Point Zero

Okay, so here we go. Oh, first let’s make a pre-meeting assessment,

1. Smart look, ah.., uncheck
2. Formal dressing, um, check? Probably not
3. Papers, check
4. Pens, check, oh wait.. I don’t have those
5. Sanity, check
6. Willpower, not much, check
7. Precog ability, check, do I have one? Duh..
8. Fuel, check
9. Focus, check
10. Anything left unsaid? Check, probably.

It’s starting! Whoosh.. I tell myself, “oh, come on, what could possibly go wrong? We’re civilized, and we’re cool.’

+15 Minutes

Okay, so far so good. All the introductions and basic stuff are done for. The level of seriousness escalates a bit. Being an observer as I am, I can’t help to make a personality profile, I always make this virtual table in my mind with blinking cells made of colorful Jell-O’s which indicates personal psychological  and mental states, as I observe and feel. Each group of cells is assigned a photo of a specific person, and I arrange the groups in a large circle. Every interaction is visualized by colored lines which indicates the ‘feel’ of the dialogue between two parties. When A says something to B and B feels good about what A says (as I observe), the line is green and glowing happily! A counter argument is yellow and an attack is red. There’s also blue which is personal talks. It’s real-time, and it’s fun, and I’m happy to mentally play with something while physically doing nothing at times like this. At least I can keep my brain busy.

+30 Minutes

Uh, okay. We’re talking about the things we’ve been talking for the past.. 30 minutes. Redundancy is key to complete comprehensiveness, it seems. That’s good, I have yet another reason to replay a level of a game where I don’t feel I’ve played it thoroughly. My spouse (when I have any), will surely understand that if not joining me playing the game in the process. Wait, why don’t I feel thirsty? I should have been thirsty. O yea, I forgot. I don’t speak. For real. Meh. Let’s test my precog ability. Hmm, let’s see.. <thinks> .. <watches> .. Wow it happens! The conversation goes exactly as I have foreseen! Can I inject a thought? <force> .. <watches> .. Holy shrimp!

+60 Minutes

Ha, now I know what it feels like to be The One. Like Neo, The One. I can finally see them, the truth of what The Matrix is. Oh, everything is transformed into glowing mumbo jumbo characters, floating and scrolling sideways in very repetitive and predictably unpredictable ways. Is it hex? I think so. It is hex. I haven’t seen so many hex’s since, well since tonight actually when I reshack-ed some dlls. I seem to remember something, replacing some vague bytes of some vague dll just to remove the windows dotted-focus indicator! Do I really need a focused item be dotted all around it? Who decided that it *improves* user accessibility? It hurts me eyes, MY FOCUSED STUFF IS IN DIFFERENT COLOR! I don’t need it to be border: 1px dotted #333; like you showed me. Okay, reshack > replacer, there you go. Bye, focus rectangle. I’m hurt, am I supposed to be hurt? I shouldn’t be hurt. Is it hurt anyway? If it is, it’s against Asimov’s First Law of ‘Three Laws of Robotics’.

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

I’m a human being. I’ll sue you, robots. Now, what’s your model and production batch? <Pull ‘Universal Robotic Scanner’, scans the other parties> .. <beep beep beep beep beep> .. No that can’t be, one more time.. <beep beep beep beep beep> .. No! All youse isn’t robots! Youse all is The Crystal Skull from the latest Indiana Jones movie! The superb magnetically magnetic folks with extremely extreme psychic ability. No wonder my circuitry is.. What? MY CIRCUITRY? Am I.. <scan self with ‘Universal Robotics Scanner’> .. <ding> Fried shrimp! I’m the robot! What’s my manufacture date again? 16th of February? And I thought it was my country’s Independence Day, it’s not? Wait.. It can’t be.. My existence is no existence? Impossible, nothingness can’t be no more than a nothingness unless it’s not a nothingness in the first place. Nothingness, I seem to remember that a new particle is ‘created’ at a rate of one particle per kilometer cubic per year. Is that even scientifically correct? It couldn’t be more wrong than Rapidshare placing a 15 minutes gap after each download. It’s wrong. It’s terribly wrong. Even though I can circumvent that, it’s still wrong! Like, totally! Wrong! Anyway, youse aliens, so you over-psychic me and made me think what you want me to think what I want you to do in the last hour? It can’t be.. Now I feel like this Sauron guy, he is so incredibly powerful that his weakness is himself, he splits himself into two, and later he allows half of him to be destroyed by one Gollum which is under the influence of him, which results in his destruction. Don’t he survive with just half a soul? Ever heard of Horcrux, Sauron? Lame. Anyway, Arwen is so phriggin’ beautiful, is she an Elf? She is? Well, that explains a lot.

+120 Minutes

Fsck! My ext3 data partition is probably corrupted in some inodes. I need to umount /dev/sda2 and repair it offline. Okay, umount it is. <type type type damn I love Terminus>. That’s it. My data partition is offline, I’m going into ghost mode with limited personality and intelligence. Just enough to get me back home. Sigh.

Okay, no offense there. Anyway, this tutorial is very simple, it just needs 3 steps to achieve the final result you see above. Okay, now let’s begin shall we? Let’s assume you have opened an empty document (canvas) in Photoshop, I consider this step 0, it doesn’t count. I prefer 1024×768 pixel size, transparent background. No, you can’t see what’s behind your screen.

Step 1

I also assume you have selected a color as the main gradients, I use the ‘free’ Tango Color Palette, here or here. Set one color as the default foreground color. Next, go to “Filter > Render > Clouds”. Okay.

Step 2

Go to “Filter > Pixelate > Mosaic”, and use the settings as pictured. That’s my settings, anyway, you are free to use whatever you want but I found that 50px works best since most of the time I’ll downsize the canvas anyway.

Step 3

Go to “Filter > Blur > Motion Blur”, and again, use the settings as pictured. You may tweak the values later on. Voilà!

Next thing to do would be to apply this thingy in your projects. Use your imagination, and may the Force guide you. One more, it’ll be easier for you if you make a custom actions with the above steps. Therefore, you can make one thingy rapidly with less clicks.

Installing software, even the ones that I need, will put more files, more registry entries, and maybe new startup entries as well. In time, this will slow down the PC. So, in order to prevent that, I decided to make portable almost all my needed applications. Almost, because there are some that cannot be made portable (Virtualization Suite), or some that must be installed in order to work properly (Antiviruses). Drivers are excluded, can’t do much without them installed, eh?

By using portable apps, I can avoid installing (thus keeping my system clean), and the best part is, I can bring my applications and use them anywhere! It retains my settings and preferences so I can continue working in environment I am familiar with, no matter where. Plus, it’s cool. Believe me.

Some links to visit:

• http://portableapps.com/ (my main source of.. portable applications :) a very nice must visit site)
• http://www.portablefreeware.com/ (another source, I don’t visit here often, but it’s still a good site for comparing/researching for portable applications)
• http://www.vmware.com/products/thinapp/ (a virtualization program, it can “pack” your application into single executable file. You can make your own portable applications easily with this. NOT freeware, and VERY expensive.)

Hm, I think that’s all for now.

So, enjoy! And if you have any suggestions, opinions, or whatever, you are pleased to write them on the comments form.

By the way, it’s only been tested on Firefox 3 and Google Chrome Beta. The theme looks good on both, and it’s supposedly also looks good on Opera, Safari, and Camino. It also *should* render properly in Internet Explorer 6, and if it’s not, it’s not a big deal since in this modern world, who on earth still uses a prehistoric web browser anyway?

Watch this space, I will update it as soon as new versions are out.

Current Version: 0.4

Update: Template is temporarily switched back to SMPL05, for no other reason but because I can. No, seriously, SMPL06 is in active development, version 0.5 will be out soon.

Update: Lack of interest and time has made me suspending the development of this theme. Sigh. Life is so complicated nowadays.

The index is created by the magic of Bash script from fukawi2. I merely improve the styling and made some changes here and there.

You can see the library here.

Emma Shapplin is a soprano vocalist, and she sings mainly blends of classical and contemporary music, crossovers in tradition of Sarah Brightman. I listened to Emma’s song for the first time sometime around ‘00, the song was “Spente le Stelle” of album “Carmine Meo”. It was featured on the “inspirational Moments” album, a VA contains mainly New Age music.

Official Site | Wikipedia | last.fm

Rating: 8

Hayley Westenra

Another soprano vocalist, and again, in the style of Sarah Brightman.  This time, celtic, folk, and rock elements are incorporated. The atmosphere of the albums are a bit mixed, but sounds good overall. It seems like a mashup of some of Sarah Brightman, some of Enya, some of Adiemus, and some of something else. The result, however, is surprisingly good.

Official Site | Wikipedia | last.fm

Rating: 9

Krypteria

A German power metal band, with lead female vocalist from Korea. “Wait, a German metal band with oriental babe vocalist?” Um, yeah, you read that right. Don’t let the look fools you, though, the music is surprisingly good. The music sounds more like symphonic power metal with intensive uses of choir, instrumental percussions, and orchestra.

Official Site | Wikipedia | last.fm

Rating: 9

Lacuna Coil

A gothic metal band from Italy. The death grunt is softened, toned down from brutally incomprehensible “grunts” or “shrieks” of some conventional black/doom/gothic/whatever metal style, to just heavy vocal, Metallica style. I dig the female vocal, especially in song “Heaven’s A Lie”, it’s very cool.

Official Site | Wikipedia | last.fm

Rating: 7

Leaves’ Eyes

This band claims to be folk-rock band, although it sounds much like gothic metal and symphonic power metal. It’s hard to define the style of this band, since all elements all are there. There’s traditional folk instruments, death grunts of gothic metal style, and majestic opera atmosphere of symphonic power metal. These combinations sound a bit weird at times, and the entire albums sound like disorganized songs that have no specific style. It’s challenging, really, but after a while you get to grip the “feel” of the albums and enjoy them.

Official Site | Wikipedia | last.fm

Rating: 7

Disclaimer. This guide is written for people who like to tinker with their system, like to get their feet wet, and don’t cry when something bad happens. We will be working entirely on CLI so if you’re not comfortable with it, go get some coffee and watch movies instead. This guide contains tips and tricks from various places, notably the Arch Wiki and Forum, with some of them are the result of my own tweaking. These tweaks are applied on my system and it never had any craches or freezes or any other problems. It just works. Your mileage may vary. One strict rule of engagement: Always make a backup of everything you edit!

Use a faster filesystem

Various filesystems exist and what you’ll be using is entirely up to you. Every FS has goods and bads, but for this guide we’ll be using the fastest FS while maintaining high reliability and low CPU usage. My choice is JFS. It’s reasonably fast, if not the fastest at some points, it’s journaled, stable, reliable, and has very low CPU utilizations. Other options are ReiserFS (quite stable, faster), and Reiser4 (unstable, very fast). Changing filesystem type may require you to first erase the partition. If this isn’t viable, you can use whatever you already have right now. Or, do the tar routine. Or, use clonezilla. Whatever.

Trim your initrd

Go edit /etc/mkinitcpio.conf and trim it to your needs. Make it as compact as possible. This config will be used to generate an initrd, which will be loaded by the boot loader, sets your hardware (loading modules, etc) and mounting the filesystem. After that, it gives the control to the kernel. Delete hooks that you don’t plan on using, or don’t need to be loaded at this stage of booting process. Hardware configs will be done later after the kernel loads instead. In my case, my mkinitcpio.conf looks like this:

MODULES=""
BINARIES=""
FILES=""
HOOKS="autodetect base udev sata filesystems"

That will generate a very small initrd which is enough to mount the root filesystem and loads the kernel.

Trim your rc.conf

Two of the main delay when booting is loading daemons and modules. The other would be loading udev, which we will see later on. If you have more fancy hardwares, the kernel will load more modules to activate them. The wisest step would be disable the ones you don’t need via BIOS. The second wisest step would be to blacklist the modules. In short, just load modules and daemons you need. As for the daemons, replace some of them with more lightweight ones, FAM with Gamin, for example. My /etc/rc.conf looks like this (some lines omitted):

...
MOD_AUTOLOAD="yes"
MODULES=(powernow-k8 fglrx)
DAEMONS=(preload hal @cpufreq @network)
...

Trim your rc.sysinit

The file /etc/rc.sysinit is very important, it configures core system functions such as mounting local filesystems, activating swap device, setting udev, and so on. Sometimes, you don’t need some of the functions available in rc.sysinit, such as LVM and encrypted filesystem (at least, I don’t). What you can do is removing the “if” statement that calls the function you don’t need. Or better, just comment it out (use “#” in front of the if…fi statement). One example, I don’t use RAID, so why should the system bother to check if I use RAID? Therefore I comment the if statement that contains it.

# If necessary, find md devices and manually assemble RAID arrays
#if [ -f /etc/mdadm.conf -a "$(/bin/grep ^ARRAY /etc/mdadm.conf 2>/dev/null)" ]; then
#    # udev won’t create these md nodes, so we do it ourselves
#    for dev in $(/bin/grep ^ARRAY /etc/mdadm.conf | /bin/awk ‘{print $2}’); do
#        path=$(echo $dev | /bin/sed ’s|/[^/]*$||’)
#        node=$(echo $dev | /bin/sed “s|^$path/||”)
#        minor=$(echo $node | /bin/sed ’s|^[^0-9]*||’)
#        [ ! -e $path/$node ] && /bin/mknod $path/$node b 9 $minor
#    done
#    status “Activating RAID arrays” /sbin/mdadm –assemble –scan
#fi

Udev tweaks

Tweak1. We can speedup udev loading time, by starting it earlier in the boot process. If we look at /etc/rc.sysinit we can see this fragment around line 81:

...
stat_busy "Starting UDev Daemon"
/sbin/udevd --daemon
...

and this fragment around line 125:

...
stat_busy "Loading UDev uevents"
...
/sbin/udevadm trigger
/sbin/udevadm settle
...

Let’s move the udev daemon trigger right after the daemon itself is loaded. This will give it some time to finish what it’s doing before getting settled. Give it an ampersand so it loads in the background. The finished fragment would look like this:

...
stat_busy "Starting UDev Daemon"
/sbin/udevd --daemon
/sbin/udevadm trigger &
...
stat_busy "Loading UDev uevents"
...
/sbin/udevadm settle &

This is like playing catch-up, this is a little bit dangerous since there’s a possibility that a module which is needed not already loaded when a daemon requests access to the particular hardware. This might be the network interface or sound card. But, I haven’t had any problem with this tweak, and I have booted more than 200 times without problem.

Tweak 2. Udev, by default, uses it own program to load modules, which is /lib/udev/load_modules.sh. We can improve the modules loading speed of udev by using modprobe instead. Make a copy of load_modules.sh, and then replace it with a symlink to /sbin/modprobe

# cd /lib/udev
# mv load_modules.sh load_modules.sh.backup
# ln -s /sbin/modprobe load_modules.sh

There is one drawback, though. You’ll lose the ability to blacklist modules from rc.conf. Now, you must enter the modules you want blacklisted in /etc/modprobe.conf, which looks like this on my system:

blacklist pcspkr
blacklist soundcore
alias net-pf-10 off

Inittab tweak

We can force the system to immediately load the Virtual Console once the init level is reached. This will enable you to immediately use the Console while the modules are still loaded in the background. We just need to replace “wait” with “once”. It’s much better if autologin feature is enabled (via mingetty). If you’re the only user, why bother logging in? My /etc/inittab looks like this

...
rm:2345:once:/etc/rc.multi
...
c1:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty --autologin prasetya vc/1 linux
...

If you see annoying process scrolling after you’re logged in, a simple “quiet” in kernel line will solve this (GRUB).

Optional: Compile a custom kernel

You can compile a kernel that’s suitable for your system, stripping out unneeded stuff and make several device drivers builtin instead modular. This will give you some advantages: Less bloat, and faster booting. Compiling the current kernel is super-easy in Arch Linux. For this, you need ABS (Arch Build System).

# vi /etc/makepkg.conf
# pacman -Syu
# pacman -S abs
# abs
$ cp -R /var/abs/core/kernel26 ~
$ cd ~/kernel26
$ vi config
$ vi PKGBUILD
$ makepkg -i

Step 1 means, edit file /etc/makepkg.conf and add custom CFLAGS according to your CPU type. The list is here. This is to enable CPU specific code optimizations.

Step 8 above means, find the md5sum of file config, and then replace the previous md5sum for file “config” in the file PKGBUILD with the new one. Or, just comment out the md5sums.

Compiling a custom kernel only give me 1 to 2 seconds improvement. It might not quite worth the time wasted on it (about 1+ hour of configuration + compilation), but yeah, I want that extra seconds. And so I give in to the temptation of the dark side :). If you decide to upgrade the kernel you’ll lose that optimizations, unless you recompile it with the new code. Given its high maintenance cost it’s only advisable for at least intermediate users (and curious ones). But, if just for kicks, why not? You’ll also learn a thing or two, by the way.

Optional: Recompile the entire system

There’s a script in AUR (Arch User Repository) that enables you to mass-recompile every installed package on your system from source using ABS. This, in logic, will give a more optimized binary for your computer, which in turn will make everything faster. I personally haven’t tried it yet. It’s similar to FreeBSD’s make buildworld/buildkernel command. The script name is pacbuilder, here.

Arch Linux is not originally designed to be mass-recompiled by the user, so the advantages of this script still needs to be proven. I personally wouldn’t want to use this (for now), I’ve had enough of similar process on FreeBSD.

Anyway, you’re bound to recompile each new packages once they hit repo if you use this method. I think it’s cumbersome, if you decided to recompile every new package that is. Anyway, it’s Arch. It’s already very fast. Why bother? But then, it’s up to you.

Other steps

Obviously, you can always improve the overall performance of your system by *upgrading* your system. This solution is the “easiest” and most feasible if you don’t like tweaking and have some $$$ to spend. Go find an extreme series motherboard, put two Quad Core Intel CPUs, buy several SATAII 10K RPM harddisks (or ultra expensive ultra fast SSDs) and put them in raid0+1 config, and buy the fastest, lowest latency memory cards. That’ll cost a fortune, but you’ll be like driving a Lamborghini Reventon (performance wise). Or, just stick to the tweaks :).

Conclusion

Why wait for some more seconds while your PC can do it in less? Tweak and refine your system. It’s one part (of many) of computing on Linux that’s very fun in practice, and gives you more knowledge while doing it.

Regarding the post title, it refers to the clouds in the sky that, during the flight, you sliced through and be above it. That typical chunk of condensed air sometimes gives me the creeps, and various other emotions on other places. I don’t know, at some places, if I look to the sky I can feel this “stir” up my spine or something I can’t describe. Sometimes it’s more like happiness, sometimes sadness, and once I feel anger or that kind of emotion.That particular “sensation” also applies to mists. Especially, thick mists.

When I was in high school, the dorm was located between two rivers, and was very misty at times. The mosque and classrooms are located on higher ground and the only access to them is by a ridiculously long stair, and when the area is covered in thick mist, I felt, a simple walking through the staircases like that, to be almost divine. And I once climbed a mountain for a week, back and forth, to the top, just for two purposes, to bathe in thick mist, and see the clouds from above.

There’s something in the clouds. And mists too.

That’s where this simple article comes. It’s by no means a super cool technique, just a simple routines I perform in case of what I describe above happens. I, for one, have experienced it so many times it’s quite frustrating. The idea is to “snapshot” your installation at specific times. I use Arch Linux, and I guess it’ll work for basically anything except Windows and OS X. Why bother? Who uses them, anyway? Okay back to the topic. For this to work, you only need patience. Everything else is already built in.

How to backup

The simplest thing in backing up your system is by tarball-ing it! My favorite combination, tar + bzip2. Fast, no nonsense, just get the job done. Tarball your root partition, keep the permissions intact, and there you have it! A snapshot.

cd /
su
tar cvpjf arch.190508.tar.bz2 --exclude=/arch.190508.tar.bz2 --exclude=/{proc,sys,home,lost+found} \\
--exclude=/mnt/{temp,docs} --exclude=/var/cache/pacman/pkg --exclude=/vmc /

I have separate partitions for home, pacman’s pkg, and vmc. The temp and docs are separate harddisk. It should be pretty self explanatory, the above command will tarball your system while excluding some directories. The omitted dirs must be recreated again at restoration process. Now put this tarball somewhere safe.

How to restore

1. Boot using Arch’s install CD.
2. Create 2 dirs under /mnt, src and dst
3. Mount your source partition which contains the tarball created above, to src
4. Mount your target partition to restore the tarball to dst
5. You can rm -rf the target partition, or use cfdisk before mounting, or whatever means you like, just clean the destination part
6. Suppose your tarball is located at /mnt/src/arch.190508.tar.bz2, then run this command

7. tar xvjf /mnt/src/arch.190508.tar.bz2 -C /mnt/dst

8. Reboot using Arch’s install CD, chroot to the restored partition, reinstall grub
9. Okay now you have restored your Arch system as it was when you made the tarball. Don’t forget to recreate the omitted directories you specified when creating the backup.

Some tips

You can actually use this method to clone your Arch install to different partitions, even computers. Mass cloning is also possible. In that case, you might edit, to reflect the new setup, fstab and menu.lst, if you use grub. Lilo? I don’t know about lilo, what is it?

Scenario

1. Err, these are what I actually did some 3 days ago.
2. Fresh install of Arch, only base system. Nothing else. Eats 516MB of harddisk space, tarballed to 98MB of bz2 file, arch.base.tar.bz2
3. Install X, Xfce, and various apps needed. Total install size grows to 1.9GB, tarballed to 323MB of bz2 file, arch.xfce.fresh.tar.bz2
4. Do some customizing, tweaking, optimization, whatever, tarballed to arch.xfce.custo.tar.bz2
5. Decided to try KDE instead, Xfce looks kinda lame (’coz of constant exposure), KDE4 looks particularly eye catching. Believe the pacman power can uninstall whatever packages installed, but resort to fresh install instead. Poor guy. Restore the arch.base.tar.bz2 and install KDE4 instead.
6. After some time, come into senses that everything but Xfce sucks, and decided to go back to Xfce, so the system is restored using arch.xfce.custo.tar.bz2
7. Compute happily

Disclaimer

These are just rants, ramblings, and mumblings of an average Linux user. Do not take them too seriously :)

Update

Here is the final script, as of now, looks like:

cd / && tar cvpjf /mnt/docs/Image/Arch/arch.basic.261008.tar.bz2 --exclude=/{home/bluekurv,home/prasetya,root,loop,lost+found,mnt/docs,proc,sys,tmp,var/cache/pacman/pkg,}/* /

The logic: go to /, tar+bz2 and preserve permissions of entire thing under / with the exceptions of the *contents* of these folders (the –exclude list), and put it in /mnt/docs/Image/Arch as file arch.basic.261008.tar.bz2. Phew.

You no longer need to recreate the omitted directories, as the backup process now only omit the *contents* of the directories specified in the exclude list.

So, for a while I’ll be using this theme as a replacement to SMPL05 and while I get back working I’ll restore it. Or else.