Funny things in Gentoo
In Gentoo, "emerge" is the package manager (the tool used to install new applications and software on the system). You can type "emerge mozilla-firefox" to install the most recent Firefox release or "emerge ruby" to install the Ruby programming language.
Here's a slightly unexpected result...Diane will like this... 
Okay, so it doesn't do anything, but it's kind of funny.
Making Cygwin more handy
I enjoy having Cygwin installed on Windows and often like to use the shell commands (grep, find, etc.). However, it's inconvenient to spawn a new terminal window and slog through the often-complex Windows directory structure. Based off of some websites I found, I now have a way to make this work...
Create a batch script file in your Cygwin /bin folder (for me, this is C:\Cygwin\bin) with the following:
@cd /d %1 @bash --rcfile BASCHRC -i
Create a file called "bashcontext.reg" and save the following text into it:
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shell\bash] @="Open Bash shell here" [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shell\bash\command] @="C:\\Cygwin\\bin\\runBash.bat \"%1\"" [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Drive\shell\bash] @="Open Bash shell here" [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Drive\shell\bash\command] @="C:\\Cygwin\\bin\\runBash.bat \"%1\"" [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\*\shell\bash] @="Open Bash shell here" [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\*\shell\bash\command] @="C:\\Cygwin\\bin\\runBash.bat \"%1\""
You can add the registry information by double-clicking the file to run it.
Now on every directory you have a "Open Bash shell here" option that will take you there immediately. Handy!
Here's a screenshot showing my cluttered context menu:
A-sitting On a Gate
- I'll tell thee everything I can:
- There's little to relate.
- I saw an aged aged man,
- A-sitting on a gate.
- "Who are you, aged man?" I said,
- "And how is it you live?"
- And his answer trickled through my head,
- Like water through a sieve.
- He said "I look for butterflies
- That sleep among the wheat:
- I make them into mutton-pies,
- And sell them in the street.
- I sell them unto men," he said,
- "Who sail on stormy seas;
- And that's the way I get my bread --
- A trifle, if you please."
- But I was thinking of a plan
- To dye one's whiskers green,
- And always use so large a fan
- That they could not be seen.
- So, having no reply to give
- To what the old man said,
- I cried "Come, tell me how you live!"
- And thumped him on the head.
- His accents mild took up the tale:
- He said "I go my ways,
- And when I find a mountain-rill,
- I set it in a blaze;
- And thence they make a stuff they call
- Rowlands' Macassar-Oil --
- Yet twopence-halfpenny is all
- They give me for my toil."
- But I was thinking of a way
- To feed oneself on batter,
- And so go on from day to day
- Getting a little fatter.
- I shook him well from side to side,
- Until his face was blue:
- "Come, tell me how you live," I cried,
- "And what it is you do!"
- He said "I hunt for haddocks" eyes
- Among the heather bright,
- And work them into waistcoat-buttons
- In the silent night.
- And these I do not sell for gold
- Or coin of silvery shine,
- But for a copper halfpenny,
- And that will purchase nine.
- "I sometimes dig for buttered rolls,
- Or set limed twigs for crabs:
- I sometimes search the grassy knolls
- For wheels of Hansom-cabs.
- And that's the way" (he gave a wink)
- "By which I get my wealth--
- And very gladly will I drink
- Your Honour's noble health."
- I heard him then, for I had just
- Completed my design
- To keep the Menai bridge from rust
- By boiling it in wine.
- I thanked him much for telling me
- The way he got his wealth,
- But chiefly for his wish that he
- Might drink my noble health.
- And now, if e'er by chance I put
- My fingers into glue,
- Or madly squeeze a right-hand foot
- Into a left-hand shoe,
- Or if I drop upon my toe
- A very heavy weight,
- I weep, for it reminds me so
- Of that old man I used to know--
- Whose look was mild, whose speech was slow
- Whose hair was whiter than the snow,
- Whose face was very like a crow,
- With eyes, like cinders, all aglow,
- Who seemed distracted with his woe,
- Who rocked his body to and fro,
- And muttered mumblingly and low,
- As if his mouth were full of dough,
- Who snorted like a buffalo--
- That summer evening long ago,
- A-sitting on a gate.
- -Lewis Carroll
Filth
With three boys now, I'm seeing a fair amount of filth around us. If it's not an excreted material, it's a pulverized food product, or some sticky conglomerated mass composed of items A and/or B combined with other household objects. It's not pleasant.
Today my oldest got into the spackle and dutifully applied it to not only to the walls, but also his younger brother. At least it doesn't smell bad...
...But now the serious point: We have this massive amount of cleaning tools, equipment and supplies that we use on a daily basis to scrub ourselves, our children, our tables, floors, cars, etc. It's sort of amazing how much effort we put into it. I think the wife and I are a little on the freakish side of obsessive compulsive cleaning but still, I would bet that most people spend an enormous part of their life cleaning. I think about people in the past... I have a strangely realistic-feeling episode in my head of "neolithic" people huddled in a cave with their bear pelt (carefully skinned and washed to remove the stench). And oddly I can picture that although we would consider them filthy, I bet they spent a LOT of their time cleaning things.
...But now to the REAL serious point: I don't think we consider very much how incredibly revealing this is about us as Christians. An ordinary Christian hates sin just like your plain vanilla human (yum!) hates filth. It's internal filth and it's really pretty nauseating. But for my own part, I know I spend hardly any time at all cleaning out the internal filth with some spiritual Windex topped off with some heavenly PineSol. Why not? We're so focused on the trivial filth of this world. Sometimes we complain about the bad smell of sin in our lives but we don't spend enough time taking a shower in God's grace.
We know we'll get dirty again as humans but we still make a real and conscious effort to avoid it. Shouldn't we have the same attitude towards spiritual gluck? I don't believe "cleanliness is next to Godliness" but maybe if we synchronize the ideas in our heads we'll end up spending more time thinking about our Godliness (or lack thereof).
There's not too much else to do in the shower -- why not pray for spiritual cleansing? I think I'm going to try to do that from now on.
For those of us that already have a keener sense of their sin and God's grace, take this post the other way around and hop in the shower a little more often! Your friends and coworkers appreciate it and being clean is at least nice even if it's not morally required!
Return of the Car Computer!
Well, nearly 3 years ago, I started building a car computer using a Mini-ITX 1GHz motherboard, an 8" touchscreen LCD, some custom power components, and a bunch of spare parts. $794 later I still am pretty much where I was then.
I had trouble with:
- Building my own case -- it looked terrible and was almost taped together. Absolutely horrid.
- Some sort of weird Windows problem (that I still haven't resolved)
- Trouble with setting the thing up since the LCD runs off a car cigarette-lighter outlet
- Still a high cost for Bluetooth and 802.11/a/b/g/n -- which was important to having the thing be useful
Most of these hurdles have been beaten as of this week. Weird Windows problem is solved by not using it (I got the touchscreen drivers to work under Gentoo using Enlightenment as the DM). Good bye Billy Gates! Due to some car battery issues I purchased one of those massive backup car starters, AC/DC, monstrosities. This gives me the flexibility of working with the car component in the house in the office where I can make (and leave) a mess instead of having to set up / tear down everything in the car whenever I wanted to fiddle. The cost for Bluetooth and wireless has dramatically dropped (I have a spare Bluetooth dongle hanging around and a few wireless cards).
The one outstanding issue is a case. I really haven't been looking but I'm sure there are more options now. I've considered also storing the thing in the trunk and wiring display/USB/etc up to the front. If that's the case, I can leave the components in their junky case and not worry about it.
Some other cool developments:
- You can now get very cheap IDE-Compact Flash solid state "hard drives" for these things. Gentoo will run just great on a 2GB card. It's fast, easy, and it saves even more room.
- VIA has iterated twice since I purchased my motherboard and has both a Nano-ITX and now a Pico-ITX (about the size of a deck of cards) motherboard. These are cool, but I likely don't need them.
- I'm smarter now than before and can actually successfully navigate through some tricky Linux configurations for "non-standard" hardware. Many, many kudos to Steve Huskey from work who helped me initially (and got me addicted to Gentoo) and then instilled me with enough curiosity to go nuts and play with the stuff. I'm not exactly sure what a kudos is, but Steve deserves a lot of them.
- I have some free time... No! Stop laughing, really, I do! Or at least I plan to make some. I don't have any money any more (the government and the banks take care of that) so hopefully I'll mostly be able to finish this using free software and skill.
- People read my blog now! So maybe when I run into trouble now I can get some help instead of yelling into the dark void that was my January, 2005 blog.
So, here it is:
See! It's only missing:
1) A car
2) A functional computer
OK, so there's a lot of work to be done... I'll keep you posted as I move along.
(By the way, the blue box is my server which just happens to be serving as a roadblock to avoid pedestrian traffic from trampling on the sensitive electronics The smallish silver square containers are the car computer itself and the LCD screen is sitting on top of the server. The orange thing is the aforementioned, large, American, AC/DC power, car-starter, utility-light, air-inflater, super-multi-tool!)
This (like so many Dilbert comics) seems far too realistic…
Yes, that's right, this post IS categorized as "Actual Events".
Patently pretentious people
Is it just me, or do others notice a lot of people around them who are:
1) Pretentious
2) Obvious about it?
I think everyone's a bit pretentious (myself included -- notice the pedantic use of alliteration and long words in the title --and, oh darn, the use of the word "pedantic" just now). I think that as a Christian, and in particular who experienced a rather long period of life under a pastor who was a big on "mortification" I may be more sensitive to this than others. I was always able to see the dark side of my own actions (for example, "I'm writing this blog post because other people write more interesting things on their blogs and I need to be better than them"). Maybe it's unhealthy... It's definitely highly pessimistic. But I can't help but be somewhat annoyed when people think they're so clever but they're not very gracious about admitting their shortcomings. I think I mostly feel that people are "real" when they're able to say that they may not know what they're talking about.
So, if anyone ever asks you if your "motives are pure" answer immediately, "No!". I don't think this side of the pearly gates we'll ever have pure motives. I think that friends and relatives admitting faults to each other is amazingly refreshing. And to be clear, this is not the same as inventing trivial, almost good sounding faults. "I'm so sorry to give you such a large and expensive present!". Honesty, especially when talking about motives makes me feel so much better. "Sorry that I was abrupt with you today" is not nearly as helpful as saying, "I was in a rush and didn't consider that you had something you needed to tell me." Or even, "Sorry that I was abrupt but I was angry from before with you and took it out on you." (By the way, I tend to be abrupt with people when I'm irritated with them and I know that this last statement is one that I should say more often.) There's something there that isn't usually mentioned in an apology... It's a statement that you didn't do something right but now you'd like to make it right. It's not passing the buck or making excuses. We always can make excuses (I was in a rush, it was a stressful day, you were hard to deal with, etc.) but the reality is that these simply don't help the person that we're supposedly apologizing to. And the point is to help them.
But I've wandered a little bit -- I was talking about pretentious people. From the Free Dictionary I get the following definition:
Claiming or demanding a position of distinction or merit, especially when unjustified.
So, my gripe is that everyone, absolutely everyone has tons of problems and should be awfully careful that they don't act as if they deserve distinction or merit for their actions. And furthermore, that being humble will go a long way to really connecting with people. I was just listening to some lectures by Gordon Clark from a class that he taught. He was asking students in the class if anyone knew what the "Lycopersicon esculentum" was and making it sound like they should. No one knew. But instead of blithely going on and pretending that this was everyday stuff to him, he sort of stumbled over the term himself making it abundantly clear that he had simply written the name down himself and probably wouldn't remember it tomorrow. I know this is trite example but it was something fresh in my mind. He could have made himself seem incredibly smart but he instead really connected with his students by admitting that he didn't have this stuff memorized and then went on to make his point.
I was watching (I'll admit it) a rather horrible show called The Next Great American Band. The idea is that bands get up and perform and are one after the other eliminated until the voters (the watcher's of the show) have determined the final band that "makes it". Anyway, the point is that after each band performs the judges make some statements about how they think the performance went and what needs improvement. With one exception, all the bands said things like "That's just who we are", "that's how YOU feel", "We don't agree", etc. It was kind of disgusting. Because they "made it" to the show, they were too proud and self-important to admit fault at all. I thought some of the bands did well, but I was immediately disgusted afterward when they acted so pretentious about their performance. It's so commonplace now in America to act like this and it's sort of sickening.
This has been sort of a long post and I don't know what else to mention. It just bothers me a lot and it seems like people don't realize how bad they make themselves look. Doing something stupid makes you look bad but not admitting it or making excuses makes you look much worse than just stupid. Being smart makes you look good, but being smart and admitting that you don't have all the answers make you truly seem wise. And that's what we should all try to be!
Ron Paul 2008
Ron Paul is on a roll! Today, he's raised more than $1,348,377. And it's only 11:15am EST...
It's part of a grass-roots movement -- This November 5th...
Faithful blog reader! Donate now!
Here are some charts and graphs... He's getting about $57/second right now.
Update: Ron Paul ended up raising close to $4.0M on Monday. Absolutely amazing. We can only hope it's put to good use!
Synergy (the software program, not the buzzword)
I just installed and was playing with Synergy. It's a very cool program that allows me to take advantage of the fact that I sit with three screen at my desk (one is my MacBook, one is my "work"laptop running Windows, and the third is my Gentoo server). Now, instead of switching mice and keyboards I can access all three as if they were a single computer with three different monitors. Basically, with my Windows computer in the middle, I can access my MacBook by moving the mouse beyond the border of the Windows screen on the left and access my Gentoo server by moving the mouse beyond the border of the Windows screen on the right. It's very fluid and responsive despite that all three are using wireless currently.
Because my life is not boring enough, I made a video that shows it in action...
