this girl drives a tank

I am quite happy with my self that I compiled a new kernel, added framebuffer support and made the appropriate changes to my grub files, all while sitting on the porch at the cottage with no Google or IRC to help me, just the docs included with the kernel source.

Now the laptop is much better, I can actually fit quite a bit of information in one screen. All these old timers will tell you that all they had back then was a console and no fancy GUI, well, it ain't so bad, I don't know what they are complaining about. :-)

I think we will come back on Friday, it's a long weekend (Canada Day) and cottage country is jam packed with people which somewhat works against the reason we came up here in the first place.

Besides that, I spilled boiling water on my hand today so its sore and if it doesn't get better I will want to go home. My boyfriend actually caught fish this morning which made me very proud :-) He told me I can now cast aside any doubt of his ability to provide for me, adding that if I was more motivated, I would have foraged for nuts and berries to go along with the fish.

After work last night we left for the cottage and despite being dog tired it was a good idea. Downtown traffic and the highway was pretty much nonexistant and we got there just in time to sit on the dock and watch the sunrise, all romantic-like :-)

I did end up taking my laptop and took the time to grab the 2.6.11 kernel sources with a mind for once and for all getting the framebuffer to work on this thing. Don't ask why I feel I need a new kernel, that has probably got nothing to do with it but its there just in case.

I like reading without X and it saves the battery so the frambeuffer is important because I hate the big ugly console fonts. Anyway I have something to do now while my bf is off scaring the fish away.

We slept untill noon, but it was pretty hot out and woke up in a horrible daze of heat, all sweaty, sticky and humid, but the nice thing was to run out to the dock and jump right into the lake :-)

Tonight I plan to leave the city for a week up north but my boyfriend thinks he will work, which means I will likely work tonight also and leave right afterwards. This means of course driving at 3:30 am and arriving at the cottage around 5:30 or 6:00am Sunday morning.

I doubt this will happen as I hate driving when I am tired but we will see. My laptop might not make the trip, I am undecided. It is supposed to be a break from everything, our cell phones will be off and left in the car and only recreational items are allowed. However he will sit at the end of the dock and fish for ages, which is fine, trust me the fish are in no danger :-) but I will likely want to read or try some of my programming exercises and will miss not having the laptop around.

Toronto continues to sizzle, I cannot remember a more consistently hot May and June and the forecast shows no indication of this changing. I'm happy to report my patented chalky white skin is even looking bronzed these days.

I wanted to try the opensolaris release and downloaded the iso's but none of my computers can boot the images, someone in irc did an md5sum of their iso, since Sun neglected to offer md5sums on the site, but the iso is fine. Paul directed me to disable some acpi stuff which did not work either and then thought perhaps my computer might have too much ram, all of them have a gig at least. Well it is not important, I just wanted to see what Solaris looks like, especially the beautiful looking CDE :-)

Sarah had some friends over on the weekend and were playing mp3's on her computer, quite late at night, quite loudly and very drunkenly. The next morning she complained to me her computer was yet again broken and making loud beeps when she turned it on. I rebooted it and sure enough a long string of beeps could be heard during the POST. When I picked up the keyboard, vodka and coke poured out of it onto the floor. Sarah grinned and asked if I could fix that.

I turned 30 yesterday and my little brother was nice enough to call and declare I am now "middle-aged" which of course I do not believe for a moment, but am not going to google for the precise definition of middle-aged just in case.

I remember about 5 or 6 months ago someone asking in #irssi for some help writing a script that sets the irc client /away as soon as you detach from your screen session. I noticed in my /usr/share/irssi/script directory today there was a script called screen_away.pl.

It works like a charm and will even change your nick for you, it is also easy to set up with only a few simple things to configure..

# there are 5 settings available:
#
# /set screen_away_active ON/OFF/TOGGLE
# /set screen_away_repeat <integer>
# /set screen_away_message <string>
# /set screen_away_window <string>
# /set screen_away_nick <string>

So Nvidia released another driver update recently, I think 2 or 3 weeks ago at least. I decided tonight to update mine from the version I was running and the installation went smoothly as usual but when i restarted X I was looking at 1600x1200 resolution and not 1920x1200.

This means my precious mode lines need tweaking again, and this sucks because I tried about 100 different modelines before finding one that worked. Now, to get the card working with the new driver, I need to guess the modeline again.

My solution is to reinstall the old driver. I am back to my happy sized desktop and will forget about it for the time being. What bothers me is not knowing how to generate the correct modeline every time I update my driver. If some one has a sure fire way to do this please let me know.

I taking a week's vacation early this year, at the end of this month actually and will be going up north with my boyfriend to his family's "cottage" in Muskoka. It will be so nice to just get out of the city for a while. We are talking about a trip down south in the fall perhaps but that's just a pipe dream at the moment.

With the release of Sarge the version of irssi I had been using for what seemed like years :-) suddenly got upgraded. This was fine but some of my old config file stuff didn't seem to work, so I built one from scratch and took some notes this time.

I was particularly interested in the split window stuff, writing this down, as I had pretty much stumbled on a working config from trial and error and I hate learning how to do something, by accident, and not being able to repeat it.

Its a very rough guide but you can read it here.

The Chinese government never ceases to amaze.....

Instead, the government-run tobacco industry clearly promotes smoking
as a way to improve health in the nation of 1.3 billion people.


Ads in China tout smoking as a cure-all for diseases and ailments -- from
Parkinson's to ulcers. In fact, smoking can even make you smarter and happier,
if you listen to the government.

The American government never ceases to amaze.... (NY Times article use bugmenot)

Mr. Cooney is chief of staff for the White House Council on Environmental
Quality, the office that helps devise and promote administration policies
on environmental issues.


Before going to the White House in 2001, he was the "climate team leader"
and a lobbyist at the American Petroleum Institute, the largest trade
group representing the interests of the oil industry.
A lawyer with a bachelor's degree in economics, he has no scientific training.

Yesterday evening I stopped at crappy tire and bought a little window air conditioner. I was so excited to get it home.

I wasnt sure how to install it so for the night I wedged it in my window really tightly with a block of wood and sealed up the gaps with a blanket. Tonight my Dad is coming here to fix it properly. Sarah is soooooo jelous, and spent the entire night, including sleeping in my room. On my way home tonight I stopped once again at Crappy Tire and picked up another one for her room. Poor Dad, hes now got 2 to install :-\

I noticed this peculiar bug on the debian-user mailing list and had to chuckle at the response:

> On Wed, Jun 08, 2005 at 07:58:19PM -0700, j smith wrote:
> > i have just downloaded 1st CD of 3.1, only to find the
> > following "Last Minute Notes" in README.txt:
> >
> > You should keep in mind that this is an unofficial CD
> > of the current development version of the Debian
> > system. This means that all sorts of bugs may be
> > present anywhere in the system.
> >
> > i'm completely confused. after waiting for so long,
> > 3.1 still has so many bugs?

Joey Hess then stated that this warning file is included on development builds of the cd images and was supposed to be removed from the final build but got somehow forgotten, prompting the following reply:

It is clearly an error, or is it? It makes for a very nice paradox:
since the README comes with a Stable release, it is out of place. But
since it is out of place, its presence is a bug, therefore making its
claim true, and consequently it is _not_ a bug... thus it is not out of
place in a Stable release :^)

Basajaun

I am very happy that Sarge has been released and congratulations are in order to the developers. I have already got my server upgraded and am happy to have all this new software and yet see stable in my /etc/apt/sources.list. Yay.

It has been so hot here this week and we have no air conditioning. I had one propped up in my window last summer, and although it was loud, it cranked out delicious cold air into my bedroom and for that, I will put up with the noise. The problem came when it started leaking water all over my window sill, peeling up paint and just generally being cantankerous. It had to be removed.

Last night it was 29C at 11pm and sleep was just impossible. We are cursed with horrible humidity here, probably because of the Great Lakes, and the air is just so sticky. Another concern right now is my computers

orchid@morcheeba ~ $ hddtemp /dev/hd{a,b}
/dev/hda: Maxtor 6Y160P0: 73°
/dev/hdb: WDC WD2000JB-00GVA0: 63°


That seems a tad excessive. Sarah and I bought a box of beer and keep it in the fridge. We cant sleep because of the heat so we decided to try drinking a pint of cold beer before bed. It did actually cool me down and made me sleepy so I dunno, I just hate to think of that developing into a nightly habit.

As you might recall, I have two desktops hooked up to my Dell 2405FPW LCD monitor. One runs on the DVI port (Geforce 6800 card) and the other on the VGA port (Geforce 5700 card). It took alot of fiddling around to get them both running at 1920x1600. The 6800 card didn't work until I upgraded my Nvidia drivers. The second desktop never worked properly.

It ran at 1900x1200, but it left two black unused portions of the screen on either side of the desktop, about 4 inches wide, and scrunched up the image. For the last few weeks I have learned to live with it and didn't do much to resolve this issue as I was busy with other stuff.

Google has very little info on setting this montior/card combo up under linux as I suspect most of the people that have bought one run windows. So in case someone googles, I will paste the all important modelines here and hopefully it will help somebody.

For the Geforce 6800 on DVI....

Section "Device"
Identifier "Generic Video Card"
Driver "nvidia"
Boardname "GeForce-6800"
VideoRam 131072
Option "DPMS" "on"
Option "RenderAccel" "on"
Option "AGPMode" "8"
Option "DigitalVibrance" "0"
Option "NoLogo" "1"
Option "HorizSync" "DFP-0:30-81"
Option "VertRefresh" "DFP-0:56-76"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
Identifier "Generic Monitor"
VendorName "DELL"
ModelName "2405FPW"
HorizSync 30-81
VertRefresh 56-76
Option "DPMS"
Modeline "DELL1920" 193.16 1920 2048 2256 2592 1200 1201 1204 1242 -HSync +Vsync
EndSection


For the Geforce 5700 on VGA....

Section "Device"
Identifier "Generic Video Card"
Driver "nvidia"
Boardname "GeForce-5700"
VideoRam 262144
Option "DPMS" "on"
Option "RenderAccel" "on"
# Option "AGPMode" "8"
Option "DigitalVibrance" "0"
Option "NoLogo" "1"
Option "HorizSync" "DFP-0:30-81"
Option "VertRefresh" "DFP-0:56-76"
EndSection


Section "Monitor"
Identifier "Generic Monitor"
VendorName "DELL"
ModelName "2405FPW"
HorizSync 30-81
VertRefresh 56-76
Option "DPMS"
ModeLine "1920x1200" 154.0 1920 1968 2000 2080 1200 1203 1209 1235 +Hsync -Vsync
EndSection