By Ruben(nerd) Schade, a UTS university student and IT guy in Sydney and Singapore. c.2004
Allegedly hotlinking makes Mikuru so upset she starts blurting out Français! From http://mikuru.haruhi.fr/, surprising though it may seem.
Imagine if I hotlinked this image. "Dawg, I heard you like hotlinking, so I hotlinked the hotlink image you can hotlink while you hotlink!"
Add Xzibit to the list of celebrity based memes I fail at.
As I was walking through Borders in Wheelock Place last night taking a break from scanning (topic for a future post no doubt) and checking my tweets on my iTelephone (that just sounds wrong for some reason) @Jlist made a remark about Haruhi.
Man, if Haruhi really existed she would totally need to be on meds. #anime
Quizás, quizás, quizás! Of course I read that as I was walking past the manga section and saw Haruhi staring at me from a shelf with a sinister smile. I take that to be a sign that the latest universe she created has her trapped in paper form and scaring the crap out of timid white boys late at night, and I expect she's getting a royal kick out of it!
But I digress. I commented on The Twitters that if Haruhi is on the mad pills, Mikuru must be on Xanax! :D
Alprazolam, also known under the trade [name] Xanax is a short-acting drug of the benzodiazepine class. It is primarily used to treat moderate to severe anxiety disorders and panic attacks.
Though I suppose if Mikuru was on Xanax she wouldn't be able to do as effective a Mikuru Beam and she wouldn't be as jittery and moe, so she's probably under contract from producers not to take any. Just taking a stab in the dark here.
For me anxiety is best alleviated with hugs. My mum gave the best hugs, of course :(. Any volunteers?
Poor Mikuru!
Stuff the 14th of February being Valentine’s day, tomorrow is day for Unix geeks in Asia Pacific to celebrate because this happens to be the day that is represented in Unix time systems as 1234567890. In the US (and I believe Europe), 1234567890 will be happening on the 13th of February… there’s something sinisterly poetic about that :).
If you like Bill Kurtis and don’t know (I’m not Bill Kurtis), Unix and Unix-like systems such as GNU/Linux, FreeBSD and Mac OS X store dates as a sequential series of numerals representing the number of seconds since the 1st of January 1970. There are caveats to this explanation, but that’s the gist of it.
There’s a problem though: because these numbers were traditionally expressed as 32 bit integers, in 2032 we’ll run out of dates we can keep track of. This problem would manifest itself In the same way for the same reasons as the Y2K bug.
ASIDE: As far as I know the BSDs now uses 64 bit time as does most GNU/Linux distributions, but don’t quote me on that.
In the meantime, Happy 1234567890 everybody! I’m going to be celebrating by staying at home and painfully coughing loudly while I have difficulty breathing, holding food down and my sinuses continue to flare up and down. Will be having lots of soup though and will be watching some silly anime shows and Warner Brothers cartoons from sixty years ago, exciting and enjoyable stuff I can tell you!
I wonder what would happen if Elmer Fudd and Daffy Duck met Suzumiya Haruhi in some time matrix thing? If they can make a Flintstones and Jetsons crossover movie, why not that? ^_^. Can you believe some people actually liked the cheesy Disney characters better than the sarcastic, hilarious Warner Brother’s Merry Melodies chaps?
If you didn’t see, I just posted another entry where I link to Duck Amock, a Daffy Duck cartoon that also happens to be the single greatest cartoon of all time.
Did I say Happy 1234567890 already? Happy 1234567890 everybody!
In my continuing saga to find the perfect FreeBSD desktop, I decided to set aside the fully fledged desktop environments (KDE, Gnome and Xfce) that I've reviewed so far and instead focus on one of the most lightweight window managers: Fluxbox. I figured if I could get it to work, and liked using it, I could adapt it to fit on my boss's ThinkPad which can only just run IceWM or Windows 98 as it is ;).
Here's my basic Fluxbox desktop running on FreeBSD on my MacBook Pro with Mozilla Firefox and Xterm with custom colours:
As you can see, it's very lightweight. On a machine like this it loads faster than you can lift your finger off the return key when you type startx to launch it, it's wild!
Unlike the aformentioned desktop environments and like other vanilla window managers, Fluxbox does exactly what it's supposed to do; and that's it. It's entirely up to you to choose your web browser, email client, office suite, file maneger, terminal emulator and so forth which can take more time on your part but is very rewarding.
The first snag I came across installing Fluxbox on FreeBSD is that the port in the ports collection called fluxbox is actually not the one we want, but rather the fluxbox-devel. Despite the name, fluxbox-devel is the stable release. Caught me out the first time!
Once you have the base fluxbox window manager, just add exec fluxbox to your ~/.xinitrc file, then type startx to fire her up.
The configuration files are created in a new folder ~/.fluxbox in your home directory. The customisable settings are in the init file, and you can customise the right-click desktop menu with the surprisingly titled menu file. Is good yah.
To use your own custom desktop backgrounds, you need to install a seperate image viewing program, such as feh which can be found in the ports collection under graphics. After installing, just modify your init file so the line rootCommands: reads rootCommands: fbdeskbg -f /path/to/your/image. You can also pass images to feh on the command line to open them:
Chuck Norris and a Llama, what more do you need? :D ;)
As for file managers I chose ROX-Filer because it's lightweight and zippy but still allows thumbnailing of images which is very impressive. Again, it's in the ports collection:
The verdict? Even on slow machines Fluxbox whoops some serious arse, and on my MacBook Pro it works faster than I can type the commands! For many situations I'll definitely consider it, but I'm a sucker for nice graphics so for my production machines I'll stick with the desktop environments for now; but I must admit Fluxbox + ROX-Filer is a very nice combination.
Surprisingly the folks over at Fluxbuntu have had a very similar idea and are implementing Fluxbox and ROX-Filer over Ubuntu Linux. If it weren't for the fact it's not FreeBSD I'd check it out, looks very intresting.
My other *NIX desktop environment related posts: