Thursday, February 24, 2011

Making Life Easy With Pgrep & Pkill

When I was a young Unix wannabe and whenever I would need to kill a process I would go through this rigmarole.

  • Look up the process id with ps -elf | grep
  • Kill the process with kill
Nowadays on Fedora I do the same thing except that you know have to send kill the signal, which for my purposes is usually 9.

Now instead of doing all of that I simply type

pgrep
pkill

This is cleaner since it shows all the app's process ids and I do not need to filter.

Tuesday, February 22, 2011

Whipping the Donkey To A Randian Paradise

In a better world blinkered idiots like Megan McArdle, Andy "Bellcurve" Sully, and David "fscking Bobo" Brooks who never let fact drage them away kicking and screaming from their tin foil where they heat their hits Ayn's Amphetamines and Conservatism's crack. The tin foil which is the valueless heterosexual dollar.



In a better world them and Thomas "Moustache of Misunderstanding" Friedman would be working in a strip mall of second hand shoe stores, Dollar Generals, and the Golden Corral is closing because Randy's Roadkill Restop has better food. In a better world these pundits for plutocracy would be selling ad copy at half a cent a word to The Montana Sandwich Board Marketers Association. Occasinoaly they would cough up the cancerous lies that they got from spending a thousand and one nights taking bong hits from toxic fumes of Atlas Shrugged in their pseudorandian sheesha pipes.



In a better world Steve Gilliard who was right about so much would be writing about Obama's America in the pages of Atlantic Monthly. Not dying in some gray fucking hospital that had been disinfected of its healing touch by nonchalance and neglect between incestuous sheets with neoliberalism and neoconservatism in a chemical wedding they gave froth children who wander the streets of earth crying rust! rack! ruin! With bills of attainder signed by GATT and letters of marquee and reprisal authorized by the WTO they sail ships of states bringing low intensity class warfare like the G7 like the G7

Friday, February 18, 2011

Driftglass Interviews Mario Savio About Cell Phones

This interview took place at the Starbucks across the street from the Haight Ashbury communal chard garden. Not the Starbucks thats right next to the heirloom tomato nursery. The interview occurred on Monday February 30th 2009, When he found out that I am one of his big fanboys Mr DG gave me permission to excerpt this small part of the interviews since he hates everything about cell phones.

Driftglass: So do many people call you about protests they want to start?

Savio: Surprisingly yes but they are mainly evangelical students who want my advice on using the fairness doctrine as a way to bring Intelligent Design into Biology departments. Sometimes The Association Of Responsible Mountain Top Removal Companies will ask me to go to congress to give a protest speech. And most shockingly Free Teapartiers Of America hired me as a consultant for their campaigns.

Driftglass: How does it feel to have all these groups coopt your message?

Savio: Its very strange, sometimes it makes me feel that the real Mario Savio is dead, its kinda like an exercise in how to disappear completely. But then my phone rings.

Driftglass: What do you do when your phone rings?

Savio: At times the ringing of the phone becomes so odious, makes you sick at heart, you can't even hit passively hit mute. And you've got put your feet upon the nokias, and upon the androids, upon the iphones, drape your body upon the towers and make it stop, And you've got to indicate to the people that own it, to Sprint, and Glo that if they don't make texting after 5 pm free, the cellular network will be prevented from working at all.

Driftglass: Well thank you for your time Mr. Savio and thank you for protesting in the 60s.

Savio: It was a pleasure, I have to go now I hear Stairway to Heaven playing.

Wednesday, February 16, 2011

Monday, February 14, 2011

Zonet ZW2545 With Fedora 13

Ha! Some of the reviews of this usb wireless dongle said that no configuration was needed to get it working with Ubuntu. So I ordered it and found out that some configuration was needed to make it work under Fedora13.

Running lsusb, dmesg will have you think that it needs an rt2870 driver but that information is misleading. As was stated in this Fedora Forum thread the modules needed are kmod-rt3070 and akmod-rt3070.

Once I installed them with yum and restarted the machine the wireless dongle was detected. I ended not changing anything in /etc/Wireless/RT3070STA/RT3070STA.dat though I did add rt2870 & rt3070 to the end of /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf

Thursday, February 10, 2011

A Lousy Limerick

Paul drove a van into the dyk when it broke urbal beats gushed forth into the town of buuren
where Armin was cruisin' that oompah sound mixed big bass with humming bird tweets. nudged a reflections on his perspective. He kicked off his pants and danced like King Saul when he was in a state of trance.

Play Through!

When the elephant of ennui
is carrying reluctant you
to the graveyard of lost hours
Jump off and play through!

Looking For Divisional Dreams In Cheap Thrill's Seams

I once knew a girl who tried to sing with the voices of the two Js.
Janis Joplin & Joanna Newsom after a three day bender of
deriving rhymes to alcoholic patcholi scented beats,
distilled into a cup of exurban folk blues.

She roller skated through the pages of her book of days.
Down unnamed streets, dealing out impulsive cards
to which her friends raised selfish stares
and called her bluff of love.

She placed her bets with the cards marked cheap thrills
A smart man named tasty chard knew the fake ante
To her only one thing was real on the roulette of rules.
A girl with a David Lynch tattoo says he is her film beau.

A red great coat in a castle of mush and ice.
Once she beat my taut tummy like a ten foot sacrificial drum.
in a room where pachengas made us linger.
I laughed like a daimon sleeping in the Iroko tree's leaves.
All this was stencilled in the year two thousand and three.

Thunder Perfect Mind

I walk among the baobab trees
as lightning flashes messages in the cool breeze.
black plastic bags, little flags to the death of elephant grass,
dance in the wind's summoning rapture,
before returning to give the ground a fouling embrace.

I smell the polymer sacrifice rising to a god of whom the people are dreaming.
Spies from the Lord of Flies grab their share of glass of star.
And I write another sentence, with my back hunched in a metal, ribbed, chair.

Outside, outside, under gray skies full of dust
I passed by patient cows,
dessicated and lean,
The egrets pick their children clean.

Inside, inside
Stare into the abyss of souls
and the birth of tragedy stares at you.

Stare into the abyss of souls
and the odium of joy flies past you.

Stare into the abyss of souls
and the clatter of consciousness questions you.

Stare into the abyss of souls
and the rites of reason spring past you.

Stare into the abyss of souls
and the pilot of passion directs you.

There you are in the underbelly of uncertainty,
reading the entrails of rancid revealators.
Out of the crooked timber of humanity
no straight thing was ever made.
So we might as well indulge in gin and tacos
while doing back flips with wacos.

Now in the winter of my discontent I will be lazy.
And face the book of womanist musings.
Alter the destiny of mad biologists
through lawyers, guns and money.
An angry asian man takes the hammer of resistance to racism.
Where a panda has gone to eat shoots and leaves.
I laugh with driftglass darkly
at the hullabaloo raised by Captain snarky.
In the fields of dark black
tenacitus starts a tirade on the intersection of madness and reality.
And Killadelphia's finest battles the president of Anon Inc.

This is the message of Thunder's perfect mind.
Some heard the music of delusional spheres
and others in the static scream saw trillions of electrons
discarding photons on the celestial dome.
Thunder perfect mind dwells in mankind.