Update: It’s warming up!

Every day should start like this.

There was a freezing rain alert last night, quite the chaos.

Things were pretty nuts on the roads, cars sliding around on the ice everywhere. Despite the alert we decided to head downtown to check out some crazy xmas light action. On the way back we struggled to get over one overpass, the incline and a big patch of ice meant we had 0 traction – but we got up eventually.

A lot of people weren’t so lucky, with nearly 170 prangs overnight and this morning.

We saw a 4WD which had hit the guard rail hard, it might even have rolled given the huge dent in the roof – although the occupants seemed ok. There were numerous other minor bingles, four cars parked perpendicular to the traffic just near the hotel, and Ambulances flying ’round all night. Nuts nuts nuts.

I noticed Chris’ post WRT the relative slowness of gnome-terminal vs xterm.

I’m waiting just now to take Kate’s remaining belongings to her brothers’, so while I’ve got a few minutes I thought I’d investigate myself.

Chris was winging about make clean, which is obviously going to be the worst case. Although that’s interesting, I thought I’d look at an actual compile, so I benchmarked a kernel compile.

~src/kernel/2.6.9-uml$ time make ARCH=um V=1

Obviously konsole on another desktop is sort of cheating. The konsoles, gnome-terminal and aterm are all running transparent. That is with the desktop image showing through but slightly faded towards white. xterm is just using a plain white background. konsole and gnome-terminal are also using anti-aliased fonts, whereas aterm and xterm aren’t.

Chris, being one of the fvwm crowd ;), likes the speed of xterm, and fair enough. Personally I like to see my pretty desktop backgrounds, and anti-aliased fonts I can’t live without – so I’ll stick with konsole.

It’s good to know though that if I’m running some compile that generates lots of output for no good reason, I should plonk the window on another desktop. I actually do that usually anyway, to stop it annoying me. I use this little script to let me know when a long compile or the like has finished.

#!/bin/bash

eval $@
if [[ $? -eq 0 ]]; then
    kdialog --msgbox "Command '$@' in $(pwd) completed." 2> /dev/null
else
    kdialog --error "Command '$@' in $(pwd) failed!" 2> /dev/null
    exit 1
fi
exit 0

And now I’m off to deliver some boxes. One step closer to a sane house!