some things

I haven't posted anything in forever, so I thought I'd just give a quick overview of some of the things I've been doing:

1) Fun with DD-WRT

I installed new, open-source firmware on my router, which lets me do all kinds of fun things, like actually log what my firewall is doing. I set it up to use DNSMasq, which is a cool little bit of software that allows DNS forwarding for networks using NAT, so that I can assign pretend DNS names to stuff on my network. DD-WRT has many more options than my previous firmware; you can boost the transmit power of the wireless access point, create all kinds of priority settings for different protocols, machines, and ports on the router itself, and (possibly the funnest thing about it), you can set it up to use SNMP, which means that I can finally log traffic on my network.

I do this using the second thing I've been working on:

2) Cacti

Cacti lives on a web server and makes pretty graphs using data it collects via SNMP. Here's what it looks like:
Obviously there is not a ton of traffic on my network, but I still think it's fun.

The new DNSMasq setup also made it easier to make my web server available to the network,
which I am very excited about. I made a nice home page for it that allows me to easily access all the crap that is running on my server:

3) Web projects

I've also been doing two web projects lately. The first is the Proper Bostonian Quilter's Guild site, which Caitlin and I have been working on for some time. It's almost done and looks a little something like this:

That's the gallery page, currently in its development stages, but you get the idea.

I've also been doing the new Infolink website for GSLIS, which has been fun. This is by far the fastest I've ever put together a website of this size, although it's not exactly from scratch: to do it, I had to sort of reverse engineer the new GSLIS website. This was pretty entertaining, and after doing it, I have to say that Firebug is awesome.

I think that's all for the moment. Maybe more later . . .

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mouse functionality in virtualbox

Well, I finally got it working - in fact, I'm typing this from my openSUSE virtual machine! I am rapidly running out of hard drive space, but it sure is fun. So, as my way of giving back to the community (and by community, I mean the three people who read this), I'm reposting the fix. I found it here:

http://www.tipstrs.com/tip/8159/Getting-the-mouse-working-in-an-Ubuntu-Virtualbox

It required adding the following lines to the end of /etc/X11/xorg.conf:

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Configured Mouse"
Driver "vboxmouse"
Option "CorePointer"
EndSection

Now, I'm going to go ahead and state the obvious, because it took a long time before I remembered to do this every time I needed to: you need to be root to edit configuration files, so make sure you open your text editor as root.

Have fun!

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fun with installing stuff

Installing and playing with virtualbox is one of my two halfway decent accomplishments this week. See? I have goals. They're just stupid.

So here's Windows 7 Beta running on my Linux machine using virtualbox (thanks Sun! so cool!):


Of course, I am still having terrible, TERRIBLE trouble getting my mouse to work with virtualbox. I really have to fix this at some point, but at the moment, I'm impatient, so I've been learning a LOT of keyboard shortcuts.

And here's my other accomplishment for the week:


That's Damn Small Linux running on the old Thinkpad that Leslie gave us. I tried Linux Mint at first, but the Thinkpad only has 256MB of RAM, and it was pretty pissed off and wouldn't install. In fact, there was some obvious strain just from trying to run Gnome off the CD, so I figured the simplest option was the best.

By the way, this was preceeded by an unsuccessful string of attempts to install anything that would boot on this hard drive. First I tried the CD drive, which failed at varying points, all of which were before a LiveCD could even load. Then I tried booting from a USB stick, but the board won't support booting from USB. Then Bill went digging around the other two Thinkpads to see if there was a working optical drive, which there wasn't. Then I tried taking out the hard drive and installing Linux on it using one of those USB converters. This not only wasn't bootable (for reasons unknown), but also overwrote my bootloader every time I did it, which got to be a major pain in the ass. Then, finally, my father was kind enough to lend us his old Thinkpad. The DVD drive from that computer did have the same connector, so I finally loaded Mint from the LiveCD and tried to install it. And failed. Because the computer barely had enough memory to run it off the CD. So then I tried DSL, which worked spectacularly and resulted in a nice, fully functional laptop, complete with Linux.

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chivalry

Well, someone finally said it better than I could.

I dug this up after I read an excerpt from it in Jessica Valenti's new book. (Her blog, Feministing, is linked in the right menu, and is awesome.)

The operative paragraph:

"Did feminism kill chivalry? I don’t think so, but I wouldn’t complain if it did. There’s a difference between being chivalrous and being nice or polite. Opening a door for someone because you got to the door first is both nice and polite; making a huge production of opening a door for a woman in the hopes that she’ll see what a chivalrous dude you are and fuck you (and then getting all pissy when she doesn’t respond how you want her to) is not polite or nice. And that’s the thing with chivalry: It always demands something in return. If you’re being nice to me because you like me and you’re the kind of person who is nice to people you like, then that’s great. If you’re being nice to me because you’re hoping to get something out of it, or if you think you’re entitled to sex or a relationship with me because you were nice and “chivalrous,” you can go fuck yourself. See how that works?"

The article she's talking about actually contains this paragraph:

"And so emerged a group of warrior princesses affectionately referred to as Feminazis; lean, mean, emasculating machines in power suits who proved to the world that women are intelligent, strong, capable and incredibly frightening. “I am woman, hear me roar!” they yelled."

This same idea of women being "frightening" comes up in later in the book, as well, in the section on financial success and, basically, who pays for dinner. Jessica says:

"A September 2007 article in The New York Times explored the supposedly recent trend of young women making more money than their significant others and how it has affected their dating lives : 'Women are encountering forms of hostility they weren't prepared to meet, and are trying to figure out how to balance pride in their accomplishments against their perceived need to bolster the egos of the men they date.' [Ahem. Maybe it would be best to tell anyone expressing hostility at your success to either grow up or get lost?] . . . When I discussed this article on Feministing.com, one male commenter (who shall remain nameless) wrote, "How could a guy every feel needed in a relationship where his partner completely outperformed him?"

Yeah. What else could women possibly ever look for in a man besides someone to provide financially?

This is very tied up with the chivalry thing, at least in my mind. Do these men really think of themselves as such worthless sexual partners, companions, and friends that if chivalry and picking up the check are gone, they're left without a playbook?

And I didn't even get into the "nice guy" thing, though Jill Filopovic does if you read the blog entry I linked to up top.

I mean, I know I live in some sort of happy liberal bubble, but . . . really?

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midnight snack

I realize that it's bad to eat at night. But sometimes, like tonight, when I'm stressed and certain people and cats are restless, I really want something to munch on while I try to decide what the hell to do with myself.

I often wind up making fried rice, because I usually have everything in the house to make a good meal out of it that doubles for breakfast as well. It's fun, because it's different every time depending on what's in the fridge.

This time, I had about a quarter of a block of tofu, which I cooked in some canola oil with a dash of sesame oil in it:

Then, when it started to brown a little, onions and garlic:

Then leftover brown rice:


Thai basil:
Some cilantro, along with a little soy sauce, fish sauce, and garlic chili sauce, and then a couple of eggs:



And at the last minute, a little brown sugar and some scallions. I squeezed some lime over it too, which was delicious, and of course had a little more chili sauce, because it's awesome.The other nice thing about this is that, all told, it's got to take probably 15 minutes. If you keep crushed garlic around, and if you tear the cilantro by hand and leave the thai basil whole, basically the only prep you have to do is chopping the onion, scallions and tofu. Other than that, it's just throwing things in a pan. And of course, there are a lot fewer dishes to do if you don't measure anything.

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grub: a hot mess

This is just a word of warning: if you are trying to make a bootable flash drive, be prepared.

It turns out that when you do this, at least with Ubuntu Hardy, it can kinda sorta mess with the master boot record on your hard drive. A little.

I really feel the need to reiterate these instructions, in hopes of being even a little helpful to someone else, maybe preventing the several moments of sheer unadulterated panic I experienced before I realized that I could fix a broken bootloader, and in fact I've done it before and it really shouldn't be that difficult.

By the way, the grub error was Error 21.

So, there are two options here. Number one is to run the grub-install script:
(http://www.pendrivelinux.com/grub-error-21-after-full-install-to-usb-hard-drive/)

1) Get yourself a root terminal with sudo su
2) Run fdisk -l and find your boot disk/partition (in this example, let's say it's hda).
3) Run grub-install /dev/hda (but, you know, replace hda with whatever it is on your system).
4) Reboot

If this doesn't work (say, if you get an error like I did along the lines of Could not find device for /boot: Not found or not a block device), try number two:
(http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-504678.html)

1) Get yourself a grub command line with sudo grub
2) Now, find /boot/grub/stage1
3) This returns something like (hd0,0). Plug that into:
4) root (hd0,0) (but, you know, replace it with the right numbers)
5) setup (hd0)
6) quit
7) Reboot.

This should have returned grub to its proper happy place on the MBR.

It should also be quite possible (but please don't take my word for it, I'm a moron really) to execute that second set of instructions from the grub prompt you may or may not get after seeing "error 21". It was just that I had to boot the machine from a CD to check the instructions, so it was just as easy to do it from there.

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steam-powered ubuntu

Here it is, at long last:


First of all, credit where it's due.

The icons: http://aiolorwile.deviantart.com/art/Icons-of-the-Library-70721899
This is an awesome set of icons originally designed for Mac OSX that I co-opted for my nefarious Linux purposes. They're really gorgeous; I highly recommend checking them out.

The Metacity theme: http://www.gnome-look.org/content/show.php/Walnut?content=57232&PHPSESSID=6 Really nice dark wood Metacity theme. I used this theme as the base and modified it by adding little images of gears as the close, minimize, maximize and menu buttons. All this stuff is done through the magic of XML, and I am working on my own Metacity theme at the moment, because it's fun to learn.

The GTK theme: http://www.gnome-look.org/content/show.php/Wood+Theme?content=91601 This theme is really cool, and I've used it on its own as well, but I modified it in a variety of ways. First of all, I had to change a few things around so that my gnome menu bars would use a dark wood image from Walnut instead of the wood theme's images (this took a surprising amount of work). Secondly, I changed a bunch of the icons (these are the ones that go with the window widgets) to ones from the British Library set.

The screenlets:

Clock: This is the ordinary gnome screenlets clock (which, for those of you running Ubuntu, can be had with a hearty "sudo apt-get screenlets", but for those of you with other distros and/or no package managers, instructions for pretty much everyone under the sun are here. The theme for the clock comes from http://www.gnome-look.org/content/show.php/Screenlets+Vintage+Clock?content=85030

System Monitors: These come from the Manometer screenlet, which you can get at http://www.gnome-look.org/content/show.php/Manometer+CPU+%26+memory+meter?content=70961. You can use them to monitor CPU, memory, or network usage, or temperature. There are a few different choices for how they display, as well.

The wallpaper: This came from the nice person at http://flickr.com/photos/pizzabytheslice/3140762424/, who does some cool Photoshop tutorials as well.

I think that's everything (obviously, I am using AWN, which I've grown attached to). I also adopted the Firefox "glowy gold" theme, which is kind of nice (although actually a little much for my liking).

So yeah. Many (too many) long hours went into figuring out how to manipulate various config files as I learned all about Metacity and GTK and Gnome icons (like I said - the magic of XML), as well as learning even more than Caitlin has already taught me about vector graphics, using Inkscape, and the like. But I feel like it's almost there; I'm pretty happy with it.

Oh, and if you are wondering why my memory load is so high, all those programs on the dock are running at the time of the screenshot - I hate launchers, and I wanted some of my icons in the picture :)

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ale on lees

Ever see something like this on your beer?


It's the "ale on lees" part I'm interested in (if you were wondering, this is from a bottle of La Fin du Monde, which is delicious).

It took a while of seeing this before I finally looked it up, but as it turns out, "lees" is another word for sediment, so an ale on lees is just a bottle-conditioned ale that has yeast sediment at the bottom.

Now I know. And so do you.

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more desktop fun

After my attempt at a Leopard desktop, I decided it would also be hilarious to try for various Windows themes. I downloaded an XP theme, Windows fonts, and a set of icons from gnome-look, and this is what I've got so far:

As you can see, it's not perfect yet, but I also don't quite know what I'm doing with gnome yet. I should, of course, be working on my assignment for XML that was due yesterday, but I can at least reassure myself that many of gnome's configuration files use XML, so I am at least learning something.

The real reason for doing this, of course, is that although I got quite attached to the Mac-style desktop (as much as I hate to admit it), what I really want most is a nice steampunk theme. No one seems to make a good one (at least not that I've found), so I'm trying to learn how to configure gnome manually and make one myself. I am thinking that this set of icons would work well, but I think I need to make my own set of widgets, because nothing I've found has enough of a clockwork look.

Bill suggested that I find or make a skin for my system monitor that looks like pressure gauges. I think this is an excellent idea; I just have no idea how to go about it. There is a pretty nice Enlightenment theme that does something like this, but as usual, I am having more difficulty than I should getting it to work. As usual, suggestions are welcome.

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roasted swede with parmesan

Before you decide that I've finally snapped and started murdering my enemies and turning them into ethnically-themed soylent green products, take a look at this.

The back story is that since Christmas, I've been trying to remember the weird name for rutabagas that I read in a BBC recipe. I say this as though rutabaga isn't a weird name, but I had never seen the name they used in the recipe. I started asking everyone if they had ever heard of another name for rutabagas, and everyone thought I was crazy. Well, they may be right about that, but I was right about rutabagas being called something weird, damn it!

That weird name is "swede". I looked it up in the OED, and apparently it's supposed to have come about because rutabagas were introduced into Scotland through Sweden. Though, oddly enough, the Scots seem to call everything turnips (though they probably also use this word to refer to carrots, beets, spinach, peaches, tables, phones, water . . .). According to Wikipedia, there is a wide variety of bizarre Scottish words for turnip-related vegetables. This entry is sourced from The Concise Scots Dictionary (actually a 2-page leaflet).

Okay, enough with the Scottish-bashing. I just get such a kick out of making fun of other places where England has stuck its greasy fingers in the governmental and societal pie. I kid out of love - we mostly share the common bond of a crappy inconsistent language, disgusting food that only those from cold-weather climates could love, and unaccountably prudish sexual mores.

Anyway, though, the OED also provided this lovely usage tidbit:

"1812 SIR J. SINCLAIR Syst. Husb. Scot. I. 112 With turnips, particularly the Swedes, there is no occasion to give any corn to oxen."

Oh! Great! Well, now every time I eat a rutabaga, I'll think of how it's actually supposed to be LIVESTOCK FEED. Lovely. Because it's not enough that one almost took my mother's finger off.

All this got me thinking about other foods that have different names in different places. One of my favorites is arugula, which is the Italian name for the leafy green that most other English-speaking places call rocket. Why the hell don't we call it rocket?? It sounds SO much cooler.

And possibly the most well-known of these is, of course, the mighty eggplant, or aubergine, as literally THE ENTIRE REST OF THE WORLD calls it. According to On Food and Cooking, the name "aubergine" comes through Arabic and Spanish from Sanskrit. I knew that eggplant was a member of the nightshade family, but I did not know that it's the only one that was around in the Old World before any real contact with the Americas. According to the book, the going theory on this is that eggplants float. Makes sense to me.

I'm thinking I should start some sort of free food research service - I know lots of reference sources (actually I have 2/3 of a degree in this sort of thing), I know how to make sure my sources are accurate and trustworthy, and, as we all know, I'll take any flimsy excuse to read about food history.

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