zen.org Communal Weblog

We were going to throw a big turkey dinner this weekend as a practice run of Christmas. We’ve got family over then, and want to make sure we pull off the complex menu we’ve concocted. But then we were told by more than one person how turkeys are a rare product in Ireland except right before Christmas. “There’s no market for them except for Christmas,” it was explained. The great organic butcher down the street confirmed what the butcher at the supermarket had told us: no turkey before mid-December. So we let go of the idea and didn’t plan to do anything this time.

At the very same supermarket this morning, where I was doing an early-morning run for the week’s menu, I had just finished getting frozen veggies when I saw a cooler at the end of the aisle. Packed full with big, big frozen turkeys, complete with giblets and the rest. At least 20 of them. To back up my organic butcher’s story, I bet if I looked on the wrapper around the turkeys I’d find an address in England. But still. They were both wrong: you can get a turkey in November, just not a fresh one, much less an organic free-range civil responsibility sort of turkey.

Maybe we’ll have a veggie stir-fry this weekend to just really push the point.

Discovered in a blog via Google: Male turkeys are too stupid to find their own food, so in a group (sic) of male turkeys there must be a few females to find the food or else the males would all starve to death.

That tends to describe the scene in an awful lot of supermarkets—or the kitchens of too many homes.

As an aside, our road has a ladies’ book club that meets about every three months. The husbands on the street don’t have a gathering of their own for another time, though I would love to figure out something. No meeting up in a pub to watch a match, since not everyone drinks. I had the idea of a gathering where all of the guys take part in putting together a 3-course meal. The ladies would eat it with us at the end. The cooking idea got poo-poo’d by more than a few people. Not many of the guys would find that even close to a recreational activity. Oh well. Maybe we’ll come up with something else. Poker or a similar game is reportedly a favorite among testosterone gatherings. Don’t suppose they’d be into Scrabble or Boggle or Risk or … boy do I feel snobby.

I tried doing

   chmod u+s /usr/bin/mythbackend /usr/bin/mythfrontend

to see if it would make the display of the show actually work properly. No dice. I wonder now if there’s an issue with the X display properly using the Hauppauge card? I worder if there are hardware options available on the card that my XF86Config should use to make things go more quickly.

Actually, I suspect the first thing I should do is check out the latest ivtv driver. Build it, make it reboot to load it (I’ve not been able to make the module unload, try as I might). One helpful comment from someone suggested that I shouldn’t be forced to do quite the level of custom settings in /etc/mythtv/modules/ivtv as I have been. The newer driver reportedly does a lot of the work for you, so you don’t have to specify which card, PAL vs NTSC (I’m suspect of the chances of this), etc.

Just a matter of time. I’ve got to get this working in the next couple of weeks, or I know the holidays will make me not touch it again until January. That would just be ridiculous. 🙂

I tried to upgrade my desktop system from SuSE 9.1 to SuSE 9.2, but it failed. I have a few drives on it:

hda / and /home
hdb /work
hdc /music
hdd CD-ROM/DVD-RW
hde /backup and /tv

(I know I need to put /home on its own disk, just not easy at the moment—either a 40Gb as it is now, or a 250Gb. Too much space for /home not isolated on its own disk.)

I was able to boot off the CD, pick the language English(US), and then select “Update an existing system.” (Why on the initial boot menu don’t they say “Installation / Upgrade”? I had to go through to see if it supported upgrading instead of just a raw install.)

It got to the point of trying to figure out my system and then complained, “Failed to mount target system.” It pointed me at /var/log/YaST2/y2log for the details. Tsk tsk, the GUI should let me see it there. I looked in the log, and saw that it failed trying to mount /dev/hdd1 as /backup. Hmm.

It looks like it saw the hde drive just fine (meaning the kernel has the driver for the Promise UDMA133 card that I use to let me have more than 4 devices), looking at the Alt-F3 screen where it initially lists the drives. But something in the scripts used to install messed up the idea of where the drives are. The original /etc/fstab is clear about mounting /dev/hde1 on /backup and /dev/hde2 on /tv. I’m not yet sure why it thought it was hdd (the CD doing the install). I didn’t expect a mistake like this.

The short-term fix will be to just comment out the /backup and /tv entries in /etc/fstab so that the install process won’t think that those partitions need to be mounted. Maybe tomorrow or next week, time to go to bed.

Sven and I were comparing notes on how people describe the way dog barks in the English and Chinese language. Off the top of my head, I only know of one Chinese bark – “wo, wo”. In English there are many – “bark”, “ruff”, “arf”. We couldn’t figure out what’s up with “bow wow”.

I posted on the jPodder user forum some notes about my progress trying to port jPodder to Linux. Well, not yet really porting it; what I’m currently tackling is the ability to just recompile all the Java files so that I can then look at making changes to the code, recompile, and test the result. I want to find a way to make it use the interface for KDE to use juk, for example, to do the listing and playing of shows like happens with iTunes and the Windows Media Player. Via KDE’s kicker?

I’ve had a lot of luck with Alien Package Converter recently. I have Debian liboost-* packages installed on Fedora and Fedora libaio* packages installed on Debian. All seem to work well.

So I tried converting one of Sun’s Java RPM package to a .deb, it don’t work. The resulting .deb file installs fine, but none of the commands work. At least Sun put out an alternative install method, and all is working well.

In Dublin on a wall we saw the words: “Eat A Dead Gay Baby For Jesus”. After a second of shock, I couldn’t stop laughing. Just about every word is made to want to offend someone. Awesome.

A quick Google search pointed me at one description where someone had seen a similar slogan on a bumper sticker. Their page, in turn, passed me to T-Shirt Hell. Oh. My. God. I want them all.

Tee hee. Ethics, I reject thee!

NPR had a piece on Slow Food this morning. It should show up in there audio archives some time. If you are the sort of hippy eat to save the world weirdo like I am, it’s worth a listen.

I only discovered Slow Food about a month ago. It seems I was “®” crazy at the time too.

After looking at the RSS 2.0 Spec, I was able to fix wp-rss2.php so it’ll properly give attribution to the author of each post when someone gets them via a RSS aggregator like Liferea. Ahhhhhh, much better. I’ve got it doing ‘mailto’ because apparently some aggregators use that properly; Liferea actually shows it and doesn’t create a link for it. At least, not the version I’m using.

I don’t think we’ll ever see the Oscar Terror Alert Level.