Bloggers and the Dark

There are a lot of good bloggers. Too many to have in the links there. And really, I don't particularly want to link to people because then they'd link to me. And then this blog would become more self-conscious (or, actually, more other-conscious), and I'd actually have to think about what I say here.

But I should list bloggers, and links, here anyway. Just so that, maybe, I could find them again later. Thus:

Naomi Chana. I don't think we have anything in common. But those who write well I want to remember so that, when I'm dark and down and could use the help, I can visit them and all without their knowing, gain the benefit of their light.

Mandrake Weirdness

I’ve got quite a lot of Mandrake weirdness. On my dialup gateway, iptables wouldn’t load at all. I cleaned some stuff up (apparently I’d installed newer modutils and such, maybe when I was playing with some cooker RPMs, or when I was playing with a 2.5 kernel. Anyway, I got iptables to insmod. But it’s still not perfect, because I get invalid something errors when I try to add the masquerade rule. So iptables works, but masquerade won’t.

I have just the same problem on the laptop. With:

iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -j MASQUERADE

# yes, I know that’s not secure, it’s just for example and for simplifying things. In practice there would be filters there.

I get : Invalid argument.

I don’t get that in the vmware linux. So I guess it’s because of installing unsafe RPMs and such. I’ll have to reinstall

on both. Hahay. Better not forget anything when backing up! Heh, last time I lost two or three days worth of email

(had backed up just three days before).

Local Thesaurus and Dictionary - a technique

I’d love to have the contents of dictionary.reference.com and thesaurus.reference.com (and, for that matter, Encyclopedia Brittanica) on my local machines. So that i wouldn’t have be online to get access. Now, there’s not much chance of getting a CD copy to work since I work in linux and there aren’t any linux readers. Sure I’ve got win4lin, but win4lin has some limitations involving multimedia. And VMware is too slow on this box.

So I’m thinking, it’d be an interesting afternoon’s work to download a bunch of web pages, strip out the unique words in them, add the contents of the unix wordlist, maybe whack a lot of random blogs to a depth of 5 or so. That should cover almost all the words in the English language.

Then, after taking all the unique words out, run them through the thesaurus. Try each word in turn, except if it’s already appeared in a previous thesaurus run. That should give us almost everything right there.

And finally, with our new list of unique words, run them through dictionary.

I wonder what the legal repercussions would be though. Not that it matters. I’m probably not going to do this, and even if I do, it’ll be only for my own amusement. Heh, I probably won’t even use the data, probably deleting it after a week or so. But the legal status would be interesting.

So maybe opera isn't so broken after all

Here I whine that opera is unstable and does a lot of things wrong. Now I’m not so sure. My problems might be configuration related. I’m blogging this now from a different username, with a completely fresh .opera (didn’t exist before this session). I’m not seeing the problems I used to. For instance, while blogging, for instance, the text going under the scrollbar… well, for one thing, the scrollbar is always visible. Unlike in my other instance. Also, in my other setup, I have the zoom percentage set at a default of 120%. This is set at 100% and so i don’t see the text going under the scrollbar. One thing about that though… the text is rather too small for comfortable blogging.

I’ll test some more. For now I’m very interested to see if the browser will be unstable with very many documents open. And then I’ll start to do my fixes to bring it to parity with my other setup (bookmarks, remove the ad thing, switch to text only browser look (i don’t like the icons since i’m not a visual person).