PresidentBeef.com

Library Thing

A while ago I started adding some of my books to this LibraryThing after deciding the Facebook application I was using was lame. Anyway, you can see a part of my pile of books right here, though you should be aware that it is heavily biased towards recent purchases and science fiction. I haven’t really gotten to any of my non-fiction books (they tend to be heavier and harder to throw around for some reason.) LibraryThing allows you to catalog up to 200 books for free, so if I am to add all of my books I will need to pay the (relatively small) fee for a lifetime membership. But I am waiting to see if it is really all that useful for me.

Fish and Turtles

Yesterday I bought the turtles a bunch of fish to snack on. Last time I bought them fish, the turtles ate a couple and then very, very slowly worked their way through the rest of them, except for one. This time, I had asked the PetCo guy for six fish, but he gave me around twelve because several were really, really tiny.

The turtles have eaten them all, the only fish surviving is the one that was left from the last bunch.

Little killing machines.

Magnet

Getting a refrigerator magnet from a taxi company with not just their number, but the numbers for local police and hospitals, is the kind of thing that makes me happy.

Comments

You know have the ability to share your thoughtful insights on my clever and informative blog posts. Of course, if you were reading them through Facebook that probably wasn’t really a huge concern in the first place… I wasn’t really planning on adding comments any time soon, but I happened across this Disqus thing which manages comment systems for you. You can add it to any webpage (which is good, because how many people have heard of Ozimodo, much less attempt to support it?) and it takes care of pretty much everything. Kind of neat.

Updates and the Horizon

Well, the conference paper that has been delayed again and again since the beginning of this year has finally been submitted to WICON so I feel a sudden sense of relief and release. A meeting with my advisor today set out a fairly ambitious (I think) schedule for my next projects, but I am excited to get started on it, though that may just be because it is something new. In celebration, Kingdoms of Ahln now has its own little server, meaning it is actually accessible to people other than myself. I plan to be putting a lot of time into it in the remaining summertime. I’ve had a lot of ideas bouncing around in my little head, but they are pretty worthless if they stay there! It’s also time to finally start working on my mom’s website for her new independent practice, which I am sure she will appreciate. And what about Pi, No Forks and Black Orange? Believe it or not, I do have some song things kicking around, but I have not had the time nor energy to record them. But maybe I will now. My instruments and recording stuff look sad and lonely. I’m pretty much done with Sqwee for now, I think. I still use it, but haven’t had any burning desire to improve it or add any new features. Of course, maybe if other people used it and made suggestions… One other thing I’m planning is maybe adding some way of leaving comments on this blogatron…though probably nobody would. Hrm…

Apartments

Why do people think that being located right next to an interstate is a "great location"?

What I've Done

Huh?

Three years after buying The Pocket Guide to TCP/IP Sockets for my networking class, I have realized the title of this book is a little misleading. No, it’s not the “pocket” part. It will actually fit into the back pocket of my pants. It’s the “TCP” part. Why in the world would you specify that it is about TCP/IP sockets and then brazenly have an entire chapter on “Using UDP Sockets”?? That makes NO SENSE! I just realized I have no idea why I am writing this.

Tiny App Launcher

Story I just upgraded my lab desktop to Mandriva 2008.1. As usual, my first action was to install Xfce. That all worked well until I hit my usual Alt+F2 to launch a program. Nothing happened. I tried again. Still nothing. So I checked out the keyboard shortcuts, thinking they might be messed up. After actually finding where Alt+F2 gets set (there are a few different places in Xfce where keybindings are created), I saw it was indeed set up to run xfrun4, Xfce’s little run dialog. I headed to the console (another aggravation: I am used to using gnome-terminal for my console, because I like its tabs and general feel. But it is way too slow for some reason and, even more importantly, I cannot figure out how to make the cursor stop blinking. It drives me nuts) and ran xfrun4 from there. Result: segfault After poking around to see if there are any other little things like xfrun4 (something I have done before, actually), I gave up and wrote my own. Requirements * Zerenity * GTK2 * Ruby/GTK2 Code

#!/bin/env ruby
require "rubygems"
require "zerenity/entry"
require "zerenity/warning"

loop do
        begin
                program = Zerenity.Entry(:title => "Run")
                if program
                        exec program
                end
                break
        rescue Interrupt
                break
        rescue Errno::ENOENT
                Zerenity.Warning(:text => "Program not found.",
                                 :title => "Error")
        rescue Exception => e
                Zerenity.Warning(:text => e.inspect, :title => "Error")
        end
end

Thrilling Conclusion I dropped this in a file in /usr/bin/ and changed the keybinding…and that’s it. Works well enough, though it would be nice to have autocomplete/history stuff. But Zerenity does not have that (yet).

Am I the only one?

Seriously, am I the only one who wonders who decided to put the ‘SEAS Cafe’ (basically a tiny little convenience store in Boelter Hall right next to a bunch of chemistry labs? I’ve been thinking about this for a while, especially those days when the odor coming from those labs is really foul. So today I paid a little bit closer attention. One of the labs a few doors down from the Cafe has a lovely “radioactive materials” sign on it, but – even better – two labs directly adjacent to the Cafe have “biohazard” signs! Now, the likelihood of something going wrong is probably pretty low, nothing to worry too much about. However, the likelihood of something going very wrong if something does go wrong…well, I would guess it is quite high. But…who cares, I guess? It’s convenient :)