David @ Tokyo

To give life a little more spice, I have volunteered to translate the Unofficial Enlightenment DR17 User Guide into Japanese in my free time. It has been keeping me busy. But tonight I am taking a break to catch up on some email etc and other stuff. Who knows, I might even boot into Windows...

Labels: enlightenment

Ever wonder about those people who say they are giving more than 100%?
We have all been to those meetings where someone wants over 100%. How about achieving 103%? Here's a little math that might prove helpful.

What makes life 100%?

If
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z is represented as:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26
then,
H A R D W O R K
8 1 18 4 23 15 18 11 = 98%
K N O W L E D G E
11 14 15 23 12 5 4 7 5 = 96%
But, A T T I T U D E
1 20 20 9 20 21 4 5 = 100%
...
And, B U L L S H I T
2 21 12 12 19 8 9 20 = 103%
So, it stands to reason that hardwork and knowledge will get you close, attitude will get you there, but bullshit will put you over the top.
And look how far
A S S K I S S I N G
1 19 19 11 9 19 19 9 14 7 = 118%
will take you.

Earlier this evening I got back from a nice little trip up to Tochigi (I will probably upload some pictures later). The Onsen we stayed at was really nice ( Matsuya ), and there was a very scenic waterfall / river nearby.

Also, I completed my little mini-goal of installing Enlightenment 17 from the anonymous CVS repository this evening too. I got stuck previously on the very last library required before building Enlightenment itself, but I checked out the source again and rebuilt everything from scratch. Just a matter of running 1) ./autogen.sh 2) make, then 3) (as root) make install, and finally 4) ldconfig to update the shared library info or something like that. Everything went fine this time around. Maybe cvs was broken before.

Anyway, indeed Enlightenment 17 looks pretty flash. My poor 2.5 year old laptop didn't handle the flashiest of the graphical eye candy too well, but for normal use it seems plenty snappy enough.

I also gave "Entrance", the graphical login manager for Enlightenment a go too, looks pretty nice, and after some road bumps I got eRSS (an RSS feed reader for Enlightenment) installed as well. Initially when I tried to run the ./autogen.sh script for eRSS I got an error complaining about xml2-config not existing in my path. Eventually I found a page via Google that indicated that the xml2-config binary is available in the libxml2-dev package, and after installing that I was set.

I will probably demonstrate with some screenshots later on, but eRSS will keep me updated on any changes to my favourite news sites. Here's my eRSS config file for Rodney Hide's blog:

Seems to work ok!

[UPDATED]: Well, the xml gets eaten up by blogger.com when I submit the post, so forget about it :-) No one reading this will ever probably run eRSS anyway!

... tomorrow morning I am off to Tochigi for a stay at some hot springs. Should be fantastic. Back on Saturday evening.

Here is my desktop now (I have rearranged things a little). In the top left hand corner there is a moon clock (yup, it seems to be in phase with the moon!), and a standard old-style clock (These are little programs for Enlightenment 16 called epplets by the way). The third box below the two clocks has a big blue flame in it. This epplet is illustrating my CPU usage. At the time I was going through my initial attempt at building the Enlightenment 17 foundation libraries from the anonymous CVS repository online. Maybe I need more CPU :-)

Labels: enlightenment

This is how my Enlightenment 16 workspace looked about 8 days ago. On the left is "gkrellm", a stack of various system monitors. I had just found a plugin for it that enables the user to take screenshots. This was my test!

Labels: enlightenment

My little bit of fun for the weekend (although I have to go to work in 13 minutes - it's a Saturday) is going to be getting all the source code for Enlightenment 17 on to my machine, and hopefully building it.

This is how I am apparently supposed to do it:

Gotta learn a few CVS commands it seems. That will be a first, but I've used Microsoft Visual SourceSafe before, so how hard can it be :-)

Labels: enlightenment

Well, it seems like I'm a bigger geek than I thought. I have just finished installing Debian Sarge on to my laptop using the "daily build" (doesn't that sound like I am a guinea pig - who would have thought!), and have installed the x-window-system, enlightenment, mozilla-firefox packages, enabling me to type all this from Mozilla Firefox 1.0 running on Debian, not Windows XP for the first time ever.

Still lots of stuff to figure out how to do; substitutes for programs I use in Windows (one example is the client software that I always use to upload pictures to this blog - so I won't have any screenshots up for a while), got to try using all my various hardware with Linux (got a firewire hard drive, MiniSD card USB device (supposedly designed for Windows XP only), plus my USB mouse... not that I ever use it... hmmm, can't think of anything else. Oh yeah, I have a USB vid cam too. I never use that either, no one out there with broadband to talk to me!

The new Debian installer is supposed to be lots easier than the old one, but I couldn't really see the difference, it just seemed to be all reorganized. I guess I am used to the complicated one now. The scary step was partitioning. First it used some symbols to describe the partition layout, which I couldn't understand. I found my way into a submenu that explained it all though. But it had decided to make the partition with Linux on it the only bootable partition. "What about Windows XP?" I thought - when I shrunk NTFS yesterday it told me very explicitly to make sure to re-set the bootable flag when recreating the NTFS partition - and now it was gone. But with my backups all safely taken, I trusted it, and sure enough in the next step (Grub installer) the existing Windows XP installation was detected, and ultimately all was setup correctly. I've always used the LILO boot loader until now, so I guess I wouldn't have been so anxious if I was familiar with Grub.

Anyway, all is well, and Enlightenment 16.6 is super fast on this newer machine (Processor is 1.066 Ghz Celeron versus the old Pentium 166Mhz, and 256M of RAM as opposed to 32).

Going to call home to Mum in New Zealand soon. She will probably get sick of me writing all this mumbo-jumbo techo crap on here! But it's my blog :-)

Ah well...
This morning, with my freshly shrunk ntfs freeing up 7GB on my hard disk, I went through the procedure of installing grub on Windows so that I can install Linux over the network with nothing but my network connection. No CD's! Ain't that something!

The Grub installation went fine, but I had to abort part way through the actual Linux installation. Unfortunately the Debian Sarge archive is incompatible with the RC2 netboot image at the moment. Once I got up to the "Download installer components" part of the installation procedure, I was hit by the problem described here.
This is because the Debian people are right at this time busily preparing for the next release candidate. I don't know why that means they have to break the previous release candidate archive, but being a Free project, I guess the Debian project has limited storage space or something.

Anyway, not to worry! Apparently I can use the daily build image to install instead. So I'm going to try that now...

Well, that all went like a ... whatever it they say something and a babies bottom. I forgot. It happens when you speak Japanese 75% of the day.

ntfsresize successfully shrunk my Windows XP C: from 29GB down to 22GB. Rather than use the GUI interface, the command line interface approach seemed like a more reassuring way of going about the task thanks to the very clear example .

In fact, I found that I could improve on the example a bit too. When recreating the partition for the shrunken NTFS, it recommends using the new NTFS size + the theoretical maximum cylinder size, because the partition creation program can round down the partition size to align it on a cylinder boundary.

So I did this when I used fdisk the first time around, specifying the size of the new partition as 22140Megabytes (the example says that 140M is the max theoretical cylinder size). But when I ran "ntfsresize --force --info /dev/hda1", the output indicated that rather than rounding down, the value had been rounded up so that the partition was actually 22160 Megabytes.

That's 160 Megabytes I want for my new Linux installation thankyou very much!!

So I repartioned again, instead using 22010M as the size of the partition. And sure enough, when I checked the output of "ntfsresize -fi /dev/hda1", the partition size had been rounded up to 22020M.

One exercise that I will do later: I've now rebooted successfully back into Windows, but note that my new NTFS size was only 22000M. The partition size is apparently 22020M - so I'm wasting 20Megabytes. Okay okay, big deal, sure, but after carving 7GB off my Windows partition suddenly it seems like every byte counts! Confident now that this ntfsresize tool knows what it is doing, I'll run it again, but this time to enlarge my file system to fill out those extra 20 Megabytes. That's at least 4 mp3s I can fit on there!!!

Thanks also to Knoppix for including this great free repartitioning software on the Live CD, and also further thanks to Google's Gmail. I just got invited to set up an account the other day. I used my Gmail account while logged into the stateless Knoppix to post various backup files to myself - just in case! As it turned out I didn't need them yet, but who knows, maybe my Linux installation will eat my MBR, then I will be thankful!

After recovering from a nasty disease, my interest in the Linux OS has been greatly rekindled. Several reasons for this:

1) I use Sun Solaris at work, and want to learn some more cool UNIX command line tricks (most commands apply on Linux as well, except the really internals specific stuff, like "prstat" instead of "top").

2) Enlightenment 17 preview videos ... What is Enlightenment? Well, it is a Window Manager. For you Windows users, this is the equivalent to the thing that displays all your application windows, responds to you moving them about the screen, resizing them, drawing those three buttons in the top right hand corner etc. In Linux, you can pick a Window Manager of your choosing. Sure, the default in Windows is fine, and you can even change the colours right? I didn't care either, but then I saw the videos for Enlightenment 17 (still in development) and it looks amazing. Check out some videos:
e17_movie-02.avi
e17_movie-03.avi
Can't wait for the final version. Don't people do some amazing stuff in their free time?!? Think you don't want this because it's a waste of RAM? I guess you have a solid blue background on your Windows too! This is just a natural progression methinks.

3) Linux is CHEAP to install now. Sure, Linux only cost the price of burning a CD, but you still need hard disk space to install it! My stumbling block has always been having an NTFS (Windows XP File system) that I didn't want to risk damaging with some commercial partitioning software. These companies take your money but tell you to back up your hard drive, just in case?!? No thanks! But I discovered a utility now included in many Linux Live CDs (like Knoppix) with which you can resize then repartition your hard drive for FREE!! ntfsresize. The authors still recommend users take a back-up, but from all reports I have seen this tool looks spotless, and like I said, it is FREE, not $99.

So with that said, I am cleaning up my NTFS partition right now, and come the weekend I will shrink it and install Linux on the free'd up space. Stayed tuned for some screenshots! (Maybe only Enlightenment 16 for a while... I need to learn how to compile Enlightenment 17 before I'll be able to show that off...)

UPDATE: These are not screenshots of mine, but you can see how cool Enlightenment is here (note that this is the previous version, 16 - first released about 5 years ago) and how Linux can also be made to look something like Windows XP too.