May 6, 2006

guitar day

so I got a lot of friends to play guitar in the GR area… I’m thinking I should invite them over for a “lets learn to play better” excercise. The best way to learn to play better is to play with other people- you learn new techniques, get practice, etc. So, anyone up for such an idea? wonko? ogg? yojimbo? silver? beth? rodarmer? when would be a good time? can we make this a weekly thing?

May 3, 2006

Dependencies of Dependencies in FreeBSD

Something that is really aggrivating the hell out of me is FreeBSD’s package management system. I’ve heard people go on and on about how it’s the best out there, but frankly I’m unimpressed. The main reason for this is there is no way to determine ALL of the dependencies that are going to be installed when I install a package. Lets do a comparison of a freeciv install on my workstations vs the freebsd server:

April 28, 2006

I live…again…

So I’m back in Michigan and holy hell does it feel good. a quick rundown is in order: got to MI alright like the new job movers broke a minimum of stuff, but had no common sense (packed a brush and a mirror together and put weight on top of the mirror, yet wadded up my spring jacket, wrapped it in padding, and taped the packing shut around it,) recieved our good within a reasonable amount of time (packed it on thursday, was unpacking sunday).

April 6, 2006

Morgajel is Not Amused

I generally don’t like to talk about money on here because it’s depressing, but this bothered me so much I had to say something. It’s going to cost us about $5k to get the movers to move our stuff from one apartment to another. The drive is too far for jackie and I to do in multiple trips, we lack the manpower we had during moves in college, we have more stuff, and the cost of movers would be negated if we had an accident during the 12 hour drive.

April 5, 2006

Slow Decline of Writing Skills

I’m sure I’m not the only person to notice this, but my spelling and grammar has been getting worse. I don’t think I’m the only one suffering from this problem. I’m pretty sure I can attribute it to the internet in general, and this blog/irc in particular. Why do I blame them? Because I’ve gotten used to typing as fast as I can and hitting enter without proofreading. With the blog, I do proofread a bit, but not nearly as much as I should- with IRC, I rarely even think if I *should* say it before hitting enter.

March 31, 2006

Humanizing Ziggy

For those that are not familiar with Ziggy, he is a character based on a DnD character from a few years back and has taken on a life of his own. He’s made an appearance in my Willis module for Neverwinter Nights (based off the same campaign), a book that I’m writing, several sketches as to what he looks like, and an IRC bot written in perl. The IRC bot is what has really shaped his personality, and he’s become pretty much another member of the group.

March 29, 2006

Useful Utility: sed

Sed is a powerful utility for going regexes on the fly. Regular Expressions (regex) are beyond the scope of this artcle, but I’ll try to write one later. As I go, I’ll explain the regexes I use, but you really should learn about them because they’re handy as hell in many different utilities. First up, we’ll use a simple example of a regular expression. Suppose for some reason, you want a list of the Input Device names used by Xorg, and plan on piping it into another script later on.

March 27, 2006

instablity

I don’t know if BSD can smell the gnu in my blood or what, but it is seriously putting up a fight. As I mentioned in the previous post’s followups, I got kde working finally- however every time I pop open Konqueror and hit slashdot, the entire machine locks solid. Not just konqueror, not just X; the whole machine. Now, I know slashdot has a troll meme about BSD dying, but this is ridiculous.

March 25, 2006

What’s Missing?

So, I’m compiling a list of what’s missing from my BSD install from the get go. tab-complete – stupid default shell is csh, which means no tab complete. Come on guys, jump on up to 1999. alt key – This is probably a keymap issue, but the alt and delete keys do not work. Alt acts like it does nothing, and delete behaves like a tilde. This means no alt tab.

March 22, 2006

Need an Update

Anyone know where I can find an update for Lynx? I got this message while trying to test my printer to see if it was still connected via wire or if wireless had decided to work. Nothing suprising really, just amusing.