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I have not found anyone on the internet who's managed to answer the oft-asked question of how to remove unwanted items from the Places and System menus that can't be removed with Nautilus or Alacarte. My great triumph of the weekend is that I managed to figure this out ( Read more... )

Ooh, so I erroneously blamed Kolour for that mysterious shutdown bug. I apologize to it! After my fresh install of 10.04 yesterday, with no Kolour at all, it did the same weird thing to me yesterday. "Hibernate" disappears from the menu, and instead of shutting down or restarting, I get logged out and taken back to the login screen. Most times I ( Read more... )

Well, I tried fixing the acpi problems that you get by combining Toshiba Satellites with Ubuntu by getting a patched kernel, which some anonymous kind soul in my comments linked me to. It solved all my existing acpi-related problems and was awesome, except it made the machine crash and lose my working data approximately every hour. Excuse me? This ( Read more... )

Well, Christina and I changed the inverter on the screen of the laptop that got wet a couple months ago. It helped. The screen now comes up, and then it starts flickering, flickers increasingly and gets increasingly dim until it (presumably) dies. We always shut it down before it fully died ( Read more... )

In an Assyrian recension fragment of the Atra-hasis, the Babylonian flood myth, we find the phrase

ididi]glat na-ra-am

The superscript id is the Sumerian determiner for "river."

idiglat is the Euphrates.

na-ra-am is the Akkadian word for "river", in the accusative ( Read more... )

I am too tired to make any kind of intelligent post, I had a loooong day, but my great triumph was a bash script that tells me the number of minutes until the next bus leaves, from home and from campus, and that updates every 60 seconds. That was actually not too difficult, now that I'm getting a feel for bash, although it did of course take me a ( Read more... )

When I was eight, my parents got me a very expensive device known as a PreComputer for Christmas. It had a keyboard, and a screen with one scrolling line of text. A few buttons allowed you to alternate among programs. It also came with a user manual. I think it was probably meant for kids 12+, but I was precocious ( Read more... )

So, I finished converting that chapter into an article draft and sent it off to Donka ( Read more... )

Well, I'm a leetle bit tired right now, but feeling accomplished. I hid out the whole week at home because we were having a mini-course on Iranian this week, and the visitor who was giving it was hosted in the graduate student office space. I didn't feel like going, and I had no good excuse, so I just lay low so I wouldn't make it painfully obvious ( Read more... )