Northward Midget Blog

MAOI Update and the Syndrome With the Funny Name 4

Me

MAOI Update and the Syndrome With the Funny Name

No new MAOI dosage, no more late-night milk-spilling slapstick, and no better feelings.  To be fair to the meds, the past month has been a stressful one.  The wife thinks I have Asperger Syndrome.  (Henceforth “AS” for brevity and to avoid the “ass-burger” images.) It fits my career, lifestyle, and personality, and I’ve suspected it myself. Unfortunately, if it’s AS and not “just” depression and anxiety, the behavior that causes us so much domestic strife is not so much a...

Stuffing Text Into All Screen Windows 0

Hacking

Stuffing Text Into All Screen Windows

Various pagers have been giving me question marks in boxes and hexadecimal codes.  This is probably because I didn’t have the right font in the past and inserted various hacks into my ~/.bash tree to get around them, e.g. aliasing a LANG=C before every perldoc command. Well, now I’ve just about got everything right and proper in UTF-8 mode using a uxterm, but those little nigglers still pop up.  Today I did a man less and found the LESSCHARSET environment...

Mounting Windows Shares On Linux 0

Hacking

Mounting Windows Shares On Linux

There must be a gazillion posts on this, so I’m just going to concentrate on what I did wrong. First I wanted to mount the target share as NFS, but the server doesn’t export to our desktop subnet at work. I saw it was running Samba, and remembered having had it working on Windows XP, so tried that. A friend at work had an /etc/fstab line that almost worked. Turns out smbfs is deprecated and cifs is the new smbfs,...

Gitweb Diffs Between Versions 4

Hacking

Gitweb Diffs Between Versions

Our company deploys code into production primarily from our version control system.  I suppose all companies do, in some way or another.  We endured a long hell with CVS and a far shorter stint in the purgatory of Subversion before we went into the heavenly light of Git. The way we do it is to tag various branches destined for certain groups of machines, archive a snapshot, then copy those out to where they belong.  This is all partially automated...

I Brake For Debt 0

Me

I Brake For Debt

We’ve been trying a “cash budgeting” system for a few months now, and it’s going pretty well.  That is, it covers our variable expenses.  I still use a bank account dedicated to relatively fixed expenses such as rent, utilities, membership dues, and minimum credit card payments.  Most of those are paid automatically, pulled directly from the account. Unfortunately, there are two places where the system falls short.  This isn’t so much because of any flaw in the idea of cash...

In Other News 0

Me

In Other News

We had a great role-playing session Saturday night.  I found a group through meetup.com and we’re playing the “Dawn of Defiance” campaign for the Star Wars Saga Edition RPG.  It was mostly combat this week, but quite involved with some good character twists. The campaign has a section on Obsidian Portal.  I took a lot of notes in anticipation of doing a writeup from my character’s perspective.  Our GM gives us an extra 100XP if we do it, but I...

MAOI Stage 4 – Crash! 0

Me

MAOI Stage 4 – Crash!

I sat in a pool of milk and wondered how it got on the floor.  I knew I’d spilled it on the countertop trying to pour it into my cereal, but how did it get all over the floor?  I stood, shakily, and saw that the half-gallon cardboard container of organic whole milk was tipped over, as was my cup of cereal.  Milk was everywhere, soaking boxes, creeping under the toaster, dribbling into the sink. Wednesday afternoon, my psychiatrist upped...

Emacs Menubar Buffers List Format 0

Hacking

Emacs Menubar Buffers List Format

And now for something completely different.  No depression updates this time.  A new “Hacking” category and a code tip on getting the full filenames in the menubar buffers list of Emacs. I use Emacs 23.1.50.1 on my desktop, mostly for the kinds of things (quick copy and pasting and scratch pads) vim’s modal model doesn’t make altogether easy.  I’m not a vehement advocate of either editor, but of both. ;; Copied from /usr/share/emacs/23.1.50/lisp/menu-bar.el.gz (defun menu-bar-update-buffers-1 (elt) (let* ((buf (car elt))...