this girl drives a tank

Last night in order to procrastinate from doing some real work I attempted another Solaris install on my notebook. This time I actually got to the point of partitioning the discs, from within the GUI installer no less.

However it didn't seem to recognize the existing linux partitions and wanted to take over the whole drive. Since Solaris uses different names for partitions I was unsure what to to do and left it for the time being.

The laptop has a 30GB drive, 20 of which I keep for an OS that I can actually use and do work on whenever I need to, at the moment Ubuntu is installed, and a 10GB partition for throwing new and exciting stuff on for tinkering, like Solaris, Gnu Solaris maybe and the newest Debian installer which I really must get around to trying out also.

Tonight was marred by the discovery of water leaking into our apartment and it looks like we will have to get some drywall replaced and the living room repainted :-(

"That time" being new hardware time. My friend Debbie who has given me tons of computer hardware called me recently to tell me she has some 'stuff' I might like. We have plans to go out next weekend so I will likely know more then.

I worked last night at the bar and will likely do some moonlighting up to and including the Christmas holidays. It wasn't so bad as on Friday nights a least I don't have to get up early for work the next day, Sunday night I am supposed to be working also but I don't really want to with the office being so busy recently.

This is quite possibly the worst movie (well I managed 20 mins of it at least) I have seen in ages. I don't usually mind Christian Slater but it made me wonder if he really isn't getting offered any good roles anymore or he just doesn't care. Next week at least I get to pick the movie and not my boyfriend :-)

A post on debian-mentors led me to Virtual Richard M Stallman, or vrms, which tallies the number of packages on your system that are non-free.

             Non-free packages installed on morcheeba
abs-guide                 The Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide
album                     HTML photo album generator with theme support
ebook-dev-alp             [EBOOK-DEV] Advanced Linux Programming
ebook-dev-ggad            [EBOOK-DEV] GTK+/Gnome Application Development
grokking-the-gimp         GIMP tutorial book by Carey Bunks (HTML)
nvidia-glx                NVIDIA binary XFree86 4.x driver
  Reason: Proprietary license
nvidia-kernel-2.6.8       NVIDIA binary kernel module for Linux 2.6.8
nvidia-kernel-source      NVIDIA binary kernel module source
rar                       Archiver for .rar files
rutebook                  Linux: Rute User's Tutorial and Exposition, an online
ttf-larabie-deco          Decorative fonts from www.larabiefonts.com
ttf-larabie-straight      Straight fonts from www.larabiefonts.com
ttf-larabie-uncommon      Special decorative fonts from www.larabiefonts.com
ttf-mikachan              handwritten Japanese Truetype font
ttf-xfree86-nonfree       non-free TrueType fonts from XFree86
unrar                     Unarchiver for .rar files (non-free version)
  Reason: Modifications problematic
  16 non-free packages, 1.1% of 1473 installed packages.

It seems RMS would not be too happy with me as 1.1 percent of the software I use isn't free I do feel however that its not a bad effort and I have Debian to thank for that. I could actually get by with no non-free packages if it weren't for tuxracer, foobillard and bzflag depending on an open gl capable video card driver for my Nvidia 6800, but even then my bios is proprietary and probably some other things I've not considered.

These last couple of weeks have been so busy, the office is gone nuts with year end catching up and on top of that I have been running around trying to get all my Christmas shopping done so that I will have time to do some shopping for people like my brother who can't seem to shop for himself anymore.

My boss got promoted and with that I ended up getting a raise. It was a surprise to me and will be on top of our usual salary increases so that will be nice and really help me getting my car paid off.

I am still, when time permits, going through my book and it is helping me understand calling system programs from within C. It's slowly sinking in and I really hope typing and running all these little example programs is going to benefit me in the long run. I do tend to get discouraged when I realize how little a drop in the bucket I really know about programming but then remind myself that it was only just over a year ago that I decided to even learn C so that keeps me going a little bit.

I would love to have a feature in emacs that displays function prototypes and includes in the mini-buffer. Lets say your looking at some code and the word execlp is under your cursor. You would then hit some key-binding and in the mini-buffer you might see:

#include <unistd.h> int execlp(const char *file, const char *arg, ...); 

I figure this wouldn't be too hard to do using an external program, either a shell script that parses the man pages or a C program, you could then call that from emacs and put the output into the mini-buffer.

I usually have a man-page buffer open (WoMan) and its reasonable fast but my memory of all these prototypes is appalling and I very often just need to peek at the prototype to get the right answer.

I was told that ECB might do this for me but it seems like a full fledged code browser and I am not sure if it will be overkill for me. There is probable a way to do it in elisp but that isn't an option for me at the moment as I'd have to learn a ton of stuff beforehand. So I've added it to my ever growing TODO list....

I have installed f-spot and quite like it compared to gqview, the user interface is much better in someways and it is quite fast at indexing all my pictures, almost 5000. Of course I mentioned to one of my friends in irc that I was installing f-spot and his response was "I prefer the one that starts with the next letter of the alphabet, better user interface"

Last week while learning about fork(), wait() and execlp() I wrote a little forkbomb, that just spawns processes until the 'ulimit' is reached and the program is terminated by the kernel, unfortunately on Debian, the ulimit is set to "unlimited" so the kernel never shuts down the offending program and the computer pretty much crashes.

orchid@supergrass fork $ killall -9 a.out
bash: fork: Resource temporarily unavailable
orchid@supergrass fork $ screen -x           
bash: fork: Resource temporarily unavailable
orchid@supergrass fork $ top                 
bash: fork: Resource temporarily unavailable

This was on my laptop and forced a reboot, no big deal for me but I think its a bug to be honest that Debian by default will allow this. I just am not sure what package to file a bug against, ulimit is a shell built in so it comes with bash but bash seems to me like the wrong package to file this bug.

This week I have to learn about pipe() and popen() and a bunch of other stuff to get my program to actually work, so its slow going to say the least.

Eric emailed me shedding some light on the Pizza Hut issue, he actually worked there in high school..

They make all the dough for the day in the morning. They use previous sales for that particular day of the week to determine how much of each size to make. Although they open at 11am or so, there are folks who get there at 8 or 9am to start making the dough. It gets mixed, and then tossed into a proofer where it has to sit for some time to rise. I forget exactly, but I think the time to make new dough is roughly an hour. However, they do not use frozen dough... or sauce for that matter. They do use frozen cheese and toppings

eww.. frozen cheese and toppings :-)

There is a new version of the Debian Installer which has some interesting stuff, now it comes with a 'rescue' mode so you you can fix a forgotten password by simply typing 'rescue' at the boot prompt instead of booting the installer, stopping just before the partitioning, switching to VT2, create a /target directory and then searching for the right udev entry in /dev/discs, mounting it at /target and then running chroot /target. Much easier now :-)

It also has add 'laptop' as one of the tasks and I presume that will load some wireless tools and hopefully wireless drivers. There is a even a gui version of the installer in this release, and the apcid daemon is installed if your hardware supports it.

I was recently in Pizza Hut with my boyfriend and I had ordered a 'personal' sized pizza which is supposed to be a tiny little pizza. What the waitress brought out was actually a medium pizza, this giant thing that I was in no way capable of eating. She told me that they had ran out of personal sizes and had given me the next size up.

This is quite common in the restaurant business except that it just seems odd that a pizza place can run out of a specific size doesn't it? I mean do you not make the dough, roll it out to the size you want and then add the toppings? This leads me to believe that Pizza Hut uses frozen pre-sized dough, which is less than appetizing.

My mac keyboard is really nice for typing, it has a very soft feel and even sounds better than my old keyboard. I do need another KVM now though as I had bought a ps/2 KVM and this is a usb keyboard :-\

I would also like to know how to get the F13-F16 keys working in X and the volume and CD eject key working.

After looking in vain for a decent simple keyboard with none of the multimedia keys and sliders, knobs and extraneous buttons I decided to go to the mall on a mission to pick up a Apple keyboard.

The problem was of course I spent $40 on the keyboard, but about $230 at other stores that happened to be next to where I got the keyboard. Anyway I have some nice jeans and a new belt to wear while I'm using the new keyboard. :-)

I am a little concerned about X and key bindings and of course Emacs keys now all messed up but hopefully this wont be a nightmare to tweak and someone has all the answers already indexed by google.

Now to plug this thing in....

I am in the market now for computer speakers, I rarely go through my email, mailing list, daily website, backup and apt-get dist-upgrade routine without some sort of loud music blasting out of my desktop speakers. It makes reading emails much more enjoyable. However it seems the left speaker no longer works at all. There is some sound coming out of the little tweety part but the rest of it is dead.

I don't want to toss them out and get new ones as the other speaker is fine as is the big heavy bass box under my desk. I will contact Klipsh and see about oredering a replacement speaker or failing that ebay one up perhaps.

I wish I could get louder music out of PC speakers, or maybe I should hook a stereo up to it? I have broken pretty much every pair of PC speakers I have owned and should probably look at a more robust setup.