note to self....

Something I must Do

2009-02-01T01:04:00.002Z

One thing I know I must do, and do soon, is to find the source code for this "GNOME bloger" thing / Post Blog Entry widget so I can fix the whack HTML translation it does with what I type into this little 90% opaque window...

Is there a technical reason?

2009-02-01T01:02:00.001Z

Is there a technical reason I like KDE4 better than the alternatives I have seen, almost to the point of using it rather than my old steady, FVWM? No, not really.

I do like the widget set. I find that somehow KDE has divined exactly which widgets I want on my desktop and has provided them.

Furthermore, as I look in he system tray, I find that all the little tell-tales, meters, and indicators I need to re-assure me that all is well in my little laptop world are there with their blinking or beeping or popping up little transparent slides - slices of glowing crystal with printing on them - telling me everything is okay. Everything is okay.

It's sort of more like a philosophical or metaphysical reason... you know?

I am incensed, nay, Outraged

2009-02-01T00:50:00.003Z

by a discovery I made just this same day, today.

There are commands - plain old command line text from the keyboard, typed into a Bash prompt in an xterm commands that don't even really need the xterm commands, to suspend or hibernate this cute little laptop system. Imagine! So....

The commands are:

pm-suspend - suspend to RAM
pm-hibernate - suspend to disk

I believe the 'pm-' prefix stands for "Power Manager".

In any case, I submit to you the question that begs to be asked in light of this new evidence:

Why the HELL is it so difficult to get the goddam suspend/hibernate/shutdown widgets to work from within the many and various Window Manager/Desktop Environment environments?

Well? The world awaits your answer...

So. Well, I know one thing for goddam goddammit shure, at this point: My damned Xt-widget-based applet/button widget thingies that invoke shell scripts based on some stored property or resources - the ones that I use will hence forth work, and work just jim dandy fine, thank-you-for-freakin-nuthin-you-bloat-crazed-widget-making-fiends.

GNOME is Gone

2009-01-31T17:39:00.001Z

Well, it just gets weirder and weirder - GNOME (perhaps I should start calling it "The GNOME" or "the gnome", since its behaviour is becoming quite fae, and should probably be personified) for reasons yet to be understood, has left the desktop. Not only that, it appears to have taken with it.

My faithful FVWM has been the only available Window manager, but even sweet FVWM has lost her configuration files, so all I got was the default root window menu, where XTerm - the X-Windows Eye-Candy Messiah [Oh save us from our bloated gluttony of Widget-Bloat, oh beloved Spawn of the Xt Widget-set] - was the only room exit shown.

The "Exit FVWM" exit was a false door, since it looped back through a KDM that would only return to FVWM, completely ignoring any prayers and imprecations offered on the altar of the KDM Login Session Menu.

Where, or where, is that GDM I request all those weeks ago, and so painstakingly downloaded over the borrowed DSL connection? Gone, gone, gone away, it would seem. At least, it's not running, and I have yet to find the radio button that will entice it to leave it's dormant state and participate in the operation of the system.

So KDE4 is running now, having dropped to the console login, and started it form the command line.

2009-01-27T11:55:00.000Z

Removed eXecute Permissions from blender.png Icon

$sudo chmod -x /usr/share/wbar/iconpack/wbar.osx/blender.png

2009-01-27T11:38:00.000Z

and another

http://crash.gnome.org/report/index/e9cf9e02-ec66-11dd-bd6e-0007e9333148?date=2009-01-27-11

This time it was the settings manager, again.

2009-01-27T11:34:00.000Z

Another GNOME Bug Report

http://crash.gnome.org/report/index/0152bd62-ec66-11dd-8276-0007e9333148?date=2009-01-27-11

This time it was gnome-terminal.

It seems like all of these crashes, as well as the 100% CPU Usage is around the Gnome Panel and/or some issue it or one of its applets have with pixmap drawing - specifically, there is a pixmap not getting found, a variable not getting initialized, and then a crash.

Gtk2 to blame?

2009-01-18T04:39:00.000Z

GNOME blog posting widget

It works right out of the box - it does seem to have a tendency to try to keep the authentication data, however.

ray heinrich poems

2008-12-21T22:34:00.005Z

From: http://wordbiscuit.com/wb037.htm - it's by ray heinrich also of rec.arts.poems:



      < oh you always >
      
      begin talking
      telling me secrets when i can't hear you
      so i fill them in
      those secrets
      fill them with whatever i want
      say them
      where you can't hear me

why would i be mad?

2008-11-20T14:02:00.002Z

getting my attention
taking it away again
left me incommunicado
waiting just to die

today is always the day
divine intervention
against all human

screw you
screw your god
screw your universe
gimme back what's mine

i used to be

2008-03-04T12:35:00.003Z

a valued member of the community, at one time
now i'm 
sitting out this morning's tornado watch
blogging from my mom's computer
drinking coffee black and sweet

remembering some things not pleasant
so now i am no one in particular to you
it seems this thing has just gotten 
out of hand to the point of being
over the edge

Obama Insane

2008-02-02T19:00:00.000Z

It was as I read the following quote [from http://www.democracynow.org/2008/1/31/headlines] ...

Sen. Barack Obama: “I want to go before the world community and say ‘America is back, America is back’ and we are ready to lead the world against the common threats of the 21st century, terrorism and nuclear weapons, but also climate change and poverty, genocide and disease and I will once more send a message to those yearning faces beyond our shores that says: you matter to us, your future is our future and our moment is now.’

... that I began to realize that Barack Obama is clearly insane.

what's going on here?

2008-01-21T02:07:00.000Z

logging on
first light
seven times
in so many

taking down thirty
tinfoil seal
this

Off-The-Record (OTR) IM for Gaim 1.5.x under SuSE 9.2

2006-06-12T04:44:00.000Z

Building the OTR 3.0.0 Plugin for Gaim 1.5.x: A how-to text from cypherpunks.ca describing how to build and install the OTR plugin under SuSE 9.2 using the guru packages: howto-build-otr-plugin-for-gaim-1.5.txt
Building libotr-3.0.0 for SuSE 9.2: A how-to text that describes how to build libotr-3.0.0 for SuSE v9.2: howto-build-libotr-for-suse-92.txt

Note that the two operations - building the plugin and building libotr are only loosely related, particularly since we used a pre-built libotr from the guru site to build the plugin. Logically one might prefer to use the libotr built from sources instead of the guru pre-built RPM package.

Thin clients, fat servers, and the SVGA VNC client

2006-06-09T22:37:00.000Z

Desktop Guerrilla Tactics: a Portable Thin Client Approach (from Linux Journal [LJ]) talks about using http://www.tightvnc.com and http://packages.qa.debian.org/s/svncviewer.html to create a VNC client without resorting to running an X server for the VNC client.

Learning *nix (Linux / Unix)

2006-06-09T21:56:00.000Z

These links are culled from the Ask Slashdot discussion entitled Where should one go for Unix/Linux Training?.

The C Programming Language - this is the classic "K&R book" - one post [the one that provided this link] makes the point that "you can't *know* UNIX/*nix if you don't know how to program"
SlackBook - an online electronic book mostly specific to the Slackware distribution.
Linux Administration Handbook - also home to the Unix System Administration Handbook
Real World Linux Security [book]
Linux International
"For complete newbies" try Linux Questions or The Linux Documentation Project
Unix Guru Universe
O'Reilly [the publishing house]
distrowatch.com
LearningLinux.com

Firefox Selected Text Color Fix

2006-06-06T08:47:00.000Z

Okay, here's a solution to one that's been bugging me for awhile:

The problem is that Mozilla Firefox 1.x under SuSE 9.2 KDE 3.3 has some weirdness with the text select foreground / background color. The fix for this was found [tweaked] from http://www.mozilla.org/unix/customizing.html#prefs.

This fix is documented on the mozilla.org website for Mozilla, but this works [seems to] for Mozilla Firefox [curr ver 1.5.0.4], as well.

The tweak was that my X server didn't like the color names that were used in the example from the website - not sure why "green" or "white" are not being mapped by the X RGB color database, but using the [somewhat] standard HTML color hex number format ('#rrggbb', where rr == red, gg == green, bb == blue, and each color is a 2-digit (8-bit) hexadecimal color component value) seems to work fine.

Note that this fix might be possible in the ${ff_user_app_dir}/chrome/userChrome.css file, but I haven't found the CSS definitions of Firefox user interface elements, yet. That should exist, I believe, but it may be wrapped some sort of XUL implementation verbiage.

Anyway - here are the pertinent entries from my newly created ${ff_user_prof_dir}/user.js file [user.js did not exist by default for Firefox - simply create it and add whatever of the available Javascsript UI style commands are desired - the page linked above has more examples]:

// Set select colors for text:
user_pref("ui.textSelectBackground", "#00ff00");
user_pref("ui.textSelectForeground", "#000000");
// Select color for typeahead find is slightly different:
user_pref("ui.textSelectBackgroundAttention", "blue");
// Not clear when/if widgetSelectBackground ever gets called: let's find out.
user_pref("ui.widgetSelectBackground", "orange");

Notes:

For the shell variables used above -

${ff_user_app_dir} - this is the user's application config and state directory (typically something like $HOME/$USER/.mozilla/firefox/)

${ff_user_prof_dir} - this is the Firefox user profile directory (typically something like $HOME/$USER/.mozilla/firefox/${profilename} where ${profilename} is a string randomly generated for the [default] profile when Firefox starts up - usually the first time.

starwars screensaver

2006-05-23T03:52:00.000Z

To the X screen saver with a binary entitled 'starwars':

Quit hogging all my CPU cycles - freaking NINETY-NINE PRECENT (99%) of available processor capability is occupied running the screensaver. This is a Bad Thing™.

Note to self: Delete/Remove this bitchy little bit of software ASAP

... and CHECK for other X screen hacks that have the same predatory tedencies.

To play DVDs under SuSE 9.2:

2006-05-14T19:15:00.000Z

Install Win32 Codecs - downloaded Win32-Codecs (w32codec-all-20060501-0.pm.0.i586)
from Links2Linux.de
- w32codec-all-20060501-0.pm.0.i586.rpm
- w32codec-all-20060501-0.pm.0.src.rpm
the .i586 package had to be installed as an upgrade ('rpm -U')
Install libdvdread - downloaded libdvdread from Links2Linux.de
Install libdvdcss - downloaded libdvdcss from www.videolan.org (http://download.videolan.org/pub/libdvdcss/1.2.9/rpm/)

the Comprehensive TeX Archive Network

2006-05-09T01:46:00.000Z

the Comprehensive TeX Archive Network

Installing User Fonts

2006-05-09T01:43:00.000Z

jsMath (Download): Download TeX fonts for jsMath has this about installing fonts for an individual user (does not require privileged access):

Create a directory called .fonts in your home directory (if you don't already have one).
Place the [TTF fonts] in this folder.
Restart your browser

Install Type1 Fonts

2006-05-09T01:38:00.000Z

jsMath (Download): Download TeX fonts for jsMath has the following about how to install Type1 fonts:

Move the .pfb and .afm files to /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Type1
CD to that directory and run 'type1inst'
Run 'xset fp rehash'
Test that the fonts are installed using 'xlsfonts | grep cm'

Install TrueType (TTF) Fonts

2006-05-09T01:33:00.000Z

jsMath (Download): Download TeX fonts for jsMath has the following about how to install TTF fonts under Unix:

Move the .ttf files to /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/TTF
CD to that directory and run 'mkfontscale' and then 'mkfontdir'
Run 'fc-cache' to rebuild the cache
Restart the X server

Enable TrueType Fonts for Mozilla

2006-05-09T01:28:00.000Z

Enabling TrueType Fonts

memory issues

2006-04-24T10:45:00.000Z

Why does kamix take more memory than Emacs? I mean, for that matter, why does Emacs take more memory than Firefox? Still, wtF? Fully graphical web browser - Mozilla Firefox 1.5.0.2 is listed in top as taking 0.5% of memory (we're talking 512M here, I believe) - and that's running maximized and with the Performancing blogging extension open.

GNU Emacs, on the other hand - a text editor with a text inerface, but running under X (so I guess there are a few widgets allocated there) - Emacs is taking up (again: according to top) 3.7% of RAM, with no files open, and no child processes running (?).

Now, this is nothing, really (3.7%) as we look up the list from bottom to top - in the same vicinity as Emacs on this listing (sorted by %MEM) we have such notable applications and services as kalarmd (3.8%), gkrellm (3.3%), and (less than 3%) xterm, artsd, etc. No, this is nothing - we're in the lightweight end of the listing - let's look closer to the top.

Let's see ... kdeinit (4.1%), kdeinit (4.2%), kdeinit (4.5%) ... the list goes on - altogether there are something like 16 instances of kdeinit running, each of them taking up more RAM individually than either Emacs or Firefox - more, in fact than any other of the 15-odd applications running except for e.g. X (7.9%), kgpg (6.3%), kamix (5.4%) ... whoops - wait, I've overlooked something: firefox-bin is running up at the top, consuming some 12.7% - followed by the #1 instance of kdeinit (10.5%) second, and X itself (7.9%) third....

So please ignore what I said about Firefox at the beginning - that was 'firefox' the script that starts 'firefox-bin' - everything else was [i think] pretty accurate.