this girl drives a tank

Because Solaris hates me, I decided to give Ubuntu a shot, Ubuntu is the sexy nekkid people distro based on my beloved Debian.

The much esteemed ubuntu installer is actually not much different than the Debian Sarge installer which would be very surprising if it were given its authors. It was a quick painless installation and the only thing I noticed that Debian didn't do was 2.6.12 kernel and prism drivers for my network card. Oh alsa, worked out of the box as well.

Having my wireless card picked up and configured during the install was a bonus, I don't know if Debian will include this driver down the road or maybe its a licencing issue.

On the downside I cannot burn cd's in ubuntu, all I ever had to do was install cdrecord in Debian and burn from the command line, in ubuntu the same command with cdrecord fails with lovely cryptic errors, I will try to fix it one of these days.

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I have ordered a laptop stand, one of those things that you can place over your lap on the couch or in bed and the laptop is at the perfect angle and no longer cooks your thighs. I look forward to sipping tea in bed and checking my email on the upcoming cold Sunday mornings.

I won't be around until the weekend, maybe even longer so if you see me in irc I am undoubtedly /away

Oh and The Magic Number's Love is a game is my favourite song at the moment.

There was a new upstream version of rxvt-unicode. My favorite terminal emulator.

One of the new changes was a fade to color option. My normal terminal looks something like:

And then with the fade option set in my ~/.Xresources when that window loses focus it will look like:

Which is nice if you have a bunch of terminals open and do not notice right away which one is focused.

But while poking around in the manpage, I managed to solve a long standing annoyance, in the way X cuts and pastes urls. Often times now urls contain special characters, like a '?' in php urls and an = sign, up until now double clicking on irssi or in my email client, only the text up until one of those special characters was highlighted. for example the url:

http://my.bzflag.org/bb/viewtopic.php?t=5018&highlight=

If some one writes that in irc, and I double click it to paste into firefox I only get

http://my.bzflag.org/bb/viewtopic.php? 

As the '?' is one of the default cut off marks, I didn't know you can change this with the cutchars argument.

cutchars: string
         The characters used as delimiters for double-click word
         selection. The built-in default:
         BACKSLASH `"'&()*,;<=>?@[]{|}

So I can remove the '&' '=' and '?' form that string and it will cut the proper urls for me now. Oh the BACKSLASH I am told isn't literal but more likely the author didn't know how to put a literal \ into a manpage, I am not sure about this but if you include BACKSLASH the urls cut will halt anytime a url has a capital B or A or C or K.... :-) so you don't want that.

I know about gnome terminal and Konsole and a number of other terminals that automatically make a link out of a url that you can click on and pass to firefox or something but that doesn't work if your in an ssh session and besides that, those terminals are horribly slow when scrolling large files with font-lock on in emacs. Urxvt is a fast and light terminal so I don't mind a double click to snag a url that I can then paste into my browser.

One last option is -tcw which means when you triple left click on a line of text the normal behaviour is to grab the entire line, even if there is a ton of whitespace, with -tcw it will ignore the whitespace.

My Mom loves Country and Western music, which is possibly the only kind of music that I'm not really into. But when I am at Mom's we usually listen to it. Some times you hear some really skilled musicians, the banjo and fiddle come to mind, both quite difficult instruments to master but sadly are overshadowed with twangy guitars and pleading vocals that are the hallmark of a good Country song.

One thing Mom and I do have in common is a sense of humour when it comes to the lyrics in Country music. These are some songs we listened to last time I was there:

Trisha Yearwood - She's In Love With The Boy

Katie's sitting on the old front porch
Watching the chickens peck the ground
There ain't a whole lot going on tonight
In this one horse town.
Over yonder, coming up the road
In a beat-up Chevy truck
Her boyfriend Tommy, he's laying on the horn
Splashing through the mud and the muck
Her daddy says, he ain't worth a lick
When it came to brains, he got the short end of the stick
But Katie's young and man she just don't care
She'd follow Tommy anywhere
She's in love with the boy
And even if they have to run away
She's gonna marry that boy someday

Hehe, short end of the stick... as a result of this song my Mom now says that about my boyfriend :-) Shania Twain - Men Are Like Shoes

Men are like shoes, made to confuse.
Yeah, there's so many of 'em,
I don't know which ones to choose.
There's the kind made for runnin',
The sneakers and the low down heels.
The kind that will keep you on your toes,
And every girl knows how that feels.
You've got your kickers an' your ropers,
Your everyday loafers, an' some that you can never find.
You've got slippers an' your zippers,
Your grabbers and your grippers, an' man, don't you hate that kind?
Some you wear in, an' some you wear out,
Some you wanna leave behind. 
Sometimes you hate 'em, an' sometimes you love 'em,
I guess it all depends on which way you rub 'em,
But a girl can never have too many of 'em.
It's amazing what a little polish'll do

And this one from Dierks Bently - Come A Little Closer

Come a little closer, baby
I feel like laying you down
On a bed of sweet surrender
Where we can work it all out
There aint nothing that love can't fix
Girl s right here at our finger tips
So come a little closer, baby
I feel like laying you down

Oh My :-) easy there cowboy..... But despite the quirky lyrics one thing that's for sure, if you drive any distances in Canada, out of the city limits where its farms, fields or forests, country music on the radio while your driving feels right, even if its the only time you listen to it, there's an undeniable harmony between the music and the landscape.

I used to use Elinks as my text based browser but of course this descent into emacs enlightenment has led me to W3m, but it took a while to get the hang of the key bindings, I didn't like the the way the up and down arrows behaved until I discovered these settings for my ~/.emacs:

;; w3m ------------------------------------------------------------------------
(setq w3m-symbol 'w3m-default-symbol)
(setq w3m-key-binding 'info)

Also, the bury-buffer function is really good, repeatedly hitting it cycles the buffers quite quickly so I bound it to the Win32 context menu key, next to the right Win32 logo key.

;; bury buffer, cheesy way to cycle buffers -----------------------------------
(global-set-key [(f16)] 'bury-buffer)

For the first time this Fall I had to turn on my heater and am sad now as I am well aware of what is around the corner. If you don't know already I get the winter blues quite easily, I guess being born in June has something to do with me being a sun worshipper.

Anyway, according to the almanac:

The winter season will have below-normal precipitation and snowfall. Temperatures will be near normal, on average, with the coldest periods in early, mid-, and late December, and mid- and late January. The heaviest snowfalls will occur in late November, mid- and late December, late January, and late March.

I have made some progress on my program but have hit the wall in another rather important bit and will try to see about fixing that today. As a break, I dived into the emacs info pages and figured out how to use M-x todoo to make a nice todo list. I know about planner.el and even poked around a little setting it up but it seems a bit too much for what I need.

It appears I am doomed to never run Solaris. My first attempt failed after downloading and burning the 4 iso's with the intention of installing it onto my laptop. As soon as the boot prompt came up it simply rebooted. I was told that this was a ram issue, the installer didn't like my 1gb of ram.

I waited for a few months, and a few releases later revisited the Solaris Express website and this time, downloaded all the iso's but only burnt the first one. I got the same problem, just a little bit later on in the boot sequence, the laptop just reboots.

On my desktop, where I have no drive space to install it, the installer works :-\ There are some laptop resources on the opensolaris website and my Dell is listed there but I don't look forward to trouble shooting things that I have no clue about, and installing it on my desktop would mean a new drive or resizing partitions and generally rocking the boat.

There are two basic ways to customize emacs, I like directly adding something my self to the file like:

;; ignore case in searches
(setq case-fold-search t)

But emacs has a built in customization feature where you can choose all sorts of things with incredible detail and hit save when your done and emacs will write it out to your .emacs file. But it wont format what it writes and leaves your file in a great big hard to read mess. For example, when I set up my email, all the mail setting were dumped into my .emacs file like this:

'(gnus-group-highlight (quote (((and mailp (= unread 0) (eq level 1)) . gnus-group-mail-1-empty-face) ((and mailp (eq level 1))\ . gnus-group-mail-1-face) ((and mailp (= unread 0) (eq level 2)) . gnus-group-mail-2-empty-face) ((and mailp (eq level 2)) . gn\ us-group-mail-2-face) ((and mailp (= unread 0) (eq level 3)) . gnus-group-mail-3-empty-face) ((and mailp (eq level 3)) . gnus-gr\ oup-mail-3-face) ((and mailp (= unread 0)) . gnus-group-mail-low-empty-face) ((and mailp) . gnus-group-mail-low-face) ((and (= u\ nread 0) (eq level 1)) . gnus-group-news-1-empty-face) ((and (eq level 1)) . gnus-group-news-1-face) ((and (= unread 0) (eq leve\ l 2)) . gnus-group-news-2-empty-face) ((and (eq level 2)) . gnus-group-news-2-face) ((and (= unread 0) (eq level 3)) . gnus-grou\ p-news-3-empty-face) ((and (eq level 3)) . gnus-group-news-3-face) ((and (= unread 0) (eq level 4)) . gnus-group-news-4-empty-fa\ ce) ((and (eq level 4)) . gnus-group-news-4-face) ((and (= unread 0) (eq level 5)) . gnus-group-news-5-empty-face) ((and (eq lev\ el 5)) . gnus-group-news-5-face) ((and (= unread 0) (eq level 6)) . gnus-group-news-6-empty-face) ((and (eq level 6)) . gnus-gro\ up-news-6-face) ((and (= unread 0)) . gnus-group-news-low-empty-face) (t . gnus-group-news-low-face)))) '(gnus-group-list-inactive-groups t)

Gross eh? Anyway you can force emacs to use a different file to store any of its customizations, this isn't new, just new to me.

;; save custom changes to a special file
(setq custom-file "~/.emacs.d/custom.el")
(load custom-file)

Now once again my init file is nice and clean and readable, keeping people like me who are pedantic about their config files happy.

I am back now reading about ncurses after several diversions. The program I am working on depended on /var/lib/dpkg/*.list files being the canonical way to list all the files a package installs, however it turned out that post install scripts and such add stuff afterwards so your dpkg -L $package might miss what your looking for.

I had to write functions that traverse the filesystem, but not before learning how to write such functions. Things slow down when you have to learn as you go but its incredibly satisfying when it works after hours of mistakes and frustration.

Learning to program isn't easy, and irc helps, a Friend who can say paste what you have, then look it over, and comment on what your doing wrong is a great help.

Then next logical step is a pair-programming editor, with a chat window and compile and shell perhaps and of course an editing window.

I had lamented the lack of pair-programming apps for linux, Mac and Win32 both have some pretty mature products for this and recently someone blogged about Gobby.

Sadly no Sarge package but it is in unstable (not sure about testing) and I checked it out. Its actually quite good, more than one person can join the editing session so it would make an excellent app for tutorials and such.

One major drawback, programmers tend to LOVE their favourite editor, and even for quick lesson cannot bear to use something as less featured and customized than what they are accustomed to. Gobby falls short in this area, offering a (at least at first glance) gedit type of editor. It would be great if the program gave you an empty window and let you fill it with $EDITOR.

I have found Gnu/screen a poor-womans way around this, run screen, then run emacs, open a shell window in emacs for compiling, a scratch buffer for chat, and of course some file to edit. Enable multiuser in screen, add their name to the screen user list, let them ssh in and run screen -x orchid/

Of course you really have to trust them enough for an ssh account but screen has some basic permission commands for multiuser mode so its not really that bad. I am sure more could be done, maybe a restricted bash shell and so on. For me the point is moot as only my close friends have the time and inclination to ssh in and help me anyway :-)

I have an internet prediction, Microsoft will purchase Yahoo, not soon, but eventually. Yahoo have the one thing MS really would like and that's real competition with Google. (albeit not strong competition)

This is my first venture into Corporate Internet Predictions and I think its not a bad effort eh? Remember you heard it here first :-)

My apologies for not blogging much as of late but things have been really busy. Work has once again swamped me, as our year draws to an end we have all this money in our departments budget so my boss is frantically trying to spend it, so that next year he can demonstrate that he needs the same budget again. Its one of this silly things big companies do all the time.

I have been fighting with RF (radio frequency) Engineers at work also. It seems me that as soon as you put the word 'Engineer' after someones job title they stop listening to everyone else and operate in their own little dream world.

I have one guy who calls me insisting that a microwave hop between two building must be implemented by the weekend. He sends me a map showing the buildings and the height of the two dishes and how it will all fit in nicely to his little telly tubby dream land cell phone network.

All have to do in 4 days is contact the owners of of both buildings, convince them to lease space on their rooftops, obtain a building permit for both sites from the City of Toronto, order all the materials, (the dishes might be in Sweden someplace), take bids on the job from contractors, pick one to do the work and then send them all the materials and drawings.

So rather than explain all this to him (as Ive been through this countless time with this guy and he doesn't listen) I just wait 2 days after he emails me and then send one of those "I will be out of the office until the end of the week..."emails.