Well, I finally caved and enabled captchas on anonymous comments and trackbacks. Actually, I snuck them in yesterday some time, and haven’t seen any spam since. I’m not a big fan of captchas, but they seem to be the nature of the beast on these Intertubes. Bots can easily access the backend functions, it seems, leading to such volume. Hopefully, no longer.

How it captchas trackbacks is actually somewhat clever, but perhaps a little prohibitive to anyone actually wanting to leave a trackback — a person enters their generated captcha and is given a trackback URL with a unique key which is valid long enough for most people to write their post and submit their trackback as usual. Invalid key in the URL, no trackback. Unfortunately annoying, but it should save me having to keep an eye on the site constantly, looking for a valid comment needle in the spam haystack.

At the moment, moderation is still necessary on comments and trackbacks, but if things last a week or so without any spam, I’ll probably disable it.

Well, actually, Metroid Metal, created by Stemage, has been around for a while, so it’s hardly a birth… Nevertheless, those who enjoy the video game tunage should definitely check them out. It’s Metroid. But, you know… metal. Pretty good stuff.

I’d discovered them many a year ago, care of fe in #lh. Back then, there were only classic Metroid tracks up, but upon randomly dropping by their site again today, I discovered they now have a couple tracks from Super Metroid and Metroid Prime up. Naturally, they are awesome, and well-fitting to their obvious motif. Adore “Prelude/Theme” from Super Metroid.

My mind often, regrettably, skips over this collection when thinking of my favorite video game mixes, but their entire work is definitely a must have. So check them out. And while you’re picking up Metroid Metal, ActRaiser fans should pick up a Stemage/Chunkstyle collaboration track, “Teddy’s Bread", which opens with a most excellent acoustic rendition of “Birth of the People” (the music from the city-building half of the game) before switching to the crunch for the sidescrolling songs that one would assuredly, by now, come to expect.

It amazes me that some people seemingly think that more one-sided mud-flinging will solve problems, or is even a noop when evaluating the problem. I’m all for public exposure when it is relatively neutral (although I disagree that the “solution” is either meritocracy or perfect equality [the problem is people — culture, man, not organization]), but in my opinion, people who look at this current event, draw a line in the sand, and then go throwing stuff over it are doing just as much harm — despite whether they are “in” on the problem or not — as the original perpetrators.

We’re an enormous community. Like it or not. We use each other’s software, we’re exposed to other people’s ideals in software and in writings, and they are exposed to ours. Unless you’re going to go to proprietary software la-la land and stop writing code/documentation/bug reports/whatever, you can’t escape that. So please, stop lobbing mud over the fence, because it turns out we’re all in one giant pen.

It doesn’t matter if you’re a developer, an ex-developer, a suspended developer, or just some random user: your public actions matter. They can make large reaches of people look childish and unprofessional. They can frustrate people trying to get work done. They can drive others into obscurity.

“Dried poo gives excellent pellets to fuel a fire. … I think that’s my quota of poo-flinging for this week…” MIMO.

It’s been a while since I posted a desktop screenshot that made it to the blog. It doesn’t really change all that often — I’ve been using exclusively KDE for years, and aside from occasionally attempting a dark color theme, there are only serious changes to the style a couple times a year, but nevertheless I make these posts. I could claim that it’s merely because I like documenting my desktop evolution over the years, but the screenshots are already in my gallery, it’s not like I need to re-document them. I think I just like subjecting other people to them.

Which brings me to another point.

I bought Terminal Error off of Amazon and it came a couple days ago. It is one of my favorite horrible movies. And horrible it is, despite the rating on Amazon — awful special effects, a ludicrous plot, spotty acting from recognizable stars, it has it all. And I love it. I watch the Sci Fi Channel’s Sci Fi Saturday solely because the movies are almost always so wretchedly bad. I gleefully cackle as I subject the uninitiated to their awfulness. “What are you watching?” “Oh, Raptor Island. You should check it out, it’s pretty bad,” (which is putting it lightly, it’s very, very horrid).

Certainly there are varying levels and flavors of personal preference, but in my travels, I’ve found the type to get enjoyment out of sub-mediocrity to be a very rare breed. Yet, myself and many of my friends (a couple in particular — Pants… :) have lists of our favorite examples of cinematic torture. Other favorites of mine include Mosquito and Dungeons & Dragons. It must be some sort of dementia which is necessary for this behavior, but certainly it is no small part in understanding why I so adore Mystery Science Theater 3000.

Bouncing around in my head while typing this entire post is concern over the unfortunate side effects some may suffer by reading this; for instance, I believe Andy just shakes his head at my nonsense these days. And then there is a poor fellow on Planet Larry (I really love having a reason to read other people’s randomness) whose mind has likely since recoiled and is trying very, very hard to go to its happy place.

I’m sorry. I understand where you’re coming from, sir, and for other media, I second your opinion. But part of me just loves stinky, stinky cheese. (And part of me wants Transformers to be good, but it is Michael Bay, so I’m not expecting much. And the nostalgic side of me is really bugged by the Transformer designs in the movie. [And as a double aside, hooray, Phantasy Star IV avatars.])

Not that any of the above applies to the movie in the desktop image, Kung Fu Hustle. Said movie is truly quite good and very entertaining.

That’s it for me, I’ve got some other things to dust off before I go to bed. In closing, everyone should keep in mind that one person’s obsession is another’s mindless and generally unemotional diversion.

Fueled by a reminder that I never really liked the default theme for my blog, and that my theme of choice was only a stop-gap solution, I started work on a new theme, my first for b2evolution. I was originally going to make a CSS overhaul of one of the existing themes, but me being the tinkerer I am, I ended up rewriting most of the template too.

So, that’s up now. It’s the default, so visitors will see it immediately unless they previously set a preference, in which case they have to select the “bss” theme if they want to check it out. The theme itself goes back to a very sane, very barebones layout that is fairly light on the CSS styling, and doesn’t drag in any additional images. I’m hoping it will be more palatable for those people who just want a low-frills presentation of the data. And for the crazy types, “basic” still exists.

In other news, and since it’s getting some chatter on Planet Larry, I installed Paludis last night on my desktop, and it’s been pretty pleasant so far. The migration guide is straightforward, and when making large leaps into new software, good documentation is critical (just look at the installation docs for Gentoo, which practically hold your hand through the process). It’s a very comforting thing when documentation tells you up front what to expect, and what should work at what point in time. And Paludis’ status/warning/error messages are helpful, instead of being totally meaningless like half of Portage’s faults.

So without throwing into the back and forth going on PL, I was half expecting to have to wrangle everything back to a working state (perhaps years of breaks have made me cynical), but so far it’s been smooth sailing. I’ll obviously have to play with it more, but I think I might eventually switch on a couple other boxes, such as the VIA where Portage can be dog slow.

I’m syndicated at Planet Larry now (thanks, Steve!), so like a rite of passage for any bloggér, it is time for me to give a little hello to my Gentoo brethren and then fall back into my cycle of not updating the blog for weeks on end because I have nothing interesting to say or I’m too busy to say it.

I use Gentoo. I have for a long time. My forums account was registered in February 2003, although I was using the distro a couple months previous. It was my first major foray into Linux, discounting some random fumbling in Mandrake that never saw the light of the Internet because all I had at the time was a software winmodem.

In my days I’ve done a lot of tinkering and broken a lot of things locally, but until I eventually finish classes, that’s been scaled back to just occasionally poking some bugs in Gentoo or KDE — KDE being my other choice project.

My blog itself is about Linux just about as often as it isn’t (case in point: nestled between this post and a post addressing the wonders of GNU Screen is a picture of nature’s assassin, the velociraptor [or Jurassic Park’s interpretation of one]). There was a point where I tried to keep everything nice and partitioned, but then I realized I wasn’t updating enough anyway, so any content I had to say might as well have been put anywhere I could put it.

Hmm… boxes. My computers are relevant. My apartment contains:

• An AMD64 3800+ desktop dual-booting 64-bit Gentoo and 32-bit Windows, the Windows primarily for gaming (TES4: Oblivion and Civilization IV)…
• a 2.0 GHz Core Duo MacBook dual-booting Gentoo and OS X…
• a 2.66 GHz Pentium D mini-tower used mainly to run MythTV and intending to be the new traveling emulator box…
• a 1.0 GHz VIA C3 Nehemiah acting as a router, and most importantly, running Irssi…
• and finally, another such VIA machine, this one with a funky motherboard, currently in some sort of computer limbo.

About a half dozen other computers have been mine in the past (hell, for a while, I owned a DEC Alpha). I think you could safely call computing my hobby (and my vocation, being a computer science graduate student).

So that is that. I sporadically post on the forums, and I’m slightly more active in #gentoo and some of its child channels. Basically, at any given point, I have a dozen things going on, and the time to focus on two of them. Such is breadth over depth.

As an aside, and to close off the post, Nine Inch Nails’ Year Zero is good. Really good. It’s been practically on loop in Amarok since it arrived yesterday.

Before I forget to post it again for another week, here’s the website template screenshot I was telling some of the gang about:

Evidently my apartment has some bad history with tenants owning reptiles…

Jotting a little something down for the benefit of myself when I invariably forget how I did this, and for others if they are looking for the very best in Screen on X11. (There are plenty of general Screen tutorials on the Internet, a good one is at the Gentoo Linux Wiki).

Using this method, you will set up your favorite terminal emulator (Konsole, in my case) to attach to a multi-display Screen session instead of starting the default shell every time you run the program. Doing this, all of your Konsoles will work on a shared pool of Screen windows that you could also attach to over SSH, on the Linux console, or however else.

To start, the following configuration setting defines an alias which can be used to fire up your ultimate “create once, use everywhere” Screen session.

~/.bashrc
...
alias main-screen='screen -A -O -U -x -R -S main-screen'
...

When main-screen is run inside bash, Screen is started with the following options:

-A             Adopt the size of the terminal (only
               when the session was previously detached).
-O             Better output mode for certain terminals.
-U             Run Screen in UTF-8 mode.
-x             Attach to the session, even if it is
               attached elsewhere (multi display mode).
-R             Create a session if it doesn't exist.
-S main-screen All of these options apply to a session named
               main-screen

This allows multiple terminals, terminal emulators, SSH sessions, etc. to attach to the one Screen session. Each terminal has their own focus history, so for example, your xterm may be viewing Screen window 4, while an SSH session is focused on window 1. Or, they could be on the same window, in which case they see the same information, including what the other sessions are typing.

This creates a very convenient central Screen session that you can use any way you can imagine, organizing all of your windows in one session without disturbing previous Screen attaches you started. Inside X11, the last step is to automate running the screen alias.

I prefer KDE's Konsole, so this example is for it. If you use some other terminal emulator, it's up to you to figure out what to do.

1. Start Konsole.
2. Bring up the Settings menu and Configure Konsole...
3. Click the Session tab.
4. Enter a new name for your session, such as “Main Screen”.
5. In the Execute field, enter: bash -i -c main-screen
6. Set other options as you desire.
7. Save the session.
8. Edit .kde/share/config/konsolerc and change DefaultSession to DefaultSession=Main Screen.desktop (why you can't do this in the GUI I do not know).
9. Save konsolerc and exit Konsole.
10. Restart Konsole and you should be presented with your Screen session.

Now, whenever you start Konsole, you'll be attached to your main-screen Screen session, and can live free, blissful in the knowledge that all of your consoles are a few mouse (or key) presses away.