this girl drives a tank

I was setting up a graphical email client for someone and hoping that it could import their old Maildir formatted email. I tried Sylpheed and Evolution with no success. Evolution imported all the mail actually, but the were all 0 bytes long and not particularly useful. Next up was Mozilla's offering, here is how that went:



I have seen Supergrass 3 times but they have never played live one of my favorite songs, Cheapskate, and up until the other day I wasn't aware there even was a video for it. Another video I hadn't seen was Mary This is one of those songs where I never really took the time to figure out what it was about, the video was quite surprising in some ways :)

I tried new linux version picasa on the weekend and removed it again yesterday.

First I got picasa_2.2.2820-5_i386.deb, a 21MB file that will turn out to use 79MB on disc. So there is nothing lightweight about it. For me this isn't a big deal but I know not everyone has acres of disc space.

When you first run it you have to agree to this massive licence which no, I didn't read from top to bottom. Then you get to choose between scanning the entire drive or selecting folders individually.

I chose by accident the entire drive the first time and it took forever, I mean almost an hour on a P4 3GHZ machine with 2GB's of ram. So, don't choose this option :)

Once it's all done scanning I started poking around my pictures. I have almost 7000 photo's so I am game for any app that organizes them for me. I also have about 20 times that of photos for work which are crying out for a decent organization tool.

So as photo app's go I quite like it, it has a unique interface that's easy to use and some nifty effects tools, it has the usual slide-show feature and a time-line feature that I quite liked. I am not sure what toolkit they used but it looks like QT and feels very much unlike a traditional "wine" app. It also has a batch edit menu, a plus for sure and has, as you would expect, nice integration with blogger and gmail.

The bad stuff however is pretty bad. Picasa uses tons of ram and CPU, scrolling with mouse for instance racks the CPU up to 100%, for some reason keyboard scrolling doesn't.

It steals my window manager keys (ctrl+alt)

Picasa hard-codes this directory tree:

PicasaDocuments
|-- My Music
|-- My Pictures
`-- My Video

yuck! not only capitals, but spaces too :( I guess this is one of the problems with it not being a native linux app.

I also see no obvious way to include or exclude hidden folders, which if you choose /home as a top level directory to scan, then it starts wading through folders like .thumbnails and .icons, which really sucks.

For me its too greedy resource wise, and too slow to keep around so I removed it. I wish they had done this with Google Earth to be honest instead of Picasa but perhaps that will come too one day. I tried to run Gooogle Earth in wine but failed miserably.

Byzanz is another desktop session recorder along the lines of Istanbul ,Wink and vnc2swf. There are several other such apps but I haven't really tried those. Byzanz is nice since it outputs to a relatively lightweight animated .gif that pretty much any browser understands.



There are no Debian packages for this yet so I had to compile it and I couldn't get any GUI working so I had to call it from the command line. You can get the geometry of the app you want to record with xwininfo and then just substitute those variables on the command line:

./byzanz-record -x 1 -y 49 -w 564 -h 602 -c -d 60 --delay=3 ~/tmp/test.gif

There is an interesting discussion underway on the TLUG mailing list about basically how difficult info pages are to navigate and how easier it is using 'less' and 'man' Some comments so far...

> Thank God.  My pet peeve about 'info' is that it breaks up into pieces
> and forces me to navigate using keystrokes.  Whereas 'manpage' gives me
> single document which can be piped to 'less'.
 
>>     Which you navigate using keystrokes.

> And many of the keystrokes in "less" are used in vi. Your UNIX knowledge is 
> transferrable to several apps, lessening your learning curve and allowing you to 
> concentrate on actually _using_ the operating system. Even in bash, you can tweak 
> your .bashrc to allow you to use vi keystrokes to edit your command line. With 
> the invention of "info", that knowledge was no longer transferrable to the new 
> interface. In a company environment, these things mean time to have to re-learn 
> new tricks, and that is money not used to do whatever else you were hired to do. 
> I would like to see Linux move toward simplicity and elegance. Info is a move 
> away from that trend, in my  view.

I would argue... And many of the keystrokes in "info" are used in emacs. Your UNIX knowledge is transferable to several apps, lessening your learning curve and allowing you to concentrate on actually _using_ the operating system. Even in bash, you can tweak your .bashrc to allow you to use emacs keystrokes to edit your command line. With the invention of "man", that knowledge was no longer transferable to the new interface. In a company environment, these things mean time to have to re-learn new tricks, and that is money not used to do whatever else you were hired to do. I would like to see Linux move toward simplicity and elegance. Man/less is a move away from that trend, in my view.

I don't see the big deal though, on my Debian computer typing 'info gcc' opens up the info page. I type / and it asks for a search term, just like in man/less (except its also a regular expression search) This search applies to all nodes in the document not just the current page. Tapping the space bar (just like in man/less) takes me page by page through the document. Pressing q (just like in man/less) quits the process.

Given that, I really don't see what extra keystrokes you are being forced to learn.

I agree that to a brand new linux user, user *both* man pages and info pages are not exactly a pleasant way to get your dose of documentation and many times when reading documentation we tend to already be in an unsavoury mood because we are stuck and *have* to go look something up so there is already a "lets get this over with" attitude going in... but that's a mental thing, more to do with how we approach documentation.

^{Disclaimer: I am heavily biased toward emacs and info pages}

Of all the long weekend holiday's we get each year, Victoria Day has got have the stupidest reason. I know we were once a colony but really, Canadians don't care anymore, we should rename the day to something more relavant. Anyway the weekend was good, cold weather but still a nice break.

I didn't get any studying done so I am no further ahead in groking autotools than I was last week but I did add an ide controller and a third hard drive to my computer so I actually have space now for both music and movies!.

Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda1              19G  6.2G   12G  36% /
tmpfs                1014M  4.0K 1014M   1% /dev/shm
/dev/hda5              15M   14M  685K  96% /boot
/dev/hda6              19G  7.8G  9.7G  45% /home
/dev/hdb1             184G   87G   88G  50% /mp3
/dev/hde              230G   14G  205G   7% /video
tmpfs                  10M  152K  9.9M   2% /dev

I have always wanted to "coin" a phrase. Its not really fair that lots of other people get to invent phrases that become entrenched in society, and I don't.

So when the other day when Sun and Ubuntu made their affections clear to each other, I thought to myself "what a great opportunity to coin the phrase Sunbuntu!".

Alas someone had already beaten me to it. Anyway, as far as the Sunbuntu relationship goes, it's interesting to read about how this might ultimately hurt Red Hat and how fast these new Niagra servers will be running Ubuntu but I think it might also help gnusolaris a great deal as it is already based on Ubuntu.

I attempted this afternoon to reinstall gnusolaris but this time using only half the drive and saving the other half for Debian. This didn't work out so well, the installer recognizes the hard drive, but not my two partitions, so I had to do the manual partitioning thing which went from ok, to bad to worse until I accepted defeat and let it use the whole disc again.

On the plus side they've added 1400 more packages since we last talked so that's a pretty big jump. I will also skip the Nvidia driver this time around as I only play on 3d game and not on this laptop, so I don't really need it. Wireless is now my next hurdle.

Some believe that usage of to coin in this fashion is actually an error, believing instead that it should be to quoin. This term is a printer's term meaning to secure a block of type with a quoin, or metal wedge. So to quoin a phrase is to set it into type or make it permanent. But quoin is simply a spelling variant of coin that is primarily used in this specialized printing sense. The sense meaning to create is invariably spelled coin. (source)

This is supposed to be some sort of math joke

<learner> 1+1=3
<orchid> it doesn't 
<learner> for very large values of 1 is does

I don't get it. Then I was provided with a program to confuse me even further.

  #include <stdio.h>
  int main(int argc, char *argv[]) {
  int a, b, c;
  
  a = 1.5;
  b = 1.5;
  c = 1.5 + 1.5;
  printf("%d + %d = %d\n", a, b, c);
  
  return 0;
}

[orchid@morcheeba:~/src/c/tmp]% ./a.out
1 + 1 = 3

I have taken the first plunge into the Gnu Build System this weekend by actually writing a Makefile.am and configure.ac, as was pointed out to me it is a lot to understand at one shot, and thankfully I have a simple program to work with and a great mentor :) However I still feel a little lost, even remembering what tool creates what file isn't easy, let alone what M4 macros should be used and when. Seems to me I could spend years understanding all this without ever writing any more C!

On a more fun note I did download and install Gnusolaris this weekend and its now running on my laptop. It has a decent installer, not near as nice as Debians but not bad with the exception of the partitoner, I had the choice of using the entire disk which would have erased my Debian stable install ( I wanted to dual boot) or manually edit the partition table. I chose the latter which was a huge mistake as once I had selected disc "0" it then asked me to enter the number of cylinders.

If your partitioning tool ever asks me to enter cylinder numbers, it ain't gonna happen. So I redid the install and just let it wipe the entire disc.

Other than that things went ok, it wasn't able to get xorg properly configured but I just shoved in a Debian xorg.conf and changed a few font paths and it worked out fine.

Having dpkg is awesome, so familiar right away and not like that lost "how do install stuff??" feeling you get the first time you look at an OS you've never seen before.

I installed Xfce4 right away and of course emacs21 (no emacs22 packages yet unfortunately). The Nexenta website boasts 5360 packages which isn't bad, but not quite up to Debians incredible repository just yet..

• gnusolaris 5360
• Debian stable release 15609
• Debian unstable release 18748

Next up, the nvida driver and hopefully wireless networking...

I have mentioned K3b previously and as a rule try to learn command line tools if possible, however a GUI for burning dvd's makes sense as I can drag and drop (meaning decide what to burn as I go) and juggle the remaining space on the disc easily with the indicator bar.

I suppose the job of ripping a cd/dvd or burning an iso is better suited to the command line but for filling a dvd with directory's you want to backup the GUI seems the way to go. One thing I like is K3b (and its associated back-ends) takes up hardly any CPU resources so I can keep working on other things while it burns the disc. Also the little status window pictured above is sticky on all desktops so I can keep an eye on its progress. One big drawback however is this trumpet noise it makes when it's done! OMG annoying, and it scared the crap out of me the first time I heard it.

I've also discovered with Ripmake that I can easily rip any dvd to an avi file which is "good enough" for me.

Happy Birthday Menotume!

I once again was given some new hardware from my friend Debbie (who is amazing!). This time, an LG GSA-H10A DVD RW, and an LG 1GB usb thumb drive.

So my main goal is to burn data to dvd's for backups. To be able to rent a movie and copy it copy the movies that I own would be a lovely bonus :-) but not something I really need. I took the stuff home, shut down my backup desktop and installed the new drive and rebooted. It didn't show up under lspci but then I am not sure if it was supposed to. However dmesg was more rewarding..

armarda:/home/orchid#  dmesg | grep -i dvd
hdc: HL-DT-ST DVDRAM GSA-H10A, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive
hdc: ATAPI 48X DVD-ROM DVD-R-RAM CD-R/RW drive, 2048kB Cache

Next I tried the command eject /dev/dvdrw and the drawer slid open making me smile ear to ear. I then realized I had no clue how to actually burn data to a dvd disc so I hit Google, and on the first page found Behdad's blog which I actually read via Planet Gnome so I knew who he was...anyway, following those directions I inserted my first dvd disc and it is happily burning away as I type this!

I watched Littlefish last night and was really impressed. This is an Australian movie with a very good cast and an excellent, if not troubled plot centering around heroin addiction and recovery. (here's a little clip made with avisplit, part of transcode) Cate Blanchett played probably the best role I have seen her in and it bugs me a little that she never gets the attention that say someone like Charlize Theron gets for instance. Anyway, if you like drama, rent this one.

It occurred to me this morning that I type cd ../../ or cd ../../../ quite a lot and decided to try some alias's for this.

alias 1='cd ../'
alias 2='cd ../../'
alias 3='cd ../../../'

I can't think of ever needing to type 1, 2 or 3 for anything else and see no real danger in this so I will give it a try for a while.

This site has a great collection of Cajun Music. I especially like Eddie LeJeune's Johnny can't dance.
If you want them all(221 files, 547MB): wget -r -l2 --no-parent -A.mp3 http://npmusic.org/

It turns out some of the screenshots from "24" are definitely Gnome and one is even KDE 1. So it seems Jack Bauer needs to do an apt-get dist-upgrade.

My roommate and I recently started watching the show 24 It's not too bad as far as TV goes but sometimes a little far fetched, however because each show represents one our in a day, if you see one show, you kind of get hooked and need to see what happens next.

24 is similar to CSI and countless movies in that they have these super duper computers that can connect to any computer in the world and exchange data in literally seconds.

I found myself taking interest more and more in the desktops the Counter Terrorist Unit uses at work, they looked a bit linuxy to me.


I definitely saw some files owned by root, and what looked like a desktop pager with an almost KDE-like panel, also some of the window decorations look similar to some gnome themes, perhaps Crux or something close to that. I got to wondering for a big show like that do they actually hack up an existing desktop? The shots of the computers looked too fluid and too much like a working desktop to be videos of photoshop hacks, there was streaming data in these windows and so on, anyway it got to the point where I obsessed about the desktops and kept pausing the show until my roommate got mad at me :-)