A time to compare where we are, to where we should be, to where would like to be…

And as is usual for most of humanity, we will all most likely decide: Screw that, we’ll try again next year.

Merry Christmas to all of you, and a very Happy New Year.

This is a massive loss, since the man’s work is the very reason for my career.

So long, dmr, and maybe now would be a good time to join the demigodic party…

printf "`cal| sed \"s/^/ /;s/$/ /;\
  /^ Su.*/d;/.*\`date +%B\ %Y\`.*/d;/^$/d;\
  s/\`date +%e\` /\\\\\033[1;37m\`date +%e\`\\\\\033[0m /g;\"`"

I will admit to still using the previous version, though, since I prefer the font bolding in that one.

Rather subversive, I know, but we all have our weaknesses.

One go the packages I make a habit of installing, and updating, is JWZ‘s Mac build of Xscreensaver. The biggest down-side of doing that, though, is that, unlike in Linux, it doesn’t by default display quotes the fortune files.

The ability do so is, of course, still very much there, but the Mac build does not have an easy way of enabling it.

Herewith, then, my workflow to get things back to “sanity” once I’ve upgraded.

Firstly, make sure that you have installed fortune from the ports (or any other way that takes your fancy):

eroux@smaug:~$ sudo port install fortune
--->  Fetching archive for fortune
--->  Fetching fortune
--->  Verifying checksum(s) for fortune
--->  Extracting fortune
--->  Applying patches to fortune
--->  Configuring fortune
--->  Building fortune
--->  Staging fortune into destroot
--->  Installing fortune @6.2.0-RELEASE_0+universal
--->  Activating fortune @6.2.0-RELEASE_0+universal
--->  Cleaning fortune
eroux@smaug:~$ 

Once you can run fortune and get a result, you are ready to continue:

eroux@smaug:~$ fortune
I always had a repulsive need to be something more than human.
                                                -- David Bowie
eroux@smaug:~$ type fortune
fortune is hashed (/opt/local/bin/fortune)
eroux@smaug:~$

Now you need the following patch, which we’ll use to convince Xscreensaver that we know what we’re doing:

eroux@norbert:~$ cat <<EOF >~/xscreensaver-text.patch 
--- xscreensaver-text.pre   2011-03-01 18:06:46.000000000 +0200
+++ xscreensaver-text       2011-03-01 18:07:05.000000000 +0200
@@ -247,6 +247,7 @@
   elsif ($text_mode eq '1') { $text_mode = 'literal'; }
   elsif ($text_mode eq '2') { $text_mode = 'file';    }
   elsif ($text_mode eq '3') { $text_mode = 'url';     }
+  elsif ($text_mode eq '4') { $text_mode = 'program'; }

   $v = get_cocoa_pref_1 ($id, "textLiteral");
   $text_literal = $v if defined ($v);
EOF
eroux@norbert:~$ 

All we’re doing here is adding a program text mode to Xscreensaver, which we will then use via defaults to get fortune to run under its auspices.

Now we need to update all the files that actually could use some fortune:

for I in Apple2 FlipText FontGlide NoseGuy Phosphor StarWars XMatrix; do
    cd "/Library/Screen Savers/${I}.saver/Contents/Resources/" && \
        patch -p0 < ~/xscreensaver-text.patch && cd;
done

Now we get to test one of the screen savers. My favourite is one called Phosphor, so lets start with that:

defaults -currentHost write \
  org.jwz.xscreensaver.Phosphor \
  textProgram "/opt/local/bin/fortune";

This tells Phosphor which program to run, but not yet that it should actually use it. Let’s do that now, why don’t we?

defaults -currentHost write \
  org.jwz.xscreensaver.Phosphor \
  textMode 4;

Here you see us actually using the mode we defined in the patch, earlier. I had to change the scale of the fonts to get the display to fit on my screen, so if it’s too big or too small, you can change that from within the screensaver configuration window.

eroux@smaug:~$ defaults -currentHost read org.jwz.xscreensaver.Phosphor
{
    scale = 3;
    textMode = 4;
    textProgram = "/opt/local/bin/fortune";
}
eroux@smaug:~$

All done… Now you just need to sit back and wait for your screen to lock… Or just press Ctrl-Shift-Eject if you’re too impatient, of course.

Some alternatives to consider: Since the fortune you run is the same program you would find on any Linux machine, you could use “/opt/local/bin/fortune -s” to get only the short quotes, if you wish, or even “/opt/local/bin/fortune -o” for some… other quotes.

What makes GeekTool cool, is that it allows you to embed different items into your Mac desktop, so it is quite easy to use it to display a text file, for instance (like your system log) or to scrape a ticker-tape from the web and use that to keep track of your favourite Stock Price, but it is also possible to do much cooler stuff…

A quick example of what is possible has been shown on LifeHacker, here, where they embed the venerable Unix “cal” command in the desktop, and using some “sed” slight-of-hand they even mark the current day on the calendar.

“Very Cool”, I thought, “except…”

Well, yes, except. I would have preferred not losing the day, but rather marking it in some way.

But before I get to that, I need to digress a bit first, though.

There are some thinks I would really like in this world. Peace. Children being able to play together for more than a few minutes without fighting. Winning a big one on the Euro Lottery. GeekTool being able to display HTML. But alas…

And since GeekTool would not allow me to embed HTML (or any other markup I could tell: I would have settled for Markdown or even RTF) I tried to work around the problem…

After a couple of iterations (and careful selection of the font GeekTool used to display my resultant calendar) I finally settled on the following:

cal| sed "s/^/ /;s/$/ /;s/.*`date +'%B %Y'`.*//;/^$/d;\
s/ `date +%e` /[`date +%e`]/g;"

This got me a nice-looking calendar with the day-of-week marked by some parentheses:

 Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa 
                 1  2 
  3  4  5  6  7  8  9 
 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 
 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 
[24]25 26 27 28 29 30
 31

In doing this, I also got rid of the Month and Year since I already have another Geeklet that displays that on my Desktop:

That displayed okay, I guess, but I was still (slightly) disappointed. Then it struck me: I was being an utter dunce. I had already been overlaying the other script Geeklets to get the Date/Time display I had wanted; there was nothing stopping me from generating two calendars, one on top of the other, one with the current day edited out, and the other only containing the current day, in the correct spot. That way the second could be displayed in another colour and give me the result I had been seeking.

So, without further ado, I cooked up the following. First, the easy one. Here is the script for displaying the calendar with the current day masked out:

cal| sed "s/^/ /;s/$/ /;s/^ Su.*//;s/.*`date +'%B %Y'`.*//;\
/^$/d;s/`date +%e` /   /g;"

The second stumped me for a bit, till I realised I was doing my usual: over-thinking the problem. This is the script I used in the end:

cal| sed "s/^/ /;s/$/ /;s/^ Su.*//;s/.*`date +'%B %Y'`.*//;\
/^$/d;s/ `date +%e` / ## /g;s/[0-9]/ /g;s/ ## / `date +%e` /"

In these I also deleted the Day strip at the top and added a Geeklet containing the days of the week in the more traditional three-letter format. By dropping the font of that to 18 points as opposed to the other two’s 24 points, I managed to for it all in perfectly:

Now all of them fit together rather nicely, and I’m a happy(er) person.

For anyone curious enough to know how I had all of these placed to get them to work together (both of you), here it is:

For everyone else… I apologise?

Oh, and if you’re wondering about my Desktop Wallpaper, it’s Vlad Gerasimov‘s Mac OS-X Lion wallpaper…

Apple is offering free repairs to those with Macs and iOS devices who had their equipment damaged in the earthquake and tsunami that struck Japan back in March.

A guide on Apple’s Japanese website (Google translation) states the company is offering free repairs to Macs, Cinema Displays, iPhones, iPads, and iPod touches for people who live in the municipalities covered be the Disaster Relief Act of 2011.

For those affected, Apple will pick up and repair your equipment at no charge, then deliver it back to you once the repairs are complete. The company is also offering free access to the AppleCare Service & Support Line for those who can solve issues over the telephone. Apple has been keen to help those in Japan who have been affected by the recent disasters: It has opened up its stores as ‘communication centers’ and allowed people to access the Internet to contact their loved ones through email, FaceTime and Skype. It has also offered donations from app proceeds and allowed customers to donate to the Red Cross through iTunes.

Maybe some lessons to be taken here by the rest of Tech…

--- Lions.old/lionc.tex 1994-05-19 04:40:49.000000000 +0200
+++ Lions.new/lionc.tex 2011-04-07 15:38:14.000000000 +0200
@@ -1,7 +1,16 @@
 %
 % The Lion's Commentary, file lionc.tex, version 1.3, 18 May 1994
+% Updated 07 April 2011 to generate PDF Bookmarks
+% and to fit LaTeX2e slightly better
 %
-\documentstyle[twoside,fancyheadings]{article}
+\documentclass[twoside,a4paper]{article}
+\usepackage{fancyhdr}
+\usepackage[plainpages=false]{hyperref}
+\hypersetup{%
+    pdfborder = {0 0 0},
+    pdftitle = {Commentary on 6ed UNIX OS},
+    pdfauthor = {John Lions}
+}
 \font\twlrm = cmr10 scaled \magstep1
 
 % Set the page dimensions
@@ -38,7 +47,7 @@
 
 % Set up the headings for the document
 
-\setlength{\headrulewidth}{0cm}
+\renewcommand{\headrulewidth}{0pt}
 \renewcommand{\sectionmark}[1]{\markboth{#1}{}}
 \renewcommand{\subsectionmark}[1]{\markright{#1}}
 \rhead[{\it UNIX 6th Edition Commentary}]{\it \leftmark}

If you have no idea what I’m talking about… Well, then, erm… Never mind… :-)

As someone who spent more than just a few years in the military and who had been involved in a few riots, and you have to have been in a riot in South Africa in the mid to late eighties to really understand the significance of that statement, I do know the fear and uncertainty involved in standing in a line; just a few soldiers against thousands of rioters. I can still remember the anxiety and can still actually remember “tasting”‡ the fear.

What I can also remember is standing there with rifle uncocked and pointing down. We were warned that there would be actual hell to pay, court-martial style, if we ever shot a civilian; no matter the reason. The rioters were of course not aware of it, or if they were, were not always believing it, but that was immaterial; our job was not to quell the riot but to marginally control it; it was to keep people not involved as safe as we could. The rioters would only very rarely attempt to break through the lines and make our job impossible. Even in those bad old days, the military was respected by the civilians; the police… not as much.

It was during those times that I had learnt to equate the tasks of the soldiers and the police to those in certain medieval city-states: the difference between the Watch and the Guard.

In those cities who might actually have had both, the guard’s primary task was to defend the gates and wall of the city, the watch was to police the city and the wards… Well as much policing as happened in those times. Point being, while these groups would support each other in crises, these groups had their own expertise and zones of authority: the guard would watch for external threat and the watch would police the city.

It is just wrong then, that a “weapon” (there is no other way of really describing the military machine) would be used by their own government on their own citizens. The very existence of military forces is to protect the people, not to oppress them.

A note to the soldiers involved in this: these actions will come back to haunt you, and when it does please remember your beating up the poor paramedics while you lie there bleeding after it has done so…

The wheel turns. It always does…

‡An erstwhile buddy of mine, the joker of the platoon, would always claim you can smell fear… It smells like sh… Ah. Never-mind…

Be that as it may, however, it’s been quite some time since I’ve been witness to one as sad as this.

Nokia has been struggling for some years now, trying to fend off the upstarts who initially snapped at its heels and eventually started to overtake it as a company, providing more capable and able handsets with more consolidated product lines and much more modern interfaces.

Part of Nokia’s problem was that they’ve been stuck in a backwards compatible API (mostly by choice) and took too long to recognise the problem and develop an upgrade strategy. They eventually bought “TrollTech” (the company behind KDE’s QT widget set) but, again, took way too long to mature their exit strategy.

Now, in the age-old mind-set of “when you’ve hit rock-bottom you start digging” Nokia has started digging…

On Friday 11 Feb 2011 they’ve announced that Microsoft will become the new provider of Operating Systems (in the form of Windows Phone 7) for all Nokia smartphone handsets. Thus fittingly ending a series of fairly stupid moves with an absolute humdinger and finishing the Finnish era. Or at least start to.

Update:

Can you say “ouch?”:

NYSE:NOK at Google Finance

Though, spare a thought for those poor buggers reading this via the RSS feed to Facebook, and not on this blog. They’ll be even more in the dark…

But, to return the… <dramatic pause> promise.

Here’s the link to the Widgets I use to display my “Currently Reading” (as well as my “Previously Read” section) as well as the badges I display on the blog:

• Currently Reading
• Badges

Do with them what you will…

I suppose there’s no point in having dynamic sidebars if you don’t do something, erm…, dynamic with it, is there?

I have managed to now stop using “Custom Fields” in posts to populate the “Currently Reading” section (it had the advantage of time-stamping the posts with the primary book I was busy with, but it was also a bit of a schlep to keep up to date) instead just updating the widget directly…

I’ll put them up for download on WordPress’ Website as soon as my Plugin Access had been granted.

And people like Zapiro seems to be at the forefront of that action. In this cartoon, he asks a very important question, and one I would love to have seen answered…

Wishful thinking, I know…

Mzilikazi wa Afrika, after being arrested, released and then threatened by the NPA, now has had his charges formally dropped. But, it has to be added, only provisionally… This is also known as throwing mud with the hope of getting some of it to stick.

What this is really known as, and I’m certain the ANC agrees — or at least they should — is an extreme abuse of power.

We’re all aware that the Nationalist Government were past masters of this type of action, but it seems that the ANC has taken to the lesson extremely well; so well, in fact that the student might still become the master.

Stephen Grootes, in another brilliant piece in The Daily Maverick covers the “Stench of Abuse of Power” that lingers over the Mzilikazi wa Africa saga…

Since the proposed “Media Tribunal” is meant to serve as a recourse to the poor (embattled politicians), I fully expect that Stephen will become one of their first supressions. Erm, I meant “rectifications”, of course… And the bloody ANC politicians wonder why everyone with half a brain is edgy about it?

Now here I’m not even talking about your latest attempt at limiting press freedom (Good luck with that, by the way. After all, we do live in a constitutional democracy. You know, the one your forebears fought for? Before the ANC became a bunch of power mongers? You remember!) Anyway, where was I… Oh yes. We’re not talking you press-freedom attempts.

We’re not even talking about the fact that you disbanded the Scorpions (You remember them too, of course. They were the ones who would arrest corrupt politicians… Yeah, them) and replaced them with the (ahem) Hawks.

No, were talking of your latest attempt to use those self-same Hawks to arrest a journalist on political grounds, and the have them keep them (You used to call that Detention Without Trial when the Apartheid Government did that to you guys, remember… Those were the days, eh? You could do whatever you wanted an no-one would even think of querying you..) even though the prosecutor claims they have no case…

Stephen Grootes (who I’m certain is next on the Hawks‘ list of people to arrest-and-detain — I wonder if you guys will torture him?) has written quite a nice analysis of the situation…

Oh, I wonder whose those nice people in uniform outside my door is? More of yours?

Bastards! There. I feel better now.

This intrigued me, but I could not get it to work at all. Until I actually read the Texinfo log message, of course.

Just in case I ever forget how I did it, here it is:

@c %**start Sans-Serif
@c Sans-Serif does not work too well yet. Drat. Needs some work...
@c @set SANSSERIF

@ifset SANSSERIF
@tex
@sf
@setfont@secrm@sfbshape{11}{@magstep1}@endcsname
@setfont@chaprm@sfbshape{11}{@magstep2}@endcsname
@setfont@titlerm@sfbshape{11}{@magstep3}@endcsname
@setfont@ssecrm@sfbshape{11}{@magstephalf}@endcsname
@end tex
@end ifset
@c %**end Sans-serif Fonts

This is currently commented out, since it breaks all kinds of headings, indexes and other miscellaneous mark-up rather badly, but it is a beginning…

And hopefully this saves someone else a bit of frustration as well…

More than a year ago (on 18th October 2007, to be precise) I wrote a post entitled “Of universal truth…” in which I asked for the source of a poem I had read as a youth.

And today I received an email from Tim Neutel from the Netherlands (at least, that where his email originated).

Here, thanks to Tim, is the poem in original form:

The station is ominous at midnight
Hope is a dead letter
Time to change trains for something better
No local train now
Long since departed
Now way of getting back to where you started.

What impressed me more than anything, though, is the fact that I recalled it so well, if not quite perfectly. It had indeed made a lasting impression on me as I had mentioned.

And the source?

It was from a book entitled “The Night of the Fox” by Jack Higgins…

Thanks Tim!

And a very happy new year to you all, friend and foe alike.

2008 had been much better to me than 2007 had been, but that’s not really saying much: it’s kinda like saying that a frontal lobotomy is preferable to having your head chopped off. That might be true, but we’d still prefer to avoid either of the two outcomes, won’t we?

So here I go again: I’m starting off the new year in a new job (quite literally, in fact: I’m reporting for duty on the second) which is kinda scary in the current economic market. I’ve had to buy a new car since some arseho “kind-hearted person” decided to torch my old one. Fun times…

Being as that may, I’m also starting the new year on a clean slate, forgiving all of those who had betrayed me. I might not wish to be friends with them, or mix with them even, but I do forgive them.

So… Have a happy new year all of you, and may love and happiness haunt your doorsteps.

Eugéne out…

This world really pisses me off at times…