June 2006 Archives
June 28
competitive eating
We have all seen these food eating
competitions from time to time but I didn't realize there was an
International Federation
of Competitive Eating. Some of these records are
gross/amazing...
Baked Beans
Six Pounds Baked Beans
One Minute, 48 Seconds
Don Lerman
Beef Tongue
3 pound 3 ounces pickled beef tongue whole
12 minutes
Dominic Cardo
Oysters
46 Dozen Acme Oysters/ Acme Oyster House
10 Minutes/ Mar. 20, 2005
Sonya Thomas
SPAM
6 pounds of SPAM from the can/ SPAMARAMA
12 minutes/ Apr. 3, 2004
Richard LeFevre
Watermelon
13.22 pounds Watermelon/ Brookville Community Picnic
15 minutes/ July 30, 2005
Jim Reeves
Yikes!June 27
worlds fastest indian
Summer is officially in full swing
and I have found myself ever drawn further and further away from my
computer. Weddings (one last weekend, another this weekend) seem to
be all the rage and I have 3 more to attend before September. There
is also the usual stuff like barbeque's and concerts tugging at my
attention.
I am a little sad to lose focus like this, but more so I think that I am sad because it doesn't bother me so much as it did say even a year ago. Hopefully it is just a phase and I can get back on track, but sadly everything I thought I knew about Autotools will now have to be re-learnt, and as was pointed out to me recently if it slipped away so easily, I probably hadn't grasped it very well in the first place.
Tonight I watched a movie called World's Fastest Indian which is about a motorcycle builder named Burt Munro who set a bunch of land speed records on a really old motorcycle. I don't why I am such a sucker for feel good movies but several times in this movie tears rolled down my cheeks. Anthony Hopkins played his role with superb charm, definitely check out this movie, even if you don't like motorcycles. (which I generally don't)
I am a little sad to lose focus like this, but more so I think that I am sad because it doesn't bother me so much as it did say even a year ago. Hopefully it is just a phase and I can get back on track, but sadly everything I thought I knew about Autotools will now have to be re-learnt, and as was pointed out to me recently if it slipped away so easily, I probably hadn't grasped it very well in the first place.
Tonight I watched a movie called World's Fastest Indian which is about a motorcycle builder named Burt Munro who set a bunch of land speed records on a really old motorcycle. I don't why I am such a sucker for feel good movies but several times in this movie tears rolled down my cheeks. Anthony Hopkins played his role with superb charm, definitely check out this movie, even if you don't like motorcycles. (which I generally don't)
June 19
xubuntu (dapper)
Most people familiar with Ubuntu know that the latest release
codenamed "Dapper Drake" was released recently. (Actually I
think the beta release only carries a codename now and officially
this release is called 6.06 LTS, which makes me wonder where the
number 6 is coming from, have they had 5 prior releases?)
I downloaded the Ubuntu version and Xubuntu, the Xfce4 Desktop version as I usually remove Gnome and install Xfce4 anyway. The first thing I noticed was that you had to boot to the live CD desktop and then click on an install icon to start actually installing the OS.
This struck me as a bit odd that they wont let you jump straight into a text based install right off the bat. I then noticed that there actually is no text installer anymore :( You have to do it with the GUI and have to sit there for 2 or 3 minutes whilst the desktop loads and then start installing.
The other thing I really do not like is the GUI partitioner, ok it's not too bad in that it is intuitive and you can even just stretch out the partitions with your mouse to the size you want, but, you cannot specify percentages as partition sizes,you must instead use MB or GB and worse, you cannot set the mount points on the same page, so lets say you make 3 primary partitions and an extended partition containing 3 more logical partitions, you then have to go to another page where you get to enter which one of the 6 partitions you want as boot, home and so on. Perhaps this is too much for my feeble short term memory but why not let the user assign this at the same time?
If you want to crash the installer, don't create a swap partition and click on the forward button, when a dialog box pops ups warning you about having no swap space, click on the back button to fix this error and presto!, the installer will then crash.
This release did not recognize and subsequently offer to configure my pcmcia wireless network card, which the last 2 versions of Ubuntu did, I don't know if they dropped support for this because they cannot legally distribute the driver or what exactly happened but I am left with no networking at all which as we all know simply sucks.
Lastly, the xscreensaver is on by default, and picks an opengl screensaver, despite having no video card driver capable of displaying opengl applications.
So I suppose I am not that impressed with "Dapper" and being the fickle type that I am, I suspect it wont last long on this laptop if something prettier and more interesting comes along. :-)
Update: My roomate walked in and suggested we call this guy :-)
I downloaded the Ubuntu version and Xubuntu, the Xfce4 Desktop version as I usually remove Gnome and install Xfce4 anyway. The first thing I noticed was that you had to boot to the live CD desktop and then click on an install icon to start actually installing the OS.
This struck me as a bit odd that they wont let you jump straight into a text based install right off the bat. I then noticed that there actually is no text installer anymore :( You have to do it with the GUI and have to sit there for 2 or 3 minutes whilst the desktop loads and then start installing.
The other thing I really do not like is the GUI partitioner, ok it's not too bad in that it is intuitive and you can even just stretch out the partitions with your mouse to the size you want, but, you cannot specify percentages as partition sizes,you must instead use MB or GB and worse, you cannot set the mount points on the same page, so lets say you make 3 primary partitions and an extended partition containing 3 more logical partitions, you then have to go to another page where you get to enter which one of the 6 partitions you want as boot, home and so on. Perhaps this is too much for my feeble short term memory but why not let the user assign this at the same time?
If you want to crash the installer, don't create a swap partition and click on the forward button, when a dialog box pops ups warning you about having no swap space, click on the back button to fix this error and presto!, the installer will then crash.
This release did not recognize and subsequently offer to configure my pcmcia wireless network card, which the last 2 versions of Ubuntu did, I don't know if they dropped support for this because they cannot legally distribute the driver or what exactly happened but I am left with no networking at all which as we all know simply sucks.
Lastly, the xscreensaver is on by default, and picks an opengl screensaver, despite having no video card driver capable of displaying opengl applications.
So I suppose I am not that impressed with "Dapper" and being the fickle type that I am, I suspect it wont last long on this laptop if something prettier and more interesting comes along. :-)
Update: My roomate walked in and suggested we call this guy :-)
June 17
World Cup
Amongst my family and friends, and
much to the dismay of my boyfriend, I hold the unpopular belief
that it will be Argentina winning this years World Cup, and
yesterday's game against Serbia was quite a statement by the
Argentinians.
Most of my friends are supporting either Italy, England, Germany and Brazil. Today's upset of Ghana over the Czech Republic was another very entertaining game and next week Holland vs Argentina should be a really good game to watch. Unfortunately the games are during working hours so I have to wait until the replay the game which sometimes is quite late at night. The other problem is trying to get home from work without having the result revealed to me, which isn't easy.. for example, 3 cars passing me in the other direction, huge Italian flags draped out all the windows and horns honking is a pretty good indication of who won.
Most of my friends are supporting either Italy, England, Germany and Brazil. Today's upset of Ghana over the Czech Republic was another very entertaining game and next week Holland vs Argentina should be a really good game to watch. Unfortunately the games are during working hours so I have to wait until the replay the game which sometimes is quite late at night. The other problem is trying to get home from work without having the result revealed to me, which isn't easy.. for example, 3 cars passing me in the other direction, huge Italian flags draped out all the windows and horns honking is a pretty good indication of who won.
June 16
moo
[orchid@morcheeba:~]% aptitude moo -v
There really are no Easter Eggs in this program.
[orchid@morcheeba:~]% aptitude moo -vv
Didn't I already tell you that there are no Easter Eggs in this program?
[orchid@morcheeba:~]% aptitude moo -vvv
Stop it!
[orchid@morcheeba:~]% aptitude moo -vvvv
Okay, okay, if I give you an Easter Egg, will you go away?
[orchid@morcheeba:~]% aptitude moo -vvvvv
All right, you win.
/----\
-------/ \
/ \
/ |
-----------------/ --------\
----------------------------------------------
I don't understand what the drawing is meant to represent, a laying
down cat?June 12
Learning To Fly
The Cessna 172 has long
been a favorite aircraft to train people to fly, it handles easily,
is forgiving and recovers very well, but I cannot get it to climb
past 500ft, I don't know what I am doing wrong so I switched to a
more powerful and low wing Piper Comanche
250. This should be much more difficult to fly for a newbie but
it wasn't at all. Here's a screenshot of me flying over California
someplace... 
Ok, so its a flight
simulator, namely Flightgear, but it's a pretty good
one and fun to fool around with. I have a couple of unresolved
issues, one is the scenery for my part of the world simply wont
display, I have tried everything I could find in the wiki and docs
but still no luck, and secondly the old analog Logitech Wingman
Interceptor joystick wont work in the game, despite working and
being recognized by Debian. These issues might require mailing-list
assistance.
The sim is a little slow to start but is very cool and almost relaxing once you get the hang of it. There are some neat extensions, an app that uses rsync to download scenery as you fly, and, you can even track your flights on google maps.
Ok, so its a flight
simulator, namely Flightgear, but it's a pretty good
one and fun to fool around with. I have a couple of unresolved
issues, one is the scenery for my part of the world simply wont
display, I have tried everything I could find in the wiki and docs
but still no luck, and secondly the old analog Logitech Wingman
Interceptor joystick wont work in the game, despite working and
being recognized by Debian. These issues might require mailing-list
assistance.The sim is a little slow to start but is very cool and almost relaxing once you get the hang of it. There are some neat extensions, an app that uses rsync to download scenery as you fly, and, you can even track your flights on google maps.
June 07
how to lose your job as a roofer
I haven't really had much of
computer-centric week and as a result felt little inclination to
blog to be honest..
We have been swamped at work. Some roofers were doing repairs on a site we share with another cell phone carrier and managed to set the roof on fire.
Roofing material is often made of tar, and to patch a hole you bring a sheet of whatever they call it and glue this to the existing roof by slightly melting both parts with a torch and sticking them together.
They seemed to have misjudged two things, fist the" slightly melting" part and second the "bring the right sized fire extinguisher" part in case you misjudge the first part.
No one was hurt luckily but they not only have two cell phone companies to pay off, but I hear they have damaged the building so severely the top two floors must be rebuilt. $Ouch$.
We have been swamped at work. Some roofers were doing repairs on a site we share with another cell phone carrier and managed to set the roof on fire.
Roofing material is often made of tar, and to patch a hole you bring a sheet of whatever they call it and glue this to the existing roof by slightly melting both parts with a torch and sticking them together.
They seemed to have misjudged two things, fist the" slightly melting" part and second the "bring the right sized fire extinguisher" part in case you misjudge the first part.
No one was hurt luckily but they not only have two cell phone companies to pay off, but I hear they have damaged the building so severely the top two floors must be rebuilt. $Ouch$.