Mark has some anger issues. In his daily life he deals with unfairness and injustice and stupidity, and it aggravates him, and he has no healthy outlet. In the old days, he would turn bright red, stomp off to a private area, and destroy inanimate objects with a blunt metal instrument.

After pursuing this course of action for quite some time, Mark tried out some new hobbies. Most of them ended up frustrating him more than helping. One might have broken even: he joined a volunteer reserve police force.

Mark saw that the volunteers had various motives for joining. Some used it as a tool for womanizing, and would generally “stretch the truth” and claim to be real police officers even though their uniforms (paid for by the volunteers) actually reflected that they were not. Some used it as a tool for facilitating the crimial pursuits of their relatives. Mark did it for three main reasons: it gave him plenty of opportunities to talk about laws, it let him feel power over other people, and it helped feed and freshen his heroic fantasies.

On patrol (for which he was not paid a cent) he always secretly hopes that some spectacularly complicated and expensive criminal enterprise will precipitate its most climactic actions in his immediate environs, and he will rise to the occasion, leap on top of a car, vault into a helicopter, and save Bruce Willis from anti-Israeli commandos. This has not yet occurred.

After some frustration with the real police officers, partly for their unfamiliarity with laws and regulations, partly for their willful disregard of such, Mark packed his things and moved to a completely different jurisdiction. At first he tried to get a paying job as a real police officer, but he failed all his interviews in the “ethics” portion of questioning.

Mark took a hard look at himself and resigned himself to the fact that he was not cut out to be paid to treat people like criminals, and that he would have to continue doing it solely out of love. So he found another department that would accept him as a volunteer, and pretends to be making a difference to this day.

While I find #532065 somewhat irritating, it's #432350 that makes me wonder why the hell eclipse hasn't been orphaned.

Who wants to fork this and adapt it for Debian and use Trac instead of Bugzilla?

It was obviously an ethically intolerable situation, which Marcin would denounce and relinquish. Only he would not. He needed Surendra. He wanted to publish what he wrote and to send it to the men who could understand it, the punk bitches of Grakk Auron; he craved their acceptance, their rejection, their endless nattering on.

So they had bargained, he and Surendra, bargained like two greased savages in a lake. For it was clear to Marcin, or at least so he told himself, that there was no way to get what he wanted without compromising his principles.

In truth, he was becoming part of the problem. The entire reserach hierarchy, which he despised, was predicated on a bunch of selfish, deceitful men claiming that they did what they did for the greater good, or because it was the least evil of all the alternatives, or some other flimsy justification.

Deep down, he knew this, and his anger and self-revulsion came out as caustic hostility every time someone dared to criticize him. If he had been a better person, he would have apologized and undone what he knew to be wrong, but something inside him was unwilling to face the fact that he had erred, strayed from the path mapped by his great-aunt Phyllis.

Instead, he retired to his chamber, nerves on edge, and distracted himself with thoughts of the girl from the cotillion with the loud, drunken Tiddlywinkers and the delegation from Decepticon VI. What had her name been? He had been too preoccupied with bragging about his publications to have retained it. Did he even ask?

He had not. Her name is Pertelope.

Belkinsauce is plotting against me, hiding my items and mismanaging his soundfont. Such is his wont.

I wonder what this means. Is it a reference to the ftp and release teams thinking that they are entitled to block packages from being uploaded to unstable? Is it a reference to the core team members thinking that they are entitled to operate without transparency? I cannot guess.

What seems like eons ago, I ordered one of those SheevaPlug Development Kits. After about six weeks, they got around to shipping it, and then, yesterday, after I assume a tortoise had piloted it across the country on broken tricycle, it was finally delivered to me.

I booted it up, observed that there was some kind of Ubuntu thing on it, and set myself to correct that problem. Within an hour I had managed to lock myself out.

Here is something I should have read beforehand.

Thanks to Martin Michlmayr, it is now running Debian and allowing me to log in.

Here are some steps to follow if you would like to boot Debian off of a USB stick plugged into your Sheevaplug:

• Grab the tarball from http://people.debian.org/~tbm/sheevaplug/lenny/
• Make an ext3 filesystem on the first partition of your USB stick (ext2 will not work with the current image)
• Mount the USB stick's filesystem, unpack the tarball onto it, then unmount
• Plug the USB stick into the SheevaPlug's full-sized USB port
• Plug the SheevaPlug in, and use minicom or your favorite terminal program to console in over the mini-USB port (don't forget that you need to use the ftdi_sio module instead of usbserial; 115200,N,8,1, no flow control)

• Abort the autoboot, and type the following commands:

  setenv mainlineLinux yes
  setenv arcNumber 2097
  saveenv
  reset
  setenv bootargs_root 'root=/dev/sda1 rootdelay=10'
  setenv bootcmd_usb 'usb start; ext2load usb 0:1 0x0800000 /boot/uInitrd; ext2load usb 0:1 0x400000 /boot/uImage'
  setenv bootcmd 'setenv bootargs $(console) $(bootargs_root); run bootcmd_usb; bootm 0x400000 0x0800000'
  saveenv
  run bootcmd
  

That should be all there is to it.

Next I'm wondering if SDIO wireless cards work.

This is about two things that are not robust.

zomg, as of version 0.5.7, can play libre.fm radio streams without modification. It does not do this particularly well.

As of today a second type of libre.fm radio stream is available, so I will give two illustrative examples:

• To play free music tagged 'Blues' (note that almost none of this is actually blues),

  zomg -r librefm://globaltags/Blues

• To play free music performed only by Abscondo (note that the "similarartists" is there to mislead you):

  zomg -r librefm://artist/Abscondo/similarartists

These stations lack the intelligence to avoid annoying duplication or much of anything but randomization. However, both zomg and libre.fm are free software, and anyone can chip in and improve this if desired.

In other news, the state of client support has moved a bit, though not as much as one might have hoped. You can get a picture of that here.

Duck number 1076783 since 1582.

I don't know what votes are in a bug tracking system, but it's almost enough to distract me from sharing my opinion about Seb Ruiz, whoever he is.