flog

It seems the file system viewer feature maybe Cygwin specific. I was unable to reproduce the browser feature on Mandrake. Since the machine I installed Ubuntu on a week and a half ago has no keyboard and is not networked, I can't check that one out at the moment.

Version info:

• Cygwin VI - Vi IMproved 6.3 (2004 June 7, compiled Jun 8 2004 10:02:10)
• Mandrake VI - Vi IMproved 6.3 (2004 June 7, compiled Feb 2 2005 10:13:38)

I, for one, welcome our new robotic overlords.

She scares me with her
split tooth thunder and all those
dark rock formations.

Izzy Janko was the "bad guy" in a really crappy spy short story I wrote in 7th grade. As far as I knew, I pulled the name out of the late Cold War Era air...and yet some 18 years later there are at least 3 websites with that phrase on them.

What are the odds of just that phrase showing up? Surely astronomical*, ergo, there must be some governing intelligence in the universe.

Are you going to claim that a mechanic who uses the computer in your car to tell him you have a bad sparkplug is a bad mechanic? Or are you going to be quietly grateful that he was able to fix your problem for $50 in 1/2 an hour instead of the old school "hard core" method of slowly replacing part after part until you figure out which was the broken one, which costs you lots of time and money?

Since this is /., I'm going to denounce anyone who buys pre-made cars instead of smelting and molding the steel themselves. Let's face it, those who don't design and implement the whole engine and drivetrain, on a lathe, by hand, are girly men at best. Furthermore, if you ever did use a mechanic, I'm going to question your worth as a human being and mock your nickname. In this case, I'll observe that the parent is named "captain craptacular," which hardly inspires confidence.

Christian transformational ministry or a "stop smoking" website?

I must have a finely tuned Jesus detector because I was sure this was propaganda after about 2 paragraphs despite the lack of overt jesusosity.

Maybe I had subliminally perceived some of the sidebar titles, though I had consciously ignored them. Or maybe it was the misuse of words in an attempt to appear intelligent. Either way, I just knew that when I clicked on the "re-think" link, it was gonna be the jesus hard sell.

I just discovered these two gems yesterday.

• You can use VI as a file system browser. Typing this:
  vi /
  displays all the files and directories in /. "?" then displays the shortcuts used for navigating the directories and loading files.
• vimdiff file1 file2
  will give you a visual diff of the two files. vimdiff works in console mode and gvimdiff (if you have it) will work in your GUI.

• Star Wars: A New Hope in 168k. ( Mirror)
• Hitler playing the banjo.

I'm wondering why Winamp doesn't display the title that is entered in a PLS or an extended M3U playlist file for a SHN file. Even when a title is explicitly defined it is ignored and the filename alone is displayed. WTF?

Well I've finally got X11 Forwarding working on my Cygwin installations. In fact, I'm typing this into an xterm window running a bash shell on my home machine, with the display showing up on my work machine. (The tricky part, that I wouldn't have figured out without Google was that the XWIN server must be running on *both* ends of the connection.) I now realize that there's not much I can do with my new found remote X skills because outside of xterm there's not really any other applications that run under Cygwin/X. It was an interesting xercise, though. For the 3 of you that will hit this page through a Google search on "X11 Forwarding" "Cygwin" here's what I did to get it working:

1. Install Cygwin (including Cygwin/X) on your work machine, marvin.
2. Install Cygwin (including Cygwin/X and OpenSSH) on your home machine, eddie.
3. Configure SSHD on eddie, making sure no firewalls are blocking the SSH port. In sshd_config you need the entry X11Forwarding Yes
4. Startup the XWin server by running startxwin.bat or startxwin.sh on both marvin and eddie. I recommend commenting out the penultimate command that invokes xterm, so that the script just runs XWin in its multi-window mode (both scripts are in /usr/X11R6/bin/).
5. On marvin, download PuTTY and setup a session pointing to eddie. In the Connections>SSH>Tunnels section make sure "Enable X11 Forwarding" is checked.
6. Open the Session you setup above and logon to eddie.
7. In the bash shell running on eddie (i.e., in the puTTY window) type xterm &, to open up an xterm window that displays on marvin (but which is running its shell on eddie).

That's all from memory just now, so I may have skipped something minor, but it is free advice - you get what you pay for.

I have this urge to be-englisc modern English. (It seems I'm not alone.) But I've never been very successful. My most recent efforts:

• A friend and I brewed a Sierra Nevada Pale Ale clone named Hrithe Ridge (a clever calque of the New World Spanish, I thought).
• yit (originally git in OE) for ye two. Numerous Indo-European languages had a second person plural that meant "the two of you" (an argument could be made that ModEng still does in the phrase "you two", but that seems to me more of a work around, due to the lack of compact pronoun than anything else). Anyway, I actually had an occassion to use yit in an email message and I took it. It felt good.

So, why not revive an Anglo-Saxon word today?

What a beautifully thorough slam on KidRock in the midst of high praise for R.L. (from this Amazon review):

Burnside's eclectic brew of funk, hip-hop, blues and rock is as tasteful

a reinvention of a storied sound as anyone could have asked for. Even the 

unfortunate presence of Kid Rock - a talentless poser who seems bent on 

mooching off the reputation of every elder statesman in the business - 

cannot distract from Burnside's energetic and menacing vocal performance 

throughout the set. This is not an attempt at dressing up an older 

artist's sound to make him seem hip to a younger audience. It is a 

startlingly successful (and refreshing) experiment in which Burnside's 

authenticity is never compromised by production.

  

A delightfully chill amalgam of surfer and desert rock from stoner rock legends, Alfredo Hernandez (Kyuss), Mario Lalli (Fatso Jetson), and Gary Arce (The Sort of Quartet, Oddio Gasser).

Almost before we spoke, we cursed.

It's a one of a kind piece.

That was some dash cunning on Churchill's part.

Rabbit stalls -- or not.
Oil buzzer sounds. Strange car stops.
I am terrified.

Just in case anyone was wondering. Killing SSHD and then immediately logging out will render you unable to get back into your machine. Just in case you were wondering.

xxxx@EDDIE ~

$ uptime

Uptime v1.0.0

14 days, 14 hrs, 14 mins, 14 secs