return void;

I finally bought a new pair of running shoes last weekend. I have been using the Brooks Adrenaline GTS for a while; I’ve gone through 3 pairs now (on the 4th).

I went to my local Run On! and pestered the saleswomen to fit me for various shoes like I do every year. That is, once a year, I go to Run On! and try on a bunch of shoes to see if any of them suddenly fit and feel better than my last pair. Every time so far, I’ve kept with the Adrenaline because they fit like a glove and I have yet to experience any pain. Granted, I keep the milage at or under 30 a week right now and I stick with a reasonable pace, but I put them through the ringer. The last pair I just switched from had turned a dingy brown and have been worn through about 700 miles or so (had them since last August). Around January, I had to start using my expensive inserts to prevent injury. I always get lectured about how I should replace them every 400 miles, but like the dentist telling me to floss, I usually blow it off.

Well, I have a confession to make. Every time I buy a new pair of shoes, I spend a while sitting in front of the TV smelling them. The smell of new shoes is exhilarating, intoxicating even. I’m not sure what it is about the smell, but brand new shoes smell so good to me. Perhaps it’s my brain realizing the smell as a vision of all of the miles and meditation ahead of me. I feel like Cinderella would if she bought a pair of glass running shoes instead of slippers and found that the prince was a runner as well. I bet he couldn’t get 700 miles out of glass running shoes though.

The best part of new shoes: the joy of feeling like Superman again for a few weeks while they wear in.

For the longest time, I’ve put up with grief with the bash history when using multiple terminals. It never seemed to store the history to ~/.bash_history properly. I never invested the time until this morning when I had to find a command in my history for the 100th time only to find that it wasn’t there.

After searching around Google for a while, I eventually stumbled on this gem. Moral of the story: unset HISTSIZE for unlimited history, set histappend to always append the history and not overwrite it, and modify your PROMPT_COMMAND to flush each command to the history file.

Now, in following the spirit of showing the latest in the history, here’s mine:

$ history|awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}'|sort -rn|head
82 ls
81 cd
40 eix
30 vi
28 svn
22 ps
21 dmesg
14 killall
12 su
10 gphoto2

Bear in mind, this only had the default 500 lines before today, so the history is only the most recent commands. I’ll do an update some months from now when my history file grows to an enormous size.

So after using Gentoo for some 5 years now, I’ve learned there are many ways to manage the cruft on my system. I usually use eix and sift through what it shows as installed. When I find something that I don’t think is being used anymore, I check it with equery depends. If everything looked fine, I removed the package and checked the system by using revdep-rebuild.

There is an option (-i IIRC) that will show all installed multi-slotted packages. That is, if you have 6 versions of the kernel installed, it will show you them. This is a pain in the ass if you manage 1 system for 4 years as I have. I have not done in install in a very long time, but instead update my system on a near monthly basis using Gentoo’s Portage system. The downside is it has the tendancy to leave old unused crap on your system.

Then I discovered a tool that was handy at detecting old packages, even old slotted/unused packages, and removed them. Udept is a rather satisfying tool to stumble-upon. It is very adept at identifying unused junk and cleaning your system of it. It has options to purge the system, perform a recursive dependency check, prune your world file, and much more. While I’m not entirely sure I want to maintain a slim world file, the rest of the tool’s capabilities are inferior to none. Granted, it collects much of the capability that is already present with the gentoolkit, but those tools are loosely banded. Udept neatly ties all of that up into one sweet package that can help you keep the crap off your riced-out desktop or server. Best of all, it’s in portage.

After running it for the first time, it found about 3 dozen packages that I agreed needed to be removed. Give it a whirl, and enjoy never having to install your OS again.