BenV's notes

Hej readers,

I decided to work on making slackbuild.pl a bit more acceptable in terms of usability and looks. The reason for this is that the dialog program doesn’t exactly do what I want.
That is, it works…. but that’s pretty much all I can say about it. It doesn’t allow me to make a comined checkbox/menu thing that I want for my configure options part. Next to that it’s tedious to fork and parse its output all the time, and let’s not even get started about looks and input issues.
So I figured: hmm, dialog is made in ncurses, perl has a Curses lib…. let’s play! (continue reading…)

I just ran into this cute ‘top’ replacement called htop, thought I’d let you know.
If you don’t know what top is, you probably shouldn’t be here in the first place… 😉

After playing with it for a bit it looks like this on my machine (click for fullsize image):

Things I like about it:

• Fast responsive interface, and the good thing is that it feels a lot better than the original top does.
• Interface is intuitive, also makes good use of available space. Showing a ‘sort’ menu and closing it again after a choice is made, I like.
• Easy to nice/kill stuff without having to type pids like with top. Simply “browse” to your process and KILL KILL KILL!!!! 😉
• Cute features like bar/graph/led mode for your CPU etc.

And so far I have found no “bad” things about it yet, but migth still come 😉
Only possibly bad thing could be the ncurses requirement, but that shouldn’t be an issue.
Needless to say it worked fine with my slackbuild script.

Try it out and see if you like it yourself.

Or… not. Oh, the pokemon reference comes from the brilliant webcomic XKCD.

Usually I have little problems getting stuff to work on it, but as hardware gets older and support gets worse thing get more interesting.
First things first: I have no issues with ubuntu, they’re doing great work. In fact, the machine worked fine after installation, except for I can’t live with 800×600, so I wanted a better video driver.
Needless to say that means NON OPEN SOURCE GARBAGE FROM NVIDIA (ATI is just as bad btw). Although their binary driver usually ‘works’, you’re royally screwed if your system doesn’t meet their requirements. (continue reading…)

It seems to be update day today….

I felt like updating my shit today. Somehow I enjoy updates so I do it whenever I see interesting stuff.
So glancing through the slackware changelog I noticed a new Apache2 version (2.2.12 with a bunch of security updates). Meh, not my favorite piece of garbage to upgrade, but local upgrades were easy enough and also the remote (slackware 11, custom builds) ones went without hickups. (continue reading…)

Somewhere in my mailbox I found a link to Impulse. I’ve messed around with pulseaudio and have it running on my server together with mpd which allows for some network audio fun, but that’s not the story now. Back then I wondered if it would be possible to have a VU meter and stuff like that, but couldn’t find it. So when I ran into this I was curious (how implemented, is it any good, etc).

So what the fuck are screenlets? Looks cute, feels cute, and once you think about it for a bit you immediately realize that it’s cute for 10 minutes after which you’ll kill the thing because it slows down your PC and you never really look at it anyway, but regardless I feel like checking it out. (continue reading…)

In case I forget it again, the !@#$()*@$%*#$ product called “flash” has a 64 bit plugin at http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer10.html

Works in opera, just trash it into /usr/lib/opera/plugins…. why is that /usr/lib and not lib64? It’ll also use it from the mozilla dir, /usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins.

Since I quit playing World of Warcraft again a while ago (seriously Blizzard, what are you doing to that game?) I find myself enjoyed playing tons of other things. Funny thing is, most of the games I play are ancient. Games from the DOS era (which means DOSBOX, I love that product) like Master of Orion (and it’s sequel), Master of Magic, Paratrooper, One Must Fall: 2097 (which is freeware these days! Download it here), X-Com, System Shock, and the list goes on and on. Yeah, come to think of it…. the games they made back then were pretty brilliant, and it’s not just nostalgia. (continue reading…)

So what do you do when you’re looking for something to do while eating your bread in front of your computer?
(or coffee in case of early days). You read the daily news (slashdot, local garbage, kernel.org, happypenguin, you know the drill).
Anyway, I ran into another time wasting online game with properties that I like (RPG like, leveling, items, upgrades) called Billy Vs. SNAKEMAN.

Give it a shot if you’re bored 🙂

Oh, and they have a nice list of why to play, including “It’s free!” and “This list goes to eleven” 😉

Also, don’t blame me if you find yourself still clicking around while your coffee mug is empty again. I won’t refill it for you.

Billy Vs. SNAKEMAN

Oh yeah, here’s my char:

Be the Ultimate Ninja! Play Billy Vs. SNAKEMAN today!

So I was messing around with some new domain registrations, and just because I’m curious I tailed my tinydns logfile.
…. WHAT THE !@(#*!#%(* is THAT?!…. I think, as my eye catches a glimp of this:


[Wed Jul 29 16:20:46 2009] 213.73.***.** port:64500 id:383b * PTR db._dns-sd._udp.winnipeg.nl
[Wed Jul 29 16:20:46 2009] 213.132.***.*** port:11328 id:300b * PTR r._dns-sd._udp.winnipeg.nl
[Wed Jul 29 16:20:46 2009] 213.132.***.*** port:45174 id:0255 * PTR dr._dns-sd._udp.winnipeg.nl
[Wed Jul 29 16:20:46 2009] 213.132.***.*** port:48779 id:9e01 * PTR lb._dns-sd._udp.winnipeg.nl


Now, these things immediately reminded me of the ZeroConf/Bonjour/Avahi garbage. However: first of all, I don’t run that on my machine since it’s a relatively new install that doesn’t have it yet.
Second, those IPs…. they’re not mine. Whois tells me it’s Quicknet/multikabel/ziggo… which some of our friends and relatives have.
That’s the weird part here, I can’t stop wondering why they’re requesting my domain while they’re back at home, so they should have a new dhcp entry and ditched their “search” line in resolv.conf. (ignoring windows as an option for now).

Google tells me it’s indeed Bonjour DNS based “service discovery” related, great, looks interesting, but I’m not in the mood to mess with DNS now… at least not until I have a machine that can actually use it. I wonder who it was though…. 🙂

Not always I have to be negative about stuff…. ads for instance. They’re terribly kanker!

Take a reasonably fast site, tag in a few ads and *boom*. Your head explodes in anger when you accidentily mouseover some keyword/item that pops up a flash thingy… or maybe not flash but css mouseover crap… or whatever it is they do these days. Not only that, it takes 5 minutes to load the site  instead of 2 seconds, because the adservers are swamped and very slow. (continue reading…)