FreddieFreeloader   Rantings of a paranoid computer hobbyist

If you stopped an emerge of a huge package, like OpenOffice, you don’t want to just do an emerge --resume because it will start with a clean tree and compile from the start again. We can start from where we left off and avoid recompiling finished directories by using ebuild as follows:

1. ebuild /usr/portage/app-office/openoffice/openoffice-2.0.4.ebuild compile
2. ebuild /usr/portage/app-office/openoffice/openoffice-2.0.4.ebuild test
3. ebuild /usr/portage/app-office/openoffice/openoffice-2.0.4.ebuild preinst
4. ebuild /usr/portage/app-office/openoffice/openoffice-2.0.4.ebuild install
5. ebuild /usr/portage/app-office/openoffice/openoffice-2.0.4.ebuild postinst
6. ebuild /usr/portage/app-office/openoffice/openoffice-2.0.4.ebuild qmerge
7. ebuild /usr/portage/app-office/openoffice/openoffice-2.0.4.ebuild clean


(Change the path to your actual ebuild)

If you want to have a backup of the built package as a binary package so you can just emerge it quickly in the future, do an
ebuild /usr/portage/app-office/openoffice/openoffice-2.0.4.ebuild package
before you do a qmerge in the steps above. This will build a binary package in your (usually) /usr/portage/packages directory which you can use to install in the future or for another box with the same specs.

Back to my old, boring, basic unix workspace. Enough with eyecandy madness. Code, code, code.

This one coming from Charles Stross, himself a well-known SF author:

When you look at the “pirate” ebook field, things are a lot livelier. There are any number of locations on the internet where you can grab hundreds or thousands of novels, for free! — albeit in violation of the authors’ copyright. These books are either produced by scanning a paper copy and feeding it through OCR (optical character recognition) software, or by cracking the DRM on an encrypted ebook. Lots of people download books off the net, but one thing even the proponents of ebook DRM agree is that it doesn’t seem to have had any economic impact on the sales of dead tree editions. In fact, there’s a lot of evidence from research into music file sharing that people who use “pirate” ebooks actually buy more of the real thing.

Why the commercial ebook market is broken

Wish I could say the same thing about pirated music and films — that the music/movie industry does not suffer from piracy. That the figures of losses they cite are based on the number of pirated cds/dvds they confiscate and not from any real sales study, thinking, wrongly, that people who buy/download pirated stuff would actually buy the real thing. Alas, I don’t have the figures, so I’ll just shut up Of course the author always has the final say on his own work so let’s just respect that.

Ok, ok. I know some of you knew about this since late last year. Well I only heard it a few days ago. Moleskine is now available in RP via http://moleskineph.com. Yep. Web-based store. I don’t think they have a walk-in store yet. Mura lang. Go get me one

According to F-Spot’s main page:

Organize, Enjoy, and Share Your Photos

F-Spot is a full-featured personal photo management application for the GNOME desktop*.

F-Spot simplifies digital photography by providing intuitive tools to help you share, touch-up, find and organize your images.

Sorry, it’s not available in Windows. You have to suit yourself with Picasa, Irfanview or whatever photo manager is available at the moment. Pray that somebody ports it to Windows. Or install a much more capable OS like Linux.

Features include tagging, photo editing, color adjustments, photo CD creation, and web gallery. It also uploads to popular photo sharing sites like Flickr, 23hq, Picasa Web or SmugMug.

* I’m using fluxbox

While waiting in line at the National Statistics Office in East Avenue, I saw this pile of old digital hardware. Something like ComputerHistory.org’s Magnetic tapes.

#gentoo on freenode:


[17:16] <igli> zlin: when i'm on a root on someone else's box,
and i've been up til 9:20 am i'm allowed a little noobism
[17:16] <zlin> igli: no you're not!
[17:16] <Linux_Junkie> igli: this is the gentoo channel not the ubuntu channel haha
[17:16] <igli> lol


We all know that Micro$oft just copies ideas from others and labels it their own. We all know that. I’m just wondering why they are so slow in catching up? I mean tabbed windows. That was done way back in the 90’s. A lot of 3rd party plugins were made for IE before M$ actually knew what was going on and now it’s on the new version of IE. Maybe they were busy doing patches and stuff.

Now M$ launches Vista and made some eyecandy for it, Aero. 3ddesktop is old story in the *nix world. *Nix even has different apps for it (Beryl/Compiz/3ddesktop). I wonder why they can’t catch up way sooner so they can really make people believe they’re getting their money’s worth.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xC5uEe5OzNQ]

PS: For the record — I don’t use this stuff. I’m an old, grumpy guy who’s eyes hurt with too much computer graphic masturbation. For me the terminal is eye-candy

More often than not digital cameras name their photos in succession (eg: IMG001.JPG, IMG002.JPG, etc). If you use your digicam a lot and tend to dump photos in a hurry in some directory, then some of them may get clobbered by new ones if they have the same filename. Some cameras have the ability to continue with the successive numbering of filenames without resetting it back to IMG000.JPG after an erase or format. My Canon PSA530 has this setting, but I still rename my photos to its creation date just to make sure. It makes sorting photos much easier too.

Get perl’s ExifTool module.

for i in *.JPG;do newname=`./exiftool -CreateDate $i -d "%Y-%m-%d_%H-%M-%S" -p dater`;mv -iv $i $newname;done

Where the file dater has only this line: ${CreateDate}.jpg

Now you don’t have to worry about overwriting your photos.

Elections coming up. I can’t see anyone worth voting for. While I don’t want to be responsible for putting these clowns in office, I don’t want to give up my right to suffrage either. I’ve always been on the notion that as long as the people don’t vote right, they deserve all the crap they can get. But what will you do when you can’t find one SOB to vote for?

Last presidential elections a lot of people, thinking they’re doing the right thing, voted for the incumbent president so that the actor would not win. Those same people are now accusing the incumbent of cheating. Now it’s a big mess.

Here’s a short run-up of my dilemma:

Two candidates are in jail.

One smart one who used to be a university president and a lot of other citations, but later supported an actor in a presidential election. Also quite big on logging.

Some are close family members of incumbent officials. (God I hate successions).

One is a cold fish son of a hero who thinks that riding on the shoulders of his father is enough merit to vote on.

Some new blood who came from filthy fuckin rich families. Talks a lot. Smiles a lot. Think I’m impressed? Think again.

A whole truckload of actors. No I’m not generalizing. Do something worthy first. And do that without a camera behind you.

The military has a nice term for this — charlie foxtrot.