this girl drives a tank

By way of Metafilter....
Paris 99 years later...

There, among the things and places that Atget had admired, I resolved to return and do a rephotographic exploration to discover if the haunting and beautiful Paris of Atget’s vision still existed. Eight years later, in 1997 and 1998, I made three trips to Paris and rephotographed 500 of the scenes that Atget photographed. 24 of those image pairs are shown here in Lens Culture, with my image on the right and Atget’s image on the left.

My old Celeron 500 laptop still has Gentoo installed but its a machine that I don't use that much. Last night I booted it for the first time in ages and tried to update it.

emerge sync
>>> Updating Portage cache:   90%!!! Cannot resolve a virtual package name to
an ebuild.
!!! This is a bug, please report it. (virtual/libintl-0)
Then running hte command again gives me:
rsync error: timeout in data send/receive (code 30) at io.c(109)
rsync: connection unexpectedly closed (3145798 bytes read so far)
rsync error: error in rsync protocol data stream (code 12) at io.c(189)

I guess emerge needs to be ran more than once a year. The last emerge sync was in May of last year.

This screenshot illustrates something I didn't know, Gnus can distinguish if a script or patch is included in an email message and highlight it for me. I don't remember Mutt being able to do this by default.

Cute mailing list sig: Ten guys were trying to win a woman's favor, each by using a play on words. No pun in ten did.

Yay! :)

I had emailed Debian developer Emanuele Rocca about a question regarding his smart bookmark package and today he was nice enough to let me know its an official package. xfce4-smartbookmark-plugin is now an official package and a handy way to quickly do a search on your favorite sites. You just type in a word and it does a search in a new tab of your $BROWSER. I have set mine up for the Debian BTS, Emacs Wiki's search page and google-linux.

This interview on Ubuntu's Mark Shuttleworth is one of the worst interviews I have seen, I mean its so short, has huge quotes all over the place and the questions are decidedly fanboyish and dull. One of the questions actually begins with "Ubuntu is in my opinion the distribution that will give Microsoft the finishing stroke"

Last week my building posted a notice about a power outage scheduled from 2am until 6am. Yes that's right, 4 hours!! Toronto Hydro needs 4 hours to fix whatever they are fixing!

Of course everyone is upset, some people will have to get up and go to work with no power in the house, not to mention the freezing cold and then for me having to shut down my computers, always a treat as I hate shutting down my server. It seems to like running. Rebooting a server always struck me as a great time for stuff to fail.

So of course when I got up this morning the power was still on, it had never gone off. To add to that, my Superintendent told me they didn't do the work so it "it will be sometime this week". So I am probably going to have to shut everything down every night this week just in case.

My server rebooted sort of ok by the way, It had to fsck the mp3 drive for some reason but appears to be running normally.

There has been mucho fuss lately over Novell's XGL release. Bringing to your desktop true transparency and rotating cubes and wrapping an app around the corner of a rotating cube and so on...

While this looks like fun eye-candyish stuff, I can't imagine it coming without some sort of performance hit and for what?

True transparency allows you to see the window beneath current, at the moment, I can only use pseudo transparency, ie: my terminal is transparent, and shows only the desktop background. (in this screenshot you cannot see the browser under my gnome terminal)



Unless someone can teach me to read text over text, I cannot see the advantage of true transparency over pseudo transparency. Watching a movie with another window overlapped seems a bit silly too.

The spinning desktop cube might be a fast way to switch to another desktop, but I already have a fast switching desktop. So it might be a cooler fast way then... if it comes with no notable performance hit then I might play with it. Other than desktop switching I cannot see a practical use for this feature.

The Desktop Organization movie is interesting though and is something I wouldn't mind seeing in Xfce4.

Here are a couple of pretty amazing musicians. Both playing songs originally recorded by The Beatles but definitely not quite like the the Beatles's versions.





One of my bzflag friends has now been accepted as a Gentoo developer! So look for 'tupone' to appear on this list soon :-)

Yesterday Lars Wirzenius held an irc python tutorial which took about 3 hours. I wasn't really lost until about 2 hours in :-)

The third hour was one of those situations where you cling on are dragged along until the end, hoping the notes you take and the irc log will be enough to make you understand when you review it later. The problem I am sure is that had I asked about all the things that I didn't get right away, I would have dragged the tutorial on for 5 hours instead of 3.

Python struck me as a sort of bash on steroids. Or a cross between bash and C even. The loops seemed very similar to bash but the library calls were much like ones in C.

I think at first glance its a language I could probably learn and at least doesn't scare the hell out of me like Perl does. To be fair I've not had much of an intro to Perl either outside of some random tutorials that litter the net.

Lars is running for the Debian Project leadership this year, I think he's one of those developers who doesn't make lots of noise, is not screaming at people on mailing lists, I think he prefers to code than type emails, but when he does post something its usually quite measured and to the point. Most likely he would make a very good project leader.

It looks like the Debian maintainer of rxvt-unicode has decided to drop the package after some difficulties with the upstream author, the usual process in Debian is now another Debian developer must adopt the package or it will be removed from the archive.

I am told urxvt is too big of a package for it to go orphaned for long, many people use it and someone will surely adopt it but just in case I looked at a few alternatives. I need a terminal that supports more than 16 colors and can render UTF-8 characters, and is reasonably fast.

Xterm and Aterm were the only two that come close but I had some strange issues with the key-bindings in screen and in emacs so I am not sure what I will do if urxvt disappears. I think the most likely thing will be to just download it directly from the author and compile it each time there is a new release, kinda like what you Gentoo people do with everything :-)

Gnu Screen has always been one of my favorite apps as it allows you to log out of a machine and leave your programs running, waiting for you to log back in from anywhere. It does mean you have to make use of text mode applications only, but once you get past past the initial shock of email, irc and editor all in text mode, it becomes a non issue. No really, you do get used to it :-)

Screen has the ability to split the window into regions but the current version only supports horizontal splits. The two most frequent questions on the irc channel #screen are: "how can change the escape key?" and of course: "can I split the screen vertically?".

One of the dev's on the screen mailing list has hinted at vertical splits if enough people wanted it and even better, somebody has actually provided a preliminary patch which I finally got around to trying this evening.

It works as advertised but likely I will need to drop my hard-status line as in this situation you really don't need it. C-a TAB moves you around between windows quite well but I haven't tried it yet with a lot of windows open. I usually have about 8.

The big drawback, isn't with the patch, but it's that when you detach from screen, all your regions are wiped, you cannot reattach and have all you carefully constructed splits restored which is a bit of a drag if you ask me and something that I hope they will look into in the future.

I saw yesterday, Blackhound and Comanche, two great bzflag players who disappeared for a while. Hopefully they are here to stay. I cannot keep track of all the older players that have moved on but its nice to get shot by a blast from the past once in a while :)

I have been thinking lately that my email on my lan is all set up wrong. Currently only one of my computers can send and receive email to the outside world. I ssh into that machine and read my mail with Gnus.

This is fine except when I need to send a bug report or something from another machine. I can't even send mail between my computers either. So really I need all my computers to send mail through my server and have my server relay it to the right host. That's project number one.

Project number two is a proper firewall script that allows samba, email and a few people to ssh in and blocks out the script kiddies.

The udev issue is fixed, last night I updated both machines to 2.6.15 and I am now one of the cool kids running udev.

apt-get install linux-source-2.6.15
tar -jxvf linux-source-2.6.15.tar.bz2
rm -rf /usr/src/linux
ln -s /usr/src/linux-source-2.6.15 /usr/src/linux
cd linux
cp -i /boot/config-2.6.8 .config
make oldconfig
make 
make modules_install
cp -i arch/i386/boot/bzImage /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.15
cp -i .config /boot/config-2.6.15
emacs /boot/grub/menu.lst (add new kernel to the grub menu)
reboot into new kernel
cd /usr/src/madwifi/
make
make install
modprobe ath_pci
modprobe ath_hal
modprobe wlan
ifup ath0
m-a a-i nvidia
m-a install nvidia-kernel-source
modprobe nvidia
apt-get remove --purge hotplug
apt-get install udev
reboot into new udev sytem
profit!!

I really like shift+arrow to move between windows in emacs

;; shift+arrows to move between windows
(when (fboundp 'windmove-default-keybindings)
      (windmove-default-keybindings))

My other choice would be M-` which is close to alt-tab but I will save that for something else.