Aaargh! Here's ANOTHER reason not to use Gentoo on PPC. I have "no space left on device" when I try to make even a little directory as my regular user, after trying to install Ximian OpenOffice. OO is famous for being probably the largest standard package in the open-source world; this means that it requires huge resources -- CPU time and disk space -- to compile. This is why Gentoo provides a "bin" version of it, a precompiled, to-hell-with-the-133t-optimizations-just-get-it-installed version of it and a few other large apps (actually, mozilla is the only other one I know of right now). But... it only provides the binary versions for x86 platforms. If you want OO for PPC, you have no choice but to compile it yourself.
I managed to shave my ext2 partition usage down until I had about 93% -- or maybe 90%, I don't remember -- of my sole Linux partition used. Then I commenced the emerging of "openoffice-ximian". It filled up the disk while I was asleep. No prob, I'll just delete a few files so that I have the bare minimum and so that my blog will still work, and I'll figure out later how to clear even more space so that I can finish the build. So I found some builds to delete. OK, that should clear up a little space. Nope: "no space left on device". OK, well, there's probably some sort of overhead having to to with needing a certain number of blocks to do anything, something like that, I thought. So I deleted some more. And more. No space left on device. NSLOD. NSLOD. Eventually I noticed that the ratio of "used" to "1K-blocks" listed in the df command was definitely a full percentage point or more less than 100, yet it still said 100% full. Somehow, by googling, no doubt, I learned that the OS prevents ordinary users from writing to the disk once it's more than 95% full. Root can still write, but ordinary ussers -- like apache -- can't. That's where I really got stuck today; I tried to upload a preliminary version of this post, and it had the effect of rewriting my blog home page and the previous entry as empty files. Not good. I actually had to grab my home page from Google cache as root and move it there just so I would still have a home page that looked something like my real home page, even though it was 2 weeks out of date.
And what did I end up doing to recover enough space to get my blog working again? Well, I found some large files to move to my HFS partition, and that did it, actually. But how was I going to finish my OpenOffice install? I mean, I had cleared 5% of my disk space so that I could save small files as my regular user. But if that 5% wasn't enough to finish compiling it, I would again end up with a full disk, and the task of having to find 50 MB worth of files to delete or move so that I could do stuff again. I eventually learned that it takes 4-5 GB to compile OO, so I just cold deleted the build tree and installed openoffice-bin. Which does have a PPC version. I discovered that while writing this post, but I'm sorry, I just don't feel like going back and correcting what I wrote earlier. So, Gentoo does provide a bin version for regular OpenOffice.org, but not for Ximian OpenOffice. Umm.... so there.
When I came in from lunch hiesterday, the cicadas were loud. When I left work around 7:00, the cicadas were about silent. I was kind of bummed and surprised; I thought perhaps all of Brood X had suddenly got done with their hitherto raucous mating and all the remaining females had got on to the quiet business of carving slots in twigs. But it seems they simply knew some bad weather was on its way, and decided to take a day off from that. They are back in full force today. Yay.
First, check out the witty dialog over at The King of Pointland: Cicada Revue, significantly enhanced by One Idiot.
Anyway, when I grew up, I called those big ugly summer bugs "cicadas", with the middle "a" pronounced as in "father" -- or I called them "locusts", for reasons I no longer understand (never did see actual locusts in my lifetime, AFAIK).
Now that the 17-year cicada is the hot topic of the week, people are saying this word a lot -- really a lot, I mean, they're sometimes absent-mindedly using the word as a substitute for "expense report" when they've managed briefly to stop talking on the subject of actual cicadas. And in all these utterances of the word, I don't think I've heard anyone say it the way I grew up saying it.
Now, I've gone and checked a dictionary (AHD, 1985), and it gives both pronunciations as correct. And I prefer my original pronunciation, not only because it's mine, but because, as a rule, I prefer for letters to be pronounced as close as possible to their international values, and in this case, as close as possible to the original Latin (though in ecclesiastical Latin, at least, the 'c' would have been pronounced like modern English 'ch', rather than an 's' sound). But, since I have not heard a single soul pronounce it with the "'a' as in 'father'" sound, I have taken to (consciously) pronouncing it with the more plebeian "'a' as in 'milkshake'". I occasionally slip up, though, despite my best efforts. Wonder if I sound like some sort of snob when I do, or if I just sound like I'm from another planet.
Well, it's new car time for One Idiot. The Nova will probably still va for a while yet, but there are just too many things wrong with it.
The Idiot sees a lot of things to desire in Toyota automobiles, like hybrid technologies, and Bluetooth-enableditude. As well as the usual famed reliability and good quality of their cars. BUT... their web site is totally useless without Flash. By now, both of you know the deal with me and Flash. Not available on Linux on PPC (also I have no sound on my computer at work, so sound flash is out there), so viewing Flash properly usually involves me rebooting my laptop into OS-X. Which I pretty much don't do unless a friend has sent me something he/she wants me to look at.
So, what to I do? Do I let the biggest financial decision I've made in my life so far hinge on the how friendly the companies make their web sites to the 3% of surfers who don't have Flash (and the even smaller percentage who don't have it and can't get it)? Well, when put that way, it would seem to be a very stupid way to make decisions.
But, all other things being equal, why not? If I could buy another car that would give me as much satisfaction and value as a Toyota, then Toyota certainly deserves to lose a customer for making their site so reliant on an effectively proprietary technology. And there is the quite practical matter that, well, I just can't see the site. Because I haven't felt a burning need to reboot to OSX, I simply haven't been able to get any info from their site. I have, however, checked out the VW and Honda sites.
All right, I've gone back to the site. I can see some info if I look on the right pages, but I don't know if I'm getting the whole story, because every page has a big empty patch in the middle where the Flash should be. So at this point I feel much better informed about what I can get from the other two companies.
Unrelated: now wondering if I should buy my car on Ebay, like someone I know did. Blech. I hate options.
OK, so all these horrible pictures are being printed and reprinted daily in the media. The one that really bothers me for reasons outside of the behavior of the American soldiers is the one where the Iraqi is standing naked while the MPs intimidate him with dogs. The man's face is clearly visible and identifiable. He has apparently tucked his penis between his legs, but otherwise it's pretty well full frontal nudity. Why didn't the press blur his face out when they published the photos? Granted, some uncensored photos would be circulating out there on the net, but not that many Iraqis have internet access, and internet users don't see those kinds of things unless they're really looking for them. I don't know what the Arab media did; hopefully they blurred it out or didn't show it at all as a matter of taste. If they showed it unblurred, then why? Why humiliate the man even further? I mean, geez, what happens behind the prison bars could theoretically stay between him, his psychiatrists, and the prison guards, but for the photos. Now he'll be recognized throughout the country for his naked body. That'll certainly make him angry; I wonder if it'll make other Arabs angry, and if so, who will they be angry at?
I also think they should have blurred the faces of the U.S. soldiers (the whole innocent until proven guilty thing). I just can't imagine that any of those soldiers are proud of appearing in national newspapers for that. None of them joined the Army looking to torture Iraqis.
Slashdot tells us that Novell is about to release Ximian Connector under the GPL. Ximian Connector is the only(?) software for Linux that can interact with MS Exchange via Exchange's proprietary protocol. I always assumed that the reason Connector was proprietary was that Ximian had actually paid money to M$ and signed an NDA to have the right to use the protocol, and/or access to the specs. If it's now under the GPL, however, that implies that that never was the case!
Woohoo! Soon I'll be able to have better mail handling at work (the M$-happy network people here use Exchange for our mail)! Now I just have to spend 50 hours reverse-engineering the DHTML for Deltek Time Collection so that I can get it to work with Mozilla, and I'll be able to do all my regular work functions with Linux!
At some point I bemoaned the fact that I couldn't find any PA articles discussing Gabe and Tycho's distaste for continuity in their strips. In fact, I couldn't get Google to give my any PA articles, even when I found a nice old one and picked a sufficiently unlikely combination of words occurring in the post I found. My working theory is that somehow, incredibly, there are no outside links to any of these articles, and the only way to find one is to either do a search within the site (something Google won't do), or to simply follow the chain from the homepage to previous articles. Well, to test my theory, here's a link to a Penny Arcade article about "Baby vs. Rhino". Should take about a month for Google to 1) find this post (i.e., the one you are looking at), and 2) decide to follow the link herein.
Boy, it's a good thing I don't, like, have work to do.
My "Charlestowne North Wins!" article used to be the top search result for a search on said apartment name. Now it doesn't even show up. Wish I understood better how Google works. This is ripe for conspiracy theories, however: the top entry for the building we are trying to promote is instead painting a picture of adversity between management and tenants... better make some calls to make that go away. Yeah, I'm sure that's it.
Remember when I mentioned having the opening of my cubicle facing the opening of the cubicle of someone I don't like very much (as an aside to talking about Spolsky's "bionic office")? Well, said character has just moved out today, to go to the other building! Hooray!
Actually, I'm not feeling terribly elated; maybe it's because I'm feeling generally like crap today. Maybe it's that I'm also aware that the last remaining person in my cube block, someone I do like even if he plays heavy metal and electronica on his radio and I can hear it, will also be moving to another building -- in Colorado. Maybe my Catholic upbringing is making me feel bad about being happy that someone is leaving. Dunno. I think I preferred it when the guy's stuff was there, but he wasn't.
Sahara Smith, when are you going to put out a CD? Don't make me have to rip your song from the Prairie Home Companion audio stream. Goosebumps, fuckin' goosebumps, man.
Well, a /. posting today was all about "moblogs", a term that undoubtedly has been among the barrage of unfamiliar words and concepts that bombard me daily, like so many jelly beans being thrown at me by a horde of howler monkeys, most of them (painfully) bouncing off, never to bother me again. But -- well, this post threw the term around like we already knew what that was (although I bet very few of these self-styled "mobloggers" realize that "moblog" spelled backwards is "golbom", which is suspiciously like the name of the computer-generated character in the LOTR movie trilogy), so I had to go look it up.
Come to find out I'm behind the power curve. Moblogs are the new thing, plain old "blogs" are passé. Me without a cell phone, let alone one with a camera to take a picture of something every day of my exciting life.
What, you're still reading my [snort] weblog? Go find yourself a "moblog" to read (or rather, to ogle), and go away!
Went out with the guys at work today to Cluck-U (when lunch plans were being discussed, it was proposed as the "Ultimate Evil". Should call it Cthulc-U). To make a long story short, I overate there. Now I'm trying to decide if I should eat dinner, and if so, what. I don't have room for a TV dinner, but I think I need to eat something somehow resembling a meal ere I slumber.
Wil Wheaton does such a good job of bringing you into his personal life and making you feel like you are really a part of it. Right now he and his family have a "wonderful, wonderful" cat who is not doing too well. The way he thanks his blog fans for their support, and talks about how lucky he feels to be a part of something that makes the Internet suck less, spread the love, etc., really touches me.
>snif<
If he were some random interior designer (or a pompous software engineer), I probably wouldn't empathize with him so much, but he's a fellow geek who gets excited about shell scripts, and is totally unassuming.
Have I mentioned how I hate my Linksys router? It's so unreliable. This laptop is "hooked up" wirelessly through it. Oddly, it usually seems to stay up while I'm at work, and when it goes down, it's usually while I'm at home. Had an incident last night, and spent a little while getting things right. Once I thought the network was set up right, I rebooted my laptop. This is because when I shut down the primary interface, eth1, it shuts down all other services that depend on it, but then those services -- http, ssh, and ntp (think that's it) don't get restarted when I bring that or another interface back up. Doing the reboot is just a way to make sure everything's done right.
This morning, the router was cranky again. I spent a really long time doing stuff; ended up resetting the router and re-configuring from scratch, something I have to do so often that I learned not to try to change its internal IP from 192.168.1.1 to 90.0.0.1, because that forces me to log back in, which is OK once every two months, but not twice a week. Anyway, after finally re-establishing the internet connection (outgoing, hint, hint), I was happy... but I forgot about all those services, and forgot about rebooting my computer (something I had probably already done once that morning when I thought I was done but turned out not to be). So of course it was not until I got to work that I discovered I hadn't started ssh or http. All my morning work to get stuff up and running was for ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. And it's not quite high-priority enough for me to actually come back home, reboot the machine and go back to work, which would have taken at least half an hour.
When I launched my current stylesheet last August, it had a problem when being viewed in Mozilla, which I never figured out: the "container" div I had created wouldn't expand to contain the list of posts on my main index page, so I had to apply the same background color to both the blog portion and the sidebar, and even then, the background color wasn't applied to the lower right hand corner that was neither the blog nor the sidebar.
Well, I happened to swing by Scriptygoddess today, something I do occasionally, and saw my problem as issue of the day. Well, not "my" problem, per se; of course they weren't saying "hey, what's wrong with One Idiot's Blog in Mozilla?" But the Goddess herself was having the same problem, and found a hack to "fix" it, but didn't know why it was a problem, nor, obviously, why the hack worked.
If you read the comments, you find out that, once again, it is IE that does it wrong. The part that was extending beyond the container is a "float" element, and therefore is not supposed to be contained like that. I didn't know that, of course, and it seemed so unquestionable to me that if one div lexically contains another div, then the outer div should likewise contain the inner div visually. This assumption is why I was scratching my head so much. I ended up just shrugging my shoulders and saying, "well, it doesn't look that bad in the Lizard, and I guess M$ has done something right for a change."
Those of you who've been regularly visiting my site using Mozilla or a derivative would notice an improvement in appearance, if you existed. Failure to exist prevents you from doing quite a number of things, unfortunately.
Well, as you may be able to tell, I've gotten MT working again. The details are covered in this as-yet unanswered query to the Gentoo forums, "Apache upgrade broke Movable Type". I changed ownership on the Berkeley DB files that were in my home directory, among other things.
I &heart; my blog, even if no one reads it. That Apache upgrade did a lot of damage to my weekend. Glad it's mostly over, though I still need to come up with a more proper fix.
Must-read /. commentary on a battle between the Keebler Elves and the Pillsbury Doughboy.
Last Thursday or so, I upgraded Apache on my laptop. After doing so, I just checked that it was still serving pages, and it was -- and still is, as you can see if your are reading this. But I only discovered on Friday or so that apparently it has hosed my Movable Type software. I can't log in (that's two words when it's a verb, people!), and no one can add comments. I am directly editing the HTML on the homepage to put this entry here. RRRRR.
Now, MT is obviously not completely broken. The scripts are clearly executing, otherwise Apache would give me errors like "you don't have permission to execute mt.cgi", etc. But it's acting as if I don't have any data, including my own login (noun -> one word) and password. I've been looking all over the net trying to see if anyone has had a similar experience. One problem is I'm using Berkeley DB for my DB functionality, while MySQL seems to be far and away more popular, so there's not a lot of help for the Berkeley DB users.
UPDATE: We're back in business. See the link for details, but in short, it was a permissions problem.