English Over The Sleeve

I’m going to start experimenting with themes again, to find a less cluttered intense style, that will go better with my amazing logo-over-the-sleeve (TM the GF, that one is).

Stay tuned.

• What do you think of the new header? Credits to the GF…
• I’ve installed Picasa for Linux, that you can get if you go to http://picasa.google.com/linux (If you’re not in the USA, use an american proxy, or you’ll get a 404 - I used www.hidemyass.com - EDIT: you don’t have to use a proxy any more…). It’s quite a good app, based on Wine. I don’t know if I’ll keep on using it though…
• Over the next few months, blogging is going to be even less regular than usual: I have 2 1/2 camps to prepare, so I’ll be rather busy. I’m also and concurrently moving. Email is still working, though…
• I’ll be up near Preston for a month during the summer (see item above).
• The website was AWOL for a half hour last night. I know, and I apologise. I was trying to integrate PHPWebgallery and wordpress, with a plugin called Photon, but it all went horribly wrong. Luckily, I had backed up.
• This is a fun link
• So far, May has the largest average of visits per day. Hello to all you new visitors.
• I’m looking for English speakers who want to do some paid work for a couple weeks in August, on a summer camp for French 11 to 14 year olds. Speaking French is not necessary, but some knowledge is a plus. You can reach me here
• I’ve written a new script, called jpgshrink, that automagically reduces all the jpgs in a folder by 50% and renames them using a suffix. If anyone’s interested, you can get it here. It’s very modifiable: just open it in your preferred text editor, and change size, image type, previous file extension…
• This point is pointless - but “Ten points to consider” sounded better than “Nine points to consider”.

The GF and I went to see some trains today, and it was a lot of fun (and, no, I’m not talking about the TGV).You see, I live in the middle of WW1 (and I’m not speaking figuratively, either - there are more Commonwealth War Graves than there are living Frenchmen in a 20 mile radius!) So we wandered down towards the site of the Somme Battle, that swept back and forth across a distance of, oh, about 500 yards, from July to November 1916.To bring troops and supplies up to the front line, the various warring nations built narrow-gauge railways - narrow gauge, because the trains are lighter and the track could be laid on unprepared ground: always a good thing for a mobile army.

After the war, the Somme railway was used for the reconstruction, and then sold to a sugar-making company, who used it to take the beets from fields to the factory. Eventually, it became uneconomical to continue, so an association bought the line and the rolling stock, and has been busily preserving it ever since.

It’s rather nice, so, rather than boring you with text, I suggest that you visit the photo album, where you can admire it for yourself.

So I’ve had Ads on my site for quite a few months now.

Guess what? In that time, I’ve received exactly 43 eurocents… so there’ll be a few extra ads for a bit - I’m hoping that those will pay for the web connexion, eventually.

If anybody wants to send me €30, I will take the ads down for a full calendar month. Contact me, I take moneybookers, paypal, amazon wishlist…

I’ve always loved the kill command in Linux. You know - the sheer power of having ultimate control over your PC. Don’t like the lay of the cards at solitaire? KILL!

The problem is, of course, that you don’t necessarily want to open up a terminal just to spontaneously kill an annoying program: especially if that program has decided to eat all your ram and swap, leaving you waiting for half an hour…

Therefore, to make sure that you can kill things without worrying about that pesky commandline, I suggest that you press alt+F2, and type in xkill. Your cursor will transform into a skull-and-crossbones, and all you need to do is click on the application window that’s giving you grief.

Do you think that Google will give me an NRA ad for this post?

If you’re already at the command line, use top to discover the running programs, and get the PID. Then kill PID.

Two points today.

We all know how to use the list command: ls, and ls -l if we want details.
If you want real file sizes, rather than a nine-figure number in bytes, then type ls -lh (the h stands for human-readable).

Second point: Amarok 1.4 is out, and it’s been integrated into the Kubuntu reps: add this line to /etc/apt/sources.list:
deb http://kubuntu.org/packages/amarok-14 dapper main

Then apt-get update and apt-get upgrade in the usual way.

Actually, don’t use the usual upgrade: do a dist-upgrade, because amarok 1.4 needs these apckages as well, and it won’t get them with a regular upgrade: fftw3 libexscalibar1 libgpod0 libifp4 libjack0.100.0-0 libvisual0.2

sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

On a more general note, It’s often better to do dist-upgrade rather than upgrade, at least while Dapper is in beta. (Yes, the Dapper reinstall went fine, except for a tad of bother with the installer.)

So I typed startx into the terminal in a carefree way.
Ha. Little did I know that the dreaded computer gremlin was even then poised to strike. I’ll spare you from the sheer unadulterated horror of it, and simply note that  my unbounded cleverness saved the day: I had backed up.
When startx quit with an error (the slacker!), I ran dpkg-reconfigure xorgsomethingorother - and tried again.
When startx quit with an error (the slacker!), I ran dpkg-reconfigure xorgsomethingorother - and tried again.
When startx quit with an error (the slacker!), I ran dpkg-reconfigure xorgsomethingorother - and tried again.
When startx… but I’m sure that you get my drift.

(Greets to ravloony, who held my hand during this rather annoying time).

In the end, I used the fact that I have another computer to download the Dapper disc, and reinstalled from scratch.

But oh! the humiliation of being beaten by an apt!

After a while, something bad happens:
Ack! Something bad happened while installing packages. Trying to recover: dpkg: parse error, in file `/var/lib/dpkg/available' near line 10564 package `libtotem-plparser0': `Replaces' field, invalid package name `tote}-gstreamer': character `}' not allowed - only letters, digits and -+._ allowed
So using my 133t hacker skills, I manually edit the above-mentioned file (with nano, at that). Then sudo aptitude dist-upgrade, and we’re off again…

Later on, another unfortunate occurrence: aptitude tells me there are unmet dependencies for a whole slew of programs. “Try harder?” it asks. ‘Ah-ha’, I say to myself. ‘Let’s let it have a bit more time’. Some ten minutes later, it aborts in apparent despair. Using all my cunning and native wit, I cleverly type ’sudo qpt-get –dist-upgrqde’ (my French keyboard is mad; it thinks it’s from Quebec, at the moment). It eventually finishes installing, removing, configuring.

I’m about to start X. If you never hear from me again, tell Scarlett I do give a damn!

(written with nano… in a terminal… on a French keyboard mapped to a Quebec layout…)

So my desktop was running Breezy. Amarok 1.4 is out now, however, and that demands Dapper - so I’m upgrading as we speak. (Well, technically, I’m blogging on the laptop while the big PC upgrades itself…)

The big news though is that I actually remembered to back up first - I copied /home/macdo and /etc over to another partition on another disc). That way, if when it all goes pearshaped, all will not be lost!

I’ll let you know.

There will soon be a post here about MS - you have been warned!

Blogged from Writely

I said a few months ago that google disappointed me when they didn’t produce Linux apps at the same time as Windows apps (if, indeed, at all). Well, they have just brought out a new service, Google Notebook, that says, and I quote: “Window or Linux (Mac OSX may crash).” Okay, so it’s a Firefox extension, but even so…
As for the service itself, it looks quite good. I feel that it does actually fulfil a need (unlike pictures in a chat client…). The million-dollar question, however, is whether or not that need is general, or only a niche market, for people like me who often search for things like grammar points, where different webpages have different points, presentation and exercices. (I think that Yahoo had a service like that - no doubt m’learned friend over at InsideYahoo.net will be able to enlighten us).

Interestingly enough - but no, I’ll post about that another time: tea is becoming essential!