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The Editor Wars… continue!

There’s always a sort of tongue-in-cheek banter between boosters of Emacs (aka ‘The One True Editor’), and ‘vi’, the old workhorse that it is. Note that ‘vi’ has pretty much been replaced by ‘vim’ (aka ‘Vi – Improved!’), as the old version hadn’t really been updated in 15+ years.
One of the weapons in this give and take was the vast number of plugins and tools and full-on applications people had written to run inside emacs. Ticket management, email clients, news readers… all written inside emacs. One of those was in a fact an IRC client, so Emacs users could chat online without ever exiting or switching away from their beloved editor.
On a lark, I went looking to see if someone had done the same for vim. Sure enough, VimIRC is a script for vim that… lets you connect and talk to IRC servers inside the vim environment. It’s sort of painful actually watching conversations happen in editor buffers (you actually say something on channel by inserting a line into the buffer), but someone had fun doing it.

Fun with digital cameras.


Inspired by this pool on Flickr, I decided to do some digital camera geeking of my own. This is the end result. I title it “Time To Do The Laundry”. I’ll add it to the flickr pool tomorrow. Right now I’m too tired and I killed the batteries on my camera during this process.
I think the next step will be to work on a double-shot, using the second monitor as well, but that gets complicated when doing ‘skewed’ viewing angles. One thing at a time.

Some light browsing for the day

Back in the good old days, I thought one of the coolest jobs on the planet would be to run a video game store. You know, always have all the games at your fingertips, tons of cool toys, and everyone would come visit you and talk about games, gaming, and all the fun it was.
There may have been a slight element of self-delusion there.
As if to underline that possibility, there are the wonderful comments of one Gord, the owner of ‘Gamers Edge’ up in Canada. Although no longer running his store, he faithfully documented the daily fun encountered in his store.
From the introduction:

But the story was not yet over. For some time The Gord and I concurrently kept The Retail Faith. His Establishment maintained, surpassed and soon eclipsed mine in sheer Consumer Idiocy. Tales were told that begged disbelief. “No one,” we thought, “Is really that stupid.” But the stories continued, and the cries of the wretched grew louder and more plentiful. The stories were true: The Gord had become an Owner in Hell. Witness after Witness held forth tales of lunacy and mental vacuousness.
I knew him as Gord. These were his stories..

CounterfeitMini.org!

Consumer watch alert!
Unscrupulous dealers are trying to foist unofficial Mini Cooper lookalikes on an uninformed public! If you’re considering purchasing a new or used Mini, it’s important to review this site to make sure you don’t fall victim to this scam!
Thanks to Adam and mort for the pointer.

Mobile once again

This afternoon marks the end of my forced detachment from mobile computing. After a brief stay at the local IBM warranty repair center, hunter, my trusty T40 laptop, is back in my hands and working properly. I had gone about a month and a half dealing with keyboard problems that INCLUDED a keyboard replacement (didn’t help), and a kernel upgrade (didn’t help but fixed some other things).
I really wasn’t aware how much of an impact this was having on day to day life until I had the machine available for remote work again. Now I sit happily at Panera sipping a coffee mocha latte and catching up on email, irc, and blogstuff, all on a new keyboard and stable system.
I’ll take this opportunity to point out how much IBM’s warranty program rocks. I bought this T40 off ebay about 8 months ago, from Joe Random Seller. When it arrived, it was a simple matter of going to ibm.com, typing in the serial number, and noting that yes, in fact, it’s under warranty for another 2 years. That means just about anything that breaks will be free to repair, either via ordered parts (shipped to me for free overnight), or via carry in service (ala a motherboard replacement). Turnaround at the service center was 2 days (though 1 day is normal – the mobo came in late yesterday), and cost to me was $0.00.
Hard to argue with that.

XChat for Windows

There’s hardly a more contentious subject among the geek crew than “What IRC client is best?” I suppose “Which Linux distribution is best” may eclipse it, and lets not even talk about ‘What’s the best editor?’. But the IRC client argument certainly ranks up there.
Recently my trusty laptop ‘hunter‘ went in to the local shop for some repairs. My keyboard problems had become too much to ignore, and a new keyboard didn’t fix it. So off to the local IBM Warranty repair office for a new mainboard.
This of course leaves me to work on the red-headed stepchild in Chez Geek, my ShuttleX Windows XP system. Now, normally this box simply runs Seti@Home, or tests out viewing pages in IE, or runs Azureus, but today it needs to belly up to the bar, and actually do -work- for me.
Naturally, the first thing required is a decent IRC client. Priorities, yanno.
I’m a fervent user of X-Chat, the excellent GTK based IRC client by Peter Zelazny. Were I on my Linux box, there’s no question what I’d run. Alas, Pete decided a while back that building under Windows was too much of a hassle (and, to his credit, it is), and changed the licensing agreement on the product so that Windows users had to pay for the official builds of the client (the Linux version was still free). Needless to say this annoyed a lot of folks who are forced to use Windows.
Ah, but the joys of the GPL come to the fore. Since the application is licensed under the GPL, anyone can pull the source and build it and offer it for distribution, and someone has done just that.
The folks over at Silverex.org are providing up to the minute rebuilds of the Xchat client for windows. Latest versions are online and install cleanly without a license or hassle.
I’m happily running Xchat on my windows desktop now. On to pillage…

MythTV – Success!


“It’s really unstable”
“It’s painful to set up”
“Good luck with all the yak-shaving!”
Poppycock! I come to you happily reporting on the successful installation, configuration, and implementation of MythTV.
For those not in the know, MythTV is an opensource (aka Free) system that mimics much of the behaviour normally attributed to a Tivo. At it’s very root, it is a Linux-based Personal Video Recorder (or PVR) that allows cable (and DVD and other mediums) to be stored, displayed, and manipulated in realtime, effectively turning an ordinary PC into a home video component.emotes.
Alas, MythTV has a long history of being INCREDIBLY complicated to get running. Starting with a baseline Linux install, people have talked of months of twiddling network drivers, card configurations, database problems, and video drivers all to get the system into perfect ‘balance’, at which point the system would work fine, but the process would ultimately leave a bad taste in the mouth of the implementor. Hardly a glowing recommendation.
Recently though, some bright folks have built up KnoppMyth, a MythTV installation wrapped into the well-known cd-based distribution, Knoppix. Knoppmyth allows you to go from a powered off ‘blank’ machine to the MythTV main menu – system installed, configured, and drivers ready to be enabled, in less than 10 minutes.
It wasn’t without a few hiccups – mostly due to the smoothness of the installation, it was easy to try and go right into viewing online video without actually configuring the image capture boards. The system has an enormous array of configuration options which can easily baffle a newcomer, but in the end I was happily watching Comcast cable on my VGA monitor, and able to tune around the entire spectrum, complete with on screen programming guide.
For reference, here’s my configuration:

  • Athlon 1400
  • 512 meg RAM
  • 80gig ATA-100 drive
  • Hauppage PVR-150 video encoder card
  • nVidia NV3 video

I’ll be exploring this system more over the next week or two, but so far, I’m exceptionally impressed with what the KnoppMyth folks have done in bringing a previously complex and potentially painful installation into something mere mortals can attempt.

K3B. Polished, useful, clean software for Linux

In my ongoing quest for “Really Good Software”, I tend to get grumbly about the vast quantity of software around for Microsoft platforms that ‘just plain works’. It’s polished, clean, and looks great. Occasionally though, I come across gems under Linux that are just as good.
In this case, we’re not talking just as good as Windows. We’re talking “Far better than 90% of the crud out there”. I’m talking about K3B the KDE CD/DVD Kreator.
Anyone who has done CD burning under Linux knows that there’s tons of tools for command line manipulation of volumes, but woefully few that run in GUI space, let alone do it well. K3B has the benefit of an outstandingly complete, polished, and well-designed interface, on top of the fact that ‘it just plain works’.
I recently used K3B to burn a copy of KnoppMyth to a CD on my T40 Laptop. I originally grimaced at the thoughts of what this might entail, but a quick ‘apt-get install k3b’, plus another install of ‘cdrtao’ (which K3B thoughtfully told me I needed – not in a crash and text output, but in a dialog saying ‘You’re going to need this’), and I was off. Speed was high, the interface was intuitive, and in 15 minutes I had my burned CD. And it worked.
K3B embodies what CAN be done if developers take the time to complete and polish their apps. There’s nothing like this in the Windows world – all the ‘tools’ I’ve seen for Windows (that are proprietary and usually cost money) are pale shadows compared to K3B. Bravo!

‘Woot’ defined!

I try to make it a habit to go to woot.com every day to see what spiffy things they have available (and have frequently gone ‘yes! I do want one of those turnip twaddlers!’, much to my chagrine.
Anyway, today they have an interesting tidbit on the origin of the term ‘woot’…

Several times a day, I find myself explaining “woot” to grandmas, probation officers, and disinterested bartenders at the local dives. “Double-you oh oh tee, like ‘loot’ with a W instead of an L.” It’s actually so rare that someone knows the term that as I repeatedly try to explain it, I just end up feeling foolish and tired…so very tired…

Read the entire entry.

Single Signon for RT using Active Directory

Over on Blah Blah Blog, Nathan has come up with what he describes as the “Holy Grail” of RT authentication in a Windows environment:

A lot of people use RT to track helpdesk requests, problem reports and other incident data at their jobs. An even larger number of people use or are forced to use Microsoft Active Directory as the central repository of username and password information at their jobs. As a result, probably the single most-asked question on the rt-users mailing list is “how do I unify logins between RT and ActiveDirectory?” Following close on behind that is “how do I get RT to use Windows authentication so people don’t have to type in their password twice?” Strangely, these are questions that seemed to lack any authoritative answers.
Until now.

Link to article on Blah Blah Blog

Fall in New England

I spent some time yesterday walking an abandoned rail line in Sudbury, MA. I’d been there once before and remembered the bridge. I didn’t however count on the runoff from all the rain we’ve had lately, so the water was very high (the big I-beams that support the bridge were half submerged). Also, late summer growth made the trail a lot harder to walk.
Regardless, there were some beautiful scenes…