Couldn't Resist

Yes, of course, the new version of ical compiles and runs on Fedora Core 3.

My Wife Sent Me This

http://virtual-bubblewrap.com/popnow.shtml

More ical

When we last left Sanjay Ghemawat's ical calendar program, I was trying to get it to run on a SUSE Linux machine, without much success. The problem seems to be the various versions of Tcl and Tk that are to be found in different implementations of Linux.

Fortunately, a new version, ical-2.3.1, is out. This site has bandwidth problems, though. Fortunately, I found John Heidmann's site, which has source RPMs for Fedora Core 2 and 3. After extracting the source, and looking closely at the spec file, I was able to get ical up and running on the SUSE machine, meaning that now I can get notified before every seminar.

Dare I try compling the Fedora Core 3 RPM on this machine? Not tonight, but maybe over the weekend.

Things I Forgot to Say about Superbowl ILX

Just a few:

• In addition to missing the score by one point, I also said that Adam Vinatieri would kick the winning field goal. He did, though not at the end of a last-second drive.
• Announcer Chris Collingsworth was down on the Patriots young cornerbacks during the Eagle's 3rd quarter touchdown drive. Something about them finally realizing that they were in the Superbowl, and that they had to cover Terrell Owens. Then on the next drive they stuffed the Eagles, and CC all mentioned was how well the corners were playing.
• I didn't watch many of the commercials, but the Careerbuilder.com series was funny. I didn't see GoDaddy's, but now they have a longer version on the web. You see almost as much there as on an episode of Desperate Housewives.

Digging into RPM files

RedHat based Linux systems, and others, use the RPM Package Manager (yes, it's recursive) to package files for the computer. RPMs can come in binary or source (SRPM) versions. We've covered how to compile an SRPM into an RPM. But what if we just want to get at the files in an RPM or SRPM file? Today I was trying to compile ical on a SUSE Linux machine. In order to do that, I had to pull the files out of an ical*.src.rpm file. But how?

Comes the Web to the rescue, in the form of a Bill Kearney article. I'll summarize it here:

Get the RPM or SRPM file to your computer. Then run the command:

rpm2cpio package.rpm | cpio -iv --make-directories

where package.rpm is the name of your file. The contents of the RPM file will be placed in the current directory.

I never did get ical to compile on SUSE. More on that later.

Vanity of Vanities

OK, it might not be as bad as The Preacher said, but I'm going to start an exercise in ego-boosting or self-humiliation. At the bottom of the right-hand bar you'll see a little box that says Site Meter, which will keep track of visits to this blog. At the moment the number on it is 1. That would be me. Clicking on the meter will give you some other stats about this blog.

It's sort of like the citation index we have to keep track of at work. I've got a number of publications, and every once in a while the powers that be want to know how many people reference them. And therefore we go to the Citation Index, which (for a fee) counts such things. The Site Meter performs a similar function for the blog.

I'm curious, really. Who reads this thing besides me and TK? Anybody? No one leaves comments. So this is a way of finding out.

So let me know, Blogizens, is anyone out there reading this?

Yup, a Dynasty

OK, I missed the score by one (24-21, not 23-21), and I didn't get the ending right, but the Pats did win. It was not a pretty game. The defense mostly dominated the first half, and and the second half had some nice drives by both sides.

Remember how it was said that McNabb wouldn't make the mistakes Rothlisberger made? McNabb made the mistakes, though.

Oh yes -- Freddy Mitchell? One catch, 11 yards. TO played fantastically, though, 122 yards on 9 catches.

And what about Philadelphia's time management? Down by ten with about 4 minutes left, they played like they had another quarter in the game. Even on the last possession, before the interception, they lost time on the clock when Westbrook caught a no-gain pass. That and the turnovers killed the Eagles.

Sorry Philly. You've still got chances, though. McNabb is yet young.

However, Brady is younger, and the Pats will have all their on-field weapons back next year as far as I know. They'll lose both coordinators, but the keep Belichick. I'd say they're odds-on favorites for next year's Superbowl. Yes, we do have a dynasty.

Historical Kansas Maps

I wasn't exactly looking for this, but here's a neat collection of Kansas maps before 1900 from Wichita State.

Figures

BBC Five Live is blocked in the US for the duration of the game. "Contractual Obligations." It would have been fun hearing them try to explain American Football over the radio.

Another Sign of the Apocalypse (UK Version)

Not only does the BBC have extensive pre-game coverage of Superbowl IXL, tonight you'll be able to listen to the game on BBC5. The only thing missing is the commercials.

Dave Barry's Guide To Men

is going to be a Major Motion Picture. From the trailers, it looks like it's starring Dave himself.

Thanks to RToaCL for the link.

Does Anybody Really Know What Day It Is?

Over on Slashdot they're having a discussion of Sunbird, Mozilla's new stand alone calendar program. I downloaded it, tried it, and found:

It can't be programmed to accept the fact that the fourth Thursday of the eleventh month is a holiday.

It also can't figure out when Easter is, either, but I've given up on finding a calendar which will do that. emacs has calendars for every religion and culture known to man, but hey, put that in a modern calendar program? What do you want, anyway?

My favorite calendar program for X was called ical. No, not the ical you're thinking of, this is a different one. It was originally on Sanjay Ghemawat's page, but as you'll see, that page ain't there anymore. Fortunately, Tom Bennet has updated the old RedHat RPMs for ical, and released them to the public. I took the Fedora Core 2 SRPM and got it to install. Of course, first I had to install the tcl-devel and tk-devel packages, but that was easy, as they're in the original Fedora Core 3 installaton and so accessible via yum. Once I did that, the program worked just as I remembered it from old versions of RedHat.

If you need a relatively lightweight calendar program, don't mind that it's format isn't very compatible with anything else, and like the fact that it can figure out that the third Monday in February is President's Day (US), then try this version of ical.

Now could someone come up with a 100-year file of the dates of Easter and the related moveable feasts? You could start here. Or maybe pilfer the code from emacs.

The Story of My Life

Except, of course, that I'm a man, grew up near farms but never lived on one, and my wife can't drive a tractor, though she makes great dinners.

(And here are other Jeanne Marie Laskas columns from the Washington Post.)

Coronation?

Remember Super Bowl XXXVI in 2002? St. Louis vs. who, New England? This was supposed to be the game that made Mike Martz a Certified Offensive Genius. Things didn't quite turn out that way, did they?

Best Nike ad, ever, appeared the day after. Full page, just a swoosh, and the words:

That's Why They Play the Game

And now it's Bill Belichick's turn. However, I'm not going to bet against the Patriot's:

• New England's defense has shown that they can play with anybody, at any tempo. Next to McNabb, Philly's best offense is likely to be a gimpy TO, and Brian Westbrook. This defense handled the Colts, smashed the Steelers.
• If I've learned one thing over the last three years, it's never, ever bet against Tom Brady and Adam Vinatieri in the last few minutes of a big game. They may need inexplicable and previously unknown rules, but they'll find a way to win.

Pats 23, Eagles 21. On a last second field goal.

Dynasty

Firefox Meltdown

So I fire up the computer this morning and click the Firefox button.

Wait

Wait some more

Open a terminal window, give the command
$ ps xawu | grep -i fire

nothing running.

Type firefox in the terminal window. Get back a prompt. $ echo status yields 255. This is Not Good. (You want to see a 0 here.) OTOH, at least I know something's wrong with Firefox, not some weird thing with the window manager or something else that's been updated.

Try again:

$ firefox http://cst-www.nrl.navy.mil
INTERNAL ERROR on Browser End: Expected a version > 5! Version = 4

System error?:: No such file or directory
$ echo $status
255
$

Very bad. No idea what it means. What to do? Panic seems a good option, but let's assume that it's not Firefox that's corrupted, rather something in my Firefox preferences, extensions, or whatnot. So try:

$ cd ~
$ mv .mozilla .mozilla_old
$ firefox

And wonder of wonders, Firefox runs. Of course, now I have to copy my bookmarks from ~/.mozilla_old to ~/.mozilla, and reinstall the extensions, but at least it's running.

It's possible to do things like this in Windows, but I find it much easier to figure out the local settings of a program under Unix -like operating systems. Of course, I don't know what went wrong here, but at least I got things back to work quickly.