For those people who weren’t aware (because I didn’t put this on my calendar) I was in Piscataway, NJ this past weekend on “business” with the IEEE. The purpose: University Partnership Program Chair Summit. By now you’re wondering WTF is that. Lemme start with the basics of IEEE, then I’ll explain the UPP.

If you by chance be building eterm in Gentoo and get the following error:

gcc -Os -march=pentium4 -pipe -o .libs/Eterm main.o  -L/usr/lib -L/usr/X11R6/lib ./.libs/libEterm.so /usr/lib/libImlib2.so
/usr/lib/libfreetype.so -lz /usr/lib/libttf.so -ldl -lutempter /usr/lib/libast.so -lSM -lICE /usr/lib/libpcre.so -lXmu -lXext -lX11
-lutil -lm -Wl,--rpath -Wl,/usr/lib:/usr/lib/Eterm
./.libs/libEterm.so: undefined reference to `imlib_render_pixmaps_for_whole_image'
./.libs/libEterm.so: undefined reference to `imlib_context_set_display'
./.libs/libEterm.so: undefined reference to `imlib_render_pixmaps_for_whole_image_at_size'
./.libs/libEterm.so: undefined reference to `imlib_context_set_colormap'
./.libs/libEterm.so: undefined reference to `imlib_context_set_drawable'
./.libs/libEterm.so: undefined reference to `imlib_context_set_visual'
./.libs/libEterm.so: undefined reference to `imlib_free_pixmap_and_mask'
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status
make[2]: *** [Eterm] B³±d 1
make[2]: Leaving directory `/var/tmp/portage/eterm-0.9.3-r4/work/Eterm-0.9.3/src'
make[1]: *** [all-recursive] B³±d 1
make[1]: Leaving directory `/var/tmp/portage/eterm-0.9.3-r4/work/Eterm-0.9.3'
make: *** [all-recursive-am] B³±d 2 
 
!!! ERROR: x11-terms/eterm-0.9.3-r4 failed.
!!! Function src_compile, Line 54, Exitcode 2
!!! make failed

Then you have a USE flag problem. I’m seeing a lot more of them recently.

Anywho, your solution is:

root#> USE="X" emerge imlib imlib2 eterm

This should compile it nicely.

Gateway (business) technical support has really pissed me off from the get go. Not only does their website not provide any half-way decent support documents on several different trouble cases, but it also fails via the phone for the following reasons:

• They make accusations of things you didn’t ever say you did.
• They won’t support something they post on their own website.
• They don’t even give you the time of day or try to thoroughly look into a problem you have.

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Okay, time to try this again and not sound pissed off, cause I just spend the past 10 minutes typing this thing up and managed to hit “Ctrl+R” - destroying my work….

Okay, so last week I had gotten fed up with Debian’s lack of speed with regards to packages and lack of good support and stability with the testing distribution, so I decided that it had to go on my desktop. The decision was upon me to try to figure out which distribution I was going to go to next. FreeBSD was out of the question, and I really did not like the choice of Suse, RedHat, etc. So, I was stuck between the choice of Gentoo or Ubuntu. Eventually, my heart went back to Gentoo as I’ve had nothing but sheer happiness with that distro.

But alas, my reinstallation turned me from a happy gentle human to a truly crazy and perplexed human. Why? Because of one stupid little thing I probably should not have been working on, but did so because I have a tendency to track these things down until they are FIXED. The problem, was with gensplash.

For those who don’t know, Gensplash is Gentoo’s program that will create a graphical bootup splash screen much like Ubuntu, MacOS, and alas, Windows. This splash screen looks much prettier than the traditional text dump of the kernel loading to the screen.

Nevertheless, if you would like to read-on to see what I had to do in order to fix it, and the other complications that I came across along the way, please read on!

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As most people know by now, Steve Irwin passed away recently. There has been a lot of press regarding this incident, and with due right. Steve Irwin was one of the most successful people to be able to be plastered all over the TV and become a world icon with respect to animal rights and educating people about animals (and of course, the all too famous of the “Crocodile Hunter”). Why should I care about Steve Irwin, considering I’ve never met him? Because anyone who is concerned for the rights of animals and educating people about them so they have a better respect of them is more than deserving of my respect.

Few people like him exist out there. In fact, I don’t think we’ll ever see another like him. Ever.

Steve Irwin really cared about his job and what he did for a living, as an animal and nature lover, and as a person - it showed everywhere he went with increased data collected through his important research, the television shows he was a part of, and the numerous interviews that he did. To hear about his death (especially when it is caused by one of the more docile animals he could have potentially handled - a stingray) is a true tragedy.

Thank you for everything you’ve given the world, Steve. We’ll miss you.

Okay, I feel silly for writing this post, but as many of you know, this blog is not only for other’s enrichment, but for me document what I find for my own purposes and future uses. It also helps me to remember things I find cool, interesting, highly important, etc.

Well, for those of you who use databases (particularly MySQL) and don’t have as vast of a background as you’d like to have (like myself), you find yourself writing ridiculous queries to obtain the previous row of data you inserted into a table.

For example:

mysql> INSERT INTO users (name, email, phone) 
       VALUES
       ("Chris Weldon", "chris@chrisweldon.net", "232-353-4544");
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.01 sec)
 
mysql> SELECT id FROM users 
       WHERE name = "Chris Weldon" 
       AND email = "chris@chrisweldon.net" 
       AND phone = "232-353-4544";
+------------------+
| id               |
+------------------+
|            12373 |
+------------------+
1 row IN SET (0.03 sec)

Well, with what I have finally found by purusing the MySQL Reference Manual - you no longer have to write that second assinine query which could potentially take a while to retreive the data, especially if the users table (or whatever table in question is being queried on) is large and could potentially have fields that are not indexed.

Here’s your nice solution:

mysql> INSERT INTO users (name, email, phone) 
       VALUES 
       ("Chris Weldon", "chris@chrisweldon.net", "232-353-4544");
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.01 sec)
 
mysql> SELECT last_insert_id();
+------------------+
| last_insert_id() |
+------------------+
|            12373 |
+------------------+
1 row IN SET (0.00 sec)

All I can say about this is “Where have you been all my life?”.

For those people who love their listservs, or like to talk to peeps a lot, sometimes it’s just better to have threading enabled for their E-Mail client. One such email client that uses threading beautifully is Mozilla Thunderbird. Collapsable, mark all readable, etc. threads really makes my day (or at least reading email) go much smoother.

Alas, there is one problem that I’ve always had a problem with: enableing the threaded views. This article will quickly explain what is necessary to accomplish this.

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I saw Crank on Saturday with a bunch of my buddies from the Helpdesk. I hope to keep this review short and sweet - as it should cover the basic gist of the movie.

From what I saw of the previews, the movie seemed like it was gonna be nothing but hardcore, adrenaline pumping, fist fighting gun blasting action - a type of movie I haven’t seen in a loooong time. But, that’s about the basis of what I got from the movie. What it actually turned out being was something far more weird and twisted than I had imagined.

When the movie started, I immediately recognized the fact that there were going to be some oddities about the movie - such as odd camera angles, weird effects, etc. They started to splash video clips of what was going on elsewhere up on the walls - the character obviously is not meant to see them, but they were random - but cool. In general, the method that the movie was shot was peculiar, but welcomed because I hadn’t seen anything like it before.

Then, onto the plot. Umm, yea. Plot. Lemme recall…oh yea, not very much of one at all. I think it was all about revenge and survivial.

Other random odditities, such as random text appearing on the screen the coordinated with what the characters were saying, was thrown in at the most appropriate times that made it absolutely hilaroious. For example, the dialogue between the main character and his doctor is something like:

• D: You need epinephrine, dude.
• C: What?
• D: Ep-i-ne-phrine, dude….

Consequently, the random “text” was ep‧i‧neph‧rine, dude. Probably not as funny here, but in context - everyone was laughing.

Cunt on forehead was funny. Watch out for it.

Overall, the random oddities, sound effects, camera angles, and pumping kick-ass action made the movie a lot more enjoyable than I though it was going to be. I give it 4 stars.