Recent Comments

Or, he could write his own DE.

SHAZBOT!

Also, according to the bug report, the remaining problems also impact zsh.

This has been refuted in the same bug report, so zsh is safe from this issue. You can consider the upgrade ;)

Do the GNOME developers actually use the crap they put out? I knew a GNOME dev back in college. He worked on GNOME but actually used KDE most of the time. He only contributed to GNOME because they'd accept his crappy code, while KDE wouldn't!

"The official specs make it 128mm x 90.1mm x 9.3mm"

That puts it at about 13:9, not square.

The corners are pretty square. A big departure from Apple's infamous "rounded edges" they sued Samsung over. And the screen may even be perfectly square, but the phone isn't.

Yeah, I've seen that freak-out too, and it's annoying. Are you running term on blackbox, by the way? How wonderfully oldschool (and non-UTF). If Aterm had only gotten utf support I'd still be using it now.

If you don't need quite all the bash-isms, mksh is a great lightweight replacement, which is almost entirely drop-in compatible:

* http://mirbsd.de/mksh

I prefer mksh primarily because bash goes horribly brain-dead when you attempt line-editing on command lines that wrap-around to the next line. Your bash session becomes practically unusable after you hit that limit (which I do, often) and it first wigs-out:

* http://i.imgur.com/Vo2BQq2.png

It doesn't hurt that the mksh binary is 3.4X smaller, starts-up faster, is more responsive, can be statically linked, and doesn't hold open 28 files, all of which matters a lot in a minimal system recovery type situation.

Jeez, I never thought of that. Now I'll never forget it. Thanks, bud.

I'll just go out there and say that the press release to me is indicative of the project: way too much time and effort going into polish and presentation and not enough into things that matter. Maybe that's a personal preference, but when I see a pig with too much makeup on I start to wonder if it's really just a pig.

That said, it feels mean to criticize them for spit and polish when so many people agree that Linux software needs more spit, polish, and attention to detail. Guess my complaint is that Gnome now consists of too many people working methodically on the color of the bikeshed and not enough people worrying about if the bike rides at all.

I have avoided Gnome3 like the plague. But I'm not hugely enamored of KDE4 this week either - it keeps crapping out on me. I find refuge in Windowmaker, the only environment that seems to be dependable and non-annoying.

Interesting - I didn't know about the zsh aspect of it and almost put in a wisecrack about upgrading to zsh to stay safe - glad I didn't!

BTW, if anyone knows a good tutorial for the zsh I'd be interested. There are lots of blogs but no great, single resource other than the manual, which is many pages too long.

Wow... alrighty then... you can spit venom at a bunch of people creating software according to their own tastes or you could just you know not use it.

So the arrogant pricks have produced some more steaming crap. A new weather panel. Wow-whee. Just what we were all waiting for.

Knowing Gnome you'll not be allowed to set your own location, won't be able to turn it off and will be forced to run it full screen.

I really wish the gnome project would die already.

"Black Lotus, Channel, Fireball"

This might sound like I am contradicting myself. My point is that removing GUI alone is not solving the problem as they will always find things to do. Still I believe putting restrictions have an effect. To just blame the GUI however is wrong. You need to deal with the temptation, whatever it is.

No sane teacher is showing with a video projector every single step the kids should do and expecting them to do the same. No teacher is having the kids to memorize all the steps. I am giving them the result and I tell them to use whatever method they want to achieve the result. That includes reading the built in help, using google etc. This makes them ready to use the next version when the GUI has changed. I only help them when they have been long time enough stuck without advancing in the task. With temptations their time will be lost in games and shuch rather than in experimenting.

When you lock down the environment you remove the temptations and you actually get better result. That I know and I have been witnessing. It actually takes more effort to learn in this way rather than having them to memorize everything. As the effort grows, they more easily pick up the low hanging temptations.

Let's say you have a alcohol addict. If that person is getting away from places where alcohol is served he has better chance to stay sober. Walking into a bar would be dangerous. In the same way if you notice the kids are not able to handle a temptation, you remove it so they better are able to concentrate on their tasks. When you have an Internet Facebook addict, you remove Internet access for that one. Okay, that particular pupil lost one way to solve the task: googling for help. Still getting the task done with built in help is better than not getting it done at all.

In the school I am teaching we do not have any particular restriction besides that they can only install stuff in their own home folder and not as root. However, if I see that someone is not able to handle the freedom, I remove what was the temptation for them.

Yes, there are non-penetrating roof mounts that are bent at close to 90 degrees, specifically to fit right on top of the peak of a sloped roof.

But since you have a dish mount, as you said, I'd suggest putting both on that. You can buy a longer J-pipe to make more room if necessary.

Twinhan is a much bigger name in Europe, with DVB tuners. Hauppauge cards are the most consistently supported under Linux and Windows (Media Center), so I don't know what upgrade issues you refer to.

Yes, HDHomeRun is less trouble, can be used by laptops and tablets and such, and has a smartphone app to make antenna aiming easier, but the other (cheaper) options work fine, too.

Why no mention of other tuner options?

This journal is more than long enough as-is...

all the PCI cards were iffy

Not sure where you got that idea from. Cards from Hauppauge, Twinhan, and others work just fine.

Do I screw into my poor old roof to mount a base/mast, or hope my old metal faux chimney can take the stress?

I would only try a chimney mount to a heavy object, not a stove pipe vent, if that's what you mean. Even if you don't have a catastrophic failure, the added stress and movement is likely to shorten the life of your roof and cause leaks. If lacking large rooftop candidates, I most often prefer one bracket as high on the eves as possible, and a mast going down into the ground. Two brackets on the wall is even more-secure. Most other methods won't support a large antenna jutting up 10ft above the top of your roof.

A J-pipe dish mount works fine up to just a couple feet,... A tripod will let you go a bit higher, but still not nearly 10ft without supporting guy wires.

If you're concerned about making holes, there are "non-penetrating roof mounts" available, which set on top of your roof and just get anchored with bricks. You could compliment it with guy-wires anchored down at ground level, for taller masts... All without any holes in the building...

Wasn't trying to "win" anything. I'm probably older than you, and sometimes I paid attention when I was a little kid.

Yes, sign in to vote.

Hmm, odd ordering, develop software and web pages are lower than assemble or dual boot a PC?

Do we need to be signed in?

I think there was a PCW kicking around at our house, before the PC compatibles.

Well, at least one user (on Reddit, sorry) says the whole darned thing becomes unrecoverable. I suppose one could find or write recovery tools to try to get back some of the data. (With text logs the recovery tool is called VIM.)

http://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1y6q0l/systemds_binary_logs_and_corruption/

Put a hinge between two Galaxy Notes and you're pretty much there, really. Software design part is almost trivial, notwithstanding handwriting recognition.

A product doesn't have to be perfect, it just needs to offer better value. A dual-screen Courier style tablet could work even if it's not as slick as the original Microsoft design. Just give me one surface mainly for handwriting and the other mainly for viewing documents/video/apps. No need to worry about lefties, as they can just rotate it 180 degrees.

Thank you very much. I still don't have an account here although I frequently comment. I'm pretty sure you can upvote ACs if you wish.

I'm a little surprised one of the Android manufacturers, or even accessory providers, hasn't come up with a Courier workalike. All you'd really need is an accessory screen and a video extender kludge/applet. (Some case manufacturers are producing really nice stuff.) Maybe 200 bucks should do it, retail. Tricky part of course is video bandwidth. As with most things, the rigidly uniform Apple product line means it would be the first practical target for such a thing. I've no idea about extending iOS video though...

AC, you should really log in because that was a good comment. I had forgotten about Courier, but now I remember how disappointed I was when they canned it. Chasing quarterly numbers makes a lot of these good, early-stage projects die on the vine.

perhaps should have been yelling "R&D! R&D! R&D! R&D!"

What is the deal with huge companies having great lab projects that just never get "monetized" until the idea is picked up by someone else?

From Xerox PARC to Bell Labs to MS... They turned their tabletop "Surface" research into overpriced underwhelming touchscreen laptops, and their interesting "Courier" pad never saw the light of day. Now others are building touch tabletops and whiteboards, and of course iOS and Android own mobile touch computing. Some of their software projects (I recall a photo stitching effort) also reside in obscurity.

So of course now they start dumping one of the few areas of the company that really is an engine of innovation (contrary to all massive lip service applied to that "i" word by them and everyone else). Sigh.

Yeah, that looks right, at least for my older dishes -- thanks! (I mostly see them when I'm trying to unscrew the sliding bolts to repoint the thing with my shoe.) So I can get away with mounting the UHF/VHF to one of the older dishes and not even worry about interference because I'm not even actively using the dishes anymore. And I can leave the new (bigger) DTV setup alone. Great! Again, I thought the bolts holding down those plates would not be sufficient to handle anything taller than the minidish, but I "hear you" about wind forces on the dish.

Thank you, EP. You've saved me some worry and effort. :) Now just to re-read how to mount it properly to that little pole.

Chrome box/book

Agreed about XML of course, and yes text "log files" COULD be written randomly, but they're not. I don't know about systrmd's binary log files, which is why I'm asking. It would seem silly to switch to a binary format and continue to do nothing more than append uncompressed ASCII equivalent byte strings to the end of a file. I just doubt the systemd logs work that way, but I do not know. Thanks for the feedback.

Your water use was 748 gallons.1
Your neighborhood average water use was 7,998 gallons.

That's an incredibly low figure. I'd guess you eat out all the time, don't wash your own car, have no plants, don't do laundry, take very short showers days apart, and more. Or otherwise are away from home a great deal of the time. While that behavior may reduce your home water bill, you're still using lots of water, and in a way that's far more expensive than just using water at home.

With the standard 2.5 GPM shower head, 750 gallons is just 5 hours of running the shower per month, total. Some people take 5-minute showers, or skip quite a few days in-between, but most don't, and the average would also go through the roof in a household of several people, so that's not really a practical level of water usage to expect of people, except in cases of extreme rationing.

And showers aren't the biggest water users... Toilets consume more water, so you need to cut your showering time down to 1/3rd of that to fit the numbers, still. Throw in some dish washing, outdoor plant watering, and you get up to those big "average" numbers quickly.

"Binary file" implies no such thing.

Text files can be written with random access in complicated data structures as well. The most impenetrable XML file is plain-text, after all.

These kids and their eyePhones...NOW, GET OFF MY LAWN!!!

But that's nonsense. Binary implies the files are not sequential but stored in data structures with random access and placement. You seem to be implying that binary files are written to sequentially. Nope. Maybe in SyatemD's case I don't know.

Your first week was a bit different to mine. We learn program structure and how to run the compiler.

with a qualification: Computer system first used at work where you earned a wage.

Fine. You win.

That stops them from getting in, but doesn't stop them from flooding your system (and your logs) with hundreds of tries per second, right?

It does, actually. If you disable password authentication entirely (not just for root or specific users), the server will not provide any way for someone to send it a password. So that's the end of brute-forcing attempts.

(Sorry I'm late to the party)

When I cut out the Internet from their computers in order to get them to do something useful

That's called micro-managing. I don't believe it has any useful effect. The fact that you're ABLE to do so, doesn't mean you SHOULD. If kids don't turn-in their assignments, they get bad grades. It's true whether they're watching TV instead of doing their homework, or browsing the internet instead of doing their computer course work.

if kids are not interested in doing what they are supposed to do, they will always find something else to do.

Indeed. And the kind of controls teachers / administrators put on computers to try and force kids to do their extremely narrowly-defined coursework, is monumentally detrimental to kids actually learning how to use a computer. That only results in rote memorization and following rigidly defined step, and further becomes a tremendously onerous atmosphere where the most basic exploration is brutally punished...

Frankly, NOTHING you can teach them in that locked-down atmosphere, is anything worth learning. I would rather see the money spent on computer labs go to other projects.

systemd DOES NOT LOG TO DISK BY DEFAULT.
Is that clear enough?

If your distro opts to configure it to do so (out of the box for you), that's a different matter entirely, and one you'll have to take-up with them. They could keep rsyslogd in-use just as easily.

And yes, binary files are just as recoverable as text files. The only difference between text and binary is a 7 vs 8-bit character space, and the standard character defined for line-endings. Otherwise, there is no difference between binary and text files. This is entry-level stuff, first week of programming 101.

I am teaching in an elementary school.

I fully agree kids would learn more if you removed the GUI. However, it would not be fully as efficient as you think:
1. Smart phones exist. When I cut out the Internet from their computers in order to get them to do something useful, they begin using their phones instead and I still need to be alert in following what they do rather than concentrating on teaching.
2. If smart phones would not exit, we would see a quick increase in the bigger IRC communities. They would fill their home folders with text games, irc clients etc rather than going through the material and it becomes even more difficult for the teachers to see from a distance if they are really doing their task. In this kind of cases usually one smart kid able to do it is enough as he will install it for all other.

My point is that if kids are not interested in doing what they are supposed to do, they will always find something else to do. The biggest difficulty a teacher is facing is how to make the material interesting enough and at the same time convince the kids they really need to go through it.

I see the opportunity as having two parts.
Part One--
Without touching the command line, manually running post-install scripts, or even using an "App Store", I want to see a distro that:
-My dad can use to run his small business and to look at adult entertainment sites
-My aunt can use to get on Facebook, upload photos and videos from her phone, and watch YouTube
-A college kid can use to write their lab report on in a format that the professor accepts, view their online textbooks and coursework, and on which they can run the specialized app that they need for their Biochem final paper on protein misfolding.

I have made every single one of the above cases work, but it took searching forums, wikis, and man pages. And there are times when once everything is working, a single upgrade can screw it all up due to dependency issues. For this reason, the number of people I convert to Linux is limited by my ability to help them troubleshoot.

Part Two--
Applications that can be a drop-in replacement for what people use on their Windows box. Yes, I know that such-and-such can open .docx (most of the time) and that WINE is pretty good as long as you use the right settings, but the average person does not want to go from what works now on Windows to a land of busted dependencies, abandoned software projects, command line, and constant fiddling to make things work like they did on Windows. A better value would be something that requires less effort, not more.

I love freedom and I love free and open source software. I hate the thought that people who would otherwise support FOSS may give up and stick with Windows due to their inability to get a Linux distro working on the level they would expect from a Windows box. A technically superior product that is harder to use is not a compelling replacement for something that "just works."

If only someone could package a nice GNU/Linux or BSD that offered the average consumer a better value than Windows...

This is so alien to me, what is missing? What magical awesomeness have I missed out on during the last decade thus depriving my life of joy and laughter and all things good?

Photoshop? Nah it can't be that, I mean it has to be something really impressive and I haven't even bothered installing Krita yet although I'm planning to (I do have InkScape and GIMP though). Nerflix? Don't use it but it's coming now isn't it? Games? The Steam is picking up but I don't need that either. Skype? Didn't Microsoft just kill that everywhere anyway?

What hidden gems are you hoarding Venkman! You better tell us or we'll slobber you :D

Are you saying I could get away with linking the HBU22 to the little sat dish? I would have thought it would overwhelm it

Yes, the wind-loads on a solid dish are huge, and a dish can't move at all without signal break-up, so the brackets are designed to handle lots of forces. The wind loading on your (not-solid) antenna will be very, very low by comparison.

My last sat dish just had some short lag bolts or something. Come to think of it I've got a few old dishes up there now. :( But they always have little custom mounts, not poles, so I'm missing your point I think.

These are the standard DBS mini-dish mounts used by DirecTV and Dish Network, and are found littered around North America at least:

http://www.amazon.com/Winegard-DS-2000-Universal-Antenna-U-bolts/dp/B00068YUN4/

That pipe is pretty short, but you can extend that out to a longer J-pipe to make room for more than just the single dish by itself:

http://www.amazon.com/Winegard-DS-3000-Pipe-Mount-Antennas/dp/B001DFS49U/

If you're talking about something else, I have no idea what you've got, and certainly can't give you any advice on it.

I'm pretty sure we only paid about $9 per win95 OEM pack so there really wasn't that much price difference overall, unsure what OEM win8 packages are worth these days, haven't been in pc retail for a loooong time.

I like messing around with older hardware and pushing the boundries... such as running VNC client under linux and using server scaling (UntraVNC server on WinXP) to display a 1600x1200 desktop on an 800x600 LCD panel, still usable despite the small text. I've run Deli linux and Thinstation on my 486/pentium laptops, is there anything more recent/capable that I should try out on these old machines with very little ram? I'd like to give BSD a go sometime (unsure of hardware requirements at this stage) I think I once got a pentium to run BSD but didn't really check it out much.

I didn't actually program it, but I did watch an analog computer being programmed when my father took me into his work. Programming was done by connecting patch cords with banana plug ends to patch panels on 19" racks. Various op amps were connected with LCR networks and other analog functional blocks to simulate physical systems. Output was on a pen chart recorder. Around 1960.

The program I remember was able to simulate the response of an airplane (or car, different version) to simple control inputs--and since it was analog it worked in real time!

Have had a fascination with banana plugs and other patch cords ever since...

Lucky you, the Cyber at the university (used by our high school class) took punch cards and the only language we had access to was Fortran.

Thanks! Are you saying I could get away with linking the HBU22 to the little sat dish? I would have thought it would overwhelm it. I'll have to get up there and check.

My last sat dish just had some short lag bolts or something. Come to think of it I've got a few old dishes up there now. :( But they always have little custom mounts, not poles, so I'm missing your point I think.