Usually when I drink caffeine it I get it from Mountain Dew, and not Coffee (eww.) or any of the harder stuff. I only drink it sporadically; I'll buy a 12-pack of Dew and drink it over the course of a couple days, and then maybe I won't drink any for a month.
I don't seem to notice much of an effect, unless I've had quite a bit. If I drink way too much I'll get the shakes. But the main effect it seems to have on me is not to keep me from falling asleep, but to make me sleep less. I.E. I'll wake up after fewer hours of sleep because of it.
Despite my inventing the term 'Liquid Awake' to describe the stuff, it doesn't seem to help wake me up either.
Personally, I think that with all the combo drives out there, none of DVD[-+]R(W?) are going to win the format wars.
Or, said another way, the combo drive is going to win the format war ^_^
Or, said another way, all of them will win the format war.
Or, as I once uttered, "It looks like the winner of the DVD format wars is going to be 'Yes.'"
Re:My own Linux toy project
on
Linux Toys
·
· Score: 1
If you'd have added a cron job to shut down the recording process during Rush Limbaugh... it would have been even better, and saved hard disk space!
If we had speech-to-text capability, Limbaugh would compress nicely though... very little unique content.;-)
Bwahahahaha!
Actually, the station I was recording didn't air Rush. This was a station that largely ran moderate to liberal hosts. Yes, there is such a thing as liberal talk radio. At least in San Francisco.
My own Linux toy project
on
Linux Toys
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I'm a bit of a talk radio junkie. A couple years back I put together something that would record a local talk radio station 24/7. Basically it was a radio plugged into the soundcard of an old P120, which recorded it into 16kbps MP3s.
I wrote a quick-and-dirty program that would record from the soundcard, pipe the output into LAME, and break it up into 1-hour chunks. Later versions were a bit more sophisticated, using liblame instead of piping to a separate LAME process, and using libshout to send the output to a shoutcast server on localhost live.
There were also a couple cleanup shell scripts that would delete old files when the drive began to fill.
But probably the most interesting part was, it was web-accessible. I had a few quick-and-dirty CGI scripts that would make an HTML index of the files, and provide links to the files, and also links to.m3u files that would stream in WinAmp or whatever when you clicked on them.
Rather than create an.m3u file for each mp3, I just wrote a CGI script that would automatically generate an.m3u file on the fly, and scriptaliased it to an appropriate regex that would call it when an.m3u file was requested. That way the browser really thought it was downloading an.m3u file, instead of a.cgi file or something.
Of course, I find out much later that mod_rewrite would probably have been a cleaner way to do it.
Naturally it had NFS and SMB access as well, so I could just pull up a show from any of my Linux or Windows machines over the network.
Well, as soon as I saw the ad I immediately recognized the chick. As in, I'd seen the ad before, not that I knew who she was. But I never even realized that it was an ad for personals.
Just goes to show how much I pay attention to the ads...
I've got one of those ancient compaq 286 laptops... one of those with the detachable keyboard and the carry handle and the power supply the size and shape of a brick. Battery died ages ago but still runs on wall power. Makes a nice serial terminal to a Linux box.
A lot of other posters have sworn by those old IBM Model M keyboards, and I'm no exception. Mine's a bit oddball in that it's lacking the numeric keypad. But I never use it, so that's just less wasted desktop space.
If your problem is not with the keyboard, but with the mouse, an easy solution that cuts your pain in half is to simply learn to mouse with your off-hand.
/me seconds this.
I was getting horrendous pain in my right wrist. It took a while before it dawned on me that the pain was happening when I was using the mouse. Once the pain started, as soon as I tried to move the mouse it got dramatically worse. When I let go it got better.
Finally I decided to just move the mouse over to the other side of the keyboard and begin the long, slow, painful process of learning to use the mouse with my left hand.
It turned out to be worthwhile. Now, after several years of using the mouse exclusively left-handed, I can operate it right-handed for a while without pain. It's not fully 'healed' yet (and I don't know if it ever will be) but it's improved dramatically.
Interestingly, typing doesn't seem to bother me at all. It may be my non-standard typing position, or maybe the fact that I simply don't type constantly for hours on end. I'm at the computer all day, but don't spend all that time typing.
I've had a couple of those in my lifetime, both with a bit of a twist.
The first one was an ordinary 101-key layout, except it was missing the Num/Caps/Scroll lock LEDs. I got it off an old XT that someone dumped off on me.
Unfortunately I took it apart for cleaning one day and never got it back together. The keys ended up falling on the floor and getting stepped on (and thus getting mangled)
Now I've got another one like it, except this one is missing the entire numeric keypad. (It also, like the last one, has no LEDs) TBH, I don't really miss it. And the keyboard ends up taking up less desk space this way.
The only real annoyance is the lack of LEDs; you can't tell if you have CAPS LOCK ON UNTIL YOU START TYPING. Fortunately I have Capslock remapped as the 'Hyper' key in X, and Num Lock is pretty meaningless without a numberpad.
Some people rip on opensource progammers for ripping off Microsoft. I rip on opensource programmers for not ripping the/right/ feautres off Microsoft.
One of my biggest gripes about opensource apps is that they never seem to have keyboard shortcuts. In a Windows app, you can access almost any menu with a few keystrokes. I can go "Alt, f, a" to Save As in about a third of a second. Under Linux I'm usually stuck using the mouse.
In Windows, when you open a dialog box with a text entry box, you can usually count on the text box to be focused, so you can start typing right away. Under Linux I usually have to explicitely click on it (or at least tab into it). Also, in Windows the Enter and Escape keys are almost universally bound to the OK and Cancel buttons.
The Gimp seems to be a major offender here. If I want to (say) rename a layer, I have to click the textbox, type the text, then click the OK button. If it were a well-behaved Windows app I could just type the name and hit enter.
Why do Windows apps have these features? Because if you can learn to use them, they're/damn/ fast. And if you don't know how to use them (or don't know that they even exist) they're still pretty unobstrusive. This is a perfect example of making something easy to use for the grandmothers without dumbing it down for the advanced users.
What disturbs me is, programmers are (or so I've always been led to believe) are supposed to be the kind of people that use these kinds of "advanced" timesaver features. Yet Linux programmers don't seem to be putting them into their programs. It sometimes makes me wonder what kind of people are programming these apps...
my parents have DSL from the phone company. What they do is plug it in, then give you a CD and tell you to install it yourself. If you aren't careful it does some pretty crazy stuff. Your computer will turn into a giant ad for the phone company if you don't play it smart.
I ran into a similar problem cleaning out a friend's computer after she installed Earthlink's software. It came with earthlink's `own` browser, and a bunch of other crap that simply slowed the system down. (It was a Pentium 133 (One I loaned to her (It was the only one I had to spare)))
Apparently another friend helped her install it, and apparently ran the 'install' program off the root of the CD, which installed it all. I uninstalled all the Earthlink software, and reinstalled WinPOET, which thankfully had a standalone installer on the CD (though hidden in a folder with an obscure name)
When I pull the scrollbar downwards, and keep pulling below the window - all of a sudden the scroll-bar pops back to the top??
You know how, when you click on a button, and decide "Oops, I didn't want to click that" before you actually let go of the mouse, you can move it off the button and let go without anything happening? I think it's the same logic at work.
I knew exactly what I was doing, and Nader politicised me. All this time I've been saying people should vote for WHO THEY WANTED. If Democrats decided to ignore this and cost their man the election it is NOT my problem, and I don't have any sympathy
Fair enough. In that case, you're not one of the people I was yelling at. My apologies to you and others like you. My rant was (or, was meant to be...) primarily directed at the "disgruntled democrats", the 75% (Your Mileage May Vary) I alluded to.
That said, you're right. I don't have the guts, all things considered. The way I see it, I could have (a) voted for slime, as you put it, or (b) voted for not-slime, and ended up getting (as I see it) worse-slime.
I figured (a) was a better deal. If you believe that's selling out, well... fair enough.
---
Estimated percentage of Nader voters that would have voted for Gore had Nader not run: 75% (YMMV)
Do the math.
To those of you who refused to believe that "A vote for Nader is a vote for Bush", it's time to wake up and smell the numbers.
Most of you Nader supporters (from what I gather) are "disgruntled democrats"; you're voting for Nader because you're not happy with Gore. But I'm sure that if it came down to Gore or Bush (and in the end, it did), you'd be/way/ less happy with Bush than with Gore. Well, you had your chance to keep Bush out of office, and you passed it up. All in the name of 'voting your conscience.'
Our channel has been visited by these bots. One of our regulars has compiled a list of exactly what these bots do. You can find it at http://home.sprynet.com/~talus/scanbot. html
I used to be polite to phone-spammers (a.k.a. telemarketers). I'd say "No thank you" and wait for them to hang up. Now I just hang up as soon a I figure out it's a telemarketer. I don't have any obligation to be polite to them (though I'd agree that chewing them out is not productive).
The more I think about it, the more I come to the conclusion that unsolicited advertisements are nothing less than a form of harassment. After all, they've sent me something I don't want/called me when I didn't want to be called, and pressured me to buy something I don't want. The telemarketers are particularly bad, since a phone call interrupts you from what you're doing, and you have to take time out to deal with the harasser.
I mean, if I'm interrupted by a call that's actually/important/ that's not so bad, but having to deal with someone calling just to harass me out of my money is absurd.
I was experiencing pain in my right wrist for several months, sometimes severe pain. I didn't think it was from typing, since it was only affecting the one wrist, and it seemed to get worse after using the mouse for a while. Finally I moved the mouse to the left side of the keyboard, changed the settings in the OS, and started learning how to use the mouse left-handed.
Now I can use the mouse with my left hand as well as I could with my right, and the pain hasn't been bothering me since. But I'm online a lot (especially in IRC) and do a lot of typing, so I won't be surprised if my wrists start bothering me again eventually:/
Re:so what is the right pronunciation?
on
Linux on Jeopardy
·
· Score: 2
According to Linus, in an interview on ZDTV, "I don't care."
Hell, I'm just going to go out and patent Common Sense. And I'm not going to licence the technology to/anyone/. I'm going to keep it all to myself, muahahahaha!
Oh, I wouldn't worry. I don't think anyone is going to miss it that much.
May I just be the first to say what an appalingly stupid concept I think this is. I'm just glad I don't work there and won't be around to see it happen. And I'm glad I don't use any of their products. I couldn't in good conscience support a company forcing any of their employees to eat insects, no matter how noble (I use that word loosely...) their intentions are...
Oh, and if I may be allowed to be pedantic for a moment. They're also apparently unfamiliar with Lubarsky's Law of Cybernetic Entomology: "There's always one more bug."
A simple trick (although I have no idea how secure it is) I've found to make DCCs work is to use a program such as redir (look on sunsite) to redirect ports on the linux machine to another IP address. Set aside a port (or block of ports) on each masqueraded machine that's unique to each machine (this is assuming you can do so on your IRC software; mIRC can), and run several copies of redir to redirect those ports to the desired machine. (Running it through inetd would probably be better; I haven't tried to do this yet)
Slashdot Mirror
Usually when I drink caffeine it I get it from Mountain Dew, and not Coffee (eww.) or any of the harder stuff. I only drink it sporadically; I'll buy a 12-pack of Dew and drink it over the course of a couple days, and then maybe I won't drink any for a month.
I don't seem to notice much of an effect, unless I've had quite a bit. If I drink way too much I'll get the shakes. But the main effect it seems to have on me is not to keep me from falling asleep, but to make me sleep less. I.E. I'll wake up after fewer hours of sleep because of it.
Despite my inventing the term 'Liquid Awake' to describe the stuff, it doesn't seem to help wake me up either.
Personally, I think that with all the combo drives out there, none of DVD[-+]R(W?) are going to win the format wars.
Or, said another way, the combo drive is going to win the format war ^_^
Or, said another way, all of them will win the format war.
Or, as I once uttered, "It looks like the winner of the DVD format wars is going to be 'Yes.'"
Actually, the station I was recording didn't air Rush. This was a station that largely ran moderate to liberal hosts. Yes, there is such a thing as liberal talk radio. At least in San Francisco.
I'm a bit of a talk radio junkie. A couple years back I put together something that would record a local talk radio station 24/7. Basically it was a radio plugged into the soundcard of an old P120, which recorded it into 16kbps MP3s.
.m3u files that would stream in WinAmp or whatever when you clicked on them.
.m3u file for each mp3, I just wrote a CGI script that would automatically generate an .m3u file on the fly, and scriptaliased it to an appropriate regex that would call it when an .m3u file was requested. That way the browser really thought it was downloading an .m3u file, instead of a .cgi file or something.
I wrote a quick-and-dirty program that would record from the soundcard, pipe the output into LAME, and break it up into 1-hour chunks. Later versions were a bit more sophisticated, using liblame instead of piping to a separate LAME process, and using libshout to send the output to a shoutcast server on localhost live.
There were also a couple cleanup shell scripts that would delete old files when the drive began to fill.
But probably the most interesting part was, it was web-accessible. I had a few quick-and-dirty CGI scripts that would make an HTML index of the files, and provide links to the files, and also links to
Rather than create an
Of course, I find out much later that mod_rewrite would probably have been a cleaner way to do it.
Naturally it had NFS and SMB access as well, so I could just pull up a show from any of my Linux or Windows machines over the network.
Well, as soon as I saw the ad I immediately recognized the chick. As in, I'd seen the ad before, not that I knew who she was. But I never even realized that it was an ad for personals.
Just goes to show how much I pay attention to the ads...
I've got one of those ancient compaq 286 laptops... one of those with the detachable keyboard and the carry handle and the power supply the size and shape of a brick. Battery died ages ago but still runs on wall power. Makes a nice serial terminal to a Linux box.
A lot of other posters have sworn by those old IBM Model M keyboards, and I'm no exception. Mine's a bit oddball in that it's lacking the numeric keypad. But I never use it, so that's just less wasted desktop space.
I was getting horrendous pain in my right wrist. It took a while before it dawned on me that the pain was happening when I was using the mouse. Once the pain started, as soon as I tried to move the mouse it got dramatically worse. When I let go it got better.
Finally I decided to just move the mouse over to the other side of the keyboard and begin the long, slow, painful process of learning to use the mouse with my left hand.
It turned out to be worthwhile. Now, after several years of using the mouse exclusively left-handed, I can operate it right-handed for a while without pain. It's not fully 'healed' yet (and I don't know if it ever will be) but it's improved dramatically.
Interestingly, typing doesn't seem to bother me at all. It may be my non-standard typing position, or maybe the fact that I simply don't type constantly for hours on end. I'm at the computer all day, but don't spend all that time typing.
I've had a couple of those in my lifetime, both with a bit of a twist.
The first one was an ordinary 101-key layout, except it was missing the Num/Caps/Scroll lock LEDs. I got it off an old XT that someone dumped off on me.
Unfortunately I took it apart for cleaning one day and never got it back together. The keys ended up falling on the floor and getting stepped on (and thus getting mangled)
Now I've got another one like it, except this one is missing the entire numeric keypad. (It also, like the last one, has no LEDs) TBH, I don't really miss it. And the keyboard ends up taking up less desk space this way.
The only real annoyance is the lack of LEDs; you can't tell if you have CAPS LOCK ON UNTIL YOU START TYPING. Fortunately I have Capslock remapped as the 'Hyper' key in X, and Num Lock is pretty meaningless without a numberpad.
Some people rip on opensource progammers for ripping off Microsoft. I rip on opensource programmers for not ripping the /right/ feautres off Microsoft.
/damn/ fast. And if you don't know how to use them (or don't know that they even exist) they're still pretty unobstrusive. This is a perfect example of making something easy to use for the grandmothers without dumbing it down for the advanced users.
One of my biggest gripes about opensource apps is that they never seem to have keyboard shortcuts. In a Windows app, you can access almost any menu with a few keystrokes. I can go "Alt, f, a" to Save As in about a third of a second. Under Linux I'm usually stuck using the mouse.
In Windows, when you open a dialog box with a text entry box, you can usually count on the text box to be focused, so you can start typing right away. Under Linux I usually have to explicitely click on it (or at least tab into it). Also, in Windows the Enter and Escape keys are almost universally bound to the OK and Cancel buttons.
The Gimp seems to be a major offender here. If I want to (say) rename a layer, I have to click the textbox, type the text, then click the OK button. If it were a well-behaved Windows app I could just type the name and hit enter.
Why do Windows apps have these features? Because if you can learn to use them, they're
What disturbs me is, programmers are (or so I've always been led to believe) are supposed to be the kind of people that use these kinds of "advanced" timesaver features. Yet Linux programmers don't seem to be putting them into their programs. It sometimes makes me wonder what kind of people are programming these apps...
Apparently another friend helped her install it, and apparently ran the 'install' program off the root of the CD, which installed it all. I uninstalled all the Earthlink software, and reinstalled WinPOET, which thankfully had a standalone installer on the CD (though hidden in a folder with an obscure name)
You know how, when you click on a button, and decide "Oops, I didn't want to click that" before you actually let go of the mouse, you can move it off the button and let go without anything happening? I think it's the same logic at work.
That said, it's still bloody annoying.
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ln -s /bin/rm /bin/lzip
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Fair enough. In that case, you're not one of the people I was yelling at. My apologies to you and others like you. My rant was (or, was meant to be...) primarily directed at the "disgruntled democrats", the 75% (Your Mileage May Vary) I alluded to.
That said, you're right. I don't have the guts, all things considered. The way I see it, I could have (a) voted for slime, as you put it, or (b) voted for not-slime, and ended up getting (as I see it) worse-slime.
I figured (a) was a better deal. If you believe that's selling out, well... fair enough.
---
In Florida, with 99% of the precincts reporting:
/way/ less happy with Bush than with Gore. Well, you had your chance to keep Bush out of office, and you passed it up. All in the name of 'voting your conscience.'
Bush: 2,835,930 (49%)
Gore: 2,780,481 (48%)
Nader: 94,320 (2%)
Estimated percentage of Nader voters that would have voted for Gore had Nader not run: 75% (YMMV)
Do the math.
To those of you who refused to believe that "A vote for Nader is a vote for Bush", it's time to wake up and smell the numbers.
Most of you Nader supporters (from what I gather) are "disgruntled democrats"; you're voting for Nader because you're not happy with Gore. But I'm sure that if it came down to Gore or Bush (and in the end, it did), you'd be
What good has it done you?
---
---
I love the irony. The most popular distro on the RedHatIsNotLinux.org poll IS RedHat %)
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I used to be polite to phone-spammers (a.k.a. telemarketers). I'd say "No thank you" and wait for them to hang up. Now I just hang up as soon a I figure out it's a telemarketer. I don't have any obligation to be polite to them (though I'd agree that chewing them out is not productive).
/important/ that's not so bad, but having to deal with someone calling just to harass me out of my money is absurd.
The more I think about it, the more I come to the conclusion that unsolicited advertisements are nothing less than a form of harassment. After all, they've sent me something I don't want/called me when I didn't want to be called, and pressured me to buy something I don't want. The telemarketers are particularly bad, since a phone call interrupts you from what you're doing, and you have to take time out to deal with the harasser.
I mean, if I'm interrupted by a call that's actually
Three words... LOOK OUT BELOW!!
I was experiencing pain in my right wrist for several months, sometimes severe pain. I didn't think it was from typing, since it was only affecting the one wrist, and it seemed to get worse after using the mouse for a while. Finally I moved the mouse to the left side of the keyboard, changed the settings in the OS, and started learning how to use the mouse left-handed.
:/
Now I can use the mouse with my left hand as well as I could with my right, and the pain hasn't been bothering me since. But I'm online a lot (especially in IRC) and do a lot of typing, so I won't be surprised if my wrists start bothering me again eventually
According to Linus, in an interview on ZDTV, "I don't care."
Hell, I'm just going to go out and patent Common Sense. And I'm not going to licence the technology to /anyone/. I'm going to keep it all to myself, muahahahaha!
Oh, I wouldn't worry. I don't think anyone is going to miss it that much.
This makes a bit of sense actually.
/meta/ CPU.
What's the name of the company? Trans/meta/
What are they building? A
(Someone's already pointed this out, I bet.)
May I just be the first to say what an appalingly stupid concept I think this is. I'm just glad I don't work there and won't be around to see it happen. And I'm glad I don't use any of their products. I couldn't in good conscience support a company forcing any of their employees to eat insects, no matter how noble (I use that word loosely...) their intentions are...
Oh, and if I may be allowed to be pedantic for a moment. They're also apparently unfamiliar with Lubarsky's Law of Cybernetic Entomology: "There's always one more bug."
A simple trick (although I have no idea how secure it is) I've found to make DCCs work is to use a program such as redir (look on sunsite) to redirect ports on the linux machine to another IP address. Set aside a port (or block of ports) on each masqueraded machine that's unique to each machine (this is assuming you can do so on your IRC software; mIRC can), and run several copies of redir to redirect those ports to the desired machine. (Running it through inetd would probably be better; I haven't tried to do this yet)