This is odd. I uploaded a couple of shots of “bug hunting in action”, just for the hell of it, and because I know that Bengt put up that shot of him “hunting bugs” as a joke for me. All photos of people in my Flickr stream are marked “friends only” because…because it’s none of anyone’s goddamned business what we look like, unless I say it is. I have thirteen people marked as friends, seven of which I practically never see, and I happen to know that MiloÅ¡ hasn’t been around since last night, which brings us down to just five friends likely to have been online since I uploaded those, so…how did one of the shots get eleven views, and the other twenty; about the same number as my public shots? Even if some of those five have two computers–I know Lars M. does–that’s still an awful lot of views, especially for something that isn’t interesting. Very strange…

I can’t decide whether to be entertained…or mortified. Peer Gynt is one of my favourite classical music suites, and I’d have to say that In the Hall of the Mountain King is perhaps one of the most universally recognisable pieces of music ever composed. I’d imagine that some Beethoven and Mozart beat Grieg out, but there probably aren’t many people who wouldn’t at least experience a vague, “Yeah, I’ve heard that somewhere,” especially if they’d ever watched cartoons. However, when you think, “cellists trained at the Sibelius Academy in Finland”, this probably isn’t what immediately springs to mind. On one hand, Grieg is probably rolling in his grave, but on the other, it’s strangely compelling and I watched the entire thing without even opening a new tab (as I often do when I’m playing a music video on YouTube). I’m not sure whether that’s because it was appealing, or whether it’s for the same reason people stop to look at accident scenes…. 🙂

I used to use some gDesklets, but there are so many nice Screenlets now that I’ve switched entirely to those. Even after all these years, I’m still impressed that an entire operating system–and one that can be configured to look like almost anything–is absolutely free. I was first hit by that when I got a copy of Mandrake something-or-other. All I’d ever used was Windows (well, Mac OS9 for a while), and when I first booted Mandrake into the default KDE desktop, I distinctly recall thinking, “Holy shit…people made this and just gave it away for anyone to use for free!” Back then, Linux could be decidedly un-user-friendly (and often was), but KDE was kind of pretty, and I was so amazed that I could not only make that look the way I wanted, but I could have other DEs as well, all without reinstalling or removing anything at all. I switched to Gnome when Ubuntu first came out because I liked the “cleaner” look, and in spite of what devout KDE users say, it’s not that hard to find settings that you want to change, but even now, I’d still use KDE if it was that or Windows. When I do really need Photoshop and have to run Windows, I keep looking on the right of the screen for stuff like CPU usage, GPU temp and new mail, but it’s not there. I’m sure there are apps you can buy that will do it, and Vista might do it natively (don’t know, don’t care), but only Linux does it for free. If I want to change the look of Windows beyond a few choices that MS made for me, then I have to buy something to do that, and use up my system resources to run it on top of the OS. All of my Linux stuff is free–there is not one single piece of software installed on my machine that isn’t at least free as in beer, and most are both free as in beer and free as in speech. I think that’s pretty goddamned awesome; maybe there is some hope for our culture of greed and power worship after all. Maybe. 🙂

Edit: Oh, and for when I forget (again), the way to make minimised-to-panel Rhythmbox stop popping up the artist/title/album every time it plays a new song is right click the icon and uncheck “Show notifications”. It’ll still show on mouseover.

Many people consider hip-hop dancers to be part artist, part athlete….and maybe some are. They’re certainly energetic. None, though, have anything on these awesome Soviet Army dudes. Jesus H. Christ–it would take a quart of really, really good vodka to get me to even attempt something like this, and I’d need a crack medical team on standby, ready for the point at which I would break an important bone, or drop right the fuck dead of a heart attack. They’re doing this in full uniforms with boots, on asphalt (or concrete) and they’re fucking smiling…they don’t even look slightly winded. Accordion dude is practically fucking flying….I’d have a face full of road rash on my first attempt. You go, Soviet dancing-dudes–you’re amazing! 🙂

I love the Ubuntu community! Last night, I had one reply to my plea for Ã¥ with a suggestion, but it didn’t work (though the guy is both a Linux and aquarium enthusiast, so I made him a contact). Another this morning said he probably couldn’t help, but asked for information to try. Third time lucky–some wonderful, helpful soul knew that Compose+a+a would make my long-lost Ã¥. Better yet, it’s even faster than the o+a combination. I also found the caret and breve; Compose+<+ (c/s/n/z) for caret and Compose+(+a for ă, which is the only character I ever use with a breve. ååååååå Ã…Ã…Ã…Ã…Ã… ăăăăăăă Å¡Å¡Å¡Å¡Å¡Å¡Å¡ čččččččč Yaaaaaay! :)

Well, I wanted something to do, and I got Compose key woes.

/usr/share/X11/locale/en_US.UTF-8/Compose

That’s for when I forget the location of the list. All of the letters I need are there in the list, but not all of them work. I don’t know why. I should’ve checked this on the weekend when I actually had time to screw around with it, but I didn’t. No, it’s not urgent because I can paste from Character Palette, but it’s one of those things that will drive me batshit-fucking-insane until I fix it and know it’s working properly.

schäfer
datanörd
Kütchen Füsh
tschüß
gøre
éclat
mère
niña
français
dobrý
zdravím
août
encyclopædia

Okay, yes for accents grave and acute, yes for circumflex, diaeresis, cedilla, and æ (whatever it’s called), and also for the swishy Spanish thingie (tilde? Mathilde?), but I have no caret, no breve and no ring; it just gives me nothing at all. þ Oh, facrissake, I can make a thorn…handy for Icelandic, but I hardly ever write Icelandic. ¿ Great–I can even ask a question in Spanish! Too bad I don’t know anything except ¿yo te quiero taco bell (and I don’t even know whether that’s right). Argh.

Since I had nothing to do, I pissed around on YouTube for a while. Found some old commercials from the 70s and 80s that I remembered (I still want the “right” Zoodles commercial, and the Caramilk one with the devil…”I’m willing to pay…anything!”), and also found this. I’d forgot all about it except for occasionally getting the song stuck in my head. It was part of a collection of commercials from the 80s, but I didn’t know the rest, so I liberated a copy, converted to AVI, edited out just this one, then converted it back to Flash because…well, basically because I’m awesome. Now, if only I can figure out how the hell to put it in un-embedded friendly WordPress….and I thought I had nothing to do!

Okay…here goes the code. Will it work?

Well, that was fun….no, it won’t, and I have something to do. 🙂

That works, though it’s utterly frightening that I remembered every word of it even though I hadn’t heard the commercial since I used to watch Jem and Denver The Last Dinosaur (never mind that I actually owned Army Ants–their arses glowed in the dark)…now how to I make it “click to play” instead of autoplay? Hmmmm…

How the hell can I do this…do I have to make the FLV itself click-to-play? Adding a play parameter set to false doesn’t work, though that’s what Adobe claims should do it. I’m about to say “fuck it”; I’m not that desperate for something to do! 😆

I didn’t go with P. today because it was cloudy, windy and nowhere near warm enough for any but the bravest bugs to be out. Instead, I decided to take a nap, with the plan to be well-rested before tackling the installation and manual configuration of the dreaded Samba on my brand new Hardy install. Usually, Samba and I don’t get along very well; I do what it appears I’m supposed to do to enable sharing, curse the air blue, demand that it work because I’m root and what I say goes, but it doesn’t work because for reasons known only to the software, it hates me and the feeling is mutual because I hate it even more. That has been my experience with Samba (especially, though not exclusively, on Ubuntu) for practically as long as I’ve known it existed. Fuck swat; a web interface doesn’t help me if: a. I have no idea how to get it open; or b. when I finally do figure out how, none of the changes I make seem take effect. Same goes for LinNeighborhood, pyneighborhood and whatever else I might have tried out of sheer desperation. Anyway, just the word “samba” has in the past generally given me a pre-headache, in preparation for the headache I usually had by the time it was actually (or at least mostly) working. Last time wasn’t too bad, but that was mostly because I didn’t have to look up “sudo gedit /etc/samba/smb.conf” and knew what lines to uncomment, what changes to make, and knew I had to do “sudo /etc/init.d/samba stop”, then “sudo /etc/init.d/samba start” for changes to take effect (didn’t know that the first time–took me forever to figure out how to restart samba without rebooting). I memorised that stuff because I’d had to do it so many times.

I hadn’t looked at the changes in Hardy. As a card-carrying nerd, I always install the latest version, usually within a day or two of its release, so unless I’d seen, “DON’T INSTALL HARDY HERON, 8.04–IT WILL DESTROY YOUR HARD DRIVE AND EAT YOUR FIRST-BORN!!!!”, I’d install it anyway. Why read the changelog when I could be….doing the install. For that reason, I didn’t know that they’d implemented something called “easy file sharing”, but when (just for the hell of it), I right-clicked a folder and selcted “Sharing Options”, I was presented with a little window that had checkboxes where I could allow the folder to be shared, with or without write access, with or without a Guest account (for users not in the Samba accounts list). I checked the desired options, then clicked “Apply”, but since I hadn’t yet installed Samba, it said I could not share folders and offered to install the necessary software (that’d be Samba). Gun-shy from so many years of fucking with this stubborn software, I clicked Cancel and installed Samba with Synaptic, so I don’t know whether the auto-install would have worked (probably–did just fine with audio and video codecs), but after that, I went back and tried to share the folder…and it worked. I did run into a bug where it doesn’t tell you that you have to log out to be made a member of the samba group, but even that wasn’t too bad, and they’re fixing it now so you’ll get a prompt. My laptop was already a member of my workgroup, and the desktop detected it, adding it to the Places menu. I did change my desktop to be a member of the same workgroup, but I did that only for the neatness factor of having them all in one; it worked even before I made the change. Except for a FAT32-formatted partition that for some reason does not want to share (I think it’s because it’s FAT32; the ext3 partition shares just fine), “easy file sharing” really is easy, and I may even be a bit disappointed because I’d set aside literally hours to get this working. Now, I have nothing to do! Maybe one of the Manti-Dudes is up for a professional modelling shoot or something. 🙂

I’m officially a Flickr Bug-Woman! It occurred to me tonight, after reading another “What the hell is this bug?” Flickr Mail, that I get them quite often, usually a “referral” from a contact (or a contact of a contact) who says, “Oh! I know who can ID this for you!” I suppose it’s the social networking aspect of Flickr, and the fact that my stream is composed mostly of…well, bugs…but I still get a kick out of it. I’m not an entomologist, I’m not even a biologist. I’m a former correctional officer, currently a geek-down-the-street, occasionally foster mama for displaced baby insects….and apparently, that’s all it takes to be considered a bug expert! Then again, they were Lubber nymphs, so it was pretty easy. 😉

Well, the Gutsy-Hardy upgrade was a non-event, and I ended up not reinstalling all of the stuff I had because after I went through the list, there might have been half of it that I actually use, so I’ll just install that. I did manage to free up almost 20 gigs of space, though (to be fair, four of those were for an installation of XP in Swedish used to make instructional screen caps), but now I can’t get the Compose key to create all of the characters I need. They’re in the Character map, and I even tried installing Slovak and Swedish language support, but I still can’t get it to make the caret or the ring. Oh well, I’ll figure it out; it’s probably some stupid little thing that I did last time and forgot about. I did run into the login bug about ~/HOME/.dmrc permissions being incorrect, but it didn’t stop me from logging in, and fixing it was as simple as changing the directory permissions in properties. Didn’t even need a terminal. I’m glad I did a clean install because it occurred to me that when I installed Gutsy, I’d got lazy and used Automatix for the third-party stuff, and Automatix never did play nice with upgrades. The devs abandoned the project because now you can just enable restricted stuff in the default install. I haven’t tested a DVD yet, but the videos I checked are fine, and I did install the gstreamer plugins for mp3 support. Couldn’t have been easier, either; all I did was try to open an mp3, and got a prompt to search for the necessary codec, and (unlike Windows Media Player), the search actually came up with the one I needed, and installed it in just a couple of clicks. I don’t know what installed support for WMV and AVI video, and I don’t care (maybe VLC?) Now I just have to figure out how I managed to mute the sound, which was working fine after the install and right up until I shut down last night. I know it’s something I did, though, probably fussing with alsamixer, and it’s not like I haven’t broken stuff before. 🙂

Oh, came across this on some blog and thought it quite amusing….

Macs are overpriced underspec’d poncey toys for people with too much money. Macs are great value for money – you couldn’t get the same spec for the same money elsewhere. OSX is great Windows is shit. Windows is great OSX is shit. 2GB is nowhere near enough memory these days. 2GB might not be enough for Vista but Macs run fine with it. OSX copied Vista. Vista copied OSX. Some boring shit about the finer points of Intel processor technology that’s the equivalent of showing everyone how big your willy is except nobody is interested whatever. OSX is shit and Windows is shit; I run Ubuntu blah blah blah. I hate Steve Jobs he eats babies. Bill Gates eats the babies and their mothers. I run Cock-Rot Linux and it’s the best in the world and I don’t know why everyone uses Ubuntu when you can do everything using Vi and the terminal feature of my obscure mobile phone (which nobody ever rings ’cause I’ve got no friends). Some other boring comment about processors from someone who wants to show the world that his willy is bigger than the other processor posters (okay, one person read the whole post). Apple hardware is overpriced I hate anyone with an iPhone. Actually BSD is much better than Linux or Windows or OSX, that’s why such a large percentage of people have it installed on their home machines. Doh, didn’t you know that OSX is Unix and runs BSD. Actually it’s not Unix ’cause Apple won’t pay for the certification. Yes it is. No it’s not. Fanboi something. Don’t you know the whole fan-boy thing is old and so juvenille, just like your spelling. I still use a Lisa and it does everything I need it to. I use a Commodore 64 with a hard-drive and it’s better than the Lisa. I don’t know what I’m talking about and haven’t read the article but I’m going to chip in with something irrelevant and wrong anyway. OSX sucks. OSX rocks. Bootcamp. DRM. iTunes. Steve Jobs is on first name terms with Satan. Bill Gates is Satan. I’ve got an iPhone and I love it. It really pisses me off that Apple has to put i in front of everything. Something about PPC versus Intel. Something completely without evidence comparing Apples and Oranges (pun intentional) proving PPC is and always will be better than x86. Something completely without evidence comparing Apples and Oranges proving x86 is and always will be better than PPC. GPL. Google. Linux. QNX. My Dad’s harder than your Dad. My Nan’s harder than your nan. Something anti-American. Angry riposte proving anti-American point. Thoughtful welll thought out riposte clearly disproving anti-American point that nobody will ever read because there’s so much uninformed chaff above it.