Month: October 2002

for bloggers.
I had to have a little laugh at the “techie blogger=togger” desciption. But I don’t think I’d put a computer in the fridge and I don’t read slashdot. But I am an INTP.

Yeah it’s all about attitude. Today I’m feeling a bit better and accordingly there doesn’t appear to be 57 ways in which the world will end in the next week. It’s taken me a little while for me to accept it, but jean annd i are now broken up and there’s nothing else I can do, and it’s out of my hands now and I can accept that. That acceptance part has been the hardest.
Now it’s just the logistical nightmare of moving (oh, and exams, re-enrolling, etc) myself and stuff out of here in a couple of weeks … ah – but I’m getting ahead of myself again. The only things I’m not sure how to get moved are the fridge (which will need one of those super-trolleys with a seatbelt annd triple wheels) and a large white couch which is more like the pyramid of Cheops than a couch.
Anyway we’re both being very civilised about it, thank god. There’s no venomous name-calling or nasty tricks — that’d really send me around the bend.

Will be a shame to not be in anglesea for summer – that’s the best bit! But it’s not as if I’ll be moving to alice springs or anything.

Have to remind myself to make a bookmarks page this time – as in- how I lost all the stuff after the reinstall. Is a hassle having to find all those addresses again. Am still using Mandrake at the moment – don’t have time to deal with trying to make red hat font rendering work for me — but at some stage will have to because mandrake package updating is pretty useless and I can’t get sound working for it.

Uh, sorry I just had to get that off my chest. We aren’t all doomed but i feel like I am. Have had this impending sense of doom all day, despite it being a beautiful day. Am having trouble concentrating on study.. I think I am going nuts.
Eventhough I have nothing startling or interesting to say, am posting for the sake of regularity, which isn’t a very good sake to be posting for. But it’s these kind of posts that make the good ones seem like good ones.
I tried listening to the Miami vice soundtrack LP to cheer me up but I just ended up thinking about 1985. But I don’t care who you are, you gotta love that opening theme. I don’t know if I’ve ever mentioned how it’d be great if everyone could pick they’re own personal theme music and when they walked in the room, the music would just come out of nowhere.
Up until now, I’d been thinking that Herb Alpert & the Tijuanna Brass’ ‘The Lonely Bull’ would be mine, but maybe it should be the Miami Vice theme. The best part about it is that there’s three variations: the entrance bit – short, snappy, .. the longer ending (complete with brassy bum-bah-buh-baah-buh -bar keyboards) good for saying good night etc. and the faster, tension-building version which was originally used for running around the sides of buildings with gun in hand, but in my case would better suit running for the bus or cooking.
There’s a Phil Collins track on that LP too, but there’s nothing I can do about that.
Maybe the next Spouting redesign will be in salmon and blue pastel.

biblically proportioned storminess the next.
I’ve been watching CART car races off and on (mostly on) for four years, and of the races that actually went ahead, yesterday’s race at Surfer’s Paradise would have to be the worst.
If it rains before/during a race on an oval track, they call it off because the cars go too fast and they can’t get enough grip, but not so with curvey race tracks, or those set up on city streets (like yesterday). But they probably should call it off with the latter because the curvey tracks which are built specifically for car racing are designed so that water drains off them straight away, but not so with your average city street.
There was a huge pile up in the first 10 seconds of the race and then for the rest of it they drove around and around but weren’t able to pass each other (under yellow flag). I was able to have a larf at how farcicle the whole thing was, maybe it’d be different if I’d spent time and money to actually go there to see the thing.
Reminiscent of that australian speed skater who who won because of everyone else fell over, Mario Dominguez – a mexican rookie “won”. It was more like bingo than a car race. More of a write up here.

Our lawnmower sits in a storage area under the house. I’d generally thought that people saying the sea air rusts things were exagerating, but it seems not. The cord on the mower that controls the throttle has basically frozen. i was thinking I’d have to take it to someone to get fixed (and may still do) but this morning had a fiddle around with it and ended up removing the whole cord. There’s a little lever right down on the engine – i gave that a yank with some pliers (pliars? – how do ya spell that?) and then had a tug on the rip cord to start it, fully expecting the whole effort to be hopeless, but it sprang into life at full throttle, and before i knew what I was doing I was mowing the lawn.
Mundane this may seem, but i basically never mow the lawn. All part of my non-interventionist mentality I suppose, and thinking further, the whole idea of a “lawn” is a bit whacked. However I’m not boss of the world, and the grassy clumps are growing.
Since I’ve hardly ever done it, I have a pretty fresh technique to it, and at stages it reminded me of vacuuming – hahah. The noise filled my ears, the fumes my lungs and as I saw the skinks running for their lives before me and the threshing monster, something took over me.
Well, maybe not, but it was good to get it done. I had to drive it kamakaze style into a pile of clippings to turn it off because the throttle won’t stop it anymore.

Things didn’t go very well with the upgrade of red hat from 7.3 to 8. The whole CD I made with my stuff on was rooted because I burned it at 40x when the disk could only operate at 16x, so it’s another collecting everything from scratch situation, which sucks sincerely.
And you know, I was getting all excited and anticipatory with red hat 8, thinking of doing a review of it for ‘the bottom-feeder’s guide to computering’ and also making a recommendation to other bloggers that, since they (presumably) spend a bit of time on the net, then this was the time and version of Linux, to get rid of windows with. But frankly, there’s was a few things that really bugged me about it – like there not being enough of an explanation of what the different levels of firewall meant. I went for “high security” (and wouldn’t most people?) and then found that, even though I could connect to the net, it wouldn’t let me go anywhere because the rules were too tight. There was no internet connection wizard during the install, and then the app. needed for it was really hidden when I got to the desktop. That’s odd, because in older versions there’d been an icon on the desktop. And then, Mozillla was seriously broken, and required updating straight away, which just ain’t good enough.
In comparrison, Mandrake 9 seems to hit the ground running much better. And I’d also like to thank my brother for donating a copy of windows98se to the Spouting benevolent fund. Tah. Now I can connect the digikamera to Juggernaut.

Car race at Sufers tomorrow, Go Michel Jourdain Jr.! in the Gigante ford. I gather Gigante is a mexican supermarket chain, and sure – I don’t know who they’re owned by, but at least as a front-sponsor they sure seem a lot less evil than Eli Lily or Shell.

name: Keely
email:
url: http://
ip: 65.102.3.58
date: 2002-10-29-04-44
Red Hat can be like that sometimes. A little bit of tinkering for your computer always comes into play. We run SuSE Linux ( you might want to try that) it’s quite lovely indeed & tends to not be so painful…as Red Hat can be sometimes. I use Yellow Dog on my iBook runs like a dream, so if you have a Mac (old one, new one) you might want to have a go of that to :)f you have any questions about Red Hat just email me….be more than happy to help out 🙂 – Keely
Edit Comment / Delete Comment Block IP 65.102.3.58 / Block IP range 65.102.3.*

name: yak sox
email:
url: www.spouting.net
ip: 203.58.6.8
date: 2002-10-29-08-48
Thanks. It should be okay though. Everytime I do a clean install, I just forget how it takes months for everything to fall into place just right.
Mind you, I’m using Mandrake 9 right now and am liking it. Its GUI for installing true type fonts is what Red Hat is missing, now that KDE doesn’t have that font installer admin tool.
SuSE is neat, but i’m inhibited by the price.

Just thinking of the Ed Kuepper version of the Canned Heat song.

Am going down the highway a bit today to see my mum for a day or so. I don’t do it nearly often enough, but I feel too old for hitch-hiking mostly these days.

Posting from uni — from the mac lab too. Netscape 4.7 will accept cookies, where IE won’t. And surprisingly, the Spouting front page looks halfway decent in Netscape 4.x at the moment. Last time I saw it it was unreadable.

Came across a canadian last night (I don’t know what state from) and they really were saying “eh?” — and not at the end of sentences the way a Queenslander would (“ay?”) – but in the middle of a sentence — I really had to stifle a few grins there.

Am going to have a go at cutting my own hair today. Have been using electrical clippers for a year or more now – but it’s never benn me doing it, jean has done it for me. Should go okay – I just dunno about the bottom of the back. With two mirrors lined up I might be able to figure it out. The thing is, I find it hard enough getting my sideys (sideburns – “side-ees (?)) level and balanced looking and they’re on the front of my head. It’s mirrors – it’s okay if i don’t think about it, but if I hesitate even for a second then my head starts getting boggled by how the reverse images isn’t really reverse, and my hands never seem to be where they should be according to the mirror.

Last class for the year this morning.

I know there hasn’t been much nerd-news outfeed here lately. Things have been involuntarily tangenting. But also have realised that I’m a bit out of balance with my extra-curricular pursuits, and computers and the internet are a bottomless pit of things to find out and learn. As much as I’m tempted to try and get to the bottom, I never will and I should be giving more time to walking (and or other outside-ish things) and self-maintenance.

One little thing though – I saw the (Murdoch-owned) australian pc magizine has 2 CDs worth of Mandrake 9 on its front cover this month.

There’s a vacant block of land with a bunch of trees on it about 50metres up the road and this morning at 7:30 on the dot they started ‘developing’ it. A chainsaw and an industrial strength mulcher.
I’ve read that it’s quite possible that rising sea levels and room temperatures don’t have anything to do with human activity – but either way, that mulcher is a gruesome noise. Next will be the gurggling of cement trucks and the bang of carpenters’ hammers.

I’m deliberately breezing over the ‘lot of things going on here’ because right now it’s all too close.

I had a go installing last night but accidentally put GRUB on the start of the /boot partition when I really meant it to be on the MBR. Also, the first try – I whacked the install CD in the CDRW drive, thinking that’d run faster, but anaconda kinda wigged out and wouldn’t recognise it — but using the DVD-drive worked, despite it having been relegated to slave (by me).
When it got to taking out the 2nd and putting in the 3rd install CD, it wouldn’t mount it, which I found a bit disconcerting – but it turned out the thing was just overheating – and continued after a couple of minutes rest. Apart from that, the install was breezy – the second go this morning went fine.

It’s tempting to start dropping sentences like “why the hell did they hide the Terminal so far away?” but it’s got to be expected. It’s like moving into a new house – a much nicer looking new house, but all the same, it won’t be long before you’re rummaging through dozens of boxes wondering where the damn kettle is — and figuring out how appliances will fit with the power points.
It does look nicer. It’s funny this transition with anti-aliased fonts. First there was just bits of Kde that had them, then bits of Gnome got them with Gnome 2 – and now it’s pretty much wall-to-wall (although, the default install of Mozilla’s typefaces don’t look any smoother). I open up the shell and WoW – it’s even smoothed out there! That was a real surprise. From memory, I don’t even think OS X’s terminal uses anti-aliased fonts.
First download? – Opera, so I can browse properly. If you’ll excuse me now, i have a lot of unpacking to do. :^)

name: SirFlakey
email:
url: www.core.org.au
ip: 144.132.163.213
date: 2002-10-20-17-21
Nice moving metaphor.

I got red hat 8 today which is fantastic, but I still haven’t finished this assignment on Zen Buddhism, which isn’t fantastic. Hopefully I can get it knocked over by this time tomorrow so then can have some guilt-free fun re-messing with the partitions and doing a clean install.

I was originally thinking this fellow was a blue toungue, but there is the ‘stumpy tailed’ (?) variety around here also — and it’s nice to see him back out and about. It seems totally reasonable to go to sleep for the whole winter. Was puzzling about how lizards really dig strawberries for some time yesterday. There’s some story-worthy depth to the fact that the strawberry, which is held as being a rather sensous kind of fruit … y’know, chocolate dipped, big lip-sticked lips – that kind of thing — them being a favourite food of the lizard which to most people register a twinge of revulsion, or wariness at least : the reptiles are different to us.

Was nice to hear that Sun Microsystems are donating billions of dollars worth of software to asian countries and central/south american countries, and even some to australia – schools. But in the same week I hear that they are sacking 8000 employees – 11% of their staff. Personally I think they’ve got their priorities wrong, and it shows that the first little factoid for what it is – not a pure act of benevolence, but part of their corporate strategy to undermine Microsoft.
Sun use the excuse of “market slowdown was unkind to them” … and the thing is that most people will just accept that – and that’s the way it is. Whatever happened to job security?? Pick up yer game Scott ‘they airbrushed my teeth’ McNealy.

After raving on about nature for a couple of days it feels like time for something computery.
Via OSNews earlier in the week I see that Codeweavers have licensed their Crossover plugin to the Xandros Linux OS. Struck me as interesting. I think it was mainly for users to be able to use MS Word. But I was thinking – if Red Hat ever did something like that would I pay the extra for it? Firstly – I know that even with this latest one – they went out of their way not to include any closed code software; like the NVIDIA geared kernel (but then I heard that there was some little bit in there that was Copyright Red hat – something to do with Bluecurve I think).
I just think it’d be really good to be able to watch Quicktime and .WMP things from Linux. I’m not interested in using Word – OpenOffice does a fine job. And if RH was going to be buying the plugin in bulk then surely they’d get a discount – so say – the bottom o’ the range version of RH Linux goes for 32bucks now, would you buy it for 60 if it had that plugin? Would I? I’m not sure.

But then – sometime in the future Kde 3.1 with a jacked up version of the XINE movie player may support quicktime .mov files annyway — or at least that’s what it says on this page. There’s a lot of interesting things on there. Like the fact that the german govt. is funding a groupware suit and secure email stuff for it. Apparently it’s old news, but I hadn’t heard it before.

More: just found this via kungfugrippe – a colour chooser for all your site design needs. It’s very javascripty – and only partially worked in Opera when I set it to pretend to be IE, but in one of those nature-freaky things, it works really well if looked at in Konqueror. (Of course I’m sure all those IE people will have no trouble at all.
And here I was thinking I’d have to schnaffle the colour scheme that I saw on a surf board the other week for the next redesign. As that Jello Biafra song goes, “Relax, Shudddup! At last all your decisions will be made … for you”.