June 2004
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I am The Cyberwolfe and these are my ramblings. All original content is protected under a Creative Commons license - always ask first.
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Archive for June, 2004

Fun with definitions

Posted in Humor on June 10th, 2004

I wanted to make sure I had the use of the word “meme” correct, so I did a quick dictionary search. The second definition has an interesting point.

Memes can be considered the unit of cultural evolution. Ideas
can evolve in a way analogous to biological evolution. Some
ideas survive better than others; ideas can mutate through,
for example, misunderstandings; and two ideas can recombine to
produce a new idea involving elements of each parent idea.

(…)

Use of the term connotes acceptance of the idea that in humans
(and presumably other tool- and language-using sophonts)
cultural evolution by selection of adaptive ideas has become
more important than biological evolution by selection of
hereditary traits. Hackers find this idea congenial for
tolerably obvious reasons.

Camping tips for the city dweller

Posted in Humor on June 9th, 2004

Because Kylanath asked:

Things to take camping

  • Tent
  • Rain-fly or tarp for the tent
  • Sleeping bags
  • Water
  • Something to cook
  • Something to cook it in
  • Fire or something else to cook it on
  • Something that doesn’t need to be cooked for when you can’t get the fire lit.
  • Something to eat it with
  • Socks!! Lots of socks!
  • Appropriate clothing
  • Sunblock if clothing isn’t appropriate
  • Towell. Maybe two.
  • Toothbrush and toothpaste
  • Painkiller for when you bash your finger pounding in tent stakes. (Booze is good for this.)
  • First-aid kit for when you nearly slice off a digit trying to open a can of beans with a bootknife because you forgot the silly can opener. (Booze is not good for this.)
  • Something to do in the tent for when the air has only slightly less water in it than the lake.
  • Flashlights for those after-dark nature calls
  • Charmin so you don’t get poison oak on your tender bits because you improvised.
  • A picture of poison oak so you can recognise it, before you improvise.
  • A shovel. (Cats bury theirs, you can bury yours.)
  • A scary story, a song or other spoken entertainment. C’mon, it’s a tradition.

That may be a bit much for some situations, but over 20 years of camping has given me a pretty good idea. Enjoy!

This is surprising

Posted in Geekery on June 9th, 2004

So, what does the Wolfey-guy do late at night when he’s bored, can’t sleep, and is tired of reading other peoples’ blogs? He does a little bit of ego-surfing and checks his server logs.

I must say, I was surprised at how much traffic I’ve been getting. I remember looking at the logs several months after I started the Diary-X journal and being happy to see more than ten hits a day, but now (for the past three weeks, anyway) I’ve been averaging about 75 hits a day, after you subtract the ones generated by my own site maintenance and postings. Average page hits are under two, so folks aren’t digging through the archives, but they’re reading the main entries.

Greyduck gets the booby prize for biggest referrer, with over half of all the hits coming from his domain. Thanks for the link, roomie! (Sorry, but the ‘booby’ in question will have to remain metaphorical.) Conspicuously absent, however, were referrals from a site I’ve been affiliated with for quite some time – turns out, they’ve removed the link. Can’t please everybody, I suppose.

What I’m really wondering is where the heck the referral from nude celebrity blogs came from. I think somebody is very confused.

Because I’m never satisfied

Posted in Geekery on June 6th, 2004

Well, I had a couple hours before the barbecue started yesterday, so I went ahead and tried the ftp install of SuSE 9.1, and I am very happy with the results.

I thought it would take alot longer, since it was the openning weekend of the process, but I was up and running in just about two hours. It only missed one package during the initial download (a console font package) which it correctly installed when I did an update later.

There will of course be the minor annoyances of renamed packages and paths, but that really only hits me in a couple of programs, as I can usually build from the source code. Aside from that, the interface is slick as always, there’s a ton of stuff already installed, and it has a solid feature set.

Two things I was disappointed to see: the “My Computer” icon on the desktop and an implementation of a WindowsXP-style “autorun selector”. Both of these things are easy to kill though, so it’s not a huge problem.

Now to shove the ATI drivers down it’s throat :)

Oh gods…can’t breathe…

Posted in Humor on June 5th, 2004

Just can’t explain. Duck, this is so you, I’m surprised you haven’t had this thought already.

Queen of Wands

Damn, I thought I had this beat

Posted in Life on June 4th, 2004

Symptomology:

  • Slight runny nose
  • Sneezing
  • Itchy eyes
  • Slight light-headedness
  • That’s right boys and girls: allergy season has arrived. I had thought that maybe the sinus infection I had last year may have cured my allergies, since they usually show up before now, but I guess it ws just Mother Nature playing tricks on me.

    Maybe this year I’ll have better luck finding a combination of treatments that allows me to function instead of simply knocking me out. I tell ya, those packages shouldn’t read “may cause drowsiness”, they should read “don’t make in fuq’ing plans”.

    Achoo!

    Arch Linux 0.6 – Final thought

    Posted in Life on June 3rd, 2004

    Ok, I’ve played with it for a couple days, and I have to say that Arch Linux definitely shows alot of promise…but it needs more work.

    There are several known bugs in the package lists, most notably in KDE itself. While I was able to get the sound working, I had to jump through a number of hoops to do so, and arts still isn’t quite on the bandwagon, even though alsa is.

    One major drawback is going to be the hardware incompatabilities. There are certain hardware vendors that only provide rpm drivers, (notably ATI video cards) and this system is rpm-unfirendly. While it is possible to get these drivers installed, it is a long and arduous process that leaves this distro in the hands of the guru rather than the mid-level enthusiast.

    If you want to learn more about how Linux works, right now would be a good time to play around with Arch, before the developers iron out all the kinks. If you want to run Linux but don’t want to have to delve deeply into the command line, stick to one of the big boys like SuSE or Mandrake.

    As for me, I think I’ll be investing some time into an ftp install of SuSE 9.1 over the weekend.

    Arch Linux 0.6 – Quick Review

    Posted in Geekery on June 1st, 2004

    Ok, so far, I have gone through three different hard drives before I found one that would stick, but I don’t believe that has had anything to do with Arch. Finally got it working on an 82.3 gig, split kinda half-n-half for / and /home.

    Not a bad little system. The pacman package manager works as advertised. A simple ‘pacman -Sy {packagename}’ gets you the latest version, checks (and downloads) all dependencies, then installs the whole kaboodle, all from the command line. (Anyone who has ever tried to install mplayer from scratch will appreciate that!)

    This is still a young distro, so there (of course) are going to be some shortfalls in the package lists, but it looks to be fairly simple to build your own packages out of tarballs. The nice thing is that the packages that are on the list are right up-to-date. (I didn’t realize that Gaim had finally gotten the ymessenger snafu figured out until I installed it last night.)

    Things I still need to figure out:

  • How to get the mouse wheel working in X
  • I need to see if XFree86 4.4.0 is the one with the stupid licensing
  • How to get user permissions for the media drives
  • How to get the sound working (the install notes cover this, but it didn’t work)
  • Nothing too major, but it will take some playing. The big irritant is that Arch uses the DevFS filesystem, which means the nomenclature is once again, different than what I’m used to, so I can’t simple copy over the /etc/fstab file from my working system. (/dev/hda1 is now /dev/discs/disc0/disc1 for instance)

    All-in-all, a distro to watch. A good middle step from the uber-user-friendliness of SuSE or Mandrake to the gotta-know-everything of Gentoo or Slackware. As they move towards the 1.0 milestone, things should get pretty sweet.