crunch fitness in sf
Rob Landley's Firmware Linux Build Log.
- November 28, 2008
I suppose I should just get used to random 45 second pauses where Firefox freezes and won't even repaint its windows. It would be nice if there was some way to figure out what triggers them, but it seems pretty random.
I could also reinstall Konqueror, but I feel bad enough about keeping kmail. (If these various apps weren't tangled together into the giant hairball that is KDE, I wouldn't mind cherry picking them. They're quite nice. But they made kde too much of an all-or-nothing proposition; if you don't run the desktop, it's awkward to use the apps.)
Fade ordered "Reservoir dogs" through netflix, and it's been sitting around for weeks so we finally watched it. I'm not sure why that movie was made, or why anybody would ever want to see it. No urge whatsoever to see the commentary, and I even watched the commentary on Ella Enchanted. (Not so much bad as thoroughly pointless. Imagine if Seinfeld was violent instead of funny. Why?) Oh well, at least we get to send it back now.
Apparently tcc has been November 27, 2008
Still liking November 26, 2008
Firefox scales a graphic down to fit in a page, and then when you hit ctrl-plus to expand the font size, it scales up the scaled down image to give you something nice and pixilated. This may be part of the reason most .png files look so much better in Konqueror than in firefox.
Sigh. The "What is Firmware Linux" part of the documentation has always been the hard bit. It's a bunch of shell scripts! It's a development philosophy! AND a floor wax! But you'll probably just download the prebuilt binaries to start out... Darn incoherent.
Oh wow boldface sucks on Firefox. Throwing boldface into text to highlight a few phrases makes the result significantly _less_ easy to read. (How do you manage to screw up that badly?) Alas, underlining in HTML means "hotlink", so can't be used merely for emphasis, and italics don't stand out at all. (This is almost certainly a font choice issue, but this is the default font on Ubuntu.)
It occurs to me that I haven't particulary added to my mp3 collection since Napster went away. (The gnutella networks never scaled properly, and I never really got into bittorrent. It's a file transfer protocol, not a search/indexing service. Yeah, ok, I know about a few like animesuki.com that let you search for specific things (although by the time I know what series are worth watching they're long gone from there).)
I even have CDs I haven't ripped. I've got piles of old CDs I bought years ago, plus everybody knows they can get me any new Weird Al release for my birthday, and I even have a few new ones I got at conventions. (I've been carrying around "I can has FUMP" for weeks _meaning_ to rip it, because November 25, 2008
It occurs to me that El Shrubbo can't pardon himself for violations of _international_ law, only of US law. If he and Cheney really get egregious about self-pardons, the US can always decide to hand them over to the criminal court in the Hague, where he can be tried for war crimes. (This doesn't have to set a precedent if we don't want it to; the decision to extradite is always made on a case by case basis.)
Writing documentation gives one lots of ideas for user interface improvements. For example, it occurs to me that run-with-home.sh and run-with-distcc.sh would probably be better collapsed together into run-emulator.sh as command line options. If hdb.img exists, it gets mounted on /home inside the image. Use "--make-hdb" to create one, use "--with-hdb" to specify a different name, failing if it can't find it and if --make-hdb wasn't specified. An extra argument is treated as a path to the cross compiler for the distcc trick, with the standard check to make sure it's actually there.
Ok, that's cool.
Fade and I went to see Bolt, which was entertaining. How they managed to actually cast Nybbas as the agent is a mystery for the ages. (Putting the head of Pixar in charge of Disney's existing animation department has been very, very good for them. Of course the guy who _used_ to run it is now the K in Dreamworks SKG. Spielberg, Katzenberg, Geffen. Disney's fault for driving him away in the first place, he's now their main competition.)
The trailer for The Pink Panther 2 also managed to do the impossible, convince Fade and Myself that the movie may actually be worth seeing. (It just _looks_ like a tape recorder, it's actually... a pen!) I never would have expected Steve Martin to find his own interpretation of Clouseau that A) isn't trying to be Peter Sellers and B) actually works.
Late in the day, finally gettin