EoR, End of Rest

Almost time to get back to school work 🙁

Bored to utter tears but with a little determination I should have an entire subject polished off by the time I’ve got to report back to work.

It’s not very challenging, don’t think I’ve been seriously academically challenged since I learned to read… But the faster this buffalo pucky gets done the faster I can get moving. To be honest, I’m tempted to write a program to do my math homework for me, maybe even try different methods just to piss off the teachers.

At least that way I might learn some thing in the process 🙂

My written English skills are derailed by speech’isms and keyboards. My writing tends to be a cross between how I speak and how I think, rather then the formalities (some friends wonder if I’ve ever heard of a ; lol). And my handwriting is hopeless from the years of keyboarding — after working on it to profection “under penalty of death” in the early years that pisses me off lol. Of all that I’ve done the few B’s and C’s I’ve seen over the years come from English-related subjects.

Heck, my motivation for learning to read as a child was because I wanted to read a book myself. The only part school played was in motivating people to help me along the way. The routine bit they had first tried to throw at me did nothing but annoy me, didn’t teach a darn thing.

The majority of my understandings of mathematics and the related didn’t come from school, learned 90% of things I know trying to solve problems that *interested me*. I remember when things like square and cubic measures were first introduced into my schooling years ago.

It bored the shit out of me!

I had already reverse engineered processes if you will — that is I figured it out by looking at a real problem in front of me. Using my brain cells and expirmentation to try and solve it until I got close enough for my tastes.

Back then I had spent a lot of my free time working on custom ‘Mech designs to the great est technical details I could think of: Calculating the amount of fuel that could fit in the storage space; figuring how much volume could be gained from storing it in some oddly shaped location (that was fun), the amount of force generated by the thrusters, thrust to mass ratios, acceleration rates (never was good at that), payloads without failing apart, etc.

That’s actually how I learned the Metric System, I was a kid that only was familiar with the US system of measure. Which oddly enough is defined in metric terms these days or so I’ve read xD. I had to learn to work with metric units because most things ‘Mech related are described in metrics. Before that my only encounter with meters/metres had been the Technical Manual to the NCC-1701D =/

The only limit to how far I could go was how much I could figure out between my head, a calculator, and scratch paper. And not a text book to be had ! It’s been years so I wonder how much has still stuck without any thing of interest to keep it fresh. I actually look forward to the more complex topics that you don’t get in high school, in the hopes it will be interesting for a change.

What good has school done me? Read, Write, Count and that is about it. The rest I’ve always learned because I have wanted to learn. For ****s sake most of the other subjects in high school, I’ve learned more by not listing to the text books. Most of my history tests had a –verbose switch added. I remember practically snoring through parts of the biology text book (it really was that bad). However, a little look for information on my own accord and it actually stuck. Psychology was actually fun buta tad useless at the HS level.

IMHO 75-85% of the stuff they make us do is busy work because between K and “Good bye and good riddens” people could learn a lot more in schools. tbh, I think I would rather have skipped it all and just went to the library every day instead — much more productive. For what remains, well…

Most of my back-log comes from letting it rot (as it deserves) and being to busy with work to do any of it. If I had just sat down and done it as it came, rather then working to pay for it… And devoting the rest of my time to learning things of interest I wouldn’t be in this situation now.

Thats why I want out and I’m taking it to bat — even if I’m bored stiff, it will give way before I do. 2008 is the year it falls and I get the heck out of it.

Because I do not surrender.

When surrounded and no way out but surrender, facing being ‘roasted alive’ at the hands of a tyrant.

I have no pride left in me. What I do, now I do for my people and for Camelot. And may they forgive me. This is my last act as your king. Do not be afraid. All things change. I am Arthur of Camelot, and I command you now… all… To fight! Fight like you’ve never fought before! Never surrender! Never Surrender! Fight as you never…

/* crossbow bolts strike him across the chest */

Camelot lives!

— First Knight, 1995.

As Arthur lay dying, the people and his knights resist Malagants men. Even the unarmed civilians engage the enemy as a fighting mass and repel the enemy from Camelot by sheer force of attrition.

Given the choice, to yield to tyranny or fight for ones freedom who could resist? As some of my country men once said when our nation faced the same decision: Give me Liberty, or give me Death!

I don’t think the idea will ever be allowed to die, while people hold breath.

You know, I actually forgot how much I hated PHP. C love it, C++ can take it, Python is great, Ruby is fun, Perl is handy, LISP just RTFM, Java is livable as long as CTS doesn’t set in. But PHP is just a pain in my neck.

Between the days volley’s and having to tinker with modules written in PHP, I think it’s time for some shut eye before I pass out lol. Now if the dog hadn’t stolen all of the covers already…

With luck I can finish the module tomorrow and get a start on my homework this weekend. A few days off should really help me if I don’t lose any marbles in the process.

I figure, exercise, shave, shower, and hit the books. Weekends actually about the one time of the week I have *room* in my own room to exercise with out being crowed out for storage :

2 Minutes on press ups, 2 minutes to catch a breath, then 2 Minutes on crunches works quite well. If it was possible without being hounded by dogs wanting to go and crazy Georgian drivers that would hit me, I’d add a few miles run to the mix but oh well…

Not fond of exercise by any means (especially crunches!) but its comforting to know my body will hold up to it. I could probably survive the calisthenics fair enough if I ever ended up in basic but BUD/S would be a killer… Physically fit bastards lol.

Would be great to find some way of getting running into the mix. When I used to be a couch potato I could run like a bat out of hell. When I had to do some thing outside ‘tween the commercial breaks; I’d be to the other end of the complex and back with the mail before one commercial had passed hehe. Since I stopped watching a lot of TV these past few years that endurance just isn’t there any more and I fade out after tens of metres with ankles that won’t cooperate :

Well, I suppose that would make a good set of goals for the year. Get back in running shape and be able to pass through my exercise routine with ease. It’s not really hard, not as hard as I used to think and it is easier without a girl sitting on your back lol.

And compared to what the Navy SEALs go through, that’s a bloody cake walk.

The dissolution begins or does it continue on?

My sister in law finally got the papers, her and my brother are now legally divorced after over 8 years of marriage.

Well, what can I say? He’s an asshole lol.

His say’s he doesn’t want to be miserable for the next twenty years, far enough… If you ask me they had enough years before hand for him to figure that one out. So after moving *both* of them into his best [also female] friends place he threw her out flat a month later. Which means Ma is stuck on the couch because they gave up the apartment first :.

I remember when we first heard they were moving in there, Ma threw them both out of the house instantly. Everyone knew it was going to be a bad idea but my Sister [in-law] was willing to try and make things work, my Brother OTOH wasn’t.

And now they are going to soon be three-way arguing over the photo album with my Mother leading the charge from the sounds of things. I know better then to get involved, even if my “neutral as Switzerland” approach to family wars is often disregarded by all participants… I do hope he gets to keep some of the pictures, for Pete’s sake. I doubt he should get much more then the car personally (it’s in her name, not his) but how could you argue over the photo album !?

What can I say.. My family is the kind that cuts deep, then sucks out the blood. That’s the world in which I live. A scene comes to mind, I saw the end of “From Dusk Till Dawn” last week when I was waiting for the next movie to start. In the end battle some one was being chewed on by about ten or twelve vampires… That is what comes to my mind.

I some times wonder what branch I came from because that is not my way. I only intentionally return in kind when I know nothing else will bring them to relent’ment. My ability for anger is limited to all of the about 10 seconds it takes for me to calm down. Unlike my family, I learned to control my temper quite well and to deal with it without hurting others. No wonder we’re known for loud mouths and hot heads so to speak lol.

It’s a shame but it’s his life, when the other woman bleeds him dry I guess he’ll learn better. I remember when I was a child, I used to count the periods of family in-fighting by ‘world war’ starting with IV, lost count many years back around IX or so.

Do we begin to dissolve bit by bit? Or is it just another fragment in a long war.

Some times I wonder if I honestly care any more.

I don’t think that GOD made people this way, we learned it on our own. As the world around us damages us bit by bit, they don’t know any better. So they cut the other deeply with the words, and suck dry the blood that flows.

I know if I ever get out of here, I pray to look back at it as a memory and nothing more. I don’t want to bring that mentality to a new generation… I’m not like the rest of my family but they are still my family, each of them and I love them.

*mutters*

finally some peace and quite..

all but barricaded here since the laundry racks full most of the room. But people have finally let me be, it’s nice to be able to hear myself think again. Possibly I think to much but it is about the only real freedom I have in life next to the right to have my own opinion.

When the house is so loud you can’t even hear the freaking radio without maxing out the volume you know you have a problem! And I normally wear headphones so as not to disturb people.

Humbug.. figures that the second I open my mouth they start again.

Oh what fun it would be to just get out and go to the beach, damn it I haven’t been to one in years.. I really miss Florida some days, not the heat but other things. It was home for half of my life, I still consider myself a [displaced] Floridian at heart.

Hmm, maybe with a little luck people will STFU in a few hours and I can concentrate on getting stuff done if this headache subsides. On a normal day I can here them from upwards of 10-15 metres outside.. So it’s still loud in my room. At this rate I’m going to have to sort out a very loud playlist soon and skip the radio :

A good nights sleep, no family-included headache, and a trip to the beach — my idea of vacation.

Hmm, todo list:

  1. Add compress level handling for gz/bz2’d tarballs to mak and a –pass-args switch
  2. Finish that doc for Gerard
  3. Finish converting/updating/rewriting SOPs for SAS
  4. Some work on NPM would be nice — overdue * 210
  5. Still need to port the next chapter of my book to TeX source

I wonder which will hit me first and what if any thing will actually get done in this rats-nest before the clock strikes 2300. Hell… Even if I enlisted at least I’d be waking up by 0430 for BCT rather then going to *bed* at 0530 for Pete’s sake!.

Can’t even get **** done in my own home… Unless I’m the only moron awake.

I’m now a GMail Convert

I’ve now mostly completed my transition to Google Mail, the issues I’ve been having with POP3 Fetch mail on Ippimail seem to be a bit derailing of late… So I’ve got every thing set up to the GMail account now including my primary address (ippimail). If it ever can be fixed I can always transition back over.

I rather like the Squirrel Mail software that is used at Ippimail because I’ve worked with it before and they have a very nice theme. But I’ve got to admit, GMail is quite nice… I do however miss the ease of opening like 3 or 4 E-Mails in different tabs simultaneously with Ippimail though but I love the labels system in GMails software.

The spam folder is also about 5 to 8 orders of magnitude more full then Ippimails!!! But so far the filtering system works excellently just like googles search engine. I’ve had nothing put there that wasn’t spam yet and I’ve yet to see any thing penetrate the standard filters. I remember years ago I once tried Hotmail and felt like it was being placed on the world wide spam r us list :. I guess that’s impossible to avoid with any common services (hotmail, aol, yahoo, gmail, mail.com, etc) but hotmail back then at least was totally ridicules. At least GMail is doing a good job with the filters hehe.

Now that my Webmail problem is sorted out I guess it’s just the instant messengering one to fix. It would be so awesome if I could get a decent multi-protocol instant messenger that I didn’t dislike; I consider Pidgin and Kopte both cases of “foo sucks less”.

I have an XFire, an M$N, an AIM, an YIM, an ICQ, and even LiveJournals Jabber/GTalk features but I’m usually unreachable via XFire on my laptop and normally only on the others on my laptop. It would be awesome to be able to use each ! All the better without having to run Windows XP in the process or hack up FreeBSD’s Linux ABI to much to run the software.

Kopete and Pidgin both suck horribly for IRC (Internet Relay Chat) as well and I’m usually on several channels off irc.freenode.net. Which is why I’ve got Konversation on my laptop and X-Chat on my XP machine… Most of my friends use either AIM, MSN, or both. Still running 2-3 programs (xfire, irc, rest) is a total pain in the butt. I suppose it beats the 7 I would need if it wasn’t for applications like Kopete….

Oh wellz, back to the code.

The proverbial payback is a pain

Oy’

I was up to almost 0600 in the morning and I was chuckling because my sister was waking up for work — 1000 in the morning comes around and BAM.

Ma wakes me up to talk to Epson tech support 8=)

Oh well, with luck I’ll still have 45 minutes before I’ve got to get ready…

Supplemental:

What pipe was I smoking? Trying to get any thing done here during daylight, let along pre-work time scales my productivity to -1000% :@

The authoritative software list

With PC-BSD 1.5 on the horizon, think 1.5RC2 is out last I checked the mailing lists.

I’ve been working on compiling a list of software. Largley because I can remember an update some time in the past that essentially removed /usr/local/*, it said it would remove all the ports but not the entire directory tree!!!

So needless to say, just in case I prep before hand hehe.

Here is my list so far


Development
/bin/sh and friends
C Compiler
C++ Compiler
Java Compiler+JRE
Perl
Python
Ruby
Scheme
Qt (as many bindings as possible)
GTK+ (as many bindings as possible)
Games
solitaire (kpat)
battle for wesnoth
xgalaga or chromium b.s.u.
doom / quake
Graphics
GIMP
Inkscape
xv or kview # i.e. any thing light and fast for many formats
Internet
Flock
Lynx
Thunderbird or KMail or Sylpheed
Mutt (optional)
KNode
Konversation
Kopete or Pigen or *better* program of same genre.
Download manager, command line + gui (kget/wxdfast?)
ftp (command line client)
TeamSpeak (client)
Misc
Vim
Emacs
MicroEMACS
Multimedia
MPlayer
Mencoder
cdrtools + k3b
Office
Omni-Purpose file viewer would be nice! -- Okular (and a few more fmts)
Full LaTeX suite of tools and outputs utilities
Spreadsheet (no preference other then xls/ods support + fair speed)
Personal
zsh
Window Maker (currently) + Docker + WMClock
Decent terminal emulator that supports transparency on any WM.

My laptop is really the one computer that I have that is special to me. My darling Dixie has arguably been a live saver without it I’d never get any work done in this place :

It’s bad enough I’m usually awake until 0400-0500 local, at least work doesn’t start until the afternoon on Mondays…

The list is fairly short considering that my laptop functions as my central system. Just programs for working with data really, text processing, images, etc. A few programs for audio/video and a couple of games to kill time. Most of the stuff filed under Internet is communications based, konvi for IRC and a decent multi-protocol instant messenger so I can be on AIM & M$N simultaneously, not to mention the YIM and ICQ accounts I have should I ever find a use for it.

I’m 100% Webmail based so I don’t really need a local MUA but I like to have one handy for the sake of emegency. After the flash drive snapped in two I gave up on Netscape mail based stuff (like Thunderbird) and had to switch to webmail. The only other decent alternative is to run it off my file server and I tried that. It kind of sucks to deal with multimedia attachments and html e-mail via ssh !

Hmm, time to see what work needs to be done for the night.

Thank GOD work doesn’t start at the crack of dawn… hehe

Writer’s Block: That’s So Cliché

Which, ahem, “internets” clichés do you wish would go away already?

Live Journals Writer’s Block

I don’t know if I would call it a cliché so to speak but one thing I’d love to see put to an end is the ASCII Vs HTML E-Mail thing.

I for one prefer to send E-Mail in plain text, most of my systems use either UTF-8 and a couple of apps ISO 8859-1 (aka Latin1) by default. I generally follow the old concept of

*bold*
_underline_
/italic/

Quite simply because I find it faster then [b]foo[/b] on forums and unlike the <strong> and <em> tags I tend to use. The <u> tag for underlining text was depreciated in HTML a long time ago, I don’t use <b&#62 or <i&#62 often either.

I think though it would be kind of cool to strike a balence between plain text only and html bloated e-mail.

No HTML Attributes
No Stylesheets (CSS)
No Javascript (including friends)
No Inline images (or implementors discretion),
No Hyper links not written out in the text, e.g. http://www.foo.org/ == ok, <a href=”http://www.foo.org/”>text to show the reader</a> != ok.

Allow lists (numbered, bulleted, definitions) because those can be easililly translated into plain text if desired using alphanumerics (e.g. 1. element / + element and tabstops).

Allow bold, underline,and itallic because they can be dumped to **, __, and //

allow horizontal rules because they could be made with – or _ lined up to screens width.

And you could implement all of that in a mail client *without* the complexity of writing a full HTML parser and Render. If you wanted you could do vertical rules as well but it would increase complexity.

Thus users with HTML Capable mail clients could view the HTML by default (most can be set prefer html or plain text) and mail clients that can not handle HTML, either by design or simply because it is just so much horse shit to have to render HTML in a mail client without a web browser!!! (internal or external)

But no, most HTML Mail you see is so full of crap from the tags the MUA uses that you can’t dump it all to *comparable* plain text without knowing how to handle all of HTML standard/non-standard tags, without either leaving unknown tags in plain view or risking miss-formating the message.

And to be perfectly honest it would be very sweet if such a system became the standard for sending E-Mail. Because it would be backwards compatible with HTML Capable MUA’s ability to render HTML E-Mail, so only the sending/composing would need an update. Plus one could use pre and post processing scripts to deal with MUA’s that lack HTML support and lack support for this kind of restricted HTML.

But oh no, we’ve got to have HTML E-Mails auto-generated by MUA’s in such a sorry state you wouldn’t want to touch it with a ten foot poll and having to either use a HTML’able MUA, pipe to external browser, or better yet /dev/null if it is spam hehe.

Flocking great !!!

The other day I sent the port maintainer of linux-flock an e-mail reminding them that flock 1.1 had been released and thanking’em for maintaining the port.

Did a csup of ports and updated flock *my way*:

dixie# fastest_cvsup -c us -q
dixie# vi /root/ports-supfile # make sure the server is set correct
dixie# cd /usr/ports/www/linux-flock ; ls
Makefile distinfo files pkg-descr pkg-plist
dixie# less Makefile # confirm it's 1.1 in ports
dixie# pkg_delete linux-flock-1.0.3
dixie# make install distclean
...

Fired up flock from another aterm logged into my regular user account so I could see any messages that popped up on stdout/stderr, all good and even got the “Successfully updated flock” page.

Checklist:

Settings unchanged — yes
(Linux) Flash player plugin v7 — works
(Linux) Mozilla MPlayer plugin — works, using FreeBSD MPlayer build 😉

And I can see that Flock has finally implemented the one feature I really wanted from them, the ability to customize the ‘My World’ page. I removed the new friend activity widget and put back the favorites sites window, popped off the multimedia panel too. Because I don’t really use it, got my RSS feeds there.

The RSS|Friends|Multimedia layout I got on first start of 1.1 added a scroll bar at my typical window size (~1240×500 or so I’d guess by eye), which losing was one of the nice things of the style changes from flock 0.9 to 1.0. I’m really looking forward to more advancements in the My World page concept and to be honest it is an improvement over Operas “Speed Dial” feature which I used and abused back when I used Opera regularly.

I remember when I installed flock the flashplayer setup from PC-BSD worked out of the box, not very important to me but good to have. My great dislike for every thing Adobe remains but I lifted my ‘ban’ on them after Flashplayer 9 was released for Linux. I had installed the linux-mplayerplug-in port some time ago but it never worked and crashed flock with an error about loading files, I figured it was an issue of using a linux browser plugin but only having MPlayer compiled for FreeBSD installed. So I removed the stuff from my profile and solved the problem.

Earlier today I was surfing the web and saw the MPlayer plugin load up and I was like what the heck !? It works!!! So now I can listen to my favorite radio station without having to open a konqueror window for it ;-), I’m used to keeping flock loaded 24/7 on my laptop any way because its still a heavy weight program even if it runs faster then firefox 3 alpha and 2.x, seamonkey 1.x, and (Linux) netscape 9 did on here. I actually prefer the mozilla plugin to the KMPlayer plugin in konqueror which IMHO is not even as good as the Kaffeine plugin. This is actually a good thing for me, I don’t have to swap to konqueror to multimedia files — which is why I tried installing the linux-mplayerplug-in port in the first place xD

I think I will take a the new GMail / Yahoo! Mail integration features 🙂

Flock N Roll