Tim's Bits and Pieces

Tech Support Cheat Sheet

For your reading pleasure may I present A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages.

You'll notice I'm posting late again, for which I blame C.S. Lewis, and since he's dead he can't defend himself from this unfounded accusation completely serious and non-trivial explanation for my tardiness.

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My Slackware laptop had decently fast boot times (a little over a minute), but I'm impatient and decided to see if I could speed it up some more. Here's the changes I made and the results down the bottom. This is on a Dell Vostro 1510, with 4GB of ram and a 2.1GHz Core 2 Duo. Obviously the results will vary depending on your hardware.

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I've noticed an annoying little problem with a couple of open source web browsers namely Seamonkey and Kazehakase. Both of them have the same problem when you run them the normal way, ie by entering they're name on the command line, they fail to do anything if you already have the program open nothing happens. I'd prefer if they instead opened a new window, so I've written scripts to "fix" this. Basically each of the scripts checks to see if the program is already open and if so simply open a new window, otherwise they start the program. Both scripts work slightly differently but accomplish nearly the same task (the Kazehakase one will not open a link in the new window).

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I recently decided to install Kazehakase 0.5.1 on my computer. As with any software installation of Slackware my first step was to check for a SlackBuild on SlackBuilds.org. There is one but it is for version 0.4.7. OK, that's often not a problem, you just change the $VERSION variable to the version you actually want. So I tried that, the SlackBuild printed out the usual range of progress reports, etc, then gave me this:

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