this girl drives a tank

I have been messing with UTF-8 once again and on my Desktop running Sid have managed to get it working not only in mutt, but also inside screen.



However on my server where I actually use screen and mutt everyday, I cannot get it to work, it might be to do with my locales, I've set en_CA.UTF-8 as my default locale on the desktop computer but my server (running Woody) has no such locale, I'm told that this locale is most certainly in woody but I cannot find it, but now at least I know it's possible.

I also installed cygwin on Sarah's computer and her ex's computer (which he left here and we use for virus testing). This lets me use rsync to back up their stuff onto my server.

I watched the movie the Incredibles recently and thought it was really well done, very exciting and fun. Not since Monsters Inc have I enjoyed a " cartoon" movie so much.

æc♥

The new Adobe acrobat reader version 7.0 is now available for linux. I had been using 5.0 which is horribly ugly, as is xpdf in my opinion. I had tried evince but it had no way to simply read pages continuously which is a major drawback for me.

I like to press the down arrow and nothing else, but evince forced me to reach for the mouse or try to remember a keyboard shortcut neither of which was appealing to me.

Adobe 7.0 is really nice looking, I have to say, it renders a pdf beautifully, but its not a small package, takes quite a bit of memory, about 25 MB, and of course is closed source.

The memory and disc space I can live with but if I can find open source software I try to use it instead. Hopefully evince will improve and I will then switch to it. I am somewhat of a hypocrite though as I do use Nvidia's closed source video card driver. If Nvidia, or ATI for that matter released a fully open source driver then yes, I would use that, but as long as people like me accept the proprietary drivers, they have no real incentive to do so...

Easter was the usual mix of good food, family dysfunction and relaxation. I played tons of xbox with my nephew. He has a motocross game where you jump all kinds of hills on a little motor bike. The game will only let you run one map until you earn points to unlock them. Not surprisingly he knew about cheat codes and where to get them on the internet. (This is from hanging around with my younger brother) Anyway, soon we had the new maps working and the expensive bikes that jump higher.

This morning I tried to update my blog software to the latest version. It seems the archive format has changed and despite following the instructions in the documentation, I could not convert my archives, finally I figured it out but the next problem was using "æc♥" as the authors title now breaks the rss generating part of the blog. It has worked up to now so I might have to ask a mailing list or something what the problem is, as I don't know too much about XML and RSS.

æc♥

I promise to stop writing about emacs, I really do, after today that's it. Devhelp has the complete emacs manual included and I was just browsing through and noticed a heading called Distracting the NSA.

Hmm, what is this all about.

M-x spook adds a line of randomly chosen keywords to an outgoing mail message. The keywords are chosen from a list of words that suggest you are discussing something subversive. The idea behind this feature is the suspicion that the NSA snoops on all electronic mail messages that contain keywords suggesting they might find them interesting. (The NSA says they don't, but that's what they would say.) The idea is that if lots of people add suspicious words to their messages, the NSA will get so busy with spurious input that they will have to give up reading it all. Here's how to insert spook keywords automatically whenever you start entering an outgoing message:

(add-hook 'mail-setup-hook 'spook)

Whether or not this confuses the NSA, it at least amuses people.

So what kinds of words are these?

CipherTAC-2000 EuroFed Indigo Perl-RSA Taiwan genetic chameleon man beanpole Chobetsu Consul Semtex STARLAN condor Commecen encryption

Albanian FSF Blowfish Crypto AG top secret White Water Crowell SHA Area 51 2600 Magazine militia INSCOM Steve Case subversive spy

I listen to the radio on the net but basically listen to the CBC stations. Someone pointed me to to NPR which seems quite good also. I often like to surf to some foreign faraway land and listen to their local news, I am not sure why I do this, most of the news makes no sense to me, and I sometimes have to look up the town on google to even get a clue whereabouts in $country the station is.

I looked in my apt-cache and found no real software that simply lets you jump around radio stations all over the world or has them all listed and searchable etc. This would would be a nice program to have, so if you know such a beast or have a better solution than just firefox bookmarks, please email me.

æc♥

Although I am not having too much trouble adjusting to Emacs, I do miss how pretty gvim was, the thing about gui apps is you can make all the fonts nice and pretty and also have far more colors available to you. Gvim had all of that and then some.

The emacs gui is quite ugly to me, it uses some sort of old toolkit that just doesn't compare to GTK. The cvs version however has GTK support so just out of curiosity I compiled it today. This screenshot looks quite a bit better and hopefully it will be even more polished when they release it.

Sarah has adjusted quite well to not having TV and found that one can download pretty much any TV show with limewire. To my horror I checked her computer this evening and she had 46 episodes cued up and downloading. Not only that, file sharing being what it is, at least half of those were uploading their way out to other users on the net. eek!

I'm starting to get the hang of binary, hexadecimal and octal numbers, and can see a little now how these strange things called bit operators behave. I can also see quite a bit of tedium in my future as the program exercises are more of the instructional nature than practical stuff that I could use elsewhere.

æc♥

We do not have cable TV at home now and it a point of debate between Sarah and I if we should subscribe to the roughly $50 a month service.

She likes TV, I make no judgement of this, its just one of the ways she passes the time. For me I find little on television that is appealing. Oh sure I have a couple of shows I do not mind watching but guilt trip myself when I watch them, telling myself its a waste of time.

All the information I need I can get on the internet, and after all if its not on the internet, then it simply isn't true. :)

We used to have cable, but were stealing it. Our building superintendent hooked it up illegally for us. Then the cable guy saw it and unhooked it, so our super hooked it again. This went on for a while until the cable guy threatened us with a bill, he said "I can show you a photo of your cable NOT hooked up after my last visit, and then I returned and it IS hooked up, this is proof" I told him I will give him a photo of my television turned off, and that proves I don't watch TV.

Well, anyway, I don't want a big fight with them and I don't want Sarah bored or wanting so I think we will get it back. I wouldn't mind seeing my shows either and could try and get this TV card on my computer working.

I have a spell checker and thesaurus now with Emacs so its becoming pretty much a complete editor for me.

The thesaurus was not too hard to set up, using the well commented .el file I found here.

Yesterday was the first day of spring, thank god, and to celebrate here's a nice "first day of spring" type song by the Gandharvas

æc♥

My girlfriend picked me up yesterday morning and we went into her work where she exchanged my video card for a GeForce 6800. We hit the the mall after that for some comfort shopping and a bite to eat.

When I got home I was anxious to know if I could get my monitor to do the resolution I wanted with the new card. So after installing it, and rebooting I was disappointed to see that no, I was still stuck in 1600x1200.

Then someone mentioned on irc about the latest Nvidia drivers. I knew that new drivers were out, but had heard some people had been having stability problems with them. At this point I didn't care anymore and upgraded to the new driver.

That did the trick and I was delighted to see my desktop at 1920x1200. Finally everything was the right size and my apps didn't look too big. I cant believe how much stuff I can do in one workspace. I tried last night putting my Emacs window next to my irc window but that really isn't any good as I don't have the discipline to focus on working and not look at irc.



I did discover a nifty feature of Emacs which makes visiting files you frequently edit a breeze.

C-x r m      will (r)e(m)ember a bookmark
C-x r b      will (r)ecall a (b)ookmark
M-x edit-bookmarks
M-x list-bookmarks

Bzflag at 1920x1200 is insane, Its so huge. I think it will take some getting used to.

I am now on the hunt for large wallpaper....

Oh and btw, Happy Birthday Chestal!! æc♥

Finally my new monitor arrived and all I can say is wow! In typical Dell fashion though, they supplied no manual in book form, but rather on a cd. It has one of those glossy quick set up brochures but all that showed was where to plug stuff in.

I am all for saving trees and commend them for not printing a book that you use only breifly and then discard, however, they could try to cram more information than just what plug goes where. What if I didn't have another computer to read the contents of the cdrom? All the troubleshooting info is on the cdrom.. "if the screen is blank..."....

Anyway, I have been sick most of this week and not getting on well with my significant other so despite the new monitor I was a little grouchy trying to set it up.

My new video card is not sending any signal whatsoever through the analog port and will only send signal through the DVI port with an analog-to-dvi adaptor which converts it to analog, negating any benifit of using DVI.

I put the old card back and it runs in real DVI without a problem but I now cant make X run at anything more than 1600x1200 which make everything a little too big on this monitor. Im getting my card replaced to make sure its not the problem and hopefully will soon get this thing running at 1900x1200.

Coincidently, Aribeth, another bzflag player has also just gotten herself the exact same monitor and she runs linux, so I am dying to see the config file she uses.

All of this has slowed down my C book a little but I hope to get back at it this weekend. Im happy the monitor is here but frankly got a little bit down when trying to set it up and realizing just how much there is to know about all of this stuff and how much out of the loop I am.

At least though I did better than this poor guy. :(

æc♥

Never ever ever again.

The Jack and Jill was fun and certainly helped the happy couple raise some money for their wedding. I drank far more than I usually do and really suffered for it on Sunday. I am determined this time to not drink like that ever again.

I like the idea that friends get a way to help a couple financially when they marry, but have always thought that the weddings are a cash cow for companies that provide all the little details one needs, flowers and food and photo's etc. To me it makes more sense to have a very modest, small wedding and put the money toward a house or something more useful than a lavish reception. Were not talking small change here either, the last four weddings I attended cost over $20,000 dollars, 2 of them were over $30,000.

This movie was sent to me today and is pretty funny, the classic girl gets drunk at the office party.

æc♥

Yesterday I picked up my new video card and my friend also gave me a little UPS thingy that will keep my server running for about 5 minutes if there's a power outage, she didn't have the big ones in their warehouse but will get me one later on.

I have installed apcupsd but of course the woody package is quite old and didn't support usb UPS's so I broke one my cardinal rules and compiled the new version from source and installed it. I really don't like having anything other than official packages on my server but I thought this was worth it. As it turns out, apcupsd doesn't see my usb port so I left it for now, and will try later to fix it.

The real reason I need a UPS is that the server is in our laundry room and plugged into an outlet Sarah uses for the the iron, and she sometimes just yanks the iron cord out of the wall which pulls both cords out, killing the server :)

Then I decided to install the new video card, this was much easier than I thought it would be, I pulled out the old card, put the new one in and rebooted. The driver didn't need to be changed at all. Even windows cant do that. The frame rate in bzflag has jumped from an average 100-120 FPS with the old card to 390-420 FPS with the new card!

So now all is left is Dell delivering my monitor....

æc♥

I skimmed the next chapter in my book, "Operations on Bits" and quickly put the book down. It looks really hard, and its an area of computers I have never bothered to learn. Another such area is IP, all that horrible networking theory. I am woefully under educated in that department.

I guess I was hoping pointers would be the only "confusing concept" I would have to deal with in this book, but alas I was wrong.

I did finish another bzflag patch, enabling admins to /mute and /unmute players so they cant talk to anyone, and you can now run a server that has all chat disabled which might be nice for a change.

I have a Jack and Jill to attend this weekend and today, a dress to go get fitted for their wedding, which is coming up this spring. I'm so happy that I can say spring is coming, once into April I start to cheer up considerably.

æc♥

After several days of "should I? or shouldn't I?" I finally did decide to buy a new Monitor

The real turning point was discovering that a friend of mine had a brother at Dell so she said call him before making any decisions. I got the monitor, including taxes and shipped to my door for $1300 CDN, much better than the $1,723.85 that it comes to on their website. My other girlfriend who gets me all kinds of hardware has an Asus v9570 video card for me and an APC battery backup thingy for the cost of restocking so that's pretty decent!

I told my Dad and he admitted it sounds worth it so hes not so grouchy about my lavish spending now.

I have switched back to emacs for now after finding no simple way to make vim highlight function names in files. There are ways of course, but one has to learn the intimacies of the c.vim file and define a new class etc etc, I just hoped there would be a simple setting to change but its trickier than that.

Searching in emacs really is better than vim, incremental searches are so much nicer and more efficient. I think Ive got the "jumping around between buffers" down now and have to figure out highlighting and then cut/copy/paste operations on blocks of text and that will do me fine.

Now back to refreshing Dell's "track your order page"......

æc♥

My Dad is not impressed that I want to buy a big fancy expensive Dell LCD monitor and he made this clear in one of our little chats. Mom is surprisingly on my side on this one which will help when it comes time to plonk down the money.

I have always let my Dad have a say in any large financial decisions like my car for example and lets face it, its not a small ticket item anymore. His main concern is not affordability so much as "do you really need it?" and the age old "why not wait until the price comes down"

The first one is easy to counter. I told him it will help my eyesight. I spend more time at home looking at a computer screen than a tv, this isn't ever going to change and right now as I primarily work from a laptop, my screen is 15". He has 50" big screen TV I was quick to also point out.

The second argument about the price coming down is harder for me to sway him on. He's right, in 6 months maybe they will be cheaper but then the apple cinema displays seem to hold the same price over the last few years haven't they? If I wait lets say 6 months, the price may drop but also Samsung or Sony might release an even better LCD and I will buy that one which will certainly cost more.

We left it in a state of limbo right now but I sense he will give me the go ahead, grudgingly even but that's fine...



hehe

æc♥

Finally I have completed my chapter on pointers, I cannot say honestly that I have totally grasped the concept, but I do feel I have retained enough information that I can move on. Everyone tells me "don't expect to fully understand pointers right away" and of course I don't, but I also do not wish to carry on unless I am sure at least the fundamentals are down pat.

The next chapter, "Operations on Bits" looks every bit as intimidating as pointers did and I am tempted to take a break and do something bzflagish for a little change.

I am really thinking about buying one of these new Dell monitors. I haven't quite justified the expense yet, but hopefully I can come up with a reasonable explanation other than its a "really cool monitor".

æc♥

Richard Branson "swooped" into Toronto today, literally, and announced the launch of Virgin Mobile (don't bother). He was wearing a superhero type of suit and slid down a wire from atop a huge billboard in Dundas Square, red smoke pouring out of his boots. He then hopped into a monster truck and drove over three cars, labelled "high rates" "completely confusing mobile service contract" and of course the dreaded "hidden fees"

Believe me, the subtle metaphor was not lost on Torontonians.

At my office we are not to worried about competition, his service at the moment is pay-as-you go and for that type of service its actually competitively priced. Virgin is piggy-backing on Bell Mobility's network so they haven't yet spent the hundreds of millions of dollars to implement their own network. I think competition will be good, there are only 4 carriers in Canada and for me, its would also be another source of employment if needed. Telco workers, particularly cellular ones, move sideways alot, many people at my office has worked for the other competitors and often switch jobs every five years or so.

I'm not sure Id want to work for a guy like "Sir" Branson though. :)

æc♥