this girl drives a tank

One of the funniest television series I have ever seen is The Office A show from BBC about a group of people who have to endure the worlds most annoying boss, played by Ricky Gervais. His character is a liar, is insensitive, sexist and has the worlds worst sense of humour, despite thinking of himself as part boss, part entertainer. He is oblivious to his employee's disdain for him and this makes for so very funny moments.

Dig through the clips on BBC's website, although they are too sort to do the series justice. If you spot the DVD boxset, I would certainly recommend buying it. This might be old news to some of you, but I haven't had TV in a almost year so just learnt about this show recently :-)

Debian-user is one of the busier mailing lists that I have subscribed to and actually has more volume of mail than I can read, but I do scan the subjects for things that interest me and on a rare occasion I am able to help someone. There are many very helpful folk on the list and more often than not a new Debian user will find the help they need.

Occasionally however you will see stuff like this

On Sun, Sep 18, 2005 at 05:34:08PM +0200, Florian Ohnimus wrote:
>> I am completely new to Debian and was wondering why there isn't a
>> xstartup script in the .vnc/ directory.




Because you haven't created one, of course.  I suppose you expect the
package to create one for every user on the system, separately?  And have
a daemon running, so that if you create another user, it can recognize it
and auto-create one for that new user?




>> How else can I select window manager other than gnome?




Dunno.  Why do you have so much trouble with the extremely simple concept
of creating a file when it doesn't already exist?  And then putting in it
what you want in it?

It really puzzles me why people even bother to respond if all they have to offer is snotty condescending comments designed to belittle the newbie. It is not helpful to the new user and reflects poorly on the community. What I find amusing is how a response like that only confirms what a idiot he can be, which is a shame as I can attest from irc, he has actually helped some people in the past, no really, he has, honest.

I have been staying at my parents for most of this week so I didn't have any internet in the evenings which wasn't really bad as it was sort of a no computer week, a needed break maybe. Maybe this weekend I will get back into the swing of things.

Last night right in the middle of typing a big long really interesting blog entry the power went out and the computer just shut off. I lost everything I wrote so you will have to do with this today as I feel like the "moment" has gone and don't want to retype it all :-)

Emacs is set to auto save my files but it saves in the current working directory, and because nanoblogger uses /tmp the auto save file is cleaned out on the next boot. I will have to figure out how to make nanoblogger use my /home/me/tmp directory instead.

I did learn, albeit too late, that you can boot to single user mode and recover /tmp files so at least next time I wont lose the data. Another side effect was I forgot to reset my alarm and woke up this morning way too early, the clock was flashing 12:00 and I thought I had overslept but once I got up it turned out it was only 5am so I went to the gym.

This week I will grab a second UPS for my desktop computers to solve this power problem once and for all.

I am finding lots of good stuff in my new book but its difficult for me to sit and read when I am at home, the computer distracts me, email and irc and all sorts of things that are more appealing than reading about programming. I do read as much as I can on my lunch and breaks at work though, and have reached the part of the book that deal with solving a particular C problem I am having so that's good.

The way the book is written seems better than the last book but that might just be because I am not a total newbie anymore and new concepts sort of make sense now instead of being entirely alien to me.

At lunchtime today my boss needed to get somethings for his wife's upcoming birthday so we hit the mall which is always fun. We picked out some stuff and made a last stop in the bookstore. I was leafing through a book called Beginning Linux Programming which was in bin of books on sale and he bought it for me helping him shop. :)

It looks ok, there's is a big chapter on ncurses and introductions to GTK+ and QT, stuff about shared memory, threads and sockets and pipes.. all things I need to know about I suppose if I want to continue on this little programming venture I've embarked upon.

The only thing odd I find is the cover picture, in fact I find it quite amusing. Firstly, is this what linux programmers look like? all business looking with the suit an ties? And secondly, does it not appear that Neil Matthew is trying to trick Richard Stones into the old "pull my finger" joke? I am not a publisher, I have no say in what makes it to the covers of the books you read, but someone somewhere sat down at their desk and said "Hey..what about this picture? its like He's gonna pull the other guys finger!" and of course then their boss approved it and a book cover was born.

I think I would have had them posed by a glassy smooth lake at dusk, skipping flat pebbles out across the water... or maybe a photo of them riding a rollercoaster, hands flung in the air with glee as they slowly crest the highest loop and begin their giddying plunge earthward... or maybe....

I have mentioned before that I have looked for HTML documentation usually stuck in /usr/share/doc and bookmarked it in mozilla. This works pretty well but I found a package called 'dwww' that does an even better job. As you can see it provides man pages, info pages and links inside /user/share/doc of whatever package your searching on. You do need a webserver running however but its a pretty easy program to set up.

I have also found a pretty decent website called Koders where you can type a function name or anything like that and it searches for examples of code using that function. I guess it goes around pulling in cvs releases of various projects and then indexes them in a searchable format. Anyway, It did help me with the regexec() function as even after reading the man page I still was unclear on how exactly to use it, so a few real world examples did help.

     Flicker, as you know has become one of the most popular places to share photo's on the web, it uses flash, but not flash in the way we have become accustomed to, Flicker's use of flash seems at first glance almost practical, it is however totally unnecessary and the site would work fine without it, but hey, they didn't over do it so I don't cringe every time I have to go there.

Yourtube is another site but this time with people posting homemade or TV video clips, There are some really good ones, and you'd do well to start off in the 'most popular' section. Its basically a great "I'm bored, and want to waste time" site. :-)
here is a ping pong video
John Cleese delivering a eulogy
and an amazing surfing one

My program I have been working on requires the use of regex's and because its hard to fake stuff in C I really need to understand them. So yet another plunge into the horror that is man 7 regex.

Last night Sarah and I sat around whining because both of our boyfriends work on Friday nights. We consoled ourselves by eating an entire chocolate cake :-)

The next version of Emacs, I presume Emacs 22 is has been available for a while in the emacs-snapshot package. I took a look at some of the new stuff the other day.

** The Emacs Lisp Reference Manual is now part of the distribution.
The Emacs Lisp Reference Manual in Info format is built as part of the
Emacs build procedure and installed together with the Emacs User
Manual.  A menu item was added to the menu bar that makes it easy
accessible (Help->More Manuals->Emacs Lisp Reference).
---
** The Introduction to Programming in Emacs Lisp manual is now part of
the distribution.
This manual is now part of the standard distribution and is installed,
together with the Emacs User Manual, into the Info directory.  A menu
item was added to the menu bar that makes it easy accessible
(Help->More Manuals->Introduction to Emacs Lisp).

This is not good as I'm now easily tempted to run off and read about all things lispy. Like I don't have enough things to do on my TODO list.

** The option --script FILE runs Emacs in batch mode and loads FILE.
It is useful for writing Emacs Lisp shell script files, because they
can start with this line:
   #!/usr/bin/emacs --script

I'm not sure how much I'd use this although I do use emacs in batch mode to create html files from source code so maybe this will make that job easier.

** New user option `inhibit-startup-buffer-menu'.
When loading many files, for instance with `emacs *', Emacs normally
displays a buffer menu.  This option turns the buffer menu off.

This one is good as starting emacs now on more than one file makes that extra pain in the butt buffer.

** Init file changes
You can now put the init files .emacs and .emacs_SHELL under
~/.emacs.d or directly under ~.  Emacs will find them in either place.

Yay, no more beeps from my terminal when I type ~/.emac[TAB] and tab completion has to wait for .emacs or .emacs.d Its the little things in life that please me the most.

** M-g is now a prefix key.
M-g g and M-g M-g run goto-line.
M-g n and M-g M-n run next-error (like C-x `).
M-g p and M-g M-p run previous-error.

Hmm, right now I am kind of used to M-g goto-line, I guess I have to type that twice now.

** You can now switch buffers in a cyclic order with C-x C-left and
(prev-buffer) and C-x C-right (next-buffer).  C-x left and C-x right
can be used as well.

This is a good idea, but I have also just recently started using iswitch with the following in my .emacs:

;; iswitch-buffer
(iswitchb-mode 1)
(setq read-buffer-function 'iswitchb-read-buffer)
(setq iswitchb-buffer-ignore '("^ " "^ \\*"))
(setq iswitchb-default-method 'samewindow)

Anyway the ability to quickly cycle buffers is a big plus. Some other highlights include a new command (kill-whole-line) which takes out the newline that C-k doesn't and C-h e will display the Messages buffer, and finally there is highlighted face in the mini-buffer which helps readability somewhat. Type C-h n to see all the new changes.