this girl drives a tank

I quite enjoy The Daily Show but since I have no television at home, I have to watch little clips on the internet. The problem is that Comedy Centrals' website is basically horrible, and Firefox never could play the videos for me.



I finally resorted to using the MediaPlayerConnectivity extension which simply plays the file outside your browser in whatever player you tell it to. So far it works pretty good!

I played a little bit of bzflag recently and must say I quite enjoyed it. I have been absent from the game for so long now I felt like a n00b again. It doesn't take long to get the hang of it again, after all, its just like driving a tank :-) I am not sure I will have time to play in the league again but I wouldn't mind say an hour a week even.

Donna won't be happy with me but I have decided to stick with nanoblogger and not go to Wordpress and consequently live without comments on this blog. You can always Gmail me!

It has been pointed out, several times now that pictures I link to on the main page, do not show up in my archives. Apparently I need to use a special variable to make this happen. So.. lets give it a try with a few pictures I took this summer.







If this works, I now have to fix every entry that contains links to images with some sort of regexp that will insert the correct string and won't break something else.

When, not if, I win the lottery, I will never again endure another Canadian winter. Instead I will depart every fall on October 1st to the series of atoll's in Indian Ocean known as the Maldives.

The Maldives (Google Map) have been luring me for many years now. I never had much interest in some of the more popular resort locations, Las Vegas for example, or even Mexico's famous resorts like Cancun hold no magic for me.

What I like is the ocean, the sun and the limited number of people, for me the Maldives fit the bill perfectly. I even know, out of the 1,192 islands which one I will reside on:



It doesn't have a name as far as I can tell, but for now I call it paradise. Until my windfall arrives however, all I can do is wistfully look at it from time to time in google-earth.

Finding the lyrics for a song can be real pain as you end up on sites likes lyrics007.com, or lyricsstyle.com, with pop ups and flash and adverts all over the place.

LyricWiki.org aims to change that and although still in its infancy looks very promising. The site actually used a bot to scrape existing lyric sites, thus despite being new, LyricWiki has 200,000 or more song lyrics in its database.

Oh and it even has a Firefox search plugin.

My iPod has a `Notes' directory which I am able to dump text files to for reading when I am out and about. This is quite nice because although I might not be the best multitasker in the world, I am capable of listening to music and reading at the same time.

I decided to to load the text version of the Emacs Lisp Intro onto my iPod.

The problem is that Apple will only allow each file to be a paltry 4K in size. So since this file is actually 637K I need to split it up. Before I get to that though, it should be noted that you can insert HTML markup into each file and make hyperlinks to other notes which is quite handy. At this point using the command line tools split, cut, sed, paste and grep is probably doable but there is a faster way.

This site will let you upload any text file, and it will split it and hyperlink it and make a zip archive available for download. It's also a free service so it is quite handy and is what I decided to do.

There are a few quite large caveats to using the Notes feature. As I mentioned, 4K is a pretty lame size restriction on a file, I am not sure why Apple did that, CPU speed? diskspace? Who knows. Another annoying "feature" is that when you browse to the Notes folder, it automatically starts loading every file it finds. This is very battery intensive, and quite slow. Not bad for the particular book I installed as it took up 161 files I think. However, I also installed 10MB worth of Wikipedia articles which forces you to hit another Apple limitation, your only allowed to have 1000 files as Notes. This is as annoying as the 4K limit but what is worse, is that it takes forever to load these files and will drain my fully charged battery. So the only way to use these Notes is to load them whilst the iPod is plugged in and then unplug it, but then it must remain on all the time, because if you reboot it, the Notes will need reloading and this will empty the battery. Not very good :-)

The Wikipedia script can be found here.

I was about 15 years old and the Toronto Maple Leafs were playing the Quebec Nordiques (who later became some team in Colorado) at Maple Leafs Garden. It was my first NHL hockey game and I was only there because my younger brother was too sick to attend.

Our seats were just to the left of the Toronto goalie, right at the lowest level, right behind the glass. Now people will tell you about the seats halfway up at center ice, and they will say things about how you can see the whole game from there, but they are wrong. If you want to appreciate the speed and excitement of professional hockey, sit right at the front, right behind the glass.

At that time, Quebec had just drafted a 20 year old Swedish player by the name of Mats Sundin, I had no idea of this back then of course as my Dad had ingrained in me the notion that all you need to know is that you love the Maple Leafs and you hate anyone that they happen to be playing. Consequently, I wasn't up to speed on what teams drafted what players.

The players would whirl around the ice like some sort of macho ballet, I was awestruck. Suddenly the flow of the game moved toward our little corner of the rink. I cannot remember his name, but the Leafs had this giant, hulking defenceman and as Mats Sundin sped around the corner of the rink to chase the puck, this big defenceman had lined Mats up in his sights and proceeded to slam him face first into to the glass. Right in front of me.

The crowd went crazy, my Dad and brother joined the rest of our section in jumping up and pounding their fists against the glass. I watched the defenceman skate down the ice, but no sign of Mats. I couldn't see him as he was laying down on the ice. When he got up, he was bleeding profusely, all over his face, the fans continued to jeer him, but he just stood up, spat a mouthful of blood onto the ice, looked directly at me and grinned, then skated off to the bench. I will never forget thinking to myself "magnificent..."

Okay, he didn't look directly at me, he kinda looked collectively at the fans in our section, but whatever. The point is, that moment was when my crush on Mats Sundin began and it has continued now for 15 years. I realize that he will never know who I am but my boyfriend has been told I would drop him in a flash if Mats Sundin offered to whisk me away to Sweden. My boyfriend thinks I am joking.

Although I no longer follow hockey I mention this only because on the weekend Mats scored his 500th goal in the NHL, no small feat. This goal was quite special because A. it was his 500th, B. it was a shorthanded goal, C. it was in overtime and D. I have a crush on him.

You can watch the goal here.

Although the word `weasel' is generally associated with the beadiest of beady eyed mammals, it also has a human context. I work with a weasel, we were on a break once sitting around a picnic table, talking about work, and I mentioned something about how our department processes requests from our RF engineers and how much of a waste of time it was and mentioned an idea I had been harbouring to speed up the process.

Later that day at one of our snooze-fest meetings, this guy (who was at the picnic table with us) pipes up with my exact same idea, and got a couple of "good idea!!"'s from our bosses. I just looked over at him and thought what a lamer he was.

I bring this up because my friend mentioned in IRC what a silly name IceWeasel is to choose for a web browser. I tend to agree, although I can offer no suitable alternative at the moment.

It is interesting to me how software projects are named. I admit I haven't done much research but it seems the older projects primarily lean toward cramming as much information into their name so one is left with no doubt as to what the application actually does.

A great example of this is course EMACS, which was first developed as a series of macros for TECO, a 1960ish Text Editor and Corrector, giving us Editor MACrosS.

Ballistic Research Laboratory's Computer Aided Design, or BRLCAD is another fine example of this naming technique. I sense that in both these cases the name was perhaps an afterthought and the software was the real star of the show.

Today it seems there are a few camps when it comes to naming software. One is the strictly-informative, Linux has tons of these, dvdbackup, xscreensaver, imagemagick, tcpdump, , mp3info, subtitleripper, cdrecord... and so on.. The kind of app you can tell quite a lot about just from its name.

Then there is cutesy-informative, like sound-juicer, acid-rip, cute-ftp, pipermail, ubuntu-linux..., these kinds of names still convey the gist of what the application does but retains some creative license at the same time.

Finally there is the cutsie-cutsie named apps. Some examples of these would be clementine, beagle, istanbul, k3b, nexuiz, hydrogen, byzanz, firefox... These apps you would likely have to google if you really wanted to know what they did.

So why is IceWeasel a bad name? Well, lets face it, nobody likes a weasel, nobody. And an ice weasel sounds even worse, I wager even regular weasels don't like Ice Weasels. Of course we all hated the name `Firefox' when it first came out, (admit it) but we got used to it. Maybe in a few years IceWeasel will be as acceptable as Firefox is now.

My closest Debian mirror has been debian.yorku.ca for pretty much as long as I can recall. My preferred method of administrating software updates on a machine running Debian unstable is to blindly do an apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade every single day. I know it's not the best thing to do but it keeps the numbers down a little, at most you usually have a handful of packages to update everyday, instead of doing this once a week and suddenly having 300 packages to update.

The other aspect of this is helper applications like apt-listbugs and apt-listchanges become more manageable if your only reading bug reports and changelogs for 5 packages instead of 300 packages.

I noticed however this past week, there have been no new updates. I should have clued in after 2 days but I didn't until tonight, suspecting something was wrong I switched mirrors and sure enough, 144 packages, 214MB needed to be downloaded. So if you run Debian unstable, and have seen no updates this week, you might want to check your mirrors. While I now take care of this, I will leave you with movie of an elephant on a trampoline.

The second biggest complaint I get about this blog is that you, dear reader, cannot leave comments. I had a heated debate with a friend in irc yesterday evening about this issue. I am in favour of enabling comments, he didn't think they would add to the blog in any way, after some screaming and yelling, he donned a uni-suit and stormed off.

But more seriously, his main point was that most comments are of the type "OMG, that's so funny!! LOL.", which might be true in some cases, yet all the email I get is decidedly more interesting than omg...lol...

I suppose one could argue that enabling comments will make it easier of people to do a quick OMG..LOL but OMG..LOL is still a valid comment in some cases is it not?

The only issues I personally have with comments is that first off this blog isn't set up for them, it is written in bash and would require some server side CGI scripts or an off site comment host like Haloscan. I am not sure I want do do CGI scripts as the blog is hosted on a friends machine and I would worry that its implemented properly and safely so that the script kiddies couldn't compromise his machine. I did try Haloscan a long time ago but found it really slow and dramatically increases the page load time.

Another option is using something like wordpress, this would solve many issues but it too has serious drawbacks, PHP being one of them, and importing my archives being another. Wordpress has a third drawback and that is typing post's in that horrible little browser based form, but I guess I could still write it in emacs and paste it.

comments welcome..

.... in my $HOME directory.

syncing to armarda
building file list ... 
193813 files to consider

This seems like quite a lot of files to me. Most of it is email, I have never deleted a single email. In fact for fun, I sometimes reply to email that is 4 or 5 years old. I cannot bring myself to delete email for some reason. Even mailing list email from the likes of debian-user, which one would be correct in describing as high traffic remain preserved in my mail folder. I think I need to learn how to archive my mail. I am really hoping my email client can do this without much fuss and will look into it sometime soonish before my filesystem explodes.

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I ran into some problems with my blog software's newest version. This update is incompatible with older releases and subsequently there are hoops to jump through, I think I have it all worked out but decided to use one of the default themes until I get the rest of it figured out. That is why this blog might look a little different than what you might have been used to.

I am doing a favour for a girl in our building by setting her up with a computer cobbled together from what is laying around. It actually isn't too bad, 1.7GHZ P4, 1GB ram and a 20GB hard drive. The sound, video and ethernet are all built in. The horror of course is having to go through the XP install process. The actual OS isn't bad to install, relatively hands off, but it did take about 45 minutes. The killer though is the updates, it first installed 57 security fixes, that took about an hour to download, install and then the mandatory reboot, followed by the Service Pack 2 update which took about the same amount of time. Why on earth they cannot bundle this into one download is beyond me.

I counted 8 of those annoying balloon notification thingies, you know..."your computer maybe at risk..." or "click here to take a tour of XP..." or "new updates availabe..."

Apparently you can turn them off but I haven't tried this yet.

I am now struggling to find drivers for the on-board sound and video. After all of this she still won't have any software worth a darn except maybe firefox, oh and solitaire. This experience always makes me want to hug Debian.

(now Windows seems to have found even more updates to download....)

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I went to dinner the other evening to an Indian restaurant, a Tandoori one to be precise and I had the loveliest rice I have ever tasted, the problem is I cannot recall what kind it was and I wanted to duplicate it at home. We use a brand of basmati rice called Tusk which is absolutely delicious, but I have to guess the rest of the ingredients by memory. I tried this in my rice cooker with a small stick of cinnamon, some cloves and yellow currents and although it was pretty good, it was missing something, saffron perhaps, I am not sure. I am now on a mission to find out how to cook perfect Indian style rice.

I needed to install some software onto my Compaq notebook that work had supplied me. But my IT guy had locked it down so I downloaded a bootable ISO called ntpasswd

This is a utility to (re)set the password of any user that has a valid (local) account on your NT system. You do not need to know the old password to set a new one. It works offline, that is, you have to shutdown your computer and boot off a floppy disk or CD. The bootdisk includes stuff to access NTFS and FAT/FAT32 partitions and scripts to glue the whole thing together. Will detect and offer to unlock locked or disabled out user accounts! It is also an almost fully functional registry editor!

It works really nicely, boots up into linux and asks some questions, resets the password for you and then reboots back into XP. Now I have pretty much setup the notebook with the software I need to keep me happy and knowing that it is all behind my IT guys' back makes it that much more rewarding.

One of things our company insists on doing is sending us to meetings, long winded 2 hour or more affairs. These meetings many times have absolutely nothing to do with our department and even less to do with my day to day activity but I am forced to sit there and pretend to be interested.

This is where Lisp comes in handy. I now drag my little Compaq with me and boot into Debian and sit there quietly reading the Introduction to Programming in Emacs Lisp(for people that are not programmers). You can read it in HTML format but reading it inside Emacs is preferred as you can try all the examples out as you go along. It is very well written and not at all what I would consider too `heavy' for lisp newbies like myself.

I did find some similarities with C albeit slight ones at best. The message function for example can take format specifiers like %d and %s and functions can have side effects, which is something I still cannot quite grasp sometimes in C, not the concept of a side effect, but what is the actual side effect of a function. Lisp seems similar in that respect.

     (setq trees '(pine fir oak maple))

If you evaluate the above statement, two things happen, the list (pine fir oak maple) is echoed in the mini-buffer and the symbol "trees" is bound to the list (pine fir oak maple). My gut feeling is that the echo is the side effect and binding to to list is the primary effect, but it is not, the side effect is pointing the symbol "trees" at the list. I am not sure why lisp is set up like this and hopefully it is something I can understand as time goes by or at least recognize when it is happening.

I had considered instead of the Lisp Manual, reading the Autotools book that I have been struggling with since pretty much page 2 or so :-) But to do that at work would require more concentration than I am capable of at the moment so I pick away at Autotools at a snails pace when I am at home.

After quite some time, my roommate has slowly taken to using linux on her home PC, the big selling point is it not bombarding her with pop-ups, spy-ware and the like whenever she uses her browser or instant messaging client.

The other selling point is that it never locks up on her, and she can leave it running all the time without fears of weird stuff happening. At the moment she is using a Gnome desktop, which when I have time, I will likely remove and try out KDE. I used not to be a KDE fan but it has come a long long way in recent years. Whilst looking for iPod software recently I tried Amarock, and I remember thinking at the time that if the rest of the KDE applications are this pleasant to use, KDE will become even more popular than it is today.

It's not that she is struggling with Gnome, but she did seem to really like the look of KDE when I showed her their site. She also, as do I, thinks the default desktop is a bit sparse, and frankly, not very attractive. Easy stuff to change once you know what your doing but still, Gnome just doesn't feel, for lack of a better term, welcoming.

When I asked her to help with my CD ripping project she said sure. I copied over my grip config files and brought down a stack of CD's (Pink Floyd if it matters..). She had no problems swapping the CD's as grip had finished and ejected them, however, every time she put a new CD in, sound-juicer would pop up and try to steal the show, thankfully managing only to steal some focus. Sarah thought it was a `virus!' at first :-) I looked in the Gnome preferred applications menu, but it only showed me a choice for my preferred browser, email client and something else I cannot recall at the moment.

So, I ask you, if it not a `preferred application', why does it pop up every time I insert a CD? I then decided to remove sound-juicer but apt wanted to remove gnome-desktop-environment which didn't sound good, so I have left it for now.

The CD ripping continues at full throttle however, I have completed box number 2 of 5 and have used about 35GB's of space. Box 3 will arrive either tonight or tomorrow. I hope all the David Bowie is in box 3!