alcopop.org

11:12: command history meme

The command-history meme seems to have finally died a death (or maybe Im not reading in the right places).

One thing I couldn't help to notice was that the most common two commands for virtually everyone were cd and—usually right behind it—ls.

I'd wager that often, the ls follows straight on from the cd.

For some time at work, I've had the following in my ~/.bashrc:

cd() {
	builtin cd $@ && ls -lhrt
}

This might well break some things, I'm not sure, but it's saved me a bit of typing.

Category: /geek/unix

23:47: Nine Inch Nails - The Slip

I would not blame the people I speak to regularly for getting some kind of fatigue regarding Nine Inch Nails. It seems like a week hasn't gone by this year without something happening: a single, an album, or tour dates.

It didn't come as much of a suprise that a new album was released in it's entirety this monday gone. ID3 tags in previously-released singles said "watch nin.com on 5th of may". It wasn't even that suprising that the whole album was free, either.

What was a suprise, to me at least, was that this album is fantastic. I'd heard two tracks prior to the album being released (although one only by a few days). Whilst I enjoyed them, they were pretty safe, lyrically and musically. They didn't push any boundaries. They also did not forshadow the album at all.

This album is the best Nine Inch Nails release this century. It's too early to tell whether it stands higher in my estimation than 1999's The Fragile. If so, it's the best release since 1994. I had not even considered this a possibility.

I also think it's the best album to present to someone who isn't familiar with their work to see if they'd like to look for more. It has a good range of tracks covering loud, aggressive, introspective, instrumental, dancable, dark and delicate.

I'm now starting a self-imposed ban on listening to the album, so as to not overdo it too much so early on. Regardless, I can still hear The four of us are dead playing over and over again in my head. This is a strong candidate for my favourite NIN song ever. It made me think of what the Cure should be writing.

Each track in this release (like each of the 36 tracks in the last album) have their own unique embedded picture in them. There is scant software in Debian that can handle these, unfortunately. I think "tagtool" can add and remove art. Amarok copes admirably. Rhythmbox doesn't, unless you apply this patch, which is stagnating in gnome's BTS, unfortunately. For the lazy (with 32bit x86), here's a tarball of a recent-ish rhythmbox rebuilt with this patch. I'd supply a Debian package but I didn't feel like building the documentation at the time.

I haven't found a single program for the n800 that can handle the artwork.

Category: /media/music

10:13: new BBC layout

At some point in the last few weeks, the BBC changed the appearance of their sites, including BBC news.

It seems some people may have been aware this was going to happen and had an opportunity to provide feedback to the designers before the main switch. It's a shame more people didn't know about this.

The old design was flawed because it used a fixed, narrow width. They've changed this for a fixed, wider width. Web designers are capable of making visual elements scale according to the user's preferred font size. They could have taken the opportunity to move to a flexible width or make use of relative spacing.

A BBC blog post on the subject states:

As Steve Herrmann and Ben Gallop have both mentioned 95% of you have your screen resolution set to 1024 pixels wide or wider. And that number is growing every year.

This makes the mistake of assuming that everyone uses their web browser maximized. I don't, and I haven't done for years. It's too wide for my laptop display (1024x768) home and work displays (1280x1024) using the window sizes I tend to use; and far too wide for Internet phones and suchlike (including my nokia n800).

Category: /web

20:29: Qemu madness

At work today, I needed to get a screenshot of a LUKS passphrase prompt for a document I was preparing. I had my desktop configured with an encrypted /home partition, but there are practical problems taking screenshots from text prompts before a system has booted. What is easier would be to take a screenshot of a qemu emulator window, running a booting linux kernel.

I therefore performed the following:

# chmod g-w /dev/sda

# chgrp jon /dev/sda

$ qemu-img create -f qcow -b /dev/sda tmp.img

$ qemu -hda tmp.img

I created a qemu copy-on-write image backing off my hard drive and booted that. I was therefore booting the currently running kernel with the current root as the root filesystem.

This worked far enough to get a screenshot of the luks passphrase. Once I'd unlocked that, it started a fsck. This was attempting to repair "damage" to the filesystem (which was currently open on the host machine). Of course, all of the fsck writes were going into the qemu image file, which is a file stored on the filesytem that fsck was trying to repair...

Category: /work

23:14: Debian Games

I'm a member of the debian games team. We package a huge number of games, and I feel slightly ashamed that I have played very few of them. I decided I should try and play every single one, at least once, and write a one-line summary of it. Call it "QA".

I'll try and do roughly one a day. Today, amphetamine. Quoting the control file, Amphetamine is an exciting jump'n run game that offers some unique visual effects like colored lighting, fogging and coronas..

Amphetamine is a 2d side-on platformer/shooter. You shoot what look like toxic versions of mario koopas and run around pushing buttons etc. The game structure is reasonably common but the concept and environment are fairly strange.

I added a screenshot for it to games-thumbnails and filed three bugs: ship a .desktop file (471254); supply a symlink /usr/games/amph -> /usr/games/amphetamine (471257) (fix in SVN); game loop runs CPU at 100% (471259).

Category: /debian