An orange in an apple orchard
To go with the changes in my working environment, a new style for blackbox 😉
Since I left KDE in favor of more compact systems, I’ve found that I tend to change my layout of things less often. Most of the arrangements are calculated for muscle memory, and my visual patterns, and have become a set of very quick reflexes.
I don’t miss a taskbar at all, and have still yet to find an excuse to use the slit or dock in Blackbox lol.
I love this thing….
Laptop is under abusively heavy load compared to what my much more powerful windows machine does, but it’s still in a very usable state. If this system ran Windows XP instead of FreeBSD, it would be slow’n to a crawl lol.
currently running: 155~165 processes, 6 shell sessions, 1 x session, temperature is at 64.0 Celsius
This kind of workload, is fairly typical for me when running FreeBSD. On the windows machine, I don’t even bother – doesn’t take well to it :.
Well, finished one portion of my docs (Grrr… wasting time in #kde-chat and #vim lol); even got one of the manual pages written out.
Ya know, with the mdoc.samples(7) and mdoc(7) manual pages + a few simple manual pages for reference (head, cat, pkg_add) the process of writing a manual page is actually much less painful then I remember it being. I’ve only got one small problem so far, thin I’ll post on daemonforums later and see if anyone has an idea; if not I’ll probably have to adjust the man pages wording a lit’ bit.
nroff/troff is also strangely addicting once you start playing with macro packages…
Check if the program ‘named’ is running and listening. I don’t know off the top of my head if /etc/rc.d/named supports the status command or not (rc), but finding out if it is running the hardway is still easy.
I’m not familiar with any of the dns/ apps in ports, so I can’t say what name they would run under; but I’m sure someone here would point it out.
—
$ ps xa | grep named
... is named running?
$ cat /var/run/named/pid
... does the pid file exist?
$ netstat -n -p tcp | grep 53 -- s/tcp/udp/
... is anything listening on the usual port?-> Assuming that the standard issue name server was used, you may want to check named.conf first, in case the settings were changed. On FreeBSD I believe this is etc/namedb/named.conf.
I really should check my posts for typo’s more completely, before I make an ass of myself so easily…. at least J65nko spotted it. Most times I try and check what I write, but after work, it’s not exactly a high priority – compared with finishing the sentence before I get AFK’d for the umpteenth time lol.
http://forums.pcbsd.org/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=11261&hilit=lzma+update
how to apply pc-bsd updates manually
Believe it or not, I’ve just spent the last several hours spelunking around FreeBSD, and end it with a smile lol.
I got tired of a program I was writing (and a minor headache), so… I turned my attention to something that’s been on my todo list for ages. Tracking more and more of how the system handles it’s startup procedures. It would certainly be a bit more helpful to my understandings, if I had ever had time to learn x86 assembly. Maybe someday, I’ll get to that part of my todo list, lol but by then AMD64 will probably be old as a Pentium :
Well after 0500 now, time to get some sleep…. Flibin’ work early tomorrow, and another day of… annoyance.
Terry@dixie$ uptime && shutdown -p +2 'head hits keyboard, begins to snore loudly'
9:23AM up 6:15, 2 users, load averages: 0.07, 0.09, 0.06
Shutdown at Fri Oct 31 09:25:48 2008.
shutdown: [pid 3624]
Terry@dixie$
*** System shutdown message from Terry@dixie.launchmodem.com ***
System going down in 2 minutes
head hits keyboard, begins to snore loudly
h man, if I never see apt-get mania again, I’ll be happy lol.
$ sudo apt-get install -y foo
....
$ sudo apt-get install -y foo-doc foo-eggs foo-ham foo-spam
To be honest, if whoever organized this thing… doesn’t know what database normalization means, I’d be shocked as shit lol.
I’ve been using a mixture of vim/ssh to setup sal1600 with my standard operating environment, thankfully Ubuntu has a decent package search site hehe. I still need to sort out Java (jdk, jre, browser plugins), flash plugins (maybe anyway), realplayer, and codecs for mplayer. But for the most part, I’m up to go. I’ll need to go over libraries with a fine tooth come, to make sure I don’t lose anything. I really don’t like GNU/Linux, I like the Linux kernel well enough, but the mish-mash of parts pisses me off. But, given the choice of Windows or GNU/Linux, I’d rather put up with it. As far as Linux distributions go, Ubuntu is probably one of the best desktop systems. It’s certainly not my favorite distribution (Slackware), but it likes my desktops hardware much better… Something no other GNU/Linux distro has done lol. One thing I regret about my desktop, it usually needs kicking into obedience a lot of times under any OS.
Tomorrow, I’ve got 3 main goals after work:
If I can play SWAT comfortably on GNU/Linux, I’m more then willing to switch back to a single monitor. Which really, is a shame b/c the X Windows System truly offers a better experience then what I’ve had with Windows multi-monitor support. The real concession will be having to shift to a usable resolution to play SWAT :.
For the most part, I’ve only used the 2nd monitor as a dumping ground for extra programs. Most of the time, I’m alternating between 2-5+ programs. On my laptop however, I’ve found it perfectly comfortable to arrange 3 virtual desktops to “split” the workload. I guess, I will probably end up with something similiar on my desktop now. 1600x1200px on a 19″ CRT is just to small for the amount of programs I interact with; but the 2880px wide (-monitor edges in the centre) that my current setup gives, is also a bit too darn big… optical scrolling sucks. This really makes me wish I had one big 22″ LCD, but I’m not sure if anything with a /sane/ price and good performance for action games, has caught up yet (probably has).
My original design specs for sal1600, did call for an LCD – not because I /like/ them, but because it’s a pain to lug a CRT around haha !
$ vim pf.conf.new
... write new packet filter configuration file
$ pfctl -nf pf.conf.new
... silent output if no errors
$ su - root
Password:
# cd /etc
# mv pf.conf pf.conf.old
# cp /home/Terry/pf.conf.new /etc/pf.conf && rm /home/Terry/pf.conf.new
# chmod 644 pf.conf && chown root:wheel pf.conf
# echo 'pfctl -F all -d' | at hhmm
... unlock the door if we screw up
# pfctl -e
enabling or disabling the packet filter (-e, -d) kills the SSH connection, but in the event of any embarrassing “oh crap, I’ve locked myself out” accidents, the at job will flush the firewalls settings and disable it. Believe me, if you’ve got a system running with no head or physical inputs (e.g. no monitor, no keyboard), ya really want to use such a thing… I still remember coming home from a *very* bad day at work, working on my rule sets, and locking myself out 5 times, and having to hook up a monitor and keyboard to the server each time >_>.
What wonders you can learn from one bad day, huh?
At least tonight, I’ve not locked myself out once… despite the days troubles, hehe. One of the reasons I like OpenBSDs packet filter, it’s simple, it’s powerful, just read the fine manual, use your gray matter, and it works! The rule sets are fairly easy to read, and OpenBSD documentation is second to none. Heck the manual page even gives the pf.conf syntax in Backus-Naur Form. The only complex part of pf, is the networking stuff – not the configuration. And of course, I love anything that is configured through a sane text file, rather then having to fire up some cornball program lol. Really, I wish I had the resources to replace my router with an OpenBSD machine, that way I wouldn’t have to learn my way around a new web-interface whenever one pops its final cork.
Ahh… At least one good thing happened this weekend!!!
Oh what fun it would be to have Google Chrome + Plugins (that work) on FreeBSD or even just chromium + plugins (that works)… It would certainly beat the dozen or so others available (all of the main stream ones are also available in native & linux versions).
All the better, would be a cross platform web browser besides Lynx that does not suck… but Google Chrome at least presents a usable technology for surfing the web 10+ hours a day, even if it’s essentially winsucks only for mere mortorals… for the time being.
And best of all, would be a web browser better then lynx, that didn’t piss me off *eventually* or prove tiresome to use for such long periods of time.
An interesting thing to come up in #vim, Why, oh WHY, do those #?@! nutheads use vi?. Which reminds me a lot of why vim has ruined me for all other editors, except vi.
When I first took up programming, I had started with C++ (probably not a good choice), and I selected an IDE so I could concentrate on C++, not the compiler and debugger. When I started to learn other languages, which my C++ focused IDE didn’t give a flying flub about, So I quickly came to the conclusion, that since I would never _stop_ learning, I would do best to find a general purpose code editor. Because if I kept using IDEs, I would spend more time learning to use Integrated Development Environment XYZ then programming something meaningful in language XYZ.
I knew that the most widely used (read if the machine supports text, it probably runs this editor) would likely be Emacs and Vim. I’m the kinda guy, I like to use the same tools without caring about the OS ‘too much’. Although I don’t mind if a program changes widget styles to match, I hate things like Firefox that change from Microsoft ‘Tools->Preferences” and Unix “Edit->Preferences” instead of just creating a damn “Settings” entry in the file menu. So obviously, an editor that works that way, can suck my **** lol. Emacs and Vim are fairly consistent.
At that point in time, text editing consisted of Left, Right, Up, Down, Delete, Backspace, Page Up, Page Down, Home, and End… nothing else (I had yet to learn the control modifier to them). Currently, the number of actions I know in Vi and Vim, far exceed that by the size of the death star, hell… I know more emacs then that, and I haven’t “really” used emacs in years. But I didn’t really care about that kind of stuff at the time, I just wanted something with syntax highlighting and extreme portability.
I knew full well, that Vim and Emacs were extremely powerful tools; but they would take learning to use that effectively. A knife is a simple weapon, using it ain’t. (And admitidly, if emacs was a pocket knife, it would be the “swiss army knife” to existing Swiss Army Knifes, as swiss army knifes are to classic pocket knifes.) The main thing that attracted me to Vim and Emacs, was hat they support many languages out of the box (vim 7.2 supports around ~500 by now, for syntax highlighting alone.), and could be extended with support for more.
So for one reason or another, I gave vim the first try. I couldn’t even figure out how to open or save files with it; as I had elected not to use the graphical editing interface. I basically chucked Vim in the corner and started looking at emacs, choosing XEmacs over GNU Emacs. XEmacs proved to be a quite a nice editor and very useful to me. In fact, I think my user account on Josephine still has XEmacs for Windows as my default text editor. Later on down the road, I was reading a skit, using pico, gnu emacs, and vi. Reading the part on lowly Vi, it all looked pretty darn logical all of a sudden lol. So I started to play around with Vim, using the :help system to learn to use Vi. In a short period of time, I became much more effective at editing text then Iw as under XEmacs or Wordpad; in my case vi commands were also much easier to remember before muscle memory caught up.
Why do I use Vim, and utterly hate all other editors? (Except for vi and microemacs.) Most typical editors are week in the knees, trying to ‘edit’ text with them after living with vi/vim, just feels like dancing with a cement kimono, I work with textural information non stop, be it books, web browsing, television, instant messengering, e-mail, games, etc; even the operating systems command line interface, let alone editing text files lol.
*Actually* learning how to use vim the right way, quickly lead to editing smoothly and learning how to learn more ;-). One thing I like about vim, it is modal like vi, and my brain is essentially modal as well! And unlike emacs, it doesn’t seem to slow my down when exercising my “ten fingered typist” style of using a keyboard. With vim, the only limit is you mind. Tonight, I’ve actually learned 4-6 new things (most of which are vi compatible hehe) tonight, that allow me to edit even more effectively then I have been. Which if I had to compare to the best offerings of notepad.exe or MS Word, Vim has allowed me to be 1,000,000,000,000,000,000^256 times more effective. And yesterday, I spent what, like 16 hours editing code?
If I had to use something like notepad for that, I would go out of my fucking mind !!!!!
Just for the heck of it, 1,000,000,000,000,000,000^256 is the equivalent of:
1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
But I don’t think I know how to count that high in written English LOL.