Kylog

So running Thunderbird 3.0 under Fedora 11, I couldn’t get it to launch chrome correctly. It would just start a new chrome window (not a new tab) with the default start page (blank page for me). This was the behavior despite:

setting chrome as my default browser

going into Edit/Preferences/Advanced/Config Editor (or alternately ~/.thunderbird/ /prefs.js) and overriding the protocol-handler entries for http and https. I tried both specifying /usr/bin/google-chrome and specify xdg-open. No dice.

Grrr. The missing magic:
gconftool-2 -s /desktop/gnome/url-handlers/http/command -t string "/usr/bin/google-chrome %s"

#!/usr/bin/env python

import rlcompleter, readline
readline.parse_and_bind('tab: complete')
del rlcompleter, readline

I really enjoyed this book, probably as much as any contemporary fiction (not that I read much ;>) of recent years. The only other contender would be The Known World, but save that for another day. So, some notes.

Love the names: Rupp and Cain seem right out of Waiting for Godot, Daniel Riegel is suitably quasi-regal quasi-biblical, Bonnie is just spot-on prairie, Gerald Weber is spot on as well (and at least the same character counts as “Oliver Sacks” hee hee, the Gerald possibly a nod to Gerald Edelman), the slightly off Karin, Karsh the Shark, not sure what to do with Schluter, ….

Love the organization, 5 chapters built around the central puzzle/theme trope of the book, reproduced here b/c I kept flipping around looking for it:

I am No One
but Tonight on North Line Road
GOD led me to you
so You could Live
and bring back someone else

It unfolds nicely as the story unfolds, with the great epigraphs from Loren Eiseley and Aldo Leopold to mark the sections.

The plot is quite crisp, deftly mixing family drama, the mystery of the event, and a rich cast of characters with conflicting motivations and impulses, etc. And though, there is a consistently Powers-ian voice throughout, the per-character instantiations of that voice range widely and effectively.

Best, I love that this is a fiction writer who can unabashedly engage with “science” with a rich, sympathetic, critical set of frameworks. The implicit critique of Sacksian psychiatry is long overdue (one of my college professors, Arthur Quinn, wrote a similarly critical essay on Sacks 20 years ago, but it slipped beneath the waves as far as I know) — what Powers has done here is worth thorough consideration. The engagement with neuroscience and consciousness is compelling (a theme for Powers? the only other book of his I’ve read is the AI’d Galatea 2.2, and the interleaving with ecology is really provocative (Edelman again?).

Oh and can I just say: a few weeks earlier I attempted to read Don DeLillo’s Falling Man and had to put it down as just too hackneyed, cloying, predictable, etc. Just bathing in 9/11. Powers’s book on the other hand is truly and elegantly a post-9/11 book — informed by it, framed by it, could not have been written before it, and yes avoids any easy entrapment by it. Hurrah!

Perhaps more detailed thoughts will follow … ;>

The time is always right to do something right. –Martin Luther King

Weird but true. When I down/up-load some torrents (esp w/ many peers?), my 2.6.17 (FC5) Broadcom tg3 driver goes belly up. Here’s a thread about the problem:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/showthread.php?t=476368

FMI, on FC5 the best place to address this was to add

ethtool -K eth0 tso off

as the penultimate line of /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifup-eth, just before the final “exec” line.

These are just the basic things I forget, after everything is set up and installed.

4 windows:

n800:
ssh root@IP (192.168.0.5 at home

sbox:
/scratchbox/login
export DISPLAY=:2
af-sb-init.sh start
gcc -o maemo_hello maemo_hello.c `pkg-config --cflags gtk+-2.0 hildon-libs` -ansi -Wall `pkg-config --libs gtk+-2.0 hildon-libs`

Xephyr:
Xephyr :2 -host-cursor -screen 800x480x16 -dpi 96 -ac

Edit:
cd /scratchbox/users/kylo/home/kylo

http://repository.maemo.org/stable/bora/maemo-scratchbox-install_3.1.sh

Installation was successful!
—————————-

You now have Scratchbox 1.0.7 ‘apophis’ release installed.

Scratchbox cannot be run as user root. Instead, use your normal login
user account. Add additional scratchbox users and sandboxes with the
following command (outside scratchbox with root permissions):

# /scratchbox/sbin/sbox_adduser USER yes

Running this command will create sandbox environment for that user and
add user to the ’sbox’ scratchbox user group.
You will need to start a new login terminal after being added to the
’sbox’ group for group membership to be effective.

Scratchbox service must be started for CPU transparency to be functional.
Run the following command (outside scratchbox with root permissions):

# /scratchbox/sbin/sbox_ctl start

Add this command to e.g. /etc/rc.local file to start scratchbox service
at boot time.

Login to scratchbox session using the following command (as user):

$ /scratchbox/login

Refer to scratchbox.org documentation for more information re scratchbox:
http://scratchbox.org/documentation/user/scratchbox-1.0/

Good advice, like a secret, is easier to give away than to keep. (264)

“If my devils are to leave me, I am afraid my angels will take flight as well,” said Rilke in sharp defiance of the future industry of TV and self-help-book exorcism. (288)

Great elaboration of Camp:

Camp is not in rugby football.
Camp is not in the Old Testament.
Camp is not in St Paul.
Camp is not in Latin lessons, though it might be in Greek.
Camp loves colour.
Camp loves light.
Camp takes pleasure in the surface of things.
Camp loves paint as much as it loves paintings.
Camp prefers style to the stylish.
Camp is pale.
Camp is unhealthy.
Camp is not English, damn it.

But …

Camp is not kitsch.
Camp is not drag.
Camp is not nearly so superficial as it would have you believe.
Camp casts out all fear.
Camp is strong.
Camp is healthy.

And, let’s face it ….

Camp is queer. (136)

And summing up his adolescence:

Didn’t Woody Allen say that all literature was a footnote to Faust. Perhaps all adolescence is a dialogue between Faust and Christ. We tremble on the brink of selling that part of ourselves that is real, unique, angry, defiant and whole for the rewards of attainment, achievement, success and the golden prizes of integration and acceptance; but we also, in our great creating imagination, rehearse the sacrifice we will make:the pain and terror we will take from others’ shoulders, our penetration into the lives and souls of our fellows; our submission and willingness to be rejected and despised for the sake of truth and love and, in the wilderness, our angry rebuttals of the hypocrisy, deception and compromise of a world which we see to be so false.

There is nothing so self-righteous nor so right as an adolescent imagination. (297)

Paston School lived up to all my prejudices, as things always will to the prejudiced. (299)

To Myself: Not to Be Read Until I Am Twenty-Five

I know what you will think when you read this. You will be embarrassed. You will scoff and sneer. Well I tell you now that everything I feel now, everything I am now is truer and better than anything I shall ever be. Ever. This is me now, the real me. Every day that I grow away from the me that is writing this now is a betrayal and a defeat. I expect you will screw this up into a ball with sophisticated disgust, or at best with tolerant amusement but deep down you will know, you will know that you are smothering what you really, really were. This is the age when I truly am. From now on my life will be behind me. I will tell you now, THIS IS TRUE–truer than anything else I will ever write, feel or know. WHAT I AM NOW IS ME, WHAT I WILL BE IS A LIE. (301)

I’m nearing the end of this monumental tome (20 pages left!) and I’m collecting my thoughts. Actually, truth be told, my thoughts were largely collected several hundred pages ago, which is not to the book’s credit. I’m a Pynchon fan, having read everything but Mason and Dixon over the last 15 years, and I eagerly anticipated this book. So, while I’m still blown away by the talent, I’m afraid that this is not his best work.

The maximalist prose is still there, and the classic TP themes are there: the paranoid interpretation, the galloping across history, the ludic sense of humor, the constant interplay of light and illumination, the hard left anti-corporate stance, all of which I love. But …. mmm, where do I start. First, frankly, the man needed an editor here: the book too often feels like an indulgence, an overflowing accretion of ideas. Of course Pynchon has never been the sculptor who produces a chiseled David, but here he’s the sculptor who just kept throwing more and more clay on the figure until it bloats past any point. Someone save this man!

What’s ironic to me too is that of all TP’s books, this is the most overflowing and yet oddly the most linear. For all the time travel talk and the sprawling across 3 decades of turn-of-the-century history, everything pretty much happens in order, it’s clear what year we are in at any given point in the book, and by-god things might even happen for a reason! Quite ironic given his continuing digs at the “Christian linear sense of time,” the toying with bilocation (etc) all the time, and whatnot. So for once his narrative structure is out of line (in it’s linearity) with his narrative topoi — which, when coupled with the book’s sheer unrelenting length, makes this reader end up saying: “Huh?”

One intriguing thing, though, about TP’s reluctant seduction by the muse of linear narrative is that he plays very successfully with some classic authorial voices. For example, he starts with the Chums of Chance narratives, which are straight out of Horatio Alger or other Boy’s Life serial chronicles (side note: why does he abandon the CoC? they were such a great sidebar commentary on the major lines of narrative!). Or again, I just finished reading the bit at the end of Part 4, where he dons the Chandlerian ethos for the hard-boiled detective in Southern California between the wars. Magnificent! It really is impressive how he can take such a classic voice and adopt it and make it his own.

I just got it! This is TP’s covers album! Hee hee. Almost.

Cuz I forget:

1. Download kermit, e.g. sudo yum install ckermit
2. Produce a .kermrc like so (snipped from man page)
   set modem type none
set line /dev/ttyS0;
set carrier-watch off;
set speed 115200;
set flow rts/cts;
set parity none;
set flow xon/xoff;
connect;
3. (Optionally) modify grub.conf like so:
   serial --unit=0 --speed=115200
terminal --timeout=10 serial console
4. Add to the appropriate kernel line:
   console=ttyS0,115200