There’s “bloat”, and then there’s BLOAT.
“Bloat” is spending 5% of your CPU cycles and RAM to have a nice-looking user interface. “Bloat” is having the nerve to create a desktop environment that might not run well on a computer that’s 15 years old.
BLOAT is a PDF reader that is a 70 MB download, and (according to the installer) takes up 418 MB of space in total once extracted.
If Adobe software were people, they’d be dead from DIABEETUS.
As a kid of around 9 or 10, I had a “young adult” focused football book. It was all about stories of players and games from football’s past. It’s almost the only football book I remember owning, and I literally read the covers off of it.
Having no idea who authored it or any sort of inkling of the book title, I tried to find the book. Armed only with a vague memory of what it looked like (yellowed pages, and some yellow on the cover somewhere) and a much less vague memory of the stories contained within, I headed over to Google Books to try and come up with some search queries to find the book in their archive of scanned books.
My first go-to queries related to the 222-0 Cumberland vs. Georgia Tech game. I knew very well that this story came from that book, but no joy. I searched for Dick “Night Train” Lane, but the hits there didn’t yield my book either.
Finally, I struck gold. I remembered the story of Tony Dorsett and his 1,000 yard season streak (dating back to his high school days), and how the streak was broken by the 1982 player’s strike. (In my memory, I thought it was the 1987 strike, but luckily, that didn’t matter). I searched for: Tony Dorsett 1,000 yards strike and found the exact page I was looking for:
It was only a snippet, but I vividly remember the phrasing of those sentences. I knew I had found what I had been trying in vain for the past few years to dig up in my memory.
The book was Sports Illustrated: Strange and Amazing Football Stories, written in 1986. And I’ve come to figure out that I was incredibly lucky with that search phrase. Google Books does not have anywhere near the full text of the book archived, which is why neither Cumberland nor Night Train put me on the right track. Now that I knew the book’s name and could pull it up on Google Books, I had a search bar that searched only this specific book. Most of the stories I remembered came up with no hits, and even ones that did came up with no scanned page snippets. The only hit I’ve been able to come up with that gave me a look at the book was the Dorsett query.
But that was of no consequence any longer. Now I knew the book’s name and author. Mystery solved; I had the bastard right where I wanted him. Next stop was Amazon, which gave me plenty of used copies to choose from. I picked out one listed in good condition, and a few days later:
Mission accomplished.
Not being very long, the book was easy to breeze through in an evening. Reading through it confirmed every memory I had about it, and how many old football stories and tales of old players I knew came directly from this book:
I could list plenty more. It’s a nice collection of stories, especially given what the book is. The author, Bill Gutman, apparently churned out these kinds of young reader sports books by the dozen, for publishers like Scholastic and, as in the case of this book, Archway (putting it alongside the likes of Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew books).
Sadly, fact-checking may have been a tad loose in this book, as I picked out one glaring factual error. At the end of telling the Jerry Kramer story, the author tied things up with a nice but oh-so-wrong sentence:
“No wonder Jerry Kramer ended up in pro football’s Hall of Fame”.
Should I ever meet Kramer, I would ask him to sign this book, a relic from an alternate reality exactly like our own save for a Jerry Kramer bust in Canton.
It’s been a long time since I’ve posted here! Believe it or not, I’ve been writing a lot of blog posts. They’re all saved as drafts, waiting for me to get around to doing all of the updates to this blog that I’ve been meaning to.
I’ve managed to import posts from my old Blogger blog back in college, and I am currently digging through the Wayback Machine to recover as many posts from my old LiveJournal – yes, LiveJournal – as possible. (If there’s one thing I kick myself over, it’s how insanely sloppy I was with data archival back in college. Actually, pretty much my entire life up until now. Turn 30 and now I want all that stuff back).
I’ve come up with a new simple design for the blog, updated to WordPress 3.1.x, added Disqus commenting, syntax highlighting for whenever I post code snippets. And soon, to avoid repeating my past mistake, I’m going to look into how to archive Twitter and Facebook content here.
I’ve been cooking up some technical posts and, of course, it’s time to start talking football again, with the draft so close.
Let’s see if, this time, I can stick with maintaining my “web presence” here.
There are a couple of neat utilities in Mac OS X that a lot of advanced users / UNIX geeks love to use that I too have recently embraced.
The first is Visor. Visor is a terminal window that pulls down from the top of a Mac OS X system’s screen when triggered by a hotkey. If you’ve ever played a game like Quake and remember the drop-down console view triggered by hitting tilde (technically, backtick), then you know what this looks like. Instead of a game’s console, however, it’s a UNIX terminal (specifically, an instance of the OS X Terminal.app application).
I prefer to use iTerm for my normal OS X terminal emulator, and unfortunately, there’s no way to make Visor use iTerm instead of Terminal.app. But I find this to be of little concern. Visor is for running a quick UNIX command, something that doesn’t demand I move off of my current desktop space to the one where I have iTerm/tmux running.
The other utility is Quicksilver. Quicksilver is an application launcher. Instead of clicking icons in the Dock or browsing through the Applications folder in Finder, users can trigger Quicksilver with a keystroke, begin to type part of the application’s name, then hit Enter to launch the app when Quicksilver has matched your typing to the specific app. In practice, users typically need to only type a few letters in the app’s name for Quicksilver to properly figure out which one it is that the user is seeking.
So, these things are great in OS X, but I hate having utilities like this on OS X and lacking them on Linux. Luckily, both of these tools are faithfully replicated by Linux software.
The counterpart to Quicksilver is GNOME Do, which is quite frankly almost a note-for-note re-creation of Quicksilver in Mono. I have no hang-ups on using Mono software, and I greatly prefer following the Quicksilver look and behavior as closely as possible, so this works great for me.
A Visor replacement was harder to find. I tried Tilda but just opening and closing it was very error prone. Twitter user @mrf clued me in to Guake, which works nearly as well as Visor. I also like how Guake is transparently named after its gaming inspiration.
My hotkeys for these apps are control-backtick for Quicksilver/GNOME Do, and alt-backtick (or command-backtick) for Visor/Guake.
I don’t know why it took me so long to come around on these tools. I’ve known about Quicksilver and Visor for some time. I suppose it’s because I’ve become more of a keyboard-dominant UNIX user, and these tools provide some nice functionality for making use of the keyboard within a GUI environment. Particularly in OS X, I’m making far less use of the Dock as an application launcher.
I dig the NAPA Know-How redhead girl
Today, I spent a lot of time fussing with bootable USB thumbsticks, trying to set one up that would boot the new backup server I just built at work. The machine has no optical drive, so I just wanted to boot a simple netinstall and have the system pull everything it needs from remote mirrors.
The supposed easy method was to use Unetbootin. Everything about it was easy, except for the part where the bootable USB sticks it created didn’t work. Every boot attempt was met with “Boot error” or “Missing operating system”.
Since I am on Ubuntu, I tried to use Ubuntu’s usb-creator. Also a nice app, except for the fact that it too failed to work. In usb-creator’s case, the failure was to even get started. I would browse to the ISO that I wanted to use as the image for my boot stick, and the app refused to load it, or any ISO. No error, the app simply didn’t respond to the input.
So, two piece-a-junk GUI apps down. After a little digging, I found the methods that created working USB sticks on the first try.
1. Download diskboot.img from a CentOS mirror’s centos/(version)/os/(arch)/images folder.
(I used the kernel.org mirror and i386 arch, so my diskboot.img was located at: http://mirrors.kernel.org/centos/5.5/os/i386/images/)
2. Insert USB stick (I’ll assume it’s /dev/sdb, adjust instructions to fit your system), format to FAT32 (I used Gparted for this)
3. Run:
dd if=diskboot.img of=/dev/sdb
4. Remove USB drive, stick into machine that’s getting the CentOS install, and boot
When asked for installation media, select HTTP. Use the website and folder path of the mirror you’re using.
So, from my example:
Website name: mirrors.kernel.org
CentOS directory: centos/5.5/os/i386
Proceed through installer as normal.
1. Download boot.img.gz from /debian/dists/(version)/main/(installer-arch)/current/images/hd-media folder
(I did i386 stable from Debian’s US mirror, so boot.img.gz was located at: http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/dists/stable/main/installer-i386/current/images/hd-media/)
2. Download Debian netinstall ISO (I used: http://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/5.0.5/i386/iso-cd/debian-505-i386-netinst.iso)
2. Insert USB drive (again I’ll assume /dev/sdb) and format to FAT32
3. Run:
zcat boot.img.gz > /dev/sdb
4. Remove and re-insert USB drive. Copy the netinstall ISO to the USB drive.
5. Stick USB into machine getting the Debian install, boot, and run through installer.
I imagine these instructions will probably stay good for a long time. You’ll just need to adjust for mirror location, arch and release numbers, but the URLs I’ve provided here should give you a good clue as to where to find the necessary files on the mirror you’re using.
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