Shallow Thoughts : : Jun

Xkcd Search Bookmarklet

Today's topics are three: the excellent comic called xkcd, the use of google to search a site but exclude parts of that site, and, most important, the useful Mozilla technique called Bookmarklets.

I found myself wanting to show someone a particular xkcd comic (the one about dreams). Xkcd, for anyone who hasn't been introduced, is a wonderfully geeky, smart, and thoughtful comic strip drawn by Randall Munroe.

How to search for a comic strip? Xkcd has an archive page but that seems to have a fairly small subset of all the comics. But fortunately the comics also have titles and alt tags, which google can index.

But googling for dreams site:xkcd.org gets me lots of hits on xkcd's forum and blag pages (which I hadn't even known existed) rather than just finding the comic I wanted. After some fiddling, though, I managed to find a way to exclude all the fora and blag pages: google for xkcd dreams site:xkcd.com -site:forums.xkcd.com -site:fora.xkcd.com -site:blag.xkcd.com
Nifty!

In fact, it was so nifty that I decided I might want to use it again. Fortunately, Mozilla browsers like Firefox have a great feature called bookmarklets. Bookmarklets are like shell aliases in Linux: they let you assign an alias to a bookmark, then substitute in your own terms each time you use it.

That's probably not clear, so here's how it works in this specific case:

1. I did the google search I listed above, which gave me this long and seemingly scary URL: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=xkcd+dreams+site%3Axkcd.com+-site%3Aforums.xkcd.com+-site%3Afora.xkcd.com+-site%3Ablag.xkcd.com&btnG=Search
2. Bookmarks->Bookmark this page. Unfortunately Firefox doesn't let you change any bookmark properties at the time you make the bookmark, so:
3. Bookmarks->Organize Bookmarks, find the new bookmark (down at the bottom of the list) and Edit->Properties...
4. Change the Name to something useful (I called it Xkcd search) then choose a simple word for the Keyword field. This is the "alias" you'll use for the bookmark. I chose xkcd.
5. In the Location field, find the term you want to be variable. In this case, that's "dreams", because I won't always be searching for the comic about dreams, I might want to search for anything. Change that term to %s.
   (Note to non-programmers: %s is a term often used in programming languages to mean "replace the %s with a string I'll provide later.")
   So now the Location looks like: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=xkcd+%s+site%3Axkcd.com+-site%3Aforums.xkcd.com+-site%3Afora.xkcd.com+-site%3Ablag.xkcd.com&btnG=Search
6. Save the bookmarklet (click OK) and, optionally, drag it into a folder somewhere where it won't clutter up your bookmarks menu. You aren't ever going to be choosing this from the menu.

Now I had a new bookmarklet. To test it, I went to the urlbar in Firefox and typed:

xkcd "regular expressions"

Voila! The first hit was exactly the comic I wanted.

(You'll find many more useful bookmarklets by googling on bookmarklets.)

Tags: tech, web, bookmarklets
[ 22:13 Jun 30, 2007    More tech/web | permalink to this entry | ]

A Quartet of Workarounds

I upgraded my laptop's Ubuntu partition from Edgy to Feisty. Debian Etch works well, but it's just too old and I can't build software like GIMP that insists on depending on cutting-edge libraries.

But Feisty is cutting edge in other ways, so it's been a week of workarounds, in two areas: Firefox and the kernel. I'll start with Firefox.

Firefox crashes playing flash

First, the way Ubuntu's Firefox crashes when running Flash. I run flashblock, fortunately, so I've been able to browse the web just fine as long as I don't click on a flashblock button. But I like being able to view the occasional youtube video, and flash 7 has worked fine for me on every distro except Ubuntu. I first saw the problem on Edgy, and upgrading to Feisty didn't cure the problem.

But it wasn't their Firefox build; my own "kitfox" firefox build crashed as well. And it wasn't their flash installation; I've never had any luck with either their adobe flash installer nor their opensource libswfdec, so I'm running the same old flash 7 plug-in that I've used all along for other distros.

To find out what was really happening, I ran Firefox from the commandline, then went to a flash page. It turned out it was triggering an X error:

The error was: 'BadMatch (invalid parameter attributes)'.
(Details: serial 104 error_code 8 request_code 145 minor_code 3)

That gave me something to search for. It turns out there's a longstanding Ubuntu bug, 14911 filed on this issue, with several workarounds. Setting the environment variable XLIB_SKIP_ARGB_VISUALS to 1 fixed the problem, but, reading farther in the bug, I saw that the real problem was that Ubuntu's installer had, for some strange reason, configured my X to use 16 bit color instead of 24. Apparently this is pretty common, and due to some bug involving X's and Mozilla's or Flash's handling of transparency, this causes flash to crash Mozilla.

So the solution is very simple. Edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf, look for the DefaultDepth line, and if it's 16, that's your problem. Change it to 24, restart X and see if flash works. It worked for me!

Eliminating Firefox's saved session pester dialog

While I was fiddling with Firefox, Dave started swearing. "Why does Firefox always make me go through this dialog about restoring the last session? Is there a way to turn that off?"

Sure enough, there's no exposed preference for this, so I poked around about:config, searched for browser and found browser.sessionstore.resume_from_crash. Doubleclick that line to change it to false and you'll have no more pesky dialog.

For more options related to session store, check the Mozillazine Session Restore page.

Kernel: runaway kacpid

Alas, having upgraded to Feisty expressly so that I could build cutting-edge programs like GIMP, I discovered that I couldn't build anything at all. Anything that uses heavy CPU for more than a minute or two triggers a kernel daemon, kacpid, to grab most of the CPU for itself. Being part of the kernel (even though it has a process ID), kacpi is unkillable, and prevents the machine from shutting down, so once this happens the only solution is to pull the power plug.

This has actually been a longstanding Ubuntu problem (bug 75174) but it used to be that disabling acpid would stop kacpid from running away, and with feisty, that no longer helps. The bug is also kernel.org bug 8274.

The Ubuntu bug suggested that disabling cpufreq solved it for one person. Apparently the only way to do that is to build a new kernel. There followed a long session of attempted kernel building. It was tricky because of course I couldn't build on the target machine (inability to build being the problem I was trying to solve), and even if I built on my desktop machine, a large rsync of the modules directory would trigger a runaway kacpi. In the end, building a standalone kernel with no modules was the only option.

But turning off cpufreq didn't help, nor did any of the other obvious acpi options. The only option which stops kacpid is to disable acpi altogether, and use apm. I'm sorry to lose hibernate, and temperature monitoring, but that appears to be my only option with modern kernels. Sigh.

Kernel: Hangs for 2 minutes at boot time initializing sound card

While Dave and I were madly trying to find a set of config options to build a 2.6.21 that would boot on a Vaio (he was helping out with his SR33 laptop, starting from a different set of config options) we both hit, at about the same time, an odd bug: partway through boot, the kernel would initialize the USB memory stick reader:

sd 0:0:0:0: Attached scsi removable disk sda
sd 0:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg0 type 0

and then it would hang, for a long time. Two minutes, as it turned out. And the messages after that were pretty random: sometimes related to the sound card, sometimes to the network, sometimes ... GConf?! (What on earth is GConf doing in a kernel boot sequence?) We tried disabling various options to try to pin down the culprit: what was causing that two minute hang?

We eventually narrowed the blame to the sound card (which is a Yamaha, using the ymfpci driver). And that was enough information for google to find this Linux Kernel Mailing List thread. Apparently the sound maintainer decided, for some reason, to make the ymfpci driver depend on an external firmware file ... and then didn't include the firmware file, nor is it included in the alsa-firmware package he references in that message. Lovely. I'm still a little puzzled about the timeout: the post does not explain why, if a firmware file isn't found on the disk, waiting for two minutes is likely to make one magically appear.

Apparently it will be fixed in 2.6.22, which isn't much help for anyone who's trying to run a kernel on any of the 2.6.21.* series in the meantime. (Isn't it a serious enough regression to fix in 2.6.21.*?) And he didn't suggest a workaround, except that alsa-firmware package which doesn't actually contain the firmware for that card. Looks like it's left to the user to make things work.

So here's what to do: it turns out that if you take a 2.6.21 kernel, and substitute the whole sound/pci/ymfpci directory from a 2.6.20 kernel source tree, it builds and boots just fine. And I'm off and running with a standalone apm kernel with no acpi; sound works, and I can finally build GIMP again.

So it's been quite a week of workarounds. You know, I used to argue with all those annoying "Linux is not ready for the desktop" people. But sometimes I feel like Linux usability is moving in the wrong direction. I try to imagine explaining to my mac-using friends why they should have to edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf because their distro set up a configuration that makes Firefox crash, or why they need to build a new kernel because the distributed ones all crash or hang ... I love Linux and don't regret using it, but I seem to need workarounds like this more often now than I did a few years ago. Sometimes it really does seem like the open source world is moving backward, not forward.

Tags: linux, ubuntu, mozilla, firefox, kernel, audio
[ 23:24 Jun 28, 2007    More linux | permalink to this entry | ]

Notch has had her kids

Whew -- I think our resident squirrel Notch has finally had her long-overdue litter. It wasn't immediately obvious, but she's been deflating over a period of about a week. Since then she's gone off her mad burying frenzy and gone back to eating the nuts we give her.

Last week, while she was still pregnant, she was kind enough to give me a nice nut-burying exhibition right outside the office door, which I got on video. She digs a hole, places the nut in and tries to pack it down, decides it's not deep enough and pulls it out again, digs a little deeper, jackhammers the nut into place with her nose, fills in the hole then does her usual careful job of covering over the hole and arranging leaves on top of it to hide the evidence.

Then she turns and digs up a nut that was buried two inches away and eats it. Video on youtube.

In other squirrel news, on an afternoon hike at Rancho San Antonio yesterday I saw an Eastern Fox squirrel in the trees about halfway up the first leg of the PG&E trail. Foxes are an invasive species (just like Notch and her Eastern Grey friends who inhabit most of the suburbs around here), so that's not good news for the native Western Greys who have traditionally inhabited the park. I suppose it was just a matter of time, since RSA is so close to suburbia, before the non-native eastern squirrels invade and drive out the wimpy native squirrels. It'll be interesting to see whether the western greys can hold their own, or, if not, how long the invasion takes.

In non-squirrel news, we had a few very hot days last week (mid 90s) and fled to the redwood forests to escape the heat one day, and smelled that odd chlorine odor I've noticed before. The smell was fairly faint this time. I asked my Bio teacher about it in class last semester, but he didn't know what it might be, so it remains a mystery for now. I'll be tracking whether it's there on all hot days, or just some, this summer.

Tags: nature, squirrels, urban wildlife, chlorine
[ 15:49 Jun 21, 2007    More nature/squirrels | permalink to this entry | ]

Openbox 3.4

It was a bit over two years ago that I switched from icewm to fvwm as my window manager. Fvwm proved to be very fast, very configurable, and "good enough" most of the time. But lately, I've found myself irritated with it, particularly with its tendency to position windows off screen (which got a lot worse in 2.5.18). It looked like it was time to try another window manager, so when I learned that the Openbox project is headed by a fellow LinuxChixor, I had to try it.

Openbox impressed me right away. I'd tried it once before, a couple of years ago, when I found it a little inconsistent and immature. It's grown up a lot since then! It's still very fast and lightweight, but it has good focus handling, excellent window positioning, a good configuration window (obconf), and a wide variety of themes which are pretty but still don't take up too much of my limited screen space.

But more important, what it has is a very active and friendly community. I hit a couple of snags, mostly having to do with focus handling while switching desktops (the problem that drove me off icewm to fvwm), so I hopped onto the IRC channel and found myself chatting with the active developers, who told me that most of my problems had already been fixed in 3.4, and there were .deb files on the website for both of the distros I'm currently using. Indeed, that cured the problem; and when I later hit a more esoteric focus bug, the developers (particularly Dana Jansens) were all over it and fixed it that same day. Wow!

Since then I've been putting it through its paces. I have yet to see a window positioned badly in normal usage, and it handles several other problems I'd been seeing with fvwm, like focus handling when popping up dialogs (all those secondary GIMP Save-as dialogs that don't get focused when they appear). It's just as flexible as fvwm was when it comes to keyboard and mouse configuration, maybe even more so (plus it has lots of useful default bindings I might not have thought of, like mousewheel bindings to change desktops or "shade" a window).

I was going to stay out of theme configuration, because there were several pretty good installed themes already. But then in response to a half-joking question on my part of whether a particular theme came in blue, someone on the IRC channel made me a custom theme file -- and I couldn't resist tweaking it from there, and discovered that tweaking openbox themes is just as easy as fiddling with its other defaults.

I don't use transparency (I find it distracting), but my husband is addicted to transparent windows, so when I noticed on the web site that openbox handles transparency I pointed him there. (He's been using an old Afterstep, from back when it was still small and light, but it's been a constant battle getting it to build under newer gccs.) He reports that openbox handles transparency as well as afterstep did, so he's switched too.

I haven't looked at the openbox code yet, but based on how fast the developers add features and fix bugs, I bet it's clean, and I hope I can contribute at some point.

Anyway, great focus handling, great window positioning, fast, lightweight, super configurable, and best of all a friendly and helpful developer and user community. What more could you ask for in a window manager? I'm an openbox convert. Thanks, Dana, Mikachu and all the rest.

Tags: linux, X11, window managers
[ 14:13 Jun 17, 2007    More linux | permalink to this entry | ]

Find the nearest matching color name

Someone showed up on #gimp today with a color specified as an HTML hex color specifier, and wanted to know how to find the nearest color name.

Easy, right? There have got to be a bazillion pages that do that, plus at least a couple of Linux apps.

But I googled for a while and couldn't find a single one. There are lots of pages that list all the RGB colors, or convert decimal red, green and blue into HTML #nnn hex codes, or offer aesthetic advice about pleasing combinations of colors for themes (including this lovely page on butterfly-inspired color themes, courtesy of Rik) but nothing I could find that gave color names. Apparently there used to be a Linux app that did that, a piece of Gnome 1 called GColorSel, but it's gone now.

I got to thinking (always dangerous!) ... /etc/X11/rgb.txt has a list of color names with their RGB color equivalents. It would be really easy to write something that just read down the list finding the ones closest to the specified color.

Uh-oh ... of course, once that thought occurred to me, I was doomed. Programmer's disease. I had to write it. So I did, and here it is: Find the Nearest Matching Color Name. It checks against both rgb.txt and the much smaller list of 17 CSS color names.

Tags: programming
[ 23:18 Jun 11, 2007    More programming | permalink to this entry | ]

Young Squirrels are Nuts!

It's springtime in the backyard! I saw a couple of mockingbird fledglings cheeping to be fed in the pyrocantha while we were having dinner last night, though we never saw the mockingbird nest. And we have a couple of California towhee fledgelings who come by to eat sunflower seeds. Mama towhee first brought them by one by one, broke the seeds up (apparently a sunflower seed is a little too big for a towhee to swallow in one piece) and fed them to the cheeping youngsters. But now they're coming by on their own, and still having some trouble breaking up the seeds, but they're making progress. Unfortunately one of the chicks hops only on one foot, apparently having injured the other already.

It's springtime for our local squirrels, too. Ringtail, the fox squirrel, is still around, and we have an occasional visit from a male fox squirrel as well. Notch, our longtime resident grey squirrel diva, is heavily pregnant. She looks like a little furry bowling pin and we keep thinking she's going to have her litter at any moment, but days pass and she continues to grow. We noticed her pregnancy some time in mid-April (it was quite visible by then), and gestation is supposed to be around 44 days, so either she's way overdue, or the books are wrong about Eastern grey squirrel gestation. (Or she's just fat and not pregnant at all, but I don't think so since her nipples are very prominent too.)

She still moves remarkably gracefully and has no trouble with leaping and climbing, unlike Nonotchka, who lumbered and waddled when she got to this stage last summer.

But the real fun is a pair of baby squirrels who showed up a week ago. We're calling the female Nova and her brother Chico (he has slonchy ears that look like Chiquita's). We have no idea who their mother is -- obviously not Notch, and we haven't seen any other female greys in quite a while. The kids wear sleek summer coats, while Notch still hasn't shed her shaggy winter fur despite the warm weather.

This pair is much bolder and more athletic than Chiquita and Ringlet were last year. They leap, they run along the fence, and they scamper headfirst down tree trunks. They don't play together much at all, the way last year's twins did, but sometimes they play by themselves. This morning, we watched in amazement as Nova played by the guava tree just outside the office door, alternating between pretend-burying of walnut shells and wild gyrations, rolls and backflips.

Best of all, I got it on video! I've set up a youtube account and uploaded a long video of her doing backflips and spins, and a shorter video of her digging and rolling.

Tags: nature, squirrels, urban wildlife
[ 20:32 Jun 10, 2007    More nature/squirrels | permalink to this entry | ]

Artificial Hand

What's up with portable radios that get great reception when your hand is on them moving them around, but the minute you let go, the static comes back?

I have a great business idea: some entrepeneur should make an artificial hand you can drape over your radio to get that effect to stay.

(Please no one mail me explaining capacitance. And in fact, it turns out it works pretty well to lean a long metal bar against the wall next to the radio. But I bet people would buy an artificial hand antenna anyway!)

Tags: humor
[ 12:59 Jun 08, 2007    More humor | permalink to this entry | ]

Traffic Science

NPR this morning had a program on speeding. One of the "experts" they brought in was Richard Retting, senior transportation engineer with the IIHS (that's the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, a group funded by auto insurance companies).

Early on they asked him why speeding was bad. He said there were three reasons. The first two were straightforward: when you're going faster, you (1) travel farther before you can react to something, and (2) take longer to stop. No problem there, and I waited for the third reason, presuming it was going to be kinetic energy.

Well, almost. The third reason, he said, was energy. "Remember that equation E = mc² from high school?"

Wow! If I drive faster than the speed limit, I'm converting my mass into energy? For those who haven't studied physics recently, he was probably confusing Einstein's equation relating energy, mass and the speed of light with Newton's formula for kinetic energy, KE = mv²/2. The host responded incredulously "The speed of light?" but Retting didn't seem to notice, and pressed on: "When you're going faster, your energy is disproportionate and exponential."

Okay, you're talking on the radio and you have a brain-o. I'm sure we've all said silly things when we knew better, like reciting the wrong equation then not noticing the gaffe. But he also seems confused about what "exponential" means, perhaps because of that "exponent" of 2 in the equation. An exponential curve is when you have something like 2^X, not X². Admittedly, the dictionary of "exponential" includes vague definitions like "Pertaining to exponents", and I suppose there is an exponent of 2 involved. But really, folks: kinetic energy increases as the square of speed.

A little later in the program, someone called in to mention studies showing that higher speeds don't necessarily correlate with accidents, and Redding chastised him for doing google searches for studies: "That's not how we do science in this country." Hey, Mr. Retting -- it might pay to be a little more careful with your own science if you're going to be dismiss callers with remarks like that.

Tags: science
[ 18:37 Jun 07, 2007    More science | permalink to this entry | ]