January 2005 Archives
January 31
skiing
I went skiing this weekend and
re-injured my ankle again, my brother suspects the wrong size boots
was the cause. The rental office didn't have boots my size so I had
to use a boot one size too big, so maybe my ankle moved around a
little too much, I'm not sure.
I think it might have been the snow blades. Snow blades are like ski's only much shorter and you don't need poles, pretty much like skating on snow. They're lots of fun and with far less weight than ski's so you don't get as tired if you have to do any uphill or flat skiing.
I need to build a cable for my old laptop which sits in the computer room, I don't have an ethernet cable long enough for it now, I bought some connectors and the crusher tool for it some time ago and have built my own cables before so it shouldn't be a problem, but I am half tempted to just buy another netgear wireless card seeing as the routers all set up.
Thanks for the emails about firefox, I was looking in the "search" page of firefox help and not of course in the keyboard shortcut page. :-\
This email describes the status of the long awaited release of Debian 3.1
Although my server is Woody I have no dire need for newer bleeding edge software, Apache, Samba, NFS and Exim all run fine and do the job they are supposed to do. Because I also irc from this server, a newer version of irssi would be nice as I cannot run some of the scripts I'd like to run (this is partly also due to Woody's version of perl being too old) but its something I dont mind waiting for and would not sacrifice security updates just to get a better irc client.
I wonder how many Ubuntu users will revert back to Debian when 3.1 is finally released.
æc♥
I think it might have been the snow blades. Snow blades are like ski's only much shorter and you don't need poles, pretty much like skating on snow. They're lots of fun and with far less weight than ski's so you don't get as tired if you have to do any uphill or flat skiing.
I need to build a cable for my old laptop which sits in the computer room, I don't have an ethernet cable long enough for it now, I bought some connectors and the crusher tool for it some time ago and have built my own cables before so it shouldn't be a problem, but I am half tempted to just buy another netgear wireless card seeing as the routers all set up.
Thanks for the emails about firefox, I was looking in the "search" page of firefox help and not of course in the keyboard shortcut page. :-\
This email describes the status of the long awaited release of Debian 3.1
Although my server is Woody I have no dire need for newer bleeding edge software, Apache, Samba, NFS and Exim all run fine and do the job they are supposed to do. Because I also irc from this server, a newer version of irssi would be nice as I cannot run some of the scripts I'd like to run (this is partly also due to Woody's version of perl being too old) but its something I dont mind waiting for and would not sacrifice security updates just to get a better irc client.
I wonder how many Ubuntu users will revert back to Debian when 3.1 is finally released.
æc♥
January 28
firefox
Firefox has a nifty (somewhat)
feature for searching, just type / and a little search box pops up
and it searches the page for your word as the word is typed
in.
This is handy and / is natural for me as its the same search trigger in vim and in Gnu's less command.
What bugs me about the firefox search is that it doesn't hold the search window open long enough, by the time Ive looked at one result, the window has gone, also there is no keyboard shortcut, that I can find at least, for "find next" and "find previous" so I have to reach for the mouse to do this, and many times, by the time I bring the cursor down to the button the box times out and vanishes.
Last but not least, no search history which would really be great, I'd like to up-arrow to scroll through all the previous keywords in my history.
One final browser note, Jybe is a browser plugin that allows friends to connect to your browser and "browse with me", seeing the same sites as you do complete with chat. So.. who wants to browse with me?
æc♥
This is handy and / is natural for me as its the same search trigger in vim and in Gnu's less command.
What bugs me about the firefox search is that it doesn't hold the search window open long enough, by the time Ive looked at one result, the window has gone, also there is no keyboard shortcut, that I can find at least, for "find next" and "find previous" so I have to reach for the mouse to do this, and many times, by the time I bring the cursor down to the button the box times out and vanishes.
Last but not least, no search history which would really be great, I'd like to up-arrow to scroll through all the previous keywords in my history.
One final browser note, Jybe is a browser plugin that allows friends to connect to your browser and "browse with me", seeing the same sites as you do complete with chat. So.. who wants to browse with me?
æc♥
January 23
Mutt
serves me quite well as an email client, and it fits in perfectly
with my "everything must be text" fetish. I hadn't really
looked at the .muttrc file much except to set it up initally but
have spent a bit of time tweaking it lately and in doing so,
realizing just how insanely configurable it really is.
My muttrc file is so l33t now that I might GPL it :)
I have also installed rss2email, created a ~/mail/rss folder, and have procmail dump rss feeds in there for mutt to read. Each item in a feed is seperate mail so its really much faster to skip through what doesn't interest me than scrolling with a mouse in a browser.
I just need to figure out how to make mutt always delete read messages in that folder when it exits.
The storm here yesteday was a pretty good one and we had to cancel our plans to go out last night which suited me fine. Sarah and I cleaned up the apartment yesteday but I left my window open in my room and forgot about it, when I went to bed it had frozen open and it was -21 outside, I didn't want to bother my landlord at that late hour to fix it so I slept on the couch.
I am almost ready to start the chapter on pointers, Its been slow getting there and as much as I'd like to see myself have some magical epiphany where I suddenly understand what it all means, I know that wont happen. I just have to not get down when I dont understand things.
It seems whenever I boot my windows XP computer the wireless network card can no longer talk to the router without me manually entering the security key again, Its using the netgear tools to do this but windows happily pops up a stupid bubble window asking if windows can configure it for me. I am now going to just leave the computer on to avoid having to do this all the time.
æc♥
My muttrc file is so l33t now that I might GPL it :)
I have also installed rss2email, created a ~/mail/rss folder, and have procmail dump rss feeds in there for mutt to read. Each item in a feed is seperate mail so its really much faster to skip through what doesn't interest me than scrolling with a mouse in a browser.
I just need to figure out how to make mutt always delete read messages in that folder when it exits.
The storm here yesteday was a pretty good one and we had to cancel our plans to go out last night which suited me fine. Sarah and I cleaned up the apartment yesteday but I left my window open in my room and forgot about it, when I went to bed it had frozen open and it was -21 outside, I didn't want to bother my landlord at that late hour to fix it so I slept on the couch.
I am almost ready to start the chapter on pointers, Its been slow getting there and as much as I'd like to see myself have some magical epiphany where I suddenly understand what it all means, I know that wont happen. I just have to not get down when I dont understand things.
It seems whenever I boot my windows XP computer the wireless network card can no longer talk to the router without me manually entering the security key again, Its using the netgear tools to do this but windows happily pops up a stupid bubble window asking if windows can configure it for me. I am now going to just leave the computer on to avoid having to do this all the time.
æc♥
January 18
grr
It seems a week doesn't go by without
something or someone reminding women that they are either genetically
incapable of working on par with men in technical fields or that
women are perfectly welcome to do so, as long as they fit the
beauty
pageant
mold.
The president of Harvard University, for gods sakes, but the National Bureau of Economic Research neatly side steps this with:
Conference organizers said Summers was asked to be provocative, and that he was invited as a top economist, not as a Harvard official.
æc♥
The president of Harvard University, for gods sakes, but the National Bureau of Economic Research neatly side steps this with:
Conference organizers said Summers was asked to be provocative, and that he was invited as a top economist, not as a Harvard official.
æc♥
January 17
so..thats what those screws are for?
Last night I was ssh'd into my server
where I irc from, all my email is, all my music is...and so on. I
was typing an email and vim told me suddenly it couldn't write to
/tmp.
Hmmm...so then vim itself couldn't exit, and I had to kill it. Suddenly any command I issued resulted in bash saying I\O error. I couldn't run top, du, df, who, pwd nothing...
I asked in irc and was told immediately, "your disk is hosed" So great, just what I need, all my mp3's are on that disk, the only back up is the desktop drive that has bad sectors. ls -la on my home directory showed: Total 0. I rsync ~/ once an hour to another computer but I was worried now as it 12:01 when this happened and it had probably rsync'd and empty directory..so all my mail and config files were likely lost too.
Root couldn't run any commands, bash would return the same input/output error. So I went into the laundry room and yanked the plug. Next I hooked up a monitor and keyboard to it, but it wouldn't boot up at all. There was a long beep, then 3 short beeps each time I booted up and nothing on the monitor. Google told me this means no video card in some bios's so I then opened the case. Sure enough, the video card had worked its way right out of the slot, and fallen down onto some ribbon cables. :)
I had not put that screw in to hold it in, in fact none of the pci cards had screws in them either. I try to put them in but usually the screw is so tiny and it slips and then I loose it in the case so I push the card in real hard and close it all up.
Anyway, this time I screwed all of the stuff in tight, rebooted and it came back to life, it automatically checked the file system because of the crash, it took a long time as it hadn't been rebooted in about 140 days but everything was fine and I've learnt my lesson :P
æc♥
Hmmm...so then vim itself couldn't exit, and I had to kill it. Suddenly any command I issued resulted in bash saying I\O error. I couldn't run top, du, df, who, pwd nothing...
I asked in irc and was told immediately, "your disk is hosed" So great, just what I need, all my mp3's are on that disk, the only back up is the desktop drive that has bad sectors. ls -la on my home directory showed: Total 0. I rsync ~/ once an hour to another computer but I was worried now as it 12:01 when this happened and it had probably rsync'd and empty directory..so all my mail and config files were likely lost too.
Root couldn't run any commands, bash would return the same input/output error. So I went into the laundry room and yanked the plug. Next I hooked up a monitor and keyboard to it, but it wouldn't boot up at all. There was a long beep, then 3 short beeps each time I booted up and nothing on the monitor. Google told me this means no video card in some bios's so I then opened the case. Sure enough, the video card had worked its way right out of the slot, and fallen down onto some ribbon cables. :)
I had not put that screw in to hold it in, in fact none of the pci cards had screws in them either. I try to put them in but usually the screw is so tiny and it slips and then I loose it in the case so I push the card in real hard and close it all up.
Anyway, this time I screwed all of the stuff in tight, rebooted and it came back to life, it automatically checked the file system because of the crash, it took a long time as it hadn't been rebooted in about 140 days but everything was fine and I've learnt my lesson :P
æc♥
January 15
software goodies
Carla pointed me at some really cool
image gallery software called album. You don't need
server-side stuff like php installed, but you will need perl and
imagemagick which
luckily are pretty easy to get on most OS's these days.
Album is nice because its relatively simple to use, although yours truly took a few whacks at it to get it to run properly, and its themeable. I did up an album for a girlfriend of mine who is here until tomorrow on a visit from Australia, of course I used the Dominatrix theme ;-)
Speaking of imagemagick, I also found this site, which has a ton of really cool command line image editing tools.
One more useful app I have recently discovered is unclutter. It hides the your mouse cursor after a period of inactivity, I cannot seem to find its homepage though, so I linked the debian package. Anyhow, its really nice as I hate typing away and suddenly having to move the cursor out of the way to see.
My friend leaves for Australia tomorrow, I hadn't seen her for four years so it was a wonderful surprise to see her show up at my door. She's off to Vancouver next, then Switzerland, then Thailand before going back to Sydney. I'm going to be sad to see her go, partly because I will miss her and partly because I'm not going with her :)
æc♥
Album is nice because its relatively simple to use, although yours truly took a few whacks at it to get it to run properly, and its themeable. I did up an album for a girlfriend of mine who is here until tomorrow on a visit from Australia, of course I used the Dominatrix theme ;-)
Speaking of imagemagick, I also found this site, which has a ton of really cool command line image editing tools.
One more useful app I have recently discovered is unclutter. It hides the your mouse cursor after a period of inactivity, I cannot seem to find its homepage though, so I linked the debian package. Anyhow, its really nice as I hate typing away and suddenly having to move the cursor out of the way to see.
My friend leaves for Australia tomorrow, I hadn't seen her for four years so it was a wonderful surprise to see her show up at my door. She's off to Vancouver next, then Switzerland, then Thailand before going back to Sydney. I'm going to be sad to see her go, partly because I will miss her and partly because I'm not going with her :)
æc♥
January 14
rms answering machine
My desktop again died yesterday
evening, this time I decided to actually figure out what was going
on. I unplugged the power and ide connector from the slave drive,
the one that contains a backup of all my mp3's and the very same
drive that used to be the master before it suddenly developed bad
sectors and was to unstable to use. It was mounted as /mp3 and the
only time I would access it was a twice a day cron job to sync all
my mp3's from the server.
As soon as that drive was unplugged, the system booted normally and has run for 20 hours with no hitches. So I will have to replace the crap drive I guess.
Couple of site of interest. A free software magazine which looks promising, and contained a link to the Free Software Foundation's website. A membership to the FSF will run you $120 USD annually or $60 for students.
You get discounts on gnu books and stuff as a membership benefit, but the best perk?
Here is another interesting site all about anagrams. Some of the better ones...
As soon as that drive was unplugged, the system booted normally and has run for 20 hours with no hitches. So I will have to replace the crap drive I guess.
Couple of site of interest. A free software magazine which looks promising, and contained a link to the Free Software Foundation's website. A membership to the FSF will run you $120 USD annually or $60 for students.
You get discounts on gnu books and stuff as a membership benefit, but the best perk?
Recruit Other Members and Receive an Answering Machine Greeting by Richard Stallman or Eben MoglenHeh.
If you are an FSF associate member, a way to contribute further is by recruiting others to join and support our work. Spreading the word about our work, and how FSF members enable us to do our work, is help that we appreciate. For every three new members who name you as their inspiration for joining, your choice of FSF founder and president Richard Stallman or FSF counsel and scholar Eben Moglen will record a personalized greeting ready for use on your answering machine.
Here is another interesting site all about anagrams. Some of the better ones...
Dormitory = Dirty Roomæc♥
Schoolmaster = The classroom
Elvis = Lives
Listen = Silent
Desperation = A Rope Ends It
Mr. Mojo risin' = Jim Morrison
The Great New York Rapid Transit Tunnel = Giant Work in Street, Partly Underneath
Snooze Alarms = Alas! No More Z's
The Detectives = Detect Thieves
Eleven plus two = Twelve plus one
The United States Bureau of Fisheries = I Raise the Bass to Feed Us in the Future
January 13
hard drive problems
My desktop packed it all in last
night, it suddenly froze with all kinds of input/output errors on
the console.
Upon rebooting there are no hardrives detected and grub bails out. I cant believe its the hard drive again, I guess it is possible, but it wasn't that long ago that I put this new drive in to replace the almost brand new 160GB one, so now I have two relatively new malfunctioning 100GB+ drives?
I think I can get another motherboard off my friend and try that. I think also I will get one of those pci cards that you can hook hardrives to, and have like 3 or 4 drives in one computer instead of the normal 2. If you know of one that works in linux lemme know!
Bzflag is on the verge of releasing version 2.0 but last minute hitches are delaying things. Players are coming into #bzflag every 10 minutes it seems demanding to know if its released yet, and if not, when will it be released? Its a wonder the Dev's don't delay it out of spite.
hmmm...before I typed all of this, I took my desktops cover off and pushed all the cables in and cleaned. Now as I have finished this post it seems to have booted normally. :-\
æc♥
Upon rebooting there are no hardrives detected and grub bails out. I cant believe its the hard drive again, I guess it is possible, but it wasn't that long ago that I put this new drive in to replace the almost brand new 160GB one, so now I have two relatively new malfunctioning 100GB+ drives?
I think I can get another motherboard off my friend and try that. I think also I will get one of those pci cards that you can hook hardrives to, and have like 3 or 4 drives in one computer instead of the normal 2. If you know of one that works in linux lemme know!
Bzflag is on the verge of releasing version 2.0 but last minute hitches are delaying things. Players are coming into #bzflag every 10 minutes it seems demanding to know if its released yet, and if not, when will it be released? Its a wonder the Dev's don't delay it out of spite.
hmmm...before I typed all of this, I took my desktops cover off and pushed all the cables in and cleaned. Now as I have finished this post it seems to have booted normally. :-\
æc♥
January 11
minimac
As expected, the "around
$500" Mac was announced today and I totally want one. What
really does it for me is its so cute and tiny, I expected just a
regular sized Mac without a monitor, but this is really cool.
Ok sure, many people will (and already have) found fault with it, but cmon, as a product clearly designed to lure PC users to the apple platform, you cant beat this deal. Priced on apple.com/ca the mini-mac comes in at around $730 Canadian, lets add tax and ram upgrade, and I'd spend about $1000. Hrm... still it is tempting. I can get an LCD for free off one of my friends so that really sweetens the deal.
I will give it a month, the reviews will come in, the biggest pros and cons should surface by then and hopefully I can get my grubby little hands on one.
I have been listening to a ton of Motown music these last few days, I don't know what kicked it off but its great. The Jackson 5 are simply irresistible and they make you long for the days when Jacko wasn't whacko.
I have settled on rdesktop and tsclient to remotely (from across my room) control my Windows computer, Vnc is very cool, but not quite as fast on my (possibly mis-configured) setup.
æc♥
Ok sure, many people will (and already have) found fault with it, but cmon, as a product clearly designed to lure PC users to the apple platform, you cant beat this deal. Priced on apple.com/ca the mini-mac comes in at around $730 Canadian, lets add tax and ram upgrade, and I'd spend about $1000. Hrm... still it is tempting. I can get an LCD for free off one of my friends so that really sweetens the deal.
I will give it a month, the reviews will come in, the biggest pros and cons should surface by then and hopefully I can get my grubby little hands on one.
I have been listening to a ton of Motown music these last few days, I don't know what kicked it off but its great. The Jackson 5 are simply irresistible and they make you long for the days when Jacko wasn't whacko.
I have settled on rdesktop and tsclient to remotely (from across my room) control my Windows computer, Vnc is very cool, but not quite as fast on my (possibly mis-configured) setup.
æc♥
January 08
VNC
Until I get a new monitor my Windows
XP computer will be have to be viewed via VNC.
I have to carry my monitor from my linux computer to my windows one each time I want to use windows, and I usually only need windows for a couple of quick things, then have to carry it back, its too heavy for me to do this all the time so Ive set out on a quest for an alternate solution.
This weekend I will look at all the VNC options and hopefully can leave the Windows XP computer running headless, ready for me when ever I need it. It is tempting to install Vmware instead, I have a copy of it and have used it with success in the past, but it does take up a lot of resources with Windows running inside of my linux host. The advantage of course to Vmware is that I could install Windows into linux, then completely wipe the existing Windows computer and use it for some other form of linux, like Ubuntu or Gentoo.
I will see however how the VNC goes and take it from there. Besides, my $500 Mac will be here soon so I wont need anything else. :P
I finished another patch for bzflag, this one is a /quit command and it was accepted and uploaded last night into cvs, so I am very happy about that. My other patches were all server side, and focused on a small set of files to edit. This one needed the server to send a message when a player quits but also to kill the client, the killing of the client required a lot of hunting around in all those src/ directories for a function that quits the game, so I did learn some more about the massive and confusing code base that is bzflag/src.
The biggest thrill for me however this weekend was looking out of the laundry room window at the snow raging down as I pulled on a pair of jeans fresh out of the dryer. Life can sometimes provide you with little happy moments like that :)
æc♥
I have to carry my monitor from my linux computer to my windows one each time I want to use windows, and I usually only need windows for a couple of quick things, then have to carry it back, its too heavy for me to do this all the time so Ive set out on a quest for an alternate solution.
This weekend I will look at all the VNC options and hopefully can leave the Windows XP computer running headless, ready for me when ever I need it. It is tempting to install Vmware instead, I have a copy of it and have used it with success in the past, but it does take up a lot of resources with Windows running inside of my linux host. The advantage of course to Vmware is that I could install Windows into linux, then completely wipe the existing Windows computer and use it for some other form of linux, like Ubuntu or Gentoo.
I will see however how the VNC goes and take it from there. Besides, my $500 Mac will be here soon so I wont need anything else. :P
I finished another patch for bzflag, this one is a /quit command and it was accepted and uploaded last night into cvs, so I am very happy about that. My other patches were all server side, and focused on a small set of files to edit. This one needed the server to send a message when a player quits but also to kill the client, the killing of the client required a lot of hunting around in all those src/ directories for a function that quits the game, so I did learn some more about the massive and confusing code base that is bzflag/src.
The biggest thrill for me however this weekend was looking out of the laundry room window at the snow raging down as I pulled on a pair of jeans fresh out of the dryer. Life can sometimes provide you with little happy moments like that :)
æc♥
January 05
vim
If you use gvim and want to make your
own color scheme but would like a "try-before-you-buy" deal, then
this
site is perfect for you, it will build the theme based on your
colors and then generate the config file.
æc♥
æc♥
January 04
the new year
I had to work on NY's eve and wasn't
too happy about it, but the tips were really really good and as the
only other thing I had planned was to stay home, I suppose it was
the right choice. I didn't get much sleep so the next day was a
groggy one.
I think after trying several news readers, I have settled on slrn. It has a similar look and feel to mutt and with a bit off messing around I am now able to use it without looking up what keys to press. I tried nn, and tin and a number of other text mode USENET clients but I have a very simple rule now in new software, it must be at least somewhat intuitive, that is, I should not have to look at the manual right off the bat to do the most basic of things. Slrn to some extent passed that test.
I do now know why people prefer GUI's, its not that they like pointing and clicking over using the keyboard, its just having to remember a whole bunch of keys across several different apps can become a little too much. Vim, mutt, slrn, irssi, elinks....thats a lot to remember! So slowly I am getting there and my wrists appreciate not mousing.
I am still 4 or 5 exercises away from finishing the character strings section of my book and it has been suggested to me that I don't have to do every single one, no one is grading me and its not like a real course. I am far to stubborn though, and want to do every example in every chapter as I have it in my head that I will miss some crucial piece of knowledge if I skip one.
So, Christmas being so busy, I have still yet to complete that chapter.
By the way, why USENET? well there are so many more interesting groups than i can find in mailing lists, especially non computer ones, like food and books and of course mp3's :P
æc♥
I think after trying several news readers, I have settled on slrn. It has a similar look and feel to mutt and with a bit off messing around I am now able to use it without looking up what keys to press. I tried nn, and tin and a number of other text mode USENET clients but I have a very simple rule now in new software, it must be at least somewhat intuitive, that is, I should not have to look at the manual right off the bat to do the most basic of things. Slrn to some extent passed that test.
I do now know why people prefer GUI's, its not that they like pointing and clicking over using the keyboard, its just having to remember a whole bunch of keys across several different apps can become a little too much. Vim, mutt, slrn, irssi, elinks....thats a lot to remember! So slowly I am getting there and my wrists appreciate not mousing.
I am still 4 or 5 exercises away from finishing the character strings section of my book and it has been suggested to me that I don't have to do every single one, no one is grading me and its not like a real course. I am far to stubborn though, and want to do every example in every chapter as I have it in my head that I will miss some crucial piece of knowledge if I skip one.
So, Christmas being so busy, I have still yet to complete that chapter.
By the way, why USENET? well there are so many more interesting groups than i can find in mailing lists, especially non computer ones, like food and books and of course mp3's :P
æc♥