this girl drives a tank

On Sunday I awoke determined to tackle an exercise in my book that has, and still is, giving me some troubles but noticed my server was having all kinds of disk I/O errors. This was the smaller, old disk that the system was installed on, not the large mp3 storage ones.

It has been running Woody for ages, but its a really old crappy 10gb drive, and I the only thing I had handy to replace it was another really old crappy 10gb drive. So I installed to the other drive, this time installing Sarge instead of Woody.

I had been keeping faithfull backups so no data was lost and I had a backup of the /etc directory so restoring most of the system specific files wasn't too hard. There were a couple of configs that were not compatible like Exim4 but I got that set up using some google-kung-fu.

The only problem i had was with cron, I run fetchmail every 10 mins from cron to get my email from my isp, but for some reason cron was not running my fetchmail entry. There was no error, no messages in any related logs, nothing.

I grepped my debian-user mailing list folder and found a guy who had the same issues, and he said it was a blank line at the end of his crontab entry. Sure enough I had a blank line also, and 10 minutes after removing it my mail was flowing in again.

Cron should, in my opinion look at a crontab entry and if for any reason it cannot execute the command, send a mail or log the error, yell at me, phone me, whatever. I thought this was the default, it sends the user a mail if it cannot run the command, but in this case I got no useful errors at all.

My friend Debbie who gets me all the free hardware told me she will grab me a new drive this week, so, I havent done anything else with my configuration as I probably will re-install onto the new drive. It did just occur to me though, If I put the new drive in as a slave, there must be some way to copy over the curent setup and then boot the slave drive right?

Menotumes giant radar patch is in cvs now so if you like your bzflag with giant radar, check it out, I set mine to the maximum, it will take some time to get used to but, it certainly is big :-) You can see a screenshot here.

I managed to fix Sarah's virus, some of the files were tricky to delete, had to be done from dos, and I don't know dos at all, I couldn't delete the files with really long file names and file names with spaces in them, as I could see no way of tab completing the name or quoting the filename, also dos doesn't have an up arrow command history, so it quickly got frustrating.

Then I remembered I had installed cygwin on that computer and opened a bash shell and had her fixed up in a few seconds, Sarah was very impressed with linux after that and even let out a "Yay, linux fixed my computer" which was amusing.



I have never been one to shy away from mp3 players, in fact, I probably have at one time or another installed every available mp3 player under the sun.

The mp3 player, for me is as important a piece of software as an editor or an irc client. Emms is an emacs extension to play mp3's inside your editor, this has for me at least, on huge advantage in that I can load all my mp3's and use C-s to search them just like searching any other buffer in emacs. As you can see it hilights nicely so there no doubt as to what the current song is and because its a buffer, you can move it, resize it or whatever just like any other buffer. The only drawback right now is that you cannot skip ahead within a song, you can only jump to the next one, but hopefully that feature is coming soon.

I watched the movie Spanglish the other day and was very impressed. Although Adam Sandler received top billing, the movie was not really about his character at all, and the show was without a doubt stolen by Paz Vega in the role of the Mexican housekeeper. She was so captivating and had you rooting for her right from the very beginning.

Tea Leoni also was very good as the distraught wife and should get some sort of award for the most bizarre cinematic orgasm ever captured on film :-)

Sarah got tickets on Friday for Starwars, the latest movie that just came out. I declined to go as I will probably go with my boyfriend later on this week, but she and another couple went.

Despite having tickets, and despite knowing that she would see the movie that night, she decided to download it off limewire! Then, about 20 minutes before she left to go to the cinema, she clicked on the downloaded movie, nothing happened except the cpu suddenly spun up to 100% usage and the computer froze, so we rebooted it of course, the first step in fixing any windows related problem.

This didn't help at all, as soon as she logged in again, same thing happened. Google revealed that there is a virus in some of SW movie files floating around the p2p networks

It wasn't until yesterday I was able to find online a fix for this, and did one of those online scans, found 9 viruses, cleaned them all out and now her computer is back to normal.

My latest C book has no answers to any of the programming exercises, which is a little bit disappointing, I think that even if I get the task done, and it works, how am I to know if I did it the right way, wrong way or the worst possible way?

When I met my boyfriend downtown the other day he was very grumpy as he had only managed to get 5 hours sleep, which I had little sympathy for as thats about what I sleep each night anyway, so he wasnt in the mood to let me take my time and sit and read a while. Anyway the only book they didn't have was the O'Reilly book, so I wanted to go to "The World's Biggest Bookstore" which is about a 10 min drive from UofT but my bf was not into it at all and grumbled about wanting to go home.

So was mad then, drove him home complete with ye olde silent treatment, and I went home. Today, I suppose he had a change of heart, and he wen't down to the bookstore and bought the book I was looking for, then drove all the way out to my house to present it to me.

I was pretty impressed and quite happy, but the problem was, he had gone a got the the wrong book :-) It seems O'Reilly have "Practical C Programming" and "Practical C++ Programming" both by the same author no less. Easy to mistake to make but when I hinted about the receipt he seemed for a second to be thinking maybe I didn't like the gift and would return it, so I will just keep the book and who knows, even read it one day.

More importantly, I'm not mad at him anymore :-)

My boyfriend has agreed to meet me downtown tomorrow at the UofT bookstore on good old fashioned bookstore date, although he doesn't know it he will be buying me some books :-)

I will likely get the Oreilly C book and hopefully Carla's linux cookbook if they stock it. Chestal pointed me at C++ Accelerated and it also looks interesting, in a scary kind of way.. so I will see if I can read a bit of that while I'm there.

I had to endure one of our meetings at work today, the kind where your continually stifling yawns, so many that your eyes water. They're just so damn boring, and after a while I find I am barely listening and the voices are like a distant hum, droning on and on. At these moment's I wish we had screen for real life, screenRL or something, I could detach, get in my car, go home, lay one the couch in my perfectly silent apartment and drift off to sleep, then later, go back to work and do a screenRL -r and be back in my meeting just as its wrapping up.

I finished my book, finally :-) so have to decide what to do next, the first and most obvious thing would be to "write lots of C programs" and I think I should attemt to do some things that are a little more useful than finding stupid fibonacci numbers.

There is an Oreilly book Practical C Programming that I have in pdf form and might buy the book if it looks like it is something worth working through. It has also been suggested to purchase the dreaded grandaddy of C books..K&R's The C Programming Language. I am not sure even at this point I could manage that one, but I suppose there is only one way to find out.

So as usual, suggestions for a good second book or general what to do next ideas are always welcome. I would love to do more bzflag things, before I forget what little I know about the bz code, I wish bzflag were written in C and not C++, I wouldn't feel so guilty then about the time investment it takes me to do a patch.

I have been reading with some interest the huffington blog, a sort of Hollywood perspective on Washington. It has some very interesting contributors, Seinfield co-creator Larry David..

I know this may not sound politically correct, but as someone who has abused and tormented employees and underlings for years, I am dismayed by all of this yammering directed at John Bolton. Let's face it, the people who are screaming the loudest at Bolton have never been a boss and have no idea what s like to deal with nitwits as dumb as themselves all day long. Why, even this morning my moronic assistant handed me a cup of coffee with way too much milk in it. I was incensed.

Bill Maher.....

Here's Bush's chance to stand his ground and actually be the guy he's been marketed to us -- a president not afraid to shut down a military base in a congressmans home district, replace it with a nuclear waste site, and then nickname that congressman "Nukie".

Rob Reiner.....

I have been fighting this toxic mixture of superiority and cynicism since I became involved in the child advocacy movement almost 11 years ago. The truth is, when Americans are treated with respect and receive accurate information, they make wonderfully wise decisions. The system breaks down, however, when the press fails to provide such information, as they do today. The so-called fourth estate is now little more than the public relations arm of a government propaganda machine in which all three branches are controlled by the same political party. Who is watching the store?

Maxim Editor Greg Gutfeld....

To pass the time on the 4400 Stairclimber at 24 Hour Fitness, I often engage in "nonsexual heroic celebrity fantasies." (NHCF) Basically, i fantasize about rescuing celebrities who are in peril. These fantasies are highly detailed: I am running along Columbus Avenue, wearing a red hooded sweatshirt and black running shorts. Tight. I hear screams. I race to a rundown apartment and peer into the window, to see veteran actor Paul Sorvino (circa 2001) strapped to a wall, arms and legs akimbo. Surrounding him: three terrorists gesturing lewdly. I stay calm and wait until the terrorists split up. Then, methodically (like a cat!) I sneak into the apartment, disable the first terrorist quietly from behind (with some kind of choke-hold). Then the second, then the third. Paul Sorvino is very grateful, and asks me to dinner. I decline. I want to get on with my life! The press hounds me. I'm interviewed by Elizabeth Vargas, who flirts with me. I am embarrassed; she leaves in tears. Media appearances comprise most of this fantasy, which last roughly 45 minutes.

There are other contributions from the likes of Quincy Jones, John Cusak, Norman Lear, Gary Hart, Walter Cronkite and Julia Louis-Dreyfus...

My favorite snack of late is toasted pumpernickel bread, with raspberry jam, and emmantal cheese...yum, not exactly healthy but ive grown bored of bagels and creme cheese and am back on the toast binge for a while.

My favorite music at the moment is a band called British Sea Power, another called Gomez and one more called Bloc Party.

Besides my C book I am reading a beautiful book of poetry called "The Weight of Oranges", by Anne Michaels.

I saw National Treasure the other day (one of Sarah's downloads) and thought it was only partly crappy, and watched it to the end, so it couldn't have been that bad, Tonight it is the movie Closer, the Jude Law movie we have been looking forward to :P

We know it wasn't really a good movie, we really do....but still the tagline: "If you believe in love at first sight, you never stop looking."

This weeks weather has been perfect, we even lay out in the sun yeasterday for an hour and sipped iced tea like it was July, I hope this dosen't end anytime soon.

I had hoped to get past the last excercise in my current chapter but late last week and move on, things were looking good but i had forgotton about a wedding one of my bf's friends was having and spent a lot of time rushing around to get things ready.

The wedding was a Friday wedding which was great actually, you get to take the day off work and have the rest of the weekend to recover. As it turned out I needed that extra time and when Sataurday morning rolled around I was sick a little from too much food and drink and didn't touch my computer all day.

Sunday I tried to solve this last problem and now find my self still picking at on Monday night, so Im getting pissed of with it and with myself a little bit.

I have a nagging voice telling me that if i find this hard now, just wait until later... which is counter poductive I am sure.

Anyway... back to my guess/save/compile/run/guess/save/compile/run routine :-)

My KVM switch arrived today and worked as expected, I had to shutdown both computers, hook up the cables and reboot. It has a nice big led button to push which changes colors depending on what computer is hooked up.



The nice thing about this model as I meantioned before is that it also switches audio. I haven't tried the keyboard shortcuts to switch computers because it relies on the scroll lock button which I have long since disabled. The only small problem I face now is of course getting the second computer to run at 1920x1600, I copied over the relavant parts of my XF86-config file and when x started, it was indeed at the right resolution.

xwininfo: Window id: 0xa4 (the root window) (has no name)
Absolute upper-left X: 0
Absolute upper-left Y: 0
Relative upper-left X: 0
Relative upper-left Y: 0
Width: 1920
Height: 1200
Depth: 16
Visual Class: TrueColor
Border width: 0
Class: InputOutput
Colormap: 0x20 (installed)
Bit Gravity State: ForgetGravity
Window Gravity State: NorthWestGravity
Backing Store State: NotUseful
Save Under State: no
Map State: IsViewable
Override Redirect State: no
Corners: +0+0 -0+0 -0-0 +0-0
-geometry 1920x1200+0+0


As you can see X is running at the right resolution but on the monitor itself, there are two big black bars on each side of the picture, and the actual desktop is only taking up about 60% of the space. I think this difficult to troubleshoot, at least for me as it seems that X thinks its running fine. I tried the basic positioning switches using the on screen display but they didn't do alot and max out after only a small increase.

I have taken my blog off the linuxchix rss feed. I just felt that i haven't done anything to contribute to linuxchix outside of hanging around in the irc channel. I don't think it is enough to just be a girl that uses linux to warrant the front page billing. I do try to answer questions on the mailing list but more often than not, like most mailing lists I subscribe to, I tend to be a lurker.

There is also the debian women project of which I am a member but again, until I can contribute to debian with patches or maybe package something, I feel sometimes like watcher more so than an active participant.

I sometimes don't understand much of what they talk about in the D-W channel either, quite a lot of developers hang out there and its difficult for me to learn all the debian lingo, for example, I wondered for a long time why they couldn't spell "build", instead spelling it "buildd" :-)

I am up to chapter 16 finally in my book and an now am learning to work with files so this weekend I am trying hard to do as much study as I can. I should admit at this point I am looking forward to finishing the book, I don't like his teaching style, I don't like being introduced to real and practical examples so late in the game, and I still don't know if half of the homework I have done is correct, as the author has yet to publish the answers to all the exercises in the book, choosing instead to only publish the odd numbered answers. (it was originally published in 1983, its not like he doesn't have time)

All I know is that the way I did it works, but have no idea if its done in the manner he intended. I follow Liw's second rule of programming truths on this matter: if it compiles, it's correct

My brother has moaned about the computer I set up for him having only 512mb of ram and wanted to do some things on mine, so I graciously acquiesced and let him have an account on my desktop, but I set his window manager to ion3 which neither of had ever used. We actually had some fun trying to figure out how to use this very spartan window manager. I have never shied away from trying a new window manager, but the problem I always have is the key-bindings, I can figure out the gist of most window managers pretty quickly, but sometimes its key-bindings clash with ones I set inside apps like irssi, screen and emacs. This is tedious and frustrating to solve, at least on the first day :-)

Anyway, ion3 is pretty cool, I must admit it has a very business like feel to it, with little to distract you and very minimal use of your systems resources, with what appears at first glance to be a great window manager if you are like me and try to use the mouse as little as possible. (plus watching my brother humbled and lost was a bonus too :-))