Category Archives: Brain Dumps

Stupidity

Posted by za3tar on October 10, 2007 6 comments

Geekiness Warning: This post might be inappropriate for normal human consumption.

After 3 days of downloading the dvd via the slow peer-to-peer network (since the direct link was not working yet), burning the iso onto a couple of DVDs (since the first copy was erroneous), performing three formats and repartitioning operations, and moving 30 Gigs of data back and forth, openSuSE 10.3 has finally installed successfully on my machine …. “successfully” here means “with some quirks”.

SuSE ships with a bunch of desktop environments, of which i mainly use KDE and GNOME. Unfortunately it does not ship with what i really would be using …. fluxbox … but i guess i can download that later.

Well …. the thing to know about openSuSE is that it is an awesome .. awesome distribution …… but it comes with a few quirks (or at least that has been my experience with it). This time around, GNOME had two problems. First, the panel and the dialog boxes would assume that my screen resolution is only 1024×768 and would sit in the upper left hand corner of my screen. To add to the oddity, YaST (the system configuration über-tool) correctly detects my normal resolution, and so does KDE and the rest of my system (except KDE4 preview). Not only that, even in this faulty GNOME, the background extends to cover the rest of my screen, and i can actually use the rest of the screen correctly. It is just that it thinks that its resolution is 1024×768 (and it displays that in its control center), but it also acknowledges that the screen is actually bigger !!! So, dialog boxes are centered in the upper left corner of my screen …etc.

In addition to that, the right click menu does not work on the desktop, and i can not see any desktop icons (not that i actually want to). Even worse …. i could not browse the filesystem without using the command line shell !!!

What could that problem be … what could that problem be ?!! …. Oh wait …. apparently i have accidentally installed GNOME without (guess what) … nautilus !!! For god’s sake, how could the system allow me to install GNOME without nautilus !! .. I installed nautilus and i can now use my desktop and browse my filesystem ….. (i wonder why :-) ).

Unfortunately the 1024×768 dilemma was still a problem. I later on found out that it is somehow kdm‘s fault … it seems as if it was not passing the correct parameters or something .. i don’t know. But switching to gdm seems to have fixed the problem. Now all is left is to see why is NetworkManager giving me a hard time recently .. but other than that everything seems great (specially that 1-click install spiel).

Eh …. anyway, i hate formatting and setting up systems (last time i did that was 15 months ago). I have to get back to my Rails project. Unfortunately i have deleted the development database and all the dummy data, but luckily i have the entire db schema in migration files (which is one of the very nifty things about Ruby on Rails).

Bab El-7ara

Posted by za3tar on October 9, 2007 6 comments

Bab El-7ara (part 2) is the first movie series i’ve watched since the last 5 Ramadans. Although i did not see the first part, i started watching this series since the rest of my family and friends did. As many others, i was shocked by how the “female role” was portrayed in this series, and by how trivial are the issues that the males fight ever so dramatically about.

One night while i was making one of my usual “this is absurd” comments, my little sister looks at me and says, “maybe they are not showing us this as a good thing”, and it finally dawned on me!! Traditionally, movie series set up in the semi-distant past idolized the lost values and traditions of those eras. Although many of these values (such as modesty, bravery, generosity, courage, caring for one another and for one’s neighbors) are good and should be idolized. We sometimes overlook the fact that the semi-distant past did carry a load of problematic traditions such as female illiteracy and gender bias.

Maybe she’s right! Maybe the producers of Bab El-Hara want us to take a critical look at problems such as gender bias and trivial in-fighting. After all, this series did successfully create a huge buzz, and it did in fact stir up many discussions. …. anyway, even if that was not purposefully meant, i think this is how i will look at it from now on.

Blogging ??

Posted by za3tar on September 21, 2007 None comments

Well, i’ve tried this a while back. Needless to say, procrastination caught up with me and i stopped blogging after my fourth post …. I can’t even remember what was my blog’s name, and what happened with it.

However, things have changed now (really ?). It appears that many interesting regional blogs have sprouted here and there. So i decided to become a cool kid and start my own blog ….. who knows, i might even enlighten the world with a whopping 5-post blog this time !!

Eh, i actually have some stuff on my mind, so i’ll probably be posting later on today.