zen.org Communal Weblog

The campaign site for George W. Bush is reportedly blocking non-US visitors. It doesn’t matter if you’re a US citizes abroad. You won’t be allowed in. Ahh, America in action.

If you need ways to connect to your system remotely, but in a secure way and only when you want it to be available, check out Paul Keck’s really creative use of SSH keys. With a cron job using curl or wget, you could create a file on a particular web server that would cause an ssh tunnel (by way of that cron job) to be created from the inside of your system. That tunnel would listen on a port on the remote end, which you can then use to ssh in. Really handy sometimes. (Assuming my description is clear enough that if you have experience with this stuff you know what I mean, of course.)

With a little tweaking you can make KDE look like a Mac with the menu properly planted up at the top of the screen. I’ve never considered myself in the closet about honestly liking Macs even if my day-to-day box has been Linux for nearly 10 years. Yet this still feels like I’m exposing something about my inner self that has been put away safely for no one to see.

While we’re on the topic, MacOS should be available to the public for the x86, not just the powerpc. With the FreeBSD guts to it, I’d have a blast trying it out. I can see problems with the array of hardware that could be put onto the system in comparison to Apple’s very finite and clearly defined set they’re willing to support. But why should all hardware vendors accomodate Microsoft, maybe a bit of Unix, but never MacOS? Yeah, market share. Maybe that’s why they’re moving onto the GNU/Linux bandwagon. But it’ll take a fleet of GUI experts kidnapped from Apple for the interface of KDE or Gnome to ever touch the Mac despite everyone’s great efforts.

The past few days have been hectic and productive. After a subdued day, we attended a concert on Saturday night with our friends Declan and Dolores. Nanci Griffith, a long-time favorite, performed again at the Olympia Theatre in Dublin. The opening act who we only saw briefly because we were late arriving, turned out to be The Crickets formerly of Buddy Holly and the Crickets. Nanci Griffith was there already on stage doing backup vocals with them. When they finished, we had an interesting experience. For the first time for any of us, the audience (with the help of the venue leaving the lights down) called the opening act back for an encore. The lead singer returned to the stage, and he had a funny way to greet everyone.

“Well, thank you kindly for the great applause,” he said. “You know, we were coming back anyway …”

The crowd burst out in laughter at this unexpected honesty; undoubtedly I wasn’t the only person finding this whole “scream and applaud so they’ll come back” thing something of a charade. It’s become so rote and so processed now that you wonder if artists really see it as a true complement to their work anymore.

On Sunday we had home-made cinnamon buns for breakfast; Patrick helped prepare the dough and really enjoyed sprinkling the cinnamon/sugar mix. Towards mid-day I went up into Dublin to pick up an old friend who I worked with at Cygnus for a good while.

His nearly-quarterly business trip to Europe had him in Dublin for a few days, so we got to have him over for a meal on Sunday afternoon. It’s always an interesting experience to reunite with someone you haven’ seen for a while (in this case, about five years). You have to put some effort into talking about where your lives have taken you, while at the same time trying your best to not fall into the things-of-the-past trap. Once in a while there’ll be a reference to some event or person that give you a brief travel back, but I, at least, have a real aversion to spending too much time rehashing funny anecdotes. It always makes me feel like I’m obviously having trouble finding things to talk about, so why not fall back on old-reliable.

We had no trouble chatting about the current and the new, ranging from the geeky technical bits to our experiences as parents. We have a few friends in common that we each try to stay in contact with, which is even better since we can try to use each other to stay up-to-date on the others.

Around 6pm I gave him a ride back up to his hotel, and this time took Patrick up with me. For some reason, P was in a really pissy mood for most of the day. We know that part of it in the afternoon was paying more attention to our guest than playing actively with him, which can really bring out the devil in him. (Even though he absolutely gets enough attention for two children, much less just one.) He fell asleep in the car perhaps 15 minutes into the drive. We have tried to avoid using a car ride as a sedative as we know is so popular (and sometimes practical), but today proved to be a perfectly good time to use the trick.

Right now transportation in Dublin is horrible, with the traffic around St Stephens Green in the center of the city actually turned completely around. The end result was that I had to drive a long circuitous route around Trinity College to get to his hotel. E and I had found a great route that would cut it nice and short even with the weird change to St Stephens Green, but we weren’t clever enough to know that a big marathon was set for this weekend and resulted in the great shortcut being closed. Gahh.

Monday, then, was when we went into DIY mode. We’d intended to move the livingroom stereo into the top of the shelves in the dining room; tile behind the kitchen sink; set up some shelves in the upstairs bathroom; move Patrick’s bedroom around; and rerun the phone cable that works for our DSL connection. Now at a bit past 7 in the evening, with Patrick now zonked out with exhaustion, we’ve no intention to try to finish off our list.

We’ve got his room rearranged, much to the satisfaction of all of us. He’s no longer got a changing table, which is part of our ongoing effort to encourage him on his path to becoming potty trained. (Doing pretty well so far, minor accidents included. Fingers crossed.) His little work desk is now in his room where he already showed that he likes to look at his books in his chair instead of his bed. And his sheet-hanging-from-above is still forming a tent where he can now have his “secret” books and “secret” toys.

The stereo is moved with a cable to supply power to it, but we’ve got to borrow our friend’s drill to run the cable so we can plug it in. The phone line is rerun for the DSL so we’re less likely to trip on it as it travels between some of our floor boards. We got the grout and other bits we need to do the tiling in the kitchen, but we’re accepting that we’ll try to do that tomorrow evening after P’s asleep. We’re waiting on the bathroom shelves until we can find a suitable heated towel rack, since the shop we went to today (on a bank holiday, basically a national holiday) did not seem to stock them.

And, best of all, we finally got a lawn mower and I was able to make our front and back gardens look much much nicer and less wild. I feel some remorse at the fact that we did buy a gas-powered mower after our manual push mower died and I had no desire to try to fix it. The back garden is pretty huge and can wear you out if you do it all by hand. Bit woosy of an excuse, huh?

We got an inexpensive mower to at least make the grass presentable, but Patrick today argued strongly in favor of the two of us fixing the push mower together. I’m looking forward to watching him push the manual mower around at age 12, swearing he never in his life would suggest we repair it.

Like my cousin so aptly put it, Holy freaking crap on a stick. I guarantee you’ll want to replay it, if solely for the shock value…not for the timid.

Fear and Loathing, Campaign 2004, Hunter S. Thompson in RollingStone

Last night, I was playing with our two year-old son Patrick in the livingroom before dinner. A complex system of wooden train track spread its way across the floor, bridges and tunnels and sudden turns galore. But for some reason, we both appeared—at least momentarily—to be fast asleep on the floor.

The whole project had started in the kitchen with a sudden crash against my legs similar in force to that of a miniature freight train. Looking up at me with his head now tall enough to reach my waist, eyes wide and mouth wider, was a very eager Patrick.

“Dad, want to play a puzzle, hmm? Want to? Hmm?” came the invitation. I mean, seriously, how could I possibly say no? We went into the dining room where he selected the Winnie the Pooh alphabet puzzle, a great Christmas gift from one of my aunts. Making our way into the livingroom, he looked back a couple of times to confirm I was still following him and hadn’t suddenly vanished back into the kitchen.

Interest in the puzzle lasted only long enough to get pieces out of the box. (When prompted he correctly identified the letters ‘A’ and ‘D’ on the large puzzle pieces, our little genius. Will it happen if I try again now? Nah, probably not.) A few minutes into the effort, one attempt to join ‘K’ and ‘F’ pieces together made obvious to anyone watching just how seriously flawed this puzzle was. It really didn’t matter anymore.

Puzzle pieces cast aside, P went straight to one of his current addictions: trains.

About half an hour went by with the detailed construction of a modern transit system. Once all imaginary passengers of his 1-Engine-and-4-Cars train happily traveled over his bridge a few times, it became clear to P that his work here was done. He stood up from sitting on the floor and walked (all of two feet) over to me. His arm wrapped around my neck, and his other hand firmly grasped my shoulder.

“It’s time to sleep,” he said, looking straight into my eyes. With the aide of his body weight, he pulled my torso down onto the floor. Not like a professional wrestler, but still not the most subtle action you’ve ever seen. Propping himself up, he pulled my left arm over so it was reaching across the floor and lay down with his head resting over my elbow.

Two seconds later from on top of my arm came a loud resonating snore, coupled with an impressive exhalation of air. A pause, snore and breath repeated, then his head popped up.

“Dad, it’s time to sleep!” Oops. I guess I’d been leaning up too long. My head rested against my shoulder, and as he began his next amazing snore I offered my own version. A couple of snores later he started giggling and looked up at me. Eyes open, he gave another strong snore, and exhaled with force into my face. More laughs from both of us.

“Want to sleep again?” he asked me. These questions tend to be clearly rhetorical, so his head quickly went back down to my arm for another round of who can snore better? in which I would surely be in second place.

A few minutes later it was dinner time, and he leaped up and ran out of the room, leaving me to quickly restore the floor to its previous state. As I put the last of the train cars into their box and lifted the puzzle to put it back on its shelf, I got another one of those curious emotional floods. Not an urge to cry or that sort of thing, more the sensation you get when first waking up from a good night’s sleep.

I’d just spent the last half hour with my head clear of everything, relishing in nothing but P’s unrestrained happiness. His incredible curiosity about everything couples perfectly with a form of pure innocent joy. Evidenced by scheming grins and squeals of delight, his good spirits prove to be just as contagious as his laughter.

I found that Mozilla, Mozilla Firefox, and undoubtedly other browsers weren’t making the background gradient (the cool white-to-gray pattern) look correct from the style I was trying. For whatever reason, they made the square around the pen image more obvious; I tried playing with the background-* settings, and changing gradient.gif to gradient.jpg (expecting issues around GIF patents), but no change. So now we’re trying Jaws pattern from the same style contest. Early morning silliness.

Nope, konqueror hadn’t shaken off its headache when I looked this morning, so I get to try to recreate the story from (my) memory later.

Three time now in the last two days, I’ve written a story for my blog and because of some random kestroke the KDE browser Konqueror goes running happily into an infinite loop, never to return. This most recent loss was sharing a great time I had with our 2 year-old son before dinner. Time to either download and build the latest KDE to see if it’s improved, or just stick with Mozilla Firefox and stop trying to settle with the default. It’s too frustrating to find myself trying to type a Euro symbol (Compose + ‘=’ + ‘e’) or hit Compose & another letter, only to find the browser oblivious and unretrievable.

I suppose I could make the KDE window manager no longer understand the Compose key, but that would force me to revert to doing a Copy & Paste to type a Euro symbol, a character I actually need every few days. Bleah. Fine, I’ll let Konqueror spend the night with its own interests and see if what I was writing is miraculously still there in the morning. Nighty night.

I’m giving the artistic efforts of others a try. Today, it’s a slightly tweaked copy of Hadley Wickham’s great entry entiltled Rubric in Alex King’s style contest.