Time Unknown

Compared to most other such dialog boxes, this one, from Konqueror is a thing of beauty. I don't need to hesitate a moment when I see it. It assumes I know what I'm doing and has Quit as the default. It's just perfect.

My two major bookmark annoyances with Firefox 3 were not having a "bookmark this page" option in the bookmark hierarchy and having to open Organize bookmarks just to look at tags. Seems that Bookmark This Page Plus add-on solves the first issue and TagSifter solves the second. If in addition you feel tired to always have to open the bookmark tree when adding a bookmark the normal route, OpenBook add-on will let you change that.

I discovered my Serendipity database was huge, really big - almost 90M. Turned out every nasty spam comment had gotten logged into serendipity_spamblocklog table. I changed spamblock settings so that it logs to a file, and then did TRUNCATE TABLE serendipity_spamblocklog;

Now the database is less than 1M and I'm one happy camper.

I needed to learn about visual hierarchies for web design purposes and shocking the most illustrative guide to them seemed to be a map making book called Making Maps: a visual guide to map design for geographic information systems. Quite a mouthful, that. There are excerpts of the book available online for the curious and the needy.

The #ubuntu-offtopic IRC channel on Freenode is a timewasting cancer but luckily I'm currently in remission again. An injection of "NO, GO AWAY" when I was just stating what I personally prefer worked wonderfully this time, and I just went away. I feel oddly relieved.

Yesterday a stranger followed me from the train stop. Not really creepily, he said hello and we talked. Interesting this was the same stranger that did the same thing last year.

I'm somewhat wary of strangers initiating a conversation with me without there being a natural trigger for that. I find myself wondering what they want of me, and might lose a chance of a nice friendship in the process.

However, some wariness is all good and well. After all, yesterday I also saw a pigeon without toes. And I don't think it was born that way.

One of the current Hugo Nominees is a wonderful fantasy story in Film Noir style, A Small Room in Koboldtown. You can hear it at PseudoPod or read it as PDF, whichever suits your senses.

As both SVN and CVS support multiple projects under the same root, don't be too embarrassed if you accidentally made your git repository span multiple projects as well. This can be a big problem in situations where you want to publish just one of your projects. Worry not, there is a way out of the mess! You can separate a single directory into a repo of its own.

First, always work with a copy:

cp -r mygitmess myspecificnewname
cd myspecificnewname

Filter to just that one directory you want to single out:

git filter-branch --subdirectory-filter MyDirectory HEAD

This will also move the contents of MyDirectory up into your working directory.


Some clean-up actions to make sure everything ends up fine and dandy:

rm -rf MyDirectory
git reset --hard
git gc --aggressive
git prune

Then make sure everything works and start using your project specific git repo! You can remove the old repo (mygitmess) once you have separated all of your projects similarly.

If you use Bind as your DNS server, you have probably upgraded it already. If you use MaraDNS, you just didn't need to. How's that for goodness.

I'm currently using Konqueror and Firefox 3, mostly because Konqueror is not as tolerant about page quirks as FF and FF on the other hand is still somewhat hoggy. I'd like to change to just one of them for most of my uses, but kind of feel I'd be giving something up in the process. It might be I still like Konqueror better, for some reason. Hmm. Any hints to ease the transition?

According to the answer I got from Universal Laser Systems, the makers of Versalaser, they have no plans to release a Linux driver for the device and zero plans to ever release specs so that an open source driver could be developed.

There seems to be other Windows-only laser engravers/cutters out there, I wonder if some of them might be a bit more Linux friendly. I'd assume tech geeks to be a non-tiny potential market.

My next targets for inquiry are IEHK, Epilog and GCC. Feel free to point me to another companies too, or let me know if you know any to be Linux friendly.

Powertop result with idling Firefox3:

Power usage (ACPI estimate): 22.1W (2.6 hours)

Without:

Power usage (ACPI estimate): 19.2W (2.9 hours)

That's one needy Fox!

My friend's housemate has an amazing glider necklace made of peyote beads. It looks way sleeker than in the photo, a beautiful piece indeed.

Lately a big part of my time has gone into coding Clueshare. It feels nice to be on a roll.

Much fun can be had with

an -m 5

and variants an a quiet afternoon. Thanks Danie!