this girl drives a tank

I returned last night from spending Christmas in Newfoundland, which is inhabited by quite likely the friendliest people you might ever encounter. My extended family is spread out right across the country and every year we decide who will `host' Christmas.

This year it was relatives in Newfoundland and my parents and brothers quite wisely decided to fly down, whereas I decided to drive, and to take my boyfriend with me. Canada as it turns out, is quite big. Normally one would leave Toronto, drive out of Ontario, across Quebec, down into New Brunswick and then over to Nova Scotia, this takes about 23 Hours. Next you take a 6 hour ferry and arrive in Port aux Basques, followed by a further 9 hours or so to reach St. John's.

The problem of course is that I had assumed the weather would be fine. I didn't check ahead of time and thought nothing of the heavy rainfall we had in Toronto on the day we left. The rain never stopped, and I hate driving in the rain, I always feel like I am going to skid off the road and I have trouble seeing things with the wipers on and the dots of water all over the place. By the time we reached Montreal it was nightfall and the rain turned into freezing rain. My car was covered with ice and after getting out of Montreal, the traffic had slowed to a crawl, we spent the rest of the night just getting across Quebec, there were cars in the ditch every few kilometers and I was all stressed out and nervous.

Normally I would have just gotten a motel but I had all the Christmas gifts in my car and didn't want to be late so we kept going. It wasn't until the next evening the rain finally stopped and the drive became a little easier. We did miss the ferry though and had to take a much later one, which pretty much dashed any chance of getting there on time, but at that point I was happy to get 3 hours of sleep in the car while we waited. We finally arrived in St John's at about 3:30AM Christmas morning, just in time to tuck the gifts under the tree.

Was it worth it? Definitely, the rest of Christmas was perfect, with lots of fun, great food and too many parties. The return trip was much less eventful and with good weather it wasn't nearly as tiring. I will however never do that drive again.

I am nearing the end of my CD ripping project, my friend dropped the last lot off to me yesterday and I hope to have them ripped before Christmas. All in all his stuff will add about 75-80GB to my collection.

Then next step is friend number 2 :-) He has only about 500 Cd's but he also has almost that many vinyl albums. He wants to put those on his computer and asked me how. "Easy!!" I replied. I have no idea how to do this mind you.

Preliminary googling suggests I need at least a turntable which I can get, but it seems I will need some other audio equipment, namely a pre-amp, I am quite sure I do not have one of those but I think my local music store rents them. The other problem is CDDB look up is rather easy when you rip a CD but I would imagine I would have to sit there and type in the data by hand for each and every LP. This would most certainly suck big time.

If you have done this before, please gmail me

One of our silly family traditions, (and we have plenty of them) is the Christmas music selection for Christmas dinner. Every year a different family member was in charge of the music during the dinner and throughout the evening. I think it was my Mom that started all this. I remember being very young and she would remind me in like September that it would be my turn.

I of course would spend the oncoming months furiously researching the hundreds of Christmas albums we had trying to come up with the most crowd pleasing playlist I could think of. I liked all kinds of Christmas music, My Mom was very much a fan of Anne Murray and Nana Mouskouri but my Dad liked music ranging from Classical Christmas Choral music to good old fashioned Country and Western.

One year it was my brothers turn, he had told Mom that it would be an Elvis Christmas, she was pretty happy as who doesn't like Elvis? As it turned out however he meant Elvis Costello.

My parents were mortified, but I will never forget the ruckus it caused and although I assisted my parents in talking some sense into my brother, under the table, I was tapping my toes in glee to the tempo of What's So Funny Bout' Peace Love and Understanding?

This article discusses adding the `trashcan' functionality we see on most desktops, but at a kernel level.

The patch works like this: whenever the last link is removed from a file, the undeletable and secure deletion flags are checked. Should either one be set, the file will be moved over to the .trash/<uid>/ directory in the root of the filesystem. Each per-uid directory has restrictive permissions, keeping users from perusing each others' deleted files. There are no subdirectories, so the path information is lost; preserving paths might be added in a future version. A number is appended to the file name when collisions with files already in the trash happen.

Seems like a good idea. I have rm aliased to rm -i but have conditioned my self now to expect the confirmation question and not pay attention to it as much as I should. I regularly do backups with rsync and feel a bit safer knowing that I could at most lose an hour or so of work.

What might be better would be for the kernel to recognize a major and disastrous delete command. The infamous `rm -rf /' comes to mind, and would be easy enough to detect I imagine, so would wiping out /usr or /bin, but where would you stop interfering with the superusers judgement?

zsh is nice to ask if I am sure when I do something like rm -rf ~/tmp/foo/*. I am sure this a shell option I can turn off but still, it's quite often I use the `*' wildcard to delete files without first checking to see what the `*' actually expands to, so I let zsh give me pause for thought in those cases.

My desktop, Xfce4, also has a trash can similar to the windows recycle bin. (what exactly is being recycled? your not putting glass and plastic in there and ftp'ing it off to MS.) I only delete files via a GUI when they contain lots of invalid characters that I am too lazy to learn how to escape in zsh.

Since July of 2003, Jeff Myers has graciously allowed my blog to live on his web server at the bakadigital.com domain.

Very early last month, he informed me that the DNS entry for bakadigital will expire and he wasn't renewing it, instead he was going to move everything over to his other domain, opencombat.net, a much cooler domain don't you think?

With plenty of warning I then proceeded to totally forget to inform anyone that reads this blog about the change and as a result last week it briefly disappeared. Jeff saved my bacon by renewing the DNS and thereby giving me an opportunity to inform you properly of these changes.

So, if you are reading this via the bakadigital domain, please change it to point to bzgirl.opencombat.net or alternatively you can use bzgirl.org, a domain which was parked for a long time, but was snatched up and delivered to me as Christmas gift as soon as it became available by a very good friend.

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Elive is a Debian derivative powered by the e17 desktop.

Elive is a complete operating system for your computer. It's the perfect choice for replacing your proprietary, high-cost system. It is built on top of Debian GNU/Linux and customized to meet your needs for a complete operating system while still offering the user eye-candy with minimal hardware requirements. Turn your old computer into a high-powered work-station again, with an Interface that dazzles everybody that sees it. This is Elive's goal.

They seem to be meeting the goal from what I can tell, even with Xorg's composite extensions enabled, this desktop is fast and light, and of course really pretty. One thing I didn't like was the ugly and unintuitive elpanel configuration tool.

If e17 were to get into Debian officially, I would give it a longer trial as my main desktop, but I don't think that will happen anytime soon. I installed the elive CD to an empty partition, as you can be sure running a composite manager off a live CD will bring the system to a crawl. :-)

PS: Jeff, thank you once again!

One of the things I have always struggled with in C programming is knowing what to do when my program crashes, and inevitably, my programs will crash. I long got over the fact that everything I write will be bug laden and eventually crash given the right situation. I even accept that. It's a little hurdle you have to get over I think, and knowing that everything has bugs is the first step to understanding why it has bugs and what to do about bugs.

Most times GCC does a pretty good job of letting you know what the error is, but sometimes I know its something a bit less obvious and I get that sinking feeling that I have to fire up GDB and investigate.

I have always hated GDB, it seemed cryptic to me , especially the part where your looking at stuff like:

(gdb) n
0xb7d5fea8 in __libc_start_main () from /lib/tls/libc.so.6
(gdb) n

I think basically hexadecimal numbers make me want to run away screaming. I searched around for some tutorials, and there are plenty out there to be sure, but most of them tend to ignore the fact that if you have no idea what the stack is or what frames are, your going to spend a lot of time spinning your wheels. I found one tutorial however that starts from the start, it's called Peter's GDB Tutorial and it's the best one I have found so far. It starts out with a really good introduction to virtual memory and how memory is allocated in Linux, and oddly enough, many of my bugs are memory bugs. One other little plus for this tutorial is a section on debugging ncurses which is very handy as I quite like ncurses and expect I will be fiddling with it for a while yet before taking on something like GTK, and then LISP, then maybe Python, oh and C++....Sigh.

I still don't look forward to using GDB, as having to use GDB means I have done something horribly wrong, but I like it a lot more now.

One of the great things about this wonderful series of tubes we know as teh intraweb, is of course having access to things that in all likelihood you would have probably never seen. When I stumbled upon the writings and photographs of William Gedney I was blown away to be quite honest.



The series on a rural Kentucky family in 1964 was particularly striking. Also check out the series on India and one about a bar called O'Rourkes somewhere in New York City.

This site (sorry evil flash format) depicts a series of of amateur soccer fields, and players, all over Europe set against some rather lovely backdrops. Now in Europe they would call them `Football Pitches' but that's just plain wrong :-) One of my favorites is this one from Warley, in England, it just looks so very English, for lack of a better description.



Now if those two sites do nothing for your cultural or creative mojo, then you might just like this you-tube video of that great American classic, Chicken Fried Bacon!

I found this picture of Ted getting pwned floating around the internet, I can sympathize though, I have on a few occasions times gotten angry at my shell and done something similar. Saidar is little program that uses libstatgrab to display a nice overall summary of your computer. I decided it would be nicer if it had some color in its output so I downloaded the source code and started adding a -c option for colors. It turned out to become a little bit harder than I thought as I realized that I could do different things with the colors as the numbers change, for example the CPU will go bold at 60% usage and reverse-video at 90% usage. My patch was accepted by the software's author and as a result, version 0.14 includes color support.

I have returned my focus to my little document reading program and am spending time trying to find ways to handle users resizing the screen in ncurses without having the terminal become unreadable. This involves trapping signals and redrawing boxes and sub-windows. Fun stuff that makes me feel like Ted.

I have written before about desktop session recording software, particularly byzanz and Istanbul, both of which do a decent job but without sound. The latest package I have tried is called recordmydesktop and as far as I know its the only one that records sound as well as video. Here's a clip featuring bongo, a great music player for emacs.



To get sound working you need set alsa to record from the `wave' device of your sound card (actually there are plenty of other ways but this worked for me.) I used `gnome-alsamixer' for this as it was the only mixer that showed me the little `rec' checkbox, I was unable to figure out how to set a device to record in the console alsamixer.

The Debian version of recordmydesktop is not new enough to use with sound as it has some issues with choppy sound, so after installing libxdamage-dev, libvorbis-dev and libtheora-dev, the latest cvs version from their site compiled with no problems.

The default output is in ogg format, I know linux users won't have a problem seeing it, I *think* Windows Media Player can show oggs, let me know if it dosen't work for you.