BenV's notes

These guys are so stupid, they never stop to amuse me.
Look what they’re coming up with now…. A new digital format.
What is it with these guys and being completely out of whack? Why on earth would people want yet another format? (probably crippled too).
MP3 files work fine for most, put them in a nice little directory structure, add a picture file and a lyrics file, and you have what they propose. Only better since it doesn’t need a special decoder/player.

Record companies: please die. Now.

So while messing around with some perl/curses stuff I got fancy with colors and soon found out about the limited support of colors in terminals and therefore also Curses.
Anyway, I made this little “fractal plasma” thingy with it, see if you can get it running 😉
It’s not really a fractal plasma, so don’t get technical on that, but it describes it best I think.

To get it running, open up your favorite terminal that supports 256 colors and allows palette changing – I found both xterm and urxvt to work.
Make sure your TERM variable is set to something that allows this, for instance in urxvt:

$ export TERM=rxvt-256color
$ ./fractplasm.pl

or this worked for me with xterm:

$ export TERM=xterm-256color
$ ./fractplasm.pl


Something like this is the result:

Enjoy!

Messing around on one of my machines I checked a timestamp on a file…. and noticed “Huh, didn’t I just touch it?”.
ls told me the file was about 12 hours old. Interesting, since it was just created.

# date
Fri Aug 7 10:08:09 CDT 2009

What the…. CDT ? When did we move? 😉

# ls -la /etc/*time*
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 36 2008-03-14 04:42 /etc/localtime -> /usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/Amsterdam

Well, not recently… that’s for sure. (continue reading…)

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…)