I use Gentoo. I update daily. I run KDE 3.3.2. I run KPatience 2.2.1. I run XMMS 1.2.10. I run Atun, but won't right now because the bloody thing won't go away, short of xkill on it.
Patience has a nifty thing - when it's determined that a win at solitaire is impossible, it talls you so. Sometimes, it's right. More often, it's wrong. I've been told a game is unwinnable, with only one card left to turn over.
Ii've thought of mentioning this, or even trying to fix it, but KPatience is not on bugtrack.
XMMS will sometimes just stop after a song ends. No apparent reason - the song plays fine, then it decides it must have played every song and stops. It's annoying, but not life-threatening, so I tolerate it.
KDE decides, tho I've told it not to, that it knows best where I *really* wanted to put icons on my deskyop. Drag and drop, and watch it end up near where I put it, but not where I said. This is annoying, but not fatal, so I tolerate it.
However, even given those examples, Gentoo is still so far ahead o the competition it's unreal. I can run Gentoo for months with naught but minor annoyances. Windows, I'm flippin' lucky to run 4 hours sans death. I've never had to wipe and totally reinstall Gentoo. Windows, that was a weekly occurrance, burning up most of a full day. More fun is that, with all this use, the Windows disc gets marred, and after six months needs to be replaced, which means shelling out even more cash on totally shoddy software.
I may be disabled, but I'm not stupid. Linux is not perfect. Windows is not perfect. However, I can live with Linux's imperfections far easier than I can live with Windows. As an added bonus, Microsoft is not getting more of my miniscule disability income, to pay its employees who use their money to make life in Seattle less tolerable.
Using Linux is a win-win situation for me. Stop bitching because it's not perfect, yet.
but all the blogs I check daily DO make sense, and DO check stories before they post them. They are not going away any time soon - that's just more wishful daydreaming on the part of the Powers That Be.
Sorry, folks, but this guy's got far more than just a screw loose.
Sorry, lost them all when I moved. Pity, the rings were nice ones - 10 ga Niobium, anodized purple, with 6mm malachite beads. They were pretty to look at, and fun to play with. I really liked when my gf sucked on them.
Probably. I know my (former) employers were none too thrilled with my see-through silk tank top, especially after I had my nipples pierced, and that was before the dotcom bubble burst. 'S a pity, too, as several of the guys seemed fascinated by them.
The "spam" I've gotten is *spam*. Unsolicited commercial email. Stuff from ebay sellers with stuff I didn't win, so they had no reason to email me.
Other than that, I get nothing any more. I'm reasonably careful not to post my address, but I know it's out there in several places - eBay, PayPal, Yahoo, a few mailing lists. My "social engineering" hack seems to be working.
So far, on my main email account, I've had exactly three pieces of spam in the last three years. I bounced each of them, and that was it.
See, I was smart. You see how people add some anti-spam text inside their email adress, to avoid spam harvesters? I did something more clever still - my real email address has that same sort of anti-spam *in it*.
That way, if a spam address harvester bot "sees" that text, and was cleverly designed, it strips it out, and what's left is not my real address. If it's not cleverly designed, and they send spam my way, a bounce message tells them my address is not valid, and it gets removed from the list.
The beauty of this is, if this "secret" gets out, as I'm doing here, spambot writers will never know if the address is or is not real, thus cluttering up their lists with scads of invalid addresses, taking even more time and bandwidth to try out. It makes spamming even less profitable than it is now, and might push them to actually getting a real way to earn money.
One of the things my roomie, Vikki, loves is flying her Flight Simulator helo, especially on and off small ships under way. If all it takes is a "Land this puppy *here*" system, there goes all the fun for her, and for me too because I enjoy watching her have fun, knowing that I researched and bought the hardware she's using.
Where's the sport in that? Tho, in real life, it'll likely be safer.
My power wheelchair eats juice when I go out. I'd love not to worry over if I'll be able to get home. Will these supply enough current for a high-drain device?
Goddess, it'd be great. With a catheter and leg bag, and this battery, I could axtually do all my weekly grocery shopping on the same day, instead of over three like I do at present. I might even get a life back!
Power Oveer Etheernet. Makes sense, I guess. Far more sense than what I thought.:-/
The last time I'd seen "POE" was in my favorite movie, "Dr. Strangelove," when the whack-job Air Force General launched a nuclear attack on Rusia, using "POE" as the code on the CRM119(? may have the number wrong) discriminator to verify that any radio signals were correct.
POE came from two phrases the general had scribbled on his note pad - "Peace On Earth" and "Purity Of Essence." I was trying to figure out just how a computer could be powered by Purity Of Essence, especially given all the pr0n online these days:)
Comments, at ***BEST***, tell you what the author of the comment *hopes* was going on, at the time it was written. The code that follows may well not do anything of the sort; it may have, at one point, only to have been re-written by somebody else at a later date; it may still do what was stated, though that's no longer what's needed.
Yes, it takes longer, trying to grok uncommented spaghetti code, but doing so on a regular basis will help you develop a reputation for being able to fix any bug, anywhere, any time. It even allowed me to track down a bug in a now-defunct version of Borland C's optimizer, that produced incorrect code when two seemingly unrelated options were selected. There ain't *NO* amount of commenting in the source code that would have helped there.
Learn to do your job right. Don't depend on what was written in any comments. The compiler ignores comments; so should you. However, as damned few programmers actually know how to debug other people's code, and many are too lazy to read it like a compiler, do add comments to your own code. It makes the stuff easier for PHBs to read.;)
For those who want to grok code the way it's executed, I'd suggest you start like I did, by reading old obfuscated C code winners, and running them in your head, comparing what you got with what the computer got. You'll burn up a lot of scatch paper, but eventually, you'll see what I mean.
Proof would be very hard. The company that bought them, moved everybody to a new location, and let most of the employees go, years ago. I ended up filing for disability, after living on the streets for about a year, watching what I now know to be seconary progressive multiple sclerosis get quickly worse.
I'm doing ok now. Finally slowed MS down, have an apartment, cats, and just enough money to actually enjoy life as a middle-aged woman. I'll let sleeping dogs lie, rather than get all stressed out again.
Where I used to work, there were laws that protected against being fired because you're gay... but no such laws over being TS. I tried to skate, and just let everybody think I must have been gay, but eventually caved and came out as a tryke (transsexual dyke, the proverbial lesbian woman trapped in a male body). That's when heads of *other* departments started fabricating complaints, trying to fake a "reason" to fire me.
Eventually, after being given nothing to do in months, yet being written up for not doing anything, I was graciously "asked" to resign. That was so transparent that I was even allowed to collect unemployment.
With all this talk about finding lost Gospels, nobody has even thought to mention the greatest Greek poet, whose works, all but a few fragments, were destroyed over the years by religious zealots. I'm talking about Sappho, of course.
I'd be very keen on reading any of her poems. What little we still have is all fragmentary, and highly unlikely to be representative of her best
So come on, folks, please look for her poetry too, while you're reading about 50-foot tall crosses.
I'm disabled, with multiple sclerosis. I drive a cool Jazzy 1113 electric wheelchair nowadays. I love it - it's small, it's responsive, it's comfortable... and, thanks to the small batteries, it's also not real good for tooling around outside. Around here, I can take the bus to the grocery store, and make it back, then she needs to be recharged again before I do anything else.
I'd love to get something using these, maybe as a "sunroof", to allow me to make an extended trip far from power plugs. 120 watts may not sound like much, but that's 5 amps at 24 volts, continuous, all while it's in sunlight.
Doesn't happen here, on Mozilla 1.7.5. It does try to load Flash, which I refuse to install, and that attempt creates a new pop-up window about needing to load Flash, but that's not an ad, exactly.
Just a few things to add - try your local thrift stores for hot-air popcorn poppers. We got ours for generally under $3 each. We use a measured half-cup of beans per batch - more tends to spit beans out, and less goe slowly as the beans do far more spinning than roasting. Cover the "butter" holder - we used some old circuit board:) With this open, most of the air vents through it, and roasting takes longer. Use a burr-style grinder, instead of a blade grinder like the Krupps. Burr grinders produce a far more controllable and uniform size of ground coffee. Oh, and you just might want to throw away your creamer and sugar once you get into roasting. Real coffee doesn't need "enhancement."
A few good sites to check out:
Sweet Marias has beans, equipment and instructions. Very good.
Coffee Bean Corral has equipment, beans, and some software they call the coffee matrix, to help you choose the perfect bean for your needs.
Coffee Wholesalers has beans and equipment. A good place to start buying beans online.
Hope you have fun! And you'll never tolerate stale, bitter, lifeless coffee again.
We use a Poppery II to roast our coffee, and do it all manually. There are so many variables in each batch that I'd be hard-pressed to even try to measure them. First crack? In most cases, easy to tell when, but in the Costa Rican Terrazu La Minita, was so subtle it was hard to tell when it happened. The Nicaraguan Maragogype, tho, has a very robust first crack. The Ethiopian Yergacheffe is rather subtle, too.
Then it's second crack time, and general "doneness" of the beans. The Yergacheffe is really bad here, because it varies widely in size. It's very hard to get an even roast with it - you'll have some dark-roasted beans along with the lightly-roasted ones.
What I'd add in the way of controls in the popper would be something to shut off the heating elemnt, and just pump lots of air through the batch to cool it (and help remove the chaff, too, which is a real problem with Ethiopian Horse beans). Hmm, and if I wanted a computer-controlled unit, I might try hacking an old digital camera, and measure the average degree of roast. Now there's an idea:)
I'll have to discuss this with Vikki. She has a real old camera, and lots of Atmel AVR chips. With her litterbox gadget working fine, she might enjoy a new challenge:)
Vikki has told me that it's not a PIC processor, but an AVR chip, developed on a ATMega8L and implemented on an AT90S2313. Sorry, PIC fans, she hasn't used those for a while now:(
There's a microcontroller, of PIC general capacity. There's a LED and phototransistor/photodiode to sense a cat's presence. There's a scoop, with sensor to halt it if it hits something. The scoop drags itself along a geared track, like a cog railway, lifting the lid at the end then dumping the scoop into a tray. Eventually, the scoop hits some switches, which signal it to go back, where it hits a different set of switches to park it so the cycle can repeat.
The power supply, stock, is 12 volts DC for the motor (but it runs fine from 9VDC). There's a delay, we chose 10 minutes, from "cat detected" to "send out the scoop". It's pretty simple, really.
The whole 12VDC thing is serious overkill, and that poor 5volt regulator needs some heatsink to drop that wattage:( Fix that, and it's child's play from there.
By the way, the cats love the show. When they hear it start, they gather around, fascinated by the mystical magic litterbox:)
Actually, we recently bought a (used) litterbox that cleans itself. Found out why they got rid of it - the electronics were fried (something about a +5v regulator, sans heatsink, that croaked). Anyways, Vikki mapped out all the connections, replaced the regulator and a handful of semiconductors, then wrote code for a PIC. She also designed and etched the circuit board, and put it all together. It now works great!
While it doesn't run Linux, all the work was done using tools she has for her Gentoo Linux box. The cats really like it, too - they often crowd around to watch the magic litterbox at work. This makes my life, as litterbox shoveller, a lot easier:)
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Actually, he gave Rose a pandimensional cell phone already, and she's used it to call home from far away in both time and space. It's pretty cool :)
I use Gentoo. I update daily. I run KDE 3.3.2. I run KPatience 2.2.1. I run XMMS 1.2.10. I run Atun, but won't right now because the bloody thing won't go away, short of xkill on it.
Patience has a nifty thing - when it's determined that a win at solitaire is impossible, it talls you so. Sometimes, it's right. More often, it's wrong. I've been told a game is unwinnable, with only one card left to turn over.
Ii've thought of mentioning this, or even trying to fix it, but KPatience is not on bugtrack.
XMMS will sometimes just stop after a song ends. No apparent reason - the song plays fine, then it decides it must have played every song and stops. It's annoying, but not life-threatening, so I tolerate it.
KDE decides, tho I've told it not to, that it knows best where I *really* wanted to put icons on my deskyop. Drag and drop, and watch it end up near where I put it, but not where I said. This is annoying, but not fatal, so I tolerate it.
However, even given those examples, Gentoo is still so far ahead o the competition it's unreal. I can run Gentoo for months with naught but minor annoyances. Windows, I'm flippin' lucky to run 4 hours sans death. I've never had to wipe and totally reinstall Gentoo. Windows, that was a weekly occurrance, burning up most of a full day. More fun is that, with all this use, the Windows disc gets marred, and after six months needs to be replaced, which means shelling out even more cash on totally shoddy software.
I may be disabled, but I'm not stupid. Linux is not perfect. Windows is not perfect. However, I can live with Linux's imperfections far easier than I can live with Windows. As an added bonus, Microsoft is not getting more of my miniscule disability income, to pay its employees who use their money to make life in Seattle less tolerable.
Using Linux is a win-win situation for me. Stop bitching because it's not perfect, yet.
but all the blogs I check daily DO make sense, and DO check stories before they post them. They are not going away any time soon - that's just more wishful daydreaming on the part of the Powers That Be.
Sorry, folks, but this guy's got far more than just a screw loose.
Sorry, lost them all when I moved. Pity, the rings were nice ones - 10 ga Niobium, anodized purple, with 6mm malachite beads. They were pretty to look at, and fun to play with. I really liked when my gf sucked on them.
Actually, no. I currently live in Seattle, but I lived in the NW Suburbs of Illinois when that happened.
Probably. I know my (former) employers were none too thrilled with my see-through silk tank top, especially after I had my nipples pierced, and that was before the dotcom bubble burst. 'S a pity, too, as several of the guys seemed fascinated by them.
The "spam" I've gotten is *spam*. Unsolicited commercial email. Stuff from ebay sellers with stuff I didn't win, so they had no reason to email me.
Other than that, I get nothing any more. I'm reasonably careful not to post my address, but I know it's out there in several places - eBay, PayPal, Yahoo, a few mailing lists. My "social engineering" hack seems to be working.
So far, on my main email account, I've had exactly three pieces of spam in the last three years. I bounced each of them, and that was it.
See, I was smart. You see how people add some anti-spam text inside their email adress, to avoid spam harvesters? I did something more clever still - my real email address has that same sort of anti-spam *in it*.
That way, if a spam address harvester bot "sees" that text, and was cleverly designed, it strips it out, and what's left is not my real address. If it's not cleverly designed, and they send spam my way, a bounce message tells them my address is not valid, and it gets removed from the list.
The beauty of this is, if this "secret" gets out, as I'm doing here, spambot writers will never know if the address is or is not real, thus cluttering up their lists with scads of invalid addresses, taking even more time and bandwidth to try out. It makes spamming even less profitable than it is now, and might push them to actually getting a real way to earn money.
One of the things my roomie, Vikki, loves is flying her Flight Simulator helo, especially on and off small ships under way. If all it takes is a "Land this puppy *here*" system, there goes all the fun for her, and for me too because I enjoy watching her have fun, knowing that I researched and bought the hardware she's using.
Where's the sport in that? Tho, in real life, it'll likely be safer.
Oh well. That's progress.
My power wheelchair eats juice when I go out. I'd love not to worry over if I'll be able to get home. Will these supply enough current for a high-drain device?
Goddess, it'd be great. With a catheter and leg bag, and this battery, I could axtually do all my weekly grocery shopping on the same day, instead of over three like I do at present. I might even get a life back!
Me, too *WEG*
Power Oveer Etheernet. Makes sense, I guess. Far more sense than what I thought. :-/
:)
The last time I'd seen "POE" was in my favorite movie, "Dr. Strangelove," when the whack-job Air Force General launched a nuclear attack on Rusia, using "POE" as the code on the CRM119(? may have the number wrong) discriminator to verify that any radio signals were correct.
POE came from two phrases the general had scribbled on his note pad - "Peace On Earth" and "Purity Of Essence." I was trying to figure out just how a computer could be powered by Purity Of Essence, especially given all the pr0n online these days
My bad.
Comments, at ***BEST***, tell you what the author of the comment *hopes* was going on, at the time it was written. The code that follows may well not do anything of the sort; it may have, at one point, only to have been re-written by somebody else at a later date; it may still do what was stated, though that's no longer what's needed.
;)
Yes, it takes longer, trying to grok uncommented spaghetti code, but doing so on a regular basis will help you develop a reputation for being able to fix any bug, anywhere, any time. It even allowed me to track down a bug in a now-defunct version of Borland C's optimizer, that produced incorrect code when two seemingly unrelated options were selected. There ain't *NO* amount of commenting in the source code that would have helped there.
Learn to do your job right. Don't depend on what was written in any comments. The compiler ignores comments; so should you. However, as damned few programmers actually know how to debug other people's code, and many are too lazy to read it like a compiler, do add comments to your own code. It makes the stuff easier for PHBs to read.
For those who want to grok code the way it's executed, I'd suggest you start like I did, by reading old obfuscated C code winners, and running them in your head, comparing what you got with what the computer got. You'll burn up a lot of scatch paper, but eventually, you'll see what I mean.
Proof would be very hard. The company that bought them, moved everybody to a new location, and let most of the employees go, years ago. I ended up filing for disability, after living on the streets for about a year, watching what I now know to be seconary progressive multiple sclerosis get quickly worse.
I'm doing ok now. Finally slowed MS down, have an apartment, cats, and just enough money to actually enjoy life as a middle-aged woman. I'll let sleeping dogs lie, rather than get all stressed out again.
Thanks for the suggestion, tho.
Where I used to work, there were laws that protected against being fired because you're gay ... but no such laws over being TS. I tried to skate, and just let everybody think I must have been gay, but eventually caved and came out as a tryke (transsexual dyke, the proverbial lesbian woman trapped in a male body). That's when heads of *other* departments started fabricating complaints, trying to fake a "reason" to fire me.
Eventually, after being given nothing to do in months, yet being written up for not doing anything, I was graciously "asked" to resign. That was so transparent that I was even allowed to collect unemployment.
Laws won't change people.
With all this talk about finding lost Gospels, nobody has even thought to mention the greatest Greek poet, whose works, all but a few fragments, were destroyed over the years by religious zealots. I'm talking about Sappho, of course.
I'd be very keen on reading any of her poems. What little we still have is all fragmentary, and highly unlikely to be representative of her best
So come on, folks, please look for her poetry too, while you're reading about 50-foot tall crosses.
I'm disabled, with multiple sclerosis. I drive a cool Jazzy 1113 electric wheelchair nowadays. I love it - it's small, it's responsive, it's comfortable ... and, thanks to the small batteries, it's also not real good for tooling around outside. Around here, I can take the bus to the grocery store, and make it back, then she needs to be recharged again before I do anything else.
I'd love to get something using these, maybe as a "sunroof", to allow me to make an extended trip far from power plugs. 120 watts may not sound like much, but that's 5 amps at 24 volts, continuous, all while it's in sunlight.
I'd spend the cash on it in a New York minute.
Doesn't happen here, on Mozilla 1.7.5. It does try to load Flash, which I refuse to install, and that attempt creates a new pop-up window about needing to load Flash, but that's not an ad, exactly.
Thanks! I'll keep an eye out for Ugandan AA. I need something bright to liven up my usual blends.
Just a few things to add - try your local thrift stores for hot-air popcorn poppers. We got ours for generally under $3 each. We use a measured half-cup of beans per batch - more tends to spit beans out, and less goe slowly as the beans do far more spinning than roasting. Cover the "butter" holder - we used some old circuit board :) With this open, most of the air vents through it, and roasting takes longer. Use a burr-style grinder, instead of a blade grinder like the Krupps. Burr grinders produce a far more controllable and uniform size of ground coffee. Oh, and you just might want to throw away your creamer and sugar once you get into roasting. Real coffee doesn't need "enhancement."
A few good sites to check out:
Sweet Marias has beans, equipment and instructions. Very good.
Coffee Bean Corral has equipment, beans, and some software they call the coffee matrix, to help you choose the perfect bean for your needs.
Coffee Wholesalers has beans and equipment. A good place to start buying beans online.
Hope you have fun! And you'll never tolerate stale, bitter, lifeless coffee again.
We use a Poppery II to roast our coffee, and do it all manually. There are so many variables in each batch that I'd be hard-pressed to even try to measure them. First crack? In most cases, easy to tell when, but in the Costa Rican Terrazu La Minita, was so subtle it was hard to tell when it happened. The Nicaraguan Maragogype, tho, has a very robust first crack. The Ethiopian Yergacheffe is rather subtle, too.
:)
:)
Then it's second crack time, and general "doneness" of the beans. The Yergacheffe is really bad here, because it varies widely in size. It's very hard to get an even roast with it - you'll have some dark-roasted beans along with the lightly-roasted ones.
What I'd add in the way of controls in the popper would be something to shut off the heating elemnt, and just pump lots of air through the batch to cool it (and help remove the chaff, too, which is a real problem with Ethiopian Horse beans). Hmm, and if I wanted a computer-controlled unit, I might try hacking an old digital camera, and measure the average degree of roast. Now there's an idea
I'll have to discuss this with Vikki. She has a real old camera, and lots of Atmel AVR chips. With her litterbox gadget working fine, she might enjoy a new challenge
Vikki has told me that it's not a PIC processor, but an AVR chip, developed on a ATMega8L and implemented on an AT90S2313. Sorry, PIC fans, she hasn't used those for a while now :(
There's a microcontroller, of PIC general capacity. There's a LED and phototransistor/photodiode to sense a cat's presence. There's a scoop, with sensor to halt it if it hits something. The scoop drags itself along a geared track, like a cog railway, lifting the lid at the end then dumping the scoop into a tray. Eventually, the scoop hits some switches, which signal it to go back, where it hits a different set of switches to park it so the cycle can repeat.
:( Fix that, and it's child's play from there.
:)
The power supply, stock, is 12 volts DC for the motor (but it runs fine from 9VDC). There's a delay, we chose 10 minutes, from "cat detected" to "send out the scoop". It's pretty simple, really.
The whole 12VDC thing is serious overkill, and that poor 5volt regulator needs some heatsink to drop that wattage
By the way, the cats love the show. When they hear it start, they gather around, fascinated by the mystical magic litterbox
Actually, we recently bought a (used) litterbox that cleans itself. Found out why they got rid of it - the electronics were fried (something about a +5v regulator, sans heatsink, that croaked). Anyways, Vikki mapped out all the connections, replaced the regulator and a handful of semiconductors, then wrote code for a PIC. She also designed and etched the circuit board, and put it all together. It now works great!
:)
While it doesn't run Linux, all the work was done using tools she has for her Gentoo Linux box. The cats really like it, too - they often crowd around to watch the magic litterbox at work. This makes my life, as litterbox shoveller, a lot easier
Jan 24th is my birthday. I'll be 45. One foot in the grave, the other on a banana peel.