Wow this is way harder than it should be…

1. Make a new circle called “Home Feed” or whatever
2. Pick other circles and drag everyone in that you want on your home feed – you can use the dropdown arrow to “Select all”
3. View the “Home Feed” circle, then slide the “Volume Slider” in the upper right all the way to the right to see all posts
4. View each of your other circles, one at a time, and slide the Volume Slider all the way off

That was confusing and annoying – why not make the home page feed directly configurable? But glad to have it done – my friends are more interesting than anyone I’m “following”, bleh… Now I just have to remember to add new friends to the Home Feed.

Having all your source code closed is really annoying and is automatically solved with this Visual Studio package addon.

Also, this is my first test of blog posts getting autoposted to Google Plus. Prepare for more geekdom and nerdiness, my g+ friends.

And keeping with the theme of including a graphic in my posts, let’s see how this gets cross-posted…

The stupid Windoze gaming sirens had me out of linux for a bit on my desktop. Back with a vengeance, and a huge emerge world. Hours of fun! The nice thing is I’ve gotten into gentoo enough that I no longer feel the need to document every massive emerge. For the most part, just keep using these strategies until it works itself out – while keeping your brain engaged of course:

• emerge -DavuN @world
• emerge -DavuN –with-bdeps=y @world
• emerge -DavuN @world –autounmask-write
• emerge –resume –skipfirst
• emerge –unmerge (i unmerge the SHIT out of all conflicting non-world packages! keep it clean! :O)
• emerge -1v (anything that’s missing!)
• gcc-config (as early as possible)
• eselect (boost|java-vm|php|python|etc….)
• use eix and equery to answer any package questions
• get the latest gentoo-sources and configure that kernel!
• don’t forget to emerge nvidia-drivers or any other kernel-specific package
• google for help – gentoo support information is AMAZING
• dispatch-config
• emerge -av –depclean
• revdep-rebuild
• lafilefixer –justfixit
• python-updater
• perl-cleaner –all
• targeted rebuild, for those nasty upgrades: revdep-rebuild –library libpng14.so.14
• find broken autotools stuff: find /usr/ -name ‘*.la’ -exec grep png14 -c {} +|grep \:1
• rinse and repeat!

I had a few new wrinkles…

• considered emerging gnome-base/gnome (new) to get GNOME 3 but it is soft-masked and who knows how much trouble would follow
• stupid libpng upgrades always cause everyone all kinds of headaches – see this awesome post

revdep-rebuild --library '/usr/lib64/libpng14.so.14' -- --keep-going
emerge -1av --keep-going $(find /usr \( -name "*.la" -o -name "*.pc" -o -name "*-config" -o -name "*.pm" \) -exec grep -H png14 {} \; | cut -d : -f 1 | xargs qfile -CSq | sort | uniq)

• removed nsplugin USE flag from picasa and acroread since it thought that firefox (not firefox-bin) was a requirement, stooopid things
• Qt needed a bump, which should happen all at once, which is impossible 🙂
• of course i had to add a FEW more bells and whistles!
• emerge -DavuN xfce4-meta xfce4-verve-plugin xfce4-mixer xfce4-taskmanager xfwm4-themes thunar thunar-volman tumbler thunar-archive-plugin google-chrome
• etc

I turned on the “Expand Printers” option on the XP taskbar settings, and from that point forward, any time I accessed the Start button via Ctrl-ESC, it has kept me waiting for 5-10 seconds. Watching the CPU usage with task manager didn’t give me any useful information, it was only through trial and error, and lots of false blame (eg on a SQL Server shortcut), that I finally found this problem. Disabling the setting eliminated the CPU pegging.

For a little background… On XP, I keep my taskbar hidden unless I want to see it. I’ve ranted about this before, it’s a pretty fundamental concept that it should be ME who decides how my computer communicates with me. For Microsoft to open up the taskbar in Windows 7 so that any app can force itself to be recognized, flashing until user interaction is made, is absolute madness, akin to providing a browser with no popup control. As a control zealot, this drives me mad.

I realize this is a small problem on an old OS. I really don’t care about it except that at work I’m forced to use this shitty stuff. I shouldn’t really waste blog space on this stuff… but it makes me feel better. And that’s the only reason this blog exists anyway. So there. 🙂

I’ve been having trouble with my server running out of file handles recently (ouch). Cyrus and Apache and rtorrent all do their fair share of abuse of my server, lsof typically reports 20k open files and sockets. rtorrent kept crapping out with “can’t resolve host” and “can’t save torrent file” errors, related to running out of file handles. Very hard to determine why this was happening. Eventually google turned up the answer on gentoo forums – re-emerge curl with these USE flags in [/etc/portage/package.use]:

net-misc/curl ares -threads

All is full of light.