recent activity

Terry@dixie$ cat lj.post
*Finally* started work on updating my laptop today; got world/kernel done. Set to work on the third party software, this tiem out employing portmaster for the task. To conserve CPU cycles, since that's my laptops principal bellyache (along with the shitty graphics card); I'm currently running from a screen session on a vtty (i.e. Text Mode only).

For me, that's actually not a big loss: only programs I'm missing out on are pidgin and firefox; and I _hate_ firefox these days. Most of the /good/ stuff I use all the time just happens to be console user friendly ;-)
EOF

great surprise this morning, I'm off today and working tomorrow instead (glad I didn't make plans lol). Since I had portmaster fetch distfiles a head of time, that also means I can continue my laptops software updates without lagging my game play to much hehe.


Right now I've got Dixie perched on my stand, and a SSH connection to her - with GNU Screen running, so I can always detach the session and reconnect to things from another box, or straight from Dixie's console. I don't think portmaster can be left unobserved as long as the portupgrade utility, but I think it is doing quite a good job of things: the need for a little hand holding aside. (I'm not interested in braving the "unattended mode" warning on our first date ^_^). I've also noted that perl modules can make upgrading perl a pain in the rear end; probably will have to take a manifest manually, then setup the automata to handle the unautomated part of the update procedure. All in all though, it's been very painless.

Because of the way Vim implements Perl/Python/Ruby/probably the Tcl support; and my chose to build a 'threaded perl', I need to rebuild vim before it can be used. Never the less, I managed to fix the show-stopping bug in tpsh's new expand_quotes() function -- one darn question mark '?' was missing; the difference making the regex non greedy. Although I rarely use any of the "extensions" in nvi's command set, their chose of making :Next open in a separate display window sometimes comes in handy.

I've also been contemplating the sam text editor, as a possible replacement for ed/ex; the Q is does it offer suitable history support. My only complaint about ed and ex, is you can't do thinks like ^NCR to repeat the last command (I wonder if GNU ed might've stuck that in, mm). Using vims "special" ex mode via gQ rather then vim -e or 'Q' gains all of the niceties of vim's :ex command line, but if ones gonna run a visual editor that big; why go line mode without a pure TTY? lol.


FreeBSD dixie.launchmodem.com 7.2-PRERELEASE FreeBSD 7.2-PRERELEASE #3: Mon Apr 6 22:19:37 UTC 2009 root@dixie.launchmodem.com:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/VIPER i386