this girl drives a tank

I don't usually ever turn off Irssi but for some reason I did a /quit tonight and got a bizarre error message. Suddenly the Dungeon collapses!! - You die... I knew right away it was a Screen error. These are the types of errors the old unix hackers put in their code :-) The irssi developers are mere kids by comparison. Anyway, I happen to have the screen source code in my home directory (what girl doesn't?) and a quick grep of attacher.c confirmed it.

#if defined(DEBUG) || !defined(DO_NOT_POLL_MASTER)
      if (AttacherPanic)
        {
          fcntl(0, F_SETFL, 0);
          SetTTY(0, &attach_Mode);
          printf("\nSuddenly the Dungeon collapses!! - You die...\n");
          eexit(1);
        }
#endif

So it looks like doing a /quit caused an attacher panic. All I have to do is figure out what the hell that is and how not to do it again.

On the subject of code comments, try running: grep -iwr <naughty word> /usr/src/linux *

Windows is another nifty emacs extension that lets you set up a bunch of windows each with a different file, or manpage or irc window, music player or whatever. You set up all your sizes and then simply save this as a session.

typing C-c C-w C-r (or C-cwr) gives you a choice:
A)save-all R)esume-all S)ave-this L)oad-this N)Load# ~)read-~ W)ipe 

So I can easily save all of this to a ~/.windows file and the next time I start emacs I can choose Resume from the menu and everything is restored just like when I left it. Because it doesn't restore it automatically, I can save that session, shut off my computer and the next day do some entirely different things with emacs and restore my session another time. Quite geeky!

I have also experimented with ERC the emacs irc client, there are actually quite a few irc clients for emacs but ERC seems the best of the lot. Hopefully it can do the same sorts of things irssi can and if so might be worth a closer look.

We have some guests staying with us for a while, they arrive tomorrow so Sarah and I got the bright idea to re-tile the kitchen floor so it doesn't look old and gross anymore.

Our landlord had been clearing out an apartment down the hall and there were two boxes of tiles, one unopened, the other opened but with only a few tiles missing. These are the cheapie vinyl tiles, but they still look pretty good compared to what was on the floor before.

So last night at about 1:30am we decide to start tiling and figured we would do the easy ones. That is the ones that are in the middle of the room and need no cutting. We followed the straight line that the old tiles made and it was quite simple, taking about an hour to get them all done.

This afternoon we open the other box to do the edges and it was a completely different color and style of tile :-)

So, a frantic call to our landlord resulted in him going out to get the right ones and then installing them for us, in exchange for me doing a complete reinstall of Windows XP on his computer.

For once I didn't mind spending my afternoon with Windows XP and now our kitchen looks great!

I built a Linux From Scratch system on my laptop, I have an empty 10GB partition just for this sort of thing.

LFS is basically obtaining and compiling from source everything you need to get a base level, bare bones linux system up and running. You use the host operating system to compile the very first handful of packages like glibc, binutils, automake, make and gcc. Then you have some basic tools and can then recompile them with your new version of gcc. Then you chroot into the new partition, rebuild the "tool-chain" and then rebuild the base packages, and finally add the kernel and grub and some other fun stuff.

A few of things I noticed;

• It takes a long time to compile and test Glibc :-)
• Read the Makefile, many programs have tests you can run before installing
• Out of the 57 packages needed for a basic linux system, 24 come from gnu.org!
• just because ./configure works, there is no guarantee make will also work.
• LFS makes me really appreciate Debian

I managed to even get on the internet and set up dhcp which was cool. LFS also shows you where all these little commands come from and I discovered a few new commands that I never knew about. Here is a taste of some of the more interesting ones:

Glibc:
xtrace          Traces the execution of a program by printing the currently
executed function
ldconfig        Configures the dynamic linker runtime bindings
tzselect        Asks the user about the location of the system and reports
the corresponding
time zone description 




Binutils:
readelf         Displays information about ELF type binaries
size            Lists the section sizes and the total size for the given
object files 
strings         Outputs, for each given file, the sequences of printable
characters that are of
at least the specified length 
strip           Discards symbols from object files 




Coreutils:
expand          Converts tabs to spaces
env             Runs a command in a modified environment 
fmt             Reformats the paragraphs in the given files
fold            Wraps the lines in the given files 
join            Joins the lines that have identical join fields from two
separate files 
nl              Numbers the lines from the given files 
paste           Merges the given files, joining sequentially corresponding
lines side by side, separated by tab characters 
pinky           Is a lightweight finger client; it reports some information
about the given users 
unexpand        Converts spaces to tabs 
vdir            Is the same as ls -l




Mktemp:
mktemp          Creates temporary files in a secure manner; it is used in scripts
tempfile        Creates temporary files in a less secure manner than mktemp; it is
installed for backwards-compatibility




Ncurses:
clear           Clears the screen, if possible
infocmp         Compares or prints out terminfo descriptions
infotocap       Converts a terminfo description into a termcap description
reset           Reinitializes a terminal to its default values
tack            The terminfo action checker; it is mainly used to test the accuracy
of an entry in the terminfo database 
toe             Lists all available terminal types, giving the primary name and
description for each




Gettext:
hostname        Displays a network hostname in various forms 




Bzip2:
bzcat           Decompresses to standard output 
bzdiff          Runs diff on bzipped files
bzgrep          Runs grep on bzipped files
bzegrep         Runs egrep on bzipped files
bzfgrep         Runs fgrep on bzipped files 
bzless          Runs less on bzipped files
bzmore          Runs more on bzipped files 




Diffutils:
cmp             Compares two files and reports whether or in which bytes they differ 
sdiff           Merges two files and interactively outputs the results
(sdiff file1 file2 | less)




E2fsprogs:
badblocks       Searches a device (usually a disk partition) for bad blocks
chattr          Changes the attributes of files on an ext2 file system;
it also changes ext3 file systems
findfs          Finds a file system by label or Universally Unique Identifier (UUID) 




Gzip:
gzexe           Creates self-decompressing executable files 
zgrep           Runs grep on gzipped files
zless           Runs less on gzipped files
zmore           Runs more on gzipped files 




Man:
man2dvi         Converts a man page into dvi format
man2html        Converts a man page into HTML
whatis          Searches the whatis database by keyword and displays the short
descriptions




Psmisc:
fuser           Reports the Process IDs (PIDs) of processes that use the given
files or file systems
killall         Kills processes by name
pstree          Displays running processes as a tree 




Shadow:
mkpasswd        Generates random passwords
newusers        Is used to create or update an entire series of user accounts 
pwck            Verifies the integrity of the password files /etc/passwd
and /etc/shadow 
chage           Used to change the maximum number of days between obligatory
password changes
chfn            Used to change a user's full name and other information




Sysvinit:
lastb           Shows the failed login attempts, as logged in /var/log/btmp
mountpoint      Checks if the directory is a mountpoint
pidof           Reports the PIDs of the given programs 




Util-linux:
arch            Reports the machine's architecture 
column          Formats a given file into multiple columns 
line            Copies a single line 
namei           Shows the symbolic links in the given pathnames
write           Sends a message to the given user if that user has not disabled receipt
of such messages  

I won't keep the LFS system, some people go on to running X, Gnome and even have installed package managers and so on, but it takes alot of time and besides that I want to use the partition to try other OS's from time to time. However it has certainly been an eye opener and I'd recommend any linux user try at least once.

I'm not in the best of moods, our bath/shower drain is backed up, the toilet will not flush and the water is coming up through the laundry room drain. My Dad is out of with my brothers doing the male bonding stuff and I dont know how to turn off the water.

I can't take a shower, cannot do any laundry and have to go downstairs to the restraunt to use the bathroom. Anyway the plumber is on the way, he will save me :-)

A chuckle from #emacs...

13:56  * e1f watches an interview with jack welch at mitworld
13:56 < e1f> "not everyone can be above average"
13:58 < forcer> A factual observation.
13:58 < johnsu01> not really.
13:58 < forcer> johnsu01: It's a mathematical truth.
13:58 < johnsu01> "not everyone can be above average at the same time"
13:58 < forcer> Hehe.

Last night I upgraded my desktop and my backup-desktop to xorg from xfree86. I tested it on the backup machine first and it seemed fine, nothing broke, a few packages had to be removed but the Nvidia drivers were not affected at all and X restarted with the first try.

My main desktop was a bit more of a hassle. Firstly it wanted to rip out a ton of stuff,

The following packages will be REMOVED:
aalib1-dev billard-gl bittornado-gui foobillard freeglut3 libdevil-dev 
libdevil1 libgimp-perl libgle3 libglut3 libsdl-erlang libwxgtk2.4 
libwxgtk2.4-python libxine-dev libxine1 pdl planetpenguin-racer rss-glx 
scorched3d slang1-dev tuxracer wings3d xfld-desktop xfmedia xine-ui
xlibmesa-glu xlibmesa-glu-dev xscreensaver-gl

So with all that gone, I got my xorg working. But now am missing a few apps that I have grown fond of, Xine for playing dvd's, Tuxracer for my niece and foobillard, the really cool 8 ball game. On top of that, Bzflag would no longer compile. I managed to get that fixed today by adding some more SDL stuff that must of gotten removed somehow and reinstalling the Nvidia driver. So now everything is somewhat back to normal.

I think now Debian Unstable users are finding out why they call it unstable. For so long it truly has been a stable OS but with the release of Sarge all that has changed and I suspect if Debian holds true to its promise of more timely releases we will much more of these kinds of changes in the unstable branch. No complaints though really, wheres the fun in an OS that never breaks?

So I am happily irc'ing, and reading my email on the server when I notice things slowing down, I see Samba taking alot of my CPU and ram. I figure Sarah is up to something and it turns out she is copying some music off the server onto her computer. This really shouldn't bog down the computer that much so I went in her room to investigate.

She had opened two windows and was dragging folders from the server to her computer. But the copy dialog in windows is stupid enough to pop up in the same position all the time, so you only ever see the top dialog. This dialog box was in Windows 95, its been 10 years for god sakes. Do they not have anyone in Redmond that study how people interact with their software?

Anyway, part of the problem was Sarah had no idea how many copies were simultaneously going on. The other problem was of course she wasn't actually looking at the size of the folders she was copying. The Classical Music folder for example is over 10GB :-)

I really like Gnus as my email client however what a pain to set up. To be fair it is a newsreader thats been hacked to deal with email but still, I found it really hard to get it to do all the things that mutt did for me.

Anyway its done now and I am happy with it and must say it is much nicer to have all the emacs commands, especially the search tools inside my email client. Oh thank you Johan Bockgård in #gnus for your patience :-)

You might notice that I hardly write in this blog anymore, I guess I do not get out of it as much as I used to and it should be a two way thing you know? Its not like theres a huge pressure to write something everyday, but sometimes I don't really feel like it and then that seems to carry over into the next day and the next.

Xorg will soon be in Debian unstable, I have already upgraded to gcc4 this week. Bzflag, emacs-cvs, emms-cvs and screen all build and run fine with gcc4 so Xorg shall be one of thelast biggies to upgrade to. I just know this will break my video card modelinesonce again :(

City of God is a very violent and very sad movie in many ways, but the narrative and presentation is captivating, five minutes in to the movie you realize you are hooked. The movie deservedly won many awards and even if your not a fan of subtitles, the cost of a rental is a bargain for an unforgettable movie like this.

I have attempted to use Gnus as my email client just to see what all the raving in #emacs is all about :-) Mutt makes me switch to emacs anyway to compose mail so I might as well stay within emacs and reap the benefits of not jumping between applications. A 3% boost in efficency by my estimation :)

So far I have got the part where is connects to usenet and reads groups down pat, but the part where it actually reads my email I am struggling with.

In my hunt for documentation I did find a very interesting book called The Craft of Text Editing. I don't know why I like reading books like these. maybe its less technical in nature and a break from learning C or the shell or how to install foo. Anyway what jumped out at me though was something which I was never able to articulate even in my mind, one of the major differences between Emacs and Vim....

Fourth, the basic paradigm behind the Emacs command set is "move to desired position, make desired change." This paradigm applies even in the case where I made a mistake, as I simply add the mistake to the list of changes to be made and continue to apply the pardigm. I never have to change mental gears. The penalty for making a mistake is thus minimized.

Fianlly..... From the Department of Horribly Named Applications I give you Dude Check This Out!"

I have been adding some more mp3's to my collection, and have finally put all the groups into their own folders so there are no stragglers laying around.

Some of the files were still in .wav format so on the server I had to convert them to mp3's without X windows. I also had the problem of the files names having spaces. I have a function in my ~/.bashrc file that finds files.

#find a file with a string in its name: ff
function ff() { find . -type f -iname '*'$*'*' -ls ; }

So typing ff *.wav will recursively find any wav files under my current directory. Then I simply cd into the directory with the .wav files and with my nifty one line command, remove the spaces in the names, convert them from file.wav to file.wav.mp3 and finally rename them to file.mp3.

rename 's/ /_/g' *.wav ; for i in *.wav; do /usr/bin/lame $i $i.mp3; done \
&& rm -rf *.wav && rename 's/wav.//g' *.mp3 ;

Of course if I was really smart I would merge my ff function to construct an unmitigated seek and convert mega .wav conversion command. I would have called her The Wave of Freedom I tried but was unsure how....

Several people have emailed me about my mp3 server, I no longer have a static IP so I would have to set up one of those dyndns things, so maybe when I get the rest of them sorted out, which won't be long I will set up a server again.