Monthly Archives: October 2008

Happy Blog B’day, #3

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And how the internet time flies, not unlike the time in the non-digital world. Three years ago, this old blog went live on the series of tubes1.

As is the ritual at times like these, the statistics from the WP Dashboard at this juncture are:

You have 1,513 posts, 8 pages, contained within 2 categories and 265 tags. You have 747 total comments, 737 approved, 10 spam and 0 awaiting moderation.

I’ve enjoyed the ride, and the domain and hosting being paid into aught-nine sometime, y’all keep coming back for your daily dose of drollery. OK? We never close.

-k-

H/T for the graphics: foamcow, via the Flickr. Love the penguins!

And, for the platform and plumbing: WordPress, Akismet, Scribe Fire, and HostMySite. We’ll be doing more bidness in year 4!

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1 Not to be confused with the series of cubes, wherein the originator of that phrase will be doing 5 to 10, if there’s any justice at all.

Rainbow Stew

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Well, I saw it: the Obamamercial. I must admit, it was one slick production. I cringe whenever either candidate mentions the middle class. And they both bandy that term about. I feel, firmly believing that I’m a middle-classer, like I’m in the crosshairs of some pseudo-benevolence. I don’t need any help or incentive, least of all from the government. Leave us alone. Another line from the song that’s this old blog’s tagline is We will get by; we will survive, but I thought it appropriate to include a few lines from Merle Haggard:

Eatin’ rainbow stew in a silver spoon,
Underneath that sky of blue.
We’ll all be drinkin’ that free Bubble Up,
An’ eatin’ that rainbow stew.

-k-

Jihadi Tweets

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My last post here came from Slashdot. The Slashdotters are known for humor on occasion. From the comment thread, an example of towelhead terrorist tweets:

What are you doing?

Husayn is trying to figure out these stupid remote triggering devices. Anything to avoid spending Ramadan with his wife’s sisters!

Ali is watching Coalition troop movements. Bo-ring!

Kamel wishes the carpet bombing would stop soon. The cave is cold. And the other martyrs smell bad.

Akbar is thinking about the 72 virgins awaiting him in Paradise. They better not be fat like his sister Fatima, or he is going to feel very mislead by his imam.

Commander Tariq says his Mujahedin should stop using the Zionist tool Twitter and get back to fighting the infidels, or he will beat them like the cowardly she-goats they are.

The very fact this post exists reveals the depth of our malaise.

-k-

Fail Whale Jihadists

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As if the US Army had nothing better to do, they have apparently done a study of the Twitter, and the potential use thereof by terrorists.

From the report:

A chapter on “Potential for Terrorist Use of Twitter” notes that Twitter members sent out messages, known as “Tweets,” reporting the July Los Angeles earthquake faster than news outlets and activists at the Republican National Convention in Minneapolis used it to provide information on police movements.

“Twitter has also become a social activism tool for socialists, human rights groups, communists, vegetarians, anarchists, religious communities, atheists, political enthusiasts, hacktivists and others to communicate with each other and to send messages to broader audiences,” the report said.

Good gravy, a service that’s up as often as it’s down, still manages to stay ahead of the MSM? Who knew? And now, Afghani cave-dwellers with mal intent will use the Twitter to launch the next attack on The Homeland? Terrorists aren’t dumb; they prefer working services.

So, all you socialist-human_rights-communist-vegetarian-anarchist-religious-atheist-political_enthusiast-hactkivist-jihadists, don’t tweet me. Oops, I forgot. I somehow managed to log on to the Twitter during a rare period of uptime, and cancelled my account.

I’ll say nothing about free speech, now that the Feds care. Hell, I might even resurrect my old Twitter account. My way of telling them “Nuts!”

-k-

A Rare False Positive

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For the first time in a long time, Akismet mistakenly flagged a non-spam comment. The auto-flush spam comments on old posts has trimmed the spam cesspit by a huge margin, so non-spam comments are easier to find.

And, I plucked James‘ comment out of the dreck, and it’s available to all.

Not beating up on Akismet at all; I’m in no danger of having to take off shoes and socks to count false positives.

-k-

Turning off Synaptics Touchpad in Fedora 10 Beta

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My little Dell mini has, as do all my laptops, a Synaptics TouchPad. I hate touch pads; I find them difficult to control, hard to click, and generally to be a real PITA. I prefer to use a Targus mini-USB mouse for pointing and clicking. The Targus mouse works well, but the touch pad is enabled, and I find myself constantly rubbing across the pad, sending my cursor to where the woodbine twineth. This causes a noticeable degradation of my usual good humor.

In days past, I’d hack up /etc/X11/xorg.conf, and add “SHMConfig” “on” to the Synaptics device section, restart X, and type
synclient TouchPadOff=1
This disabled the touchpad, and life and my humor were good. Fedora 10 Beta ships without xorg.conf; hal and evdev do an admirable job of making X just work without xorg.conf and associated arcana.

So, to get SHMConfig set under the new scheme of things, create /etc/hal/fdi/policy/shmconfig.fdi, with these contents:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<deviceinfo version="0.2">
<device>
<match key="input.x11_driver" string="synaptics">
<merge key="input.x11_options.SHMConfig" type="string">true</merge>
</match>
</device>
</deviceinfo>

Restart your X server, and type
synclient TouchPadOff=1, or use gsynaptics, a GUI tool. Check the box “Disable Touchpad.”

No more touchpad.

-k-

Update [12/02/2008]: This is nearly the most popular post ever at my humble blog. I found the inspiration, and a lot more Synaptics info here, and was remiss in not including it in the original post. My giddiness at its solving my problem in no way justifies my not giving credit where credit is due. Credit now noted, and given.

Also, if you cut and paste the above, some extraneous, invisible characters may show up in the pasted output. Your text editor of choice should help here.

Finally, in the comments, it was noted that SELinux should be disabled. I don’t think that’s necessarily the case; SELinux was disabled on my system when I enabled the above; I’ve since re-enabled SELinux, relabelled the disk, and all is well.

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Command of the Day

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Casual and not-so-casual readers of this blog know I’m a Linux/Unix guy. I fire up the work peecee for e-mail; since moving to my new location a month ago, I don’t even do that anymore. My new cube has only one network connnection, and that is used by my Linux workstation, running a Gnome desktop and the Exchange web client for email. I am not hardcore enough to run a workstation in text mode; still, to me, windowing systems are merely facilities for opening multiple text windows.

It is handy to capture output from some text window and paste it into an email, or into some other file that I’m editing. Heretofore, I’d just use the mouse to select the text from one window, and the middle mouse button to paste it in. Yesterday I came across a neat little utility that promises to change this method. It’s called xclip; here’s its help screen:

Usage: xclip [OPTION] [FILE]…
Access an X server selection for reading or writing.

-i, -in read text into X selection from standard input or files
(default)
-o, -out prints the selection to standard out (generally for
piping to a file or program)
-l, -loops number of selection requests to wait for before exiting
-d, -display X display to connect to (eg localhost:0″)
-h, -help usage information
-selection selection to access (“primary”, “secondary”, “clipboard” or “buffer-cut”)
-noutf8 don’t treat text as utf-8, use old unicode
-version version information
-silent errors only, run in background (default)
-quiet run in foreground, show what’s happening
-verbose running commentary

So, to get that help screen into this post, I just typed
xclip -h 2>&1 | xclip
I then used the middle mouse button to paste the stuff. No more grabbing one line too many, one line too few, etc. Precision. I like that.

Little utilities like this fascinate me. There’s room in my toolbox for xclip.

-k-

Damn Straight

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Markets are down today on fears of lower corporate earnings. <Sarcasm class=”thick”>Clearly the Fed needs to intervene. The goal should be to inject billions into every public company. We need real capital infusions, even outright ownership and control. Only that will end losses, and leave us with the profit-only system once called socialism. Just look how profitable all socialists countries have been, and without these horrible cyclical changes!</sarcasm>

h/t: Jeffrey Tucker, the Ludwig von Mises Institute

I’m not sure I’m 100% on-board with everything published on that blog, but many of the ideas appeal to me at a very deep level. More on such things later, mixed with the usual geekage and NASCAR wrap-ups.

-k-

Fair Weather Fandom

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My little bride and I are both extremely fair-weather fans of baseball. However, we both enjoy the ALCS/NLCS/Series coverage, Tim McCarver’s presence in the booth notwithstanding. And we’re both Kansas City Royals fans. The Royals are typically out of any championship hunt by the All-Star break. I can’t speak for her, but after that, I’m pretty much of the National League mindset.

Breaking with that for this year, and having lost nothing in Philadelphia1, we’re both cheering on Tampa Bay.

Go Rays!
-k-

1 Other than several precious days of my life.