Rubenerd

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12:30 – Clock and calendar silliness; the Queen's Birthday isn't the Queen's Birthday; Queen Elizabeth's mugshot on Australian coins; blogging about FreeBSD desktop background managers; the de facto one episode a month show; people whinging about too many blog posts; Zombie Plan on useless tweets; MannyTheMailman's brand new air conditioner; Asia Pacific being ahead of Hawaii; iPhone Apple WWDC speculation; Neal O'Carroll and I suing for the iTelephone name; Elke's lack of tweets; the world is flat; illegal Dutch pot scenarios and zombies eating skittles.

Recorded in Adelaide, Australia. Licence for this track: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0. Attribution: Ruben Schade.

I was having trouble compiling Gnumeric from MacPorts and Pan this evening. Turns out gtk2 was failing to build because of a problem with the tiff port.

root# port -v install gtk2
===>  Extracting tiff
On Mac OS X 10.5, tiff 3.8.2 requires Xcode 3.1 or later but you have Xcode 3.0.
Error: Target org.macports.extract returned: incompatible Xcode version
Warning: the following items did not execute (for tiff): org.macports.activate 
org.macports.extract org.macports.patch org.macports.configure org.macports.build 
org.macports.destroot org.macports.install
[…]
Error: Status 1 encountered during processing.

If you're being given this error message too, as the error suggests you need to grab yourself a newer version of Xcode. Since I only just reinstalled Mac OS X Leopard on my MacBook Pro I installed the Xcode that came on the 10.5.6 DVD which as the error above shows is only Xcode 3.0.

What's curious is the Apple Software Update has never told me about a newer Xcode. Is it because you need to login as a ADC member first perhaps?

Anyway, lesson learned: make sure you have the latest Xcode before attempting to compile software or built ports on your Mac! It's not that it's darn obvious you should, but that we need reminding sometimes :).

I can confirm adding the following code to the functions.php in my current theme prevents posts from certain categories appearing on the home page, and the main site RSS feed. In this case we're filtering category ID 5:

function myFilter($query) {
  if ($query->is_feed || $query->is_home) {
    $query->set('cat','-5');
  }
  return $query;
}
add_filter('pre_get_posts','myFilter');

If you only want to filter categories from the home page, simply remove the $query->is_feed || condition, and vica versa.

This little change really allows WordPress to be used as a simple CMS by allowing you to separate material and provide category feeds for different types of posts. I'll be using this so regular readers subscribed to my main RSS feed don't get any of my anime posts from my blog that I'll be importing from my university intranet.

Thanks to Scott Jangro for this great tip.

Passing on one of my more recent tweets for those of you not on The Twitter:

This tweet has nothing of value in it.

Thank you.

When you use lightweight window managers such as Openbox in lieu of desktop environments, you're free to choose everything yourself including applications to draw desktop backgrounds. I've happily used hsetroot for a while now, but decided this time to give Nitogen a try.

As well as being a stable gas with five electrons in its outer shell (I loved chemistry in high school, and my dad is a chemist!), Nitrogen is a desktop background setter that lets you choose images using a slick, simple graphical window. You populate the list of images by passing it the name of a folder when you launch it, then choose which image you want and whether you want it scaled, centred, tiled or fitted to your screen. You can also define the background colour if your image doesn't fill the entire screen.

While I am used to using the shell to change background images, I have to say it is nice having a window to do it, and if you use GTK apps like Firefox, the Gimp, Inkscape, Gnumeric and the like and you have a GTK theme defined, it fits into your desktop beautifully. It's requires a few extra dependencies given it's a graphical app, but (in keeping with Openbox philosophy!) it's still very lightweight and uses few system resources when running.

If you use Openbox (as in the image above) by launching an openbox-session on FreeBSD, Linux and the like, you can tell it to load your Nitrogen background on launch by opening this file in your favourite text editor which of course would be Vim not Emacs:

% vim ~/.config/openbox/autostart.sh

… and append the following lines, before you load any panels or widgets so ones that support pseudo-transparency can generate their backgrounds properly.

nitrogen --restore &echo "Grilled cheese sandwich" &

Personally I'll be sticking with hsetroot for now simply because I don't really need the graphical screen (and it's extra dependencies). As I said though, I found the interface slick and easy to use and would encourage people to try it out (especially if they're afraid of the shell like so many Linux and BSD newbies are!). With Nitrogen and apps like the Openbox Configuration Manager, Openbox becomes closer to being a general use desktop everybody can use and enjoy.

Nitrogen is available from the FreeBSD ports collection.

For those of you also living in a so called Commonwealth Realm, a jolly good, merry, happy and prosperous Queen's Birthday to you!

Here in Australia (except for WA) we have the day off on the second monday of June which happens to be today. According to infallable Wikipedia, Canadians have the day off on the 24th of May, people in the United Kingdom have it on the first, second or third Saturday in June, and New Zealanders on the first Monday of June. I suspect many of her other realms have holidays for this:

Elizabeth II (Elizabeth Alexandra Mary; born 21 April 1926) is the queen regnant of sixteen independent states known as the Commonwealth realms: the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Jamaica, Barbados, the Bahamas, Grenada, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Tuvalu, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Belize, Antigua and Barbuda, and Saint Kitts and Nevis.

None of these dates though are the Queen's actual birthday. Don't you just love living in a commn sense monarchy? :) I know I know, the holiday wasn't meant for Queen Elizabeth II and is by convention not by her actual birth date, but still!

This is a topic which has never been covered here before but one which it's continuing omission here is unacceptable. It has nothing to do with software or internet commentary; but I've resigned myself to the fact less than half the posts here do now!

I'm talking of course about fabric softener. That magic goop you pour into the centre of your washing machine that transforms your clothes and towels into things that are cuddly and soft. Having moved back to Adelaide for part of the year to study again we have a washing machine here but for some reason only just got around to buying fabric softener again. The difference is incredible; I'm wearing one of my winter jumpers and its so soft it could very well be criminal!

So if you've scrimped your money for a while but have just enough to buy something completely frivolous, buy yourself some fabric softener, then bask in soft goodness. Thank you.

For some reason I like the softer focus in this shot. The depth of field had to be narrower so I could shoot the picture faster to compensate for my overly jittery hands. At least with a 50mm 1.8 it can collect much more light in a shorter time.

This is another type of shot you just can't plan for. Like a really bad cold. Wait, that didn't sound terribly good. Need some work on holding cameras more steadily when standing though.

It seems I'm never quite satisfied with the configuration of my Armada M300 subnotebook which despite it's age works as a fantastic netbook with a brighter screen and nicer keyboard than any of "them"!

My current software configuration having played around with Arch Linux and Debian at various times is now back to FreeBSD with 7.2-RELEASE i386 with the GEOM Gjournal system enabled on /usr and compiled-in kernel support for Vesa shells, all of which I'll be talking about here at some point.

And because I have new love for link clouds, here's my currently (and ever changing) list of software installed on it from the ports collection, some of which you can see in the screenshots.

Xorg

with Mach64 video drivers

Openbox

very lightweight window manager

pypanel

lightweight panel with transparency

urxvt

lighter xterm replacement with unicode

Nitrogen

display backgrounds with nice selection window

Midnight Commander

fast orthodox shell file manager

Vim

text editor

Cream

Tasty Vim extension

Firefox 3

grilled cheese sandwich iron

Elinks

shell web browser

Alpine

shell email client

Pan

newsgroup reader

The GRC newsgroups are still all abuzz ragarding Leo Laporte and Mike Arrington's brief vocal feud on the latest Gillmor Gang. If you've been living under a rock, you can view the video on YouTube.

Steve's comment:

Gang…

Apparently Leo “lost it” during his “Gillmor Gang” show this
(Saturday) afternoon. Apparently he started swearing and using
the F-word aimed AT his guests and hung up on everyone. I find
that BEYOND difficult to imagine. I’m stunned.

—
________________________________________________________________
Steve. Working on: GRC’s DNS Benchmark utility:
http://www.grc.com/dev/dnsbench.exe

With timezone differences this was already ancient history by the time I was awake but even as of this evening Adelaide time it was still being discussed so I posted my thoughts.

I’ve been an on-and-off Gillmor Gang listener since the very beginning in 2004 while they were still a part of IT Conversations; one of my favourite episodes is still their interview with Jonathan Schwartz when Solaris was starting to be open-sourced.

That’s not to say I’ve had issues with a few of their guests, Mike Arrington in particular has always come across as a bit arrogant to me. Aside from the Last.fm debacle I’ve long since stopped reading TechCrunch.

I agree with Steve that I was shocked because I’m used to hearing the cheerful and good natured Leo; and his words may have been a bit harsh; but I can totally empathise with someone in his position. Like being called out as a “fanboy” when you merely point out a flaw in a particular OS, being called out for something you’re not guilty of in a cocky and unprovoked way can be one of the most maddening things to deal with.

—
/ Ruben Schade,
/ from Singapore & Adelaide Australia
/ http://rubenerd.com/