We Saw a Chicken …

Author: scruss

  • I don’t know what it did, but I wish it hadn’t done it

    Outlook has now decided that I need all my e-mail text in huge. I have no idea why.

  • rsync to an NSLU2

    My only real complaint with my Linksys NSLU2 is that it doesn’t have a very accurate clock. Tools like rsync expect identical timestamps, or flag source and destination files as different. This causes most of your files to be rewritten, even though the source and destination are in fact the same.
    This fixes it:

    rsync --size-only -av src dest

  • random photos

    i suspect prankage at Langstaff station

    the owl of minerva: catherine liked this

  • the long neck has arrived

    I picked up my long neck banjo from Hugh Hunter today. It’s wonderful.

    (The image links to some of Hugh’s work-in-progress pictures.)

  • this is me hating on Office 2007

    MS Office’s menus may have been a mess, but that’s no reason to replace them with something equally complex but different.

  • Found Art: Jimmy’s Writing Folder


    Found next to our recycling bin when I arrived home tonight.

  • Absolutely: The Hills of Buccleuch

    This is my favourite song from Absolutely: The Hills of Buccleuch.

  • spring tines = happy tunes

    I just got a Kalimba from Paul Tracey.

  • failballoon


    Whoops! Runaway balloon leaves parachutist grounded

  • propeller guy

    Married To The Sea
    marriedtothesea.com

  • blossom and wires

    blossom and wires

  • this blog is one document I’m not going to seal …

    I’m now a licensed Professional Engineer (P.Eng.), according Professional Engineers Ontario.

    I started my application process on December 2006. It’s not a quick process.

  • This Seat Reserved for Thor

  • wall of pencils

    Wall of Pencils

    At Wallack’s in Ottawa. They are Faber-Castells.

  • Tasty noms with Kyle MacNeill

    at The Urban Element, Ottawa

    Meena Peruvemba (CanWEA), Kyle MacNeill and Derek Lim Soo (GE) prepare the veggies at The Urban Element

    The CanWEA board, and as many staff who could make it, went to The Urban Element last night for a team-building dinner. I usually shy away from team building things (I’ve have too many There is no I in team sessions, to which I usually respond, “Yes, but there is me, and also meat, so I think that says something”) but this one was good.

    The Urban Element isn’t your average resto. You prepare and cook your own dinner, with the direct supervision of chef Kyle MacNeill and his assistants. Now it helps a lot that they’ve chosen very fine ingredients, and measured them out just so, and also have a properly set up kitchen and utensils, but we had to do the mixing, marinading and cooking.

    What we made:

    • Grilled romain caesar salad
    • Kerr Farms flatiron steaks with asparagus and Yukon gold potatoes with rosemary butter
    • Toasted saffron couscous with chick peas, cashews, tomatoes and sweet peppers
    • Crispy fennel flatbread
    • Chocolate praline tart with frangelico sauce

    It was good; very good. Really amazingly good. Great atmosphere and a very pleasant evening.

  • 80, maybe 100, milliseegers

    We watched “Shut Up and Sing” last night. Pretty remarkable the amount of ire that was directed towards The Dixie Chicks for one comment.

    Still, if we define 1 seeger to be the unit of persecution suffered by Pete Seeger for his words and beliefs, the meter barely flickers by comparison.

  • annoying ringtone

    Now I’ve discovered how easy it is to create MP3 ringtones for my BlackBerry (make a 64KBit mono MP3 of short length, e-mail it to the phone, open attachment, save it, and select “Use as ringtone”), I just had to use this little snippet of the DeZurik Sisters: dezurik.mp3.

  • Old Man Luedecke in Toronto

    I saw Old Man Luedecke play The Drake on Thursday night. After being snowed out of seeing him in Guelph, it was great to finally hear him play. Wasn’t disappointed; really fun show. Superb lyrics, fantastic technique (his clawhammer and Seeger up-picking are spot on) and gently self-deprecating stage banter make it a fun night. Go and see him if he’s playing near you.

  • auplabels – extract times of tracks in an Audacity file for adding labels

    auplabels – extract times of tracks in an Audacity file for adding labels (download).

    Audacity 1.3’s method of track splitting has always seemed a pain, so I wrote the above to help me.

    Running auplabels file.aup will generate a somewhat sparse file of track offsets:

    0.00000000
    191.57333333
    376.08000000
    550.76000000
    …

    You’ll want to edit this to add track names (there should be a tab between the first column and the title):

    0.00000000      Battle of the Blues
    191.57333333    I Quit My Job
    376.08000000    Ain't Goin' My Way
    550.76000000    Wake Up Hill
    …

    If you use File -> Import… -> Labels… to import this into your project, the label track should exactly align with your track splits.

    (Of course, this should really be an XML application since Audacity AUP files are XML, but issues were had.)

  • how to fix the annoying Ubuntu/Debian XML::SAX install problems

    Debian and its derived distributions have a policy about packages not being able to modify the configuration of other packages. While this might generally seem like a good idea, for the TIMTOWTDI world of Perl, this causes problems.

    The problem arises if you have installed Perl XML modules from both CPAN and the Debian (or Ubuntu, or whatever) repositories. Debian’s modifications subtly break the XML::SAX module, on which most Perl XML modules (including the brilliant XML::Simple) depend. If you’ve been naughty and used a module from CPAN, Debian gets its knickers in a knot, and won’t configure or run anything remotely related to libxml-sax-perl.

    If you get the error Can’t locate object method “save_parsers_debian” via package “XML::SAX” at /usr/bin/update-perl-sax-parsers line 90, your system is affected. You might get the clue that any of your Perl XML handlers freak out and fail in weird ways.

    Here’s a method (there’s always more than one, of course)  to fix it. This was combined from a couple of sources, each of which was on the right track but didn’t entirely work. Actually, the first might’ve been right on the money, but my hiragana’s a bit ropey …

    1. make sure you’ve got your system up to date with apt-get or aptitude.
    2. sudo cpan CPANPLUS (this will ask you lots of questions, to which you should almost always answer with the default)
    3. sudo cpanp -u XML::SAX (this takes quite a while, and produces no output for most of it)
    4. LC_ALL=C sudo apt-get install --reinstall libxml-sax-perl (the LC_ALL=C might not be strictly necessary, but it worked for me)

    You must remember never to pretend to be smarter than the Debian maintainers, and suitably chastened, may now return to your normal OpenSSH patching activities …