ricketyclick

I got to code up a couple of utilities (in Python, if you care) for myself, crude tools to help me download and organize all the strips from a couple of my favorite web comics.

That lead me to this:

Half-assed programming was a time-filler that, like knitting, must date to the beginning of the human experience.

— Vernor Vinge, in A Fire Upon the Deep, an SF novel set thousands of years in the future.

And looking for that, I also stumbled across:

We build our computers the way we build our cities — over time, without a plan, on top of ruins.

– Ellen Ullman

Found here.

OK, I’m about sick to death of Firefox. I mean it’s driving me to shrieking rage several times a day.

About every thirty minutes or so, it decides that it needs to do something so important, it should use up 100% of my available CPU cycles, taking my computer away from me for about 50 seconds.

Once or twice a day, it never gives it back, and I have to kill the Firefox process. I then have to start Firefox in safe-mode, let it run for a minute or so, then restart FF normally.

Yes, goddamnit, I have spent hours tracking down fixes for this CPU spike, and have tried over a dozen different ones. I’m sick of fooling with it. “Goddamnit”, because every once in a while I mention this on Slashdot or other popular forum, and I always get some FF partisan telling me what a lazy noob I am for not going to the FF site or forums and looking at the available fixes. (And once, someone told me I’m the only person having this problem, there must be something wrong with me.) So, yes, I have, actually, tried to look this up and fix it and I’m just sick of it.

So today I started trying new browsers.

First up, Chrome. No good, because there’s not a Linux version. Piss on you, Google.

Second up, Safari: Apple or Windows only. No, I don’t want to screw around with Wine. Piss on you, Apple.

Third up, Epiphany. I actually get to install this one.

The Good:

• Fast.
• Clean.

The Bad:

• No bookmark sidebar: showstopper.
• No search bar: showstopper.
• Fails to properly import my Firefox bookmarks: showstopper.
• Fails to find the RSS/Atom feeds on half a dozen websites: showstopper.

The Ugly:

• This is not a damn Eastwood movie. Five minutes finds four killers. Why the hell should I bother looking for and writing about stuff that simply makes me roll my eyes?
• Oh, OK, then, one Ugly: can’t add a tab by right-clicking in the Tab bar. Yes, I added the “New Tab” icon to the Toolbar. That’s why this is an ugly, not a showstopping Bad.

So, Epiphany is a no-go. Partisans? Piss off with your diddly fixes and workarounds. When I first loaded FF, everything I wanted was right there, out in the open. Let me know when you’re serious about making Epiphany a serious tool.

Next up, Opera.

I only have a cell phone; no landline.

I just misplaced it, again. I had good reason to believe that I left it at my parents’ house.

I was actually preparing to get dressed and drive out there (about an hour round-trip, neglecting the mandatory socializing and dinner,) when I heard it beep: someone had texted me.

The beep, however, is a short one-shot, not enough to track the phone down with.

I goggled “call my cell phone” and came up with Where’s My Cellphone?; you type in your number and it dials your phone. Found!

Outstanding resource.

It has a pop-up ad, which I don’t begrudge here since the guy has to pay for this service somehow, and I also donated a buck through Pay-pal.

[update]
Beck’s back, and says it was his fault:
“If I were in charge around here, I’d fire me.”

OK, then. Whew.

One of the most obnoxiously abrasive, rabidly self-righteous, principled and clear-thinking blogs in existence has apparently been hijacked: Billy Beck’s two–four.net now displays a bland, generic advertising portal.

I assume this is ordinary domain squatting and not the beginning of the obamist purge.

I’d say, keep Beck in your thoughts and prayers, but I know he’d just sneer at such magical superstition.

I will say this: whoever it is that’s taken from Billy what’s his is going to regret their mistake — unless it turns that it was, in fact, his mistake, like forgetting to re-up or something, in which case he will politely swallow his medicine, and do whatever he needs to do to get back on the air.

Because, you know, he runs his own life and accepts responsibility for it, up to and including defending himself and his with deadly force.

Dead on. I even seem to remember, back in the early days when high-end crypto was banned for international trade, that advocates were in fact invoking the Second Amendment in public, although I don’t recall that it was ever invoked in court. Pity, that.

The Right to Keep and Bear isn’t just about firearms. It’s about being able to resist the government with whatever tools come to hand.

In a total splurge, I got a Wacom Bamboo 6 x 8 graphics tablet.

It’s wonderful, and I wish I were artist enough to use it properly.

Unfortunately, last time I updated Ubuntu, it quit working. I had hoped that the upgrade to 8.10 would fix that, and it did — almost.

The stylus on this thing has an “eraser” button, which can be set in the GIMP to work just like an eraser. There’s also a wireless mouse that works with the tablet.

The stylus works, pressure sensitive, side buttons, and all, but neither the mouse nor the eraser work. I just spent a couple of hours dinking with /etc/x11/xorg.conf, which controls the user interface, but no joy.

So here’s my current mood:

self-doodle

Look, on a good day? I can pick out “Chopsticks” on a cheap toy piano. Controlling the GIMP with the Bamboo is like putting me in front of a really big pipe organ. I can pick out “Chopsticks” on any number of interesting-sounding stops.

Strongly, strongly recommended for anyone with any interest in drawing on the computer. Far easier to use than a mouse (fingers instead of wrist), pressure sensitive strokes — fabulous. I hope to be worthy.

One purchasing choice to consider: I went for the 6″ x 8″ pad. This gives you extra resolution. However, the cursor position on the screen is controlled by the absolute position of the stylus on the pad. To go from one side of the screen to the other, you must move the stylus from one side of the pad to the other. You cannot do this with simply wrist action; you must move your whole forearm. Also, with an ordinary mouse, if something on the desk gets in your way, you pick up the mouse, move it back a bit, and put it down. This trick does not work with the Bamboo. These problems would be less severe with the smaller 4″ x 6″ pad. Moreover, the small pad comes in a stripped down package with no mouse and no software — $70 versus $200 for the 6×8 Bamboo “Fun” package I got.

I think I prefer the larger version, but it’s definitely taking some getting used to.

[update]
I believe that ergonomically, the pen position, with your wrist held sideways, is far superior to the flat wrist mouse position. It’s the difference between a good handgun stance and the gangsta grip.

I just finished upgrading my Ubuntu Linux installation to 8.10, Intrepid Ibex.

The biggest difficulty is that many temporary files are put in the /var and /boot folders. Normally, this is not a problem, but when I set up the system, I gave them dedicated partitions. I sized them according to the advice I found on the web, and in fact oversized them.

Not by enough, apparently. I gave /var a gigabyte, and /boot 100 megs, and they both came up short, by more than half.

I couldn’t easily resize them, because they’re always mounted.

Finally, I booted from the live CD of Ubuntu 7.10 in Hudson and Hudson’s Ubuntu Unleashed, which doesn’t require those folders to mount.

I moved /var (and /tmp) to a 500 GB SATA I’ve installed but not set up yet. This was an interesting exercise, involving hand-editing the /etc/fstab file.

The /boot partition was a bit trickier; I’d hope to use the space recovered when I deleted the old /var and /tmp folders, but unfortunately, they were in an extended partition, and boot is in the primary; apparently, the extended partition cannot be resized. I ended up stealing a couple hundred megs from the vastly oversized /swap partition.

For the most part, the upgrade went smoothly after that. There was one glitch with only the root account being able to log on to the desktop; somehow the permissions on the /etc folder were screwed up.

All done now, though, and I believe 8.10 is noticably snappier than 8.04. Biggest difference I’ve noticed is in the file browser, particularly in folders with heavy graphics content.

Aside from the problems I caused with an overly-spiffy disk layout, the upgrade was essentially painless.

I’ve picked up a couple of links from a blog-scrapper, an automated site that collects links to articles that might be of interest to a given audience. This particular scrapper apparently panders to Dems and other leftie wreckers, because it’s linking So Proud, on Barry Hussein’s exceptionalism; and Obama’s Disciples, on the kind, tolerant, well-meaning folk who just chose our next President.

I hope I get a lot of traffic from those links, but I expect not. Mostly, scrappers exist to artificially inflate linkage numbers so they can charge their advertisers more. I’m leaving these two up for amusement, and the off chance that some of the Hopeful will come here and be outraged in comments,but any more links from these assholes will be deleted.

WordPress is currently running its second usability poll on Dashboard features. (The Dashboard is the page that allows registered users to post new articles and generally administer the blog.)

It’s concerned mostly with two things: position of a search box, and the behavior of Scheduling, which allows you to set the date that an article will appear.

They solicited suggestions for new scheduling features, to which I replied:

Expiration date: the ability to set a date and time after which the article would fall off the front page. I know of one project whose manager, normally a Wordpress advocate, rejected Word Press as a framework for her project primarily because it lacked this feature.

I’m thinking of a project Friend Pat is working on. Pat, you should pile on yourself.

I’m updating even though the security problem is a very low risk.

I’m updating to 2.6.1, which has over sixty fixes, but not 2.6.2, which has only a few low-priority fixes, and isn’t yet included in Fantastico.

WP 2.7, with what looks like a greatly improved Dashboard, is in the works. I’m looking forward to that, although it seems to be quite a ways out.

If problems occur, I’ll revert, having just run the (updated to 2.2.1) Wordpress Database Backup plugin. (Which, by the way, works very nicely.)

Anyway, Here. We. Go!

(As part of this process, I’m disabling all plugins, so things might be a bit wonky for a moment. Stand by.)

Seems to have gone pretty well.

Carry on.