Well, I broke down and bought a Hard Drive yesterday. I went with a seagate 60 gig. I couldn’t believe just how easy they made it to change a laptop harddrive. Sadly though it took me almost 8 hours to get everything back installed onto my computer just the way it was before the crash. With the dual boot, wireless internet, ati drivers and all it takes a while. I hope to get the networking done with scill soon. If I manage to work on it this week I should finish it this week..

I wrote a ruby+cgi blog+file upload utility. Only about 300 lines of code. Sure beats writting in rails
http://www.badcherry.org/Files/
http://rubyforge.org/projects/citriski/

[ 06:08 /media/SEA_DATA/video ] rm -rfv anime/

I have long hated sendmail, but it was the only way that I could get mail delivered to my mailbox properly with fetchmail. This way my mail was set up was retrieving mail went fetchmail-+sendmail-+procmail-+spamprobe-+mbox then to send mutt-+cream-+esmtp. This worked just fine except for one thing, those darn spamers. They would send me emails with urls that didn’t resolve so sendmail would sit on these emails for 1-2 minutes till it timed out and not retrieve the message. I figured out now how to bypass sendmail and send the mail directly to procmail, yeah! In my .muttrc I rather than “!fetchmail\r” have “!fetchmail -m ‘/usr/bin/procmail -d %T’\r”. Now those darn spamers won’t hang up my mail fetching for 20 minutes at a time. Their emails can go to /dev/null with out any hesitation now!

Never ever ever execute powerful system cleansing commands first thing in the morning, NEVER!

sudo rm -rfv .*

I know the behavior of that command, but for some reason I didn’t know first thing in the morning and have since suffered some data loss. LOL, at least I can laugh over it. Among my losses were some ebooks in pdf format that I had paid for, but I will get in contact with the supplier and hopefully I’ll be able to redownload them. For those that didn’t figure it out, I intended on removing all of the hidden files in the directory so I used a wildcard “.*” to specify all hidden files (on unix hidden files start with a ‘.’). The error in this is that in every directory there are always two other directory links, ‘.’ and ‘..’, the former for the current path and the latter for the sub directory. What my command did instead of removing the the hidden files in the current directory was to go to the sub directory and and completely delete it as well as anything in it including my current directory and any other directories that may be in it. In other words a lot of things got deleted. I feel so stupid because I know unix very well and am well aware of this behavior, but did it anyway.

I’ve begun using iRate again. It is a lot of really good music for free (and legally too), but you have to sort through hundreds of bad songs before you start getting to the good ones. It is also a great way to get introduced to some bands that you would have never heard of any other way that you will really like. I think that it would be neat to rewrite the whole thing in ruby for much added flexibility or at the very least make a ruby client for it because the client kinda sucks. I remember attempting something like this about two years ago, but gave up on it because I didn’t know the first thing about gui or network programming and was still fairly new to ruby, but I may be able to manage now. I have too many projects already, so most likely won’t even attempt it. It is a nice thing to consider, though.

WordPress refuses to leave pre tags along. I wrote a very simple wiki during the period of a week about a year ago, and an simple poorly written wiki even knew better than to fuck with pre tags. This is why I haven’t used software like this in the past. You would think that there would be some way around it, some way to post raw html into your post, but no, it must always go through some automatic formatting. I’m trying to post something, but it keeps getting mangled. I’ve tried 7 times now, and it has been over a half hour. Perhaps I should revert back to tDiary, at least it didn’t have these problems.

I downloaded some new software and themes for my computer. I really like the new layout, so I am posting a screenshot here (it is really on DeviantArt, I’m just linking it).

Ubuntu GNU/Linux 5.10
Gnome 2.12.1
Drivel (journal editor)
Firefox (web browser)

All from art.gnome.org installed with gnome-art
Theme: AluminumAlloy-Smog
Icons: Still Life Brushed
BG: GNOME Waves 3