One of those days?

Posted on February 23, 2007 by David Terrell

I try not to do the “bitch about my day” thing here, but it’s not even 8am yet and:

  • Didn’t get to the El with time enough to spare to grill an aldermanic candidate outside the station.
  • El car had a stuck door and was delayed.
  • Took two swipes to get my door badge to read, while someone stood behind me waiting. The first time I muttered “one of those days?” to myself.
  • Dropped my bagel (bagel friday, huzzah), half face down on the carpet (and spilled coffee).
  • Had milk on the bottom of my cereal bowl and got it on some papers on my desk I need for class this afternoon.
  • Thought, “wow, it really is one of those days.”
  • Now I’m blogging. Ugh!
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KDE: Control background from command line

Posted on February 15, 2007 by David Terrell

My friend Keith has done rotating backgrounds on his desktop for a while, and I was thinking today that it would be kind of nice to do that as well.

Step 1: Download some files and put them in a directory: ~/Wallpapers
Step 2: Write a script that picks a file at random and calls xsetbg

Problem 1: xsetbg and KDE don’t get along.
Solution: DCOP!

DCOP is the automation language of KDE. It’s also, thanks to kdcop (GUI client) and dcop(1) (command line client) easy to browse available interfaces.

A few minutes of experimentation show that the right invocation is:
dcop kdesktop KBackgroundIface setWallpaper $file 4
the 4 is a magic number that means stretch it to fit the screen while preserving aspect ratio. All the constants (I got as far as 8 before I got bored with the subtle variations):

0
none
1
center
2
tile
3
center tile
4
stretch aspect
5
stretch tile
6
stretch all
7
center
8
stretch vertical

Then I put it in crontab, but of course you have to make sure that dcop is in your path (on SUSE, KDE is in its own little sandbox in /opt/kde3/bin) and that you have your DISPLAY set.

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Lieberman wants out?

Posted on February 12, 2007 by David Terrell

Really?.

Let him go. If he wants to bet on the GOP re-taking control of the Senate in 2008 — well, good luck with that. The only practical result would be that he would lose his chairmanship, and he’s doing a bad job of that anyway.

There would be no power change ala 2001. That flip was only possible because of a compromise deal made in January of 2001. When the Senate first met to establish rules for that session, the Dems technically had a majority because Al Gore was still the President of the Senate. The deal was, equal representation on committees, various other concessions, and an out clause that if any seat flipped from the GOP to Dem caucus the dems could re-take control of the committees and rules process. Which then happened.

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Ack. Poor solaris telnetd

Posted on February 12, 2007 by David Terrell

first nobody uses it, now this:
There is a major zero day bug announced in solaris 10 and 11…

Ouch.

Goes without saying — if you’re using it: stop.

Posted in tech | 1 Comment

we.b.metho.ds

Posted on February 12, 2007 by David Terrell

Can anybody explain to me why — in 2007 — after the google web accelerator, after the rails meltdowns, after google mass wiki deletions, after approximately 572,349 blog rants on RFC 2616 9.1 and 13.9…..

Why the “delete this post” widget on the del.icio.us bookmark editor page is a GETtable link? Please fix this? Come on guys.

Posted in tech | 2 Comments

WordPress 2.0.6 (7)

Posted on January 16, 2007 by David Terrell

Whee, security fixes.

This was my first test of SVN vendor branches, and I managed to hork up the web directory pretty bad when I first did it, but a quick fresh checkout and everything was fine. Duly noted: When doing svn merges, don’t work on a live directory. Do a fresh checkout, merge, cleanup, checkin, and update your main tree.

Update: In case any of my three readers care, the underlying problem was that I forgot to make sure my vendor tags had a common ancestor, so stuff showed up as being replaced instead of being changed. Nothing a minute with the Subversion Book couldn’t fix.

Update: And now WordPress 2.0.7 is out. Hooray.

Posted in meta, tech | 1 Comment

Spam

Posted on January 4, 2007 by David Terrell

Steven Engelhardt succumbs.

This is why good anti-spam software trumps SQL. I only spent 6 months deleting spam from MT and adding to the blacklist by hand before I went looking for a better way. That way is Spam Karma.

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It's nice to know

Posted on January 2, 2007 by David Terrell

That having personally agonized over whether or not to get my children vaccinated (we did), that it was all a big scam to make a lot of people very rich.

Fantastic.

Update: in case you were paranoid, most vaccines do not nor did they ever include thimerosal

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Digging a hole

Posted on December 30, 2006 by David Terrell

I am completely uninterested in sites like digg.com. It seems like they’ve managed to create the intellectual heft of slashdot without a centralized set of editors.

One digg-linked author took the matter into his own hands and blocked access from Digg. The funny part being that, predictably, digg users flooded the comments on his post for not being able to take the heat. Uh, you’re a bunch of whiners and he flamed you better than you ever could back? Go away and get a life.

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Accountability? What's that?

Posted on December 29, 2006 by David Terrell

Look for a lot more of these kinds of “looks back” as we prepare to re-re-redeploy more soldiers for no good reason.

Happy Holidays, everybody.

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