Time Unknown (Entries tagged as duh!)

Remission

nospam@example.com (Lynoure) — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 10:43:47 +0300

The #ubuntu-offtopic IRC channel on Freenode is a timewasting cancer but luckily I'm currently in remission again. An injection of "NO, GO AWAY" when I was just stating what I personally prefer worked wonderfully this time, and I just went away. I feel oddly relieved.

External monitor goodness

nospam@example.com (Lynoure) — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 17:53:13 +0300

Seems I ridiculously overestimated the difficulty of getting an external monitor working with my HP NC8230 laptop in Kubuntu. I fiddled with the GUI settings. I fiddled with the xorg.conf. No image. I pressed Fn+F4 (the button for external monitor) till my finger was sore. Only a login screen, then nothing. I asked for help in#kubuntu and they fiddled with the settings with me. Occasionally I got settings that worked worse than my originals and had to revert. I tried displayconfig-gtk with miserable results.

Then I thought to try xrandr --auto and it just worked! Not only did it work, but when I closed my laptop, the image on the external monitor just briefly blinked off and then came back. I'm one happy geek now.

2008-05-02:
Alas, later I discovered this too easy fix might not been all without drawbacks. I needed to switch the video.driver setting in Xine to get video playing work again in Miro and Kaffeine. For Kaffeine it was easy, just modify the settings from within the app, Miro however does not offer a human-writable config file, so I ended up adding --xine-driver=xshm to Miro's flags.

The folder you don't want

nospam@example.com (Lynoure) — Sat, 29 Dec 2007 13:47:22 +0200

When revamping my GTD setup last week, I discovered a monster. The scary creature in question was a folder titled 'Other actionable' and it was full of stuff. When I looked at the contents, my fears turned out to be true: it was stuff I hadn't looked at since filing it into that folder. Uh oh.

Luckily none of the contents were really important, but now I am a less-than-proud owner of 15 4 euro exercise coupons that will expire on Monday. I'm considering getting a 10 session gym card to Motivus with them.

n+w is not nw

nospam@example.com (Lynoure) — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 15:28:47 +0200

When troubleshooting dhcp on a remote network with dhclient, do remember that while -n is usually used with -w, those two together is not -nw, which is something else altogether and can mess up the ip settings of the remote system you are testing on.

Hopefully this reminder saves someone from pointless suffering.

Disgusted by Facebook

nospam@example.com (Lynoure) — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 06:53:56 +0300

I just joined Facebook but I'm so disgusted about their "give us your email password" evilness that I kind of instantly want to leave.

I was expecting that to annoy me just in the registration, but no, there it is, in the end of my (still short) friendslist. And there seems to be no way to get rid of it! Argh!

A big mistake

nospam@example.com (Lynoure) — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 18:44:19 +0300

Today I broke one of my rules of sysadmining and it lead to a big mistake at a really inconvenient time.

I normally don't do sysadmin tasks when even slightly intoxicated, too tired or way ill. I slept about 4 hours last night, but I'm working full time and there was some hurry, so there was no avoiding configuring the network interfaces of a remote server.

Configuring eth0:1 went fine and it came up beautifully. The second one, eth0:2 was same except a different IP. Or should have been. Something went wrong as as sometime after doing /sbin/ifup eth0:2 the server just disconnected me. I booted the server remotely, but had daftly left ONBOOT=TRUE on both of them, so it did little good.
I'm not sure what went wrong. It's possible that I e.g. moved eth0 configuration to eth0:1 instead of copying it,

New and improved rules include making checklists first, in full detail, if I cannot avoid working in a subpar state.

I feel really bad about this one, so I better learn something useful from it.

Going for vi

nospam@example.com (Lynoure) — Fri, 06 Apr 2007 11:58:23 +0300

I finally got tired of juggling between editors and as vi is the one that tends to be always there, that's my new non-X editor of choice. Unless I find out I absolutely hate it, that is.

However, the world seems to oppose this change. Whenever I tried printing a vi cheatsheet, I always either got HUGE print in landscape orientation, or a fraction of the page in portrait orientation instead of the normal size full page in landscape. I bet this is actually is caused by the original pdf not specifying page size at all. Annoying, irritating and all around bad anyway.

I'm a bot

nospam@example.com (Lynoure) — Sun, 25 Mar 2007 15:55:08 +0300

According to Hot or Not Captcha I'm human only three tries out of ten if I'm looking at pictures of women and only once out of 10 tries when looking at pictures of men.

This is probably the hardest captcha I have ever run into and I'm starting to think there must be a bot that is better at it than I am. After all, there are programs that are already quite good at judging beauty. I wonder if one might get better results be writing and running a cleavage detection program. For me Hot or Not Capthca works as a passtime but not as anything else. Maybe it works great for people staring at Hot or Not site all day and not having much taste of their own when it comes to people.

Something like a relationship

nospam@example.com (Lynoure) — Tue, 06 Mar 2007 13:54:00 +0200

Today something not unlike a relationship might have come to an end.

I liked them and wanted them to like me too. They said they'd call.

I waited. I called them. We talked. They said they liked me and even wanted me. Certainly said they want us to spend some time doing things together. They said they'd call me about the details. I said I'd need to hear from them by certain date if they really wanted to be a part of my life.

I waited. They didn't call. I felt a bit let down. I felt sad. I felt a bit toyed with. Maybe they were just playing. Maybe they have someone else.

OS X 10.4.6 and X11 duh!

nospam@example.com (Lynoure) — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 18:52:29 +0200

If OS X 10.4.6 claims a newer X11 is on the system yet you cannot find it anywhere nor there seems to be X11 on the OS X install DVDs, simply scroll down and install. Preferably before reinstalling the whole OS X.