Plantagenet Penguinista

Another dial-up lesson learned post-facto: idly clicking on software packages to install can be a time-consuming idea... For example, deciding to see how Wesnoth is progressing only costs 2011 bytes... not very wearing... but that invites Synaptic to quietly add wesnoth-data (25.7MB) & wesnoth-music (25.6MB), which suddenly adds about 3 hours to your download time... which you (well, I) notice when there’s about 5 minutes left of it. Errr... then you notice some more minor additions... wesnoth-editor (1.5MB), wesnoth-httt (5.1MB) & from the look of the bar-chart, about another 8MB of other stuff (which may be mostly non-Wesnoth [edit: wesnoth-rsg@1.8MB, wesnoth-trow@4.3MB, wesnoth-ttb@0.4MB, wesnoth-ei@1.2MB, wesnoth-utbs@5.1MB]). You’ll notice that I haven’t lost any time at Wesnoth itself yet, either. I guess MySQL will have to wait until tomorrow (sorry, Arjen, PostgreSQL survived the upgrade), or I’ll have to figure out how to add the collection of .d...

Just when you get something established in your mind as safe & steady, some wiseacre changes it. So with Lasca , a game invented by chess champion Emanuel Lasker as a variant on draughts. I ran across this in a HappyPenguin article on the game Ascal , a GNOMEified implementation of same. Meanwhile, Get Moving Tasmania is organising a walk in dear little Tullah here, starting after a trip around in Wee Georgie Wood , the local steam loco . That’ll be good to take the kinder along to. (-:

The upgrade completed, all went well… until I rebooted. At this point, I discovered an unusual feature of the SiS 5513 controller under the new kernel — it gets scanned for SATA drives… & is broken. The IDE DVD drive works fine, but not the IDE hard drive. I was able to swap this bog-slow 566MHz Celeron for a bog-slow 400MHz P2 (albeit with some dinking around with SD-RAM ’coz it only had 64MB & one DIMM socket is broken; & more dinking because the built-in LAN card wouldn’t work) built on an Intel chipset. I did actually get a bonus, sort of, because it has built-in speakers. Hmmm. Starting to seriously exhaust the supply of random/spare computer parts to jam together for making things work.

This was one of the things which appeared in the Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon update, & I’m very pleased to announce that it did nothing. That is, nothing broke. Most things seem to go faster, & they all work. That’s a very heartening start to an upgrade. (-:

Ten hours left, it reckons, after days of messing about with DVDs & CDs. It wanted to spend 2 whole days downloading stuff when I tried the CD (the DVD part of the drive is broken), so I copied the DVD via my laptop & ran the upgrade from that. That worked, up until about ¾ of the way through it suddenly wanted me to “insert” the DVD media — & I have no idea what it was triggering on, so I killed it & restarted it again on a real CD. That worked, until it complained that there were about 40 files missing because this was not the real DVD... so I copied the list of absentees, shoved them through a quick BASH script, & duplicated them ( cp -a ) into the APT cache directory, then restarted the upgrader from the CD again. Which seems to be working (it’s unpacking & setting up .deb files) but as it says wants another 10 hours to complete. I have no idea about whether it’s going to try downloading a few more chunks as a part of that, so...

Been doing a bit of private advertising recently, lugging plastic chairs which have messages Sharpied onto them up the Mount Farrell track & parking them to the side, where walkers can rest on them & also read the messages. One thing I’ve discovered about tracks like this kind is that there’s not much point in walking up a 45° slope once or twice. The 2nd walk is just as exhausting as the first. I think I’d better pick up cycling again, as the only other aerobic exercise hereabouts is running (shake meself ta bits) or canoeing — & I don’t have a canoe. The alternative is risking having a heart-crash on the way up a hill (not particularly prone to heart trouble, but who knows?) which is hardly something to look forward to.

Working today with a WinME box locally, & a CentOS release 4.3 server in Perth. The ME box is being a pain. I had to plonk a network card into it, & then somehow get drivers onto it for the card. Naturally, the floppy drive was dodgy enough to not be useful for this, & none of the machines here have a CD burner. Finally worked around the problem child by locating an ancient ethernet card — which doesn’t even have a brand, AFAICT — which ME happened to have drivers for. The card was out of a machine with both PCI & ISA slots, with the older-style (pre SD-RAM) DIMMs — which the machine had none of — & it had a BNC (video-looking) socket as well as UTP. Shrug, it works. The CentOS box obviously has a story behind it, as the files are managed by an app called e-Smith & you can log in directly as root on port 22. All of the shared files went missing recently, & guessing from the debris, I’d put my money on someone running out of space o...

OK, a few details (from rc3, ex Gutsy)... Selection tools have been improved out of sight. Well, actually, they&rquo;ve been improved into sight in some cases. You get heads-up display of the options, & the rectangular selection allows you to dynamically add & alter rounded corners. Slight, but nifty new feature. Foreground Selection now has another method available: paint on an object within the general selection area & GIMP will select the whole object. You can re-paint instantly if the clues you gave turned out oddly. Alignment of objects now includes layers, paths & guides; aligned on an object, the selection or the whole image. New menu entries make colour management simpler. More file formats: PS’s ABR brushes; more EXIF stuff for JPEGs; clipping paths in TIFFs; deeper bitmaps & Alpha support in BMPs; PSDs get layer masks; more icon types can be read & saved to. One-keystroke full-screen toggle. Colour profiles. Much smarter Crop tool. Simpler, clear...

One aspect of the Drama Triangle which many people find puzzling is the case where there’s no obvious Aggressor/Persecutor/Attacker. An obvious answer I’ve seen in action is the Phantom Aggressor, which is an accumulation of aggressive events collected by a nominal Rescuer. They use many excuses, but the bottom line is that they need some appearance of Aggression to justify their intrusive Rescuer character, so if there is none then in one way or another, it gets invented. The Rescuer has to take care when doing this that they aren’t seen as they really are — an Aggressor — else it blows their whole plot-line, so they have to go out to dredge up another Victim if they want to continue their “Rescuer” role (which is basically an addictive/obsessive power-hunger at work as a subtle Aggressor, nothing genuinely altruistic).

Grabbed a copy of The GIMP 2.4.0 for Windaz to tweak some colours on & scale an image on this machine. The changes all appear small, but they do add up to a lot. Little things — like being instantly able to scale a paintbrush — make ordinary life easier, but there’s a lot of stuff which new (& PS) users will find amazingly obvious simply because it’s right in front of them rather than tucked away in a menu somewhere. Today’s interesting products included extending Tullah’s sense of humour a little. As you walk over Mount Farrell & first glimpse Lake Mackintosh on your way to seeing Lake Herbert (tucked away at the top), you’ll find a plastic chair there, placed perfectly to rest on & view Mackintosh. Now there’s a second one just where the forest gives way to grassy stuff on the way up, & soon (Sunday?) there will be a pair at the top, then also a pair at the break. The chairs are adorned with genuine Leon handiwork, ...

Well, moving the TP-LINK router across by two fairly thin-looking walls (about 6m) bought us another 6 or 7dB in the back rooms, & maybe 5dB across the highway, but moving it as far as 25m further on didn’t help the back rooms at all (probably even cost a few dB), & bought across-the-road maybe 2dB if that. So... Mr TP-LINK will be sitting next to the TV (flat on the wall with antenna sticking straight up) & we’ll probably get another router to plonk across the road as a bridge. It does leave me wondering whether the original router site somehow formed a wireless black hole, though. Oh, I notice that Mr Shuttleworth found a way to fill up the Gutsy DVD, specifically Win32 versions of things like Firefox, ThunderBord & AbiWord. No OpenOffice there, but I guess asking for an extra 150-oddMB for that & a few localisation packs turned out to be a little over-hard.

I got an ExpressPost in the mail today, from a sunny Perth mid-Northern suburb, which has to mean that AusPost got clever & shipped it across the Tasman to Burnie, Devonport or at the very least (stretching it for time) Launceston rather than Hobart if it was posted on Monday. Sharon, the postmistress, was quite surprised that it had arrived, but I’d warned her on Monday that it was coming. It contained a Gutsy Gibbon desktop CD, another one labelled “alternate”, & a full DVD. This all proved useful because I was able to use the LiveCD to inspect a system while another box (with a dodgy DVD drive) set about upgrading itself from the “alt” CD as I got my laptop copying (scp) the DVD across the wireless at about 600kB/s because despite being told to not fetch updates, the upgrade fetched a few items down the whoopie-how-fast-am-I dialup modem line, which was going to mean a 2-3 day wait instead of an hour or so, & I hope as I watch linux-image-2.6.22...

Comparing a nominally long-range dLink wireless router with a TP-LINK el cheapo box , to light up a laptop across the highway from the Internet link. Mr El Cheapo works out about 7-9dB stronger signals (e.g. -69dB across the road instead of -78dB) with my TwinHead DuraBook laptop, yet only claims +3dB for the antenna, which is a short whip about ⅓ as long again as the dLink’s. That has to be some kind of dipole, but my ARRL knowledge is so ancient that I’ve no real hope of recalling it. Whatever it is, tomorrow will involve some time playing with RG58 cables, switches and/or hubs, & grunting the router around the building to defeat some structural irregularities which remain. I’m of the firm opinion that dropping a second router across the road as a bridge will prove far more effective than relying upon Joe Random Tenant having a laptop with good reception — & would also offer the option of a wired connection since the routers typically come with a...

I’m not quite sure how this works, internally, but there’s something mysteriously twice as offensive when someone can’t even be incompetent at you competently. I got a whole — I think “mess” is the correct description — of spam just now, all with the above title, so it looks like they clean forgot to push it through whatever their parser amounts to before they force-fed the Internet with it. The underlying message, of course, is that we’re seriously not worth them caring about in the slightest. We’re less than “a market.” Someone with that much lack of care isn’t even worth despising. If I stumbled across a machine generating that kind of crud, I’d be sure to format the backup systems first. Carefully. With random patterns. Then see what else is on that LAN. Oh, yes, & have a nice day. (-:

…one positively must make lemonade. So I shipped 11,000 pieces of spam to Kylie as ingredients for her quest to find a use for spam. This was a good deal more satisfying than feeding it to a rendering-down script which generates (107,000 so far) blacklisted sender addresses for my email server, especially since it represents about a month & a half of spam (with the server putting a knife through the throats of about 90% of them before they come in the SMTP door). Actually, my spam is down from over 1,000 a day circa two years ago to about 70-100 a day now, despite the overall increase. These figures are after the server bins 90% of them for sins like invalid domain or identifying themselves as an unlisted host. On a completely different topic, I note that I didn’t mention an important feature of Drama Triangles: the participants are typically either blind to their place in this system, or misinterpreting it. For example, it must be OK to help people (Rescuer) but ther...

Spring must be here, since I can dry clothes on the Hills Hoist in the back yard now — up to 3 rounds a day, exciting high-tech stuff. I think the sun gets up to about 700w/m 2 in between clouds now. Meanwhile, I have a server to set up which has to live on a dynamic ADSL address since the ISP won’t offer static addresses & changing ISPs right now is a bit of a trauma for several reasons. Later, we might get a second ADSL connection with a different ISP, then give the first line the flick when the second is going steadily. This situation won’t last forever, but until then I’ll have to have a cron job polling the router to look for a changed address, then go & notify the name servers when that changes. By using short (5 minute?) timeouts in the DNS records, I should be able to respond reasonably quickly even if a visitor is mid-session when a change happens, & the initial users will be aware that it’s a trial situation so won’t be too fuss...

...one of the interesting & simple culprits to set out in search of is a “ Drama Triangle ” (also called a “Rescue Triangle”) — a situation involving 3 people (or forces) taking the roles of Victim, Persecutor & Rescuer. These simple roles can become quite obsessive, ramping up into proper co-dependencies in many cases. A Victim is helpless & hopeless, frustratingly indifferent to their own situation in some ways & dreadfully obsessed by it in others. Often, a few simple changes in outlook or attitude would put an end to their ongoing suffering. The Persecutor typically attacks them in some way, often by heaping (well-earned, in some eyes) criticism upon them. Finally, the Rescuer wades in with “all guns blazing” to save the Victim. This is often achieved by attacking the Persecutor, & in some cases the roles wind up swapped. A feature which is particularly prevalent in the typical Rescuer (& often in the Victim) is an un...

I decided to have a whack at GIMP 2.4, & the easiest approach looked to be bolting the -rc3 from Gutsy into a Feisty machine I’ve set up. One of the obvious updates was libc6. What was not so obvious was the libgcc1 & other “internal” dependencies which that implied, stuff like encryption & compression, right down to replacing a TrueType font with an updated version with a slightly different naming system, in order to please one of GIMP’s dependencies — but this broke a couple of games (Briquolo & CrystalSpace) so I had to upgrade those also (or scrub them off). 77 packages later, down a dialup link (uh, sorry, 79 packages with the games), it all seems to be working — except that this Feisty seems to half-think of itself as a Gutsy, & wants to finish the upgrade. I think that’ll be waiting until I can borrow an ADSL link in Wynyard this coming week before trying an upgrade, else I’d have to sit through (it estimates) two gi...

Well, that was one of the more delicate half-conversations I’ve ever had. The chap concerned (CC) knows another person I know (PIK), very well. CC persists in three main habits: disagreeing with almost everything I base my thoughts on; finding & pointing out the faults (real or imagined, not picky) in practically everything <1> else; inviting PIK on interesting excursions (snow, sand, fascinating architectures etc). PIK is depressive, so you can imagine the combined effect of these attributes on PIK. I think “constant chaos” is a polite but reasonably close approximation. It’s deeply disruptive & destructive, either way. Unfortunately, PIK thinks the sun radiates posteriorly from CC, so I’m immersed in deep pooh if I dare to criticise same. So my strategy here was to continue the conversation, painstakingly avoiding points of conflict, while sailing as close as possible to them (without triggering) to coerce CC into actually thinking about th...

...well, actually, they do; & to SWMBO, nearly a centimetre in diameter & maybe 10-15cm long. Fairly impressive worms down in a non-apple part of the Apple Isle. Miss 6 went totally spare when asked to fetch a lone slug with her rubber-gloved little hands, though. SWMBO finally felt inspired to work on the front garden for a bit, & it’s got a healthy-looking layer of plants in it now. Might even have an Aram Lily which appears to have squeezed under the fence from next-door-behind’s place, too. The lawn’s showing obvious signs of recovering from the thrashing I gave it with the mower, so it obviously needs another one. Funny, most of the gardens hereabouts are fairly bare & barren... so I guess their owners simply can’t be bothered trying to grow stuff — native plants have no worries, grow straight into the rock as needs be. Back in technical-land, it’s time to learn about web-cams, it seems. Not for this little blip on the map, but th...