2005-4-5
How do you save a drowning lawyer?
Throw him a rock.
Wish I had seen all of these lawyer jokes in fortune when I worked at the law firm...
Well, week 2 of the quarter, 8 and a half to go. Sigh. Not going too bad, am getting used to doing homework every night. But it makes it hard for me to sleep, my mind just races...
The weather has persisted, very nice. I may have a little sun on my face already. Makes it easier to climb on the bike or walk every day.
Nothing too excellent technically going on. Have been too busy I guess. I did get my keyboard working correctly under OpenBSD on the iBook. It's great now, the wireless is very reliable under BSD, and the XFCE4 desktop I'm using is nice, but light. I have the battery applet installed, so I can see how the battery is faring, and using xmodmap trickery I got the 'delete' key (backspace position) to act as backspace now, and set the enter key on the right of the space bar to delete just in case. Also have F10 and F11 as middle and right-click. Lucky since when I was using Yellow Dog Linux I wrote m and r above them in permanent marker. Coupled with the OpenBSD stickers my iBook definitely would stand out should I end up in a crowd of people using Indigo clamshell iBooks... Whatever.
I had to do some .Xresources wizardry to get fn-shift-pgup and fn-shift-pgdn to scroll properly in xterm, courtesy of Google. Some poor schmo was doing some coding for the XFree people in the mid-90's, and documented the heck out of customizing keyboard activity under X. He wrote a good bit of code that is in X now. And posted a regular log of tricks. Good people. Hard work that, and thankless.
Thanks dude.
Now if my iBook just had a higher res display, was brighter, had more disk space... Other than that I'm pretty happy with it. It's pretty quick under OpenBSD, and perfectly usable under OSX.
I've been trying to get ahold of Tiger, but no success yet. I need to find some disk space to put it on... Eventually I guess.
Work is going fine, I have a pretty good attitude lately. The weather helps. Just mindless desktop support work. I have some opportunities in the future at the university, I might end up with a network job. That would be much better than desktop support.
I'm learning how to use Excel in my engineering class. It's useful, but that doesn't mean I have to like it. I would rather use some graphing software that just allowed you to generate your graph by putting data in a dot file, or shell prompts. I'm a command line person. But I've used Excel and OpenOffice.org/StarOffice Calc quite a bit over the years, and it works. I don't like how Excel 2000 does a lot of automated wizard crap while you're working, it is distracting, and Dios knows if you can turn it off. It is slow even on my girlfriend's P4 laptop, so I bet the new 'features' like that are written in VB. The class will actually be shifting to MatLab soon, and I'm looking forward to getting my hands dirty with that. Should be challenging, but Matlab skills should be valuable should I end up an engineer.
Q: Why do ducks have big flat feet?
A: To stamp out forest fires.
Q: Why do elephants have big flat feet?
A: To stamp out flaming ducks.
Hee hee. Fortune rules.
I guess I might install Matlab now, or if there is an OSX version I'll wait and put it on there. I suppose I could install Office for Mac on my laptop, but I'd rather not. I just don't care to have it. Maybe I should out of courtesy so She Whom I Live With can have her laptop to herself...
I really haven't been doing much technical. Strange. I have been reading the OpenBSD mailing lists again, I resubscribed. Lack of technical discussion is surprising. I wonder if the user base is that different than it used to be? OpenBSD hasn't changed as far as usability since 2.9 when I started playing with it. I don't know anyone personally that uses it. I don't even know anyone that uses Linux on their desktop, but I know some guys that work on Linux servers all day from their Windows machines. grep-ing and mutt-ing and using the shell. Which is what I'm doing now actually... My server is running Debian, I'm enjoying the fact that other people are using my server, so I can't allow myself to break it or reload it, I just have to Let It Be. And I can leave my blog on it.
I still mean to work on the blog software, maybe I guess. I got a javascript book and a flash book for about $6 together used. Flash seems to be very much a language that has to be programmed in a gui IDE. I've never read anybody who is technical or old school saying that they think of flash as a good language or environment. But it is in demand these days. Javascript is not going anywhere soon. It seems to be as popular as ever where you can use client side programming. I was surprised to see that Google is using XML and javascript for their new satellite map feature. It is awesome! Some people at the office including myself were geeking out over it. How did they make it so fast? The interactive nature of it is very good, blows maps.yahoo.com/mapquest out of the water. Interesting.
Okay enough for now. The blog software (bzero) used vi by default on Debian, strange. I'm used to having to manually configure an editor, and using Emacs. But the vast majority of the time I do use vi.
... A solemn, unsmiling, sanctimonious old iceberg who looked like he
was waiting for a vacancy in the Trinity.
-- Mark Twain
Gotta love Twain.
The local theatre, one that has only one screen, and sells beer and pizza, and has a bar that used to allow smoking until the city banned it recently, is showing Sideways and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. I may go tomorrow. Never saw Fear and Loathing on the big screen. And I could use a break. I still don't know what happened to Hunter. I believe that he killed himself. But you have to wonder why. I don't think he was a man that would live with impotency. But who knows. Where will I get King-Hell and Shit-Rain now? I bought a copy of the Tao te Ching or whatever. I like it. There is some wisdom there. I find it soothing. But there is still some HST I haven't read.
Funny, Matz's Ruby documentation (for the Ruby programming language he created) has a very similar soothing tone to the Tao. It is very serene and peaceful. How can technical documentation have such a tone? I've looked at Ruby somewhat. Looks like Perl. But everything is an object, like Python. I'm sure the abstraction is a lot different than Perl. Speaking of Perl, maybe I'll go play...
Wish I had seen all of these lawyer jokes in fortune when I worked at the law firm...
Well, week 2 of the quarter, 8 and a half to go. Sigh. Not going too bad, am getting used to doing homework every night. But it makes it hard for me to sleep, my mind just races...
The weather has persisted, very nice. I may have a little sun on my face already. Makes it easier to climb on the bike or walk every day.
Nothing too excellent technically going on. Have been too busy I guess. I did get my keyboard working correctly under OpenBSD on the iBook. It's great now, the wireless is very reliable under BSD, and the XFCE4 desktop I'm using is nice, but light. I have the battery applet installed, so I can see how the battery is faring, and using xmodmap trickery I got the 'delete' key (backspace position) to act as backspace now, and set the enter key on the right of the space bar to delete just in case. Also have F10 and F11 as middle and right-click. Lucky since when I was using Yellow Dog Linux I wrote m and r above them in permanent marker. Coupled with the OpenBSD stickers my iBook definitely would stand out should I end up in a crowd of people using Indigo clamshell iBooks... Whatever.
I had to do some .Xresources wizardry to get fn-shift-pgup and fn-shift-pgdn to scroll properly in xterm, courtesy of Google. Some poor schmo was doing some coding for the XFree people in the mid-90's, and documented the heck out of customizing keyboard activity under X. He wrote a good bit of code that is in X now. And posted a regular log of tricks. Good people. Hard work that, and thankless.
Thanks dude.
Now if my iBook just had a higher res display, was brighter, had more disk space... Other than that I'm pretty happy with it. It's pretty quick under OpenBSD, and perfectly usable under OSX.
I've been trying to get ahold of Tiger, but no success yet. I need to find some disk space to put it on... Eventually I guess.
Work is going fine, I have a pretty good attitude lately. The weather helps. Just mindless desktop support work. I have some opportunities in the future at the university, I might end up with a network job. That would be much better than desktop support.
I'm learning how to use Excel in my engineering class. It's useful, but that doesn't mean I have to like it. I would rather use some graphing software that just allowed you to generate your graph by putting data in a dot file, or shell prompts. I'm a command line person. But I've used Excel and OpenOffice.org/StarOffice Calc quite a bit over the years, and it works. I don't like how Excel 2000 does a lot of automated wizard crap while you're working, it is distracting, and Dios knows if you can turn it off. It is slow even on my girlfriend's P4 laptop, so I bet the new 'features' like that are written in VB. The class will actually be shifting to MatLab soon, and I'm looking forward to getting my hands dirty with that. Should be challenging, but Matlab skills should be valuable should I end up an engineer.
Q: Why do ducks have big flat feet?
A: To stamp out forest fires.
Q: Why do elephants have big flat feet?
A: To stamp out flaming ducks.
Hee hee. Fortune rules.
I guess I might install Matlab now, or if there is an OSX version I'll wait and put it on there. I suppose I could install Office for Mac on my laptop, but I'd rather not. I just don't care to have it. Maybe I should out of courtesy so She Whom I Live With can have her laptop to herself...
I really haven't been doing much technical. Strange. I have been reading the OpenBSD mailing lists again, I resubscribed. Lack of technical discussion is surprising. I wonder if the user base is that different than it used to be? OpenBSD hasn't changed as far as usability since 2.9 when I started playing with it. I don't know anyone personally that uses it. I don't even know anyone that uses Linux on their desktop, but I know some guys that work on Linux servers all day from their Windows machines. grep-ing and mutt-ing and using the shell. Which is what I'm doing now actually... My server is running Debian, I'm enjoying the fact that other people are using my server, so I can't allow myself to break it or reload it, I just have to Let It Be. And I can leave my blog on it.
I still mean to work on the blog software, maybe I guess. I got a javascript book and a flash book for about $6 together used. Flash seems to be very much a language that has to be programmed in a gui IDE. I've never read anybody who is technical or old school saying that they think of flash as a good language or environment. But it is in demand these days. Javascript is not going anywhere soon. It seems to be as popular as ever where you can use client side programming. I was surprised to see that Google is using XML and javascript for their new satellite map feature. It is awesome! Some people at the office including myself were geeking out over it. How did they make it so fast? The interactive nature of it is very good, blows maps.yahoo.com/mapquest out of the water. Interesting.
Okay enough for now. The blog software (bzero) used vi by default on Debian, strange. I'm used to having to manually configure an editor, and using Emacs. But the vast majority of the time I do use vi.
... A solemn, unsmiling, sanctimonious old iceberg who looked like he
was waiting for a vacancy in the Trinity.
-- Mark Twain
Gotta love Twain.
The local theatre, one that has only one screen, and sells beer and pizza, and has a bar that used to allow smoking until the city banned it recently, is showing Sideways and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. I may go tomorrow. Never saw Fear and Loathing on the big screen. And I could use a break. I still don't know what happened to Hunter. I believe that he killed himself. But you have to wonder why. I don't think he was a man that would live with impotency. But who knows. Where will I get King-Hell and Shit-Rain now? I bought a copy of the Tao te Ching or whatever. I like it. There is some wisdom there. I find it soothing. But there is still some HST I haven't read.
Funny, Matz's Ruby documentation (for the Ruby programming language he created) has a very similar soothing tone to the Tao. It is very serene and peaceful. How can technical documentation have such a tone? I've looked at Ruby somewhat. Looks like Perl. But everything is an object, like Python. I'm sure the abstraction is a lot different than Perl. Speaking of Perl, maybe I'll go play...
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