jon.dowland.name log

build-dependencies using an XML manpage

build-dependencies using an nroff manpage

This is my first attempt at homebrew. It's from a stout kit, purchased from the Elderberry Home Brew Centre, which you can find at 28 Station Road, Whitley Bay. The fellow there is very helpful and gave me lots of advice on starting out. I'd recommend anyone interested in beer or wine making in the Newcastle or North Tyneside area to make the journey.

Finding usability failures in GIMP is not exactly needle-in-haystack difficulty. Today's frustration: it appears to disable your ability to minimize the Toolbox and related windows. I can't imagine why that was considered a good idea.

I am in the process of moving the Doom packages that the Debian Games Team maintain from subversion to git.

I started with a small native package called game-data-packager. The clone operation took hours to run and resulted in a 90-odd Mb git repository. Since game-data-packager is a relatively small collection of shell scripts with a recent history, I have reason to believe that git svn has imported much more of the Games Team SVN repo than just the game-data-packager bits.

Awesome bank holiday find.

I've been trying out the Bing search engine (http://bing.com/). I like the fact there's a different picture on the homepage every day, with some interesting facts. I rarely see the homepage of a search engine though, as I tend to use a browser search toolbar.

On a new Debian stable install, exim4 will accept mail for local user "mail", and save it to /var/mail/mail. If you also tell exim4 that you want to use Maildirs rather than mbox files, it will create and populate /var/mail/Maildir instead. I'm not sure whether this is can be considered a bug or not, but if you don't want this, add

mail: :fail:

to /etc/aliases. I've just discovered 1,664 spams on one site sitting in /var/mail/Maildir.

I have a SAMSUNG SpinPoint T166 series SATA hard drive. I have been getting some worrying output from smartctl for this drive, including

199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count    0x003e   200   200   000    Old_age   Always       -       651

and

SMART Error Log Version: 1 ATA Error Count: 531 (device log contains only the most recent five errors) ...

However, SMART selftests (short and extended) all complete without error.

Periodically I get some IO lag and the following on dmesg:

For the last two years, I have been quietly working on a computer game influenced heavily by the classic UFO: Enemy Unknown.

The game is nowhere near complete and probably of little interest to most people. However, I have recently had the urge to write about things which have come up during development of the game. I've held of doing so since I hadn't actually announced the game.

handbrake (or specifically, the ghb front end) does not honour the GNOME network proxy settings, nor the http_proxy environment variable. In addition, it runs in one thread and dials home on startup, using synchronous calls, so in an environment where outbound port 80 packets are dropped, it freezes up:

Create a local branch with git:

git branch **name**

Push this branch up to the remote, so it has it:

git push origin **name**

The local branch does not track the remote branch, however. I recall seeing a command to achieve this but I have forgotten it. You can, however, do

git branch -d **name**
git checkout --track -b **name** **origin/name**

Deleting remote branches only works locally: they come back.