Dinner (Domesticity)

Tonight's supper: a couple of baked pork chops, red beans and rice, and asparagus. Note to self: Use more red pepper in the red beans and rice.

Okay, so maybe you're not terribly interested in what I ate for supper tonight, but I was just sitting here digesting my dinner and enjoying my post-prandial coffee and cigarette when it occurred to me that it isn't horribly difficult to cook for oneself—nothing on tonight's menu required more than 15 minutes prep—but an awful lot of people don't seem to cook at home anymore. It honestly baffles me. Granted, my mother (of blessed memory) taught both my brother and me how to cook, and I quote, "So you won't get married just to have someone do it for you like your father did." So, I'm comfortable in a kitchen and, with 300 cookbooks, I have plenty of fodder for culinary experimentation.

Nonetheless, I guess a lot of two-income families are just too busy to cook. Or too tired after a day at work. Perhaps it is just easier to pick up something on the way home than contend with grocery shopping and little bit of menu-planning. To be sure, I eat out and order delivery from time to time. I can't be bothered to make a pizza and I'm not interested spending an hour chopping vegetable to make stir-fry. And, at work, lunch is heavily subsidized (the first $5.00 worth of food is free) so paying 50¢ to $1.00 for a meal is strong motivation to eat in the cafeteria.

At the end of the day, however, I want a home-cooked meal. I don't know why, but it does seem to bring a sense of closure to the day.


Posted by Kurt Wall at 19:17 2008-01-27 | Trackbacks (0) | Comments (0)

Bank Error Redux (General)

As I reported in Bank Error in My Favor, an ATM gave me a $20 bonus during a withdrawal.

While I appreciate the gesture and like the idea of a bonus for every 10,000 ATM transactions, I returned the money. They had no idea and thanked me for bringing it back. You're welcome, but how is it they had no idea? Evidently, they don't balance the ATM every day. I guess that makes a disturbing sort of sense. If you have a machine stuffed with a bazillion dollars, it's tedious and time consuming to balance it every day.

I should have such problems.


Posted by Kurt Wall at 19:57 2008-01-24 | Trackbacks (0) | Comments (0)

It Isn't GNU/Linux (Tirades)

May I go on record as saying that I despise the "GNU/Linux" nonsense?

I despise the "GNU/Linux" nonsense!.

The immediate provocation for this rant is the top line of the Autoconf page at the GNU Web site, "GNU Operating System." That straw notwithstanding, it's a tirade that's been simmering for a long time.

Just because something is built with a particular set of tools doesn't mean those tools become part of the name or get to take credit for the achievement. The workbench I crafted by hand using a Delta table saw is my workbench; I don't call it the Delta Tools-KurtWerks workbench. When you repair your car using Mac tools, you don't call it the Mac-Ford Mustang. I planted a variety of heirloom tomatoes in my garden last year. I grew them from seeds I bought from Victory Seeds, but I sure don't call my garden Victory Seeds-GardenWerks.

The true "GNU Operating System" is GNU Hurd. Don't use it? Never heard of it? No? That's the point. GNU Hurd is a dead or at least moribund project. Faced with the abject failure of the Hurd, Richard Stallman decided to attempt to hijack Linux, ride its coattails, and claim credit that isn't due. The GNU programs, tools, and utilities are fabulously successful on their own. They've proven to be a marvelous vehicle for the GNU philosophy. Why sully their reputation by taking so fantastic a position as "You built it with my tools and it's packaged and distributed with my tools, so it's not really 'Linux,' it's 'GNU/Linux'."

The real obscenity, though, is the redefinition of "operating system" to mean "kernel and utilities" so that by redefining what constitutes an OS, Stallman can take credit he doesn't deserve. I'm not making this up. See for yourself at Linux and the GNU Project. I think what provokes me the most is how smoothly and persuasively Stallman presents his argument. He'd make a fine propagandist for any fascist government.

It's absolutely Orwellian, deciding unilaterally to change the definition of a term to mean what he wants it to mean, thereby providing himself wiggle room to take credit for something he didn't do. Linux is morally Linus Torvalds' creation. That he used tools created by Stallman and the GNU project to create it matters nary a whit.

"GNU/Linux" is a lie, a deliberate misrepresentation, a self-serving distortion of history. I'll go so far as to call it "theft." Ironic, isn't it, that Stallman carries on (and on and on and on) about "freedom" and the moral obligation to share with his friends and yet feels compelled to steal someone else's OS to make up for the failure of his own.


Posted by Kurt Wall at 21:41 2008-01-20 | Trackbacks (0) | Comments (0)

CD Backup Utilities (Linux)

I've been evaluating utilities for backing up to CDs and/or DVDs. Candidates culled from a Freshmeat search include:

I'm trying to use existing utilities instead of rolling my own. My requirements include:

  • Easy to configure and use
  • Backup to CD and/or DVD
  • Ability to create/maintain searchable index files
  • Console operation
  • No odious dependencies; work with installed programs and utilities
  • Executable by root or merely mortal users

multicd is out because it doesn't work well on udev-enabled systems. Although configurable, it makes assumptions about devices and device names that don't apply and it isn't easy to persuade it to use growisofs instead of cdrecord if you want to back up to DVDs.

I eliminated scdbackup because it had a totally bizarre configuration procedure. CDBackup eliminated itself by requiring Joerg Schilling's cdrecord-ProDVD for DVD support (instead of growisofs). I tossed out sync2cd after a promising start because the syntax was confusing and poorly documented. For example, the output from sync2cd --help showed that I needed to specify a configuration file as an final option, but this was not indicated anywhere in the examples. In addition, I kept getting obscure Python stack dumps:

# sync2cd_mkdvd.sh sync2cd.cfg
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/bin/sync2cd", line 30, in 
    sys.exit(main(sys.argv))
  File "/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/sync2cd.py", line 1315, in main
    createGraftList(sys.stdout, config)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/sync2cd.py", line 974, in createGraftList
    out.write(graftEntry(os.path.abspath(item.name), item.name) + "\n")
IOError: [Errno 32] Broken pipe

Not only is the dump inscrutable (to mortals, anyway; I sorted it out), it overflows the text column in my blog. I can tolerate opaque errors, but screwing up my blog is inexcusable. ;-)

Better Backup wouldn't even compile:

$ make backup
[…]
g++ -static -Wall -Wshadow -g  -c backup.cpp
tty_lock.h: In constructor 'tty_lock::tty_lock()':
tty_lock.h:27: error: 'assert' was not declared in this scope
tty_lock.h: In destructor 'tty_lock::~tty_lock()':
tty_lock.h:61: error: 'assert' was not declared in this scope
make: *** [backup.o] Error 1

Dude, one word: autoconf.

RAB required too much set up. Oddly, its model involved writing to rewritable media (specifically mentioning rewritable DVDs) until an archive was "full" and then making a permanent copy on CD-ROM. If I've gone to the trouble of using rewritable DVDs, why not keep them there or write the archive to vanilla DVDs? Go figure. Better still, populate the archive on disk and then write the permanent archive to removable media.

So far, this is not going well.


Posted by Kurt Wall at 16:56 2008-01-20 | Trackbacks (0) | Comments (0)

Stupid *NIX Tricks (Linux)

In the Stupid *NIX Tricks category, I offer this gem that I discovered tonight.

Before installing Slackware, I tarred up my local copy of my Web site. Nothing exciting or unusual about that. Under Fedora, DocumentRoot is /var/www/html. Under Slackware, DocumentRoot defaults to /var/www/htdocs. Thus, because of the way I'd executed the tar command, the archive's members were located relative to var/www/html, that is:

var/www/html/
var/www/html/blogwerks/
var/www/html/blogwerks/archives/
var/www/html/blogwerks/archives/2007/
var/www/html/blogwerks/archives/2007/11/
…

Instead of untarring the archive and then manually moving the files from /var/www/html to /var/www/htdocs, I learned that GNU tar lets you transform archive member names while you extract them. The syntax of this handy little option is --transform SED_EXPR. So, the following command saved me 60 seconds of extra typing, albeit for the cost of five minutes reading the tar info page:

tar xzf www.tgz --transform 's;/html/;/htdocs/;'

Yup. I'm going to remember that little jewel of an option.


Posted by Kurt Wall at 00:02 2008-01-16 | Trackbacks (0) | Comments (0)

Bank Error in My Favor (General)

Collect $25!

I went to the ATM tonight to get some cash for dinner. I punched in $100, waited, and the machine spit out my money and about a $5 dollar piece of another $20 dollar bill. One of the other bills was rolled up on one corner. "No big deal," I thought, "I'll call the branch tomorrow and let them now their ATM might need service." As it was dark and a little isolated, I stuffed the cash in my wallet without counting it, got back in my car, and went to dinner.

After ordering dinner, I reached into my wallet to get one of the 20s, and, behold, there were six Andy Jacksons in my wallet instead of the five I was expecting. So, not only did the ATM give me the torn-off piece of an extra $20 dollar bill, it gave me the full measure of a second $20 bill, for a net gain of $25. So, now I really have to contact the branch—their ATM is going to be at least $20 short and someone's butt will be chewed for being short.

Why don't I keep the $20? Because I'd feel guilty. It's not mine. As much as I'd like to "stick it to da man," I don't want to have to confess to a priest that I kept $20 that didn't belong to me. No, it's much easier on my conscience to give it back. Dammit.


Posted by Kurt Wall at 23:05 2008-01-15 | Trackbacks (0) | Comments (0)

Slackware Again? (Linux)

I must have a short attention span or be bored or something, because I'm thinking of trying out the latest Slackware release, 12.0. Why?

Funny you should ask. Slackware was my first distribution, back in 1993. In the intervening years, I've used OpenLinux, Red Hat, Fedora, SUSE, Slamd64, Debian, and Ubuntu. I think I tried Mandriva and Turbo Linux, and at least nodded in the general direction of some of the small-time Linux distributions. But I keep coming back to Slackware because I'm sentimental. I also have found Slackware to be stable and (subjectively, to be sure) faster than other distributions on the same hardware.

In any event, Slackware has always had my attention. Its appeal to me is totally counter-intuitive. It lacks nifty configuration utilities; the installer is still text-based; "package management" is nothing more tarballs with a few pieces of metadata; and there is nothing like the automated update system modern distributions possess. I think I like it for the same reason that I enjoy building furniture and gardening; Slackware is an OS shop or garden in which I can putter and futz to my heart's content.

You can't do that with the big, shiny distributions anymore without running a genuine risk of trashing your installation and having to perform serious surgery to recover. I want to putter and remodel, not rebuild from bare framing.


Posted by Kurt Wall at 22:19 2008-01-14 | Trackbacks (0) | Comments (0)

Winter "Storm" (San Jose)

California is currently being hit by its first big winter storm, which equates to strong winds and heavy rain. Wind and rain don't seem storm-like to me because I've lived in Utah and Pennsylvania, where "winter storm" means metric buttloads of ice and snow and temperatures well south of freezing. Naytheless, this certainly qualifies as a storm by California's standards—roads are covered by mudslides, trees are falling all over the place, power is spotty in a number of areas, and the sheer amount of rainfall yesterday (Friday) alone exceeded the amount of rainfall Santa Clara County received for all of 2007.

It's a good day (or weekend) to stay home or at least off the freeways. I just got back from running my usual Saturday errands and the 280 was insane. Some people were driving with due respect for heavy rain, slick roads, and reduced visibility. Most though, were driving in the usual fast and aggressive manner I've come to understand is typical of California or they were driving timidly, like hats and q-tips. I'm not sure which is worse, aggressive drivers who don't give a thought to cutting you at 70 miles per hour on the freeway or the frightened drivers who are too intimidated to change lanes.


Posted by Kurt Wall at 15:40 2008-01-05 | Trackbacks (0) | Comments (0)

Ubuntu Killing my Laptop (Linux)

...or at least it sounded like it.

While running the latest Ubuntu, the zoologically named Gutsy Gibbon, I noticed that the hard drive kept clicking every few minutes. A little bit of googling showed that the disk heads were parking aggressively, with the potential to shorten the disk's lifetime. This issue was covered with the hysterial typical of Slashdot in Ubuntu May Be Killing Your Laptop's Hard Drive.

The solution was simple. Use the following hdparm command to disable the disk's power-saving feature:

# hdparm -B /dev/sda 255

Or, use this command to reduce the frequency with which the drive attempts to park the heads:

# hdparm -B /dev/sda 254

Of course, replace /dev/sda with the device that corresponds to your hard disk. It is still unclear who's fault it is, but I'll blame Ubuntu because they were delightfully slow to acknowledge the problem and seem only to have been prodded into action after the Slashdot story.


Posted by Kurt Wall at 15:22 2008-01-05 | Trackbacks (0) | Comments (0)

Lithium > Alkaline (General)

I have owned two digital cameras now. The second and current one, a very serviceable Polaroid i739 (in black, not pink) takes batteries. It eats alkaline batteries at an amazing pace. I was getting 150-200 pictures per set of two AA batteries. Having had poor success with rechargeable batteries in the past, I opted to try a couple of lithium ion batteries to see if I could get better battery life out of them.

The short answer is, "Absolutely." I've taken well over 300 pictures with the first set of lithium batteries and they showing no sign of giving out, so I think I'll stick with them for awhile. The next camera I buy will have replaceable/rechargeable battery packs rather than vanilla retail batteries, so I'll probably look for one that uses lithium. This has been a refreshing relief over my experience with alkaline batteries.


Posted by Kurt Wall at 18:34 2008-01-01 | Trackbacks (0) | Comments (0)