this girl drives a tank

I had a wonderful Christmas this year and it was worth all the fuss and stress that typically lead up to the holidays. It was marred however by the fact that I had to spend hours fixing my sister-in-law's Dell desktop.

She had a a completely clean windows XP setup and only went to her ISP's site once the internet was hooked up and promptly got infected with some pop up virus, It took me ages to figure out how to remove this, and I could never completely get rid of it so we reinstalled.

Windows has definitely (for me at least) become the most tiresome operating system to install. The initial part is ok, I did partition her disk and will install Ubuntu or Debian for her next time I go over there.

After installing XP I have to install the video card driver, and reboot. Then the sound card driver, and reboot, then the network card driver, and reboot. Then the DVD/RW drivers and reboot.

Then connect to the internet, then go to the windows update site and get the first of 35 or so updates, this requires a reboot, then go there again and get the rest of the updates except service pack 2 and reboot and finally get service pack 2 and reboot.

How many reboots was that? I mean seriously, Solaris is easier than Windows XP to install.

So that was my boxing Day afternoon...

The rest of Christmas was fine although I ate too much and feel all flabby and out of shape yet oddly not enough to prompt me to go to the gym :-)

I use rxvt-unicode as my main terminal for a few reasons, its fast, and compared to the Gnome or KDE terminals, quite light. But for ages I could not get it to use more than 16 colors, that is, 8 colors plus their bold equivalents. This was fine except limiting when choosing highlight colors for example.

The fix was to load this .el file which provided all sorts of wonderful colors like goldenrod and lightsalmon So I am a bit happier with the colors now and staring at emacs is a little easier on the eyes.

My program still needs a small fix to make it work properly but I have been unable to concentrate lately, as I speak there is new carpet being installed downstairs finally and now just a some big clean up to be done after all the work has been done. The kitchen looks great with the new ceramic tiles but we have been unable to cook or basically do anything down stairs in almost two weeks. Not even able to have a Christmas tree :-(

So, the most concentration for my computer I can muster is small stuff like the colors in emacs I mentioned. I tend to lose focus when people are downstairs tearing my apartment to bits.

My Solaris experiment is facing a big hurdle in the wireless network card, I have been so accustomed to having the wireless card work it is simply a drag to use Ethernet now, and it seems there wont be drivers for my card for a while yet :-\ I ma not sure if it is a show stopper, meaning I will install something else but it is certainly looking that way which is too bad. Also, I cannot find a rxvt-unicode package or even a terminal which I like so have to use gnome terminal whose slowness is only highlighted on my laptop.

If I don't see you until the new year, Merry Christmas and have a safe and happy holiday!

The last time I had to reboot my server was when I installed a UPS, and the time before that was when the video card fell out of its slot whilst it was running. Since then, its been up for quite a long time.

19:13:27 up 98 days,  2:04, 10 users,  load average: 0.64, 0.22, 0.07

Two days shy of a hundred days, this isn't bad considering it actually does some real work for me, its my email server, my mp3 server and where my irssi client runs from, plus a few other people use it from time to time for various things.

So there I was all proud of myself that I will reach 100 days uptime and tonight I see a security update for Sarge's kernel 2.6.8, debconf then warns me:

 You are attempting to install a kernel version that is the same as
 the version you are currently running (version 2.6.8-2-386). The
 modules.......[snip]




 I repeat: you have to reboot in order for the modules file to be
 created correctly. Until you reboot, it may be impossible to load
 some modules. Reboot as soon as this install is finished (Do not
 reboot right now, since you may not be able to boot back up until
 installation is over, but boot immediately after). I can not stress
 that too much. You need to reboot soon.

Oh well, so much for my uptime, I will at least get to clean the inside of the case after I shutdown, because it lives in the laundry room it tends to get full of dust bunnies. But more importantly, I will be running a patched kernel, good thing as I am woefully under educated in most things security related.

The workmen are replacing all the floor tiles in the kitchen and hallway tomorrow and new carpet is being laid in the living room. This coupled with the fact we are being warned of big snowstorm means I was able to negotiate a work from home day, no office for me.

Usually work-from-home means, get up really early, 6 am or so, do as much a the office stuff as possible by 9 or 10, and then just be around to answer my desk phone that's forwarded to my cell. I can then get alot of study done on fun and exciting things like ncurses and C

However I feel I might be a bit distracted with all the work going to be going on downstairs. :(

I am back to using emms for my music player, I really don't like the GUI mp3 players at all and the cvs version of emms has some great stuff in it, the pop up playlist is really nice, Ive bound it to F5 which then pops up a buffer with my playlist and disappears after I select another song. Oh emms can also stream radio now too! Now all I need is an last.fm plugin.

From the department of hypocrisy.... Superman's bulge worries movie bosses

The new Superman is giving movie bosses a headache - because of the size of his bulge. They fear Brandon Routh's profile in the superhero's skintight costume could be distracting, reports the Sun. Hollywood executives have ordered the makers of Superman Returns to cover it up with digital effects. The Sun's source said: "It's a major issue for the studio. Brandon is extremely well endowed and they don't want it up on the big screen. We may be forced to erase his package with digital effects."

But littering movies with naked women isn't distracting for anyone.

I really like knowing what type of music other people like to listen to the most, especially people I know. last.fm is a site that keeps track of what you play and then makes recommendations based on your playlist or puts you in touch with people who share the same tastes as you. It's great for finding new bands based on what you already like.

Now the downside, you of course need a music player plugin for your player, and to their credit, there are several such plugins for common linux music apps but all of them are GUI apps. I have tried most of the GUI players linux has and can find fault in almost all of them, not compact enough, too slow on huge directories, searching is awful, ugly and also you cannot remove songs from your playlist (at least in no obvious manner).

I play most of my music with EMMS inside emacs but no such plugin exists at the moment. As a compromise I tried Clint's zsh based zomg script. This worked out ok but when i tried calling cplay instead of mpg123 things went horribly wrong :-)

In the new year i might learn enough elisp to write an EMMS plugin, well that's a nice plan at least...

Emacs's Tramp mode lets you open and edit a file in your buffer that resides on a remote host.. its a separate package from emacs (at least on Debian) so apt-get install tramp will do the trick.

Its as easy to set up as:

(setq tramp-default-method "ssh")

then for example to edit my init file on my server:

C-x f /ssh:orchid@lemonjelly:/home/orchid/.emacs

I didn't know about Tramp (heard of it) until tonight and I must say this will make life a lot easier, mainly because I can cut and paste now and run commands like ediff to keep config files in sync.

I also tried it in dired mode (the emacs directory browser) and it also works across ssh. I haven't tried this on a real remote host, like this blogs pages in sunny California, remote for me is my server in the laundry room, but still, its a very handy mode.

Over the weekend I added some more software to the Solaris laptop. I had to burn another cd of GNU/linux packages, but in order to burn the cdrom full of the goodies, (screen, less, emacs, top...) I had to use the cdrecord program which is on the iso I needed to burn.... I managed to manually add cdrecord and its dependencies and then burned the cdrom and then *finally* install some software I was familiar with. I haven't found a decent terminal that I like yet though, gnome-terminal and xterm seem to be my only choices and my favourite, urxvt isn't packaged as far as I can tell. Not even good old aterm is there. Also I don't think there are prism54 drivers for my wireless card, which puts a damper on the whole "laying around on the couch irc'ing from Solaris" scene.

Oh, our apartment still sits in disarray as we are waiting for workmen to turn up and fix the leaky roof and wet drywall and ruined carpet problems. The owner of the building told me yesterday: "You can't just pick up the phone and expect people to show up and fix stuff right away", which is a statement I don't understand at all. I call contractors all the time at work, offering them money to fix something for us. They show up the next day.

I finally got around to installing Solaris Express which is like a snapshot of Solaris in between releases. You may wonder, as I do, why i would want to try Solaris, Debian does pretty much all I could ever want it to do and I seriously doubt I will never run Debian on my home computers but Solaris has a good licence now and besides that, its always fun to try new things!

What I wanted to try was opensolaris but you need to install it on top of regular Solaris so that's where I am today. I am considering also checking out GNUSolaris down the road which would give you a Sun kernel, GNU tools/software wrapped up with Debian's by far and away, superior packaging. I wonder if one day I will be able to apt-get a Sun kernel on a Debian release box.

Anyway, Solaris Express... It wasn't that hard to install, point and click for the most part. It took some time though, reboot after disc one and then 3 more discs of software. The java desktop didn't strike me as something I would fall in love with but its pretty usable and easy to get around.

I need really only to figure out a few things, how to stop and start services, how to get my wireless card working and how to add and remove software, the rest of the unix commands and tools are similar of course to linux enough that I should be ok.

My search for a quick guide led me to teachmesun.com, as you can see in the screenshot, the guy took the trouble to write a book on Solaris and then presents this on a webpage done in Microsoft's Frontpage :-) (I know its frontpage because I made a website once also in frontpage with the same background)

Oh and Solaris also ships with CDE, the desktop that Xfce4 is based on. Isn't that pretty? :-) Well its not distracting at least.

I reinstalled firefox on Debian tonight and even got my plugins to work by copying them over from the mozilla-firefox directory, so I don't really know what brought yesterdays little freak out on and i must apologize for that :-)

Just a quick update on the leaky apartment situation. We now need to have the carpet completely replaced, the kitchen floor also will get ceramic tiles and the living room walls and ceiling will get new drywall and paint. :-\

Supposedly this will all get done before Christmas, but I have my doubts. I guess I am relatively stressed about it all but but not in out and out panic mode like my roommate is. I just am glad we have no furniture damaged and the computers didn't get dripped on.

Today I revisited my file descriptor lessons will doggedly continue to try to fork a process and execute a another program in the child, wait for it to exit and continue with the main program. It's lots of fun :-)

Tonight I will either retry the Solaris install on my laptop or go to work at the bar. Ia undecided but solaris has the edge at the moment.

I installed the new firefox browser to see what all the fuss is about. Debian unstable has 2 versions of firefox:

Package: firefox
Priority: optional
Section: web
Architecture: i386
Version: 1.4.99+1.5rc3.dfsg-2
Replaces: mozilla-firefox
Provides: www-browser




 Firefox is a redesign of the Mozilla browser component, similar to
 Galeon, K-Meleon and Camino, but written using the XUL user interface
 language and designed to be lightweight and cross-platform.




Package: mozilla-firefox
Priority: optional
Section: web
Architecture: i386
Version: 1.0.7-1
Provides: www-browser




 Firefox is a redesign of the Mozilla browser component, similar to
 Galeon, K-Meleon and Camino, but written using the XUL user interface
 language and designed to be lightweight and cross-platform.

So the old version mozilla-firefox was working fine enough I suppose but has to be removed if you install the 'firefox' package because I dont' know why.

Maybe you can have only one package providing www-browser, but if that's the case what is the point of update-alternatives?

Maybe the binaries are the same name or something but in any event the new firefox wont work properly, all my bookmarks and plugins are gone. Ok I thought, I can live without java, mplayer plugin and flash, (I can't actually, well flash maybe) but I need my bookmarks. Upon trying to import them, maybe because I have no other browser installed it cant do it, copying the bookmark file manually doesn't even work.

So after reinstalling mozilla-firefox and restoring both ~/.mozilla and ~/.firefox from last nights backup just to make sure I haven't messed up any files, and restarting firefox i now get this mess:

It appears to be the theme, so after running firefox -safe-mode, a command option that isn't in the man page, I get a somewhat normal browser but because it is in safe mode I cannot add or remove any themes. Yay.

This is likely all my fault of course, but I swear I was only wanting to look at the new features :-) I am not sure how to fix this mess and save my old firefox setup.

UPDATE - removing chrome directory fixed it, I assume themes are stored there.