Non-starter

[XP] Starter Edition allows only three applications to be run concurrently. According to Microsoft, this limitation "helps [users] stay organized and reduces confusion."

2001:7d0::f556:feed:face:c0ff:ee

#ipv6 ninja_ H 0 ~im10ninja@3ffe:bc0:8000:0:0:0:0:3fab ["pirate robot ninja"]
#ipv6 integor_ H 0 ~empty@2001:7d0:0:f556:feed:face:c0ff:ee [My Name]
#ipv6 djay H 0 djay@2001:770:115:0:9898:baff:feae:defa [FENOY Gérald]
#ipv6 heidaro G 0 heidaro@shadowness.org [Natalie Portman]
#ipv6 notsasuke H 0 doneill@2001:470:1f01:178:9:0:0:4 [Sasuke Uchiha]
#ipv6 lailai H 0 ~jvilla@2001:720:1210:e:2b0:d0ff:fef3:5e41 [jvilla]
#ipv6 xdsg H 0 ~xsdg@3ffe:2900:2002:f00d:20e:a6ff:fe8f:3b0 [xsdg]
#ipv6 question H 0 ~jack@2001:8e0:abcd:276:f000:f000:f000:f000 [Jack]
#ipv6 flying H 0 ~liviu@2001:618:400:f883:0:0:0:2 [Liviu Danicel]

Of all the cool ipv6 kids without reverse dns (and Natalie Portman), I'm the lamest.

I could get a /48 prefix off of freenet6 but, since I'm tunneling through NAT at the (non-ipv6) router, there's not much point.

Possibly I will get an ISA nic for stone (OpenBSD box) so it can server as a router/firewall. My humble home network will look like -> DG834G [1] > (wan|stone -> switch -> (fire|*)). ipv6 would be tunneled to stone and then I could use the shiny /48 for anything else except wi-fi (unless I routed wireless traffic to stone as well...).

All idle musing right now. I want to get a laptop, ideally a tibook...but they're rather highly sought. I may have to settle for an old clamshell iBook. Or I could just get some random x86 laptop. I also want to pick up an old box to play with SELinux on, or maybe TrustedBSD.

[1] Issues do not seem to affect >1.0.4

Update: Ordered an ISA nic for stone. Will probably try to pick up a SGI machine next :) Laptops are too expensive...especially ppc...especially ti-books :(

Famished

#252896 - fam uses 100% of CPU

Ha, I had wondered what was locking X and generally making my system unstable. Consider yourself excused: update-rc.d fam remove

Having to reboot, however, did allow me the opportunity to knock the clock speed up to 200, giving me 2.2GHz or 3200+. So far all without incident.

So now I have a system that is 22% faster and no longer choked by famd. It is also, hopefully, more stable, meaning that my primary concern is now (brown|black)outs. However, I have not yet reached the point where I would consider a UPS.

Pufferfishery

OpenBSD is nice, really nice. It represents sense in a sea of unreasonable distributions and derivatives. The install was painless, the default setup sound.

Being ignorant, of course, I know not the preferred method for keeping the system updated. The various forms of binary patching sound nice, snapshots are also frequently recommened. Anoncvs is out for now. It could be the drive is the bottleneck and mounting /usr (and /home) on a newer drive will result in considerable performance gains. Earlier it took ~40 minutes to untar ports.tar.gz and another 1h30m to update the ports tree to -stable with cvs. [I've since junked the old Quantum Bigfoot 5.25 drive and things have much improved.]

The faq recommends packages over ports, which seems sensible enough to me (one make versus thousands). Moreover it states:

The OpenBSD ports team considers packages to be the goal of their porting work, not the ports themselves.

A philosophy that seems to elude those pesky Mandrake Expatriates.

funroll-loops.org

Quite simply: yes. Yes Debian, you are losing people to Gentoo. But... Why is this happening? Because you are old, and your stable tree is older than me. We have Portage, we have a source compilation unstable version. We are the cutting edge, and Debian has to realize this. There is a hierarchery of distributions, and right now Gentoo is at the top. There will always be Slackware, because it's always been there. Debian will remain in second place to the leading distro, and they'll always be wondering: "Why? Why are we losing users to (insert distro name here)?" Because you don't innovate. Sure, you're good. But theres usually something better. Live with it.

See also Mandrake Expatriate Syndrome.

"I Hate Linux"

I hate dial-up. I had a quite lengthy, well thought out reply to ihatelinux that referenced everything from Dilbert to SELinux (honestly!) but I posted it just as I got disconnected.

In short, however:

Guns don't kill people, rappers do!

Okay, I've also discovered that my typing is extremely crippled thanks to Quake. Left home row should be ASDF but since WASD are the default movement keys in Quake I'm way off. Hopefully now through concerted effort I can beat this fragging handicap.

Also a HD bearing has begin to go in one of the computers near where I sleep. It's not terribly loud but it is piercing.

DebianX

Possible future of X packages in Debian.

Retitlting

I don't know how wise it is to use an overelaborate precmd() but it is extremely useful for screen window titling.

Mine has now grown slightly beyond the realms of simple paramater expansion (ZshHardStatus):

if [[ $GID == 0 ]]; then
local trunc_chrs=15
else
local trunc_chrs=18
fi
local trunc="$((${trunc_chrs}-${#1}))"
local args="${${2:+${${${@[${#${@}}]##/*/}/#/ }:-}}//\"/}"
if [[ ${#args} -ge $trunc ]]; then
local args="${(r:$trunc:::::):-${args}}.."
fi
print -nRP $'\033k%(!.#\[.)'${1}${args}\
$'%(!.\].)\033'\\

There are a few kludges here. The $GID test for one. It's probably just a case of my not knowing the ins and outs of quoting well enough to assign the expansion of ${(%)(!.15.18)} to a variable. Also right hand truncation (%>str>) fails but, again, it could be my mistake. Using right-padding works quite well though.

To see it in action use:

caption always "%?%F%{.kw}%:%{.wk}%3n %t%{= ww}%? %-Lw%?%F%{+b}%:%{= ww}%?%n%f* %t%{-}%+Lw"