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After running into this on three computers, I figured I'd mention it here as well.  It's a rather old issue by now, but at a certain point com_err and ss were moved to e2fsprogs on Gentoo.  I found my workaround here : www.odi.ch/weblog/posting.php

Make sure not to unmerge com_err and ss before doing emerge -fuD world first!

Also, I had my "emerge" aliased to "sudo emerge".  That won't work, because sudo also relies on com_err, which is unmerged at a certain point.  Make sure you're logged in as root for this procedure.

It's too soon for the next monthly picture, but I've added a few pictures to the viewoverantwerp gallery anyway.  The view with snow just asked for it :-)

Edit: Added a new "snow" gallery, because I took a walk to go and enjoy the stuff in person.

Crossroads often have traffic lights.  Sometimes, those traffic lights are equipped with clicking devices to indicate to blind people when it is safe to cross.

I know of traffic lights near where I live that also have these clickers.  Only ... there are some fundamental flaws here, as far as I can tell.

• Often they don't click, as such giving no indication whatsoever that they are present.  Since there are more crossroads without these than with, why would a blind person assume that they're there?
• If they do click, they usually keep going at the same steady pace that indicates it is not safe to cross.  They don't speed up when the crossing light turns green, because ...
• There is a button.  Above the button is a sign that reads something along the lines of :

This button is meant to activate the sound indicater for blind persons
The pedestrian crossing lights also work without pushing the button.

Indeed.  The default behaviour is disabled, with only a written (no braille!) notice to indicate this.  That's right ... make them wait until Hell freezes over and then some.  Way to go.

• As far as I can tell, the button seems to be no more than a touch-sensitive area marked with, indeed, a white-painted circle.  Just as flat and smooth as the rest of the thing that holds it...

Don't get me wrong, I think it's great that an effort is being made, but come on ... what were these people on when they designed this, and where can I get some of it??

I've made a new gallery, viewoverantwerp.  The idea is to make two new pictures every month to see how the view evolves throughout the year.

First month : November, pictures made around 16:20 on the first Sunday of the month.

Even though I've grown to love vim, I'm still an emacs fan. The advantage is that I can now use both equally fluently :-)

One thing I've always found vim to be superior for is inserting blocks of text. No more, for I have learned how to do this in Emacs as well *insert maniacal cackle here*

Select an area in the usual way : press Ctrl-Space to mark the starting point, then navigate to the endpoint (via the arrow keys or Ctrl-n, Ctrl-p, Ctrl-f, Ctrl-b, and the various Meta-key combinations). Once you're satisfied, press Ctrl-x r t and type the text you want to enter into the block, followed by an Enter.

If you've selected one or more columns, the text will replace your selection.

If you haven't selected any columns, the text will simply be inserted.

Another trick (for quickly commenting out several lines of code) is selecting the lines you want to comment, and use

M-x comment-region

w00t!

An interesting comic from www.xkcd.com today - funny because it's true :-)

mailstat is a cool little program that reads your .maillog file in order to be able to give you an overview of what new mail has arrived and where it has been put since the last time it was run.

This is extremely important when using procmail - there might be mistakes in your configuration file that makes your mail go to unexpected places.  Thanks to mailstat you can still track it down ...

And just for future reference for myself : mailstat comes with procmail ...

To connect to your gtalk account via bitlbee, add the account in the usual way :

account add jabber <username> <password

Then set the server :

account set <account nr>/server talk.google.com:5223:ssl

If you get the error "jabber - Couldn't log in: Short write() to server", this means that bitlbee was not compiled with gnutls support. How to fix this depends on your distro :-)

In my case (Gentoo), remerge Bitlbee with the gnutls USE flag.

Happy chatting

A quick note on courteous behaviour when sending e-mails, since I am getting more and more annoyed at some of the mails I keep receiving. My annoyance has mostly to do with incorrect usage of the different fields an e-mail message has.

To: The recipient(s) of your e-mail. Keep in mind that everyone who receives this mail will be able to read this list.

Cc: Carbon Copy : secondary recipients of your e-mail. Once again, everyone who receives it will be able to see this list.

These two fields are useful for discussion e-mails in which everyone need to be able to reply to everyone else (e.g. when setting up a meeting for your gaming group ;-) ) They are often used interchangeably.

Bcc: Blind Carbon Copy : additional recipients of your e-mail, only the recipients of your e-mail will not be able to read this list. If you are mailing several people who do not know each other, it is wise to put all recipients of the mail in this field (and put your own e-mail address in the To: field.

I don't know about you, but personally, I don't like my e-mail address to be distributed to a whole lot of people I don't know. This one is very useful for all those jokes that people keep forwarding - if I wanted to, I could start a very successful spam business since I think I have the address books of at least half my contacts right in my inbox ... all of them in the "To" field of forwarded jokes.

Hmm ... now there's a get-rich-quick scheme ...

Subject: The subject of your e-mail. It is important to enter something relevant here, as this often determines whether I read a mail now or in, say, 5 days, or even classify it as spam.

And just because it's interesting to know, there is also the Reply-To field : here you put the e-mail address to which replies should be sent, if it is different from the address you are mailing to.

I've been playing around with the Gallery options a bit and, lookie, some pictures of my flat seem to have appeared!