Shallow Thoughts : : 2005
Akkana's Musings on Open Source Computing and Technology, Science, and Nature.
Tue, 13 Dec 2005
I spent an entertaining morning reading the thread on
Gnome-usability that Linus Torvalds started with his posting beginning,
"I
personally just encourage people to switch to KDE."
The whole thread is interesting reading for anyone who's been
frustrated with the lack of usability and missing features in
recent Gnome user interface redesigns.
Linus continues:
This "users are idiots, and are confused by functionality" mentality of
Gnome is a disease. If you think your users are idiots, only idiots will
use it. I don't use Gnome, because in striving to be simple, it has long
since reached the point where it simply doesn't do what I need it to do.
Naturally, various Gnome people speak up to defend Gnome.
Linus clarifies his position in a
followup posting:
No. I've talked to people, and often your "fixes" are actually removing
capabilities that you had, because they were "too confusing to the
user".
That's _not_ like any other open source project I know about. Gnome seems
to be developed by interface nazis, where consistently the excuse for not
doign something is not "it's too complicated to do", but "it would confuse
users".
He gives several examples of functionality the Gnome team has removed
which every competing project still allows, such as binding
mouse buttons to functions in the window manager, and
typing a filename in the file selection dialog.
A few messages later, Jeff
Waugh defends the file selection dialog, calling it "top stuff".
Carl
Worth responds to that with a nice summary of long-standing and
long-ignored bugs on file selection dialog usability. Several
other posters follow up with additional issues not yet fixed.
Somewhere along the line, the spectre of Mac OS is raised (of course).
Michael Bernstein posts the obligatory "I
gave my mom Mac OS X and she loved it" message, adding the
novel but unlikely suggestion that the cure for Linux usability issues
is to draft non Linux programmers to develop the UI.
(No one points out in the Mac OS subthread that Mac OS X itself includes
quite a few of the options which have been dropped by the Gnome
usability team, such as readline key bindings in every text field, or
a typable text field in the file selection dialog, yet no one seems to
be complaining about OS X's lack of usability.)
The thread eventually peters out without a conclusion. It's fairly
clear that neither side is convinced by the other. Gnome has chosen
their path, and "dumbing down" the UI and removing features needed by
users such as Linus is part of that choice. Too bad for the users,
though: especially users for whom switching entirely to KDE/Qt apps is
not a viable choice.
Tags: linux, gnome
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18:40 Dec 13, 2005
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Tue, 22 Nov 2005
It's Mars season (Mars was at opposition at the beginning of
November, so Mars is relatively close this month and it's a
good time to observe it) and I've been making pencil sketches
of my observations.
Of course, that also means firing up the scanner
in order to put the sketches on a web page.
Last weekend I scanned the early sketches.
It was the first time in quite a while that I'd used the scanner
(which seldom gets used except for sketches), and probably only the
second time since I switched to Ubuntu. I was unreasonably pleased
when I plugged it in, went to GIMP's Acquire menu, and was able to
pull up xsane with no extra fiddling. (Hooray for Ubuntu!
Using Debian for a while gives you perspective, so you can get
great joy over little things like "I needed to use my scanner
and it still works! I needed to make a printout and printing hasn't
broken recently!")
Anyway, xsane worked fine, but the scans all came out
looking garish -- bright and washed out, losing most of the detail
in the shading. I know the scanner is capable of handling sketches
(it's a fairly good scanner, an Epson Perfection 2400 Photo) but
nothing I did with the brightness, contrast, and gamma adjustments
got the detail back.
The adjustment I needed turned out to live in the "Standard Options"
window in xsane: a Brightness slider which apparently
controls the brightness of the light (it's different from the
brightness adjustment in the main xsane scanning window).
Setting this to -2 gave me beautiful scans, and I was able to
update my 2005
Mars sketch page.
Tags: tech
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14:13 Nov 22, 2005
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Fri, 18 Nov 2005
I found myself in a situation where a package was mostly installed,
but it was missing some files, notably the startup file in
/etc/init.d/
packagename. No problem, right? Just reinstall
the package.
Well, no. dpkg -i packagename spun and looked busy for a
while, but the missing file didn't appear. Removing the package first
with dpkg -r packagename, then reinstalling, didn't help either,
nor did dpkg -i --force-newconfig packagename.
(I didn't try dpkg -r --purge packagename because I already
had invested some time into setting up the files in the package
and was hoping to avoid losing that work.)
Of course, I could have extracted the .deb somewhere else and pulled
the single init.d file out of it; but I was worried that I might be
missing other files, and end up with a flaky package.
Well, as far as I can tell, there really isn't any way to do this
"right" in Debian: there's no way to tell dpkg "Really install this
package, every file in it, even if you think maybe some of the files
already got installed before", or "Install any file in this package
which doesn't currently exist on disk." It's amazing (I'm pretty
sure RPM offered both of these options) but apparently this isn't
something dpkg allows.
I found a way to trick it, though:
rm /var/lib/dpkg/info/packagename.*
dpkg -i packagename
You get a lovely warning that
dpkg: serious warning: files list file for package `packagename'
missing, assuming package has no files currently installed.
and then dpkg finally goes ahead and reinstalls all the files.
Whew!
Update: Aha! It is possible after all. dpkg i --force-confmiss is
the option I wasn't seeing. Thanks, Yosh!
Tags: linux, debian
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19:01 Nov 18, 2005
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Wed, 16 Nov 2005
I've been meaning to write up my impression of a few MP3 players
I've tried, since although the web is full of MP3 player reviews,
hardly any of them give you any idea of how the beast actually
works when playing music -- does it remember its position
in a song? Does it stay in random mode, and how hard is it to
get into that mode? Can you fast forward? All those details that
are critical in day to day use, but which are impossible to tell
from the packaging or, sadly, from most reviews.
The review came out rather long, so instead of making it a
blog entry I've put it on its own MP3 Player Review page.
Tags: tech
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18:48 Nov 16, 2005
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Mon, 07 Nov 2005
Update: Some of this has changed; see my newer entry,
Update
on writing udev rules for flash card readers.
Dave had one of those nifty front-panel multiple flash card readers
sitting on a shelf, so I borrowed it. It's USB based, fits in a
CD drive bay, and has slots for all the common types of flash memory,
as well as a generic USB socket.
With the device installed, I booted into my usual Ubuntu (hoary)
partition, inserted an SD card and checked dmesg.
Nothing! The four logical units of the device had been seen at boot
time, but nothing new happened when I inserted a card.
I tried mounting /dev/sda1, /dev/sdb1, /dev/sdc1, /dev/sdd1, and
/dev/sde1 anyway, but got "No such device" each time.
Dave muttered darkly about udev and hal and said I should try
it under an older Debian with a normal /dev.
I rebooted my old sid partition, with a kernel I built myself.
I needed a kernel with "Probe all LUNs on each SCSI device", of course.
I still got no messages or hotplug events when inserting the card,
but /dev/sdd1 mounted the SD card.
(For anyone reading this who's not familiar with Linux' handling
of USB storage devices, sd in /dev/sdd1 stands for "SCSI disk" and has
nothing to do with the fact that I was using a "secure digital" media card.
Any USB disk or flash card is supposed to show up under
/dev/sdsomething and the main trick is figuring out the
something. Which is part of what udev and hal are supposed
to help with.)
Then I discovered
that doing an fdisk -l /dev/hdd gave the right answer (one
partition) for the SD card. And as soon as I did that, the /dev/sdd1
device appeared and I was able to mount it normally.
Apparently, when udev sees the logical units at boot time,
with no cards inserted, it decides that there's a /dev/sdd, but it has
no partitions on it so there's no such device as /dev/sdd1. Since
inserting a card later doesn't generate a hotplug event, udev never
re-evaluates this, unless somehow forced to (apparently running fdisk
forces it, though I'm not sure why). Dave was right: udev/hal are the
culprit here, and the kernel was fine.
A helpful person on #ubuntu pointed me to this
tutorial
on writing rules for udev. It mentions the problem with multi USB
card readers not getting additional events when cards are plugged in,
and suggests modifying the NAME key in the rules (which seem
to be in /etc/udev/rules.d/udev.rules to:
BUS="usb", SYSFS{product}="USB 2.0 Storage Device", NAME{all_partitions}="usbhd"
Elsewhere in the document, it suggests getting that SYSFS{product}
string by running a command like
udevinfo -a -p /sys/block/sdd
Unfortunately, that seems to be completely ignored. udevinfo told me
the string was "CardReader SD ", but plugging that in to
udev.rules did not create any /dev/usbhd* devices.
It also seemed clear that udev is using BUS="scsi" rather than
BUS="usb" for these devices, based on the device names that are
being created (sd* rather than ub*). But making that change didn't
help.
Eventually I found a combination that worked. Ubuntu's current rules
for usb-storage devices are:
BUS="scsi", KERNEL="sd[a-z]*", PROGRAM="/etc/udev/scripts/removable.sh %k", RESULT="1", NAME="%k", MODE="0640", GROUP="plugdev"
BUS="usb", KERNEL="ub[a-z]*", NAME="%k", MODE="0640", GROUP="plugdev"
(I don't know what devices create the ub* devices. It's nothing I've
used so far).
I changed the "sd[a-z]*" to "sd[e-z]*", so that it
wouldn't apply to the four devices grabbed by the multicard reader.
Then I added these four lines:
BUS="scsi", KERNEL="sda*", PROGRAM="/etc/udev/scripts/removable.sh %k", RESULT="1", NAME{all_partitions}="cfcard", MODE="0640", GROUP="plugdev"
BUS="scsi", KERNEL="sdb*", PROGRAM="/etc/udev/scripts/removable.sh %k", RESULT="1", NAME{all_partitions}="smcard", MODE="0640", GROUP="plugdev"
BUS="scsi", KERNEL="sdc*", PROGRAM="/etc/udev/scripts/removable.sh %k", RESULT="1", NAME{all_partitions}="mscard", MODE="0640", GROUP="plugdev"
BUS="scsi", KERNEL="sdd*", PROGRAM="/etc/udev/scripts/removable.sh %k", RESULT="1", NAME{all_partitions}="sdcard", MODE="0640", GROUP="plugdev"
That worked. Now udev creates /dev/sdcard[1-15] as well as
/dev/sdcard (and likewise for the other three flash types),
and I can make a normal /etc/fstab entry:
/dev/sdcard1 /sd auto rw,user,noauto 0 0
Now as a user I can say mount /sd without needing to su to root
or do any extra fiddling. Hurrah!
Tags: linux, udev, hal
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Thu, 03 Nov 2005
I presented an astronomy program for a group of middle school girls --
and survived!
The American Association of University Women runs a program with some
of the local high schools to encourage girls to study science, math
and engineering. I've volunteered at the star party at their
"Tech Trek"
summer camp at Stanford quite a few times; the girls at the camp are
always energetic, smart and enthusiastic.
Last summer I asked the camp organizers whether they did any programs
during the school year. Before I knew it, I was (gulp) signed up to
run one!
AAUW's format: the girls rotate among four different "stations",
spending about fifteen minutes at each station. That
wasn't long enough to do any real problem solving or teach them
any mathematical techniques, so I had to stick to fairly simple
concepts while trying to give them a taste of several different
aspects of astronomy.
Then the school played a dirty trick on us, and told us when we
showed up at dawn-thirty that most of the girls were having an
important test (having something to do with state standards)
that day and so we'd only get ten girls instead of 25.
What, do they not plan the standards tests any earlier than
the day they give them? It seemed rather rude of the school
to spring this on a group of volunteers who have to show up
early in the morning for a program that's been planned for months.
The stations:
Telescopes: I showed them several different types of telescopes,
and explain the difference between reflectors and refractors and what
each is good for. My little Coulter CT-100 came in
handy since it's so open that it's easy to see the arrangement of
the mirrors. For the refractor, I used an 80mm f/7 because it's easy
to transport and set up (though something on an equatorial mount
would have been nice). Then I had my cheapie homebuilt 6-inch f/4
Dobsonian so that they could play with a dob mount and see how it
was built (and to show that telescopes don't have to be expensive).
I had hoped to show the sun through the 80f7, but the sky didn't
cooperate (no big surprise, in November). I also had a collection
of eyepieces and binocular parts for them to disassemble and play
with. Some girls were a lot more willing to play with things than
others; several didn't seem to want to look or touch until
specifically instructed "Stand there, look there, push there".
Mars: With Mars just past closest approach, of course there
had to be a Mars station. I had them make Mars icosohedron
globes and brought a selection of "Mars rocks" (mostly red
oxidized basalt). They liked learning that Mars is red because it's
rusty, but some of them had trouble assembling the icosohedrons.
Moon: A 100W light bulb and some ping-pong balls created a
model of why the moon goes through phases, and what the difference is
between phases and an eclipse. (I think the adult AAUW helpers may
have learned as much from this exercise as the girls.) Moon maps and
displays and "moon rocks" (basalt) rounded out the station.
Spectra and the Doppler Shift:
A few weeks ago I made a "Doppler ball" to illustrate the Doppler
effect with sound. Split a whiffle ball in half (the hard part here
is finding one: toy stores and Target only sell them in quantity, but
I found a 2-pack at a dollar store). Then install a buzzer (from Radio
Shack) and a 9-volt battery inside the ball (and a switch, plug, or
some other way to turn it on). Tie a string to the ball and whirl it
around your head, or have people toss it back and forth, and listen
to the frequency change according to whether the ball is coming or
going. It's very effective!
In addition, we had diffraction gratings (from Edmund Scientific;
there doesn't seem to be any place in the bay area where you can
just walk in and buy consumer-quality diffraction gratings) and prisms,
and incandescent lamp and fluorescent (mercury vapor) lamps to show
the difference between a line spectrum and a continuous one.
One of the other women got the idea to burn calcium citrate tablets
to show a calcium line, but I didn't get a chance to see how that
worked. Another woman brought a wonderful bell: she's in a
bell-ringing choir, and showed how you can demonstrate the Doppler
effect and also, by immersing a low-frequency bell in water,
illustrate sine waves very effectively. Cool stuff!
(I had tried out the Doppler ball and the gratings on my Toastmasters
group a few weeks earlier, and it worked well there too. The ball
swinging, one spectrum, and some discussion of why spectra are
important and what they can tell us about the universe, all just
barely fit in a seven-minute speech.)
Overall the day went well, considering that we started late and
had a much smaller group than we expected. The smaller group meant
that we got more chance to talk and explain things and encourage them
to play around. The evaluations were all fairly positive, there
weren't any stations that seemed unpopular or just didn't work,
and lots of them said they liked all the activities. (I was too busy
running the telescope station to get a chance to peek in on any
of the others, alas.)
I'd like to get a chance to lead a group of girls in a project with
more depth, where they actually have to solve a problem, build
something, or calculate something. That would require a few hours
rather than fifteen minutes. But the "several small stations" approach
is great for someone inexperienced in leading school programs, like
me, or when you're not familiar with the girls and their interests and
capabilities. It wasn't nearly as scary as I thought it would be,
and was fun for all concerned.
Tags: education
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Fri, 28 Oct 2005
A very strange article in today's SF Chronicle describes
"Mysterious,
bright lights in the night sky Wednesday that alarmed or bemused
scores of Bay area residents".
It atributes to Andrew Fraknoi, chairman of the Foothill College astronomy
department and media hound (it doesn't say that second part),
information that "the lights were probably Mars and Venus, two
planets that currently appear close together and will probably
remain brilliant for another week or two until their orbits begin
moving them away from the Earth again."
Aside from the "probably" (I was under the impression that the
basic orbits of the major planets were fairly well understood,
and that it's fairly rare that a planet suddenly deviates from its
regular orbit in a visible way), I found this curious because Venus
is currently in the early evening sky -- since its orbit lies inside
that of the Earth, it can never appear to move very far from the Sun
-- while Mars, a week before opposition, is rising in the early
evening and overhead at roughly midnight.
Just to be sure, I checked with XEphem. The angular distance between
Mars and Venus is current 146°. They're almost at opposite ends
of the sky. This is a definition of "close" with which I was
previously unfamiliar.
I don't know if Fraknoi really said this, or if he was simply
misquoted by the reporter, David Perlman, the Chronicle's
Science Editor. If so, the misquote is quite pervasive -- he repeats
several times throughout the article Fraknoi's assurance that the
lights (shown in a photograph accompanying the article, indeed close
together though we aren't told anything about the lens used to take
the photo) must be Venus and Mars.
Other giggle-inducing quotes from the article:
No one except astronomers could offer an explanation.
Well, gosh, you certainly wouldn't want to listen to those egghead
astronomers about a question involving lights in the sky.
(Well, okay, in this case you shouldn't listen to them,
because the Mars/Venus explanation obviously doesn't fit the
observations.)
According to Fraknoi, Mars now far outshines even the brightest of
all the stars in the sky, and when skies are clear, the fourth
planet from the sun could look even bigger than normal.
Mars at opposition is certainly brighter than any star (except the Sun,
of course). It currently shines with a magnitude of about -2.2
(a smaller number means a brighter object; the brightest star,
Sirius, is magnitude -1.4. Venus, at the moment, is much brighter
than either one at -4.2, as is usual since it's larger, closer,
and more reflective than Mars. That might have been worth mentioning.
I can't figure out whether "even bigger than normal" is supposed
to refer to size or brightness. Mars is normally a tiny object as
viewed from Earth, too small to see much detail except for a few
months around opposition every couple of years. Indeed it is much
bigger than normal right now (and a lovely sight in a telescope!),
as well as brighter; but "even bigger" seems like an odd phrasing
for something normally so small.
But since Mars' size isn't visible except in a telescope, Dave
thinks "bigger" here was meant to refer to brightness: the
misconception that brighter objects look bigger. I shouldn't make
fun of this: the great astronomer Tycho Brahe, in the 1500's, was
convinced that stars had angular size instead of being point
sources. He thought brighter stars appeared bigger, and
based his geocentric solar system model on that.
That view wasn't disproved until Galileo invented the telescope.
It's a common misconception even today, but
I'd hate to think the Chronicle's science editor was encouraging
it, so I'll stick to the assumption that he really meant size
and that the "even" was just an odd journalistic embellishment.
So what were the mysterious lights? I don't know. I didn't see them,
and the article doesn't give enough detail to make a good guess.
But the photo looks a lot like airplanes or helicopters; at least
one of the lights has a couple of smaller lights to either side,
usually a dead giveaway for an aircraft.
Update the following day: I wasn't the only one to complain about
this article, and the Chron published a paragraph in the Corrections
section this morning clarifying that Venus is nowhere near Mars and could
not have been related to the lights people reported.
Tags: headlines
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11:57 Oct 28, 2005
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Fri, 14 Oct 2005
Wacky
Chinese orbital physics are in the BBC again. Today's story
tells us how they've corrected
yesterday's
orbital problems. Quoting from China's "official Xinhua news
agency", the BBC tells us:
Xinhua said the craft had deviated from its planned trajectory
because of the Earth's gravitational pull.
I can hear them now ...
"Darn it! I guess we forgot to take the earth's gravity into account
when making our orbital calculations!"
Tags: headlines
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21:40 Oct 14, 2005
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Thu, 13 Oct 2005
BBC News Science tells us about the
orbital
problems of China's manned Shenzhou VI spacecraft.
Gravity has drawn Shenzhou VI too close to earth, the agency said.
Shenzhou VI, which has two astronauts on board, is in a low enough
orbit to be affected by the Earth's gravitational pull.
Don't you hate those low orbits that are affected by gravity?
Maybe next time they should choose an orbit high enough that it
isn't subject to gravity.
Tags: headlines
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20:39 Oct 13, 2005
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Wed, 12 Oct 2005
The mockingbird is singing. He's been doing that for three weeks
now. What's he doing bursting into song all of a sudden in late
September and keeping it up for weeks?
All over, animals in the parks are restless. Squirrels are madly
digging up nuts from one place, carrying them to another and
re-burying them. Chipmunks have appeared,
chipping from the bushes as we walk by. I normally don't see chipmunks
in the local parks, just ground and tree squirrels. Are they always
here, but usually quiet so we don't see them? Or did they migrate in
for the season?
An unusual species of large yellow-billed blue bird appeared on the
wire above the house. How odd! What's blue, jay sized but has a big
bulky yellow bill?
Binoculars provided the answer. A scrub jay with an acorn in
its bill! Since then I've seen quite a few yellow-billed Stellar's
jays in the local parks as well.
The central area of Alum Rock is filled with a large family of acorn
woodpeckers drilling holes in trees, posts, and the walls of the Youth
Science Institute building to store their acorns for the winter. The
YSI building looks like swiss cheese. A few days after I saw the
woodpeckers at work, we went back and the buildings had all sprouted
dangling silvery tinsel from all eaves. It seems to be keeping the
woodpeckers away. Bad for me (they're cute), good for the YSI.
I saw a couple of nuthatches at Arastradero. A first for me. I don't
know if they're migrants, or if they're always there and I've just
never noticed before. Arastradero was also thick with white-tailed
kites. There are always a few testing the slope currents there, but
this time I saw at least four different pairs, maybe more, each with
their own territory staked out. Somehow even with that many kites they
all managed to stay too far away for me to get a good picture.
The reason for all the time spent at Alum Rock and Arastradero is that
we're on the hunt for tarantulas. Every fall, just as the weather
starts to get cold, the male tarantulas come out of their burrows and
go marching across the trails looking for females. (Maybe the females
are marching too. I'm not clear on that.) They're only out for a short
time -- maybe a week -- and they're easy to miss. Last year we missed
them altogether (but then we lucked out and spotted one
later that month while travelling in Arizona).
Anyway, we've had no tarantula luck yet this year.
Henry Coe state park had its annual Tarantula Festival already, a week
and a half ago. But they always seem to have the festival while the
weather's still hot, long before tarantulas show up in any other
parks. Maybe Coe tarantulas are a different species which comes out
earlier than the others. At any rate, we've seen no sign of them at
Alum Rock or Arastradero so far this year.
But back to that singing mockingbird. He doesn't seem to be
the same mocker who set up house here this spring and raised three
nests of chicks. That one had a very distinctive call note which I
haven't heard at all this fall.
But what's he doing singing in autumn? Is he singing as he packs his
bags to fly to LA or Mexico? Or confused about the weather?
Someone asked that on a local birding list, after noticing thrashers
(closely related to mockingbirds) suddenly finding the muse.
I reproduce here the edifying and entertaining answer.
(Googling, it appears to have been a folk song, though I can't
find a home page for the author or anything about the music.)
The Autumnal Recrudescence of the Amatory Urge
When the birds are cacaphonic in the trees and on the verge
Of the fields in mid-October when the cold is like a scourge.
It is not delight in winter that makes feathered voices surge,
But autumnal recrudescence of the amatory urge.
When the frost is on the punkin and when leaf and branch diverge,
Birds with hormones reawakened sing a paean, not a dirge.
What's the reason for their warbling? Why on earth this late-year splurge?
The autumnal recrudescence of the amatory urge.
---
Written by Susan Stiles, copyright December 1973
Tags: nature
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23:54 Oct 12, 2005
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Mon, 10 Oct 2005
Ever want to look for something in your browser cache, but when you
go there, it's just a mass of oddly named files and you can't figure
out how to find anything?
(Sure, for whole pages you can use the History window, but what if
you just want to find an image you saw this morning
that isn't there any more?)
Here's a handy trick.
First, change directory to your cache directory (e.g.
$HOME/.mozilla/firefox/blahblah/Cache).
Next, list the files of the type you're looking for, in the order in
which they were last modified, and save that list to a file. Like this:
% file `ls -1t` | grep JPEG | sed 's/: .*//' > /tmp/foo
In English:
ls -t lists in order of modification date, and -1 ensures
that the files will be listed one per line. Pass that through
grep for the right pattern (do a file * to see what sorts of
patterns get spit out), then pass that through sed to get rid of
everything but the filename. Save the result to a temporary file.
The temp file now contains the list of cache files of the type you
want, ordered with the most recent first. You can now search through
them to find what you want. For example, I viewed them with Pho:
pho `cat /tmp/foo`
For images, use whatever image viewer you normally use; if you're
looking for text, you can use grep or whatever search you lke.
Alternately, you could
ls -lt `cat foo` to see what was
modified when and cut down your search a bit further, or any
other additional paring you need.
Of course, you don't have to use the temp file at all. I could
have said simply:
pho `ls -1t` | grep JPEG | sed 's/: .*//'`
Making the temp file is merely for your convenience if you think you
might need to do several types of searches before you find what
you're looking for.
Tags: tech, web, mozilla, firefox, pipelines, CLI, shell, regexp
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Wed, 05 Oct 2005
I love the messages I keep getting from having attended LinuxWorld a
few months ago. They say:
Dear LinuxWorld Attendee:
That's it. That's all they say.
Well, unless you dig deeper. It turns out there's an html part, too,
which actually does have content (asking me to participate in a
survey). But I would never have seen that if I didn't know how
to read the MIME structure of email messages.
You see, the message is sent as
Content-Type: multipart/alternative, which means that there's
a text part and an html part which are supposed to be equivalent.
You can read either part and they should say the same thing.
Lots of modern mailers, including Mozilla, mutt, pine, probably
Opera, and even Apple Mail can now be configured to give preferences
to the text part of messages (so you don't have to squint your way
through messages written in yellow text on a pink background, or in
tiny 6-point text that's too small for your eyes, and so that you
can be assured of safety from web bugs and other snoopware which
can be embedded in html mail). Any mailer so configured would show this
message as blank, just as I'm seeing it in mutt.
It seems amazing that their web developers would go to the extra trouble
of setting up MIME headers for multipart/alternative content, then
not bother to put anything in the content. Why not just send as
plain html if you don't want to create a text part?
I'd let them know they're sending blank messages, but tracking
down a contact address seems like more trouble than it's worth.
The mail purports to come from LinuxWorldConference&Expo@idg.com;
the message references URLs from www.exhibitsurveys.com;
the actual message (as seen in the headers) came from
outboundmailexhibitsurvey.com. It's probably exhibitsurveys.com
generating the bad email messages, but it's hard to say for sure.
Suggestion for web developers: if you write code to send out mass
mailings, you might want to check the mail that's actually getting
sent out. If your program generates more than one MIME attachment,
it's a good idea to check all the attachments and make sure you're
sending what you think you are.
Look at the actual message structure, don't just glance at the
message in the mail program you happen to use.
The fact that a message displays in one mailer does not imply
that it will display correctly for all users
(especially for a survey aimed at Linux users,
who use a wide variety of mailers on many platforms and are
quite likely to set non-default options).
If you don't know MIME, find someone who does to sanity-check
your output ... or don't send multiple MIME attachments.
Tags: tech
[
12:30 Oct 05, 2005
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]
Tue, 04 Oct 2005
Mozilla Firefox's model has always been to dumb down the basic
app to keep it simple, and require everything else to be implemented as
separately-installed extensions.
There's a lot to be said for this model, but aside from security
(the need to download extensions of questionable parentage from unfamiliar
sites) there's another significant down side: every time you upgrade your
browser, all your extensions become disabled, and it may be months
before they're updated to support the new Firefox version (if indeed
they're ever updated).
When you need extensions for basic functionality, like controlling
cookies, or basic sanity, like blocking flash, the intervening
months of partial functionality can be painful, especially when
there's no reason for it (the plug-in API usually hasn't changed,
merely the version string).
It turns out it's very easy to tweak your installed plug-ins
to run under your current Firefox version.
- Locate your profile directory (e.g. $HOME/firefox/blah.blah
for Firefox on Linux).
- Edit profiledirectory/extensions/*/install.rdf
- Search for maxVersion.
- Update it to your current version (as shown in the
Tools->Extensions dialog).
- Restart the browser.
Disclaimer: Obviously, if the Firefox API really has changed
in a way that makes it incompatible with your installed extensions,
this won't be enough. Your extensions may fail to work, crash your
browser, delete all your files, or cause a massive meteorite to
strike the earth causing global extinction. Consider this a
temporary solution; do check periodically to see if there's a real
extension update available.
More
information on extension versioning (may be out of date).
Tags: tech, web, mozilla, firefox
[
19:47 Oct 04, 2005
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]
Fri, 30 Sep 2005
I just figured out a nifty emacs trick: how to set C styles
automatically based on the location of the file I'm editing. That
way, emacs will autoindent with the proper style whether I'm editing
my own code, GIMP code, Linux kernel code, etc. assuming that I keep
the source for these projects in predictable places.
First, define a derived mode for each style you might want to use.
Each minor mode inherits from c-mode, but adds a c-set-style
call. (Obviously, this assumes that the styles you want to use
are already defined.)
(define-derived-mode gnu-c-mode c-mode "GNU C mode"
(c-set-style "gnu"))
(define-derived-mode linux-c-mode c-mode "GNU C mode"
(c-set-style "linux"))
Then add entries to your auto-mode-alist for each directory
you want to treat specially:
(setq auto-mode-alist
[ . . . ]
(cons '("gimp.*/" . gnu-c-mode)
(cons '("linux-.*/" . linux-c-mode)
auto-mode-alist) ) )
Your normal default style will still work for any files not
matching the patterns specified in auto-mode-alist.
It might be possible to skip the step of defining derived modes
by switching on the file's pathname in the C mode hook,
but I've never figured out how to get the pathname of the
file being loaded in any reliable way.
Tags: programming
[
13:42 Sep 30, 2005
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]
Mon, 26 Sep 2005
I've long wondered why people like the "alternate screen" misfeature
which has become mandatory in so many Linux terminals. That's the
one where you want to find out the options to ls, so you do
man
ls, get to the option you were curious about, hit q to get out
of man so that you can run ls with the right option -- and the man
page disappears, clearing the screen so you can't see the
documentation you were just trying to read! What's up with that?
(Sigh ... just another addition to the list of clever innovations that
make Linux terminal programs harder to use than any other system's ...
like the page up key that doesn't actually page up.)
Anyway, a long time ago I worked out how to get around this
irritating misfeature (referred to as "rmcup" on newer terminfo
systems; the workaround on older termcap systems was called
"tite inhibit").
It's easy in xterm-based programs, but harder in more "modern"
terminal programs that don't make it configurable.
I guess I never got around to writing it up publically.
Tonight someone asked about it on Linuxchix Techtalk, so I
resurrected the old terminfo entry I wrote for use with
gnome-terminal (which I'm not actually using because rxvt
doesn't need it), and wrote up a sketchy page on it:
Exorcising the
Evil Alternate Screen.
Tags: linux, terminals
[
20:18 Sep 26, 2005
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]
Fri, 16 Sep 2005
On the
Linuxchix grrltalk
list, someone was bothered by the tone of Eric Raymond's
How to
Ask Questions the Smart Way. And certainly, the tone is a bit
brusque (like much of ESR's writing), though it's full of useful advice.
The discussion hinged around user demands such as "YOU SUCK! YOU
MUST FIX THIS NOW!" This is obviously rude, and just as obviously
has little chance of getting a positive reaction from developers.
The problem is that after twenty or so of these demands, even a
polite user coming in to ask for a feature may be snapped at.
I've seen developers get touchy after reading a slew of this sort of
bug reports, and snap at someone who wasn't being particularly rude.
Really, a lot of users have no idea how many of these rude,
demanding, "YOU SUCK -- FIX THIS IMMEDIATELY!" messages some
developers get. Try "watching" a category or developer in bugzilla
for some major project like Mozilla for a month to get an idea
of the volume of email that streams in. It's easy to get ten or more
of these in one day's morning mail before you've even finished your
coffee. Lots of developers just stop reading their bug mail after
a while. I hate that and think it's wrong, but I can understand
why they do it.
Sometimes problems that twenty users comment on, even if they're real
issues, are hard to fix, or the fix would conflict with some other
important aspect of the program.
"Hard to fix" or "Hard to find a way to fix the bug
without breaking another important feature" is not an adequate
solution when you're developing software professionally. But when
you're volunteering your own evenings, weekends and vacations to
contribute to open source software, and some user who probably spent
his evenings watching TV and last weekend skiing, who doesn't
seem to have spent any time contributing to the project beyond
filing a few bugs, shows up and demands that you drop the work
you're currently interested in and instead devote the next eight
weekends to fixing HIS feature ... well, after that happens a few
times it's easy to get a little touchy. When it happens day after
day, it's even easy to stop caring so much about user input in
general, and to (incorrectly) lump all users, not just the rude
ones, into this category.
I wish users, before making a request, would remind themselves that
developers are spending their spare time on the project, instead
of going skiing or watching TV or whatever -- and no, that's not
because developers are troglodyte geeks who have no other hobbies.
DO make suggestions, but remember when you do that you're probably
not talking to someone who's paid to maintain the program forty hours
a week. You're talking to someone who donated spare time to
create a program that you now find usable enough to care about.
No, rudeness doesn't solve anything. Developers being rude doesn't
improve this situation -- it won't make the users stop being rude,
it won't help the polite users, it won't even make the developers
feel better. But sometimes people get irritable when they're taken
for granted. Developers are only human. Whatever users might think.
Tags: tech
[
11:30 Sep 16, 2005
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]
Wed, 14 Sep 2005
It's walnut season. The neighborhood is full of crows, making
rattling calls, flying from place to place with walnuts in their
beaks, and dropping walnuts on roads to try to crack them.
It's always entertaining to watch the crows' antics.
Walnuts are hard to crack, even when you're a professional.
Meanwhile, the squirrels are going crazy. In addition to running
around carrying walnuts the size of their heads, burying, digging
up, and re-burying, we've also seen squirrels fighting with each
other, threatening each other, whirling around in trees for no
apparent reason, and perching on wires barking at invisible enemies
below.
I had assumed that they were barking at cats or other squirrels
in neighbors' yards, but this morning I saw a squirrel on the power
line above the driveway, barking and threatening and staring
intently at ... the empty driveway. If there was anything there,
it must have been the size of an ant.
Makes me wonder ... do walnuts ever ferment?
Am I seeing a neighborhood full of drunken squirrels?
Tags: nature, urban wildlife
[
12:16 Sep 14, 2005
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]
Sun, 11 Sep 2005
In the wake of the Hurricane Katrina devastation, one of FEMA's many
egregious mistakes is that their web site requires IE 6 in order for
victims to register for relief.
It's mostly academic. The Katrina victims who need help the
most didn't own computers, have net access, or, in many cases, even
know how to use the web. Even if they owned computers, those
computers are probably underwater and their ISP isn't up.
Nevertheless, some evacuees, staying with friends or relatives,
or using library or other public access computers, may need to
register for help using FEMA's web site.
It turns out that it's surprisingly difficult to google for the
answer to the seemingly simple question, "How do I make my browser
spoof IE6?" Here's the simple answer.
Opera: offers a menu to do this, and always has.
Mozilla or Firefox: the easiest way is to install the
User
Agent Switcher extension. Install it, restart the browser and
you get a user-agent switching menu which includes an IE6 option.
To change the user agent on Mozilla-based browsers without the
extension:
- type about:config into your urlbar
- Right-click in the window (on Mac I think that's
cmd-click to get a context menu?) and select New->String
- Use general.useragent.override for the preference name,
and Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1) for the value.
I think this takes effect immediately, no need to restart the
browser.
Safari (thanks to
Rick
Moen on svlug:
- Exit Safari. Open Terminal.
- Type defaults write com.apple.Safari IncludeDebugMenu
-boolean true
- Restart Safari.
Safari's menu bar will now include
Debug, which has an option
to change the user agent.
If you do change your user agent, please change it back after
you've finished whatever business required it. Otherwise, web site
administrators will think you're another IE user, and they they'll
use that as justification for making more ridiculous IE-only pages
like FEMA's. The more visits they see from non IE browsers, the more
they'll realize that not everyone uses IE.
Tags: tech, web
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13:35 Sep 11, 2005
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]
Mon, 29 Aug 2005
Sven, one of the GIMP developers, has been interested in setting up
a "paper prototyping" system for reorganizing the GIMP's menus
(see his
blog
post.
Since I've been involved with some of the ongoing menu
reorganization, we've talked about it a bit, and discussed some
tools that are being written to assist with online paper prototyping
(since the "get everybody together in a room with slips of paper"
model doesn't work for worldwide distributed projects).
But for some reason it never occurred to me until a couple days ago
that GIMP itself would make a fine paper prototyping tool.
The move tool lets you move the text layers into any configuration
you like, you can control colors and fonts, and you can save to your
choice of standard formats.
It didn't take long at all to whip up a script-fu to
enable paper prototyping, which I posted
to the gimp-developer list.
Nobody has actually used my script to comment on the menu reorganization
yet ... but what the heck, it was fun to write the script. Maybe
it'll be useful in other projects that need paper prototyping.
Tags: gimp
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17:43 Aug 29, 2005
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]
Thu, 25 Aug 2005
I was contacted months ago regarding a
photo
on my web site
asking whether it could be used along with an article on
molting patterns in Dowitchers in
Birding magazine.
Months went by (print magazines are slow) and I wondered if
the plan had been dropped, but last week I heard from the author,
Caleb Putnam, and the article is in the current (July/August) issue!
Yesterday I received a copy of the magazine and a modest payment.
Cool!
Even cooler, the photo is the frontispiece of the article.
The author says he's received many comments about how great a shot
it is for illustrating molt gaps. That's a pull quote if I ever
heard one: "Great shot for illustrating molt gaps."
The article is interesting as well -- I didn't know that molt patterns
could identify the two species of dowitcher. Telling long-billed and
short-billed dowitchers apart has been beyond my modest birding
skills, but perhaps I'll have better luck now. I'll be heading out
to Baylands today at lunch to see what the dowitchers are doing ...
Tags: photo
[
11:49 Aug 25, 2005
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]
Sun, 14 Aug 2005
I bet I'm not the only one who uses Ubuntu (Hoary Hedgehog) and didn't
realize that it doesn't automatically put the security sources in
/etc/apt/sources.list, so apt-get and aptitude don't pick up
any of the security updates without extra help.
After about a month with no security updates on any ubuntu machines
(during which time I know there were security alerts in Debian for
packages I use), I finally tracked down the answer.
It turns out that if you use synaptic, click on "Mark All Upgrades",
then click on Apply, synaptic will pull in security updates.
However, if you use the "Ubuntu Upgrade Manager" in the
System->Administration menu, or if you use commands
like apt-get -f dist-upgrade or aptitude -f dist-upgrade,
then the sources which synaptic wrote into sources.list are not
sufficient to get the security updates.
(Where synaptic keeps its extra sources, I still don't know.)
When I asked about this on #ubuntu, I was pointed to a page on
the Ubuntu wiki which walks you through selecting sources in synaptic.
Unfortunately, the screenshots on the wiki show lots of sources that
none of my Ubuntu machines show, and the wiki doesn't give you the
sources.list lines or tell you what to do if synaptic doesn't
automagically show the security sources.
The solution: to edit /etc/apt/sources.list and make sure the
following lines are there (which some of the people on the IRC channel
were kind enough to paste for me):
## All officially supported packages, including security- and other updates
deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu hoary main restricted
deb http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu hoary-security main restricted
deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu hoary-updates main restricted
In addition, if you use "universe" and "multiverse", you probably also
want these lines:
deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu hoary universe multiverse
deb http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu hoary-security universe multiverse
deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu hoary-updates universe multiverse
Tags: linux, ubuntu, security
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22:49 Aug 14, 2005
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]
Thu, 11 Aug 2005
There's really not much to say about Linuxworld this year. It was
smaller than last year (they moved it across the street to the
"little" Moscone hall) and the mood seemed a bit subdued.
SWAG was way down: to get anything remotely cool you generally had
to register to watch a presentation that gave you a chance to get
something to wear that would enter you for a chance to win something
cool later. Or similar indirections. You had to be pretty
desperate. But maybe people were, since I saw lines at some of the
booths.
I did my annual sweep of the big booths to see
who was running Linux on their show machines. This year was the first
time that all the major booths used predominately Linux (except on
machines running fullscreen presentation software, where it's
impossible to tell). It was a huge change from past shows --
I stopped keeping tabs after a while.
I saw only one or two confirmed Windows machines each
at most of the big booths, like Intel, AMD, IBM, Sun, and even HP.
They seemed fairly evenly divided between SuSE and Redhat.
At the AMD booth, lots of machines sported cardboard signs saying
"Powered by Redhat" or "Powered by SuSE". One of
the "Powered by Redhat" machines clearly had a Start menu,
so I had to ask. The AMD rep gave me a song and dance about
virtualization technologies, pointing out that although the machine
was running Windows, it displayed both Redhat and SuSE windows which
he said were running on the same machine. Okay, that's a perfectly
good reason to be running Windows at a Linux convention. No points off
there. I suspect most of the booths showing Windows had similar excuses.
"Virtualization is the wave of the future! Everybody here is
displaying virtualization technologies," the AMD rep told me.
Indeed, virtualization was everywhere. I don't know that I'm convinced
it's the wave of the future, but there was no question that it was the
wave of the present at this year's Linuxworld.
Sweeping the hall, I passed by the Adobe booth, where
someone was giving a presentation to an audience of maybe ten people.
The projector showed a window which showed ... nothing. A blank window
border with nothing inside.
"Now, it's connecting to San Jose", explained the presenter with
apparent pride, "to get permission to display the document."
I kept walking . It hadn't finished connecting yet by the time I
was out of earshot. Perhaps the audience was somehow persuaded by this
demo to buy Adobe software. I guess you never know what people will like.
A bit past Adobe was the weirdest booth of the exhibit hall:
SolovatSoft, offering offshore software development at rates starting
at $18/hour. Honest, this was an actual booth at Linuxworld. I should
have taken my camera.
Gone were most of the nifty embedded Linux displays of yesteryear. I saw
only two: one (Applieddata.net, I think) which I've seen there
before, showing an array of fun-looking custom embedded platforms of
all sizes, and another showing Linux on various cellphones and similar
consumer devices. Only one laptop maker (Emperor) made it there, and
none of the smaller-than-laptop manufacturers -- I was hoping Nokia,
Sharp, Psion or some other maker of nifty Linux PDAs might be there.
The "Dot Org Pavilion", the place where free software groups like
Debian, Mozilla, the FSF, and the EFF have their booths, was on a
completely separate floor, and would have been easy to miss if you
didn't look at the maps in the convention guide. But it wasn't all
bad: someone on a LUG mailing list pointed out that this put them in a
nice quiet area away from the raucous advertising of the big
commercial booths in the main hall, so you could actually have a
conversation with the booth folks. Also, the dot-orgs got a nice view
out the second-floor windows compared to the cavernous indoor
commercial hall.
I only went to one keynote, "The Explosive Growth of Linux and Open
Source: What Does It All Mean?" The description made it look like a
panel discussion, but it was really just five prepared speeches: three
suits repeating buzzwords (Dave and I amused ourselves counting the
uses of the word "exciting", and with Toastmasters reflexes I couldn't
help counting the "ah"s) and two more interesting talks (well, okay,
Eben Moglen was also wearing a suit but at least he didn't spend
his whole talk telling us about the exciting opportunities ahead for
company X).
I would have liked to have heard Mike Shaver's keynote on web
technologies, but it wasn't worth going back to San Francisco for a
second day just for that.
In the end, the real highlight of the day was hooking up with Sonja at
the Novell/SuSE booth for a nice lunch. Hooray for conferences that
give you an excuse to meet friends from far away! Catching up with
some of the Mozilla crowd was good, too. That made the trip worth it
even if the exhibit hall didn't offer much.
Tags: linux, conferences, linuxworld
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22:25 Aug 11, 2005
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]
Fri, 05 Aug 2005
Both the mourning doves and the mockingbirds snuck in in a third
round of nesting this year.
Rather than make lots of little entries, I kept the timeline all
in one (long) file. If nothing else, it's easy to skip for anyone who
doesn't like "bird columns" (taking a cue from Jon Carroll and his
"cat columns").
Jun 24:
There's a little drama going on on the roof of the house across from
the office window. a pair of doves showing extreme interest
in the rain gutters at the corner of the porch and above it at the
corner of the house (flanking the tree where they raised their chicks
last month). She (I assume) will fly to the porch gutter, snuggle down
in the gutter for five or ten seconds, then appear dissatisfied and fly
over to the other gutter, do the same there, fly to the ground, fly up
to the roof, coo for a while, then repeat the process. Meanwhile her
mate flies from the roof to the ground to the power line, cooing
the whole time.
At one point, one of the dovelets flew to the roof just above the
gutter and started pecking for gravel, and mom chased him away
furiously. No more parenting for you! Get your own place! Get a job,
why don't you? And cut your hair!
The scaly dovelet still looks scaly. I wonder why? The other chick
looks like a miniature adult.
Unfortunately we had to disturb the little episode because the porch
gutter the dove kept landing on had come loose. Dave went out with a
hammer and hammered it back into place, but I guess that spooked the
doves. Which may be just as well -- an exposed rain gutter really
doesn't seem like a good place for a nest, especially since the
youngsters seem to avoid sun, fun though it might be to have the
nest right out in plain view of the window.
Jun 25:
The doves seem to have been scared off by the hammering of the rain
gutter, and are looking elsewhere for a nesting site.
There's lots of ooohaaahing going on while they're up on the power
lines, and once I saw the male trying to mate (the female flew away).
Haven't seen the dovelets since mom chased one off the roof.
Jun 28:
The doves are back, cooing and nestling in the gutter. Looks like she
really likes that site.
Jun 29:
She's given up on the roof and gutter and has decided to nest in the
old nest site in the guava tree.
July 2:
One dove now stays in the nest at all times
-- I suspect there's an egg there -- while her mate furiously brings
her sticks one after another. When he's not bringing sticks for the
nest, he's up on the wires singing
Oooaah, oooh oooh oooh!
July 3
Turns out there's a mockingbird nest in the pyrocanthus just outside
the kitchen window. We can see it from the sink. The mocker hardly
spends any time there, though. The dove is still sitting patiently in
the nest.
July 5
Dave cleaned the outside of the kitchen window so we could get a
better view of the nest. Haven't seen the mocker since; we may have
scared her off.
July 7
The mocker wasn't scared off after all. I saw her perched on the edge
of the nest, poking into the nest. I couldn't tell if she was
rearranging eggs or feeding chicks. No chick noises, though.
The dove still sitting. Of course, it's impossible to tell when dove
chicks hatch since they are silent and motionless until nearly ready
to fledge.
July 10
Mocker perched on the edge of the nest again, but this time we saw the
chicks. She hunted about four bugs for them in quick succession, then
disappeared. Amazing how little time the mocker spends in this nest
compared to the dove, who's always there.
July 12
One mockingbird chick tentatively seen on the edge of the nest.
July 13
The mockingbird chicks have fledged. I say "chicks" but I've actually
only seen one, hopping around the upper branches of the pyrocantha. It
doesn't seem to be able to fly yet, and still looks very fuzzy and
short-tailed.
And the dove-mom, never flitting,
Still is sitting, still is sitting ...
July 14
Drama outside the bedroom window this morning. Apparently there was a
chick down in the neighbor's back yard, and I was awakened by
squawking as both mockingbird parents buzzed something in the yard
just on the other side of the fence.
This went on for about an hour, with breaks for a few minutes every so
often. Then the harrassment abruptly stopped. I don't know whether
whatever it is they were attacking (a cat? I didn't hear any barking,
so I think the dogs were away) went away, or got the chick. But it's
possible the chick may still be okay. A little while later I heard
some tentative singing, and about an hour later there was a little bit
of squawking aimed at a different part of the neighbor's back yard.
My hope is that the chick is slowly making its way out of the yard.
July 17
I haven't seen any more sign of mockingbird chicks, but I heard
outside the living room window something that sounded remarkably
like a mocker chick and an adult talking to it. So I think at least
one chick survived.
The dove, incredibly, is still sitting on the nest. It's possible that
there are chicks in there too, but I haven't been able to spot any.
July 25
Incredibly, I think there are actually dovelets in the nest.
I had pretty much decided that it must be time for the dove to give up
sitting and go get a life, but I'm seeing vague signs of movement in
the nest, and slightly different behavior from the sitting dove.
Doves sure are patient.
July 26
Tonight when we got home from dinner, we were greeted at the gate by a
baby bird hopping around on the driveway. In the dim light it was hard
to tell what it was, but probably a sparrow or house finch -- too
small for a mockingbird fledgeling.
And fledgeling it was: after regarding us for a short time it flitted
unsteadily into the top of a nearby bush, which seemed to us like a
much better place for a birdlet to spend the night than the
driveway!
There are indeed dovelets in the nest. Looks like two again, though
it's hard to see them clearly. The parents look tired; one of them
spent part of the afternoon sitting on the deck, out in the open, and
didn't move when we walked by. (It wasn't hurt, though; I kept an eye
on it through the office window in case I needed to shoo away cats,
and it eventually flew weakly up to join its mate in the guava tree.)
July 31
The dovelets are sitting up in the nest and looking very
alert. Probably only a few more days left to fledging.
The parents are no longer sitting with them, and are up cooing
on the wire.
August 2
No dovelets in the nest! I found them in the corner of the yard, the
same corner that the previous pair liked so much. They stayed there
all morning.
Like the previous pair, there's one that looks like a miniature
mourning dove, and a second with a scaly pattern.
But in early afternoon, they were gone. A whiff of cat poo in the air
suggested doom.
August 3
There was one dovelet in the corner of the yard this morning. I
haven't seen the other, but at least one (the scaly one) survived.
August 5
Haven't seen any dovelets since the morning of the 3rd.
Tags: nature, birds, urban wildlife
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23:15 Aug 05, 2005
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]
Mon, 01 Aug 2005
Another in the series of "I keep forgetting how to do this and
have to figure it out again each time, so this time I'm going to
write it down!"
Enabling remote X in a distro that disables it by default:
Of course, you need xhost. For testing, xhost +
enables access from any machine; once everything is working, you
may want to be selective, xhost hostname for the hosts from
which you're likely to want to connect.
If you log in to the console and start X, check
/etc/X11/xinit/xserverrc and see if it starts X with the
-nolisten flag. This is usually the problem, at least on
Debian derivatives: remove the -nolisten tcp.
If you log in using gdm, gdmconfig has an option in the
Security tab: "Always disallow TCP connections to X server
(disables all remote connections)". Un-checking this solves the
problem, but logging out won't be enough to see the change.
You must restart X; Ctrl-Alt-Backspace will do that.
Update: If you use kdm, the configuration to change is in
/etc/kde3/kdm/kdmrc
Tags: linux, X11, networking
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13:52 Aug 01, 2005
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]
Sat, 30 Jul 2005
I got a new, large, and most important,
quiet disk for my
laptop.
The first Linux distro I installed on it was Ubuntu. Since quiet was
my biggest incentive for buying this disk (the old IBM disk was so loud
that I was embarassed to run the laptop in meetings), as soon as the
install was finished I carried the laptop into a quiet room to listen
to the disk,
Turns out it was making a faint beep-beep noise every second or
two, plus some clicking in between.
Another, non-Linux, operating system installed on the same disk does
not make these beeping or clicking noises. It was clearly something
Ubuntu was doing.
After a long series of ps and kill, I finally narrowed
the problem down to hald. HAL is polling my disk, once per
second or so, in a way that makes it beep and click.
(HAL, if you're not familiar with it, is the Hardware Access Layer
which works hand in hand with the kernel service udev to monitor
hardware as it comes and goes. No one seems to know where the
dividing line is between udev and hal, or between the daemons
udevd and hald. Most systems which enable one, enable both.)
I floated down to the control room to dismantle HAL, humming
"Daisy".
But it turned out I didn't need to kill HAL entirely. The polling
apparently comes from HAL's attempt to query the CDROM to see if
anything has been inserted. (Even if there is no CDROM connected
to the machine. Go figure!)
The solution is to edit /etc/hal/hald.conf, and change
true to false under <storage_media_check_enabled>
and <storage_automount_enabled_hint>. This changes hald from a
"blacklist" policy, where everything is polled unless you blacklist
it, to a "whitelist" policy, where nothing is polled unless you
whitelist it. Voila! No more polling the disk, and no more
beepy-clicky noises. I suspect my drive will last longer and eat
less battery power, too.
Tags: linux, hal
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20:00 Jul 30, 2005
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Fri, 29 Jul 2005
I've switched my desktop machine from straight Debian (unstable, or
"sid") to Ubuntu "Hoary Hedgehog". Sid was just getting
too
unstable for me (I'd been spoiled because it really has been pretty
stable, except for printing problems, for the past few years).
Freetype now has rendering problems, so any fixed width
terminal font is nearly unreadable and many PDFs aren't readable
at all. There are issues related to the switch to gcc 4. But the
last straw was when printing to my Epson C86 stopped working.
(I try to make a point of mentioning bug numbers when I whine about
open source issues. The freetype problem with terminal fonts was
already reported as bug 315150, and I opened bug 319068 on the pdf
issue though I suspect it's part of the same problem.
The gcc4 issues are well known and are just transitional issues.
I didn't bother reporting the printer regression; after over a year
of having similar bugs for my old printer ignored, finally giving
up and buying a new printer specifically so that I could continue
to run Debian, it's hard to have much confidence that reporting
printing bugs is worthwhile.)
The switchover to Ubuntu was surprisingly painless.
The install went fairly smoothly, and
in half a day I was up and running with my environment
(currently fvwm) customized the way I wanted it.
The only problems I've had with hoary are poor rendering of
fixed-width fonts (not as poor as sid with the freetype bug,
but a lot worse than debian used to be) and inability to play mp3
(I suspect I'll hit problems with other formats such as wmv as well,
but I haven't tried yet). The font problem is quite annoying and no
change I make to /etc/fonts/local.conf seems to make any difference.
The mp3 problem probably requires downloading and hand-installing
something -- I hear rumours that there's nothing apt-gettable which
will make non-free formats work, though that seems odd for a distro
aimed at desktop users.
Update 7/31: Turns out there are hoary packages for mp3 handling
after all. Search for "mad" rather than "mp3", e.g. xmms-mad adds
mp3 support to xmms.
But first I had to set up a development environment.
Ubuntu's install is very minimal, since it uses only a single
CD. It doesn't even install gcc by default. So I enabled all the
ubuntu sources (restricted, universe, multiverse) and I've been
gradually adding packages to get back everything I had on sid.
GIMP (2.3, from CVS) seemed like a good build test.
Assembling the dependencies was straightforward but time consuming.
Since people new to building GIMP are often confused about what
they'll need, I kept track of the additional packages I needed,
and posted the full list on my
GIMP building page.
Tags: gimp
[
12:24 Jul 29, 2005
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]
Tue, 26 Jul 2005
Pho 0.9.5-pre4
seems to be working pretty well and fixes a couple of bugs in
pre3, so I posted a tarball. I really need to quit this pre- stuff
and just release 0.9.5. Soon, really!
Tags: programming
[
12:51 Jul 26, 2005
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Fri, 22 Jul 2005
This has bitten me too many times, and I always forget how to
recover. This time I'm saving it here for posterity.
The scene: you wanted to check something, perhaps a window manager
theme or a font setting or something, and innocently ran some gnome
app even though you aren't running a gnome desktop.
Immediately thereafter, you notice that something has changed
disastrously in your gtk apps, even apps that were already running
and working fine. Maybe it's your keyboard theme, or maybe fonts or
colors.
Now you're screwed: your previous configuration files like
~/.gtkrc-2.0 don't matter any more, because gnome has taken over
and Knows What's Best For You.
How do you fix it?
Don't bother looking for apps that start with gnome-- or
gtk-. That would be too obvious.
You might think that gnome-control-center would have something
related ... but mwa-ha-ha, you'd be wrong!
The solution, it turns out, is gconf-editor, an app obviously
modeled after regedit from everyone's favorite user interface
designer, Microsoft.
In the case of key theme, you'll find it in
desktop->gnome->interface->gtk_key_theme.
Tags: linux, gnome
[
17:39 Jul 22, 2005
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]
Sun, 17 Jul 2005
Dave and I spent the morning swapping processors. He's letting me use
his old P3 Tualatin to replace the Sempron based system I bought.
The Sempron was what I came up with after I had no luck finding a
working motherboard to replace the one that died on my beloved old
(quiet and cool) Tualatin machine.
The machine always ran too hot. At least, everyone seemed shocked when
I mentioned that it typically ran at 59-62°C with the
case open and an extra fan blowing onto the chip, and more like
75°C with the case closed (so I've been running it with the case
permanently open, which means it's a lot noiser).
That's the second time I've gotten burned by AMD. They make fast
chips, but I don't care about speed: I care about cool and quiet
operation for the machine I run day in and day out. Intel's no better,
as long as a P4 is all you can buy for a desktop machine. The Via C3
line seems to be the only option until Intel finishes their promised
switch to desktop processors based off the Centrino line. (I hope when
those finally arrive, they're available in a version without DRM.)
After the machine swap was finished, the day had heated up, we headed
over the hill to my favorite beach, Bean Hollow, to check out the
tidepools and tafoni and harbor seals.
The tidepools had a decent selection of crabs up to about 3 inches
as well as goggles of small hermit crabs (mostly in shells of some
sort of purple snail).
Apparently it's harbor seal mating season. At least, we guessed that's
what they were doing, though they might have just been playing in
groups of two, with much flipper-splashing and nuzzling, and crowds of
other seals gathered around to watch. There was also a lot of loud,
rude sounding snorting from solo seals swimming nearby.
The seals' coats are very colorful, much more so than in spring
when they're raising pups. The rocks were covered with seals sporting
black-spotted white, white-spotted black, yellow, orange, and red.
Quite a change from their spring colors of dark silver to black.
One web reference I found said they molt after the pups are weaned,
so perhaps these colors represent their fresh coats,
which gradually turn duller as they age.
The bright colors are much more photogenic, too. They stand out from
the rocks, especially the white youngster who obligingly ran through a
gamut of cute poses for me, relaxing, looking alert, scratching,
yawning, rolling over, and finally some seal yoga: I didn't know such
seemingly ungainly animals could scratch their heads with their back
flippers!
Tags: nature
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00:15 Jul 17, 2005
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Sun, 10 Jul 2005
Yesterday was the annual Fremont Peak Star-b-q.
This year the weather managed to be fairly perfect for observing
afterward: the fog came in for a while, making for fairly dark
skies, and it wasn't too cold though it was a bit breezy.
It was even reasonably steady.
I had my homebuilt 8" dob, while Dave brought his homebuilt 12.5".
Incredibly, we were all alone in the southwest lot: the most
Star-b-q was fairly lightly attended, and most of the handful
who stayed to observe afterward set up at Coulter row.
The interesting sight of the evening was the supernova in M51 (the
Whirlpool galaxy). It was fairly easy in the 12.5" once we knew
where to look (Mike Koop came over to visit after looking at it
in the 30"), and once we found it there all three of us could see
it in the 8" as well.
We had excellent views of Jupiter in the 8", with detail in the red
spot, the thin equatorial band easily visible, and long splits in
both the northern and southern equatorial bands. I didn't make any
sketches since a family wandered by about then so I let them look
instead.
We also had lovely low-power views of Venus and crescent Mercury,
and we spent some time traversing detail on the dark side of the
slim crescent moon due to the excellent earthshine. All the major
maria were visible, and of course Aristarchus, but we could also
see Plato, Sinus Iridum, Kepler, Copernicus and its ray system,
Tycho (only in the 12" -- the 8" was having glare problems that
close to the lit part of the moon) and one long ray from Tycho
that extended across Mare Nubium and out to near Copernicus.
Pretty good for observing the "dark" side!
Neither of us was able to find Comet Tempel-1 (the Deep Impact
comet), even with the 12.5". But after moonset I picked up the Veil
and North American in the 8" unfiltered (having left my filters at
home), and we got some outstanding views of the nebulae in
Sagittarius, particularly the Trifid, which was showing more
dust-lane detail without a filter than I've ever seen even filtered.
It was a good night for carnivores, too. We saw one little grey fox
cub trotting up the road to the observatory during dinner, and there
was another by the side of the road on the way home. Then, farther
down the road, I had to stop for three baby raccoons playing in the
street. (Very cute!) They eventually got the idea that maybe they
should get off the road and watch from the shoulder. The parents
were nowhere to be seen: probably much more car-wise than their
children (I don't often see raccoon roadkill). I hope the kids
got a scolding afterward about finding safer places to play.
Tags: science, astronomy
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23:31 Jul 10, 2005
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Tue, 28 Jun 2005
Some jerk decided it would be funny to throw a lit firecracker
into the dry brush beside the freeway a few blocks away from where
I live, with
predictable
results.
Fortunately the fire department responded incredibly quickly (must
have been less than five minutes from when I heard the bang to
when the fire truck arrived) and they were able to put the fire out
before it spread far.
I hope someone saw whoever threw the firecracker, and got a license
plate.
Tags: photo
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23:12 Jun 28, 2005
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Mon, 27 Jun 2005
I needed to use OpenOffice today, and got a nasty surprise: it no
longer remembered any of my settings, key bindings, or any of those
painfully-installed templates I'm required to use for this project.
It turns the version of OpenOffice.org I pulled in with the last
Sid upgrade, 1.1.4, has a nifty new feature: it has no knowledge
of the ~/.openoffice/1.1.1 directory its predecessor used
for its configuration, and instead wants to use
~/.openoffice/1.1.0. Does it notice that there's an existing
config directory there, and offer to migrate it? No! Instead, it
silently makes a new 1.1.0 directory, with all-default
settings, and uses that. The effect to the user is that all your
settings and templates have suddenly disappeared for no obvious
reason.
The fact that the new version uses a seemingly older version number
for its configurations is a nice twist. Perhaps they were worried
that otherwise some enterprising user might figure out what had
happened, and actually recover their settings, rather than wasting
hours painfully resetting them one by one.
Aside: it's impressively hard to read OOo's settings to figure
out which ones might be yours. For example, here's a sample
line which binds Ctrl-H to delete-backward-char:
<accel:item accel:code="KEY_H" accel:mod1="true" xlink:href="slot:20926"/>
(You can still tell it involves the "h" key somehow. But I bet they're
working on purging that shameful bit of human readable information.)
That adds a touch of extra spice to the challenge of figuring out
which set of files is the right one.
Anyway, if this happens to you, move the 1.1.0
directory somewhere else, then rename or cp -a 1.1.1
to 1.1.0. That seems to bring back the lost settings.
Tags: linux, open office
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22:22 Jun 27, 2005
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I spent a little time this afternoon chasing down a couple of recent
Firefox regressions that have been annoying me.
First, the business where, if you type a url into the urlbar and hit
alt-Enter (ctrl-Enter in my Kitfox variant) to open a new tab,
if you go back to the old tab you still see the new url in the
urlbar, which doesn't match the page being displayed there.
That turns out to be bug
227826, which was fixed a week and a half ago. Hooray!
Reading that bug yielded a nice Mozilla tip I hadn't previously
known: hitting ESC when focus is in the urlbar will revert the
urlbar to what it should be, without needing to Reload.
The other annoyance I wanted to chase down is the new failure of
firefox -remote to handle URLs with commas in them (as so
many news stories have these days); quoting the url is no help,
because it no longer handles quotes either. That means that trying
to call a browser from another program such as an IRC client is
doomed to fail for any complex url.
That turns out to be a side effect of the check-in for bug
280725, which had something to do with handling non-ASCII
URLs on Windows. I've filed bug
298960 to cover the regression.
That leaves only one (much more minor) annoyance: the way the
selection color has changed, and quite often seems to give me white
text on a dingy mustard yellow background. I think that's because of
bug
56314, which apparently makes it choose a background color
that's the reverse of the page's background, but which then doesn't
seem to choose a contrasting foreground color.
It turns out you can override this if you don't mind specifying a
single fixed set of selection colors (instead of having them change
with the colors of every page). In userChrome.css (for the urlbar)
and userContent.css (for page content):
::-moz-selection {
background-color: magenta;
color: white;
}
(obviously, pick any pair of colors which strikes your fancy).
Tags: tech, web, mozilla, firefox
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21:45 Jun 27, 2005
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Wed, 22 Jun 2005
An upgrade from woody to sarge introduced a new problem with editing
mail messages in vim: Subject lines appeared in yellow, against my
light grey background, so they weren't readable any more.
Vim color files have always been a mystery to me. I have one which
I adapted from one of the standard color schemes, but I've never
been clear what the legal identifiers are or how to find out.
But I changed both places where it said "ctermfg=Yellow" to another
color, and nothing changed, so this time I had to find out.
Fortunately a nice person on #vim suggested :he synID (he
is short for "help", of course) which told me all I needed to know.
Put the cursor on the errant line and type:
:echo synIDattr(synID(line("."), col("."), 1), "name")
That told me that the Subject line was syntax class "mailSubject".
So I tried (copying other lines in my color file) adding this line:
hi mailSubject term=underline ctermfg=Red guifg=Red
and now all is happy again in vim land. I wish I'd learned that
synID trick a long time ago!
Tags: vim, color, editors, tips
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Tue, 21 Jun 2005
I updated my Debian sid system yesterday, and discovered today that
gnome-volume-control has changed their UI yet again. Now the window
comes up with two tabs,
Playback and
Capture; the
default tab,
Playback, has only one slider in it,
PCM,
and all the important sliders, like
Volume, are under
Capture. (I'm told this is some interaction with how ALSA
sees my sound chip.)
That's just silly. I've never liked the app anyway -- it takes
forever to come up, so I end up missing too much of any clip that
starts out quiet. All I need is a simple, fast window with
a single slider controlling master volume. But nothing like that
seems to exist, except panel applets that are tied to the panels
of particular window managers.
So I wrote one, in PyGTK. vol is
a simple script which shows a slider, and calls aumix
under the hood to get and set the volume. It's horizontal by
default; vol -h gives a vertical slider.
Aside: it's somewhat amazing that Python has no direct way
to read an integer out of a string containing more than just that
integer: for example, to read 70 out of "70,". I had to write a
function to handle that. It's such a terrific no-nonsense
language most of the time, yet so bad at a few things.
(And when I asked about a general solution in the python channel
at [large IRC network], I got a bunch of replies like "use
int(str[0:2])" and "use int(str[0:-1])".
Shock and bafflement ensued when I pointed out that 5, 100, and -27
are all integers too and wouldn't be handled by those approaches.)
Tags: programming, python, gtk, pygtk
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15:54 Jun 21, 2005
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Mon, 20 Jun 2005
I'm working with the GIMP developers to do some minor reorganization
of some of the menus.
In particular, we wanted to get things like script-fu
and python-fu out of the menus so users don't have to know what
language a function is written in to use it.
That part of the patch (for the image window; the Toolbox Xtns menu
reorganization is still pending) got checked in a few days ago.
Sven is now soliciting comments on the next step on his Planet
Gnome blog. The proposal for the next step is in
bug
116145. There haven't been many comments; I encourage anyone
interested in GIMP's menus to read that bug and comment in it.
The Toolbox Xtns menu reorganization is a bit more complicated,
since there are two conflicting proposals, in bug
145507 and bug
158980. I tried to suggest just moving stuff out of the
Script-Fu menu for now, since there's no agreement on further
changes yet, but that went over like a lead balloon.
So it's back to the image window's Filters menu. If there aren't
any comments in a few more days I'll just go ahead with
the proposal in the bug.
Maybe I'll even get to use my shiny new CVS access to check the
changes in myself. Woo!
Tags: gimp
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11:49 Jun 20, 2005
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Sat, 18 Jun 2005
The two dove chicks fledged yesterday, early in the morning.
By the time we were up, they were out in the yard, walking
behind one parent and play-pecking in the weeds.
They can fly: Dave saw them fly up to the fence once,
then back down.
That didn't last long, though;
after about fifteen minutes of activity they found a
corner they liked, under the blue borage, planted themselves there
in the shade of the fence, and didn't move until afternoon when
the sun hit their corner and they went off in search of
shade. They definitely prefer shade to direct sunlight (even on a
cool and windy day). The parents came to feed them periodically.
They're still eerily silent. They never call for food, or for
anything else. Very different from last year's mockingbird chicks.
When they fly they make the normal dove squeaky noise that the
adults make, but that's the only sound I've heard out of either one.
They look quite different from each other: one is a miniature adult,
while the other is a bit smaller, usually more ruffled, and has a
"scale" pattern in its feathers.
They apparently spent the night somewhere high -- we saw them fly up
to the roof a little after sunset, then they walked over to where we
couldn't see them any more.
In the morning, they were back in their corner, still content to sit
in the same spot all day. I spooked them once doing some garden work
in that corner of the yard, and one of them flew across the yard and
landed on the fence, and spent the next hour or so there before
flying back to the normal corner. Later, the other flew up into the
atlas cedar for no apparent reason, then spent a while trying to
figure out how to get a solid perch on the swaying, uneven branches.
Meanwhile, the house sparrows were doing bushtit imitations all
over the tree, hanging upside down while pecking at the needles.
I'm not sure if they were after the cones, or actually eating bugs
for a nesting season protein supplement, but it was fun to see a
flock of house sparrows acting like bushtits.
A few photos of the
dovelets.
Tags: nature, birds, urban wildlife
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20:36 Jun 18, 2005
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Fri, 17 Jun 2005
Remember the game of "Telephone" when you were a kid? Everybody gets
in a big circle. One kid whispers a message in the ear of the kid next
to them. That kid repeats the message to the next kid, and so on
around the circle. By the time the message gets back to the
originator, it has usually changed beyond recognition.
Sometimes the Internet is like that.
Background: a year and a half ago, in August 2003, there was an
unusually favorable Mars opposition. Mars has a year roughly double
ours, so Mars "oppositions" happen about every two years (plus a few
months). An opposition is when we and Mars are both on the same side
of the sun (so the sun is opposite Mars in our sky, and Mars is
at its highest at midnight). We're much closer to Mars at opposition
than at other times, and that makes a big difference on a planet as
small as Mars, so for people who like to observe Mars with a
telescope, oppositions are the best time to do it.
The August 2003 opposition was the closest opposition in thousands of
years, because Mars was near its perihelion (the point where
it's closest to earth) at the time of the opposition. Much was made of
this in the press (the press loves events where they can say "best in
10,000 years") to the point where lots of people who aren't
normally interested in astronomy decided they wanted to see Mars and
came to star parties to look through telescopes.
That's always nice, and we tried to show them Mars, though Mars is
very small, even during an opposition. The 2003 opposition wasn't
actually all that favorable for those of us in northern hemisphere.
because Mars was near the southernmost part of its orbit. That means
it was very low in the sky, which is never good for seeing detail
through a telescope. Down near the horizon you're looking through a
lot more of Earth's atmosphere, and you're down near all the heat
waves coming off houses and streets and even rocks. That disturbs the
view quite a bit, like trying to see detail on a penny at the bottom
of a swimming pool.
This year's opposition, around Halloween, will not be as
close as the 2003 opposition, but it's still fairly close as
oppositions go. Plus, this year, Mars will be much farther north.
So we're expecting a good opposition -- weather permitting, both on
Earth, which is sometimes cloudy in November, and on Mars, where you
never know when a freak dust storm might appear.
Which brings me back to the game of Telephone.
A few weeks ago I got the first of them. An email from someone
quoting a message someone had forwarded, asking whether it was
true. The message began:
The Red Planet is about to be spectacular! This month and next, Earth is
catching up with Mars in an encounter that will culminate in the closest
approach between the two planets in recorded history.
and it ended:
Share this with your children and grandchildren. NO ONE ALIVE TODAY WILL
EVER SEE THIS AGAIN
(sic on the caps and the lack of a period at the end).
I sent a reply saying the email was two years out of date, and giving
information on this year's Mars opposition and the fact that it may
actually be better for observing Mars than 2003 was. But the next day
I got a similar inquiry from someone else. So I updated my
Mars FAQ to mention the
misleading internet message, and the inquiries slowed down.
But today, I got a new variant.
Subject: IS MARS GOING TO BE AS BIG AS THE MOON IN AUGUST?
As big as the moon! That would be a very close opposition!
(Dave, always succinct, said I should reply and say simply, "Bigger."
Mars is, of course, always bigger than the moon, even if its apparent
size as viewed from earth is small.)
It looks like the story is growing in the telling, in a way it
somehow didn't two years ago.
I can't wait to see what the story will have become by August.
Mars is going to hit us?
Tags: science, astronomy
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11:48 Jun 17, 2005
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]
Thu, 16 Jun 2005
The mourning dove chicks by the back door remain amazingly quiet.
They're growing fast, nearly half the size of an adult dove now, with
fairly adult looking feathers, the characteristic wing spots of their
parents, and eyes that are starting to show a blue ring. There are
only two of them, not three as I'd originally thought. They move
outside of the nest onto adjacent branches, fiddle, flutter a
little, and preen a lot. Yet they never make any noise. Quite a
change from the noisy, demanding mockingbird chicks last year!
A female Nuttall's woodpecker showed up in the backyard yesterday.
I heard her drumming this morning. Maybe she'll stick around.
I put out a peanut-and-sunflower cake that woodpeckers are supposed
to like, though birds in this yard never seem to like the foods
the books and bird feeder companies say they will.
The towhee and house finch families still seem to be raising their
young, but I haven't gotten a glimpse of any chicks yet.
The mockingbird who shunned us earlier in the season seems to
have moved into the atlas cedar for his second nest (or is it
a third?) and is singing in the morning and squawking at jays by day.
Meanwhile, I dropped by Shoreline around lunchtime today and
got some photos of
a pair
of avocets with one chick, including the rare 4-legged avocet
(where the chick hides underneath mom, so only his legs are visible).
I also got a couple of nice shots of a stilt
flying at Alviso.
Other neat sights: a nesting colony of great egrets in a tree outside a
business park, a bedraggled but still pretty snowy egret at
Shoreline Lake, and the terns banking ten feet away from me
as they fished in the shallows of the little lake.
Tags: nature, birds, urban wildlife
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19:50 Jun 16, 2005
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Sat, 11 Jun 2005
On a hike a few days ago we saw a
baby
swallow on the trail. So cute! He didn't appear to be hurt, but
wasn't moving, either. It was soo tempting to move him, or take him
home and feed him. But adult swallows were flying all around, and he
was old enough that he had all his feathers (probably old enough to
fledge) so we left him there and hoped someone would take care of him.
Meanwhile, back at home, house finches are raising a family in the
Italian cypress outside the office, and a pair of mourning doves has
taken over the nest the mockingbirds built last year in the guava tree
outside the back door. It doesn't look like they rebuilt or improved
the nest at all: the mockingbird-sized nest looks very small under a
big mourning dove.
The chicks hatched several days ago, but I didn't realize
it for at least a day, because the dove chicks are quiet and
motionless, not at all like the active, noisy, demanding mockingbird
chicks were. The dovelets act just like eggs, except they're fuzzier
and occasionally I can catch a glimpse of wing feathers. I think there
are three.
The adult doves are a lot calmer than the mockingbirds were, as well.
The mocker parents would get angry any time they noticed a human
trying to watch them through the window, and would hop up to the
window and glare and squawk until the person went away. It was tough
to catch a glimpse of the chicks.
The doves, on the other hand, spend a lot of time out of the nest now
that the chicks have hatched (though before they hatched, there was
always a dove on the nest: the sitting dove wouldn't leave
until its mate arrived to take over) and even when they're there
they're pretty calm, keeping an eye on anyone who tries to look
through the window but not seeming too upset about it. I can't tell if
they're frightened by being watched, but I try not to watch for long
when an adult is there. (That's easy since there's nothing much to see
anyway.)
I haven't seen any feeding yet, or other interesting behavior. Maybe
they'll get more active when they're a little older.
Tags: nature, birds, urban wildlife
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13:28 Jun 11, 2005
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]
Tue, 07 Jun 2005
A house down the street just sold. It had an interesting large tree in
the front yard, some sort of yucca: an odd looking desert tree with
several thick branching trunks, spiky bayonet leaves and sometimes big
clumps of white flowers.
The new owners apparently didn't like the stark desert tree. No sooner
had the For Sale signs come down than a crew was at work with
chainsaws.
The upper parts of the trunks, and all the foliage, were quickly cut off
and tossed in the street. Then the real chainsaw games began.
It turns out that the trunks of this tree (at least four trunks,
connected at the base) are each quite a bit larger in diameter than a
chainsaw's blade. Even going from both sides, a chainsaw can't really
cut through them.
It's been a couple of weeks since the top bits of the yucca tree got
dragged away. Every day, we hear chainsaws in the late morning, and
chainsaws again for a while in the afternoon, as workers whittle at
the tops and edges of the stump containing the bases of the four
trunks. Every time I go by, the stump has gotten a little
smaller: a few inches here, a few inches there. Chips and slivers of
wood join the pile in the street by the curb. Hand saws and axes sit
wedged at strategic places in the stump.
I'm finally seeing Zeno's Paradox in action. You remember Zeno's
paradox? You're trying to get from A to B in a finite time:
so first you must go half the distance, which also takes a
finite time. But to do that, you must first go half that
distance; and since you can divide the distances in half infinitely,
you can never get to the finishing line, because it would take an
infinite number of finite time intervals.
The pile of wood by the curb gets larger every time I look.
And yet ... somehow Zeno's Stump doesn't look any smaller.
Tags: humor
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22:09 Jun 07, 2005
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Fri, 03 Jun 2005
I've been experimenting with Ubuntu's second release, "Hoary
Hedgehog" off and on since just before it was released.
Overall, I'm very impressed. It's quite usable on a desktop machine;
but more important, I'm blown away by the fact that Ubuntu's kernel
team has made a 2.6 acpi kernel that actually works on my aging but
still beloved little Vaio SR17 laptop. It can suspend to RAM (if I
uncomment ACPI_SLEEP in /etc/defaults/acpi-support), it can
suspend to disk, it gets power button events (which are easily
customizable: by default it shuts the machine down, but if I replace
powerbtn.sh with a single line calling sleep.sh, it
suspends), it can read the CPU temperature. Very cool.
One thing didn't work: USB stopped working when resuming after a
suspend to RAM. It turned out this was a hotplug problem, not a kernel
problem: the solution was to add calls to /etc/init.d/hotplug
stop and /etc/init.d/hotplug start in the
/etc/acpi/sleep.sh script.
Problem solved (except now resuming takes forever, as does
booting; I need to tune that hotplug startup script and get rid of
whatever is taking so long).
Sonypi (the jogdial driver) also works. It isn't automatically loaded
(I've added it to /etc/modules), and it disables the power button (so
much for changing the script to call sleep.sh), a minor
annoyance. But when loaded, it automatically creates /dev/sonypi, so I
don't have to play the usual guessing game about which minor number it
wanted this time.
Oh, did I mention that the Hoary live CD also works on the Vaio?
It's the first live linux CD which has ever worked on this machine
(all the others, including rescue disks like the Bootable Business
Card and SuperRescue, have problems with the Sony PCMCIA-emulating-IDE
CD drive). It's too slow to use for real work, but the fact that it
works at all is amazing.
I have to balance this by saying that Ubuntu's not perfect.
The installer, which is apparently the Debian Sarge installer
dumbed down to reduce the number of choices, is inconsistent,
difficult, and can't deal with a networkless install (which, on
a laptop which can't have a CD drive and networking at the same time
because they both use the single PCMCIA slot, makes installation quite
tricky). The only way I found was to boot into expert mode, skip the
network installation step, then, after the system was up and running
(and I'd several times dismissed irritating warnings about how it
couldn't find the network, therefore "some things" in gnome wouldn't
work properly, and did I want to log in anyway?) I manually edited
/etc/network/interfaces to configure my card (none of Ubuntu's
built-in hardware or network configuration tools would let me
configure my vanilla 3Com card; presumably they depend on something
that would have been done at install time if I'd been allowed to
configure networking then). (Bug 2835.)
About that expert mode: I needed that even for the desktop,
because hoary's normal installer doesn't offer an option for
a static IP address. But on both desktop and laptop this causes a
problem. You see, hoary's normal mode of operation is to add the
first-created user to the sudoers list, and then not create a root
account at all. All of their system administration tools depend on the
user being in the sudoers file. Fine. But someone at ubuntu apparently
decided that anyone installing in expert mode probably wants a root
account (no argument so far) and therefore doesn't need to be in the
sudoers file. Which means that after the install, none of the admin
tools work; they just pop up variants on a permission denied dialog.
The solution is to use visudo to add yourself to
/etc/sudoers. (Bugs 7636 and
9832.)
Expert mode also has some other bugs, like prompting over and over for
additional kernel modules (bug 5999).
Okay, so nothing's perfect. I'm not very impressed with Hoary's
installer, though most of its problems are inherited from Sarge.
But once it's on the machine, Hoary works great. It's a modern
Debian-based Linux that gets security upgrades (something Debian
hasn't been able to do, though they keep making noises about finally
releasing Sarge). And there's that amazing kernel. Now that I have the
hotplug-on-resume problem fixed, I'm going to try using it as the
primary OS on the laptop for a while, and see how it goes.
Tags: linux, ubuntu, laptop, vaio
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17:29 Jun 03, 2005
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Wed, 01 Jun 2005
During Debian upgrades over the last few months, apparently my
system's alsa and aumix scripts had a little private battle for
control of the mixer, and alsa won. The visible symptom was that my
volume was always at 0 when I started up.
I tried re-enabling the aumix script in /etc/init.d, which
had previously controlled my default volume, but it just said
"Saved ALSA mixer settings detected; aumix will not touch mixer."
The solution, in the end, was to remove
/var/lib/alsa/asound.state, set the volume, and
run alsactl store. Someone suggested that I use chattr -i
to make the asound.state file inviolable; it isn't on an ext2/3
filesystem, so that isn't a solution for me, but if my volume goes
wonky again at least I know where to look.
Tags: linux, alsa, audio
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10:40 Jun 01, 2005
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]
The GSA conference happened back when I was too caught in the whirl of
events to write about them. It's been a over month now, but I did want
to save a couple of impressions.
The field trips all started way too early. Sure, this is the whining
of a non-morning person: but really, when your field trip starts with
45 minutes of everybody standing around because the rental agency that
rents the vans isn't open yet, maybe that's a sign that starting a
little later might be a good idea. Even aside from the wisdom of
scheduling all your travel time for the height of rush hour.
The field trips were worthwhile, though. The most interesting
parts were often topics that hadn't sounded interesting at all
ahead of time.
The talks at the conference were terrific, total information overload,
with maybe six sessions going at once.
There are lots of people doing interesting research in geology,
often fairly junior people (grad students or postdocs),
and many of them are even able to talk enthusiastically about their
research using words that make sense to a mere student of the
subject. Dry jargon-laden talks did exist, but they were the
exception, not the rule.
Everybody was friendly, too, and very willing to talk to students
and explain their research or chat about other topics in geology.
I went to one of the "Roy J. Shlemon student mentoring lunches"
featuring a round-robin of geologists moving from one student table to
another to share insight and stories: very helpful and interesting!
The conference organizers obviously worship at the altar of Bill
Gates. There was apparently a conference-wide dictum that Thou Shalt
Use Powerpoint and Thou Shalt Display On Our Windows Boxen, Not Your
Own Machine.
The unsurprising result was that roughly 80% of the talks had at least
some problems displaying
slides, resulting in cursing, then apologies, with the speaker
assuring the audience that it would make much more sense if only we
could see the slide the way it had been written. Perhaps half of these
followed up with a mutter about having to use Windows rather than a
Mac. Macs are clearly big with geologists (though alas there was no
sign of Linux use).
That said, the conference ran aggressively on time, each session
having an appointed watchdog to sit in front and remind the speaker
when time was running out. I've never seen a conference stick to a
schedule so well, especially when filled with short (20-minute) talks.
I had been prepared for the worst after problems getting schedule
information before the conference, but the organization on site
(except field trips) was flawless.
All in all, quite a good time.
I'm only sorry next year's conference isn't back in San Jose.
(It's in Alaska; I'd love to go, but finances will probably prevent it.)
Tags: science, geology
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00:04 Jun 01, 2005
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Mon, 23 May 2005
I just finished writing up the final project for my field geology class.
The project involved discovering and mapping the geology of Red Rock
Canyon. I'll probably upload the paper and other documents later;
for now, just a few notes about the field trip, weekend before last.
Red Rock Canyon is in the Mojave desert, near Ridgecrest. I'd been
through a few times before, since it's more or less on the way to
Death Valley, but of course didn't know any of the geologic details,
other than "Ooh, look at the pretty red and white layers and the
eroded hoodoos!"
Actually, it's not technically in the Mojave. One of the reasons Red
Rock Canyon is interesting is that it sits at the junction of three of
California's geomorphic provinces, at the junction of the Garlock
fault (dividing the Mojave from the Basin and Range) and the Sierra
Front fault (dividing the Sierra from the other two). The Mojave is
bounded on its south end by the transverse section of the San Andreas,
but Red Rock Canyon is north of the Garlock fault, in the Basin and Range.
Our four day camping trip (two days of hiking, measuring, and mapping,
two days devoted mostly to travel) covered a few square miles around
the visitor's center, but we ended up with a surprisingly complete map
and stratigraphy. Several people had trouble with the temperatures,
which were somewhere in the nineties, combined with the pace of the
hikes. That's not really all that hot, especially for desert, but
it's hot for a group of people coming out of a bay area winter
and an unusually rainy spring, especially the students unused to hiking.
(This was all rather ironic since we'd switched
our mapping project to Red Rock after being concerned about too much
snow at the first choice location, June Lake. Those concerns were
probably justified; it was snowing up until a few days before we left,
so despite the heat, Red Rock was the right choice.)
Nevertheless, Red Rock is a great location to learn geologic mapping.
The structure is fairly simple and easy to see (especially from the top
of Whistler's Peak), with a series of cuestas of sedimentary layers each
capped with basalt, and a couple of other interesting and distinctive
layers in between. Luckily for us, there isn't much complex folding,
just a fairly continuous tilt caused by uplift due to the El Paso
fault (a branch of the Garlock). The rocks themselves are interesting,
with lots of olivine and other crystals in one of the basalt layers,
and an area at the base of the other basalt layer containing lovely
rocks such as opals -- the area used to be an opal mine.
It's also a fairly nice place to camp, with campsites nestled back
among towering cliffs (of the Tr5 fluvial member of the Ricardo
formation, if you're curious for details) which provides a bit more
privacy and separation from other campers than a lot of parks allow.
I'm not really much of a camper (I'm a poor sleeper, and I do like my
morning shower) but out campsite converted even the timid non-campers
in the class.
White-throated swifts play in the turbulence along the face of the
cliffs, calling loudly to each other. Their calls woke me up at
daybreak each morning, but setting aside sleep deprivation, it wasn't
all bad. It's mating season for the swifts, and it turns out they mate
in midair. Two birds come together, and locked together they spiral
hundreds of feet downward, finally separating just short of the
ground. We have white throated swifts here in the bay area, but I'd
never seen anything like their aerial mating dance before; let alone
seen it set against towering desert cliffs in the stillness of dawn
light.
Other interesting natural phenomena observed on the trip: a barn owl
flew over the campsite every night, visible against the campfire
light. Zebra-tailed lizards were ghostly white except for their
black-ringed tails and some ghostly markings on their backs.
We saw lots of jackrabbits and several alligator lizards (the
latter have been numerous in the bay area as well, this spring).
And we saw a lovely horizontal "rainbow" at mid-day of the first day
which turned out, after much research, to be a "circumhorizontal arc".
I took a telescope along, but we didn't have very good skies (haze,
thin clouds, and disturbed seeing, and with all the campfires it
was smoky and not even very dark) so we mostly looked at Jupiter,
Saturn, and the moon (we did get good seeing at dusk one night for the
moon, and we got a good look at the Mare Nectaris shock rings and
the beginnings of Rima Ariadaeus).
A few of our group were disturbed to learn on the way down that they
wouldn't have cellphone reception at Red Rock. Horrors! They rushed to
tie up loose ends, and managed it before we finally lost reception
passing by Mojave.
All in all, a very successful trip, although most of us were awfully
glad to get home and jump in the shower. I'm even gladder to have
my final report finished. Nevertheless, geologic mapping is fun:
I'm happy that I had the chance to complete a map of an area like
this. I may even be back to Red Rock some day, to try to trace out the
extent of that mystery fault at the north end of the pink tuff breccia
layer ...
5/25/2005:
photos and report are up.
Tags: science, geology
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20:11 May 23, 2005
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Sun, 08 May 2005
Updating the blog again after taking time off for various reasons,
including lack of time, homework, paying work, broken computer
motherboard and other hardware problems, illness, a hand injury,
and so on.
This afternoon, thanks to a very helpful Keir Mierle showing
up on #gimp, I finally got all the pieces sorted and I now have
a working tablet again. Hurrah!
I've put details of the setup that finally worked on my Linux and Wacom
page.
Tags: linux, imaging, gimp
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19:08 May 08, 2005
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]
Wed, 13 Apr 2005
I needed to print some maps for one of my geology class field trips,
so I added a "save current map" key to PyTopo (which saves to .gif,
and then I print it with gimp-print). It calls
montage
from Image Magick.
Get yer PyTopo 0.3
here.
Tags: programming, python, imagemagick, mapping, GIS
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17:56 Apr 13, 2005
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Tue, 12 Apr 2005
A recent change to the Debian font system has caused some odd
font problems which Debian users might do well to know about.
The change has to do with the addition in /etc/fonts of a
directory conf.d containing symbolic links to scripts,
and the overwriting of some of the existing files in /etc/fonts.
The symptoms are varied and peculiar. On my sid system, on each
boot, the system would toggle between two different font resolutions.
I'd start xchat, and the fonts would be too teeny to read; so I'd call
up the preferences dialog, see the font was at 9, and increase it to
12, at which point I'd see the font I was used to seeing (though the
UI font in the tabs would still be teeny). Subsequent runs of xchat
would be fine (except for the still-teeny tab fonts). But upon
reboot, xchat would come up with the tab font correct and the channel
font HUGE. Prefs dialog again: it's still at 12 where I set it last
time, so now I reset it to 9, which makes it the right size.
Until the next reboot, when everything became teeny again and
I have to go back to 12.
The system resolution never changed, nor did the rendering of the
bitmapped fonts I use in emacs and terminal clients; only the
rendering of freetype scalable fonts changed with each reboot.
Back in the days when all fonts were bitmapped, I would have guessed
that the font system was alternating between 100dpi fonts and 72dpi fonts.
At a loss as to what might cause this strange behavior, I took a
peek into /etc/fonts/conf.d, which Dave had discovered a
few weeks ago when he updated his sarge system and all his bitmapped
fonts disappeared. Though my problem didn't sound remotely
similar to his: my bitmapped fonts were fine, it was the scalable
ones which were flaky.
Turns out the symlink I'd aquired in the update,
/etc/fonts/conf.d/30-debconf-no-bitmaps.conf, did indeed
point to a file called no-bitmaps.conf, just as Dave's had.
Just to see what would happen, I removed it, and made a new symlink,
30-debconf-yes-bitmaps.conf, pointing to yes-bitmaps.conf.
Voila! The size-toggling problem disappeared,
and, even better, bitmapped fonts like "clean" now show up in
gtkfontsel and in gtk font selection dialogs, which they never did
before. I can use all my fonts now!
The moral is: if you've updated sarge or sid recently, and see
any weirdness at all in fonts, go to /etc/fonts/conf.d and
fiddle with the symlinks. Even if it doesn't seem directly related to
your problem.
As to why no-bitmaps.conf causes the system to toggle between
two different font scalings, that's still a mystery. The only
difference between no-bitmaps.conf and yes-bitmaps.conf
is that one rejects, and the other accepts, fonts that have "scalable"
set to false. Why that would change the scale at which fonts are
rendered is beyond me. I'll leave that up to someone who understands
the new debian font system. If any such person exists.
Update 5/24/2005: turns out you can change this on a per-user
basis too, with ~/.fonts.conf. man fonts.conf for details.
Tags: linux, debian, fonts
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22:45 Apr 12, 2005
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Sat, 09 Apr 2005
A few days ago, I mentioned my woes regarding Python sending spurious
expose events every time the drawing area gains or loses focus.
Since then, I've spoken with several gtk people, and investigated
several workarounds, which I'm writing up here for the benefit of
anyone else trying to solve this problem.
First, "it's a feature". What's happening is that the default focus
in and out handlers for the drawing area (or perhaps its parent class)
assume that any widget which gains keyboard focus needs to redraw
its entire window (presumably because it's locate-highlighting
and therefore changing color everywhere?) to indicate the focus
change. Rather than let the widget decide that on its own, the
focus handler forces the issue via this expose event. This may be a
bad decision, and it doesn't agree with the gtk or pygtk documentation
for what an expose event means, but it's been that way for long enough
that I'm told it's unlikely to be changed now (people may be depending
on the current behavior).
Especially if there are workarounds -- and there are.
I wrote that this happened only in pygtk and not C gtk, but I was
wrong. The spurious expose events are only passed if the CAN_FOCUS
flag is set. My C gtk test snippet did not need CAN_FOCUS,
because the program from which it was taken, pho, already implements
the simplest workaround: put the key-press handler on the window,
rather than the drawing area. Window apparently does not have
the focus/expose misbehavior.
I worry about this approach, though, because if there are any other
UI elements in the window which need to respond to key events, they
will never get the chance. I'd rather keep the events on the drawing
area.
And that becomes possible by overriding the drawing area's default
focus in/out handlers. Simply write a no-op handler which returns
TRUE, and set it as the handler for both focus-in and focus-out. This
is the solution I've taken (and I may change pho to do the same thing,
though it's unlikely ever to be a problem in pho).
In C, there's a third workaround: query the default focus handlers,
and disconnect() them. That is a little more efficient (you
aren't calling your nop routines all the time) but it doesn't seem to
be possible from pygtk: pygtk offers disconnect(), but there's no way to
locate the default handlers in order to disconnect them.
But there's a fourth workaround which might work even in pygtk:
derive a class from drawing area, and set the focus in and out
handlers to null. I haven't actually tried this yet, but it may be
the best approach for an app big enough that it needs its own UI classes.
One other thing: it was suggested that I should try using AccelGroups
for my key bindings, instead of a key-press handler, and then I could
even make the bindings user-configurable. Sounded great!
AccelGroups turn out to be very easy to use, and a nice feature.
But they also turn out to have undocumented limitations on what
can and can't be an accelerator. In particular, the arrow keys can't
be accelerators; which makes AccelGroup accelerators less than
useful for a widget or app that needs to handle user-initiated
scrolling or movement. Too bad!
Tags: programming, python, gtk, pygtk
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21:52 Apr 09, 2005
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Wed, 06 Apr 2005
While on vacation, I couldn't resist tweaking
pytopo
so that I could use it to explore some of the areas we were
visiting.
It seems fairly usable now. You can scroll around, zoom in and out
to change between the two different map series, and get the
coordinates of a particular location by clicking. I celebrated
by making a page for it, with a silly tux-peering-over-map icon.
One annoyance: it repaints every time it gets a focus in or out,
which means, for people like me who use mouse focus, that it
repaints twice for each time the mouse moves over the window.
This isn't visible, but it would drag the CPU down a bit on a
slow machine (which matters since mapping programs are particularly
useful on laptops and handhelds).
It turns out this is a pygtk problem: any pygtk drawing area window
gets spurious Expose events every time the focus changes (whether or
not you've asked to track focus events), and it reports that the
whole window needs to be repainted, and doesn't seem to be
distinguishable in any way from a real Expose event.
The regular gtk libraries (called from C) don't do this, nor
do Xlib C programs; only pygtk.
I filed
bug 172842
on pygtk; perhaps someone will come up with a workaround, though
the couple of pygtk developers I found on #pygtk couldn't think
of one (and said I shouldn't worry about it since most people
don't use pointer focus ... sigh).
Tags: programming, python, gtk, pygtk, mapping, GIS
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17:26 Apr 06, 2005
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]
Sun, 03 Apr 2005
We started the day at Zzyzx, south of Baker. I'd been told that there
were lots of geologically interesting things to see there.
If so, we couldn't find them. There's a little cluster of buildings
marking the Desert Research Center, but it doesn't seem to be open to
casual visitors; rather, they do classes and tours by appointment.
Zzyzx abuts the southwest end of Soda Dry Lake, so you can get good
views of the dry lakebed (with a little water on it here and there,
thanks to the very wet winter) and across it to Mojave Rd and the
Kelso Dunes. Worth the 5 mile detour off the freeway? Well, no,
not really. But Dave was happy to find a relatively windless place
where we could fly model airplanes for a few minutes.
Fortunately, Zzyxz wasn't the target of the day; that honor fell to
Rainbow Basin, a few miles north of Barstow on the road to Fort Irwin.
We'd actually tried to go to Rainbow Basin once before while passing
through Barstow, but got lost. This time we had a more detailed map,
since Rainbow Basin occupies a whole chapter in Geology Underfoot,
Southern California.
Except it turned out that map wasn't any better than the wide-scale
auto club map. The problem is that when you're coming in from the
northeast, there's an exit off I-15 for "Fort Irwin Rd", even though
no such exit shows on any of the maps. Fort Irwin Rd. is the road all
the maps show as leading to Rainbow Basin. So that's the road to
take, right?
Well, it turns out that Fort Irwin Rd and the more westward Irwin Rd
angle together to meet at a point well north of the Rainbow Basin
turnoff, which is on Irwin Rd. Irwin Rd. is the road all the maps
label as Fort Irwin Rd, while Fort Irwin Rd. doesn't exist on the maps
at all. Confused yet?
Here's the secret: if you exit I-15 at Fort Irwin Rd, make a left when
you get to Irwin Rd. and angle back toward Barstow. Drive for longer
than you think you should, and Look for a dirt road going off to the
right called Fossil Beds Rd, which has no signs whatsoever related to
Rainbow Basin even though supposedly there's a sign for it if you're
coming in the other direction. Once you find Fossil Beds Rd, you're
on track, and there are signs for the rest of the way.
Is it worth bothering with all this? Absolutely! Geology
Underfoot rightly recommends starting with the "scenic loop
drive", a short, one lane, one way dirt road that looks a little rough
but really shouldn't be a problem for any car (at least when dry).
It winds down through narrow canyons composed of colorful highly
tilted layers of mudstone and tuff, then up a little hill to a parking
area which offers a panoramic view of the Barstow Syncline, where
the rock layers have been warped by fault compression into a
striking U-shaped depression in an action mimicking the larger
scale raising of the Transverse Ranges north of the Los Angeles basin
by the San Andreas fault.
Curiously, on an intensely crowded weekend, Rainbow Basin was almost
deserted. At the Syncline parking area we joined one other vehicle,
a white van belonging to the "Loma Linda Department of Natural
Sciences (Geology and Biology)". We never did spot the Loma Lindans;
presumably they were down in the syncline measuring strike and dip.
I hope my class field trips turn out to be this interesting.
Geology Underfoot recommends following the scenic drive with a
hike of Owl Canyon, from Rainbow Basin's camping area, so we did so.
The Owl Canyon trail offers a chance to walk through the axis of the
syncline, up a mostly-dry creekbed to a dry waterfall. The colors
aren't as impressive as the layers visible from the scenic loop, but
the more subtle colors are interesting: the book mentions the green
mudstone all along the wash (green from weathering of volcanic ash,
not from copper) but doesn't mention the strikingly colorful granites
washed down into the canyon, reds and bright greens as well as greys
and blacks.
Along the way, there's a short cave in the side of the canyon marking
a tributary which runs in wet weather. The book recommends bringing
flashlights if one wishes to explore the cave. Since we had only
bought the book a day earlier, we weren't well prepared for that;
fortunately, I had my little blue LED keychain flashlight clipped
to my water bottle, which turned out to be fine since the cave was
so short.
Rainbow Basin was an excellent conclusion to our Mojave desert trip.
This well hidden pocket park is well worth a side trip if you're
anywhere near Barstow and have any interest in geology, or just
in a short scenic drive among colorful desert rocks.
Assuming, of course, that you can find the road in.
Tags: travel, mojave
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22:31 Apr 03, 2005
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Fri, 01 Apr 2005
The East Mojave National Reserve is the nation's newest member of the
national park system, signed into law as one of President Clinton's
final acts. Growing up in LA, I'd driven through various parts of
the Mojave desert since I was old enough to drive, but I hadn't been
there since the park was created, and I didn't have much idea what
specific interesting places might be there, except for Kelso Dunes,
distantly visible from the interstate near Baker and always intriguing
on our previous trips.
But where to go? I had no information about what was where, just
an auto club road map and the topographic map collection I've been
using to work on my pytopo program.
The road map had ranger hat symbols at the town of Baker,
at Mitchell Caverns down at the south end of the preserve, and at
an obscure intersection of two minor roads in the south-central part
of the reserve.
Dave didn't want to go to Baker -- it's a tacky little town whose two
claims to fame are the World's Tallest Thermometer and a restaurant
called the Bun Boy, though I have fond memories of our stay at Baker
on the first night of our first trip together.
Mitchell Caverns was too far and likely to be too crowded during
spring break week. So we decided on the third option, which followed
a road that led toward Kelso Dunes. Even if we didn't find a ranger
station, at least we'd see the dunes; and there was an intriguing
place somewhere along the road called "Hole in the Wall" which sounded
worth checking out.
Roads in the preserve are mostly dirt, but are well graded and
very well signed, and finding our way was no problem.
Wonder of wonders, Hole in the Wall is the ranger station and
campground marked on the auto club roadmap, and they have a very
nice visitor's center and bookshop. Although they
didn't have any books on the geology of the area (not their fault:
no one has written one and they wish someone would!) they did have
another in the "Geology Underfoot" series which covered, among other
places, Rainbow Basin, tomorrow's target.
Newly armed with books and maps, we headed down the Rings Trail,
Hole in the Wall's showpiece. It's short (though it connects to
several much longer trails), fun and interesting:
you scramble down over blocks of the colorful local tuff until you get
to a steep slot, where metal rings have been bolted into the rock to
provide handholds. Two such ring ladders and a bit more rock
scrambling get you to the bottom of the slot canyon, where you can
admire the fabulous colorful tuff towers above you, inspect the
interesting tuff and volcanic breccia comprising the rocks, with
their inclusions of hornblende, obsidian and other interesting
minerals, and walk out to where the canyon emerges into normal Mojave
desert with a view of the Providence Mountains and Mid Hills.
A very rewarding stop, and a fascinating place.
One curiosity about the Hole in the Wall Ring Trail: the sign at the
trailhead makes a big deal about how strenuous the hike is. It's not
really all that strenuous (the two ring climbs are short) but it could
be unnerving for someone with poor balance or a fear of heights,
too narrow for very overweight people, and of course it's not at
all wheelchair accessible. But what they don't mention: if you drive
south a few hundred feet on the road and turn west onto Wild Horse
Canyon loop, in a very short distance you're more or less at the
bottom of the Ring Trail. It's not as fun as climbing down the ring
ladders, but would be well worthwhile for someone who couldn't see
the canyon any other way.
With time left in the day, we took another route to Kelso Dunes,
going back the way we came but by way of Wild Horse Canyon Rd,
which the ranger recommended. I'm not sure why; there wasn't much on
that road which we hadn't already seen from other roads. But taking
the seemingly more direct route to Kelso, it turned out, involved
quite a lot of slow jeep trail and probably would have taken quite a
bit longer, so no harm done.
The highest of the Kelso Dunes rises to 600 feet, dwarfing the
140 foot rise of the famous Mesquite Dunes in Death Valley.
Since I'd missed yet another chance to explore and
photograph the Mesquite dunes a few days earlier,
I was happy to be at Kelso.
The parking area was packed, but there's plenty of room on the
sand: it wasn't crowded away from the parking lot. Getting to the
dunes involves fighting for some portion of a mile along a
deep sandy trail, then scrabbling your way up the side of the dunes.
The dunes are covered with wind ripples and tracks of all sorts of
animals (mostly lizards, insects, hikers, and their dogs and children)
and plants (the dune grass bends in the wind, and the tips of each
blade make an arc in the sand.)
Near the top, you start feeling like an Everest trekker: you eye
the cornice of sand along the ridge to the north, and watch the
turbulent eddies of sand blowing off the tip of the peak above you
as the wind howls past and threatens to blow you off the mountain.
Well, okay, admittedly it's a bit warmer and you don't need oxygen
tanks.
We went as high as the Hillary Step, but Dave's eyes were protesting
from too much sand under his contact lenses, and the wind got worse
with every foot ascended, so we stopped there. Our sherpas had long
since deserted us.
Descending is much quicker than ascending. For one thing, you can
take giant moon leaps, or "ski" down the sides of steep slopes, if you
don't mind getting your shoes full of sand. Alas, the long level slog
from the base of the dunes back to the parking lot is no easier in the
return direction.
We drove out via Kelbaker Rd, past perhaps the most perfect collection
of cinder cones I've ever seen together in one area. The map says
they have a lava tube there, too. We'll have to come back and check
it out some time.
Tags: travel, mojave
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09:26 Apr 01, 2005
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Thu, 31 Mar 2005
Valley of Fire State Park, in Nevada, is in the Lake Mead National
Recreational Area near the northeast end of Lake Mead.
It's an auspicious location, because the Valley of Fire exit from
interstate 15 is at the trading post run by our favorite local Indian
tribe, the Moapa.
In addition to not-completely-unreasonable gas prices and a
huge assortment of fireworks, they sometimes have a trailer outside the
store from which they sell "Really Good Beef Jerky" (it says so right
on the sign). It really is "really good", the best I've had anywhere,
even though it turns out to be imported from Wyoming and not made
locally by the Moapa. Dave and I always look for the jerky trailer
when we're passing through.
We had some idea what to expect from the Valley of Fire, because on a
recent trip we stumbled upon an excellent little rest area north of
Lake Mead called "Redstone", which included well made interpretive
signs explaining that the deep red rock was Aztec Sandstone.
Indeed, the Valley of Fire is Aztec Sandstone, whose fiery color
inspires the name; but the park turned out to be sizeable and varied,
full of color changes and scenic vistas, excellent petroglyphs, and,
oh, yes, a wildflower assortment that puts Death Valley's celebrated
wildflowers to shame.
We expected a quick drive-through, but had no trouble whiling away the
entire day in the park, including three short hikes and a lot of happy
scrambling over rocks. It's comparable to the excellent Arches
national park near Moab, in size, variety, and character. The Aztec
even forms arches like the Entrada above Moab, though it tends toward
lots of small arches rather than the big sweeping spans of the
Entrada.
Unlike Arches, though, it isn't terribly informative (Arches being
surprising good about explanations compared to most national parks).
The Valley of Fire's signs and visitor's center are rather light on details.
Why is the sandstone so deeply red in some places (well, iron, sure,
but why so much more iron than other places?) and white or bright
yellow in others? Why is it called Aztec? What makes the seams/dikes
which are so prominent in the white formations near White Domes area?
Is it just coincidence that Aztec and Entrada sandstone, both so
intensely red compared to most sandstone, also share the unusual
property of forming arches?
The visitor's center has a decent geology timeline with stratigraphic
columns and a diagram of the fault as a fixed exhibit, plus
kiosks with photos of common flora and fauna, but nothing you
can take away with you, and they sell no books beyond lightweight
coffee table fluff. "Sorry -- we keep telling them they should make
something like that," apologized the lady at the gift shop counter.
We had just enough light left after leaving the park to make a quick
trip down a dirt road to a ledge overlooking the north end of Lake
Mead. The lake level was quite low; the ingress of the lake was far
downstream of the location given on the map. Last summer, the LA
Times reported that Mead was at record low levels, and the lost town
of St. Thomas, submerged since the reservoir was first filled, had
reappeared, delighting archaeologists and historians. I'd assumed
that this was long past, after this year's unusually wet winter, but
the lake level was still quite low: and at the St. Thomas overlook,
several objects looking like the tops of buildings peeked out from
beneath the water's surface. Further research will be required to
find out whether we actually spotted St. Thomas.
Tags: travel, mojave
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09:55 Mar 31, 2005
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Wed, 30 Mar 2005
Passing through Death Valley wasn't the point of our Mojave trip, but it
seemed like a nice bonus. Everyone's been talking about how due to
the unprecedented southern California rains, this spring is a record
year for wildflowers in Death Valley.
Of course, what that really meant was that everyone in the western
half of the US decided to spend their spring break week there.
Stovepipe Wells was a zoo.
But I wanted to see Mosaic Canyon, rumored to be a good slot canyon,
and favored in "Geology Underfoot: Owens Valley and Death Valley"
for breccia containing fragments of the precambrian Noonday dolomite.
It's a fabulous canyon. The book got so involved in talking about the
breccia and stream undercutting that it didn't mention the gorgeous,
smooth, veined, water-cut dolomite comprising a long and narrow slot
canyon for the first half mile or so of the hike. Farther upcanyon,
warping caused by the Mosaic Canyon fault creates impressive exposures
in the walls.
After reluctantly leaving Mosaic Canyon, our route led us down the
Badwater road, where the fabled wildflowers were impressive in number,
if not in color (almost all yellow, with a few small whites and pale
purples). The photographers, too, were impressive in number if not in
intelligence, tending to back into the roadway in front of traffic at
unpredictable times. The fields were full of people looking for just
the perfect flower for their shot.
I'd heard rumours that Badwater was flooded, to the point where people
were kayaking there. Not true: the water wasn't deep enough for
kayaking, but the shallows were full of families and couples wading
barefoot in the brine. We didn't wade, just walked to the water's
edge and admired the new incarnation of ancient Lake Manly, the huge
lake which once filled all of Death Valley, sparkling in the sun.
South of Badwater the flowers were a little denser, but didn't change
very much in character until we left the park, where yellow coreopsis
gave way to bushes covered with bright orange dodder, a parasitic
plant that I think of as "silly string plant" because it covers other
plants with a thin, bright orange string that looks like "silly
string" sprayed out of cans.
Our last stop was just a few miles east of the town of Shoshone:
a roadcut highly recommended by the Geology Underfoot book, which
devoted a whole chapter to it. Rightly so! A strikingly weird black
stripe which appears to be a coal seam is clearly, upon closer
inspection, a layer of obsidian sandwiched between red rhyolite
layers with interesting inclusions. Both the obsidian and the
rhyolite includes bits of quartz. A little farther up the roadcut,
past the obsidian, are two striking vertical faults. Quite amazing,
and I'm glad we made a point of taking that route.
Tags: travel, mojave
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23:30 Mar 30, 2005
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Sun, 27 Mar 2005
I couldn't stop myself -- I wrote up a little topo map viewer in
PyGTK, so I can move around with arrow keys or by clicking near the
edges. It makes it a lot easier to navigate the map directory if
I don't know the exact starting coordinates.
It's called PyTopo,
and it's in the same
place as my earlier two topo scripts.
I think CoordsToFilename has some bugs; the data CD also has some
holes, and some directories don't seem to exist in the expected
place. I haven't figured that out yet.
Tags: programming, python, gtk, pygtk, mapping, GIS
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18:53 Mar 27, 2005
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]
I've long wished for something like those topographic map packages
I keep seeing in stores. The USGS (US Geological Survey) sells
digitized versions of their maps, but there's a hefty setup fee
for setting up an order, so it's only reasonable when buying large
collections all at once.
There are various Linux mapping applications which do things like
download squillions of small map sections from online mapping sites,
but they're all highly GPS oriented and I haven't had much luck
getting them to work without one. I don't (yet?) have a GPS;
but even if I had one, I usually want to make maps for places I've
been or might go, not for where I am right now. (I don't generally
carry a laptop along on hikes!)
The Topo!
map/software packages sold in camping/hiking stores (sometimes
under the aegis of National Geographic
are very reasonably priced. But of course, the software is
written for Windows (and maybe also Mac), not much help to Linux
users, and the box gives no indication of the format of the data.
Googling is no help; it seems no Linux user has ever
tried buying one of these packages to see what's inside.
The employees at my local outdoor equipment store (Mel Cotton's)
were very nice without knowing the answer, and offered
the sensible suggestion of calling the phone number on the box,
which turns out to be a small local company, "Wildflower Productions",
located in San Francisco.
Calling Wildflower, alas, results in an all too familiar runaround:
a touchtone menu tree where no path results in the possibility of
contact with a human. Sometimes I wonder why companies bother to
list a phone number at all, when they obviously have no intention
of letting anyone call in.
Concluding that the only way to find out was to buy one, I did so.
A worthwhile experiment, as it turned out! The maps inside are
simple GIF files, digitized from the USGS 7.5-minute series and,
wonder of wonders, also from the discontinued but still useful
15-minute series.
Each directory contains GIF files covering the area of one
7.5 minute map, in small .75-minute square pieces,
including pieces of the 15-minute map covering the same area.
A few minutes of hacking with python and
Image Magick
resulted in a script to stitch together all images
in one directory to make one full USGS 7.5 minute map;
after a few hours of hacking, I can stitch
a map of arbitrary size given start and end longitude and latitude.
My initial scripts,
such as they are.
Of course, I don't yet have nicities like a key, or an interactive
scrolling window, or interpretation of the USGS digital elevation
data. I expect I have more work to do. But for now, just
being able to generate and print maps for a specific area is a huge boon,
especially with all the mapping we're doing in Field Geology class.
GIMP's "measure" tool will come in handy for measuring distances
and angles!
Tags: programming, python, gtk, pygtk
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12:13 Mar 27, 2005
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]
I took a respite from wrestling with broken motherboards on
Thursday for a short mid-day walk at Shoreline, looking for birds.
What I found instead was schoolchildren, everywhere!
Maybe 20 different groups, each consisting of about 10 kids
(perhaps 5th grade or so?) and 2-3 adults.
The students all carried binoculars and bird books;
some of the adults carried scopes.
With so many people in the park, the birds weren't as
plentiful as usual, but I didn't mind:
it was fun to see how interested the kids were and
how much fun they seemed to be having. One group spotted
a hummer six feet off the trail in a bush; binoculars came up,
pages flipped, faces concentrated, and there was a chorus of
"Anna's hummingbird!" and "Ooh, look, he's so beautiful!"
Really fun. Watching kids get excited about learning is
more fun than watching birds!
(Reminds me of Ed Greenberg's comment at an
SJAA star party:
"The only thing cooler than Saturn is a kid looking at Saturn.")
Tags: nature, birds
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Wed, 16 Mar 2005
Debate rages on the
mozilla-seamonkey
list since the Mozilla Foundation announced that there would be no
1.8 release of the Mozilla browser (also called "the suite",
or by its code name, "seamonkey"). Suite users are frustrated at
lack of notice: anyone who was paying attention knew that seamonkey
was going to be dropped eventually, but everyone expected at least
a 1.8 final release. Mozilla.org is frustrated because they wish
suite users would quit whining and switch to Firefox.
Various people are slinging flames and insults, while a few
try to mediate with logic and sense. There's a
volunteer
effort ramping up to continue support for the suite, but no
plans for what to do about fixing all the regressions.
Go read the list if you want all the gory details.
Anyway, the writing on the wall (and on the newsgroup) is clear: if
you want a browser with continuing support from mozilla.org, Firefox
is your only choice. Unfortunately for Linux users, firefox is designed
by and for Windows users, copying Internet Explorer's user interface and
dropping support for a number of nice features which the old mozilla
browser offered.
I've decided that the best way to get a usable browser is to take
firefox and put back the mozilla features that I miss. Mostly
these are easy user interface tweaks. I pulled a tree last week and
had most of the items that were blocking me addressed in a few hours.
Building wasn't entirely straightforward: the build page doesn't make
all the options clear, like the fact that xft and freetype are both
enabled by default, so one of them has to be explicitly disabled.
Updating the tree turns out to be a bit problematic: firefox' build
dependencies turn out to be dicy, so sometimes changing a single .xul
file causes the entire tree to rebuild, while other times an update
builds a few files and the resulting build fails to run, and
requires a clobber and a rebuild. Still, those problems are
relatively minor.
So far, I have fixes for these bugs:
- bug 233853
:
Ctrl-enter in the urlbar should open in a new tab, like ctrl-click
does on a link. (Firefox uses ctrl-click but alt-enter.)
I have no use for the IE ctrl-enter urlbar behavior (add .com or
something to whatever is there, so if you're trying to search for
linux browser you get "http://linux browser.com" instead of
a new tab with a google search for linux browser).
Good UI design dictates that the same modifier
should be used for the same function, as it was in mozilla.
- bug 245015
:
Shift-click should do Save As. Another thing I do many times a day,
and Firefox offers no shortcut for it at all.
- Bugs 234110
and 66834:
Disable the urlbar dropdown that flickers distractingly
as I type, and steals system focus so that I can't do anything
outside the firefox window until I dismiss the dropdown.
- Add a binding for ctrl-Q so I can quit the browser easily from the
keyboard. (I can't find the relevant bug number.)
Next up: try to figure out why firefox takes so much longer than
mozilla to start up. Fortunately, once it's up, it seems just as
fast at browsing, but startup takes forever, and firefox doesn't even
offer a splash option to tell me that something is happening.
Here is
my
patch, in case anyone else is bothered by these issues.
Perhaps this could be built as an extension. Some day I'll look
into that. Certainly the current set of patches could be implemented
as a script which exploded, edited, and re-packed the .jar archives
in a firefox binary build, since the patch touches no C++ code as yet.
I'm calling my firefox-derived browser "Kitfox".
Tags: programming
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12:03 Mar 16, 2005
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Tue, 15 Mar 2005
Dave and I went flying (radio controlled model airplanes) at Baylands
last Saturday.
Dave got to the tables first, with the toolbox and one plane.
I followed, carrying two of my planes. As I walked up to the table,
some guy I hadn't seen there before chuckled, indicated Dave and said
"Heh, I see he's got someone to carry his stuff for him."
I gave him a strange look and a "Huh?" and then "No, he can carry
his own stuff."
It eventually dawned on the guy that those planes I was carrying
were my own, and I was going to fly them (perhaps the transmitter hanging
from its strap around my neck was a clue?), and he apologized.
It's amazing how often this happens; about every other time
I fly there, there's some guy reacting like "Unbelievable!
She has breasts, yet she flies airplanes! How can this be?"
It's not that they're unfriendly -- usually they're much
more complimentary than this particular fellow.
But it can get old being the phenomenal talking
dog week after week. I'm reminded of the recommendation in
Val's "How To Encourage Women in Linux" document: "Don't
stare and point when women arrive".
Fortunately, the Bayland regulars aren't like that, so it's not
quite that "stranger walks into a bar" scene mentioned in Val's howto.
But it's frequent enough that I bet it discourages women newbies.
I guess I shouldn't be surprised, based on the state of model airplane
magazines, which are still stuck at that pleistocene "Each month's
cover shows a different scantily clad bimbo with big tits and lots
of lipstick, posing with an airplane" stage from which most other
male-dominated hobbies graduated ten or fifteen years ago, or longer.
I was thinking about that today after class when, as I was getting
ready to ride home, a woman walking to her car hailed me with some bike
questions, and we had a nice talk about motorcycling.
She said her boyfriend thought she might be too short to ride
(she was about my height, possibly a little shorter)
but she'd seen a Rebel at a Honda dealer and was pretty
sure she could ride that. I assured her a Rebel should be no
problem, nor should a small sportbike like a Ninja 250. I offered
to let her try straddling my CB-1 (about the same height as a Ninja
250), but she declined -- on her way somewhere, and perhaps
nervous about sitting on someone else's bike.
Anyway, she had already decided to take the MSF course and get all
the safety gear before buying a bike -- she'd obviously thought it
through, and had come to all the right conclusions on her own.
You go, girl!
(I probably should have thought to tell her about the
Short Bike
List FAQ.)
Tags: chix, planes
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23:40 Mar 15, 2005
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Mon, 07 Mar 2005
The
acquittals
in the Pakistan gang rape case are an outrage.
You may have read about the case: a village tribunal in a remote
area of Pakistan passed sentence that Mukhtar Mai be gang raped
to punish her brother for an offense he allegedly committed
(though most news reports indicated that he was not guilty
of the offense, which was actually committed by one of the
rapists. Not that that has any bearing on whether a wholly
innocent woman should be raped for someone else's supposed crimes.)
The case spawned international outrage in a world previously
unaware of the brutality of Pakistan's archaic tribunal system.
The rapists were convicted and sentenced to death; but last
week, their conviction was overturned.
Mukhtar Mai is a hero for standing up to them and continuing to
press her case. I can't imagine what it must be like to be in
her position. I am in awe of her.
Mai's courage will help every woman in Pakistan,
and in other countries with similar disregard for women's humanity.
And not only that: she's using any financial gains from the case
to build schools in her village. She's built two already.
Several of the BBC followup stories have mentioned that most women
"sentenced" under this barbaric system, to be raped or otherwise
mistreated for the supposed offenses of male members of their clan,
accept their fate, "believing that tribal or feudal leaders are too
powerful to resist and that the police and judicial systems are
stacked against them." If anyone wonders why they might think that,
last week's acquittal should answer any such questions rather handily.
None of the stories I've read anywhere goes into detail on
the reason for the conviction having been overturned, besides the
vague "lack of evidence". This seems odd considering all the reports
of the original trial cited eyewitnesses. It's not clear why
so few details are being reported. No one mentions the
double standard which seems to be in place in Pakistan:
where was the opportunity for Mai or her brother to appeal her
outrageous punishment for his supposed crime?
The case will be
appealed to a higher court, following international outrage at the
current verdict. It is not yet clear whether the rapists will remain
in prison until then.
Tags: headlines
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21:37 Mar 07, 2005
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]
Catching up with events of the past week ...
My Field Geology class had its first field
trip on Saturday. Great fun, and lovely weather and scenery --
the meadows were full of wildflowers and meadowlarks.
We didn't study many actual rock formations, though we did see some
lovely marble, gneiss, and quartzite outcrops and several sinkholes.
Mostly we practiced mapping skills with the Brunton pocket transit,
triangulating bearings and measuring elevations to plot contours.
Today I went to the USGS to pick up some maps for local mapping
practice, only to find that they've discontinued the 15' series, and
I'd have to get a huge number of 7.5' maps (at $6 each) to cover the
areas I need to sight. I got three maps, which turned out to be
vastly insufficient for my one practice hike so far. I may need to
get some downloadable ones and do my own printing.
Meanwhile, there are other signs of spring: at home, a mockingbird has
been singing fairly regularly for a week now (before that, there were
sporadic short bursts of song but nothing sustained), and I saw one of
the Audubon's warblers carrying nest-building material. And at the
Los Gatos perc ponds, a killdeer
has decided to nest on the grass right next to the entrance road.
The rangers have her area roped off, and she doesn't seem too upset by
all the traffic passing by. She wasn't actually sitting on the
nest when we went to see her; she sat or crouched in several different
places in the grass, not just in one spot.
Finally, at Stevens Creek reservoir, a log near the inlet of the
reservoir 1hangout spot for
the lake's turtle population.
Tags: nature
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21:21 Mar 07, 2005
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]
Thu, 03 Mar 2005
Slate
and
Editor
and Publisher report that several major newspapers have dropped
Monday's
Boondocks comic strip.
In the strip, one character reads from a newspaper, "Bush got
recorded admitting that he smoked weed." Another character quips,
"Maybe he smoked it to take the edge off the coke."
The best part of the story:
the Chicago Tribune's given reason for censoring the comic was
that it "presents inaccurate information as fact."
It's not clear which part of the comic was the inaccurate
information presented as fact. The news
about the tape recording in question, which was widely printed
and has not been disputed by the White House? Or the quip in response,
the one that starts with "maybe"?
If the Chicago Tribune is so worried about inaccurate
information presented as fact ... does that mean that they will no
longer be reporting on Bush's speeches and press releases?
Tags: headlines
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09:54 Mar 03, 2005
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Wed, 02 Mar 2005
I like to keep my laptop's boot sequence lean and mean, so it
can boot very quickly. (Eventually I'll write about this in
more detail.) Recently I made some tweaks, and then went through
a couple of dist-upgrades (it's currently running Debian "sarge"),
and had some glitches. Some of what I learned was interesting
enough to be worth sharing.
First, apache stopped serving http://localhost/ -- not
important for most machines, but on the laptop it's nice to be
able to use a local web server when there's no network connected.
Further investigation revealed that this had nothing to do with
apache: it was localhost that wasn't working, for any port.
I thought perhaps my recent install of 2.4.29 was at fault, since
some configuration had changed, but that wasn't it either.
Eventually I discovered that the lo interface was there,
but wasn't being configured, because my boot-time tweaking had
disabled the ifupdown boot-time script, normally called from
/etc/rcS.d.
That's all straightforward, and I restored ifupdown to its
rightful place using update-rc.d ifupdown start 39 S .
Dancer suggested apt-get install --reinstall ifupdown
which sounds like a better way; I'll do that next time. But
meanwhile, what's this ifupdown-clean script that gets installed
as S18ifupdown-clean ?
I asked around, but nobody seemed to know, and googling doesn't
make it any clearer. The script obviously cleans up something
related to /etc/network/ifstate, which seems to be a text
file holding the names of the currently configured network
interfaces. Why? Wouldn't it be better to get this information
from the kernel or from ifconfig? I remain unclear as to what the
ifstate file is for or why ifupdown-clean is needed.
Now my loopback interface worked -- hurray!
But after another dist-upgrade, now eth0 stopped working.
It turns out there's a new hotplug in town. (I knew this
because apt-get asked me for permission to overwrite
/etc/hotplug/net.agent; the changes were significant enough
that I said yes, fully aware that this would likely break eth0.)
The new net.agent comes with comments referencing
NET_AGENT_POLICY in /etc/default/hotplug, and documentation
in /usr/share/doc/hotplug/README.Debian. I found the
documentation baffling -- did NET_AGENT_POLICY=all mean that
it would try to configure all interfaces on boot, or only that
it would try to configure them when they were hotplugged?
It turns out it means the latter. net.agent defaults to
NET_AGENT_POLICY=hotplug, which doesn't do anything unless you
edit /etc/network/interfaces and make a bunch of changes;
but changing NET_AGENT_POLICY=all makes hotplug "just work".
I didn't even have to excise LIFACE from the net.agent code,
like I needed to in the previous release. And it still works
fine with all my existing Network
Schemes entries in /etc/network/interfaces.
This new hotplug looks like a win for laptop users. I haven't
tried it with usb yet, but I have no reason to worry about that.
Speaking of usb, hotplug, and the laptop: I'm forever hoping
to switch to the 2.6 kernel, because it handles usb hotplug so much
better than 2.4; but so far, I've been prevented by PCMCIA hotplug
issues and general instability when the laptop suspends and resumes.
(2.6 works fine on the desktop, where PCMCIA and power management
don't come into play.)
A few days ago, I built both 2.4.29 and 2.6.10, since I was behind
on both branches. 2.4.29 works fine. 2.6.10, alas, is even less
stable than 2.6.9 was. On the laptop's very first resume from BIOS
suspend after the first 2.6.10 boot, it hung, in the same way I'd
been seeing sporadically from 2.6.9: no keyboard lights blinking
(so not a kernel "oops"), cpu fan sometimes spinning,
and no keyboard response to ctl-alt-Fn or anything else.
I suppose the next step is to hook up the "magic sysrq" key and see
if it responds to the keyboard at all when in that state.
Tags: linux, debian, networking, hotplug
[
23:06 Mar 02, 2005
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]
Mon, 21 Feb 2005
In the storm a couple of days ago, our server crashed: turned out
we had some sort of power glitch that killed the UPS. Curiously,
the other machines stayed up, including mine. I thought everything
was fine, until I tried to power down that evening and found myself
in an infinite-reboot cycle.
Since then my machine has been increasingly flaky, sometimes
sending no video signal to the monitor at startup, sometimes not
booting at all, never able to power down. Dave suggested
downloading the latest BIOS and re-flashing.
The motherboard is a GigaByte GA-6VTXE (amusingly, the manual for it
doesn't mention the company name anywhere, so I had to google for the
model). It turns out that it has an option ("Q-Flash")
to flash a new BIOS image without needing Windows or DOS. Hooray!
Sounded good, anyway: but the download images for the BIOS updates
were a bit worrisome since they had names like bios_6vtxe_f9.exe.
I downloaded the latest and put the .exe on a DOS-formatted floppy.
The BIOS saw the file on the floppy, but said it was the wrong size
(469k when it expected 256k).
Turns out that the file does need to be extracted from Windows
in order to turn that 469k .exe file into the expected 256k image.
It can't be unpacked by unzip, unrar or any other Linux utility I've found.
In other words, GigaByte is making their download files twice as big
as they need to be in order to introduce an unnecessary
Windows requirement into the Q-Flash process, which otherwise would
be completely independant of operating system.
Sigh. (And no, the BIOS update didn't fix the problems, which are
probably hardware. But it was worth a try.)
(Update: looks like it was the obvious, the power supply.)
Tags: linux, bios
[
13:28 Feb 21, 2005
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]
Sat, 19 Feb 2005
Encouraged by my success a few days ago at finally learning how to
disable vim's ctrl-spacebar behavior, the next day I went back to
an emacs problem that's been bugging me for a while: in text mode,
newline-and-indent always wants to indent the first line of a
text file (something I almost never want), and skips blank lines
when calculating indent (so starting a new paragraph doesn't reset
the indent back to zero).
I had already googled to no avail, and had concluded that the only way
was to write a new text-indent function which could be bound to the
return key in the text mode hook.
This went fairly smoothly: I got a little help in #emacs
with checking the pattern immediately before the cursor (though
I turned out not to need that after all)
and for the function called "bobp" (beginning of buffer predicate).
Here's what I ended up with:
(defun newline-and-text-indent ()
"Insert a newline, then indent the next line sensibly for text"
(interactive)
(if (or (bobp)
(looking-at "^$"))
(newline)
(newline-and-indent)
))
(defun text-indent-hook ()
(local-set-key "\C-m" 'newline-and-text-indent)
)
(setq text-mode-hook 'text-indent-hook)
It seems to work fine. For the curious, here's my current
.emacs
Tags: emacs, editors
[
14:03 Feb 19, 2005
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]
Fri, 18 Feb 2005
Lunch in the backyard, in the sun and cool wind
(I wouldn't mind a few more "rainy days" like this!)
celery and tuna salad
(have to eat it outside, a courtesy to d, who dislikes the smell)
flavored with fresh dill from the garden
(a welcome winter volunteer that pushed up next to the geraniums last week)
watching the puffy cumulus clouds billow and grow and change
and threaten to grow into thunderheads,
forgetting they're in California now
with a little lenticular stratus tucked inside of one of them
(what's that about?)
The resident phoebe chirps, hunting, while
a lone intrepid bushtit whizzes in from across the street
checks out the guava tree, then the orange tree, then zips
off to the bush at the edge of the yard
(never seen a bushtit flying alone before. A bushtit bellwether?)
Far off to the west, a blue balloon flies free,
rising against the billowing clouds.
Tags: misc
[
17:38 Feb 18, 2005
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]
Lina discovered this.
Google for "matriarchal".
Google asks:
Did you mean:
patriarchal
Tags: chix
[
11:12 Feb 18, 2005
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]
Thu, 17 Feb 2005
One of those niggling problems that has plagued me for a long
time: in the editor vim, if I'm typing along in insert mode and
instead of a space I accidentally hit control-space, vim inserts
a bunch of text I didn't want, then exits insert mode. Meanwhile
I'm still merrily typing away, typing what are now vim comments
which invariably end up deleting the last two paragraphs I typed
then doing several more operations which end up erasing the undo
buffer so I can't get those paragraphs back.
Ctrl-space inserts a null character (you can verify this by
putting it in a file and running od -xc on it).
I've done lots of googling in the past, but it's hard to google on
strings like " " or even "space" or "null", and nobody I asked had a
clue what this function was called (it turns out it re-inserts
whatever the last inserted characters were) so I couldn't google
on the function name.
Vim's help suggests that <Nul>, <Char-0>, or
<C-^V > should do it. I tried them with map, vmap,
cmap, and nmap, to no avail. I also tried <C-@> since
that's a historical way of referring to the null character,
googling found some references to that in vim, and that's how it
displays if I type it in vim.
I finally found #vim on freenode, and asked there. Last night
nobody knew, but this morning, p0g found the problem: I needed
to use imap, not the map/vmap/cmap/nmap I'd been using.
So here, perserved for google posterity in case other people are
plagued by this problem, is the answer:
imap <Nul> <Space>
For good measure, I also mapped the character to no-op in all the
other modes as well:
map <Nul> <Nop>
vmap <Nul> <Nop>
cmap <Nul> <Nop>
nmap <Nul> <Nop>
My current .vimrc.
Tags: vim, editors, tips
[
11:24 Feb 17, 2005
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]
Wed, 16 Feb 2005
I am just utterly not understanding this story on "The Leak".
The news yesterday: Matthew Cooper (Time magazine) and
Judith Miller (the New York Times) are to be subpoenaed in
the ongoing "Leak" case. (LA
Times, or via
Yahoo)
You remember "The Leak". Joseph Wilson, the CIA investigator sent
to Niger to trace rumours that Saddam Hussein had tried to purchase
"yellowcake" uranium, wrote an opinion column in the New York Times
accusing President Bush of "misrepresenting the facts on an issue
that was fundamental justification for going to war." Wilson's
published report had stated the rumours were false, but Bush
ignored the report and quoted the rumours as fact in his 2003 State
of the Union address.
Roughly a week later, Washington Post columnist Robert Novak wrote
that Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, was a CIA operative, citing
information from a "senior administration official".
It being a crime to reveal the identity of an undercover CIA
operative, Bush at the time vowed to "find the leak".
The current update in the case means two other reporters,
Cooper and Miller, who supposedly were also contacted by the
same "senior administration official", will be called to testify
as to the identity of the person who contacted them.
If they refuse, they face imprisonment for contempt of court.
The papers are full of outraged articles arguing that reporters
should never be forced to reveal sources, and waving their "First
Amendment" flags. And that's fine -- I have no problem with
journalists protecting sources.
What I completely don't understand is: Why are Matthew Cooper and
Judith Miller, who never wrote anything about the case, being
subpoenaed and threatened with improsonment, while Robert Novak,
who wrote the article which started all this, is not?
Why, in all the journalistic breast-beating which has accompanied
this case, does no one ever suggest concentrating on Novak to find
The Leak's identity?
Novak is the reporter who published the article outing Plame.
Novak is the reporter who clearly had a source.
Sure, question other sources, but why isn't Novak the prime,
number-one source in this investigation?
A cynical friend says it's because Novak is a Bush administration
mouthpiece, who did the administration's bidding in publishing the
article, while Cooper and Miller did not.
Perhaps. But if that's the case, shouldn't that itself be news?
Tags: headlines
[
12:12 Feb 16, 2005
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]
Tue, 15 Feb 2005
Lots of Linux blogging software, such as the pyblosxom I'm currently
using, uses the Unix file date on for each posting to determine
the date at which the entry was made.
This makes it very convenient to add new entries, but it also
makes it tricky to go back and update an old entry without losing
all information about when the entry was originally posted.
I've been using a little sh script I hacked up for the purpose,
which parsed the output of ls -l and then passed that in to
touch -d.
It worked, but it was ugly and had problems with postings that
crossed a year boundary or were too old (because the ls -l
format varies).
I finally got around to rewriting the script in python.
It's more robust now, and cleaner, plus it checks EDITOR and
VISUAL instead of always using vi.
blogedit
Tags: blogging
[
23:51 Feb 15, 2005
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]
Thu, 10 Feb 2005
I'm back in college, after [mumble] years away. What fun!
I'm taking Field Geology, something I've wanted to take for years.
I've been reading geology books for years, but there's a wide abyss
between reading about limestone and olivine, and being able to
identify random rocks in any location we hike.
So far, two weeks in, the class is great. The instructor is
enthusiastic and interesting. Most of the students are geology fans
like me, taking the course out of fascination for the subject. (Not
all kids, either; several are returning students, like me. Is that
a euphemism? Hey, Akkana, why don't you just say "old farts"?)
Yesterday's lab was "Here's a box of sedimentary rocks, here's a
bottle of acid, identify the rocks." Fun! I can hardly wait for
the field trips. (Dave: How was your class? Me: We dropped acid!
Dave: Really? Is it too late to sign up? Me: On the rocks.)
I brought in a rock collected from our last Utah trip, from the
plateau rising out of the eastern edge of the Bonneville salt flats.
Dave and I both guessed it was limestone. With the HCl it
fizzed like mad. Cool -- we were right!
One minor amusement about being back in college: a lot of students
now eschew the traditional backpack in favor of rolling luggage.
Walking around campus you hear these rummmmmblings that sound
like an onrushing skateboard, and it turns out to be some kid
plodding along with luggage in tow. Well, maybe they have bad
backs.
That was yesterday. Good things that happened today: I won our
Toastmasters club table topics competition, so I get to compete
at the next level. Also I posted
lesson 3 in the gimp course
(a fun one, making a Valentine's day card) and finished my
planet column on Iapetus. Bad things: more Iapetus diagrams to
make, and when I got home I discovered I had a slight fever.
I feel better now, so maybe it won't turn into anything.
Tags: education
[
22:29 Feb 10, 2005
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]
Wed, 09 Feb 2005
We went for a short hike at RSA this afternoon. A flash of blue
swooped showily past us and disappeared into the grass of the field
("What was what? that didn't look like a jay"), emerging half a
minute later, a western bluebird with a big fat worm in its bill.
We saw the first wild turkeys of the year, a big flock of about ten.
Some hikers scared them and they decided to cross the stream, but
they did it in a very orderly fashion, one by one and single file.
Obviously there was a wrenching conflict in the turkey psyche
between not wanting to get one's feet wet, versus flying being a lot
of work. So each turkey would trot down the slope to the stream,
jump just before reaching the bottom, flap two or three times, land
in the water then splash/trot the last couple steps to the far
bank. Then the next turkey in line would follow the same procedure.
The last two turkeys said "Aw, to heck with it!" and trotted
straight down the slope, getting wet feet.
Up the hill on the farm bypass trail, we came to a place where the grass
was, evidently, greener. We saw one brush rabbit, then another, then a
third, then a fourth, then some kind of mouse who vanished as
soon as it spotted us (the rabbits were less concerned). We
watched the fourth rabbit for quite a while as it munched the
grass, and Dave noticed that it never blinked. Was it blinking
too fast for a human to see, or do rabbits, somehow, not blink?
So I checked with Suzi. She says she's never caught her pet
rabbit, Scamper, blinking -- and Scamper sleeps with both eyes
open.
Dana found the answer. Rabbits apparently only blink once every
six minutes. It's in the oddly titled study,
Proliferation
Rate of Rabbit Corneal Epithelium during Overnight Rigid Contact
Lens Wear. Though I'm fairly sure the rabbit we saw on the trail
was not wearing contact lenses.
Tags: nature
[
22:36 Feb 09, 2005
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]
Tue, 08 Feb 2005
Turns out the
Novell
Ad requires flash 7, and just runs partially (but with no errors
explaining the problem) with flash 6. About 2/3 of the linux users
I polled on #linuxchix had the same problem as I did (still on flash 6).
I installed flash 7.0r25, and now I get video and sound (albeit with
the usual flash "way out of sync" problem), but mozilla 1.8a6 crashes
when leaving the page (I filed a talkback report).
Still not a great face to show migrating customers.
Oh, well, maybe it works better on Novell Linux ...
Tags: linux, marketing, web
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18:33 Feb 08, 2005
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]
Someone on IRC posted a link to a
Novell
ad trying to persuade people to migrate from Windows to Linux.
It's flash, so I saw the flash click-to-view button. I clicked it,
and something downloaded and showed play controls (a percent-done slider
and a pause button). The controls respond, but no video ever appears.
Thinking maybe it was a problem with click-to-view, I tried it in my
debug profile, with mostly default settings. No dice: even without
click-to-view, the page just plain doesn't work in Linux Mozilla.
Didn't work in Firefox either (though I don't have a Firefox profile
without click-to-view, admittedly). People on Windows and Mac
report that it works on those platforms.
I thought to myself, Novell is trying to be pro-Linux, they'll
probably want to know about this. So I went up one level to try to
find a contact address (there isn't one on the migration page).
I didn't find any email addresses but I did find a feedback link,
so I clicked it. It popped up an empty window, which sat empty
for a minute or two, then filled with "Novell Account:
Mal-formed reply from origin s". Any text which might follow
that is cut off, doesn't fit in the window size they specified.
What does Novell expect customers to think when they migrate
one machine to Linux, start using it to surf the web, and
discover that they can't even read Novell's own pro-Linux pages
from Linux? What sort of impression is that going to make on
someone considering migrating a whole shop?
Fortunately sites like Novell's which don't work in Linux and
Mozilla are the exception, not the rule. I can surf most
of the web just fine; it's only a few bad apples who can't manage
to write cross-platform web pages. But someone early in the
migration process doesn't know that. They're more likely to just
stop right there.
Tags: linux, marketing, web
[
12:30 Feb 08, 2005
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]
Thu, 03 Feb 2005
A nifty emacs trick I learned about today:
ColorThemes.
Instead of the old hacked-together color collection I've been using
in emacs, I can load color-theme.el and choose from lots of different
color schemes.
I added these lines to .emacs:
(require 'font-lock)
(if (fboundp 'global-font-lock-mode) (global-font-lock-mode 1))
(load "~/.emacs-lisp/color-theme.el")
(color-theme-ramangalahy) ;; pick a favorite theme
The disadvantage is that color-theme.el is fifteen thousand
lines long! So I'll probably make a local version that strips
out all but the theme I actually use (then I can customize that).
The (global-font-lock-mode 1) tells emacs to use syntax
highlighting on every file, not just certain types. So now I get at
least some highlighting even in html files, though it still doesn't
seem to be able to highlight like vim does (e.g. different colors
for text inside <b> or <b> tags).
Tags: emacs, editors
[
18:57 Feb 03, 2005
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]
Wed, 02 Feb 2005
Someone showed up on #gimp the other day asking about how to make
business cards. He was on Windows, so gLabels wasn't really an
option, and of course my old gimp-print patch to read gLabels label
templates would have been no help to a Windows user.
I got to thinking about how easy it would be to write a little
gimp script analogous to my CD label script, which created a
rectangular template in which to design a label, then created a
bigger image scaled to the size of a page on which the label
could be repeatedly positioned, with specified start and end points.
I couldn't resist trying it. It wasn't quite as easy as I had
initially thought, mainly because I don't know script-fu very well
and debugging script-fu is painful.
But it still only took a few hours on a couple successive
days to hack up something that more or less works:
GimpLabels.
I didn't try to parse the gLabels XML from script-fu; I wrote a
separate python script to translate the label templates into
script-fu.
It's not perfect. On a page of 30 Avery 5160 labels (10 rows),
it gets a little off by the bottom of the page. I don't know yet
if this is a problem in the gLabels template, in my understanding
of the parameters, or in the script-fu. It's fine for shorter
pages.
I integrated my existing CD label routines into the script, but
haven't yet written code to parse the CD label templates and make
a print page from them. I've lost motivation for working on CD
labels anyway, since discovering a few months ago how drastically
they hurt CD longevity.
Anyway, GimpLabels was a fun hack, and an example of how easy it is
to do this sort of thing in gimp.
Tags: gimp
[
12:20 Feb 02, 2005
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]
Sat, 29 Jan 2005
The maniacal barking of the neighbors' loony dogs brought me to the
kitchen window one morning, to see the young man walking his dog along
the street outside the house.
The man was tall, ponytailed, intense; the dog, a german shepherd with
a look of abundant alertness and interest, yet heeling close to his
master's side.
They had just stepped off the curb to cross the street
when some minor transgression on the part of the german shepherd --
did he glance over at the loony neighbor dogs? -- called a halt.
They stopped still, frozen in the intersection, tense and alert,
man and dog communicating using movements too subtle for me to
discern them from the window where I watched, fascinated.
In a minute, the conflict, invisible to an outsider, was resolved,
the two players merged back into one, and the pair continued on
their way, the ponytailed young man and the alert, obedient shepherd.
Tags: dog
[
11:33 Jan 29, 2005
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]
Tue, 25 Jan 2005
I've started my
"GIMP for
Beginners" course on the
Linuxchix
Courses mailing list, topic "gimp".
Anyone reading this is welcome to join in!
Here's the first posting, Lesson
0.
Tags: writing
[
11:10 Jan 25, 2005
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permalink to this entry |
]
I've started my
"GIMP for
Beginners" course on the
Linuxchix
Courses mailing list, topic "gimp".
Anyone reading this is welcome to join in!
Here's the first posting, Lesson
0.
Tags: gimp
[
11:10 Jan 25, 2005
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]
Thu, 20 Jan 2005
I've been very frustrated with google searches lately. Not because
of those blog links The Register is always complaining about,
and for which the silly new "no-follow" anchor attribute was added:
I hardly ever see blog links in my google searches, and when I do
they're usually relevant to the search.
(Update: Mary pointed out to me that I was confusing two issues there.
The new anchor attribute does indeed
solve a very valid
problem (not the one The Reg complains about), and isn't silly at all.
She's quite right, of course.)
No, the problem I have is that the top hits always turn out to
be a search engine on some commercial site. Clicking on the google
link takes me to a search page on some random site which says "No
pages were found matching your search terms".
Today I hit a perfect example. I was looking up Apache http
redirects, so I googled for: htaccess mod_rewrite.
The first item is the official Apache documentation for mod_rewrite.
Great!
The second item looks like the following:
htaccess mod_rewrite
... Many htaccess mod_rewrite bargains can only be found online.
Shopping on the Internet is no less safe than shopping in a store or
by mail. ... htaccess mod_rewrite. ...
www.protectyoursite.info/
htaccess-deny-from-all/htaccess-mod-rewrite.html - 8k - Cached -
Similar pages
Strangely, only google seems to show these sorts of search hits.
Perhaps the spoofing sites only do their work for the googlebot,
and don't bother with lesser searchbots. But google still wins
the relevance award for most searches, even after I wade through
the forest of spoofs; so I guess they don't need to worry about
the spoofers until other search engines catch up in relevance.
Eventually, someone else will catch up, and google will need
to clean up its results. Until then ... <pulling on my
rubber boots to wade through the muck in search of real results
...>
Tags: tech
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18:03 Jan 20, 2005
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]
Wed, 19 Jan 2005
I've been surprised by the recent explosion in Windows desktop search
tools. Why does everyone think this is such a big deal that every
internet company has to jump onto the bandwagon and produce one,
or be left behind?
I finally realized the answer this morning. These people don't have
grep! They don't have any other way of searching out patterns in
files.
I use grep dozens of times every day: for quickly looking up a phone
number in a text file, for looking in my Sent mailbox for that url I
mailed to my mom last week, for checking whether I have any saved
email regarding setting up CUPS, for figuring out where in mozilla
urlbar clicks are being handled.
Every so often, some Windows or Mac person is opining about how
difficult commandlines are and how glad they are not to have to use
them, and I ask them something like, "What if you wanted to search
back through your mail folders to find the link to the cassini probe
images -- e.g. lines that have both http:// and cassini
in them?" I always get a blank look, like it would never occur to
them that such a search would ever be possible.
Of course, expert users have ways of doing such searches (probably
using command-line add-ons such as cygwin); and Mac OS X has the
full FreeBSD commandline built in. And more recent Windows
versions (Win2k and XP) now include a way to search for content
in files (so in the Cassini example, you could search for
http:// or cassini, but probably not both at once.)
But the vast majority of Windows and Mac users have no way to do
such a search, the sort of thing that Linux commandline users
do casually dozens of times per day. Until now.
Now I see why desktop search is such a big deal.
But rather than installing web-based advertising-drive apps with a
host of potential privacy and security implications ...
wouldn't it be easier just to install grep?
Tags: tech, pipelines, CLI, shell
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12:45 Jan 19, 2005
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]
Mon, 17 Jan 2005
Anthony
Liekens has a wonderful page on open-source Cassini-Huygens
image analysis.
A group of people from a space IRC channel took the raw images
from the descent of the Huygens probe onto Titan's surface, and
applied image processing: they stitched panoramas, created animations,
created stereograms, added sharpening and color. The results are
very impressive!
I hope NASA takes notice of this. There's a lot of interest, energy
and talent in the community, which could be very helpful in analysis
of astronomical data. Astronomy has a long history of amateur
involvement in scientific research, perhaps more so than any other
science; extending that to space-based research seems only a small step.
Tags: science, astronomy
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19:30 Jan 17, 2005
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]
Investigating some of the disappointing recent regressions in
Mozilla (in particular in handling links that would open new windows,
bug 278429),
I stumbled upon this useful little tidbit from manko, in the old
bug
78037:
You can use CSS to make your browser give different highlighting
for links that would open in a different window.
Put something like this in your
[moz_profile_dir]/chrome/userContent.css:
a[target="_blank"] {
-moz-outline: 1px dashed invert !important;
/* links to open in new window */
}
a:hover[target="_blank"] {
cursor: crosshair; text-decoration: blink;
color: red; background-color: yellow
!important
}
a[href^="http://"] {
-moz-outline: 1px dashed #FFCC00 !important;
/* links outside from current site */
}
a[href^="http://"][target="_blank"] {
-moz-outline: 1px dashed #FF0000 !important;
/* combination */
}
I questioned the use of outlines rather than colors, but then
realized why manko uses outlines instead: it's better to preserve
the existing colors used by each page, so that link colors go along
with the page's background color.
I tried adding a text-decoration: blink; to the a:hover
style, but it didn't work.
I don't know whether mozilla ignores blink, or if it's being
overridden by the line I already had in userContent.css,
blink { text-decoration: none ! important; }
though I doubt that, since that should apply to the blink tag,
not blink styles on other tags.
In any case, the crosshair cursor should make new-window links
sufficiently obvious, and I expect the blinking (even only on hover)
would have gotten on my nerves before long.
Incidentally, for any web designers reading this (and who isn't,
these days?), links that try to open new browser windows are a
longstanding item on usability guru Jakob Neilsen's Top Ten Mistakes in
Web Design, and he has a good explanation why.
I'm clearly not the only one who hates them.
For a few other mozilla hacks, see
my current userChrome.css
and userContent.css.
Tags: tech, web, mozilla, firefox
[
14:03 Jan 17, 2005
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]
Thu, 13 Jan 2005
For a long time I've wanted some, but not all, text and html
files to line-wrap automatically in emacs. For instance,
it drives me nuts when I edit a system configuration
file and it wraps each long line, or when I edit an
html file containing lots of long links and it keeps wrapping
between the <a and the href=. But for files which are mostly
text (such as these blog entries), I want line wrapping.
I'd been trying to do this with html-mode-hook and text-mode-hook,
then checking the filename and calling (auto-fill-mode) if
appropriate, but it wasn't working, because buffer-file-name
isn't always defined at the time the mode hook is called.
(No one seems to know why.) The buffer name seems to be
defined at that point, but it doesn't contain path information
so I can't say "Use wrapping for anything under ~/Docs" or
"Don't wrap anything in /etc".
But with some help from sachac and the nice folks on #emacs I
came up with a much better solution, and it's way simpler than
the mode-hook approach: derived modes.
I set up two new modes, called html-wrap-mode and text-wrap-mode,
which are the same as html-mode and text-mode except that they
turn on auto-fill. Then I use the easy auto-mode-alist mechanism,
which already does string matching on the filename, to call these
modes, instead of the regular text and html modes,
based on the extension or some other aspect of the file's
pathname. Here's what I added to .emacs:
;; Want auto-fill-mode for some text and html files, but not all.
;; So define two derived modes for that, and we'll use auto-mode-alist
;; to choose them based on filename.
(define-derived-mode html-wrap-mode html-mode "HTML wrap mode"
(auto-fill-mode))
(define-derived-mode text-wrap-mode text-mode "Text wrap mode"
(auto-fill-mode))
(setq auto-mode-alist
(cons '("\\.blx$" . html-wrap-mode)
(cons '("Docs/.*.html$" . html-wrap-mode)
(cons '("Docs/" . text-wrap-mode)
auto-mode-alist) ) ) )
Here's my current .emacs.
I wonder if vim has a way to do this?
Tags: editors, emacs
[
23:30 Jan 13, 2005
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]
For years I've been plagued by having web pages occasionally display
in a really ugly font that looks like some kind of ancient OCR font
blockily scaled up from a bitmap font.
For instance, look at West Valley College
page, or this news page.
I finally discovered today that pages look like this because Mozilla
thinks they're in Cyrillic! In the case of West Valley, their
server is saying in the http headers:
Content-Type: text/html; charset=WINDOWS-1251
-- WINDOWS-1251 is Cyrillic --
but the page itself specifies a Western character set:
<META http-equiv=Content-Type content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
On my system, Mozilla believes the server instead of the page,
and chooses a Cyrillic font to display the page in. Unfortunately,
the Cyrillic font it chooses is extremely bad -- I have good ones
installed, and I can't figure out where this bad one is coming from,
or I'd terminate it with extreme prejudice. It's not even readable
for pages that really are Cyrillic.
The easy solution for a single page is to use Mozilla's View menu:
View->Character Encoding->Western (ISO-8851-1).
Unfortunately, that has to be done again for each new link
I click on the site; there seems to be no way to say "Ignore
this server's bogus charset claims".
The harder way: I sent mail to the contact address on the server
page, and filed bug
278326 on Mozilla's ignoring the page's meta tag (which you'd
think would override the server's default), but it was closed with
the claim that the standard requires that Mozilla give precedence
to the server. (I wonder what IE does?)
At least that finally inspired me to install Mozilla 1.8a6, which
I'd downloaded a few days ago but hadn't installed yet, to verify
that it saw the same charset. It did, but almost immediately I hit
a worse bug: now mozilla -remote always opens a new window,
even if new-tab or no directive at all is specified.
The release notes have nothing matching "remote, but
someone had already filed bug
276808.
Tags: tech, web, fonts, linux
[
20:15 Jan 13, 2005
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]
Mon, 10 Jan 2005
Paraphrase of a recent conversation with a teacher (who might not want
her name used):
She (describing a student who was having difficulty):
... of course,
once I realized how far behind he was, I couldn't spend any more time
helping him, because of No Child Left Behind.
Me: Um ...?
She: No Child Left Behind says we have to raise our test
scores. So now the school administration decides which students are
close to being able to get an acceptable score, and we're supposed to
spend all our time on those students making sure they pass,
and not waste time on the students who are too far back.
Me: So, because of No Child Left Behind, you have to ...
She: Leave him behind. That's right.
Tags: education
[
19:10 Jan 10, 2005
More education |
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]
Thu, 06 Jan 2005
Vignettes from a couple of short walks today ...
First, an exciting chase: a series of gulls loudly chased a crow
which was carrying something large, orange and amorphous in its
bill. I would have expected a crow could hold its own against
a gull, being nearly as large, heavier, and smarter; but the
crow obviously just wanted to escape with its prize, and ultimately
did.
Later, on returning to the car, I had just spotted a black
phoebe sitting on a branch near the road, when I saw something
buzz past the corner of my vision. It was a male Anna's hummingbird
rocketing straight up in what looked like a courtship display (in
December?)
But it wasn't a courtship display: the hummer then sped
straight down and arced past the phoebe, crying a short TCHEE! at
the bottom of its arc when it was closest to the intruder.
I watched for maybe five minutes, fascinated, as the hummingbird
repeatedly dove on the phoebe, never getting closer than a couple
of feet (perhaps avoiding the branches of the bush in which the
phoebe perched). The phoebe paid no attention, and didn't even
flinch. It did change its perch to another bush once during the
time I watched, and the hummer promptly shifted its attack to the
new location.
A fellow hiker/photographer, returning from her walk, joined me
for a minute to watch the show. She said she'd read recently in the
paper that Anna's hummingbirds were due to start mating flights in
mid-December. We both thought midwinter was an odd time to nest,
especially for a bird so small that it has to worry about
maintaining body heat. But if it's true, this male may have been
defending a nesting territory, though I didn't see any female
hummingbirds nearby.
This evening, a sunset walk along Los Gatos Creek revealed
a first for me:
a muskrat!
Tags: nature, birds
[
22:11 Jan 06, 2005
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permalink to this entry |
]
Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) has signed a protest launched by Rep.
John Conyers (D-MI) regarding irregularities in the Ohio vote,
as reported this morning by the AP (via
Yahoo,
via
ABC
News).
Conyers' report can be found on the
House
Committee on the Judiciary's page, including the
PDF
report and some supplementary documents (all PDF except the
video):
a
film by Linda Byrket called "Video the Vote",
text
of a fundraising letter Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth
Blackwell, and
Eyewitness
Accounts of Ohio Voter Disenfranchisement.
Conyers' report is described in
this
Fox News story.
John Kerry has not joined the protest.
This is not expected to alter the outcome of the 2004 election;
both houses are expected to certify the election tomorrow.
But it will force both houses to break from election certification
tomorrow, and have a public discussion of up to two hours on
some of the problems seen in the election.
Perhaps it will pave the way for changes in future elections.
Tags: politics, election04, elections, voting
[
11:29 Jan 06, 2005
More politics/election04 |
permalink to this entry |
]
Wed, 05 Jan 2005
January 8, just a few days away, is the revised deadline in the
California antitrust
class-action settlement against Microsoft, according to this
NYT
article (soul-sucking registration required, or use
BugMeNot).
Anyone in California who bought Windows (even if it was bundled on a PC),
DOS, MS Office, Works, or similar products between February 18, 1995 and
December 15, 2001 is eligible for a rebate,
in the form of a voucher redeemable for any tech hardware or
software, not just Microsoft products.
Microsoft gets to keep 1/3 of the settlement left unclaimed,
so claim the money you're entitled to now before it's too late!
Go to microsoftcalsettlement.com
to fill out your claim form.
Tags: tech
[
22:58 Jan 05, 2005
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permalink to this entry |
]
An article in the
LA Times on New Year's Day caught my eye:
California has an anti-spyware law going into effect as of January 1.
The
Times was rather sketchy, though, on what constitutes
spyware, though they did say that there were no actual penalties
under the law, merely that the law makes it possible to sue a
company for installing spyware (whatever that's defined to be).
I've seen it covered in other publications now as well, and
every article I read defines spyware differently,
without mentioning how the actual law defines it
(which you might think would be somewhat relevant).
Nor do any of them provide, or link to, the text of the law,
or its number in the CA code.
It turns out the bill was SB 1436, with a history
here: and here
is the text of the bill.
It amends section 22947 of the Business and Professions code:
here's an
attempt at a link to the actual law, but if that doesn't work,
go to leginfo
and search for 22947 in the Business and Professions code.
It's fairly concise and readable.
One point which on which I've long been curious is whether
the various proposed anti-spyware laws cover the invasive end user
license agreements, or EULAs,
which Microsoft, Apple and other software companies love so much
these days. You know, "clicking here gives you permission for
us to snoop on what files you have on your system, what songs you've
been listening to, and what extra software you have installed, and
you have to click here or you can't get security updates"
(stories on Win2k,
WinXP,
and issues
with Windows Media Player; I think Apple does similar things with
iTunes but don't have any story links handy).
It turns out that SB 1436 specifically disallows
collection of a user's web browsing history, or browser bookmarks
(so google search might be in trouble, depending on how it works)
because it's "personal information", along with your name, address
and credit card information;
but it says nothing against collection of information regarding files,
installed software, music, movies, or email. I guess none of those
constitute "personal information" and it's fine to sneak software onto
your system to collect such details.
However, consider this interesting section:
22947.4. (a) A person or entity, who is not an authorized user,
as defined in Section 22947.1, shall not do any of the following with
regard to the computer of a consumer in this state:
(1) Induce an authorized user to install a software component onto
the computer by intentionally misrepresenting that installing
software is necessary for security or privacy reasons or in order to
open, view, or play a particular type of content.
At issue here is the definition of "software component". If a system
update installs a new media player with a new invasive EULA which
suggests that the player may collect information on songs installed or
played, under the aegis of a security update, wouldn't this fall afoul
of the new law?
22947.2 (c) is also interesting:
[an entity who is not the owner or authorized user of a computer shall not]
Prevent, without the authorization of an authorized user,
through intentionally deceptive means, an authorized user's
reasonable efforts to block the installation of, or to disable,
software, by causing software that the authorized user has properly
removed or disabled to automatically reinstall or reactivate on the
computer without the authorization of an authorized user.
If you've ever disabled a feature in a piece of software,
only to have it mysteriously re-enable itself the next time
you updated the software, or if you use software whose EULA
allows that, you may have grounds to sue if you
can prove that it was re-enabled intentionally. This may be a bit
farther than the authors of the bill really intended to go; quite a
lot of software companies (and perhaps some freeware and open source
authors as well) may be exposed here. Software providers beware!
SB 1436 has some good and non-controversial effects.
It explicitly makes it illegal to install, without the user's knowledge:
keystroke loggers (presumably this does not apply to the CIA or
anyone else operating under the Patriot Act), spam email relays,
denial-of-service zombies, multiple popup ads which can't be closed
(we're in 22947.3 (a) now, which applies to software copied onto the
user's computer; but this may apply even to Javascript on a web page,
if you read the definitions at the beginning of the bill).
All good things to disallow.
What about that no-penalty comment in the Times?
As far as I can tell, they're right.
SB1436 makes no mention of fines or other punishments.
This
Infotex post says there's a $1000 fine per incident, plus
attorney's fees; but I can't figure out where they're getting that:
I don't see it in either the bill or the law anywhere.
Tags: tech
[
11:45 Jan 05, 2005
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]
Tue, 04 Jan 2005
The Grapevine, the pass through which Interstate 5 crosses
the mountains north of LA, was covered in snow today. Gorman, near
the highest point of the pass, was blanketed in white, not even bushes
or grass poking through.
We'd hesitated before coming this way -- the Caltrans web site had
listed the pass as closed until a scant half hour before we left.
Signs on the highway at Castaic still said the pass was closed,
but we put our trust in the web, and forged on. Happily, the road
was open, clean of snow, and barely even wet, giving a lovely view of
the snowy Transverse Ranges as we passed through this unexpected
white christmas. Also fun was seeing a double semi trailer full
of oranges passing through this wintry landscape.
Descending into the central valley,
we saw the first "Food grows where water flows" sign at Buttonwillow,
pinned to a trailer in a field of sagebrush and tumbleweed.
Perhaps a goat would have found some food there.
At least sage (which I do like in cooking) is closer to culinary than
the cotton that all the farms here were growing for the last two
years (presumably due to subsidies)
the remnants of which still litter most of the empty fields along the
I-5 corridor.
"Farm water feeds the nation", fifty miles farther north,
also stood in a field of tumbleweed, but the California Aqueduct
was nearby, so it was at least somewhat topical.
The next "Food grows where water flows" adjoined a vinyard.
Does wine count as food? Maybe they were table grapes.
The Buttonwillow rest stop features lovely woven hanging birds'
nests, visible now when the trees are bare of leaves and looking
like something out of an African weaverbird documentary. I didn't get
a good look at the birds occupying those trees now; usually those I-5
rest stops are populated mostly by blackbirds and ravens, but I'll
have to keep a sharp eye out next time I pass through in spring.
Tags: travel, sign, politics, water
[
19:33 Jan 04, 2005
More misc |
permalink to this entry |
]
Why is it that devices which claims Linux support almost never
work with Linux?
When my mom signed up for broadband, we needed an ethernet card and
router/firewall for her machine. The router/firewall was no problem
(a nice Linksys with a 4-port switch included) but ethernet cards
are trickier. First, it turns out that lots of stores no longer
sell them, because they're trying to push wireless on everybody.
("Hey, I have a great idea! Let's take Windows users who don't
even know how to run Windows Update, and set them up with an
802.11b network that opens their connection to the whole neighborhood,
plus anyone driving by, unless they take extra security precautions!")
Second, ethernet cards are in that class of hardware that
manufacturers tend to change every month or so, without changing the
model number or adding any identifying information to the box so
you know it's not the one that worked last time.
The sale card at Fry's was an AirLink 101, and it claimed Linux
support right on the box. The obvious choice, right? We knew better,
but we tried it anyway.
Turns out that the driver on the floppy included in the box is for a
RealTek 8139 chip: a file called 8139too.c, which has already been
incorporated into the Linux kernel. Sounds great, no? Except that
it turns out that the card in the box is actually an 8039, not an
8139, according to lspci, and it doesn't work with 8139too.c. Nor
does it work with the ne2k driver, which supports the RealTek 8029
chip. No driver we could find could make head nor tail out of the
AirLink chip.
Amusingly, the Windows driver on the floppy didn't work either: it,
too, was for a RealTek 8139 and hadn't been updated to match the chip
that was actually being shipped on the card. So the AirLink is a
complete bust, and will be returned.
Fortunately, the other likely option at Fry's, a Linksys LNE100TX,
is still the same chip (DEC Tulip) that they've used in the past, and
it works just fine with Linux.
It's sad how often a claim of Linux support on the box
translates to "This is a crappy product which probably won't work
right with any operating system, since we change it every couple
of months. But three revs back someone tried it on a linux
machine and it worked, so we printed up all our packaging
to say so even though we didn't bother to retest it after we
completely redesigned the board."
Tags: linux
[
10:57 Jan 04, 2005
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permalink to this entry |
]
Mon, 03 Jan 2005
Trails in the Verdugo hills above Burbank
are a happy place, even when they're crowded on
New Year's Day, with everyone taking advantage of a
brief respite between two weeks of rainy weather.
Everyone smiled, waved, or offered a cheery "Happy New Year!"
It's nice to see people
enjoying being out hiking, instead of grumping down the trail
glowering at everyone, like some of the trails at home.
Even after the sun disappeared and the wind came up,
people seemed happy to be there. Mountain bikers, hikers,
families, dog walkers, and one careful-stepping barefoot runner
shared the trail without any conflict.
Up at the ridge, the crowds thinned out and we were alone.
A large brown bird -- some sort of thrasher? -- belted out
a song in a tree near the ridge saddle, and we watched
a big red-tailed hawk slip silently out of a tree just below us
and sail out across the canyon, adjusting her attitude entirely
with the angle of her tail, scarcely moving her wings at all.
On the other side of a lookout peak, a towering brick chimney
surrounded by pottery shards bears witness to past attempts to
colonize this place. A kiln? And what was the purpose of the
tall mast on the hill above it -- a flagpole? A lightning rod?
We lost ourselves following side trails down from the lightning rod,
and found ourselves tracing deer trails through the chaparral.
We examined rocks (is that layered black rock a coal seam, or pillow
basalt to go with the nearby serpentine?) and eyed erosion gullies.
We waved to bikers and got sniffed by dogs. A nice New Year's
morning!
Tags: nature, trails
[
16:02 Jan 03, 2005
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