He who conquers the left side

musings from someone that likes to use the word musings.

Thursday, August 30, 2007

an akward moment

The other day I was eating dinner with my mom at a steak house, and coming back from the car, this is what happened:


Drunk guy: That's one damn looking woman, you're a lucky guy!
My Mom: (nervous laugh) Thank you!
Me: (to the guy) She's my MOM!
Drunk guy: Doesn't matter, you're still lucky.


And so concludes one of the most akward encounters with a stranger in my life.

Monday, August 20, 2007

Handy DBus Tricks

I've been experimenting a bit with DBus, first with X Input Hotpluging, then with Network Manager stuff. A common message I've been getting is:

Error org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.ServiceUnknown: The name org.freedesktop.NetworkManager was not provided by any .service files


Of course, org.freedesktop.NetworkManager can be anything, it was different when I got that message for X Input Hotplug. The question I had was, how can I tell which services ARE provided. Mailing list to the rescue! This a result of calling ListNames on my machine:]


# dbus-send --system --print-reply --reply-timeout=2000 --type=method_call --dest=org.freedesktop.DBus /org/freedesktop/DBus org.freedesktop.DBus.ListNames
method return sender=org.freedesktop.DBus -> dest=:1.21
array [
string "org.freedesktop.DBus"
string ":1.9"
string ":1.21"
string "org.bluez"
string "org.freedesktop.NetworkManager"
string "com.redhat.dhcp"
string ":1.0"
string ":1.1"
string ":1.2"
string "org.freedesktop.Hal"
string ":1.3"
string ":1.16"
string ":1.4"
string ":1.5"
]



Also, if you have any raw messages you want to send or any functions you want to call, just use dbus-send. This information was gathered from another Mailing list post. Here is another example:

# dbus-send --system --print-reply --reply-timeout=2000 --type=method_call --dest=org.freedesktop.NetworkManager /org/freedesktop/NetworkManager org.freedesktop.NetworkManager.getWirelessEnabled


I don't know yet how to pass arguments. If anyone knows, feel free to leave your comments, and thanks in advance.

Thursday, August 2, 2007

irony

A lot of people use the word irony incorrectly. This is a running joke between friends of mine. I think it all started when I was watching a baseball game and some announcer was like:
Well it's ironic that the manager here would bring in a left handed pitcher to face a right handed batter

or something wrong like that.

There's really nothing ironic about that. Baseball managers make decisions all of the time, and most of it is based on what the they think is a good decision for the team. If your left handed pitcher is a good choice for the time, why NOT put him in?

People do this shit ALL THE TIME, and it's all WRONG (by shit I mean use ironic incorrectly, not change pitchers). For some reason, sportscasters are the worst transgressors. I don't bother fixing it anymore. since every time I bring up the fact that someone is using the word incorrectly, I get a long winded explanation on how some example of happenstance or bad luck really is true irony, followed by a long winded argument that I get tired of in about 3 minutes.

And then there's these guys that think that it doesn't matter, and since people use the word incorrectly all the time then I should just accept it. From Wikipedia:
Descriptivists generally discount such self-proclaimed language authorities in favor of studying how individuals currently use the word.
Descriptivists can also suck my dick. People use the word incorrectly. If everyone started to say that 2+2 =5 would that make it correct? Of course not. But if I was a descriptivist I'd probably spend all my life trying to prove that, under certain conditions, 2+2 did equal 5. Also if I was a descriptivist, I would probably kill myself.

Maybe I should lighten up though, no one likes a guy with a holier than thou attitude. Imagine if you had a guy around the office that corrected people whenever they used a preposition to end a sentence. Oh wait...

At least I'm not the only one.

The reason I bring this up is that I just got on my lunch break, and while procrastinating by looking around for something awesome to pass the time I come upon this. From TFA:
Do it F***ing Now.

Don't wait. Don’t procrastinate. The winners in this world are not the ones who find the greatest excuses to put off doing what they know will make them more money. The winners are the ones that prioritize and seize the day.


As a result I had to watch that 7 minute video with Alec Baldwin, read all the articles he linked to, and write an entire blog post.