LinuxChix Live

כמה המלצות לתוכנות שימושיות בעקבות שאלות של אנשים, כולן בחינם:

• TreeSize לחלונות תגיד לכם איזו תיקיייה "זוללת" את המקום בדיסק. TreeSize למקינטוש (תוכנה שונה) עושה דבר דומה.
• Notepad++‎ הוא עורך טקסט נוח מאוד לחלונות, כולל תמיכה ביוניקוד, כתיבה מימין לשמאל (חפשו תחת תפריט Edit) ועוד. Smultron הוא עורך טקסט נהדר למקינטוש, וגם הוא תומך במגוון קידודים, כתיבה מימין לשמאל (קונטרול קליק ובחירה ב-writing direction) ועוד.
• filezilla הוא לקוח FTP חביב מאוד על חלונות. Cyberduck הוא לקוח FTP חביב מאוד על המק.
• Freepops מאפשר לבדוק דואר רשת (yahoo, hotmail) דרך תוכנת הדואר הרגילה (מתאים לחלונות, מקינטוש ולינוקס)
• xfolders ו-forklift הן תוכנות ניהול קבצים בסגנון total commander (עם פאנל כפול) למקינטוש.
  
  

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I'm on the local mailing lists of a dog training club and the SPCA, so when the pet food recalls came out I heard about them right away. Over a couple of days the recalls rolled in, one brand after another, but fortunately the hounds' food wasn't affected.



Chris was pouring dog food from its bag into a plastic container one day when he stopped, looked concerned, and said "wow, look at this." I looked, and saw a dead mouse in the bag of dog food. Shit, another recall and we're the first to see it. First it was toxic gravy in the wet food, now it's dead mice in bags of dry food.



Chris said "Why did you scream? It's just a mouse." I took a closer look, and he was right - it was just a mouse. Alive, scared, and very cute.







He ran away when I tried to put him into a more secure container, but I saw him run into his little hidey-hole under a cabinet. (Chris's thought on dead mice in the dog food: "Are you kidding? They'd love that! It's like strawberries in their cereal!"



Amy told me about the Mice Cube humane mousetrap. I couldn't find this type of trap locally, so I ordered a couple online and they arrived today. I set up 3 traps in places I'd seen the mice, and then Chris and I went dancing.



Well, Pandora found the trap I'd left on the floor, and she crunched it into pieces because she wanted the peanut buttered cracker inside.



As for the trap on the countertop, I found it empty, with the cracker

dragged outside of it and all the peanut butter licked off. Smart mouse. So I re-baited it with cheese. Just a little bit later I was sitting at my computer and heard a "click!" and then a drumming sound like a mouse trying to burrow its way out of a trap. Yay, I caught one!







I went and put him/her in the mouse cage outside. You may be wondering why we have a mouse cage sitting just outside the door full of mouse bedding and mouse food and a water bottle and all the mousey trimmings. Well, it's because of Chris.



On the morning I left for Boston, Chris told me there was a mouse in the dog food bag again. When I returned from Boston, I found the mouse, ensconced in his little mousely mansion with all the trimmings, on my DESK. Yes, Chris put the mouse on the desk of the person who is most allergic to mice out of everybody in the whole house.



OK, so that was kind of funny. The problem is, he was very attached to this mouse. Even before he caught it, he was calling it Mousie and feeling very sentimental about it, and periodically reciting that Robert Burns poem, "To a Mouse". It would have been cute were I not DEATHLY[*] ALLERGIC TO MICE.



[*] OK, not really.



It took about a week before I convinced him to release the mouse. The

argument went a little something like this:



him: can we keep it?

me: no. I'm allergic to mice.

him: please?

me: no. Wild mice all have parasites.

him: what's wrong with parasites?

me: they also have hantavirus.

him: you can't prove that.

me: why don't you take Mousie to a nice big field somwhere?

him: he'll get eaten!

me: so? You eat animals all the time.

him: [philosophical argument snipped]

me: huh?

him: I said, because mice are cute. Just look at him! With his little whiskers!

me: no. I'm allergic to mice.

(repeat)



The mice cube caught a second mouse while I was writing this email, a big fat mama (papa?) mouse. Soon they will all be in a nice big field far far away. Chris says he will have the same week-long argument with me for every mouse, but that we can do it for several mice at the same time.







To be continued. ... entry

John Layman, Ford Gilmore, Joan Hilti, Darick Robertson



Primarily for writers. Sorry, but artists have a somewhat easier time of it than writers do. You show up with a decent portfolio and there you go. I show up with a script and they say "that's a little long for right this second, luv."



Anyway, look into self publishing or smaller houses. Though they kept mentioning Dark Horse (who are smaller but not small and who will look at scripts w/out art).

Or find an artist.

5 or 6 page books are likely to get looked at.



Online resources at:

www.digitalwebbing.com/forums/index.php

www.penciljack.com/forum/



In theory, though, apparently I could sneak into a portfolio line at a smaller con. In which case, I should have the following:

1 page pitch

a scene, preferably w/ art but can be w/out

an outline for the full comic that scene would theoretically be pulled from

again w/ the 5 or 6 page book...



All of which is, conveniently, a lot like what they want if you are sending a pitch, so there you have it.



Shockingly enough, they prefer to see that writers can give clear art direction, preferably panel-by-panel (which you'll notice I do -- well, I'd want to see an artist go at some of it to be sure, but whatever)



Suggestions:

get a website. Apparently editors prefer a link to attachments. This is apparently true even for writers (I totally grok why it would be true for artists: it only takes a couple days before your mail box is completely full of horrible pencil sketches of Superman and Wonder Woman doin' the Wild Thing...)



I know ironymaiden took some notes as well, but I don't know that she'll be sharing...



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for this but I can't seem to start it.



Bleh. ... entry

Strong winds and no jumping today, despite blue skies :-( A good party tonight, though. Lots of cases. And waffles! The glider pilots visited late at night, and I am a bit ashamed that I gave up before them... ... entry

Stephen’s recently been questioned a bit about his email address validation regex - which has a few problems… Notably, it doesn’t allow for addresses like rob@uk, which I’m assured once existed (although I don’t believe it still does).

He wasn’t aware of any TLDs with MX records - so, of course, I had to set out to make a list. And here it is! The following TLDs (all ccTLDs, though I checked all the gTLDs I could find too) all had MX records, as of tonight

.ai - Anguilla

.as - American Samoa

.bj - Benin

.cf - Central African Republic

.cx - Christmas Island

.dj - Djibouti

.dm - Dominica

.gp - Guadeloupe

.gt - Guatemala

.hr - Croatia

.io - British Indian Ocean Territory

.kh - Cambodia

.km - Comoros

.mh - Marshall Islands

.mq - Martinique

.ne - Niger

.ni - Nicaragua

.pa - Panama

.td - Chad

.tk - Tokelau

.tl - East Timor

.ua - Ukraine

.va - Vatican City

.ws - Samoa

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This week we had the TLT (Teaching and Learning with Technology) Conference on campus and I had a dissertation defense at the same time as one session that I really wanted to go to today. Sarah "Intellagirl" Robbins was going to be talking about her work in Second Life.

My solution email Sarah and ask her out for coffee. She graciously agreed and we spent a couple of hours having a great conversation. I appreciate her letting me hold her up from heading home to her family. Feeling not quite so bad about having to do the defense today after all.

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Today I had a Schülerpraktikant - a co-worker arranged to bring his son to work during the school's spring break and he was assigned to me for the day "because he likes working with computers and I thought he could get a feel for everything from you". It turns out that "he likes to work with computers" means "he runs Windows and plays video games", but whatever. I had high hopes. I was going to show him an application we are working on and get him to write test cases for me. I have always thought that test is a great approach to programming. I mean, you can't write safe code unless you know how people will break it, right? Although I am sure that I just took my last application a little bit over the top - idiot-proofing an internal application the same way I would a web form for the public.



The experience started out poorly, as when I met him yesterday he was too shy to answer a direct question, but by noon today he had interrupted my description of the application with a wish list for improvements that he was sure would save the fab time and money. So I asked him how much money he thought our current method was costing us and how long it would take him to implement his suggestion. His answer, "Well, I don't know how to program yet, but if you show me how I will do it." ... entry

Since I'm a college student, I'm apt to take notes on my laptop in class. A pile of sticky notes won't work so great for this though. I found and installed Tomboy when I was using Dapper, and it was useful. It was included by default in Edgy, so that was great, and now in Feisty, there have been 2 very neat improvements made.

First, there are now bullets. Yay! The bulleted lists indent themselves properly without leaving second-lines starting at the far left. I always fought with the old Tomboy to try to use outline form on my notes, so this is a great help. There doesn't appear to be a shortcut key for adding a bullet (at least, it's not shown in the menu), but you can indent and un-indent using tab and shift-tab respectively.

Second, it now works like a wiki! In the preferences, enable the "Highlight WikiWords" option. If you type a word using WikiStyleCaps, it will highlight that word, telling you that it is ready to make a new note for it. Click on it, and a new Tomboy note opens up with that WikiWord as the title. If you don't want to use WikiStyleCaps, you can also type a term, highlight it, and click the "Link" button at the top. This will turn the highlighted word into a link to another note with that term as the title. I didn't think it would allow spaces, which is why the screenshot has an underscore, but I just tried it out, and yes, spaces are allowed. In my opinion, wikis are a great way to organize your notes for quick reference when studying. You can also see what other notes reference the one on which you are working by clicking Tools > "What links here?"

Of course, the old features, like exporting to HTML, highlighting, searching through notes, and importing your sticky notes are still there. More features can be added via plug-ins in ~/.tomboy/Plugins for more functionality, but I'm just pointing out the "default" ones.

By the way, you don't have to be a Linux user to try Tomboy. It has been ported to Win32, though not everything works exactly as it should.

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I had a great Day of Service with the Advocacy Project, which is a great organization that sends interns out into the field, to work with local partner organizations on issues such as human rights, women's health, peace, and many other issues. We talked about appropriate use of Web 2.0 tools for their interns, for themselves - for advocacy, fundraising, and information dissemination.

It was fun and engaging. They are an interesting and eclectic group, and our conversation ranged all over the map. But it felt useful, and I learned a lot from them. It made me think about what is important to me about consulting - why I got into doing consulting in the first place. I like talking with people. I like learning from them, I like working to give them concrete information they can use, as well as thought-provoking questions for them to ponder as time goes on.

And it reminded me of what I had been missing for all of this time in working to implement technology. It was the human contact, the human touch, the connection about more than just "can you fix this bug?" or "can you build this?" That's what I've been missing.

Technorati Tags: 07NTC, consulting, web2.0

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I finally got my old camera back! Sister (the Elder)’s brother-in-law sent it to Guyana with their brother-in-law. Big sis, then gave it to Chennette when she finally reached back to Guyana who brought it with her to Trinidad today on her way to Barbados (mom was joining her for the POS-BGI leg so we came to [...] ... entry

Semi-formal last night was quite fun. The geekiest societies at the school sure do clean up well. ;) Math, Physics, Compsci and Geology, and I don't think you could have distinguished us from any other partying students except that we kept wanting the music turned down a bit, and there was a distinct lack of creepy people at the club. Good times!



I need to remember to drink more water at these things, though. I feel really hungover, and I didn't even have anything to drink... I really don't want to get in to the painkillers, but I don't think I'm going to get any work done if I don't shake this headache soon. ... entry

It’s that time of the year again. The National Cherry Blossom Festival started this past weekend. The peak bloom period was estimated to be April 3 to 5, so a few of us met in town last night for a quick bit at Teaism and then a nice walk to the Tidal Basin.

Katie tells me that viewing cherry blossoms at night is a Japanese tradition — but mostly as an excuse to get really drunk and walk around in the dark. We didn’t drink nearly enough if that is the case, but the weather was gorgeous, and so it was a nice walk outside.

Here are a few of my pictures I took last night, Katie has her pictures posted as well.

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Lemons and stuff didn’t do the trick. Made a run to the pharmacy. Welcome to my (reversed because PhotoBooth is just like that) world.

I feel like crap.

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I caught some cherry blossoms last night before the weather turned cold and wet. Pictures here; they convinced me to crack open my camera's manual to see if I can do better.



I've been asked not to come to the kayaking skills weekend clinic I'd been looking forward to at the end of this month, due to my not yet having demonstrated comfort with being underwater in an out-of-control situation. I'm torn between using that as a motivation to focus all my effort on overcoming this issue and accepting that safe kayaking is just going to be too hard for me. ... entry

Mark Pesce, Jeff Waugh and I did a short panel interview on blogging, online communities, standards of behaviour and so on for Triple J's Hack program. This is all part of the follow on from the inter-blog harrassment of Kathy Sierra (see also Sierra's update prior to her appearance on CNN).

It was recorded Monday and went to air yesterday afternoon. I'm appearing in my new capacity as the international coordinator of LinuxChix (of which more later), although that was actually a coincidence of timing, I'd only been coordinator for a day at that point. (LinuxChix is mischaracterised in the introduction as a blogging community, by the way.) The Hack program for that day is currently available as an MP3 file [13 megabytes] (13 megabytes is at least a half hour download for dialup users, and about 7 minutes on 265kps broadband) via their podcasts. The segment I'm in starts at 22 minutes 46 seconds and ends at 28 minutes 34 seconds.

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First, I need to stop letting parts of my body get in the way of throws. Last night's damage amounted to a brow bump and undefined pain and swelling in my right hand, received on the same throw.



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How long have i been waiting for my Lenova laptop to arrive? 27 days 06:23:32.788512

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