chattr +a -V

A comment on the Curious George: Firefox recent addresses post at Monkeyfilter lead me first to Miscellaneous Firefox Tips, and from there, to The Extensions Mirror, which has 402 Firefox extensions not available on update.mozilla.org. The link lists the extensions ascending alphabetically by name. I didn't see a way to sort the extensions by date or a crude measure of popularity (such as number of views or downloads). I don't use the Thunderbird email program, so the 65 Thunderbird extensions not available on update.mozilla.org don't interest me.

The past week or so here in Raleigh, it's been around 90 degrees Fahrenheit (there's a nice Polish name), so air conditioners are getting workouts. John Gorrie thought the Florida summer heat and miasma from rotting vegetation caused yellow fever and malaria. Though quinine was effective against malaria, there was nothing available to cure or vaccinate against yellow fever.

Statue of John Gorrie in National Statuary Hall Collection

Gorrie died in June, 1855, 150 years ago. The Wikipedia says June 29, Today in Science says June 16th. He invented the first mechanical refrigeration system, the development of which is number 10 in the National Academy of Engineering's Greatest Engineering Achievements of the 20th Century.

Gorrie's Fridge, a page at the University of Florida by physics professor Gary G. Ihas, has a brief history of pre-commercial and commercial refrigeration and air conditioning.

There's an article about Boston's Frederick Tudor and his successful scheme to transport ice on ships to the tropics, as far as Calcutta, at Cool Customer, Frederic Tudor and the Frozen-Water Trade. Just as Poland Spring today markets its water as distinctively pure, so in the 19th century 'the clean rivers of Maine provided much of the East coast ice' using that marketing technique when medical officials questioned the safety of using ice from increasingly polluted lakes and rivers. Eventually, electricity and electric refrigerators replaced the iceman and the icebox.

Several news sites have substantially the same brief article (for example North Korea Cuts Phone Lines To Outside World and Nth Korea censoring phone lines: claim), referring to a Yonhap news service article which so far I havent been able to locate in English.

There's one tidbit in the latest which is interesting:

Since April, even people with permits to make international calls can only do so under the strict surveillance of security officials, [the Yonhap article] said.

Previous blog entry here at North Korea: near elimination of telephone communication. I haven't seen anything yet on this at One Free Korea or North Korea Zone.

For about a year now, I've been running Debian on my desktop. I tried out unstable for a little bit, had problems (been such a long time I don't recall what they were), so went to testing back near the beginning. Now the new stable is Sarge, and I've waited a few weeks for things to settle down, and I'm now doing an `apt-get update && apt-get update` from Sarge/stable to etch/testing. That's probably not the best way to go from one Debian distribution (Sarge) to another (etch); `apt-get dist-upgrade` would get uninstalled dependencies, but I'll be conservative.

When Sarge was officially released, I changed my /etc/apt/sources.list to replace occurrences of 'testing' with 'stable', and now I've rolled back the changes, replacing 'stable' with 'testing'.

An aside: I'm in Raleigh, North Carolina, U.S.A., and while there are .deb repositories physically close to me, those physically close repositories aren't necessarily the ones with the largest bandwidth. Some sites throttle, so choosing the closest physically might lengthen the time for downloads. The excellent program apt-spy '[p]arses a list of mirrors and tests each of the mirrors for bandwidth. Writes a /etc/apt/sources.list file based on the responses it gets.' I haven't re-run apt-spy after rolling back the changes, but I noticed that downloading the packages topped out at close to 600 kB/s on the cable modem.

Doing `apt-get update && apt-get upgrade` returned

Get:1 http://debian.uchicago.edu testing/main Packages [3432kB]
Get:2 ftp://ftp.us.debian.org testing/main Packages [3439kB]
Get:3 http://debian.uchicago.edu testing/main Release [81B]

[snip]

Fetched 8509kB in 14s (573kB/s)
Reading Package Lists... Done
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
The following packages have been kept back:
  bind9-host dnsutils evolution libgcj-common ted ted-common
The following packages will be upgraded:
  alien apt-listbugs arj aspell aspell-bin bacula-common bacula-console
  bacula-director-common bacula-fd bacula-sd balsa base-config base-files bash

[snip]

  xemacs21-support xemacs21-supportel xlibs xlibs-data xlibs-static-dev
  xosview zip
297 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 6 not upgraded.
Need to get 182MB/215MB of archives.
After unpacking 17.4MB disk space will be freed.
E: You don't have enough free space in /var/cache/apt/archives/.

Oops. Need to do `apt-get clean` to blow away the archives cache, and the downloads then proceeded.

Fetched 215MB in 9m56s (361kB/s)
Reading package fields... Done
Reading package status... Done
Retrieving bug reports... Done
grave bugs of libmagick6 (6:6.0.6.2-2.2 -> 6:6.0.6.2-2.4) < done >
 #314628 - libmagick6: Missing dependency (libltdl3) on amd64 platform
grave bugs of imagemagick (6:6.0.6.2-2.2 -> 6:6.0.6.2-2.4) < done >
 #315013 - display command fails with "error while loading shared libraries"

[snip]

Summary:
 xlibs(1 bug), webmin(1 bug), initrd-tools(1 bug), bittorrent(1 bug), libmagick6(1 bug), imagemagick(2 bugs), mozilla(1 bug), squid(2 bugs)
Are you sure you want to install/upgrade the above packages? [Y/n/?/...]

The bug retrieval is courtesy of apt-listbugs, an even more excellent program than apt-spy. Note the '< done >' flags on libmagick6 and imagemagick: I'll ignore those bug reports and go ahead with the install. The other packages (xlibs, webmin, initrd-tools, bittorrent, mozilla and squid) all have '< open >' bugs, so I choose to not install those. That means tapping 'n' at the 'Are you sure you want to install/upgrade the above packages?' prompt, which aborts the install and requires me to do `apt-get install [package0, package1 ... packageN], but with swipe and paste, putting the package names on one command line is a snap. I just swipe the list of packages downloaded, paste it into an editor, make sure the list is all one line (no carriage returns), cut the packages with open bugs, swipe it again and last, paste it after `apt-get install` on a root commandline.

 xemacs21-gnome-mule xemacs21-mule xemacs21-mulesupport xemacs21-support
 xemacs21-supportel xosview zip
274 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 29 not upgraded.
Need to get 0B/167MB of archives.
After unpacking 18.5MB disk space will be freed.
Reading package fields... Done
Reading package status... Done
Retrieving bug reports... Done
Reading changelogs... [here follows an announcement which I exit by tapping 'q']

Now I proceed to the configurations. Defaults are usually sane, and my rule of thumb is to accept defaults unless I know a different selection is what I want or need. The first program to configure is chkrootkit: the option is to 'only report problems if they differ from the previous day's run', and I choose the default 'No'.

sysstat is next: its data format changed, and I get a warning that '[e]xisting data files need to be deleted.' I have no need for old data, so I tap < enter > to select 'OK' and then agree to the old file deletion.

Verbose 'Unpacking replacement [packagename]', 'Preparing to replace [packagename]', 'Setting up [packagename]', a few items such as 'Stopping periodic command scheduler: cron' (inetd, powertweak and FAM daemons've also stopped; note to self: make sure inetd, powertweak, FAM and cron've restarted afterwards), note a problem in the xemacs compilation: loading erc (e[macs]rc: the emacs relay chat 'client') resulted in an unspecified error ... and I'm back to a root prompt with no other errors returned.

`ps ax|egrep "(inet|powert|fam|cron)"` shows the daemons running.

Success. If I want, I can see why the packages bind9-host dnsutils evolution libgcj-common ted ted-common were held back. Probably an uninstalled dependency.

The Teaching Company sells very high quality recorded lectures by noted and engaging university professors, audio and video, for lifelong learning. When Pope John Paul II died, they made available for free download, two lectures on the history and procedures of the conclave.

Until July 31, 2005, they're now making available a pair of two-part lectures, one of the pair on 1905: Einstein's 'miraculous' year and on relativity (the general theory, I suppose), and the other two-part lecture on Fact and Fiction in The DaVinci Code and 'the formation of the Christian Bible, Jesus' relationship with Mary Magdalene, and the role of the emperor Constantine in shaping the religion of the historical Jesus.'

• Einstein lectures at The Teaching Company.
• Fact and Fiction in The DaVinci Code.

archive.org previously released Radar Men From the Moon. Now they have three more:

• The Lost City (link is to Chapter 1), 'Evil Scientist Zolok (William 'Stage' Boyd), located deep in a Magnetic Mountain of darkest Africa, uses electricity to create earthquakes and distruction all over the world. One lone scientist, Bruce Gordon (Kane Richmond) shoulders the massive task of batteling [sic] this evil genius'.
• Ace Drummon [sic], (link is to Chapter 1), '13 part serial based on the comic strip character Ace Drummond created by WWI flying Ace Eddie Rickenbacker.'
• and Dick Tracy (link is to Chapter 1).

Scary headlines! Dramatic music! Advanced technology!

Jon Udell's graphing of 'link affinity' he shares with 6550 del.icio.us users (Collaborative filtering with del.icio.us) hints at 'a mixture of shell scripting, Python scripting, regular-expression pattern matching, and XML parsing' to 'identify an implicit community of interest and tap into its emergent group mind'. He promises to publish the code '[o]nce things settle down'.

He also links to Greg Wilson's Data Crunching: Solve Everyday Problems using Java, Python, and more. The site links to two online reviews of the book: at javaddicts.net and by Steve Vinoski, though google has more.

I don't want this entry to be another 'Back up North ...', so I'll only mention Hal Stern's post on his Planet Sun bog, Hal Stern: In Search of Dunkies, and the fact that the only Dunkin Donuts location I've found around Raleigh which sells the whole beans for a reasonable price is the one on westbound U.S. 70 in Clayton. Last time I checked, they were selling two pounds of whole beans for USD$11. Other stores were as high as USD$8 per pound, the list price on the web site.

If you run Linux or a Unix variant, sooner or later, you'll get the 'respawning too fast ...' message on boot.

One of ITWorld's newsletters is Unix in the enterprise (its URI is still its old name, Unix Insider), and in the June 15, 2005, issue, Sandra Henry-Stocker has an article on this topic, beginning with a brief explanation of init, the mother of all processes.

treeps is a graphical display of processes, and a screenshot of the program's output shows processes better, IMO, than `ps -ef` or `ps ax`:

treeps running

The author parses /etc/inittab, identifying the colon-separated fields, helpful in identifying which program init is trying to spawn, and pointing to your possible typo in that line in /etc/inittab. So, adding this line to /etc/inittab runs a getty on tty12, which you can switch to with the keyboard combination ctrl-alt-F12:

12:23:respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty12

the inittab file runs `/sbin/getty 38400 tty12` in runlevels 2 and 3, and if it fails or dies, respawns it.

If you've edited /etc/inittab and introduced an error, boot into single user mode and restore your previous version of the file. You did make a copy before editing it, didn't you?

Previous posts on the Firefox extension ScrapBook:

• Firefox scrapbook extension: save, organize, annotate and search web pages; and running two Firefox profiles simultaneously
• Scrapbook v0.15.5 released [bugfix]

I've sometimes wanted to download all the images on a page, but since wget, the utility I'm most familiar with for command line http and ftp file retrieval, doesn't support wildcards in http, I never had a way to grab and organize all images easily. I'm using ScrapBook to do just that, grabbing the 259 or so line art images at Line art.

Firefox 1.0.4 segfaulted part way through the capture, and I notice that when I restarted Firefox, the ScrapBook capture did not resume.

While it isn't the Unix concept of creating new tools and solving complicated problems by combining existing small tools, it works.

Firefox segfaulted when I was capturing the images and opened a new tab for a google search: when I typed the search term in the google toolbar and tapped < enter >, my multiple windows and multiple tabs disappeared. The SessionSaver extension brought my window and tabs back to their state when it segfaulted.

Very useful.

I had subscribed to ScrapBook's rss feed, and a bugfix was just released, bumping the current version up to 0.15.5. It fixes a bug where, 'if control characters get mixed in' [into?] ~/.mozilla/firefox/[profilename]/ScrapBook/scrapbook.rdf, 'the sidebar tree disappears'.

Interesting: I launched Firefox using my 'scrapbook' profile, launched Firefox again with the -profilemanager option, and went to update ScrapBook in the 'scrapbook' profile instance, and it updated successfully. Running the other instance didn't cause the install to barf. Restarting that instance of Firefox is necessary, of course.

scrapbook.rdf is an XML document, and it is the sidebar content.

An aside, because I once was in a Solaris admin class where the instructor casually asked whether a version 0.42 (or some such two-digit number) is newer than a version 0.9, and many people got the answer wrong. The higher the number, the more recent the version. So, grab the two-digit numbered versions, not v0.9.

I've posted about some helpful Firefox extensions in Session Saver Firefox extension, Enhanced History Manager Firefox extension and Firefox extension to edit and preview CSS on the fly. There's another one which I've tried to get working in my 'mike' profile, but it fails, not finding a script. That's ScrapBook, which allows you to save (including linked files, say, including mp3s), annotate, organize (tree display like bookmarks), edit and search (including regular expressions) web pages. I had looked at the extension via Leo Sauermann's entry scrapbook, Edd Dumbill's entry Firefox ScrapBook extension, and the New York Times' article CIRCUITS: NEWS WATCH; Add-On Allows Firefox Browser Users To Maintain an Archive of Web Pages. (Unfortunately, the Times' archive policy means you now have to purchase the article.) I don't remember which of these was first, but I'm interested in tools to organize web searching results, and seeing what ScrapBook says it can do, I wanted to give it a try.

When the install failed, Gomita, the program's author, emailed me that I need to create a new profile before installing ScrapBook.

$: /usr/bin/firefox -profilemanager &

will start Firefox with the profile manager, whether or not Firefox is already running. So, you can have Firefox running with one profile, and use the '-profilemanager' option to start another instance of Firefox with a different existing profile, or first create another profile and then start Firefox using that new profile. If Firefox is already running and you just do $: /usr/bin/firefox &, the profile currently in use will be used again for the new instance of Firefox.

ScrapBook opened in a sidebar
(right click and 'View image' to see larger, more detailed version)

Right clicking on the page brings up options, which now include 'Capture Page' and 'Capture Page As ...'. It's the latter which will grab linked files, whether image, sound, movie, archive, or all linked web pages.

ScrapBook - Capture Detail [what will ScrapBook save: options]

Left clicking on the sidebar entries opens up the saved entry in the browser's window, and right clicking on the sidebar entry pops up a menu including 'New Note'. Here's the main ScrapBook page annotated with some stuff I typed, and with some stuff from the page, swiped and middle mouse button clicked to paste (X windows style):

ScrapBook note, including swiped and pasted text
(right click and 'View image' to see larger, more detailed version)

Now liferea, my aggregator, will open pages from the blogs to which I subscribe, inside liferea, or in a browser (Program --> Preferences --> Browser to specify what browser and how). I just tried opening a linked page in another Firefox tab, with Firefox running both profiles 'mike' and 'scrapbook', 'mike' profile being the first profile in use. Unfortunately, liferea opened the page in a 'mike' tab, not a 'scrapbook' tab.

In the ScrapBook sidebar, there's a 'Tools' menu, which among other things, does an 'Open' on the ScrapBook directory:

ScrapBook directory
(right click and 'View image' to see larger, more detailed version)

Drilling down one level into the data directory, here's how ScrapBook stores the files and notes:

Saved ScrapBook material
(right click and 'View image' to see larger, more detailed version)

Not helpful: they're named by the creation time and sorted by name. I have no problem with the latter, but it'd be nice to have a symlink or other means to give the directories informative, descriptive, names.

When I create a new note, it's not named or saved, it seems, until I left mouse click on the note in the sidebar: the 'Writing Notes' section at ScraBook's Features (3) page doesn't make this clear: 'Auto-saving when you close a note or open another one' is all it says on that page about saving.

It looks as if you can share ScrapBook data among other users, by clicking on the 'Tools' drop down in the ScrapBook toolbar, selecting 'Import / Export' and saving the output to a directory, say on a USB stick. I suppose if a shared directory or drive were already mounted, saving there would be possible. My profile directory is read - write - execute only by user 'mike', so a different user can't directly access the original data therein; maybe by exporting to a location with less restrictive permissions would others have access? Let's see ... going to 'Tools --> Settings --> Advance' from the ScrapBook toolbar allows specifying a different saved data destination. You don't have to set the destination before saving the data: going to 'Tools --> Import / Export' brings up a file manager where you can specify a directory and then drag and drop files, folders or both into the specified directory. But ... the exported files and directories inherit permissions from the original files and directories, so if the directory you're exporting to has less restrictive perms (say world writable), the less restrictive perms are not inherited. Too bad, IMO, as inheriting the less restrictive perms, or making that inheritance an option, would make sharing easier. If the directory is on a separate partition, maybe setting the umask and gid in /etc/fstab would work, but that would ... open up other problems.

I wonder whether you could put the ScrapBook files on a website and edit those files?

The author has a page where ScrapBook users can vote on to do tasks, a nice way to respond to the user community. That page was last modified May 5, 2005, and since then ScrapBook v0.15.4 was released. There are questionnaires and an rss feed for the program as well.

All in all, ScrapBook is a very powerful Firefox extension and I can see I'll be giving it a real workout.

MP3s of 78 rpm Records, an entry from June 3 at WFMU's Beware of the Blog points to Turtle's "78 RPM" Jukebox. Will be burning some to listen to early in the morning while working.

Familiars such as

• Pack Up Your Troubles In Your Old Kit Bag
• Down by the Old Apple Tree
• Yes! We Have No Bananas
• Barney Google (the comic strip first appeared in 1919, this song is from 1923)
• Waiting for the Robert E. Lee (some background at Parlour Songs for March, 2001 about half-way down the page)
• Wearing of the Green
• The Wreck On The Southern Old 97 (also known as The Wreck of the Old 97)

The last one's tune I've heard used in the Kingston Trio's [Charlie on the] MTA,

Charlie handed in his dime at the Kendall Square station
And he changed for Jamaica Plain
When he got there, the conductor told him "one more nickel"
Charlie couldn't get off of that train.

Banjos, harmonicas, Ragtime, toe tappin' great stuff.

And '[o]nly half as many people are borrowing books as 10 years ago ... lending 20 million fewer books each year, down from 440 million five years ago to 320 million last year.' Source: Libraries will be closed in 15 years, says ex-boss of Waterstone's in The Daily Telegraph.

In the 1980s, libraries spent 18 per cent of their budgets on books, a figure that has now fallen to nine per cent.

By contrast, libraries spend 54 per cent of their budgets on staff, according to the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy's public library statistics.

Mr Coates says that what the £1 billion-a-year library service needs is not more money, but for resources to be targeted more efficiently on improving buildings, longer opening hours and more books.

Another example of the rule that bureaucracies exist to protect and promote the bureaucrats' careers: swelling the payroll.

Hat tip to June 09, 2005: Waterstones: "Libraries will be closed in 15 Years" at Rare Book News.

Listening to the In the trenches June 3 podcast this morning, Kevin Devin mentions that the SCALE 3X: Southern California Linux Expo 2005 presentations are being made available as podcasts: ogg or mp3s, IOW, with either pdfs or one ppt file.

The National Personnel Records Center in St Louis is a repository of civilian and military personnel records. This Saturday, June 11

nearly 1.2 million official military personnel files of former US Navy and Marine Corps enlisted personnel who served between 1885 and 1939 will be open to the public. This first opening also includes 150 "persons of exceptional prominence", including former Presidents, famous military leaders, celebrities, entertainers and professional athletes who served in the military and have been deceased for at least 10 years.

Some of the prominent individuals include Charles Lindbergh, President John F. Kennedy, General George S. Patton, Steve McQueen, Clark Gable, and Jackie Robinson.

Lindbergh, Patton, Gable and Robinson were all Army, so I don't know why the NPRC press release limits the records mentioned to the Navy and Marine Corps. All of these celebrities were officers as well, and that makes the wording 'official military personnel files of ... enlisted personnel' odd. Lindbergh resigned his commission in 1939. Ike restored it and made him an Air Force Reserve brigadier general. At first, the Army denied Robinson's application for Officer's Candidate School, but when then-Army Sgt Joe Louis weighed in, Robinson entered the school and got his commission. Gable enlised in the Army Air Corps and also went to OCS, eventually making major on discharge.

Hat tip to Professional Reading Shelf - Military Personnel Records at the ResourceShelf.

Telephone landlines cost money, and with its mountains and government-caused poverty, North Korea began very limited mobile service after August, 2002. News of the train wreck and massive explosion at Ryongchon apparently first leaked out from the North via cellphones. There were maybe 30,000 cellphone subscribers at the time of the explosion. (Source: Why North Korea Is Prohibiting Mobile Phones, at Seoul's Dong-a Ilbo.) The Dong-a Ilbo article discusses frequency-blocking equipment being installed in areas bordering China.

Now the DPRK is confiscating cellphones and cutting international landlines.

Starting in April, the sources said Pyongyang blocked 90 percent of its international phone lines to hinder leaks of information to the outside world. Before April, the North operated 970 international phone lines, but the sources said a direct order came from the North's leader, Kim Jong-il, to cut the lines. The North Korean Foreign Ministry is now said to operate with just two lines, while the North's military operates another two and the Ministry of Foreign Trade possesses one.

In another measure, the sources said Pyongyang has also impounded 20,000 cell phones [out of 30,000] since May of last year [2004] after the North Korean authorities came to believe cell phone calls leaked news of a massive explosion at the rail station in the town of Ryongchon. North Korean citizens who paid [1,200$] as a deposit on the cell phones are said to have been angered because the deposits are not being returned.

Source: North is said to cut back phone use at Seoul's JoonAng Daily.

The JoonAng Daily article and the discussion at You're all grounded and So Much for Sunshine make it seems as if this is a new development, tied perhaps to recent rathceting up of pressure on the North, but the JoonAng Daily and Dong-a Ilbo articles, plus the brief mention in a March 10, 2005, article, of 'public executions of human traffickers and cellphone owners in the Sino-Korean border town of Hoeryeong, North Hamgyeong Province' (Crackdowns, Public Executions on Sino-Korean Border at Seoul's Chosun Ilbo, emphasis supplied), show that Kim's crackdown on cellphones has been going on for a while.

NanoBlogger 3.2 is out. Now, where did I put my backup?

The recommended upgrade steps rebuild the entire blog, which sends out all the old articles as 'new articles' in the feeds, IIRC, and is not a step I want to take if there's an alternative.

The New York Times article (Pressure on North Korea: U.S. Stealth Jets Sent to South) from May 30, and today's Reuters article ((U.S. stealth fighters arrive in South Korea keep calling the F-117A Nighthawks fighters, but when have they engaged in air-to-air combat?

Globalsecurity.org correctly identifies the aircraft as

a single-seat attack and defense suppression aircraft for the Air Force. The F-117 is designed to penetrate dense threat environments as well as attack high value targets with pinpoint accuracy.

Source: F-117A Nighthawk.

The Times' article says 'The deployment last week of 15 stealth fighters ...' and Reuters says 'Some of the 15 radar-evading stealth fighters ...' They are bombers which because of their radar-evading design can also be used for reconnaissance. Read how they've been used:

The F-117A first saw action in December 1989 during Operation Just Cause in Panama. On 20 December 1989 pilots of the two F-117As flew to Rio Hato, Panama, to drop one 2,000-pound bomb each ...

The stealth fighter attacked the most heavily fortified targets during Desert Storm (January-February 1991), and it was the only coalition jet allowed to strike targets inside Baghdad's city limits. The F-117A, which normally packs a payload of two 2,000-pound GBU-27 laser-guided bombs ...

Although only 36 stealth fighters were deployed in Desert Storm and accounted for 2.5 percent of the total force of 1,900 fighters and bombers, they flew more than a third of the bombing runs on the first day of the war. In all during Desert Storm, the stealth fighter conducted more than 1,250 sorties, dropped more than 2,000 tons of bombs ...

F-117 Nighthawks from the 8th Expeditionary Fighter Squadron at Holloman Air Force Base NM participated in air strikes against targets in the Balkans during NATO operations. ... F-117s flew combat missions against the most highly defended, high value targets throughout the 78-day air campaign, including first-night attacks.

F-117A Nighthawk.

Nighthawks flew during Operation Iraqi Freedom, as bombers; Hussein's 'air force' stayed on the ground. It can carry Sidewinder air-to-air missiles, but the emphasis is on 'can', particularly in the context of the deplyment to South Korea. We want the ability to examine what the North is doing and the ability to strike their installations.

A few Sundays a month, I head down to Goldsboro for church, and lately, I've been stopping at Jan's Strawberries (also calling themselves the Corner Market), on U.S. 70 eastbound at the intersection with Steven's Chapel Road, a few miles east of I-95 and about midway between Smithfield and Princeton. They've got real tasty, picked that day strawberries. You can't compare what you get in the supermarkets with fresh picked fruit. The fellow behind the counter says they're getting a second crop in a week or two, the first time in twelve years they've had a second crop. He didn't know why this year's special.

Apropos Firefox crashing: SessionSaver restores windows and tabs '-exactly- as you left it, every startup, every time'. This has worked flawlessly on my desktop, after a crash and after a 'Quit' with open multiple tabs and multiple windows. Essential for me.

Well, this is what happens when I don't do `apt-get update && apt-get upgrade` for a few days.

I have the backports repositories in my /etc/apt/sources.list, and when I just a few minutes ago tried to run apt-get with the update and upgrade commands, I got a `401 Authorization Required` error. The main server is off-limits now, and a 'You MUST use a mirror!' message is on the backports main page now. Easily fixed: commenting out the backports lines in /etc/apt/sources.list and substituting `acm.cs.umn.edu/ubp` for `backports.ubuntuforums.org/backports`. /etc/apt/sources.list now has:

deb http://acm.cs.umn.edu/ubp hoary-backports main universe multiverse restricted
#deb http://backports.ubuntuforums.org/backports hoary-backports main universe multiverse restricted

and

deb http://acm.cs.umn.edu/ubp hoary-extras main universe multiverse restricted
#deb http://backports.ubuntuforums.org/backports hoary-extras main universe multiverse restricted

The mirrors list on the backports main page doesn't give the physical location of any mirror except the one in Catalonia, and checking planetmirror.com and mirrormax.com, it looks as if those two are in Australia, which leaves the University of Minnesota as the most considerate selection.

I had already installed apt-listbugs package, and because I'm going to be careful about what I upgrade, I'll pass on those with open bugs (those not marked is apt-listbugs' output).

So now I'm up to date.

And, no, I haven't started working on getting my hp's Broadcom wireless driver installed.

Krispy Kreme Doughnuts is giving away a free doughnut ('at particpating U.S. stores') today. Krispy Kreme Celebrates Doughnut Day (press release). snopes says it's true. Krispy Kreme store locator.