Week of May 19th, 2002

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Saturday May 25, 2002

Today was gardening day... I dug weeds, I moved rocks, I moved dirt, I washed the driveway... problem is, here in Saskatoon, our gowing/garden season is SHORT. Er, four months, tops. And with the late spring, and subsequent late summer we've face this year, everyone is not only taking advantage of every drop of non-rainy, non-snowy (yep, snowed two days ago in Calgary!) weather we get, there's a heart-felt thrust by all to spend time in the yard. So I did. Bad move.

I keep thinking, somewhere back in the far reaches of my wee-small mind, that I'm still twenty. Problem is, the only strenuous thing I've done for two years is push my chair back from my desk a few times a day. Mmm. Yep. Tommy is a tad stiff. Tommy is sitting, typing this on his notebook, trying to figure out how he's going to get up and walk all the way down the hall and hang his sorry-ass body into bed. Ain't life grand?

I spent considerable time and effot today trying to get our underground sprinkler system to work as advertised. I called the owners of the house last weekend, and said "make it so". So SHE send her dearly beloved over, and he squinted at the box on the outside wall that's supposed to control all this fancy stuff, and tried to blow sunshine in places I didn't want sunshine blown. Meaning he tried to give me the impression he knew exactly what he was doing and saying. I was a tad wary, but I figured -- what the heck -- this IS the house this guy used to live in, and he SHOULD know WTF he's doing.

WRONG, buckey. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

This clown kept eyeing this plastic box on the outside of the house, and wiggling wires in said box, and muttering, "it has to be in here somewhere..."

Today I had a look-see inside the box he was tinkering with. Wanna know why my DSL line's been crapping out on a routine basis? Wanna know why our phone "kackles" every now and then? Because the moron who came to our house last week to fix our underground sprinkler system was FUCKING AROUND IN MY FUCKING PHONE JUNCTION/CONNECTION BOX!!!!! Not only are the connections there already corroded from being exposed to the elements (the box is cracked and the cover is lose), but this @*$&*$# moron wiggled and jiggled the wires inside to the point where several are barely still attached to their appropriate terminal.

Sigh. I'm surrounded by idiots.

And just to make life interesting, while I was outside racking and heaving and sweating and cursing, Phaedrus was busy trying to compile Gnome 2.0 beta 5. Trying, of course, being the operative word here [snort]. Bah.

Bother.

I'm going to bed. I don't want to play any more.

Friday May 24, 2002

I didn't post last night because I was too busy... are you ready? ... having fun on my computer. Yep. Novel as it may seem...

After some init order juggling, I now have sound running under KDE (Hint: rc-update add alsasound boot; that's boot, not default). Which also means I can listen to my favorite CD's as I work. Nice.

I also managed to get cdrecord to recognize my CDRW. All it took was an entry in /etc/fstab. Nice #2.

I spent most of today blocking out a couple new tutorial outlines for IBM in the foreground, and compiling KDE 3.0.1 in the background. Ya' know, I really do wish I liked Konqueror more. While the program has tremendous potential (primarily due to its seamless integration with the KDE Desktop and other KDE apps), it remains BUGGY and lacks -- what I consider to be -- fundamental useability. For example, I cannot select a block of text from a Web page viewed from Konq and paste it into another app (like Mulberry or JEdit). Given what I do all day long, this is unacceptable. I can freely exchange information between Mozilla and all other apps I use without difficulty; Konq simply will not cooperate. Bah. Fiddle-faddle. Why do I can you ask? Because I like Konq's interface, and it's FAST.

Ah well... guess I'll file a bug report and call it a night.

Be well everyone!

Wednesday May 22, 2002

Holy windstorm, Batman... I arrived home to a made-in-the-twenties duststorm here in Saskatoon yesterday that is only now starting to play itself out. At its height late yesterday the sky was dark brown, and the wind was howling about 40 MPH. Haven't seen anything like it for almost four years now.

My trip to Indy was successful in all regards. I flew Northwest and their service was exemplarly (er, food aside). I had a two hour layover in Minneapolis/St. Paul, which incidently, is a beautiful airport. Well laid out, lots of cool shops, etc. I was on-time or early at every juncture. I was very impressed. Flying into Saskatoon yesterday, the pilot got on the intercom and announced we would be touching down in "about 13 minutes". I glanced at my watch. EXACTLY 13 minutes later, I felt the wheels make contact with the runway. I've never flown Northwest before, but they certainly get a Highly Recommended in my book after this trip.

Airport security was tight, visible, but non-intrusive. It would seem -- at least from my impressions -- that the US has taken the events of 9/11 and weaved an appropriate response. I'm told by Troy it's still not "non-intrusive" in San Fran or L.A. yet, however. Still lots of delays as a result of procedural bunglings. Oh well.

Our meeting was dynamic, intense, and yet somehow at the same time, fun. Seems the norm at Studio B.

The weather in Indy was much like Saskatoon -- unseasonably cool. But at least it's green there. Lush green. That's something I remember from my visit there last summer -- how green Indy is in contrast to Saskatoon. Beautiful manicured lawns, huge hanging maple trees... Memorable.

On the computing front, last night I 'emerged' binutils-2.12 (it's masked; you'll need to unmask it to emerge it -- but read on first as there's caveats involved) to take advantage of the new "combreloc" code. Combreloc allows the C++ linker to pre-figure out the addresses for all the methods a program will call, which in turn increases performance -- in some cases, dramatically (the key thing you'll notice is how fast a KDE application, for example, starts/loads). The problem is, once you've downloaded and installed binutils-2.12, you then have to recompile any program you want to see said performance increase in. On my system, that meant QT, KDE (base) and kdelibs. Which meant about three or four hours. Anything for performance he chortled to himself...

Round about the 95% completion mark I was poking around the system in a second console and for some reason I took a notion to type:

And up popped:

ARRRRGGGHHHH. Somewhere along the line, #$@@#@!* Portage reverted back to 2.11. All those hours for naught. I was NOT amused. A'tall, a'tall.

Here's the caveat: Any time you run emerge rsync, the download will replace your unmask notation. EVERY TIME you rsync, you have to remember to go into /usr/portage/profiles/default-1.0 and re-unmask binutils. You have been enlightened.

So guess what I'm up to tonight (wink, nudge) -- and yes, I remembered to re-unmask binutils. I'll let you know how much of a performance gain I get tomorrow.

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