Having now finished my job at the ADC, I’ve had time to put it together. I present my python Lie Generator. It’s not much, but it was fun to make. It honed my regex skills rather a lot (DWOL doesn’t include any kind of API), and is also able to deal gracefully with internet-connectivity problems. It works with Python 3 only (due to changes to their urllib library) and must be called from the command line. I might someday work it into the website in some fashion.

I should probably reiterate what’s stated in the help text: copyright for all lies remains as stated on DWOL.

Solution (assuming you use bash):

for inMyPath in `echo $PATH | sed -e 's/:/\\t/g'`;
do
find $inMyPath -name MISSING_FILE;
done


MISSING_FILE is the name of the script (or whatever) that you’re after. This is fairly trivial, I admit, but it took me a while to work out how to do it right (mainly sedding PATH correctly). I’m about to put it into a script of its own for future use.

I have worked out a potential means of fixing the laptop, though. What’s broken, I believe, is that I don’t have either of Gnome or K desktop managers installed, only XDM, which I think Fluxbox doesn’t really support. So I have a window manager with nothing behind the scenes to take control when I actually *click* on a menu item. If I can reinstall GDM or KDM, I might be OK, but without an optical drive or means of internet connectivity (also broken), I can only see one (comical) solution. Download the DPKG on another machine, and transfer via USB stick or floppy disk (!), then install locally. Great. I’m not even going to bother, I’ll just spend hours faffing when I could just be doing all my research analysis and report-writing elsewhere.

Result: I’ve installed MiKTeX on my XP desktop, and intend to ssh to pip.srcf for certain necessary operations. And now I’m going to get on and try to actually view computers as means again, rather than ends…

(FYI, I’ve been running a heavily bastardised *buntu-based linux installation on my oldish Dell C640 for some time. I’ve messed around with the packaging way too much to call it Ubuntu or Kubuntu – indeed, at various times I’ve tried not just the GNOME and KDE packages, but Xfce as well (Xubuntu), and then settled on Fluxbox with GDM underneath. This was before the concept of Fluxbuntu existed. After spending a lot of time yesterday customising the Fluxbox interface, I succeeded (somehow) in removing all display managers. I then put XDM on, and now Fluxbox comes up, but without functional menus… so I can’t even launch a virtual terminal. Ah well…)

My longer term aim is to actually build a linux install from the ground up – I want Fluxbox, but I probably don’t want a lot of what comes with Fluxbuntu. This might signal my first change from *buntu for some years…

Oh yeah, and to conclude my previous post, Airset is vastly overengineered for my needs, but does sync well to Palm devices, so I’m using that. I plan to set up some complicated iCal sharing at some point between Airset, facebook, Google Calendar/Mail, and other webapps, which could be quite cool.

Puppy Linux is a very lightweight linux distro designed to be run from USB memory sticks. It still currently uses traditional desktop applications, though.

I have acquired a (free) 512Mb memory stick, of a pretty decent build-quality and a very keychain-able size (more on how and when will be explained in a future post, once I have a bit more to add to it), and want something to do with it. I already have a similar-sized one which I use for general carrying of files between home, the department, etc, and running a few Portable Apps such as a customised Firefox, when I’m out and about. I need to read up on how exactly to make one’s own USB-bootable flash-stored OS, but I think I see a holiday project here

The fix? Not really even a hack, actually. In FF’s about:config screen, change ‘browser.urlbar.clickSelectsAll to false. Restart FF, and voila.