Economy Size Geek

I heard the author read this on npr this week.

After Making Love We Hear Footsteps

By Galway Kinnell

For I can snore like a bullhorn
or play loud music
or sit up talking with any reasonably sober Irishman
and Fergus will only sink deeper
into his dreamless sleep, which goes by all in one flash,
but let there be that heavy breathing
or a stifled come-cry anywhere in the house
and he will wrench himself awake
and make for it on the run – as now, we lie together,
after making love, quiet, touching along the length of our bodies,
familiar touch of the long-married,
and he appears – in his baseball pajamas, it happens,
the neck opening so small
he has to screw them on, which one day may make him wonder
about the mental capacity of baseball players –
and flops down between us and hugs us and snuggles himself to sleep,
his face gleaming with satisfaction at being this very child.

In the half darkness we look at each other
and smile
and touch arms across his little, startling muscled body –
this one whom habit of memory propels to the ground of his making,
sleeper only the mortal sounds can sing awake,
this blessing love gives again into our arms.

or go here to listen to the author.

Dom Imspector saves my life. It makes it seriously easy to trouble shoot what is going on when the dom isn’t behaving like you expect.

I needed it today and went to the Tools menu of FireFox – but no Dom Inspector. Not a big deal right -you just have to

sudo apt-get install firefox-dom-inspector

I installed and restarted FireFox. Pulled up Dom Inspector – and it just showed a blank page :( It took me a little while to figure out what was going on – basically one of the extension for FireFox I have conflicts with Dom Inspector.

Colorzilla prevents Dom Inspector from working as advertised. Not a big deal – I only installed Colorzilla because Brett recommended it – but he thinks a lot more about color than I do.

The point of this little aside is simple. You can easily disable any of your extensions by just going to the Tools->Extensions list and right click and select Disable. This is nice – since it made it easy for me to test and determine if the problem was Dom or an extension. Then I did a little ConflictCatcher (old school mac prog) – meaning I split the list in half and then started adding things back in until it worked. Then you can decide what to do with the offending party.

This last part isn’t Linux/Ubuntu specific – though I suppose it’s only helpful advice if you run a lot of extensions :)

How to Run up a Wall and Flip – WikiHow

I saw a link to this on some article about not slacking. Basically it gives you screen shots of what you were doing on a time lapse basis. If you have to fill out a time card it could probably be useful. It might also be amusing just to see what you do with your computer.

(Windows only – though the concept is so simple you coupleprobably rig up something equivelant in Linux using a shell script and cron)

TimeSnapper – make timesheets a snap

Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront – first time i’ve gotten to see it and thanks to cinema tuesday it was on the big screen

I know I’ve used in a couple of recent posts – but especially since I’m on Ubuntu (and they tend not to be with the installing dev packages) – the command

apt-get build-dep [package-name]

Is seriously awesome! I’m not sure how I got through my early Debian life without using it (probably because I always said – install everything).

Basically what it does is install all other packages you need if you are going to rebuild a package from source. This ends up saving a lot of time since you then know that you have everything when it comes time to compile.

You probably already knew about it – but just in case…

I’ve been a Linux user for some time (I think RedHat 4.1 was my first official version – which I switched to from HPUX). In the last six months I took a very strange journey. I ran Windows. Pretty much exclusively. That may not sound weird – since most of the worlds lives in Windows most days – for me (Atari ST -> Mac OS 7-9 -> HPUX -> Linux) it is a bit of a departure.

Don’t get me wrong – over the last few years I’ve had Windows on my computer – mostly to boot over for games and video editing. But I didn’t live there. I booted there for a reason and then switched back. At some point, I hit a perfect storm. I installed Kubuntu (which I just didn’t like – try as I might), I switched to rails development (which everything related actually runs on windows), fell in love with TortoiseSVN, and spent more time doing rails under windows tech support for my brother. It basically just got easier and easier to run Windows and harder and harder to run Linux.

That’s a long build up for the reality that I’m booting Linux again. Dapper is great. They have continued to polish and it’s really nice to use. My windows side has suffered from too much installation or something and it seems sicker everytime I boot (time for the big re-install). So now my Linux side has started to handle the “normal” stuff like seeing my Shuffle and my camera AND letting me have a kick ass dev environment.

This all came up because people all around me are converting to Mac OSX. They all end up saying the same thing – “I love it! Everything just works! No more fiddling like Linux.”

I have to admit that I’ve really lost sense of what it means to fiddle with a Linux box. That I suppose is part of the problem. I see the fiddling as part of the process – most probably because I always end up wanting the computer to do something that it doesn’t naturally do. Maybe someone could predict all the stuff I want ( I get that feeling more and more as I use Dapper), but I’m used to the computer needing to be bent to my will. (Belive it or not this post is actually about fiddling – just wait for it).

My brother is converting to Mac OSX. It’s kind of a nice thing really – it means less tech support for me and a front row seat to watching someone fall into the cult of Apple. (I say that with the satire and fondness of a former Apple lover).

Where does that leave me – in a word – Fiddling!

My Linux box works great, but I have another little computer in my Life – my palm. It has had some problems, and the more I read the more I wonder what is going to happen to Palm – but for now it is the thing that keeps track of all the most important things. If I’m going to live in Linux – it has got to be able to sync and backup.

For whatever reason I can’t seem to get USB syncing to work reliably. That’s a bit annoying – but since I can never find the cable for the thing – I usually end up using wifi to sync anyway – which Linux supports.

I have been playing with Jpilot (I may use evolution again at some point but it’s been hard as it it with just jpilot.)

There is basically a problem with the Palm software and my T|X – when it hits a file called WifiCoreLib – the palm just reboots when you try to copy it. Apparently, Palm Desktop knows to avoid this file. Linux software not so much.

Two issues –

1. RTFM – I was trying to use the Jpilot Backup conduit and it kept killing itself and not allowing me to select the WifiCoreLib as an excluded file. Turns out the top of the directions tell you – uncheck back up new databases – this will populate the list and then you can exclude anything you want. Wish I had read that the first time.

2. Jpilot itself tries to back the file up as a completely seperate process from the backup conduit ( I feel very backed up now). The solution to this was more difficult.

apt-get source jpilot
apt-get build-dep jpilot

modify sync.c

Add the following at line 1588:

{ 0, 0, "WiFi", NULL}, //Added by DJE for TX
{ 0, 0, "WiGl", NULL},
{ 0, 0, "WiSl", NULL},
{ 0, 0, "Wicr", NULL}, //END TX Code

modify your debian/changelog

dpkg-buildpackage -us -uc
cd ..
dpkg -i *.deb


That’s it – everything’s fixed. Truth be told I probably wish “It Just Worked!” – but where would the fun be in that….

p.s.

Ok I had some problems with Gpilotd (The little applet that runs in the panel) as well. Basically – it didn’t like WifiCoreLib either (noticing a pattern). I wrote about this problem before. I modified the correct file,but no joy. I downloaded the source packages and recompiled (with a small chunk of debug code – a printf ). Funny thing – that fixed the problem. It’s now obeying the exclude and syncing (via network) like a champ.

Now if only I could get Bonsai to work under wine/cross over or just get a better tool I would be very happy.

Basically this tool lets you track time to projects you are working on. I’m in the process of juggling a couple projects and thought it would be interesting to track how much time I’m burning on each.

I’m not sure if I’ll end up using it long term. But I figure worse case it gives me an opportunity to see someone else’s rails apps – which means opportunities to lift ideas :)

time.onrails.org

Tess Vigeland from Marketplace speaking in San Antonio