Shallow Thoughts : : Feb
Akkana's Musings on Open Source Computing and Technology, Science, and Nature.
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
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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
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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
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17:38 Feb 18, 2005
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Lina discovered this.
Google for "matriarchal".
Google asks:
Did you mean:
patriarchal
Tags: chix
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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12:20 Feb 02, 2005
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