English Over The Sleeve

Holidays are great. They give you the time to not do all the things you’ve been putting off because “you’ll have the time during the holidays”…

Isn’t that wonderful?

Before I begin, some new pictures are up. They were all taken over the last couple of years by the GF. Some are linked to the course she’s doing at the moment. Feel free to provide feedback.

The February holidays, as any French schoolkid will tell you, is for “les sports d’hiver” - that’s skiing to you and me (oh, all right, snowboarding too, but no curling, skating, shooting, and so on). I, however, have a rooted objection to fastening two planks to my feet and hurtling down the side of a mountain (Don’t say it - one plank is even worse… Would the snowboarding lobby please be quiet now, under pain of a 14-page essay to be handed in on the day after the holidays? Thank you).

So I’m off for a few days to the the sunny (ha ha) West Coast of France. Don’t worry, though, I have quite a bit of work to do.

In other news…

I have a kid from the Burgundy region in one of my classes, and his mother came to see me at the PT meeting. She is one of the third category of parents. Her boy is doing fine, just fine - if anything, he’s about 4 years ahead of the rest of the class in English. She explained why to me - apparently she packs him off to California, USA, for a month every summer. The funny thing is, she told me, that the boy really and truly doesn’t want to go. He’s happy to have gone, when he gets back, but given the choice between a wild Californian beach and a Burgundy house, he’d much rather the soothing influence of family. Go figure.

Edit: This howto is for Breezy; for Dapper, go here

Here’s a quick howto, because the linksys wpc54g is one of the searches that brings in the most readers…:

(before we start, I’m presuming that you know how to use a console. Commands to be typed in are shown like this.)

1. Install Xubuntu; (I’m presuming that you’ve got a wired connection for that…)
2. Using that very same wired connection, get the latest pilots for your card from Linksys.
3. unzip the package from Linksys and get the .sys and .inf files (that’s bcmwl5.sys and lsbcmnds.inf, here, but YMMV). Put them into a folder called /home/username/linksys (or whatever…)
4. sudo apt-get install ndiswrapper-utils
5. I switched off my wired connection at this point: sudo ifdown eth0
6. cd linksys
7. sudo ndiswrapper -i lsbcmnds.inf
8. The screen spits out some lines of text about forcing parameter RadioState|0 to RadioState|2. The Howto I am basing this on says that you have to change that in the conf files in /etc/ndiswrapper, but in fact, in my case, the RadioState was still 0.
9. sudo modprobe ndiswrapper
10. sudo echo ndiswrapper >> /etc/modules This step is optional, and you may need to change the permissions on /etc/modules to complete it.
11. sudo iwlist wlan0 scan That should bring up (possibly among others) your access point. I’m presuming that there is no security on it.
12. sudo iwconfig wlan0 channel [x] essid [essid] mode Managed The x is the channel number, and the essid is the name of your access point. Get them from the iwlist scan.
13. sudo ifup wlan0 - and that’s where it goes pear-shaped, at least with Xubuntu and Kubuntu.
    If you get a line that says something like “ignoring unknown interface wlan0=wlan0″, then follow these additional steps…
14. sudo mousepad /etc/network/run/ifstate
15. Add a line that says “wlan0=wlan0″ (without the quotes), and save.
16. sudo mousepad /etc/network/interfaces
17. Add a line that says “iface wlan0 inet dhcp” and save.
18. sudo ifdown wlan0 (I have no idea why I had to do this…)
19. sudo ifup wlan0

And there you go. This howto worked for me, and it is mostly based on YorYor’s howto over at the Ubuntu forums. It should work for kubuntu users as well (make the appropriate changes: kubuntu doesn’t have Mousepad, for example…).

If this helped, please let me know in the comments.

Rather than using DSL, as I had previously mentioned, I’ve decided to install xubuntu on my laptop. That way, if it all goes pearshaped, I’ll reinstall Ubuntu to the / partition, without having to worry about whether it’s compatible.
I’m following the How-to on the Ubuntu wiki here, and we shall see.

So far, I have to install Ubuntu (server) from a CD, then install the xubuntu-desktop package. After that, we’ll try to get the WiFi card working (the laptop is currently plugged into the network via cat5). I’m expecting problems… see this post…

Should be done in just a few minutes now!

So I finished school yesterday at 6pm… and I am now officially on holiday! Yay!

Yesterday was not much fun, though, as it was the parent-teachers meeting.

Parents can be divided into categories: Read the rest of this entry »

I’m always pleased to hear from my younger brothers - but, please, don’t call at 4:00am ever again!!!

(Especially if you’re a trifle merry…)

Today is the Parents-Teachers meeting: starts at 1:30pm, and ends (for me) at about 6:30pm. No break. Ten minutes per parent. I fully expect to be talking through the back of my head by about 4:00pm….

To take my mind off this, here’s a joke that I nicked off Jenny’s blog:

Tony Blair is visiting an Edinburgh hospital. He enters a ward full of patients with no obvious sign of injury or illness and greets one. The patient replies:

“Fair fa your honest sonsie face,
Great chieftain o the puddin race,
Aboon them a ye take yer place,
Painch, tripe or thairm,
As langs my airm.”

Blair is confused, so he just grins and moves on to the next patient. The patient responds:

“Some hae meat an canna eat,
And some wad eat that want it,
But we hae meat an we can eat,
So let the Lord be thankit.”

Even more confused, and his grin now rictus-like, the PM moves on to the next patient, who immediately begins to chant:

“Wee sleekit, cowerin, timrous beasty,
O the panic in thy breasty,
Thou needna start awa sae hastie,
Wi bickering brattle.”

Now seriously troubled, Blair turns to the accompanying doctor and asks:

“Is this a psychiatric ward?”

“No,” replies the doctor, “this is the serious Burns unit.”

Just remember that the PM was born in Edinburgh and educated at Fettes…

As you may or may not know, I have been planning on giving a new name to this blog for quite some time now.

At last, I have had an idea : English Over The Sleeve (L’Anglais par-dessus la Manche). At the same time, the associated photosite will become Photos Over The Sleeve.
That is at least somewhat more interesting than “da blog” and “da photos”.
Any comments on the new titles should be sent in quickly!
Although it will be a pain for everyone to update the title of any posted link, I feel that the advantages of having a real name will far outweigh any negative impact.

Update: And a quick screenshot…

I have received my first AdSense payment - a whole 36 eurocents!

Gosh!

I’ve written a bash script! (My first bash script!)
It rotates all the .jpg in a directory by 90° clockwise, and renames them using a suffix. So it’s called 90cc (because I like non-intuitive file names). Drop me a line if you find it useful.

To get this, copy it into a text file called 90cc, then make it executable. Put it into the right directory.

The command goes

$ 90cc s [suffix] [directory]*

example:

macdo@moria:~$ 90cc s sss /home/macdo/newdisk/Photos/test/*

Here is the script (or get it from here).

Read the rest of this entry »