this girl drives a tank

I had my parents, my bf and Kira here for dinner on Sunday and first went to Fortinos to get some things. This is a wonderful grocery store that has really fresh and varied food, slightly more exepensive than other stores but worth it I think.

It also sells movies, dvd players, televisions and has furniture and a kitchen store. As I had downloaded an iso of Ubuntu to test on my soundless laptop, I needed cdroms to burn onto so I thought I could grab them along with my food.

I got my groceries including apple pie and a big "brick" of vanilla ice cream, the kind in box, not a tub. Then on my way out I picked up a case of 30 cdrw discs for my laptop. When I got home, I started dinner and I guess because they both weigh the same and were in identical shopping bags, I ran upstairs, put the vanilla ice cream on my computer desk, and then put the cdrws in the freezer :-\

We had a really great dinner and a little suprise for dessert. Luckliy the melted ice cream dripped only onto my carpet, and not into my laptop, and the cdrw's didnt seem any worse for wear being frozen. I did burn and install Ubuntu tonight so they are ok.

Everyone got a good laugh at yours truly though :(

Ubuntu is pretty slick, the installer is very similar to the new debian installer but one thing did impress me, it automatically recognized my 802.11g wireless card, asked for the ESSID ad key, and got an ip off my router with no problems. This feature I havent yet seen in debian but am hopefull it will follow suit.

It uses "sudo" instead of a root password which is fine I guess but the thing that irks me about sudo, aside from having to type "sudo" all the time, is that once you have typed sudo, bash no longer searches outside current pwd for binarys. For example, if I had forgotton the exact name of "updatedb", normally I could type "upda " and press tab, bashe would fill in the rest of the name, but "sudo upda <tab>" wont work.

Anyhow, I will likely not keep Ubuntu very long as I see no real advantage over Debian sid and I kinda like, and am used to, Debian now. Oh and no sound in Ubuntu either, so now I am worried that its a hardware issue.

æc♥

I have tried about 3 different alsa/debian sound howto's and followed a couple of threads in the debian-laptop and xfce mailing lists, trying different things as people suggest them, but still no soundcard is being detected by the kernel. I then removed discover, that didnt help, reinstalled discover with no effect either.

Next thinking it might be the kernel I downloaded and configured kernel 2.6.9 This did nothing to help my sound issues, but I did notice something else, I have 1gb of ram in this laptop and kernel 2.6.8 was set to 4gb memory.

If you are compiling a kernel which will never run on a machine with more than 1 Gigabyte total physical RAM, answer "off" here (default choice and suitable for most users).

That was from the kernel help file, but later in the same file it says:

If the machine has between 1 and 4 Gigabytes physical RAM, then answer "4GB" here.

So it seems to me that it suggests "up to and including 1gb" at first but then but then "between 1 and 4gb" later on. I choose 4gb to be safe but only ever saw less than that in use; Mem: 884, I assumed this was due to the 1 mb not being exactly 1024 bytes or similar to the way HD manufactures report discs larger than they actually are seen by the bios/kernel.

Anyway, using kernel 2.6.9 with 4gb set I now see a full gb of memory. The downside however is that I cant recompile my nvidia driver for some reason so I am back to kernel 2.6.8, with less ram. Oh, and no sound :)

I'm thinking Ubuntu right about now. At least they have sexy-people splash screens.

æc♥

Yesterday I got home from work around 3:30, rushed to the airport to meet my friend Kira who was in from Scotland, then rushed home to get her sorted out and changed etc, and then down to the Pixies concert.

The concert was amazing, this band is quite possibly even better than they were 12 years ago. They played most of their old hits and disclive were recording the show and burning it right there so you could pick it up after the concert. I ordered a cd, but didnt bother to pick it up as the line up was too long. I did buy a pink pixies tee shirt though.

We went to my boyfriends bar afterwards and I vaguely remember something about him dropping us off home around 4am, we were a tad tipsy by then. Today I of course suffered horribly at work and couldnt wait to get home.

I downloaded a torrent of the seinfeld special NBC aired last night and tried to play it on my laptop, but it had no sound.

Investigating a little further revealed:

supergrass ~ # lsmod | grep snd
snd_intel8x0           33068  0 
gameport                4736  1 snd_intel8x0
snd_mpu401_uart         7296  1 snd_intel8x0
snd_rawmidi            23204  1 snd_mpu401_uart
snd_maestro3           22824  0 
snd_ac97_codec         59268  2 snd_intel8x0,snd_maestro3
supergrass ~ # /etc/init.d/alsa start
Starting ALSA.../etc/init.d/alsa: Error: alsactl restore failed with message 'alsactl: load_state:1134: No soundcards found...'.
done.
supergrass ~ # dmesg | grep sound
  No soundcards found.
supergrass ~ # alsamixer 




alsamixer: function snd_ctl_open failed for default: No such device
supergrass ~ # 

So, looks like alsa somehow got broken on my laptop, it works fine on the desktop and used to work fine on the laptop too. No clue how to fix this though and I basically spend an hour of my life following howtos, tutorials and then the old depsperate search through mailing lists and forums but to no avail.

I remember alsa-base being part of an update a few weeks or maybe days ago, but like I said, the desktop remained working and I do my apt-get dist-upgrades at the same time on both machines. Now I will have to watch the show on my crappy crt which is still dying a little bit more each day.

Good news on the programming front though, I am slowing starting to get a handle on character strings and long for the time to sit down and study this stuff even more. This last month has been horrible time-wise and now it looks like I will reach the chapter on pointers right about Christmas eve :)

Every weekend untill christmas seems already planned for me, My family, friends relatives and bf have all scheduled various parties, "events" and all that good stuff that goes along with Xmas. I am comforted only by the fact that your Christmas schedule is just as hectic :)

æc♥

Dont get me wrong, I wouldn't mind trying Solaris 10 out now they have an x86 version. There has always been in the back of my mind, the notion to try using a "real" unix, just to fiddle with, if someone were to plonk down a Sun Blade on my desk, I would be delighted, same goes for a Mac, I dont need one, but I wouldnt turn it down.



This flash promotion video is amusing though, how Sun could possibly be cheaper than linux is beyond me. Ok, linux as we know is free, but also runs on a gazillion different hardware configurations, I am not sure if the Sun HCL is as broad as Linux's but I would be impressed of that were so.

I dont understand though, the need to use a flash cartoon to promote an operating system such as Solaris. Its tacky, flash is tacky and as I watched it I was hoping for some badger badger badgers to come bouncing across my screen

badgers was probably the most useful implimentation of flash that I know of. :)

æc♥

I had to go into work today, it was the first saturday in about 4 years that I have actually had to go into the office, the security guard almost had a heart attack seeing me walk in on the weekend.

I left at lunch time and went to the mall, nothing like a bit of Christmas shopping stress to compliment work stress. :)

I think the my work situation will normalize after this month, so although things are a bit depressing at the moment, I shouldn't complain about my life as its not too bad compared to many people.

I read the urxvt man page when I got home, and found yet another nice option that lets you fade inactive terminals so that only the focused window is bright and clear.



There a few really nice things about xfce that I like, the deafault key bindingsare so easy to learn and I can now move and resize windows without the mouse, plus it runs quite a bit faster than gnome, and has some neat panel apps.

It still isnt perfect though, give me a window manager that will remember what terminals were open, and with the apps running inside those terminals ; (vim, irssi, screen, ssh) and webrowsers, opened to the page you were on when you logged off, music/movie players opened and ready at the last place you left off....etc...etc...

æc♥

Work is really becoming a drag now, we are so bogged down at the moment and with no signs of things letting up. I have tried to keep going with my C book in the evenings, but my mind seems tired or something as things that I know are simple seem to take ages to sink in.

I havent bothered with reading mailing lists, daily websites or irc as im just not into it at the moment. I heard a rumor Gnome 2.8 is going into Sid soon, and I know I should be happy about this but Im not, not only because I am so busy with work but because the last month or so I have been using Xfce instead of gnome. I will put up a screenshot soon I guess.

Tonight I tried a stress technique my brother taught me, sit back in your chair and blast some music really loud for about an hour. It made my laptop monitor vibrate it was so loud, but, I was feeling pretty good afterwards, and another benifit is the music is too loud to hear the phone.

æc♥

It was a great wedding, and despite the time of year, a truly beautiful day, sunny, no wind and with wonderful fall colors. Nobody got too drunk, despite an open bar and we all went out for breakfast the next morning.

My little celeron laptop managed to chug its way through the install and now is running Gentoo. It didnt take too long I guess, bootstrap took 3 hours, emerge system 4.5 hours, then compile the kernel was 45 mins and finally xorg took the longest, almost 5 hours to compile.

I wont bother with gnome, it would take forever and run slowly andyway, so I will try one of the lighter window managers, fluxbox or wmi.

æc♥

For sometime I have been looking for a console based mp3 player, my requirements were that it was easy to use, looks decent and could run over ssh. Xmms-text was what I had been using but you need to have the graphical version of xmms running for xmms-text to control it, plus, it dosent update the song list dynamically, If you start with track 1, let it play 10 tracks, when you look at your terminal, it will still display track 1 as the current track until you press enter.



I have settled on ksmp3play for the time being. It is simple to use, looks decent enough and its in Debian. The only problem I have had is loading 80gbs of music into it makes it segfault, but I havent lookek into why that is, and hopefully it is fixable.

Im installing gentoo on my old insipron 5000, its a celeron 500 with 64mb of ram and I am doing a stage one install so it shouldn't take more that 3 days or so :)

Ive got a wedding to go to today, and on thursday night, my bf went out with the groom and all of his friends, presumably to a strip bar :-\ I have never understood that "tradition" but found myself giving him the third degree the next day about what happened despite my best efforts to pretend I didnt care.

æc♥

There is a new Fatboy Slim album out, well new to me at least, and despite mediocre reviews from at least the British media, I picked it up today. I generally disregard most reviews as how the hell do they know what I like anyway?

On the back of the cd I noticed this "copy control" logo placed there by the IFPI.



I was then wondering if I could even burn it now, perhaps they'd come up with some clever ripping prevention. (awesome logo btw, such innovation :-\)

Grip had no problems ripping it to mp3's though but when Sarah put it in her XP comp to listen to, it popped up a little dialog box..



So she was unable to play the songs without "updating" some files, which I told her not to do as I dont know what exactly it would do if you clicked install.

Anyhow, I like the album, its not as good as the last one IMHO but then Ive only listened to it a couple of times. There is a cover of The Joker which is some old song I seem to hear whenever drunk guys gather, like softball tourney's or camping on long weekends.

Here is The Joker, and another one I like is Wonderful Night.

æc♥

I did get a little further into character strings this weekend but found that I was typing in the examples in my book only half understanding what was going on sometimes and sort of saying "hmm" and moving on.

Last night I ended up with another completed program and realized that although I see what it does, I am not truly confident I understand it totally. Today I decided to scrap the whole thing and start the chapter over. I would love to finish this book asap but I do not want to fudge my way through it.

Sarah's monitor has now gone on the fritz, so I gave her my almost dead viewsonic to use which leaves me with just my laptop for the time being. I did call my freind today and asked her about getting an LCD and she was all "OMG yes!! gimme a week to see what I can get you!" So I might end up with an LCD sooner than later.

æc♥

The basic syntax is: nb [-b blog_dir] [options]

How to ...

• create a new weblog (directory) = nb -b [blog_dir] -a
• create a new entry = nb -a
• create a new category = nb -c new -a
• create a new entry for a category = nb -c [cat_id] -a
• list current entries = nb -l [current|all]
• list categories = nb -l cat
• list entries by category = nb -c [cat_id] -l [current|all]
• edit an entry = nb -e [entry_id]
• move an entry to a category = nb -c [cat_id] -m [entry_id]
• delete an entry = nb -d [entry_id]
• delete a category = nb -c [cat_id] -d cat
• delete an entry from a category = nb -c [cat_id] -d [entry_id]
• force update of weblog = nb -u [current|all|main]

Thank you for trying NanoBlogger. Please direct comments and suggestions to the mailing list or submit a bug report to the project page on sourceforge.net.

I worked last night at the bar and got a chance to rally the rest of the staff against my bf's antique bicycle club idea, it didnt matter as he, and his brother have decided to drop the whole issue thankfully. It was pretty busy last night, which further cemeted our case that many non smokers will come to a club that has clean healthy air to breath, so that they may proceed to get hammered on overpriced drinks.

I think something is wrong with my 19in crt monitor, its about 5 years old now, and cost quite a bit of money at the time, I remember buying my first computer, and like many people tend to do the first time, went out an plonked down about $3000 on the latest and greatest money could buy. I got a PII 400 mhz I think it was :)

Anyhow, the monitor is a Viewsonic PS790 and I think it might have accounted for about $700 of the total cost of that system. Now, after it comes back awake from power-save mode, the colers are very washed out and tend to be of a reddish hue, after about a half hour it will gain some of its normal color back but not all of it.

I doubt very much its fixable but I dont want to just abandon it either. Perhaps I can treat myself to a Christmas-gift-monitor this year.

æc♥

I have finished the chapter on structures and found them to be a little bit harder than I had thought at first glance, not sure if thats the norm or not, but now I am onto the wonderful world of character strings. One more chapter left before pointers....sigh.

One thing tha nags at me is that in many forums and mailing lists people have said or hinted that if you find your book hard, or the excercises hard, then you really have no idea of how difficult it will soon get. I had one person tell me that if I find structures containing arrays difficult to comprehend, that I should probably just go learn html instead. Not too encouraging but I suspect he was just being a dick too so I will ignore it for now and hope he is wrong.

My boyfriend is still intent on his stupid bicycle club idea but is getting alot of heat from his parents now too and my Mom even gave him a little talking to which couldnt have been fun.

I have a good freind who lives in Wick, waaay up in the north of Scotland, she will be here in Canada in two weeks and will stay with Sarah and I for a while. I last saw her about 4 years ago and cant wait for her to visit!

æc♥

My boyfriend has complained constantly about the non smoking law in bars and restraunts that has now been in place since early summer. It wasnt much of an issue as his club has a very nice patio and in the summer the smokers could go outside, have a puff and not freeze to death, but now with winter looming no one will want to hang outside for anymore than a minute or so, and he fears it will hurt buisness.

So, looking into loopholes, he discovered that this law does not apply to private clubs, he then looked into what actually constitutes a private club and pretty much all you have to do, is have members, paid members, so he wants to now charge people a dollar each visit, or $25 per year, and then its not a public bar anymore. Apparently this has been done before and with success. I told him the club has to have a name and he said it will be an "Antique Bicycle Club", despite the fact that he knows nothing about antique bicycles.

Quite honestly I think this borders on bizzare behaviour on his part. He has no hard evidence to support the fact that he will lose buisness due to smokers not being able to smoke inside. Add to that the general ridiculousness of actually presenting the notion to your customers that your now a members only club whose sole interest is antique bicycles.

Finally its not fair to the workers there that dont smoke, and thats part of the reason of passing the law in the first place. I have told him flat out that next to tipping over the golf carts last summer, this is the stupidist thing I have ever seen him do. There is some hope as his parents both feel the same as I do and hopefully they can talk him out doing this.

æc♥

Halloween was great, I spent a lot of time with my niece and nephew and got to take them out trick or treatin' which is always fun. I think its cool to see how many people go to such lengths to make a special night just for kids.

One of the Chix mentioned in irc that I should tear myself away from bzflag to things that are more useful, and shes right of course, and that will likely be the case now anyway as since my new install of Debian I have been unable to get the game to run properly at all, I have to start the game in a small window with a high resolution, then switch to a lower resolution and go into the full-screen mode, which is frankly too much of a pain to do and after spending far to long finding out why this is now happening ive given up.

On friday night I had my niece over here and sh was supposed to be asleep but got up and came to see me, so she hopped in my lap and I let her play bzflag. It was on a private server with only known players but one of he guys decided to call her a moron for getting in his way which led to him getting shot and ruining his perfect kill ratio, for this he called a 6 year old girl a moron :-\(to be fair he didnt know it was her, but still this all well known players on the server)

She wasnt upset by the word, and later as his tank passed ours on the screen, I told her "look theres the guy who called you a moron" and she replied with something quite unprintable :)

æc♥