All things geek
Today I have learned of M-x toggle-truncate-lines
As an alternative to continuation, Emacs can display long lines by “truncation”. This means that all the characters that do not fit in the width of the screen or window do not appear at all…
You can enable or disable truncation for a particular buffer with the command `M-x toggle-truncate-lines’.
God bless the Internet and/or Wikipedia. They have a very detailed article on the shocker.
Thanks to Linky for writing this post which inspired me to do a web search for my followup comment.
One final thought:
14:14 <SmooveB> I want to know in what universe this is an encyclopedia article
[ Update:
14:24 <spruance> haha roe‘s talking about the shocker too
14:24 <Ark> holy crap, Richard Roeper wrote an article yesterday about
14:24 <spruance> the shocker has jumped the shark
14:24 <Ark> spruance: haha, yes!
Also, Richard Roeper had an article about this yesterday]
I’ve been meaning to write a post about my feelings on the comcast DVR after being spoiled with a DirecTiVo and a stand-alone TiVo. PVRBlog wrote up his experiance with his ComcastDVR.
His thoughts exactly mirror mine, almost to the sentence, except I don’t yet have a harmony remote for the basement setup. (I have a feeling i’ll get one for Chistmas.) Sarah just HATES the button lag, and, I have to say, its caused me a ton of grief as well. One of the follow-up comments also points out a problem I’ve seen with surround sound just dieing. A reboot fixed it for me as well.
I do have to say, watching TV in HD is a vastly different experiance. Its well worth most of the pain. However, I am crossing my fingers for the coming of CableCARD TiVos and whatnot.
This time in comic form!
STEPHEN KING BREAKS NEW GROUND AT MARVEL WITH ORIGINAL COMIC SERIES BASED ON HIS EPIC THE DARK TOWER
It looks like they’ll be following the young Roland when he started out his journey. Hopefully we’ll see Cuthbert and Alain.
Also, this marks the first time Stephen King has done original content for comics, so that’ll be good. I guess I’ll have to tell Keith to hold them for me.
Today, I learned about the existence of ~/.ssh/rc and some of its side effects.
Today, Dave couldn’t figure out why he was unable to launch an X application from a machine we both use. We both started looking into it, and it looked like xauth wasn’t being called to update the .Xauthority file. We spent a good half hour or more looking around trying to figure out if it was a bug in OpenSSH on his mac, or one on the Linux server, if xauth was wonky, or what other small differences there were between his server side environment and mine.
During the search I found this post on a Debian mailing list. It was a red herring as it had us investigating a few dead ends. However, it did point out to my mind the existence of the ~/.ssh/rc file. Up until this point, I didn’t know of this files existence. Anyway, while looking in ~dave/.ssh/ I saw he had such a file.
To quote from the man page:
$HOME/.ssh/rc
Commands in this file are executed by ssh when the user logs in
just before the user’s shell (or command) is started. See the
sshd(8) manual page for more information.
There was an emacs backup file (rc~) there, which I looked into. At one time Dave used it to set a umask for all his connections that came in via ssh. For whatever reason, he must have decided that was not doing what he wanted, so he removed the umask line, but didn’t remove the file. Because the file existed, ssh was trying to execute the commands in it, and since there was nothing in it, ssh did nothing and dumped him to a shell.
From the behavior of ssh, it appears there is a “default” rc that happens if you don’t have one or one doesn’t exist in /etc/ssh. One of the tasks of this default includes calling xauth if you’re doing X11 forwarding. By having an empty file there, Dave was bypassing all of it. I haven’t taken the time to see what other side effects came about from that, but there must not have been much, as Dave hadn’t noticed it since last April (at least according to the mod time on the rc file.)
Dave just IMed me and told me to look at the sshd man page and see the following:
When a user successfully logs in, sshd does the following:
[snip]
8. If $HOME/.ssh/rc exists, runs it; else if /etc/ssh/sshrc
exists, runs it; otherwise runs xauth. The “rc†files are
given the X11 authentication protocol and cookie in standard
input.
One other thing we learned in this is that xauth is dumb dumb stupid. xauth won’t create a .Xauthority file if there is nothing to put into it, such as when you call “xauth list” when a file doesn’t exist. However, if you do an “xauth list” and you don’t have a .Xauthority file, xauth spits out a diagnostic message saying its creating it. In reality, it doesn’t really create the file. Bad coding on someone’s part. This wasted us time, as we though it was xauth that was broken, not Dave’s ssh environment. One could argue that xauth IS broken by demonstrating this behavior, but that’s a different rant.
Its been in the news that Nicolas Cage has named his new baby boy Kal-El. Us comic geeks know that Kal-El happens to be Superman’s birth name. Not sure if this is better or worse than Harley Quinn Smith, Kevin Smith’s little girl. I’m thinking Kevin wins here.
In any case, this makes me feel less bad about how Sarah and I named our daughter.
Vacation2005/2005_07_24_18_59_58
I’m on google talk as kgarner@gmail.com. You can find me there, or not.
Last month I turned 30, which I meant to post about, and now its almost too late to be worth it. I really don’t have much to say except 30 is a number that is BIG and ROUND.
Anyway, for my BIG and ROUND birthday, my lovely wife wanted to get me something special. So, she went and visited my local comics pusher, Keith of Keith’s Komix. (Not related to, nor to be confused with Keith of… um… this blog.) Anyway, Keith helped Sarah pick out this awesomely huge 65″ wide Justice League poster with artwork by Alex Ross. Keith apparently hangs out with Alex and Keith told Sarah he could help her get it signed. Which he did. Sarah get it really nicely framed, and its really a beautiful piece now. The picture I have insert blow doesn’t really do it justice, however, you can see where Alex signed signed it.
Anyway, we got that right before we went on vacation. On vacation, we visited some family in Metropolis, IL and took some pictures with the giant Superman statue they have there.
I wanted to get those pictures framed and hang them on the same well and do a wall of super hero stuff. I’m glad I’ve been lazy about that, because this morning in the Chicago Tribune‘s Tempo section was an article on the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity’s tourism posters that feature quirky attractions around Illinois. Most importantly they include the Superman statue poster and had a picture of the power in the paper.
You can see all the posters online at the Trib’s site.
Unfortunately, they are not selling the posters and didn’t foresee a demand for them. I’d really like to get one of the superman posters to frame together with the pictures we took at the statue. I just need to figure out how. The image the Trib has online is too small to be printed out and still look good, otherwise I’d go for straight copyright infringement.
Anyway, getting that poster is now a goal. I just gotta come up with how.
I still mostly use mutt for my personal mail. The times I’m not using mutt, I’m not at an ssh capable terminal and end up using SquirrelMail, but that’s only in times of emergency. Anyway, I was inspired to write these thoughts down after an IRC conversation with Ari.
However, at work I’ve switched over to using Thunderbird. I like the offline folder stuff that Thunderbird does, and I recently found a silly extension that just cracks me up: the Display Mail User Agent extension. In general, Thunderbird does what I want, but I find myself missing a few features from mutt that I really wish was there.
attach-message navigate to a mailbox, tag messages, and quit back to the compose mail, and they are attached. For the life of me, in thunderbird, I cannot figure out how to attach a message, much less a whole thread, to an arbitrary mail. I can forward a piece of mail as an attachment, but I cannot forward n>1 messages. I often send interesting threads from mailing lists to friends and co-workers and this crimps my style.X-If-I-Knew-Better-I-Would-Not-Be-Running: Linux 2.6.12 i686
X-Time-Married: 3 years, 11 months, 14 days, 4 hours, 21 minutes, 42 seconds
X-Dinah-Lives: 1 year, 3 months, 21 hours, 38 minutes, 42 seconds
X-Uptime: 20:48:42 up 222 days, 28 min, 5 users, load average: 0.01, 0.07, 0.07
X-The-Amount-Of-Stuff-In-My-Inbox: 92
They are all silly, but they keep me entertained, and no one really sees them. However, every once in a blue moon I really give someone a chuckle.
Another feature that would be nice to see in thunderbird doesn’t come from mutt but from Apple Mail in OS X. This isn’t a make or break thing since I’m not used to it, but it is a nifty feature I admire.
Hopefully someone has already written extensions to do this and I just need to be pointed in the right direction. If not, I’ve considered writing some of them myself, but I lack the knowledge of XUL and other technologies I would need. Anyone know any good HOWTOs to get me started? (Oh, and a device to stop time so I have time to actually work on it?)
[Update 8/16: This is a mad knowledge bomb from Mark via IRC:
15:06 <spruance> hey, keith
15:06 <spruance> thunderbird can already forward an arbitrary number of messages
15:06 <spruance> drag those messages to the “send” area of your compose window and they’ll be attached
15:06 <spruance> grab a thread handle to take the whole thread
15:07 <spruance> Similarly, you can highlight more than one message and right click and choose “foward as attachment”
Well, the arbitrary forwarding works, I just must never have multiply selected images. However, under Fedora Core 3, with Thunderbird 1.0.6-1.1.fc3 (20050720) the dragging the message into the compose/address aread doesn’t work. The attachment box opens, but no messages are attached. Mark reports this works on Mac and Windows. Damn Linux.]
13:42 <meekay> I was on a train once and the woman in front of me called her bank and started giving them identifying information over the phone.
13:42 <meekay> Name, birthdate, social security number…
13:43 <meekay> I was like, “I must not use my powers for evil… I must not use my powers for evil…”