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Welcome to Scattered Random Projects, a place to collect journal entries from my personal life and aforementioned projects. On this page, you’ll find all journal entries for the site.
Personal for personal updates. Archives: Personal (All)
Fedora Blues for Fedora linux stuff. Archives: Fedora Blues (All)
Doctor SUSE for SUSE linux stuff. Archives: Doctor SUSE (All)
Technical for Miscellaneous technical odds and ends of interest. Archives: Technical (All)
And by year: All Entries (2007) | All Entries (2006) | All Entries (2005) | All Entries (2004)
If you have been happily using the two NVIDIA display driver packages with yast2:
If this is you, and you recently upgraded, you may find your nvidia display doesn’t work anymore, and fails every time to load a graphical display, kicking you back into text mode. This is really frustrating, because if you’ve been using yast2 to handle your nvidia display drivers, you know that for a long time you could upgrade the kernel without recompiling your display driver. To any linux user of nvidia products, this is a simply blindingly amazing feat of technology. Let’s just forget for a second that users of other operating systems do this everyday in a completely unremarkable way.
Well, NVIDIA thought, just for kicks, they would rename the yast packages you need to use. For no apparent reason, they are now called
So to get your NVIDIA display back, go into yast, uninstall x11-video-nvidia and nvidia-gfx-kmp-default, and install x11-video-nvidiaG01 and nvidia-gfxG01-kmp-default. Then it will work again. Unless you have one of the legacy cards described in http://www.suse.de/~sndirsch/nvidia-installer-HOWTO.html .
Why did they change the name? Who knows. Why did they make the new default packages the new weird name? Who knows. What does G01 mean? Who knows.
I have a new blog for my personal stuff. It’s called something designed to not be googleable back to my name. At some point a random headhunter mentioned my ancient personal page I created in my junior year of undergrad. This freaked me out a little--that people who are thinking of employing me might actually try and find my weird personal ramblings on the internet.
So if you are one of my friends and know my email address, I’ll happily tell you the address of my new personal blog (which currently contains hardly anything.) I’d just ask you pretty please don’t link to it with any personally-identifying links that might associate it with me in a google search.
And if you are, or are thinking about, employing me: I have no personal life, don’t waste time writing a blog, and exist only to work super hard for you. YOU! You are the most important part of my current or future life. Luv ya.
I decided that in the end, even though I’ve neglected my little blog here for so long, I shouldn’t be ashamed if the first post a put in a while is a technical one. So here goes:
If you want to kill one or many processes that all involve the same command or similar command, you can do it with the handy unix command pkill. It will kill all processes containing the string you give it as an argument. Use the -u option to restrict it to a particular user. For instance:
pkill -u joeuser java
to kill all processes with ‘java’ in their name started by user ‘joeuser’.
Another related handy command is pgrep which only lists the process id’s of matching processes and doesn’t actually kill them.
pgrep -u joeuser java
At work the other day, one of the engineers in lab mentioned that braiding power wires was a good way to keep them all together and have any interference affect them all equally, so that the relative voltages would remain constant. It’s a more complicated version of the twisted pair.
Anyway, I realized I had 4 cables, and I only knew how to braid 3 strands. So of course I spent the next few minutes figuring out how to braid more than 3 strands. It turns out it’s easy. You just take the rightmost strand, and moving to the left, weave it over, then under, then over. Then do this process again with the new rightmost strand. And then the new rightmost strand, etc., etc. You can do the same thing with any number of strands, always start with the right and weave to the left. My finely-crafted Windows Paint picture to the right shows the basic idea.
Here’s a new picture of me, on this last day of 2006 (picture taken in the wee hours of the morning.) I know this picture is a bit bizarre, but it’s nothing compared to me as a muppet with orange hair. In fact, whenever I would pull up my blog and see myself as Beaker, it freaked me out a little. To protect my self-image and prevent a tragic descent into an alternate Muppet identity, I decided to post a merely normally-odd picture of myself. Here I am at home in Maple Grove, Minnesota.
This Christmas has been blissfully uneventful--a nice break and time to relax. I got a bunch of awesome presents. Nothing excessive, but just what I needed. I read a lot, a luxury. I usually am able to afford only about 10 pages every evening, but managed to work through a couple of books over the past 10 days. I took time to indulge my addiction to P.G. Wodehouse, which I originally got from my father at an early age. (”I learned it by watching you!”) I can’t think of another author so expertly skilled in the use of the English language purely in the pursuit of mirth and frivolity. Perfect.
I’ve also started a project to gather together all of my old emails from various programs, accounts, periods of my life. I want to put them all together and print them out on actual paper. I have an idea that I periodically like to look at my old correspondence in a nostalgic way. Even if I did migrate all of these emails to a new email program, it’s really not the nicest way to walk down memory lane. Also, I can see the writing on the wall--anything that you really want to be able to see for years to come should be on paper, not on a computer. I already have files from college that I can’t read because they’re in some arcane format for some program that doesn’t exist anymore. I’m sure a computer forensic expert could always read most of my emails, being mostly text, but I want pleasant, easy access to them. I’ve already written a perl script to pull out all the emails and attachments and format them in html. If I manage to make something usable then I’ll write more about it. My goal is to have “chapters” relating to all email traffic between me and each of the various people I’ve written to.
Also, if anybody knows of a program to print out all of one’s emails for browsing, I’d love to hear about it! Tell me now before I go crazy with another project. :)
Happy New Year everybody!
If you’re a hardcore fan of Matt Clapp, you may know that at one point in the near-distant past of graduate school, I dressed up as a certain Muppet with orange hair for Halloween¹. Well, I wasn’t entirely satisfied with the effect, and I liked the idea, so I decided to try again.
So I present to you the new and improved Beaker. Hair and nose are more reddish, but much more muppet-like this time around. 
I’ve added a picture of the real Beaker here for comparison. Not bad eh? If you don’t know, Beaker was the assistant to Dr. Bunsen Honeydew, the brilliant Muppet scientist. Beaker’s expression is due to the fact that he has the classic grad student role--the go-to guy for handling dangerous acids, extremely high voltages, or Muppet-eating animals.
At the costume party I went to, old friends and new seemed to receive the costume well. Some commented that my eyes were perfectly Beaker-like with no costume help, which goes along with past comments that I’m like a muppet in everyday life. Notice the classy gaffer tape name tag. Less apparent is the gaffer tape used in place of buttons on the cheap costume-store lab coat. The name tag is covering the original HI-larious silk-screened name on the lab coat, “Dr. Seymour Bush, Gynecologist”. So it wasn’t just that I needed to tell people who I was supposed to be, I needed to, um, change the tone of the costume from the original.
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¹ Original costume included a valiant attempt to dye my own hair orange (failure, hair was too dark and ended up looking like I was starting to rust.) I also couldn’t find a suitable costume nose, so I used a small Nerf ball with a nose notch cut out. It fell off constantly. This was later put to good use as a cat toy for housemate Peter the Cat. The high point of this costume was “borrowing” a lab coat from a certain professor who shall remain nameless, and then spilling wine on it at the party.
Here’s my bookshelf--nearly finished! Everything’s there except for the head casing and base moldings that will make it a true thing of beauty. An interesting photography note: the slow-sync flash was a nice compromise between natural light and the flash.
And here is a close-up view of the shelves. Not too shabby for pine!
And I can actually use it to hold books now! For the first time! So exciting!
This establishment is nothing if not Pr f ssional.
For a long time, life in my apartment was simple, clean and uncluttered. In short, I didn’t own a couch.
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This went on for months, until one day I decided that it might be nice if women were to want to visit me in my apartment. So I bought a couch!
Here I am welcoming propsective ladies. Hey gals, look, a couch!
Here I am “taking time out” as we used to say in the yearbook trade. Either that, or it’s an alcohol-induced coma.
That’s one comfortable couch!
Hey all, just thought I’d let you know about my new online photo album at http://photos.itsayellow.com .
Right now there’s just pictures from Barcelona, and no pretty main page. But I guess there’s no reason to keep it a secret. I may still tinker with the theme of the photo pages.
The cool thing about the photo pages is that the cursor keys (left, right) navigate backward and forward through the pictures, so you can flip through quickly.
Enjoy!