jcm's blog

For some random reason, certain applications (chiefly wine) are restting my x cursor to an inverted colour mode where the mouse cursor is completely black and thus impossible to locate on a black console. This is obviously a bug in my X server because a call to:

xsetroot -cursor_name left_ptr -fg white -bg black

and similar, makes no difference, nor does using -rv to reverse the display colours. Happily, until I get around to finding what is responsible for this, I can force it to reset by calling a script which switches cursor and then back again. If you have the same problem, try:

xsetroot -cursor_name pirate
xsetroot -cursor_name left_ptr

stick this somewhere and have an icon on your panel to call it.

Jon.

P.S. X annoys me, GNOME really annoys me for not making it easy to figure out what the hell it’s doing with things like mouse cursors.

Photo: Jon Masters at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. For more photos from my most recent trips to the US and Canada, check out the gallery.

Well, it’s 2006, soon to be year of the dog and the apocalypse hasn’t quite come yet. I saw in the new year with my folks this year – kinda not what I had been planning, but it was fun. Hopefully Hannah and Joe and Kat and David had fun too. I have various aspirations for this year, and am trying to be better organised but of course managed to blow that already by not getting much useful stuff done yesterday. I’m trying harder today by actually sitting down and having a writing session to try to salvage bits of my schedule.

My mother made me some pumpkin pie, which was pretty close to the real thing, and has stated that she’s not adverse to various other concoctions in the absense of me improving my culinary skills. I’m annoyed that you can’t even buy pumpkin pie mix in US owned stores here – like ASDA – what’s with that? Who could possibly think the British wouldn’t enjoy eating that but would enjoy drinking Coors? (I’ll exclude a few million FIW people here – people who use the words “Football”, “Innit”, and “wot?” as the basis for their lexicon – people here who generally want to get shipped off somewhere for an extended visit). Crazy, all of them.

I installed Crossover for the benefit of my writing, and discovered that 15GBP isn’t a lot to pay to be able to have all of those nasty plugins and apps available if you need them. It also runs iTunes – not very well yet (it’s not getting enough CPU to avoid pops and skips – otherwise known as xruns – when the system does anything else) – sufficiently to download music and then convert it into less evil formats for long term ipod storage, which is semi-useful when one wants something more heavyweight than DVD Jon’s excellent Sharpemusique.

Apparently it can take (at worst) 42 months to find out about Canadian immigration applications (though you can apply for a work permit to cover that period if you have a job offer) but the averge is a year or so. So, if I apply in the summer or later in the year then I end up sticking around here for a while yet. That’s not a bad thing since it gives me time to sort out other odds and ends in my life, like driving and finances beyond the 10K they want you to have handy. Ever feel you’re just in the wrong country?

Jon.

I just received confirmation of my order for a shiny new Apple Powerbook from the folks at Terra Soft Solutions, who were obviously working New Year’s Eve to get these orders processed. Thanks guys.

With this purchase, I will now need to get a bunch of hardware up and running, including chipsets we know don’t work. I guess I’ll start out with USB wifi and take it from there – but I’d be greatful of emails about ongoing projects to get other bits ‘n’ pieces working.

Note that’s POWERbook, with the word POWER at the beginning, not WINTEL. I don’t want an Intelbook from Apple, so luckily the option to upgrade my existing 15″ model came along just in time. Otherwise, I’d have had to deal with inferior Linux support for x86 Wintelbooks. I doubt benh will even care enough to do a port for those things.

Jon.

As the last few minutes of the year are upon us, now is the time to reflect upon the year that was 2005 and to consider how many of those new year’s resolutions need some adjustment. 2005 was an interesting time for me, it was the first year where I began to feel happy about my longer term plans and to set some specific goals. I entered the year as I leave it, still quite the singleton but on reflection am not as bothered by this as I might have been a year ago. Over the past year, I’ve realised that I enjoy flying around the world and that there is a wealth of knowledge and adventure out there. I would never have considered myself interested in climbing this time last year, nor would I have found myself deleting cheesy pop music from my ipod.

So, in 2005:

Overall, I enjoyed 2005. There are always ups and downs in life, but that’s a universal. My primary new year’s resolutions are actually pretty straightforward:

• Lose some weight, exercise and climb more.
• Save and apply for Canadian immigration in 2006/2007.
• A few other more private ambitions.

I hope you all have a good holiday. See you in 2006.

Jon.

Ok. I’ve made some bookings. The following is more for my use than anyone else’s, but if you need to know where I’m going to be, it might be useful.


Thursday - 2005/12/15 (London->New York)

Jon.

Did you know that the Star Spangled Banner is a song about how the Americans thwarted the evil British empire on September 3 1814?

Their national anthem is based upon a poem originally written during the battle at Fort McHenry in Baltimore during the War of 1812. It’s set to the music of an english drinking song (apparently), which is all the more ironic since it is basically a song about how the evil British were thwarted that day. “And the rockets red glare, bombs bursting in air” are British rockets and bombs being lobbed at the Americans in some fit of desperation trying to convince them to accept assimilation and rejoin the evil empire. “Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight, O’er the ramparts we watched were so gallantly streaming?” refers to the fact that the Americans had erected the largest flag in their history in Baltimore so that the British could clearly see it from their boats. It also inspired Francis Scott Key in his lyrics and caused at least one of the British sailors to note its grandeur in his journal.

I know all this because I watched a documentary on the History Channel tonight. I’ve been fascinated by documentaries for years but have recently elected to continue to pay for Sky (that’s our primary incumbent digital satellite television service in the UK) simply because I find Discovery and National Geographic so thoroughly interesting (as opposed to the more than 10 “God” related television channels we now receive – which I frankly find both alarming and increadibly amusing quite simultaneously – which seem to believe I should donate money to them so they can spread the word of God via TV rather than me giving that money to worthy charities instead, how sickening). I’m adding the History Channel to the list of cool channels to while away a Sunday afternoon after lunch. That documentary had all the ingredients of a good edutainment show – light on frilly pointlessness and heavy enough on useful historical fact. I also watch far too much “Seconds From Disaster” these days (National Geographic) but they haven’t quite got the message about silly pointlessness.

There’s no real point to this post, except perhaps “watch documentaries”. Oh and I’ll have to swing by Philly now during my trip because I want to see the original articles of the Constitution.

Jon.

Random factoid. Incidentally, the War of 1812 – also known as the “forgotten war” – was the one where the British burned the Whitehouse to the ground after they (the US) had burned the Canadian Parliament (but that wasn’t the last fire they had). Rather than being a forgotten war, I think it’s actually got a lot of relevence to the makeup of the modern world. Incidentally, the British also burned the Library of Congress in the process of torching Washington – something that I can’t possibly think served any useful purpose whatsoever but possibly destroyed historical documents that we might otherwise have today. The British were so frightfully evil.

[Update: The Canadian government has been toppled in an unprecidented vote of no-confidence. Hopefully the liberals will return on January 23. ]

Ottawa has pledged extra money to keep skilled workers in Canada rather than force them to leave before applying for citizenship. This is excellent news, and makes my goals even more achievable. Anyone want to offer me a job?

Now all Martin needs is to get past Monday and those annoying Conservatives. Every country has its very own pointless political institutions. Many of them begin with the letter “C” and just don’t seem to get the tree-huggingness of my perfect political environment.

It’s 04:51. I’m on JST again.

Jon.