If you’re like me, and don’t use Gnome or KDE, then you probably use the pmount or pmount-hal applications to mount removable media. Here’s a neat thing to add to your .bash_aliases:

1
2
3
4
5

function pmh {
    pmount-hal $1
    UDI=`hal-find-by-property --key block.device --string $1`
    cd "`hal-get-property --udi $UDI --key volume.mount_point`"
}

I do type mesmerizingly fast, though… :)

I am told these were scattered around Taub… I haven’t been there to day, but it feels good to be infamous.

My lecture slides. Have a peek if you like :)

When approaching a port, the Scotsman:

You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villany. And the crab cakes ain’t too bad, either!

Later on:

• Is it fast?
• It sure is. But it’s gonna cost ya - 10,000 up-front.
• 10,000? We could buy our own ship for that!
• But who’s gonna sail it?
• I can. I piloted (some smaller kind of ship) back when I was a kid.

(and if you haven’t seen Star Wars, you’re just not gonna get it)

I’m going home for the weekend, as usual. Unfortunately, the first bus of my route comes by at highly unpredictable times - I’ve had it be an hour late on me once. There are plenty of Wi-fi networks around the station - either WPA, WEP or MAC-whitelisted… fortunately, someone was using the latter long enough for me to catch him with Kismet. Thank you, stranger! :)

It’s a sad state of affairs that people go ahead and limit access to their wireless network. I keep mine wide open - מי שאוכל לבד, מת לבד.

My new work desktop has a GeForce 4 MX, so I naturally installed Beryl on it. The graphics card has relatively little RAM, so it finds handling my 1280x1024 resolution difficult when additional texture memory is needed - so using something like Firefox really slows it down when Beryl is activated, making me keep it off most of the time. However, for coding, I’m finding that Beryl is very useful - it actually helps me that the code windows are transparent, so that I can see what’s underneath them, and the “Expose” effect still leaves text legible, which is great for reading off a lot of terminals at once. So is Beryl… a programmer’s tool?