This Week on the Command Line: Bring back CD-RWs but not the draft, also choose your dessert carefully!
30 March 2007
Long time readers will know that I occasionally do a Friday round up of selected things that I have read on blogs and so on since the last time. Hope you enjoy it!
Fixes and tips
Phill destroys his Subversion database but explains how to recover it while maintaining your sanity.
Over at 'Apt-Get Explore', there is a how-to for creating an SSH Reverse Tunnel. Really handy stuff.
steveL's bash wrapper for portage is still being improved, check out the latest version, I'm itching to do a post with output and my experience but I have a number of other topics in the oven to go first.
Thanks to Bug who lets us know that next version of Battle for Wesnoth is out. I do not have time for it this month, but Wesnoth is one of my favourite computer games. I will play the new campaigns in May as a reward for all this hard academic work I am doing now.
Joel searches for an open source wiki for his work that will run on IIS. He did not include my favourite wikis, (presumably they are Linux only) and includes four wikis that I have never heard of until now. Which does he plump for? Well you will have to read it to find out.
Justifiably laughing in my face is Brock who installed OpenBSD. Fabulous screenshots there, (is that via VMWare?). It was his third attempt though, so I might be brave enough to give it another go one day.
Like OpenBSD, QT is one of those things I plan to learn more about one fine summers day. Ravi asks whether KDE 4.0 the holy grail of Desktops ?", in particular he looks at an alternative file manager named Dolphin.
Burn CDs not teenagers
I'm a big fan of 'going back to the future', as regular readers may gather. So I smiled and nodded to myself after Scott reverts `from his iPod to CD- RWs`_, and sticks to his notebook rather than a PDA. Even though Brum is supposed to be safer than many UK cities, I still tend to be careful about how much tech I am carrying. For me though I walk, so an iPod Rockbox is still lighter and less valuable than a car.
Should America bring back the draft? I personally think it is a form of slavery. If you cannot get your Dad to get you a safe job (George W Bush), then just come over here to England until the war is over (Bill Clinton).
Flames
Lars Strojny argues that the pop up mouse previews that some people have on their blogs are akin to a virus. He also calls them "annoying and useless". Do you get the impression that he does not like them?
I am pretty liberal with the people that leave comments, I let you all flame me as much as you like? But was I too mean with this one?, probably not.
On the Gentoo flamewar, Darren Kirby, has some thoughts on his post dated Tuesday, March 13, 2007, (sorry no id tags, 'a names' or permalinks, just scroll down). At the end he asks:
> "As for the continued health of Gentoo I don't know what to think. Some responses on -dev seem to imply that the death of Gentoo is right around the corner, and just as many say that the developer status is as good as it ever was. So which is it? "
The health of Gentoo is not measured by noise and white light, rather it is measured by ebuilds. Are the ebuilds going up in a timely manner, do they work?
The answer is yes to both questions.
Apple will give a united front because there are about 4.5 Apple developers and they are paid to be shiny happy people. Gentoo is a fast moving community distro used and developed by the some of the smartest people on the planet.
Whenever you get a load of smart people in the same room or on the same mailing list then bickering, egos and flamewars are a given. It's natural.
Now for some light relief
Featured over at 'entregeek' is a really funny picture showing the differences between operating systems, I am going to print it out and put it on my wall. You might not want to look while eating dinner.
Want to watch Richard Stallman in a proprietary format? Well while in a cafe someone asks him to sing the Free Software Song, here he is on YouTube. If you are a famous inventor then people probably give you free laptops, which might be why Stallman can use his laptop as an impromptu drum.
Thanks for reading. As always I read every comment, so do let me know what you think of the above articles, and also let me know if you have read or written something cool that I have missed.
1 Phill says...
lol, recovering a Subversion repository is actually something I've managed to do a couple of times before without spending an hour faffing around getting stressed about it!
The problem was, I was under time pressure - we needed to get something working, so I didn't read the documentation properly. That'll teach me!
Oh, as for Richard Stallman singing the Free Software Song: oh dear! :D
Posted at 10:37 p.m. on March 30, 2007
2 Scott says...
Glad you enjoyed the CD-RW writeup. Thanks for stopping by. I found another hint in iTunes that lends itself well to CD-RW luddite music. It has a popup menu for converting any non-DRM'd AAC files into MP3 format. Handy for that occasional podcaster who (for whatever reason) podcasts in AAC format. If you don't do this conversion, you can't burn an MP3 playlist with that AAC track.
I wouldn't worry about the USA bringing back the draft. This scare tactic is dusted off every couple of years by the Democrats whenever a Republican is in the White House. Just as some claim the Republican keep us in fear of terrorists to keep themselves in power, the Dem's do a great job of keeping us in fear of things like "George Bush is going to reinstate the draft". "Newt Gingrich is going to end Social Security and let seniors starve." "Trigger finger happy Ronald Reagan is going to launch our nuclear missiles."
Fearmongering is bi-partisan.
Posted at 2:19 a.m. on April 1, 2007
3 bug says...
You were a bit late with the Wesnoth, posted that on the 1/1 as it seems and if I recall, it was released a few days before that date.
About the SSH tunnel, it'd be more effective if you make it dynamic with D, that way you can just surf the whole web / lan / whatever using that Shell.
[Sorry, you won't get more than that this time, trying to calm down and thanks for reading my Webbie :P]
Posted at 3:09 p.m. on April 1, 2007
4 Justin says...
I got OpenBSD installed on the second try... but I have yet to get Gentoo installed with more of a gui than just plain X11.
Posted at 3:28 a.m. on April 2, 2007
5 Texican says...
Sadly for the far left-wing lunatic fringe, the draft will not be reinstated. It is a form of slavery...the theft of ones autonomy (the kind of things Democrats love to advocate -- just as they advocated for real slavery).
Posted at 5:10 p.m. on April 9, 2007