Happy 73rd Birthday to my Grandmother Ba

She is the greatest Grandmother - So great that she can love someone as crazy as I.

Ephedra Ban Lifted by U.S. District Judge

FDA says it's evaluating the ruling before deciding whether to appeal

HealthDay Staff - 2005-04-14

Although I did not expect seeing such news, I am glad to see the USA take this positive move. Ephedra/ephedrine is becoming more difficult to acquire in Canada, but it is still not too hard to find it. I take Ephedrine (8 to 72 milligrams) a couple times a month at the most - when I feel like boosting my energy or opening up my respiratory system (enhance sport activity or alleviate congestion). It is definitely not a harmful drug when used responsibly, like any other potentially beneficial substance. Anyhow, what kind of joke is it for the USA to ban simple stimulants such as Ma Huang, when they have explosive growth in the "energy drink" industry (Red Bull is a good example)?

that is hilarious! freakin' Norwegians...

On Wed, 2005-04-13 at 09:25 -0400, nevesis wrote:
http://www.yagoohoogle.com/

Adventures in maintaining FreeBSD

I stole a little bit of bed-time to look into the problem from earlier today... I figured I may as well upgrade Gnome, since I'm not even sure what version I am running. If portupgrade is not suitable for upgrading Gnome, I may be a year behind. I should probably make sure Gnome is up-to-date to help ensure that it functions properly, especially since the rest of the system [as far as I know] has been rebulit...

gnome_upgrade.sh reported:

"Not enough space in /var/tmp to log the upgrade. Please set the MC_TMPDIR variable to a location that has at least 200 MB of free space, then restart the upgrade."

I had an annoying time getting over this issue: I always forget how to set [environment] variables, because the different shell interpreters (such as sh, csh, tcsh, and bash) can have slightly varying methods of doing so. Do you use `set' and `export', or `setenv', and then do you assign a value to variable name by putting an equal-sign (=) or a space ( ) between them? Those several common possibilities offer enough permutations to prevent one from guessing the correct syntax. I checked /etc/passwd to recall what shell interpreter my root account uses: csh. Somewhere on the web I found the syntax information I needed to produce the correct command:

setenv MC_TMPDIR /tmp

I now have gnome_upgrade.sh running "The Big Update". It says will take a LONG time, and suggests that if I've been planning a day trip, now would be a great time to take it. I think it's a little late for a day trip. I hope going to sleep for the night will be good enough...

A wonder of the world through a technological wonder.

Adventures in maintaining FreeBSD

So, I finally got tired of not being able to have clicked URL links come up in Firefox from email browsed in Novell/Ximian Evolution. To date, I have always right-clicked the link, selected "Copy Link Location", and then pasted it into Firefox's address bar.

I am running KDE as my Window Manager, and have set up Firefox as the default browser in KDE's control panel. However, because Evolution is a Gnome application, it is also affected by Gnome's configuration. In this case, KDE's web-browser setting is not observed by Evolution.

Off I went, trying to figure out how to change Gnome's default web-browser. I tried loading all of the command-line names for Gnome Control Center I could find on the web... gnome-control-center, gnomecontrolcenter, gnomecc, and none of them worked. I expected them to be there, since I had Gnome applications installed; I guess that assumption was not very correct. I ran `locate gnome | grep control | more' and found there was a port named `gnomecontrolcenter'. I ran `portupgrade -NRPO gnomecontrolcenter' (I use -O because something is wrong with my pkgdb, I don't necessarily recommend using it) and it's building as I write this blog entry.

I should probably mention that if you're running Gnome on FreeBSD, you will probably want to check out the Gnome area on FreeBSD's web-site.
Gnome still cannot be upgraded using portupgrade - a special script is made available to upgrade Gnome on FreeBSD.

Well, the build finished, and I can run `gnomecc', but I have not been able to solve my problem. I changed a couple settings and went as far as restarting X Windows (`vncserver', in my case). I don't have time today to play further, but I intend to properly upgrade Gnome and read up more on configuring it to use Firefox as the default web-browser.

Later!

The Computer Operating System FreeBSD has finally forked a STABLE branch in the 5^th major release version. I am going to upgrade around late-April to early-May.

Good timing too, because I would like to run the BitTorrent client/server Azureus on my FreeBSD machine, but there is some pain-in-the-ass problem with installing Java on 4.x; a patch was implemented for 5.x, but details were sketchy with 4.x.

Philosophy/Buddhism

I have published all my notes from PHIL 2P17: Introduction to Chinese Philosophy, a course that I took from Brock University's Department of Philosophy (Humanities Faculty) throughout January to April 2005.