This is a self portrait that’s about half way complete. I did two of these side by side one of which I did while using the reference upside down to see what it would look like.
Acrylic Self Portrait
This is one of the first portraits I did, it’s an acrylic and it looks half finished, the reason I didn’t keep working on it was that Jenny said she liked it the way it was. The idea behind the composition was from a famous painting done by Gustave Courbet called The Desperate Man.
Winslow Homer Fog Warning
I tried to copy Winslow Homer Fog Warning. It didn’t come out as good as I wanted but I’d only been painting for a month when I tried this one. Winslow was a fantastic painter both in oils and Watercolors. A few months after I painted it I bought a 48″ canvas to do a full size version, I had the drawing done but I managed to put a whole in it so that project got put on hold 🙂
Started Painting
I painted for the first time tonight. The last time I remember painting I was in primary school in Mrs Orrs class with those cheap childrens paints. Tonight was no different, I bought some paint for the kids to create some paintings for Jenny for her Birthday which was fun and messy for all concerned.
Anyway, I’ve always wanted to try painting so after a few beers I had enough courage to try it, I painted a cartoon like snowman, it looks awful but I loved every minute of it. It was a strange feeling to just go at it. I might eventually post the painting here but it’s truly bad, maybe when I can actually paint I’ll have enough courage not to care.
Ziff Davis Spam House
For quite some time I have been receiving rubbish emails onĂ‚Â variousĂ‚Â topics and they all originate from Ziff Davis. I have never subscribed to any of these so called magazine or whatever they are, they haveĂ‚Â obviouslyĂ‚Â bought some email list that I was unlucky enough to have been on and thenĂ‚Â automaticallyĂ‚Â subscribed me to every email list under the sun. This is extremely irritating. I’ve written an email to the following people to unsubscribe me.
aimee_levine@ziffdavis.com
andrew_garcia@ziffdavis.com
angelo_mandarano@ziffdavis.com
appscout@ziffdavis.com
askloyd@ziffdavis.com
barry_harrigan@ziffdavis.com
baseline@ziffdavis.com
cameron_sturdevant@ziffdavis.com
caton@ziffdavis.com
chris_maginn@ziffdavis.com
chris_primesberger@ziffdavis.com
darryl_taft@ziffdavis.com
Debra_Olchick@ziffdavis.com
Debra_Olchick@ziffdavis.com
dennis_barker@ziffdavis.com
dennis_fisher@ziffdavis.com
elda_vale@ziffdavis.com
eric_lundquist@ziffdavis.com
Evan_Schuman@ziffdavis.com
events@ziffdavis.com
eWEEK@ziffdavis.com
garcia@ziffdavis.com
gearlog@ziffdavis.com
info@ziffdavis.com
jason_freidenfelds@ziffdavis.com
jeffrey_burt@ziffdavis.com
joe_wilcox@ziffdavis.com
john_mccormick@ziffdavis.com
Karl_Elken@ziffdavis.com
kelli_turtz@ziffdavis.com
kristin_holmes@ziffdavis.com
larryseltzer@ziffdavis.com
lfreeman@ziffdavis.com
Martha_Schwartz@ziffdavis.com
Mary_behr@ziffdavis.com
mary_hart@ziffdavis.com
matthew_graven@ziffdavis.com
Matthew_rothenberg@ziffdavis.com
Nicholas_mokhoff@ziffdavis.com
opportunities@ziffdavis.com
peter_coffee@ziffdavis.com
phil_kramer@ziffdavis.com
Phil_Kramer@ziffdavis.com
ppereira@ziffdavis.com
randy_zane@ziffdavis.com
sandra_gibson@ziffdavis.com
Sheena_Mohan@ziffdavis.com
Sloan_Seymour@ziffdavis.com
stan_gibson@ziffdavis.com
Stephen_Veith@ziffdavis.com
Since the bots will eventually pick this up I hope they get the same enjoyment from their own Spamming techniques as I have.
qemu bridged networking
My final /etc/networking/interfaces file looks like (this is for Debian)
auto lo eth0 tap0 br0
iface lo inet loopback
iface br0 inet dhcp
bridge_ports eth0 tap0
bridge_maxwait 0
iface eth0 inet manual
iface tap0 inet manual
pre-up tunctl -b -u<my_user_name>-t tap0
pre-up ifconfig tap0 up
post-down tunctl -d tap0
I stole this from the following site joost.damad.be
Beware the username enttry above needs to be changed to your username… You will also need to install uml-utilities. Once I had this running I could start my image as follows:
qemu -net nic -net tap,ifname=tap0,script=no -hda debian.img
Mount You must specify the filesystem type
I encountered this error while trying to mount an image created using qemu. The command from the docs says to run the following command to mount it on the loopback device.
mount -o loop,offset=32256 debian.img ./mntpoint
This is completely wrong because the data start is not 32kb into the image file. To figure out where it starts you need to use the following commands:
]$ fdisk -ul debian.img
you must set cylinders.
You can do this from the extra functions menu.
Disk debian.img: 0 MB, 0 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 0 cylinders, total 0 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00077ccb
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
debian.img1 * 2048 5785599 2891776 83 Linux
Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary.
debian.img2 5787646 6141951 177153 5 Extended
Partition 2 does not end on cylinder boundary.
debian.img5 5787648 6141951 177152 82 Linux swap / Solaris
Once you have this output you can see that the data starts at sector 2048 and since sector size is 512 on my image I need to set the offset to 512*2048. So the final working command is:
mount -o loop,offset=$((512*2048)) -t ext3 ./debian.img ./mntpoint
and we now have a mounted image file.
undefined reference to clock_gettime
I got this error when trying to statically link libevent2 so I could benchmark it. I just added -lrt to the Makefile and all was well.
Changing your keymap
I recently had an issue where my keyboard when using synergy was inserting a double arrow instead of the usual greater than or less than sign also known as guillemotleft and guillemotright.
To fix this annoying bug I added
keycode 53 = x X greater greater greater greater
keycode 52 = z Z less less less less
keycode 24 = q Q at at at at
to a .Xmodmap in my home directory. If you are wondering how to find the keycodes etc you can use xev. To start it without restarting X use
xmodmap .Xmodmap
Google Bugs
I am not sure what has been happening to Google recently but over the last few months it has got quite awkward to use. The first thing I noticed was the new fade in. For me while it’s fading I’m unable to type anything into the search box. This is really annoying.
The other less annoying thing but annoying anyway is the fade itself, who on earth decided this was a good idea? Are they really that desperate for more searches that they will hide parts of their menus etc until you do something. I’m sure they’ve done some UED studies and concluded that it’s better for the majority of people, personally I hate it.
The second thing I noticed today is that I lose control over the Firefox menu when I have a Google Window open on the home page. I was able to repeat this quite easily and when I close the Google tab I’d get control back. This is very very annoying.
It’s getting more and more awkward to use Google and this spate of bugs is getting tiring. I appreciate Googles uncluttered page and speed but it’s just getting awkward.
As a Yahoo! employee these errors are of course good news for us. I’ve been an avid user of Google for years but I think it’s high time I stopped using Google anyway and the recent spate of bugs has given me a good reason to try Bing/Yahoo to see how I get on with them. Hopefully within a few weeks/years (more likeley never) my muscle memory for “goo” will change to “bin” or “yah”.