decided to write in this blog.

Now I have set noon as a deadline to start, or maybe I will see who is in irc :)

I was leant the movie Fahrenheit 9/11 by a freind and found it to be a difficult film to watch. Micheal Moore has backed up alot of his findings on his website so it is not so much an issue of "did that really happen". What I thought Moore did too much of was use typical film trickery to heighten the emotional experience of the viewer, careful edits and stiiring music at the right time etc...this does work but in my opinion ultimately detracts from the films impact, he really doesnt need these tricks.. the facts do speak for themselves.

What amazes me is that the current race for office is so close, given what Amercians know about Bush. It makes me wonder whats is wrong with Kerry that this race is even close at all?.

æc♥

I worked last night bartending at my boyfriends club, it was packed, as it was the Thursday night before the Thanksgiving weekend. (Monday is a holiday for us) I shall not complain though, made lots of tips and it was well worth the trip downtown. I got home way later than I should, I hung out after with the other girls and had a bite to eat, I guess rolling into bed about 4am, then up for work at 6:30.



I had to go with my boss down to all these rooftop sites to help him take pictures of the work some of our contractors had done, it was ok actually, it was foggy out and I thought the city looked kinda neat at that time of day. It was also nice to be outside as I was so dog tired the fresh air kept me awake.

Tommorow night I have a girls night out with some of my freinds which always prove to be entertaining if nothing else, and then my parents are having the whole clan over on Sunday for a dinner, so, hopefully Monday I will have some "me" time to hang out at home and be geeky.

æc♥

It was pointed out to me that the author of my C book had neglegted to include the actual formula to solve the quadratic equation, but google knows all, so once I saw the formula, I was able to finish the problem and move on to the next one. My little hissy fit was, as it turns out, and as they usually are, totally unwarrented.

There was a question on the linuxchix mailing list where someone else laments gnomes lack of "different wallpaper for each desktop" and it turns out that this feature will likely never get implimented for whatever reason, it was suggested I might search the gnome mailing list and find out more. In the meantime there is a project called wallpapoz that looks like it will do what I want.

I went overboard at the gym after work and am all achey now, I get really into it on mondays for some reason and stay way longer than I should and push far too hard, now I am exhausted, but less stressed and look forward to a good long sleep tonight.

æc♥

Workspaces are a pretty much indispensable for linux users, I couldnt imagine not having them now.



What bugs me about Gnome however is I cannot set a different background/wallpaper for each desktop. I am sure I recall doing this before when I had a naughty little fling with Kde.

What I want is a different wallpaper and even different icons on each desktop. Think of it like your kitchen and your bedroom, do you have the same wallpaper and pictures in both rooms? No, because the rooms have completely different purposes.

I have finished the chapter on functions in my book, and started this weekend on the exercises, all 16 of them. One of them involved writing a function that takes two arguments x and n, and returns a long int that is calculated to be xⁿ.

This took me forever to do, once again my math let me down, I knew what I wanted: if x = 5 and n = 3, calcutlate 5 x 5 x 5. I tried all kinds of loops and whatever, but finally had to look at the answer online:

int x_to_the_n(int x, int n)
{
long int result = 1;
while (n > 0) {
result *= x;
--n;
}
return result;
}

I was close but I was for some reason incrimenting n (++n) instead of decreasing its value. So after all that I thought "dont get discouraged, do the next one" So thats what I did, turning the page I was faced with excersise 8.8 Which left me almsot angry! Take a moment and read that...I hate how he introduces this stuff as an exercise at the end of a chapter, using some formula undoubtably written by a dead guy 200 years ago.

I am now thinking about giving up C for lets say 2 or 3 months and doing some sort of course on math, as I dont have the math skills to understand the crap hes talking about in that excersise. Is there a "Math you must know to program" book out there?

æc♥

While looking for console based mp3 players (currently I use xmms-shell) I found a packgage called debian-goodies, I installed it and found it to contain some useful little scripts for your debian computer.

Description: Small toolbox-style utilities for Debian systems These programs are designed to integrate with standard shell tools, extending them to operate on the Debian packaging system. dgrep - Search all files in specified packages for a regex dglob - Generate a list of package names which match a pattern These are also included, because they are useful and don't justify their own packages: debget - Fetch a .deb for a package in APT's database dpigs - Show which installed packages occupy the most space debman - Easily view man pages from a binary .deb without extracting checkrestart - Help to find and restart processes which are using old versions of upgraded files (such as libraries) popbugs - Display a customized release-critical bug list based on packages you use (using popularity-contest data)

root@supergrass ~ # dpigs -n 15
40296 kernel-image-2.6.7-1-386
34664 emacs21-common
34138 kernel-source-2.6.8
33652 kernel-source-2.6.7
30700 mozilla-browser
28208 evolution
28060 ttf-baekmuk
28024 mozilla-firefox
27696 w32codecs
25224 acroread
19892 gimp-data
19176 gnome-applets-data
17164 dict-gcide
16309 gnome-themes-extras
15616 libc6


root@supergrass ~ # dglob foo
foobillard
root@supergrass ~ # dglob bar
libart-2.0-2
libartsc0


I also installed the debian-reference package which will install this guide into /usr/shar/doc if you ever need it when your offline.

I am now going to find out how to remove mozilla-browser and evolution without removing gnome, this seems to be a problem, as apt wants to take gnome out if I try to remove either of those apps which I dont use as I have mutt and Firefox for email/browsing.

Last night Sarah's ex boyfriend came over with his friends to get all his stuff, it was sad to see him moving all of it out and sadder to see Sarah look around the apartment with a sense of finality, that he is indeed gone.

He took all of his fancy cookware too including the kettle (he is a chef) and now im making tea by boiling water in a pan like I am camping :-\

æc♥