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Jason Haslup
jason at haslup dot com

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Mon, 30 Aug 2004

Online PDF to HTML
blog :: linux

At work my current setup has good points and bad points... good: I get to use linux all day long for development; bad: my linux box is a 400mhz celeron with 256mb of ram and a 4gb drive. Yep, that's it... sometimes I think my Zaurus has more horsepower :)

However, to the credit of linux, everything runs just fine... we use NFS, so the 4gb of space is no problem since my home directory is on our file server. The RAM's really not an issue since I run emacs and compile on one of our beefy servers. So I really just use my linux box for email (emacs), a glorified X terminal, and web browsing with galeon.

The slightly painful part comes when I want to view a PDF document... the combination of my window manager (or lack thereof -- fullscreen for everything) and the speed/memory of my box, plus the fact that I haven't installed any better PDF viewer than XPDF makes opening a PDF file Not Much Fun.

Adobe to the rescue! Using you can paste in the link to the PDF and adobe's servers will convert it to HTML and send you to that document.

Kind of handy... now someone (me?) needs to write a mozilla plug-in so I can right click on the url of the PDF and send it there automatically.

Another option: usually Google's search results will let you view a PDF document in HTML format. But in my case, Google hadn't indexed the site yet, so that wasn't available. There may be some other google way of doing it, but I didn't notice anything.

Google Mail Invites
blog

I have a couple google mail invites if anyone's interested... email me at haslup (at) gmail.com...

I've been Admonished by Spam
blog

Had to post this since it gave me a good laugh this morning... loyal readers will know that I use emacs for reading email, which is purely text-based. No html, no pictures, etc... I like to call it pure email.

Anyhow, here's the the text of a piece of spam I got this morning:

Don't forget to help me get a free ipod. I recommend the free AOL for a month or the Blockbuster trial subscription. Those both seem to be free but require some follow-up.

jason

Wed, 25 Aug 2004

Free iPod!
blog

Yes, I've done it... I signed up for a free iPod at freeipods.com. You might have seen it on CNN or in Wired magazine, but it's basically a site where you need to sign up and participate in one deal, then convince five of your closest and dearest friends to do the same.

Guess what? I'm soliciting volunteers to help me get a free iPod! If you want to check it out, please use my referral: Click here.

There are a few "free" offers available -- all you have to do is sign up, wait a couple weeks, and then cancel something. For example, blockbuster's mail-order DVD rental is an option. AOL's also an option. If you feel like helping out, please let me know!

Mon, 23 Aug 2004

Unreal Tournament 2004
blog

So instead of buying Doom 3 (which I figure I'll play for an hour and get sick of), I went and bought Unreal Tournament 2004. Not only did I save $20, but UT2k4 includes all the tools you need in order to create your own mods and maps.

And that's the reason I bought it... so I can delude myself into thinking that I'll actually write something for it. I certainly can't create a map, because I have no 3d skills at all, so I'm going to try my hand and creating something using their built-in lanugage, unrealscript. I might actually start a new blog category for this so I can share my utter frustration with all my loyal readers.

In other, more annoying news, it literally took me three hours to get UT2k4 running on my stupid windows box. Holy cow that was frustrating... and after all that time, it turned out to be my sound card driver. The game wouldn't startup at all, but UT2k4 has a nice "safe-mode" option that lets you try different things when the game doesn't start. It's partly my fault that it took 3 hours, I suppose... I didn't think about my sound card driver until I had already upgraded my video drivers, bought an anti-virus app, and scanned my machine fifty times for crap. Duh.

The game itself is pretty cool... visually it's really nice, and I like some of the multiplayer game types they've got going. I've played some on the internet and did ok, especially considering it was my first weekend of the game. I get a kick out of the kids who use their microphone on voice-enabled servers... in team games it's kind of helpful, though, but I haven't quite bought into it.

That's it for now... tonight I'll do some more reading and maybe even compile my own UT2k4 class. Exciting.

Tue, 17 Aug 2004

Custom Display Buffer
blog :: emacs

At work, I use ratpoison as my window manager which pretty much means my emacs window takes up all 1400x1050 pixels on my screen. I like this because I can have multiple windows within emacs, including two side-by-side windows with plenty of line-length for each. This makes using ediff, looking at sql results, etc... quite easy.

One thing that was annoying me for a while, though, is how emacs uses a vertical split when it wants to pop up a new window. This happens, for example, during compilation: if you M-x compile with just one window, your session will be split so that there are two windows, one on top of the other, and the *compilation* buffer will be put in the new window.

As a big-screen user, I think it's nicer to have the screen split horizontally so that the new window appears to the right of the original single window.

Of course emacs lets you customize this, but it wasn't as straightforward as I thought it would be. Originally I thought it be a variable to set, maybe a special hook that's used for each command that splits the window. As it turns out, most of that display-buffer code is done as an emacs primitive. That is, in C.

However, emacs is still the king of all editors because of course it's still possible to easily customize how a buffer is displayed. So, below is how I've been able to customize how my CVS and compilation windows are popped up.

(setq special-display-buffer-names 
      (list
       (list "*compilation*" 'jh-display-buffer-split-horiz)
       (list "*cvs-info*"    'jh-display-buffer-split-horiz)
       (list "*cvs-diff*"    'jh-display-buffer-split-horiz)))

(defun jh-display-buffer-split-horiz (buf)
  "Display a buffer, splitting it horizontally if only one window"
  (save-excursion
    (if (= 1 (length (window-list)))
        (split-window-horizontally))
    (set-window-buffer (other-window 1)  buf)
    (other-window 1)
    (nth 1 (window-list))))

Fri, 13 Aug 2004

Fedora Core 2
blog :: linux

Tess is our border collie, who's around eight or nine years old... she's a really sweet dog, but can sometimes get on your nerves. The same goes for my linux box, tess... I finally figured out why it was so damn slow at times: the hard drive that linux was installed on was the slowest thing ever. It was literally ten-times slower than my other drive in the box that held all my data. And, of course, my swap partition was on that slow drive... so not only did all my apps load up slowly, whenever anything had to swap out or swap in, the performance was terrible.

The other annoying part about tess (the machine) is that its power supply fans were clicking. I was kind of surprised by that, since the power supply was an Antec that I had only put in there less than two years ago. I thought they were good quality PSU's? So I stuck my old Dell PSU back in, and everything's nice and quiet again. Go figure.

So I really needed to swap out the incredibly slow drive, so over the past couple of days I did a bit of a server migration at home. I've wanted to do this for a while, actually, so it's nice to have finally bit the bullet and finish things up.

Basically I want buster, my Athlon machine down in the crawlspace, to be my central "save-stuff" machine -- it should hold all me email, mailing lists, etc... then I can use tess for anything and everything else, including upgrading it anytime without worrying about losing data.

So I did that... I setup buster with a backup of my home directory on tess, and finally set it up so that I can retrieve email from haslup.com on buster. Taking it one step further, I then set up my emacs mail reader to actually use buster as a pop server. Finally, I had buster export /home so that whenever I login to either buster or tess, I use the same home directory, and better yet, I don't have to worry about where I initiate email-reading. Buster collects the mail and either machine can then use pop to retrieve it into the directory that emacs looks at.

So while that was going on, I decided to install Fedora Core 2 on tess... on a better hard disk, of course. I had just successfully installed FC2 on my laptop, and because my laptop doesn't have a CD drive, I tried the "install from hard disk" method. This is a cool method because it actually just needs the ISO images on your hard drive. So no need to burn any CDs, just drop the ISO images on a linux partition. Very easy.

As far as booting into FC2 install, I tried another way with my laptop that worked nicely... the disc one FC2 includes a small linux image that you can easily setup a current linux installation to start up into. I just copied to files to my /boot parition of my laptop, modified grub.conf, and rebooted. Voila! Mini-linux started up straight into Fedora's installer.

For tess, though, I decided to just boot from the CD image, mainly because I didn't have an existing linux partition. But I did still use the hard disk method since my data drive was available and I had copied the ISO images to it.

That install went nicely, and within an hour I was happily setting up FC2 on tess. It's nice to be up to date now, finally running linux kernel 2.6.7 which is pretty recent. Next step, and I don't know why I want to do this, is to compile my own 2.6 kernel. Like I'll notice the difference...

So all in all, everything went smoothly... I'm still missing a couple services on buster, but they're pretty much just an install away. I'm not sure if/when I'll upgrade buster to FC2 -- as a server, RedHat 8 has been working just fine.

That's it for linux for this week... nothing new on the window manager front... I'm toying with switching to Ion3 at work again, but I haven't done it yet. I'm back to Gnome 2.6 on tess, now, but mainly because I haven't installed enlightenment yet. Not sure if I will or not... I might be enjoying Gnome's eye-candy a bit too much. Metacity (gnome's actual window manager) is not too exciting, so I might try replacing it with sawmill, the lisp-based WM that should integrate nicely. That way I'll feel a little better about sticking with gnome :)

Mon, 09 Aug 2004

New Mail Server
blog

Site update... I finally switched my mail to my new linode server, so if you notice any mail issues, please let me know. Just to be even more paranoid, email my google mail with any problems: haslup (at) gmail dot com. That email address shouldn't bounce.

Pretty interesting watching all the spam come in... kind of annoying, actually. I have just a little bit more control over it now, so we'll see if that helps... I can at least setup some addresses to actually bounce emails, but that probably won't help things. I've got spamassassin running on the linode, so maybe that will free up my home server a bit.

Thu, 05 Aug 2004

Clean!
blog

Well, thanks to a combination of AdAware and "SpyBot Search and Destroy", my stupid Windows XP box is clean. Thank goodness. I've got ethereal running on it right now looking for any funny packets and it's looking nice and quiet.

What a pain in the ass. Both AdAware and Spybot are free, so be sure and download them ASAP and make sure you're clean, as well. Or switch to linux. Then you'll feel clean, as well. (I know, I'm all talk -- I can't give up stupid Windows, either.)

So it seems like my new linode server is doing well enough that someday I'll do the final switch of email to it. Good stuff, this linode... I even installed the lazy-guy's way of Sysadmin -- Webmin. I'm embarrassed, but it sure does make some tasks so easy I can't stop using it.

All my auctions are over with, so now I've got the cold hard cash needed for a new Zaurus C860. Of course now I'm getting cold feet... $600 is a lot to pay for a PDA, but this one is so damn cool it's worth it. One thing I'm sort of worried about, now, is a new model coming out soon. I'm afraid I'll get my C860 and two days later Sharp Japan (certainly not Sharp USA) will announce the C970 with more of everything. I'm sure it'll be more $$ as well, but still... so now I'm already thinking of what else I can sell just in case.

I'm in the process of downloading Fedora Linux Core 2 -- the community-driven version of RedHat created when RedHat decided to get out of the consumer-based linux. This one (finally) uses kernel 2.6, so I'm thinking about upgrading tess, my linux desktop. I'm pretty sure now that the annoying clicking drive is the one that linux runs off of, so that's a bit disturbing. It might be a nice time to drop in a new drive and see how things work. I've pretty much got all my good data on a separate, 80gb drive, so moving that to a new system is easy.

Blah blah blah blah blah. I'm even boring myself to death... sorry, more interesting stuff soon...

Tue, 03 Aug 2004

I'm such a tool
blog

Oh how I feel like such a loser... couple reasons:

One: I went to a bittorrent site that I normally only go to on my linux box and I got punk'd. Not by that mtv guy, but by all the freakin' spyware and ad crap that automatically installed itself on my stupid windows computer. I knew it was easy for that to happen, but geez... I was at the site for five seconds before I realized my brain fart and shutdown IE.

Those things were pretty damn busy during those five minutes... all of a sudden windows started popping up. Whenever I closed 'em, they'd come back with two.

In between pop-ups I was able to download AdAware and run it. It cleaned out 400+ objects off my system. I have no idea what any of them were doing and how they got there.

Of course, it didn't clean off everything... I powered up the stupid windows box tonight and noticed that my CPU was spiked and I wasn't doing anything. I ran AdAware again... it found eight more items. But it still didn't get a little app I saw running. So I killed it. Then noticed another one running. So I killed it. And so on...

Of course this time I had the network cable unplugged, but I was curious as to what was going on. So I fired up Ethereal on my stupid windows box... Ethereal's a packet sniffer, and I had just happened to have installed the windows version on my box for some reason (I forget why).

Sure enough, as soon as I plugged my ethernet cable back in, some freakin' application started firing off HTTP requests to some server. I got so mad I just saved the trace, unplugged the network, and shut that stupid windows box down.

So now I'm not sure what to do... part of me (the unrealistic part) wants to just reformat that stupid windows machine and install linux on it and never go back to the dark side. But of course, I can't play any games that way. I guess I need to reinstall windows xp and install some blockers or something. Stupid windows machine.

Part two of my "I'm a loser" rant... my monitor situation. I went to our local used computer place, figured I'd see if I could save some money and get a used monitor. They had a 19" Sylvania there, so I checked it out. I had 'em hook it up to a PC, tried the different resolutions, etc... even asked how old it was (2002). Seemed ok and it was about 1/3 the price that I was going to pay for a new Dell 19". So I bought it... just trying to save some money, do the good thing.

I get home, plug it in... it seems ok. Certainly nice to have my linux box back, I suppose. Then I go to adjust some of the settings when I realize I made the most newbie-ish mistake that a monitor-buyer can. I didn't check what the store had the brightness and contrast levels at. Of course they were 100% / 100%. Great. Good job, jason... way to check everything out.

I guess it's not a huge deal... it looks ok, it works, and I did save money. But it only contributes to my current mood of "i hate computers". I'm about ready to ditch all my desktop systems and just buy one kick-ass laptop that I can dual-boot linux and stupid windows from.

One thing contributing to this thought is the fact that tess, my linux box, is currently making a really annoying rattling sound from one of its fans. I'm too lazy and stubborn to take the time to oper her up and see what's going on, so I sit here and listen to that annoying little rattle. It's still going. Yep... still there. Wait -- it's gon... nope, still there. That's it, I'm opening it up.

That's it for now... a word to the wise: if you haven't checked your computer lately, run AdAware (search google for it) at least. Find some other Anti-Virus app and install it, too. And do yourself a favor and stop using Internet Explorer. Download Firefox from mozilla.org and use it for your browser. I think it's safer.

Better yet, download knoppix which is a linux "live" cd and use it to do any web surfing and email-checking. It runs great, straight off the CD and doesn't save anything or touch your hard drive.

And yes, I'll start taking my own advice right now...

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