From the best of ASR

With thanks to the folks of #slackware on irc.oftc for mentioning this brilliant link: The best and most favorite A.S.R Post. For those uninitated unfortunate souls, that do not know what ASR is, a slight introduction can be found on wikipedia [1].

One of the best

From: tai@bbo.memphis.edu (Tai)
Subject: Re: Help: Data Recovery
The text of the poem follows:

<> !*''#
^"`$$-
!*=@$_
%*<> ~#4
&[]../
|{,,SYSTEM HALTED

The poem can only be appreciated by reading it aloud, to wit:

Waka waka bang splat tick tick hash,
Caret quote back-tick dollar dollar dash,
Bang splat equal at dollar under-score,
Percent splat waka waka tilde number four,
Ampersand bracket bracket dot dot slash,
Vertical-bar curly-bracket comma comma CRASH.

Am I the only one? probably not .. but this seriously cracks me up.

 

[1]: Ofcoure I’m being way to nice.

font size in Google Earth for linux

After recently installing google-earth for linux, I found to my suprise that the fontsize of the new appliction was hardly readable. It took me a while to figure out how to reset this.A big thanks to Accornehl and wlwireless on the following thread on the Google Earth Community.

I am apologising in front for the daft way the urls are misformed. The current wordpress theme allows only 460px of width for the article posting and it doesn’t wrap properly.

Anyway, moving on:

How to adjust the font size in Google Earth for Linux:

Google Earth stores it configuration files under ~/.googleearth. and all user related settings are stored under ~/.googleearth/Registry/google/
googleearthplus/User (can you see the registry link, makes you wonder huh ;) )

To adjust the font size of Google Earth in Linux:

cd ~/.googleearth/Registry/google/
googleearthplus/User/render/

and edit the file: guifontsize to your desired fontsize (I set mine to 12 which is a farsight better than the fontsize 6 it was set to.

As I mentioned earlier, it seems that Google Earth stores the settings in a slightly strange fashion. Each settings has it’s own file with the value of that setting as the only data. I am inclined to think that this is a left over from porting the application from windows to linux.

Ah well. Have a look around the other settings in ~/.googleearth/Registry/google/
googleearthplus/User and who knows what you may find.

In the near future I might see and try if I can make a SlackBuild/repackager for Google Earth, but last time I tried for some reason I got horribly confused of trying to make it work properly. However I have since learned that perhaps my desire to install Google Earth under /usr and /usr/share/googleearth was perhaps too optimistic and I should place is neatly into /opt/googleearth which all in all should prefent a whole lot of problems.

Bandwith Monitoring

Once again I am being “capped” by my ISP. I am in serious disagreement over their bandwidth policy. Instead of normal monitoring they seem to have some half ridiculous sceme of monitoring what users use. Don’t get me wrong, normally 1GB is more or less enough to do what I need. But there are days that you just need that little bit extra.

Okay, what would be normal?

1. A normal 24 hour period: ie 00:00 till 00:00
2. Preferably some method where users can tell how much their usage is.

The way my ISP monitors?

1. A 24 hour monitor period from 9:00 till 9:00
2. A second monitor point at 18:00
3. Any changes will be implemented one hour later; at 10:00 and 19:00

As I have been explained today:

So lets say the monitoring starts at 10:00AM, and I manage to download say 700MB between 10:00 and 18:00. At the second monitor point, the software will mark me as ok because I haven’t gone over the limit of 1.0 GB (I wonder if they measure at 1000MB or the actual 1024MB). Now if between 18:00 and 9:00 I download more than 300MB the 9:00 will mark me as over the limit and cap me until the 18:00 check point comes along again

Now the only thing that doesn’t make completly sense: Have a look at the two monitoring periods:

09:00 <–> 18:00
18:00 <–> 09:00

So the first period is only nine hours while the second period is 15 hours. Now you can safely assume that during the second perio, there will be more internet activity. (or atleast between 18:00 and 00:00)

Anyway I have been running knemo for a while now; it works pretty good. It kinda looks like the network monitor in windows, apart that its slicker ;). Anyway knemo just records from0:00 till 0:00 and doesn’t warn me.

So what do I need?

At current I am looking for the following: a network monitoring tool that lets me define the time period, gives me need statistics and warns me clearly in time if I reach a certain treshold. Some cute graphing wouldn’t go amiss.

In short it needs the following features:

• Custom time intervals (10:00 – 10:00).
• Custom monitoring points (18:00).
• Custom Data limit.
• Warnings if approach the datalimit.
• Preferaby more than one way of alerts.
• Possibility of running as a Deamon
• Possibility of having a GTK/QT/KDE/X11/HTTP/PHP/*  front-end for monitoring

So far so good I haven’t found anything yet, that does all this. Now if I had a clue how to write code (as in C / C++ / KDE / QT code) I would/might have tried to change the source of knemo and submit it as patches to the author. At the current rate I might actually submit several as a feature request.

…. alas ..once again … into the source!

Slrn

As written in my previous post one of the things I wanted to play with was slrn and see if I could switch away from knode.

In the process I decided I may as well write a little howto on to set up slrn on slackware. The result of this is Setting up SLRN on Slackware Linux, a (mini) howto on how to setup a mimial but working configuration of SLRN. And behold it actually works.

But, I still need to some extra work on the howto and make it shine and polished. The same for this goes for my slrn configuration as well. Even though it working and I can post and read news. I need to get it to give just that extra bit of zing to make it really work for me.

The quest continues….!

Switching over

For a while now I have been thinking of switching over. Call it old fashioned, but I still do like my commandline toolage. All in all I want to have a play around and get the following things setup/changed/switched over.

1. mutt, in combination with fetch/getmail.
2. slrn, in possible combination with leafnode.
3. KDE 3.5.6, with all possibilities compiled.
4. XFCE 4.4, with all it’s goodness.

Of course, all in all that means a lot of compiling and getting used to leaving some of the more KDE like tools behind. Although I am not sure that is too huge a problem.

[1]: Right at this moment, KMail/Kontact is tending to piss me off greatly as it keeps kinda dying on me. Although Kontact is quite nice with it’s complete intergration, I do appreciate things being stable. Ofcourse when switching to mutt I will need to do some major refurbishing of my folders.

[2]:slrn looks ok enough for a command line tool to read my news. I might actually have a play around with leafnode in the same time. Even in this broadband day-and-age. I still like the idea of pulling the whole batch of news articles down to read convenient at the time of my choosing. Also, it means that I am less dependend on Eastserve’s network quality.

[3]: Considering that my box is gonna be more and more less resembling a standard box, I might just as well go all out and compile the newest KDE with all the bells and whistle.

If I am right (I haven’t double checked yet), both KDE and XFCE will need some kind of dbus installation anyway.

[4]: So while I am at it, I might as well install the full new XFCE 4.4. I hear some good things about it and it supposed to look somewhere up the road from halfdecent. And it’s lighter on the system specs as well (or atleast it is supposed to be).

On the slackbuild front, things are moving smoothly. Work over at slackbuilds.org is quite busy with more and more submissions coming in. For my personal slackbuilds, I am about half way through them now. And all are up to scratch so far. It’s rather interesting to see how far I have come between my awkwardish first submissions and the builds that are now produced.

If all goes well, I might publish some more information on how to switch away from KDE. And not being dependent on KDE tooling is always good. After al CLI stuff works about anywhere and it has added advantage that if at some point, I can log in remotely to do most of my stuff. Now I would really need to have a cool domain to go with that ;)

Chinese State Circus

well, we just have come back from a very enjoying show of the the Chinese State Circus in the Lowry theater , featuring The World Famous Shaolin Wu-Shu Warriors (read: awesome killer-fu monks!!!). It was a pretty good show and I quite enjoyed watching it. It was less on the actual kung-fu part than I had hoped for but nonetheless it was a brilliant show with lots of spectacular action and lots humor :).

If you have a chance to go and see this show, go for it!! It’s definatly worth it!

I was quite impressed how the Lowry handled their loopsystem for deaf and hard of hearing people with hearing aids. I am not sure how proficient they were in BSL sign language, but they certainly made the effort and signed problably better than me. And liz said the feedback loop was pretty powerfull so she even had to turn it down.

As a side note: I may have to keep an eye on what’s on at the lowry. I do at some point want to see phantom of the opera

Liz wrote a much better and indept review of the Chinese State Circus