this girl drives a tank

Humans consume 35 billion gallons of beer every year, however I contribute very little to that number. When it is hot, I do enjoy a glass of Corona with some ice cubes in it or perhaps a pint of half beer, half 7-up (again with ice) but generally if I do drink, its vodka and cranberry or simply white wine.



In medieval days women brewed much of the beer, as it fell under the category of food, they would even sell beer to raise money for weddings, known as "bride-ale" which gave us the modern word "bridal".

My fiancé finds this amusing and thinks I should hold a fundraiser for our wedding at his bar, with me serving pitchers or beer to the drunken well wishers. This of course has a snowball's chance in Hell of happening.

This is a rather cute animated (flash, sorry..) presentation by Hitachi pimping their perpendicular recording technology..

On Monday evening while making a salad, I managed to slash myself with a really sharp paring knife right across my wrist. Oddly enough there wasn't much blood but it did leave a horrible deep gash in my wrist and as my roommate Sarah noted, it looked like a total suicide job. She then informed me for the rest of the week she is putting me on suicide watch :-) I got 2 stitches put in yesterday and apart from a dull throbbing, I seem no worse for wear.

---

I am surprised that Google has not offered the ability to theme your personal home page before now, but you can now choose from a very limited selection of themes.



I am not sure about the other themes, but this particular one, you can choose your time zone and the sun will adjust accordingly...really useful stuff :-)

Of course if your not a fan of Google, you could always "Search The Web With Kevin!!"



Awesome!

I found an article/rant that attempts to explain some of the differences between BSD & Linux.

I have run BSD very briefly on my laptop once but decided that I wasn't quite ready to learn a whole new operating system just then and ended up nuking it. I am not sure I agree with all of the things he says, and it is difficult to compare one derivative of UNIX with all the flavours of Linux but still its not a bad read.

He makes an argument that the BSD ports tree is highly centralized

"But all those files in that big directory tree are maintained by the FreeBSD project itself. When somebody wrote KDE, for instance, it didn't magically appear in ports trees everywhere. Somebody had to write all the necessary `glue' to build a port for it, then commit the files into the FreeBSD CVS repository so it would be in the ports collection. So again, there's some level of assurance that it works with other things in the ports collection. Any dependencies it has will be there, because it can't declare a dependency on something not in ports."

I must be missing something because I see the Debian package archive in much the same light.

When I first started using Linux it was out of curiosity more so than necessity. Windows 2000 worked well enough for me but didn't really expose me to much of its under structure. My younger brother was into Linux at the time and when my Windows installation inevitably did get hosed, he offered to fix it, that is to say, he formatted the hard drive and installed SuSE 7.3.

I was quite impressed and proceeded like most newbies to investigate all these programs I found in my menus. This is how I discovered BZflag for example.

It didn't take long to realize that there was some pretty serious stuff going on too. I remember seeing `ping' in action for the first time and marveling that one could send `packets' all over the globe. Of course that is just the tip of the iceberg as far as *nix diagnostic tools go.

Much of the following year or so was spent re learning the things I was able to do in Windows on Linux and eventually being able to what I term bootstrap myself, by that I mean install and configure a distribution from scratch, and have it actually function. As I look back this time could have been spent a little better or at least could have benefited from some structure. I think choosing a tutorial or book and sticking to it would have greatly reduced the number of months I could be labelled as a n00b.

In light of that, for the next few years I have some goals that I feel are not too grandiose but will help me greatly down the road as the problems Linux present to me become more and more complex and challenging. (IE: getting X to work used to be one of those problems.)

Here are what I consider (rightly or wrongly) essential *nix computer skills:

Shell Scripting

This is an area in which I am pathetically weak. Several weeks ago I had a an rsync job that kept dying because of some obscure Realtek/rsync bug. I wanted to run a script that checked for rsync's exit status and retry if it was non zero. Simple enough no? Well not if I didn't realize my script spawned a subshell that didn't know about the return status of my rsync command. Finally after some prodding from irc gremlins I came up with `keeptrying.sh'

#!/bin/sh
STATUS=1
while [ $STATUS -gt 0 ]; do
    sleep 3;
    echo "rsync failed!!" ;
    echo "retrying........";
    /home/aec/bin/videosync
    STATUS=$?
done

The whole exercise took far longer than it should really and at this point in the game I should darn well know this stuff.

C Programming

This is one area that I am actually not so hard on my self. Given that I have no formal education in computers and learn from the internet and irc only and yada yada yada..., I think so far I have done pretty good. Lots more to learn of course but I find solving problems with C less daunting than this time last year and hope that trend continues.

Scripting Language

You could I suppose make an argument that sh, bash or zsh are scripting languages, in their own right. After all they use an interpreter and are fully programmable but the major difference (as I see it) seems to be the inclusion of libraries. Languages like Perl, Ruby and Python have huge and very interesting libraries that fledglings like myself can use to cobble up a little app to scratch a very specific itch. I have been told that I should have tackled Python before C even, but its too late for that now. Perl, from what I have seen still remains rather complex at first glance but then I haven't really given it a fair shake yet and I am not sure what to make of Ruby. And where does Lisp fit into all of this, is it essential even?

So these are some thoughts on my learning as it stands today. The best boost I could get right now more than anything would be the time to sit down and do all of this. Even though my life this year has suddenly become more hectic and chaotic than I have ever experienced, I still feel a need to learn, if only to serve myself, but being able to competently contribute to Debian or BZflag would certainly put the icing on the proverbial cake.

You can still pick up SuSE 7.3 for $18.39...

As you might know I love lyrics and love country music lyrics even more. Whilst trudging home through the slush and the sleet one evening, I heard on my iPod what was quite possibly the best Johnny Cash lyrics I have ever heard in a lovely little ditty called "Flushed from the Bathroom of Your Heart":



" From the backdoor of your life you swept me out dear
In the bread line of your dreams I lost my place
At the table of your love I got the brush off
At the Indianapolis of your heart I lost the race


I’ve been washed down the sink of your conscience
In the theater of your love I lost my part
And now you say you’ve got me out of your conscience
I’ve been flushed from the bathroom of your heart


In the garbage disposal of you dreams I’ve been ground up dear
On the river of your plans I’m up the creek
Up the elevator of your future I’ve been shafted
On the calendar of your events I’m last week


I’ve been washed down the sink of your conscience
In the theater of your love I lost my part
And now you say you’ve got me out of your conscience
I’ve been flushed from the bathroom of your heart
"

While on the subject of music, at lunch today I decided to hit the Mall. I was only intending to pop in to HMV (a rather large music retailer) to pick up the new Arcade Fire album, but somehow walked out with 5 CD's and about $80 lighter. I bought: The new Arcade Fire albumin: Neon Bible:
Interpol: Antics
Interpol: Turn On The Bright Lights
Goldfrapp: We Are Glitter
The Avalanches: Since I Left You

About this time last year one of the more interesting (from a user point of view) Debian General Resolution was passed and today I feel its effects more-so than any other time.

At the heart of the matter is the Free Software Foundation's vs Debian's position on the GFDL, particularly the `invariant sections' clause. An `invariant section' might be the front and rear covers of the user manual that perhaps contains the authors name and the publisher. The FSF maintains that modifying these sections isn't a socially useful activity and might misrepresent the authors. Debian feels documentation is essentially like software in this respect and a user should have the right to change anything they see fit.

For my part I am not happy to see documentation moved into Debian's non-free repository, already the autoconf and automake manuals live there, but as long as I still depend on a closed source driver for my video card, I will still have non-free enabled. (I would like to find a video card that has a 3D capable open source driver, but as of yet know of no such card.)

As much as I love Debian I feel they did the wrong thing here, and these issues still warrant further examination, despite the seemingly endless flame-wars discussions on the relevant mailing lists.

The point some people make is that if you rip the manual out of Emacs and package it separately, simply enabling non-free will solve your problem. However this is not good for people who refuse to run non-free software and are left with an application that is crippled without its documentation. (Emacs without its manual would undoubtedly be crippled).

I bring all this up because for almost 2 years now, Romain Francoise has maintained a snapshot of the latest emacs CVS release. Being able to run Emacs22 on my Debian Sarge server is really a great thing, and having it packaged for me, with almost weekly updates is even better, so I was somewhat saddened to learn he has orphaned the package, along with Bongo, the really cool little Emacs media player.

Both of these packages I use every day, day in and day out so I will have to either hope another Debian developer picks up the packages or checkout and regularly build the software from source on my desktop, laptop and server which might prove to be a tad tedious.

I hope Romain doesn't leave Debian entirely as he is one of those developers that responds to bug reports, listens to users and has provided me with some of my favorite software.