this girl drives a tank

You might have heard by now the rumoured release of a "$500" Mac that Apple is expected to announce at the Macworld Expo in January.

Would I buy one? Damn right, currently at apple.com/ca the cheapest G5 is $2,099.00, plus tax which would bring it to $2314 thereabouts.

1.8GHz PowerPC G5
600MHz frontside bus
512K L2 cache
256MB DDR400 SDRAM
Expandable to 4GB SDRAM
80GB Serial ATA
8x SuperDrive
Three PCI Slots
NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 Ultra
64MB DDR video memory
56K internal modem

Quite alot of money but a decent computer nevertheless. I could however be in AMD 64bit land for the same money, including a monitor.

So I would welcome a $1000 or less Mac, but Im not holding my breath, this has been suggested in the past.

æc♥

Here is link to Sharon's blog, if you have broadband and use firefox as your browser, give it a try, I made the changes yesterday and it really does work!™

I am not sure if your distribution has it, but look for the "look" command, its a nice addition to "dict". You need a "words" file that you can download here

Untar that file and mv it to /usr/share/dict/words ; then you can do:

 orchid@supergrass ~ $ look faceti
facetiae
facetiation
faceting
facetious
facetiously
facetiousness
facetiousnesses
facetiousness's

Heres another little vim tip: :h holy-grail

Oh, enter miserable failure in google and hit "I'm Feeling Lucky" :P

æc♥

I have neglected to tell you (I was informed on irc yesterday) the most important xterm menu is accessed with ctrl + middle-click. From that menu you can set the visual bell, soft reset, reverse video and scrollbar stuff.

Last night I worked, came home and slept then got early and did a bunch of chores, including playing nursemaid for my ailing roommate. Shes not too happy, and is unable to even to get up easily to get a drink of water.

Yesterday I set up ssh-keygen to make password free connections to my local computers, I am not sure why I have never done this before but its so easy now to do backups with cron and now my ~/ directory's on the server, desktop and laptop are all safely mirrored. I suppose there is a chance of data loss, and backups to cdrw's should be included in any backup solution but I'm far too lazy to do that.

My niece has the best video game console ever developed, its not xbox, and its not ps2 or Nintendo, its this. The games are all old 80's ones like Pole Position



The best part about this is that you simply plug it into your TV, yeah yeah, you do that with the other consoles too, OK then the best part is it costs $14.77 USD, and its tons of fun, how can you not like Mrs. pacman?

æc♥

Christmas was great, family-wise it was wonderful, it was very relaxing and peaceful which is how I wanted it, plus a white Christmas to boot.

I got lots of great gifts, some awesome clothes, shoes and other wonderful things and of course we all ate like it was our last meal ever. I even cooked the turkey again this year along with a little quiche for myself.

I didn't get my nephew "Grand Theft Auto" after deciding it was a tad too mature for him but got him the NHL hockey 2005 xbox game which he is absolutely addicted to it seems. Its a pretty cool game, very realistic in terms of sound and commentary, and fun to play.

My older brother immediately set me to fixing his computer when I got to his house. Its a dell with that wide format LCD screen, windows XP and 6 users, 4 of them kids. It was just like my bf's brothers comp that I fixed recently. Full of malware, bogged down with apps running at start up and slow as cold molasses.

I did the exact same things to fix it, got rid of all the malware, cleaned the registry and installed firefox, then restricted the kids accounts (which is easy to circumvent, but I'm not sure what else to do) MS messenger on all of the kids accounts was infected with something that was putting porn links in the IE favourites. This really pisses me off, people should go to jail for distributing software that does this.

I discovered quite by accident that xterm, the venerable linux terminal emulator has menus! I am probably the last person on earth to know about this, and as as I am a urxvt-girl, I have no use for this information except to pass it along...



press ctrl+left mouse inside the terminal for the main menu, and ctrl+right mouse for the font menu.

At my parents house, preparing to leave, I was coming down the basement stairs with some bags and slipped off the top stair and sort of bounced down the remaing stairs on my hip and side. I smacked my ankle really hard at the end and now its all swollen up.

My dad and bf were laughing as it happened, and as soon as I got the bottom of the stairs they rushed over and while still laughing, asked if I was ok, I wasnt really but put on a brave face and went out to the car. I wasn't mad at them, it probably did look funny and sometimes us humans cant help but laugh at stuff like that. I did however get mad at Dad when he said "you wouldn't have been hurt if you had some meat on them bones"

Anyhow, the bizarre part is last night Sarah wanted to go out with me to this party, I said nah, my ankle still hurts a little and I was tired a bit. So she goes, and after the party they're getting hamburgers at some place and shes all drunk and stuff and slips on the ice and twists her ankle! :P

So shes downstairs now immobilized on the couch and I am hobbling around trying to take care of her as best I can. My bf thinks its because we are evil witches and God has seen fit to "smote" us.

æc♥

As usual my Christmas stay with my parents will involve no internet, something I have tried to rectify, even offering to pay for a connection and set them up with a computer, but they "really don't see the need."

So in past years, with no internet connection, I would use that time to do some reading in the evenings when they have all gone to bed, or early in the morning before everyone awakes. I download:

• The Rute Tutorial --- A very thorough linux tutorial.
• Grokking the Gimp --- A must have Gimp manual.
• Advanced Bash Scripting Guide --- The giant hard to understand guide to bash scripts.
• Debian Reference --- Great in depth manual for Debian, section 6.4 will surely ameliorate any Debian user. "Enlightenment with these commands will save a person from the eternal karmic struggle of upgrade hell and let him reach Debian nirvana. :-)"
• Linux Gazette --- All the back issues of the magazine. (great tips and Q/A's in this)

These packages I get with: apt-get install rutebook debian-reference grokking-the-gimp abs-guide lg-all lg-subscription. This is all saved into /usr/share/doc and each package has an index.html which I find and bookmark in elinks or mozilla. So now with my little lappy offline there is always something interesting to read. "Apt-cache search tutorial" turns up many more than these.

This year of course I have my C book, but nevertheless. Oh for fun I also install Tuxracer and of course Foobillard.

I hope you all have a great Christmas!!

æc♥

My shopping was for the most part finished weeks ago but my little brother set out the other day to do his, and ended up with a bunch of gift certificates which I told him was for some people a "meh" type of gift. Personally I don't mind getting a certificate from him, but Mom for example thinks its " I didn't really want to put any thought into your gift" type of gift.

So last night I went and got a bunch of his gift certificates, went back to the stores he'd got them and got proper gifts. My older brother also required some gift help so I picked up some stuff for him too. I want to get his son an xbox game, specifically "Grand Theft Auto" but I'm not sure if its too violent, I don't mean violent as in the crashes and running people over, I think he's old enough to set apart that sort of game-play from reality, its just all the swearing and stuff, but he loves car racing games, and loves to play them with me, and has never played GTA so I do want to get it for him but have to find out today if its ok swear wise or if there are alternative games of that genre that would be ok.

Theres a linux help (debiancantric) irc channel that I lurk in and upon joining this morning, the first thing I see is:

08:55 < metalikop > why oh why did I wait this long to go shopping?
08:56 < metalikop > shitty weather, crowded malls, this will be the worst christmas ever.

hehe.

Here is an article on securing Internet Explorer, it reccomends fist off, downloading and install 4 third-party apps, Spybot, Ad-aware, HijackThis, and SpywareBlaster

The last page finally gets around to reccommending Firefox as an alternative, but im not sure in windows if that would solve most of the problems, msn messenger and outlook express, not to mention p2p stuff like limewire that also have a role in this Im sure.

æc♥

I had today an opportunity to spend a much needed time with my C book. With about 6 exercises remaining on this chapter, I thought great, I will probably get this wrapped up either today or late tonight.

I got one out of six finished. It took me all day on and off, and finally nearing supper-time I threw in the towel and asked a friend for help on irc, he asked a series of simple questions, and in about 5 minutes the program was finished. This in its self didn't bother me that much, but I cant help feeling that at this point I should be able to formulate at least a half-assed approach to solving problems.

Character strings turned out to be a lot tougher than I had anticipated. Pointers are next, at least they have nothing to do with arrays and strings :P

It is now 0C outside which thankfully is much nicer than yesterdays depressing -21C and I hoping for +10 by Christmas Day :)

æc♥

Our department at work has pretty much concluded our big project and I can finish up some loose ends from home, so as of today, until the 3rd of Jan I am officially off work :)

I still will do some bar shifts over the holiday but at least I can sleep in. Last night I slept for about 9 hours, which is something I have not done in ages.

I want to work more on my C book an attempted it yesterday but found I had already forgotten some of the basics, and even more disturbing was that I didn't really read the compiler errors properly and so ended up spending far too long fixing my mistakes. Hopefully today will be better.

æc♥

My Mom for several months now has been pressuring me to learn to make Minestra Maritata or Italian Wedding Soup as we call it.

It is not a soup for weddings as the name suggests, but rather the implication that two ingredients "marry" or go well together. However, it is traditional that Mother teaches Daughter so the recipe is passed down over the years. My Gran taught Mom, and apparently now its my time to learn, probably over the upcoming holidays.

So fair enough I guess, but the soup is made with a prosciutto bone, meatballs cheeses and sometimes salami and then greens such as spinach and brocolli. Its very filling but totally grosses me out with all that meat in a bowl. I wont argue though and even though I will not eat it, I will learn to make it at least, so one day I might be teaching my daughter the same.

Mom is also very shaken now that a little gold necklace and cross that I have worn since I was about 9, almost 20 years now, has broken, the clasp hooked on my sweater and pulled apart as I was taking my sweater off. So this morning I told Mom about it and she insisted that I drop it off for repair today so that no prolonged bad luck will befall me. She then called me at work twice to remind me to pick it up from the jeweller on my way home. Shes so cute sometimes :)

I fixed my bf's brother's computer last night, windows xp, riddled with spyware adware and of course pop-ups. I had to delete some registry keys, kill a ton of stuff that runs at boot time and then scan it for all those nasty little programs installed courtesy of Internet Explorer. I wonder how people who do this for a living feel about Internet Explorer.

One thing I think windows should do is show system processes separately from user ones, when you hit ctrl+alt+delete it will clearly mark the a process that windows owns so one can safely kill something without having to google its name to see what it is. Either that or stop letting apps hijack the OS...

æc♥

Bzflag has reached a sourceforge download milestone and this fact was recently reported on Slashdot.

Now slashdot being what it is, the usual torrent of idiotic comments ensued, I read slashdot regularly, but rarely read all the comments, mostly because its too much to read and besides that often times it just turns into a flame-war anyway, no matter the topic.

Most people bitched about bz's "poor graphics" saying it was like "something out of the 80's". The game isnt advertised as a cutting edge game, requiring the latest hardware and ram. The game is about simplicity, easy to learn difficult to master, go play Halo if you want all the latest and greatest.

Anyhow congrats to the devs and hoping the game retains its charm in future releases.

purple_cow turned me on to a band called Halou, citing them to be "my type of band" and indeed he was right. They're for lack of a better comparison sort of like Goldfrapp meets Air, and I love them!

Here is one of my favorites

Here also is a song Kira and I played non-stop when she was here, Sarah and I play it at home all the time, most of my girlfriends love it, most of my male friends think it is campy and "cheesy", you decide.

æc♥

My freind Kira has returned to Wick and I am sad to see her go, but happy to get some sleep for a change :) She had a great time which makes it worth while. Saying bye at the airport to someone you love and will likely not see for 5 or 6 years is not on my most plesant things to do list.

Some of the mailing lists I subscribe to are well over my head, the vim list is one of them. Most of the things they talk about are almost like another language, I think id need to sit down and seriously study vim to fully appreciate the things it is capable of doing. The real reason I subscribe is to pick up little tips that make life easier for me. One such tip that came my way recently was a keymap to add tags to the last word you type

" Tip #465: Generic xml imap to make an element of any word you type /*{{{*/ " http://vim.sourceforge.net/tips/tip.php?tip_id=465 " We're doing a lot of xml work, in docbook and custom xml files. " I'd just like to share one macro I've developed, that I really can't live" without. inoremap ,,, <esc>diwi<<esc>pa><cr></<esc>pa><esc>kA

" If in isert mode I type programlisting,,, " the text immediately get's modified to " <programlisting> " </programlisting> " with the cursor in between, still in Insert mode. " " The same happens with any other word i type followed by three commas. " <tryit> " </tryit>

So 3 commas in a row will tag up any word you like, I thought that was pretty neat.

I have also played around with folding, where you can shrink a block of text like a C function for example if its in your way, and then "unfold" it if you need to see it later on.

Who would of thought text editors could be so much fun?

æc♥

Whilst compiling my kernel I poked around in the documentation section, many of the kernel options cover topics that are way beyond my understanding and sometimes the built in help section is also brief or cryptic. The Documentation folder however has more than you could ever want on most subjects.

I was looking at networking options and saw "arcnet" and wondered what it was, I vaguely recall hearing about it before and was suprised to find wonderful poetry in /usr//src/linux/Documentation/networking/arcnet.txt

Since no one seems to listen to me otherwise, perhaps a poem will get your attention: This driver's getting fat and beefy, But my cat is still named Fifi.

Hmm, I think I'm allowed to call that a poem, even though it's only two lines. Hey, I'm in Computer Science, not English. Give me a break.

<snip....>

Come on, be a sport! Send me a success report!

(hey, that was even better than my original poem... this is getting bad!)

WARNING:

If you don't e-mail me about your success/failure soon, I may be forced to start SINGING. And we don't want that, do we?

cute :)

With help from the linuxchix mailing list I managed to get sound on this laptop by telling the kernel pci=noacpi when it boots. I dont know why I didnt have to do this previously but it works and I wont argue.

I havent touched my C book in almost a week which sucks as my memory retention seems to be at an all time low. I will likely have to do some re-reading to get back at it.

I suppose its ok to be busy with "life" stuff, and also we are almost finished our big project at work, after this is done I will have just some year-end things to work on but other than that the office will be dull and quiet untill the spring, which frankly suits me fine.

I do miss irc, I havent been on irc in ages and am wondering what everyone is up to.

æc♥

I have tried to get sound working for a several days on and off on this laptop, finally resorting to reinstalling. Ubuntu didnt recognize and configure my card and tonight I had some time to revert the laptop back to Debian (sid).

I have gotten the install down pat and even fooled around with a way to cheat with installing xfce4. First I install a base system, then choose no packages to install, no desktop, server dev etc, otherwise I get a bunch of stuff I never use. I do however want all of xfce4, every package avalable so this time I used:

apt-get install vim screen rsync less ssh
apt-get install `apt-cache search xfce4 | cut -d" " -f1`
apt-get install gdm msttcorefonts ttf-larabie-deco ttf-larabie-straight 
ttf-larabie-uncommon ttf-mikachan ttf-xfree86-nonfree 
ttf-bitstream-vera x-ttcidfont-conf xserver-xfree86 x-window-system

Then I get the kernel sources, build a kernel to enable high mem and some other stuff, run the nvidia installer, and edit my X config file and everything is nowback to normal except sound.

The second command I am told is dangerous and unwise as it blindly installs whatever apt-cache search finds, but where is the fun in avoiding damaging commands onan unstable distribution?

It all seems so drastic to reinstall just because sound isnt working, but alsa is still voodoo to me and I have yet to find a really good guide that includes what kernel modules etc should be loaded as well as what apps to install and how to configure the alsa.conf file with all those horribly cryptic alias's.

So color me a dummy on this one.

æc♥