or maybe Miss Piggy ;)

You Are Miss Piggy

A total princess and diva, you're totally in charge - even if people don't know it. You want to be loved, adored, and worshiped. And you won't settle for anything less. You're going to be a total star, and you won't let any of the "little people" get in your way. Just remember, piggy, never eat more than you can lift!

The Muppet Personality Test

But I am not sure about her attitude ... 'little people' no that's not me

yes I like to eat

Is this the *only* female role model in the Muppets?

I'm an Animal !!!!

You Are Animal

A complete lunatic, you're operating on 100% animal instincts. You thrive on uncontrolled energy, and you're downright scary. But you sure can beat a good drum. "Kill! Kill!"

The Muppet Personality Test

Fortune

Well, since my last blog I have been handed the whole teaching project to run and am working with the admin staff to manage the budget. Which reminds me, I must put that invoice in.

Anyhow, that doesn't eradicate the time I have spent being depressed about human behaviour. Again. It's a family trait; we seem to expect the best from everyone and are always disablingly disappointed and angry when the human race shows itself to be what it is.

I watched some TV last night. David Bowie in his Ziggy Stardust and Diamond Dogs phases and Pink Floyd with Dark Side of the Moon. It was amazing to find out that Dark Side of the Moon was in the charts for 741 weeks - 14 years and 3 months. I'm glad Pink Floyd created Dark Side of the Moon but the thought cropped up that these people - these band members - had made an awful lot of money out of that album and I wondered what they did with it all. It's obvious they used some of it in setting up their own environments to their tastes but after that - what? During the program they honestly declared that their intention was to be rich and famous when they made that album and they sit there with the air and attitude of people who have been successful in their aim.

But I wonder what they do with all that money? Invest it to make more money? Do they invest it promoting technical and musical education for people? Do they do that for people in deprived places or do they simply have high profile schools that only those with advantage can access? Do they invest in ecologically sound projects? Do they fund projects outside music or do they limit themselves to music projects only? Do they limit themselves to creative projects or do they help fund disaster relief like the Boxing Day Tsunami ?

What would you do with billions of pounds, dollars or whatever an unimaginable fortune is in your country?

Kitty Fishing

is, after a hard day's work, a great way to destress . All you need is a piece of string, a cat and room to play in.

I teach a basic course for women on computers using Mandriva Linux. We start off with the hardware and they get to build a computer up from parts. Then we install Mandriva and then we introduce them to the Desktop and some of the software on the machines.

Because the place that has achieved the funding from this is an arts venture the software components of importance are the GIMP, digital imagery and vector graphics applications such as Inkscape.

Delivering the course is great fun. All the women enjoy the hardware side of it because they are presented a challenge and they don't often get the opportunity to muck about with hardware in a non-comptetitive all-female environment.

This evening I found out from an acquaintance that she had been asked to do the next run of the course which is to be in the evenings. She had also been asked to do it on a voluntary basis, which she can of course afford to do because she has a full time day job.

I don't. That's the only job I have got and I was enjoying it.

I had to sit there with her going on about how she hoped I didn't mind if she did it because it would be so good for her career and her CV.

Well, girls, she certainly isn't going to make it onto my Christmas card list. We'll skip over the crushing defeat, bewilderment and general level of upsetness I felt over being left to find this out in this manner. And how stupid I felt.

A women's organisation is funding the course and the person who is holding the funds is getting women to work for nothing delivering a course for which they have paid him training funds. It must be really good for him if he can get the money and not spend any of it on delivering the course; zeroise expenditure on the course and he'll have the money to spend on something else.

The computers used are all recycled chuck outs from businesses and are delivered by the businesses to the site where the course takes place. The place has charitable status and is on a cheap rent from the council with the rent, heating, lighting and other running costs already funded.

Such is life. I so hate being at this end of the food chain.

So very lucky to be able to go kitty fishing.

Wherever you are it's always worse somewhere else

I watch Middle Eastern politics. I'm not Jewish, nor Palestinian and I have no interests in the area other than it's a newsworthy topic. It is such a troubled place. This blog in the Guardian today gives an idea of what life is like there.

The same woman blogs on here too.

I wonder whether Yousuf will survive and what he will think of the world if and when he comes away from such a place. In his future, how will he be able to integrate into a modern society which doesn't have the problems he is growing up in?

It's easy to see how, years down the line, the Intifada still grows. And that's how all things as the Israel/Palestinian conflict develop and influence us all for generations to come.

I feel so much better

Today I did something stupid and posted something where I shouldn't have.

Fortunately the attachment didn't get through but the body of the message did. I still feel a complete plonker about it. I feel sure it will come back to haunt me.

However, I sensed schadenfreude when I read of someone who has deleted their kernel.

Not that I haven't done such a thing in the past myself. Managed to tar over my kernel. Which is effectively similar.

Accidents happen, so get a life. The thing is to manage to save one self from them.

The Motherboard

is an ASUS A7V333 PCB Rev 1.04 and, according to Asus's faq in the support section of their site, this board doesn't support 1665MHz CPU frequency with a 333MHz FSB so I can only run this at 1250 MHz./260 MHz FSB.

Well that's all sorted then.

I had a look for new Socket A boards and found a cheap one with good reviews. Check costs and requirements while toddling along at 1250 I think.

The BookCase Incident (edited)

Well, here I am again

I have been in the wars over the last month , damaging my ribs in a fall while out walking, and then having to rescue my workroom when a 6ft tall BookCase fell over.

That was a real nuisance. It's about 4.5ft or so wide and had thrown all the books, LPs and CDs around, now teetering over a 17" monitor and a box of research papers, divested of its load. I had to work my way through the room wreckage on one side and try and haul the BookCase back upright.

The BookCase kindly chose to dig into the wall and skirting board at the farthest corner from me it could manage. That really hurt, leaning over awkwardly lifting the BookCase off the wall and then the skirting board. I couldn't go to the middle of it, too much 'stuff' was lying between the monitor and the box of papers propping the thing up and moving anything from underneath it while it was in that position was a dangerous proposition.

So, BookCase up, I started picking up all the 'stuff' and transporting it to the living room. Books, CD's loudpseakers, LP'sm all manner of 'stuff' that gets put on BookCase shelves.

I had been thinking about reorganising the room out for a while. There was stuff everywhere and I could only move the seat a fraction even when the books, junk and BookCase where they should be. The time had come.

I got shot of that BookCase. I'd been thinking on doing it for a while and now seemed, apart from my ribs, as good a time as any. The BookCase had always leant forward far too much; it was far too unstable. It was an old freebie from someone moving to London. It had served its purpose.

I dismantled the BookCase and hauled all these pieces of metal BookCase up to the dump. The refuse management agents weren't going to lend a hand so I had to get it all in the metal only skip myself, ribs aching and all.

I moved the desk under the window, and found the LCD screen poor competition for the February sunlight. So I moved the desk again, against the wall with the sun to my right. There is still competition with the sunlight, when it streams in again so I still need a thicker curtain or blind.

The desk is a simple arrangement, a piece of paper maché from Ikea with wood blocks at each corner. measuring about 160x80cm. Cheap and it works. It carries books, teacups, the keyboard, mouse, printer, VDU and various other paraphenalia.

At the time of the BookCase Incident, I had all my machines in the room. I was working under the desk taking a good look round the motherboard of an Athlon XP 2k that was having heat problems running at 1667MHz, hunting for information on how to tweak the CPU speed in the manual which I was looking at on my laptop. The Athlon 2k box was opened but underneath the desk. The laptop was underneath the desk. I'd just gone through to feed the cat and make a cup of tea. The two BSD boxen were in slight disarray at the end of the desk but still going. Nothing dead, damaged nor disconnected. How lucky can you get?

Anyhow, little Miss FussyBoots here moved the desk round twice. That included moving all the machines and the laptop and the Athlon box.

I ordered some new fans, some silver thermal paste, more RAM and an LG DVD RAM for the overheating box and got on with moving stuff in and out of the room.

I had lost a place to put the books but had a cupboard which I emptied of cardboard boxes and polystyrene. I decided my computers, CD player and other stuff could move without their packaging next time I have to move. The packing cases had to go. I was fed up with running stuff up the dump, getting in and out of the car hurt, picking stuff up and throw it in the right skips and my ribs were hurting badly so I decided the cardboard could go in the recycling bins downstairs. I filled a wheelie bin of that up and added the polystyrene to the weekly household rubbish.

All the paperwork and books went there and with the new desk placement I can get to them easily. Initially I put the LPs in there, but when I sat down in the living room, I looked over at my bureau and decided the fun stuff in the bottom of there could go in the work room and the LPs could go where they were because the LP's were a fun thing and the stuff in the boxes was a work thing. So I gave myself a piece of extra work, moving the LP's twice.

The BookCase Incident happened on Monday. By the Thursday I couldn't move and was really fed up with the mess and the pain. My Mum phoned. Friday my case fans arrived so I put those in. Flowers arrived Saturday and I ran the box for 8 hours straight until the motherboard's thermal cutout kicked in.

The other parts for the Athlon box arrived on Monday. The old CPU fan came off more easily than I expected and the new one went on with a very generous dollop of the silver thermal paste. I had been worried about replacing that fan but got plenty of debate and advice in a chatroom, #linuxchics on irc.oft.net. I got the methylated spirits from the garage to clean the base of the new heatsink and cleaned the top of the CPU very carefully. At this moment, I have a bottle of meths on the table but it will be put under the kitchen sink or back in the garage very soon.

My sound, which I had got working just before the BookCase Incident, isn't working now.
I am considering a sound card instead of the onboard chip, a C-Media chip which Suse 9.2 identifies as C-Media PCI CMI8738. I have no clue what this means.

The new RAM didn't like working with the old RAM so I am using just the new stick. That doubles my memory capacity. I'll see how it goes.

The fans are definitely working. The CPU fan is very quiet and the only noise I can hear from all three of them is a low buzz but I can also hear the hard disk and feel moving air near them. One of the old fans had been making a bit of a noise; probably the bearings wearing out. I also suspect the old case fans were on the wrong way, pulling air into the box instead of out. I can feel air movement when I put my hand to the bays at the top of the machine and it's cold air. The new fans are pulling air through, the new CPU fan with it's sexy heatsink using that convection to conduct the heat away from the CPU and drive the warmer air out.

The CPU cooler is a drop dead gorgeous Speeze VultureSpin and that heatsink is very Krell.

I am concerned about the top case fan because that abuts the secondary IDE connector and ribbon. I wonder how long the 80-pin IDE cable will hold up against any fan vibration.

So, how's your week been?

Me and my interests

OK, I suppose I should post a bit about myself so that you get an idea of who and what I am.

I run Linux and OpenBSD at home, have some years experience in software development and electrical engineering and I have a cat.

I am currently looking at Elisp, the emacs version of the programming language Lisp, mostly use LaTeX for document processing. I have Debian 3.1r1, OpenBSD v3.8, SuSE Linux and a homebrew of OpenBSD 3.6 on four different boxes.

I haven't used Windows in years.

Do I think Linux and OpenBSD is better than Windows? From a personal level I prefer Linux and OpenBSD. I get all sorts of software available to me and the hard part, the really hard part, is deciding what to use.

Decisions, decisions: like when writing letters do I use the standard letter class in LaTeX or do I use the Koma-script scrlttr2 class. I've been using the standard letter class until recently but then came upon the issue of writing out an invoice.

Initially I used the longtable package, then tried the invoice package which produced better results but I couldn't get the top of the page to have the recipient and sender's address quite where I want them. I tried using article class to no avail.

While using the invoice package I found mention of the Koma-script set of classes so I took a look at those. It produces a better output; looking at it this morning it definitely produces a better output than I had previously but I want more.

The book I use to help with LaTeX is A Guide to LaTeX by Helmut Kopka and Patrick W. Daly. I am thinking of buying another book which might help me understand classes and packages and how to write my own because I nearly always find limitations with the packages and classes I have at my disposal. Again, there may be something out there on CTAN which will do what I want it to do but my present issues are :

1. Envelopes - there's a package that will print envelopes and I have had success with A5 and D1 size envelopes but these are designed toward the American postal system so use a sans serif font. A barcode of the address can be printed, which apperently the American system requires and these two factors hlep the machines in American read where the mail destination. But, for the time being, in England, we don't have such restrictions. I want the envelope to use the same font as I use in my letter and it would be fantastic to be able to create the .dvi output


2. Invoices - there's a package that does invoices and does them quite well, but I want to be able to have recipient and sender address on there, and maybe the opportunity to do have a fancy header of some sort in there.


3. While using the invoice package I had a really neat invoice table and the recipient's address on the right lined up with the start of the table on the left but no matter how I tried I couldn't get the sender's address to line up with the right hand edge of the table. I wasn't happy with that at all.

So why do I waste time in LaTeX typesetting like this when there is stuff like OpenOffice out there which gives a remarkable facsimile of a Microsoft Office suite of programs. It has a word processor and a spreadsheet and it can easily produce output.

To be honest I haven't a clue why. I like the output from LaTeX. Once something is set up I don't have to worry about what it looks like, I can just worry about the content. Yes there are templates in Microsoft Word and in OpenOffice but they don't quite do it for me.

When you consider longer documents which might need cross references and mathematical typesetting, LaTeX produces really good output. I have set a thesis in electromagnetic field theory and finite elements using Microsoft Word, and it was hell to do. Move any figures, tables or equations around and it was a hunt through the whole set of documents comprising that thesis to find all the cross references and check they were ok. Sometimes things didn't line up quite right and getting that alignment correct was really really time consuming. And then Word would sometimes realign on various metrics that I had no control over so I'd be sitting there doing all that work again and working out how to get around that newly discovered metric.

With LaTeX, this typesetting is separated from the activity of looking at and considering the content. The way the two tasks are broken down, it's easier.

This is a test

Ok so I've logged into blogger.com and created a blog.

Why do I want a blog? ... And can I change my template once I've chosen it?