Suse (even opensuse) on Vmware

I use Mandriva as my preferred distribution. The *drak* stuff isn't that big a deal for me, I prefer the command line, usually, and it still isn't easy to add an ethernet interface alias via drakconf (actually, I don't think I see how to do it at all, although you can do it with webmin). I'm *really* in love with the urpmi stuff though (and mainly the command line urpmi, although rpmdrake is very good too).

I thought I'd try suse though, either the evaluation version, or opensuse. But I can't afford to overwrite my laptop since I don't want to have to reconfigure everything (openvpn to two different networks, etc). So I thought I'd try it with vmware. When I downloaded the DVD ISO, it wouldn't work in vmware. It kept giving some sort of boot error. I thought maybe the DVD download was corrupted so I downloaded again, same problem. Next I downloaded the CDs. Same problem. It looks like opensuse (or the suse evaluation version) just won't install in vmware. That's a shame, since I'm certainly not going to switch to it if I can't test drive it, and I just don't have a spare computer to test drive it on. Ah well.

Bloglines and Google Reader

I looked at bloglines last night, partly because of a post here, or on a mailing list about how it's so much easier to use than google reader. too lazy to put links there.

I think I *will* be switching to bloglines. It does seem much faster than reader (although that might just be because I've got digg in reader and there are a heck of a lot of entries in there for reader to load). It's also got subfolders, feeds are subfolders on the left (useful for ignoring digg until i've got enough time to waste, on reader everything is in the same place and digg overshadows everything), and it's got "Mark all read" (which I sometimes need to resort to if I've been away for a few days and there's no hope of reading everything that digg has found).

There's probably some way to filter things in digg (which is still too useful to drop, despite the inconvenience of having so much there), but I don't see how to do it in reader yet. I thought maybe digg would have a feature where the RSS feed is identified per user, so that my preferences in digg (what I want to see, which is not everything) would be what I'd see in my RSS reader, but even if there were a per user RSS feed, there doesn't seem to be any way to have preferences in digg similar to preferences in slashdot, where I'd only see articles in categories I'm interested in.

So it's bloglines I'll be using for now. When reader catches up and gets faster, I'll look at it again.

Dictionary of Algorithms and Data Structures

i saw the Dictionary of Algorithms and Data Structures long ago, posted on a mailing list. Saw it again on digg.com just today.

I didn't graduate CS, so a lot of this is new to me. I wish there were a more structured way to browse it though. alphabetical is doable, but doesn't link concepts very well together. alphabetical plus following related links (see also, etc) works a bit better, but that has its own problems. Heh, I'm being characteristically lazy and I want a tutorial that covers everything in there :-). I doubt if even Knuth covers everything in there and if he were to try, he'd need the immortality pill from The Myth.

visayan on mailing lists (KLUG)

I see that sacha is looking into learning bisaya. I don't know why that would be, it's not like she's not got enough on her plate already. It's certainly a good thing, learning languages is good.

I hope, though, that it's not so that she can decipher things like this. And that she doesn't try to learn things from that and similar posts on some mailing lists. Almost all visayan posts on that list are like textingese in tagalog or english, essentially illiterate. That's not to insult the poster, that's just students communicating lazily in whatever language they use. It's not their fault, it's cultural. There are wonderful, literate visayan posts somewhere on the Net, i'm sure, but they're not on mailing lists populated by students who don't care enough about their posts to try to spell correctly.

Not that spelling is an easy thing in visayan. There's no given orthography, and the examples in sacha's post feel sort of archaic, although that's better than the illiteracy that passes for communication these days). Sounding archaic isn't a big deal though. Visayan varies from place to place, people will just assume she learned visayan with people who spoke classical visayan.

National Geographic Pics

Huh, in the preceding link to Google Video I wasn't quite sure whether it was a *good* way to waste bandwidth. So there's no qualifier there. On the other hand:

Pics from National Geographics and
ScubaDiving.com cannot possibly be considered a waste.

Lots of other good photo sites out there. for instance, APOD, Astronomy Photo of the Day.

All those sites better than webshots or screensaver software that installs adware and spyware on the computers of the gullible. I think so anyway (wouldn't really know, don't use windows anymore, maybe there are webshots or screensaver freeware that aren't evil).

Google Video

Huh, I see that Google Video is up. What a way to waste bandwidth:

Asian Backstreet Boys
How men screw up romance

lots of useless stuff there too. i wouldn't be surprised if there's some pr0n there though, somewhat like that smart telecom's post your phonecam pictures here site (too lazy to find the link).

tiger