Taking the day off…. Camped out in front of the with my laptop atm, watching the end of the The Illusionist.

I’ve downloaded all 3 ISO Images for PC-BSD 7Release. I intend to test it in VirtualBox and natively on my test machine. But, because my test machine is also my games box… I’m backing the sucker up first ;-). I’ve booted the test machine into it’s maintenance partition (FreeBSD 7, my failsafe if WinXP goes belly up hehe). ssh’d in and am backing up each drive letter to Vectra (the file server). I’ll setup VirtualBox later and see how it works out, I don’t really care much for such things though, but VB may be handier then QEMU. After that, I’ll try installing it native, and see if the release likes my DVD Burner better then the Alpha/Beta versions did, lol.

I figure, for good measure I can take care of updating my laptop while I’m at it, probably lay down for a bit…. Assuming there is anything on this afternoon lol. It would be nice to gt *some* rest, but knwoing my family, it’s far from likely :

Windows XP — hates to run your programs

This one was just pricless, when I got back to my PC, I had to unlock it via pw.

When I went to click on my user icon, it gave a balloon message, essentially saying:


Terry has 3 programs running

Running to many programs reduces your computers performance. If you computer is running slowly, try closing a few programs

Now that, is just fucking funny lool.

In my increasingly, ehh… ‘insane’ ? form of web surfing. I found this essay by Eric S. Raymond.

For one reason or another, I’ve been using TWO web browsers at one time lately. Flock for websites poorly styled, Google Chrome for as much else as possible ^_^. Multiple windows, several tabs on each, in both browsers hahaha !!! This has yet to slow down the rate at which I surf the web, instead I think I’m getting faster :

I found the article rather interesting. For me, I generally prefer editing configuration files. Because if they are actually well documented, I can usually find my way along faster. Most programs that I have used, usually do a poor job of documenting what various options do… The idea of using a GUI Wizard for setting up and configuring stuff is old as dirt, but so often done half-assed. I’ve seen many programs present Wizards, some do it very well, some do it to a point–that I’d rather do it the ‘hard way’, because it is easier!

The style of user interface I enjoy, is basically that offered by programs in /usr/bin. It’s often simple to use (if you actually document it) and it’s fairly easy to code. When I try to do a GUI, I usually try to create something that is simple to figure out, but still something that I *will* use. I typically will use what ever input method is closet at hand, if my hands are on the keyboard, I use it—one reason that I love vi! While if my hands on the mouse, I’ll probably click my way about: unless it takes more then a moment.

GUI’s all to often make simple tasks easy and complex tasks impossible.

A command line interface, you generally need to know how to use. It pays to at least ask for -h,–help, /? help, depending on what system your using. Most programs are fairly obvious in their behavior without arguments. And good programs that I’ve seen, try to make them intruitive to figure out. A GUI program by comparison, if you need to go much further then a tooltip for something that is almost obvious, but explicit. Then I think there is a problem. I generally pick up and use graphical programs without needing to read documentation, because using a spreadsheet is easy but the meanings of whats fed into them are not always so simple.

If I had to go through the same thing to setup a printer, I would probably say fuck it, and go do it in a way that actually deserves my attention, LPD lol. Although, I do admit: Windows does do printing well in my opinion, as long as you do not have to deal with print “jobs”, then it sucks.

If the designers were half-smart about UI issues (like, say, Windows programmers) they’d probe the local network neighborhood and omit the impossible entries[1]. If they were really smart (like, say, Mac programmers) they’d leave the impossible choices in but gray them out[2], signifying that if your system were configured a bit differently you really could print on a Windows machine, assuming you were unfortunate enough to own one.

The difference between doing the job, doing the job well enough[1], and going that extra mile to make it better![2]. Designing a good UI is much harder then a lot of other things, but when it does happen in a good way—it’s worth it.

I remember not to long ago, I replace my *nix based PDF/PS reader. I dropped KPDF along with most other KDE apps in my change over to blackbox. Gnomes Evince was one that had been on my list for awhile and the new Okular from KDE4 was not ready yet, so I tried Evince. The program turned out to be incredibly simple, so simple that there are no (real) settings to change. The only real configuration option is how you want to layout / size a page, namely fit to page, blah blah.

At first I found this quite disconcerting, but Evince has since become my idea of the worlds best PDF/PS reader. Evince is light, it’s fast (unlike Adobe or KDE’s offers), all of the important stuff is in quick reach, and all of the unimportant stuff is no where to be found. Like at long last, a PDF reader that just cuts the bullcrap and lets me read files gracefully…. without arguing with the PDF reader !

My laugh of the day, 2008-09-08

β€œTo bring a MicroVAX to its knees, try twenty users running vi β€” or four running EMACS.”

I just couldn’t help but smile, nod, and laugh lol. Vi is a fairly light weight program in todays world, and was designed in a time when just moving your text editors cursor was probably slow as watching paint drying. Emacs on the other hand, tends to be rather hefty in most good implementations, I think it was once a cottage indrusty to make light-weight emacsen.

And to this day in the form of GNU and X Emacs is, one small operating system, but a huge text editor compared to the nimble Vi. I don’t go much in for the Vi Vs. Emacs stuff and vice versa, because I use the Vim which is the only thing better then Vi πŸ˜‰

Font sizes

Now this is pissing me off…. Almost every website I use, seems to set the font size in Pixels.

sasclan.org — 10px (for crying out loud)
pcbsd.org — 12px
daemonforums.org — 13px
sas-spidey01.livejournal.com — The Under Fire theme I’m used has a selectable but sets it in ‘px’ πŸ™

At least though, It’s not a total wash out. Live Journal itself does decent by fonts in it’s main theme. Wikipedia respects the browser, and my LJ’s theme is very configurable hehe. I think, if I ever had tons of cash to spare, a paid account + working on themes here would be a fun time killer lol.

My poor baby…

Installed Netbeans on my laptop to give it a test drive, and between top and the massive change in performance in flock, I can’t help but think that my system is in pain as it fights with flock for system resources :

last pid:  2235;  load averages:  2.04,  1.50,  1.00    up 0+01:08:22  03:52:09
86 processes: 4 running, 81 sleeping, 1 stopped
CPU: 83.8% user, 0.0% nice, 16.2% system, 0.0% interrupt, 0.0% idle
Mem: 298M Active, 18M Inact, 96M Wired, 12M Cache, 53M Buf, 1888K Free
Swap: 860M Total, 100M Used, 760M Free, 11% Inuse

PID USERNAME THR PRI NICE SIZE RES STATE TIME WCPU COMMAND
2195 Terry 30 44 0 387M 137M ucond 0:00 77.25% java
1498 Terry 1 99 0 715M 139M RUN 25:43 13.87% flock-bin
1358 root 1 44 0 119M 63776K select 1:56 0.00% Xorg
1403 Terry 1 45 0 18616K 4796K select 0:51 0.00% gkrellm
1504 Terry 1 0 0 715M 139M linuxf 0:19 0.00% flock-bin
1500 Terry 1 0 0 715M 139M linuxf 0:04 0.00% flock-bin
1499 Terry 1 44 0 715M 139M select 0:03 0.00% flock-bin
1477 Terry 1 44 0 30940K 6832K select 0:03 0.00% Terminal
1887 Terry 1 44 0 34752K 8020K select 0:02 0.00% xchat
1174 root 1 44 0 3264K 564K select 0:02 0.00% moused
1404 Terry 1 44 0 45900K 2944K select 0:01 0.00% pidgin
1402 Terry 1 44 0 14280K 2256K select 0:00 0.00% fbpanel
1509 Terry 1 0 0 715M 139M linuxf 0:00 0.00% flock-bin
1405 Terry 1 44 0 9080K 1340K select 0:00 0.00% blackbox
1515 Terry 1 0 0 715M 139M linuxf 0:00 0.00% flock-bin
1481 Terry 1 20 0 4640K 0K pause 0:00 0.00%
1399 Terry 1 44 0 8172K 724K select 0:00 0.00% bbkeys

The fact that I’ve got flash7 running in one tab and only a small set of 5 tabs open in flock, ain’t that bad I guess. It seems that my system has almost adapted to this load, because the stats in top have gotten even worse but FreeBSD has gotten almost as responsive as normal when running these programs.

I love my darlin’ Dixie πŸ˜‰

Yippie-Kay-Yay Micro$oft SFU !!!

Test one: I wonder if Console is a decent replacement for cmd.exe ‘s terminal emulator — It is

Test two: I wonder if the SFU pdksh can do completion? — It can, just had to find the ‘bind’ commands for it

Test three: I wonder if SFU’s pdksh will work with my %PATH% — it did

Problem one: SFU pdksh seems to require the formal name, e.g. ‘foo.exe’ for programs outside of it’s regular path and runwin32’s search path — That’s ok, I don’t mind much and can alias out stuff like flock.

Problem two: Because SFU follows the unix-style of open it, see if there is a she-bang line (e.g. #!/bin/sh) saying what to run it with, else pass it on to the shell…. It feeds .bat files into it’s pdksh unless they are manually executed, e.g. ‘runwin32 cmd /C foo.bat’ — that is bad, several programs I use wrap themselves in ‘batch’ files on Windows and ‘shell’ scripts on Unix.

Problem three: My universal bourne-based shrc (~/.${USER}_shrc) sets itself to the current Bourne-style shell (e.g. sh, bash, ksh-family, zsh) and Operating System (e.g. BSD, Linux, generic Unix) needs to inspect the $SHELL environment variable to determin what shell to set stuff for. — For some odd reason the SFU pdksh doesn’t seem to set SHELL !!!! To top it off, $USER is not set, but at least the Windows var: %USERNAME% is converted to $USERNAME.

Fix for problem one:

$ mkdir /dev/fs/P/bin      # creates P:bin
$ touch binmaker.sh && chmod +x binmaker.sh
$ vi binmaker.sh
#!/bin/sh
BINDIR=/dev/fs/P/bin

for CMD in `echo $PATH | sed 's/:/ /g' | awk '{ print $0 }'`
do
for EXE in `ls $CMD`; do
echo $EXE | grep -E '.*.exe$' > /dev/null &&
ln -s ${CMD}/${EXE} ${BINDIR}/`echo $EXE | sed 's/.exe$//g'` && echo "made link for: ${CMD}/$EXE"
done
done

$ ./binmaker.sh
.... # symlinks all foo.exe in $PATH to /dev/fs/P/bin/foo

Fix for problem two:

Launch a new session of cmd.exe through windows (e.g. not via SFU; use the run dialog, start menu, or desktop /or quicklaunch icon).

U:Terry> echo %PATH% > mypath.win

Return to SFU korn shell (pdksh):

$ touch batmaker.sh && chmod +x batmaker.sh
$ vi batmaker.sh

#!/bin/sh
BINDIR=/dev/fs/P/bin

make_wrapper() {
[ -e $2 ] && return # file exists, no wrapper needed
local MYFILE=`basename $2`
cd $BINDIR && [ ! -e $MYFILE ] && touch $MYFILE

echo '#/bin/sh' >> $MYFILE
echo 'exec cmd /C "set PATH=`cat ~/mypath.win` && `basename $0`"' >> $MYFILE

echo "${BINDIR}/$MYFILE created"
}

for CMD in `echo $PATH | sed 's/:/ /g' | awk '{ print $0 }'`
do
for EXE in `ls $CMD`; do
echo $EXE | grep -E '.*.bat$' > /dev/null &&
make_wrapper ${CMD}/${EXE} "${BINDIR}/`echo $EXE | sed 's/.bat$//g'`"
done
done

$ ./batmaker.sh
... makes wrapper shell scripts in /dev/fs/P/bin/ for all foo.bat in $PATH

The wrapper scripts this creates look like this:

Terry@SAL1600-$ cat bin/irb
#/bin/sh

exec cmd /C "set PATH=`cat ~/mypath.win` && `basename $0`"

Terry@SAL1600-$

it’s neccessary to set the Windows %PATH% before launch, so it can execute the program — using the path from the invocation environment won’t work, e.g. /dev/fs/P/Devel/Langauges/Ruby/bin/irb in SFU Shells but this woudl translate to CurrentDriveLetter:dev/fs/P/Devel/Langauges/Ruby/bin/irb which won’t work. Note, the program must be executed as P:DevelLanguagesRubybinirb.bat in Windows cmd shell, as that is where it is located on my system.

Fix for problem three:

I modified my ~/.profile from OpenBSD to take care of the $USER and $SHELL issues, which is also nice enough to load my custom initialization file.

$ vi .profile

export TERM HOME
USER=$USERNAME; export USER
SHELL="/dev/fs/P/Utilities/Services_For_UNIX/bin/ksh"; export SHELL

echo "Waiting for screen repaint...."
sleep 2
echo 'Korn power !!!'

ENV=${HOME}/.${USER}_shrc

I set the path to the physical rather then the /bin/ksh ‘shorty’ in SFU, so that if I later find any compatibility issues, I can always work around it ‘specifically’ if necessary.

I’m not sure if it is a problem with the Console2-Devel build I’ve installed or with how SFU’s korn shell expects to run. But a few seconds after startup the prompt disappears as if from a ‘clear’, giving any I/O that results in a line being drawn causes a fix. Since I haven’t figured this part out yet, I’ve just ‘side stepped’ the problem. It takes roughly the amount of time to sleep and echo the message before I am returned to my prompt. A quick parse of my $ENV and we’re ready to rock and all the output on the Console tab is from my ${USER}_shrc file.

I copied an old version of initialization file and made a quick edit. In the file I check for the systems unix name and use it to record the operating system type. The Services For UNIX subsystem still identifies itself as ‘Interix’ even though it’s been under Microsoft’s thumb for a bit.


case `uname -s` in
'FreeBSD') isFreeBSD=1
LSCOLORS='CxGxxxxxBxexExcxdx'; export LSCOLORS
;; # FreeBSD
'OpenBSD') isOpenBSD=1;;
'NetBSD') isNetBSD=1;;
'Linux') isLinux=1;;
'Unix') isUnix=1;;
'Interix') isUnix=1;isSFU=1;;
esac

I want to make a few changes to my shrc, but I don’t think they will work *properly* with SFU. My shrc file also pulls in a local ‘extension’ of itself, called ~/.site_shrc that makes things specific to the current system, for example adding the TexLive binaries to my $PATH on FreeBSD and noting the IP address or doing things that won’t work in the shells/v7sh that I use for testing. It looks like I’m going to have to write a site_shrc for Windows hahaha !!!

There’s more then one way to skin a cat, and this bloody hoge-podge of an operating system ain’t gonna best me !!! I will have a decent CLI interface if I’ve got to invoke a hex editor…

Spiders on a roll

Finally some time to catch up on my LJ, if I can keep my family at bay long enough to type anything meaningful >_>

Got off to a semi-early start, last night I was fairly wasted from the days ops and dropped off to sleep very quickly, all concepts of work largely forgotten until morning. Had to stop off today, Ma decided to upgrade cell phones, her new Motoorola W490 is quite nice. I don’t particularly care much for cell phone though.

So far SAL1600 is 90% of fully operational, I’ve only had minor problems. One, my mic doesn’t work and the sound drivers are pretty shitty, but on the upside seem to be much more stable then the older ones. Maybe my jokes were right after all, WHQL just means it’s certified to suck and help crash your system. I was warned when installing the newest ones from the manufactor, that they weren’t WHQL certified or what not, no biggy for me, because I know what kinda horse shit the company usually passes off for audio drivers lol. I really wish there was something like the Open Sound System for Windows, alas Windows sound technology is probably a good system. The only problem is, drivers!

Another issue is my Flock profile, I think it’s probably a paths issue. On the old box Flock was installed into it’s standard path of %ProgramFiles%Flock (e.g. C:Program FilesFlock) and my profile in %AppData%FlockBrowserProfiles… where %AppData% was formally “C:Documents and SettingsOwnerApplication Data”. On my new install, everything is installed into a ‘category’ folder in P:, e.g. P:GamesRavenShield, P:NetworkBrowsersFlock. And likewise my use profile is in U:Terry. It’s been somewhat problematic getting Windows to agree with me on such, especially the brain dead idea of it trying to copy a huge DVD sized ISO in U:TerryDesktop to C:Documents and SettingsTerryDesktop and bloating my C drive out. Maybe it is just my not knowing the management programs in Windows as well as UNIX or Windows XP is just totally brain damaged by design, I hope the latter but expect it is the former…

The software is willing but Windows is not so cooperative ^_^

The system has however been quite stable of late, pardoning IE7 crashing and a few other paths issues with my profile. I’ve also taken to having a cmd.exe window open on my second monitor most of th day. I find the DOS-inherited commands to be very child like and overly clumsy compared to any BSD or GNU/Linux based system I’ve used. The whole ruckus between copy, xcopy, and robocopy commands/programs on Windows is a nuts, I’ll never understand it… Not after having lived with /bin/cp so long.

I managed to get into TG#1 for some games today, training with Nick, Caern, and Ez. It seems that I’ve taken care of a fair bot of training arrangements lately, all part of an evil plan of course…. Muahuahauah !!! Who knows, maybe this aging war horse will get to see more action soon πŸ˜‰

Abort, Retry, Ignore — not !!!

Windows XP is about 5% and still going strong on the game machine. Really, if I didn’t need RvS and SWAT 4, I wouldn’t even have XP on that machine lol…. My only dependency on Micro$oft is an OS that supports games –> I generally dislike console games.

0/ My current plan of action is to conduct the reformat/reinstall of XP.

1/ Verify that the S.O.B. boots… Install core drivers (GPU, Wifi)

2/ Strip her naked — remove the “pre-installed” software and trial-ware, e.t.c.

3/ Boot into Knoppix Linux (LiveCD) and sort the partitions according to plan

4/ Install FreeBSD 7.0-Release and boot into it

5/ NFS mount the setup data from the file server (Vectra) and copy it to a shared FAT32 partition on SAL1600 (games machine).

6/ Boot into Windows XP MCE and install SP3

7/ Reboot and configure core system elements (e.g. get her on the network, behind a firewall, and setup the environment)

8/ Install software in the predefined order into the predefined locations, making adjustments as needed.

10/ Restore data from backups

11/ Customize her to the hilt: full command line environment; development tools, dual-monitors, desktop layout, etc.

XP is almost up to 40% already,so hopefully I can get started on the real work soon. Reinstall is easy, getting a working PC is a diff’rent story. So far everything is going smooth, and is probably planned out as good as a NASA mission ;-). Hehe, I’ve even got many of the firewall settings already prepaired. Hmm, I guess it is just fun to rip stuff apart and put it back together a better way at times.

I hope to have SAL1600 back online before morning, and with luck time to post a advance notice of training ops on TG#1… I’d like to reserve the server for a change if I can lol.