LionsPhil's Journal of Occasional Doom

I didn't spend nine years in Evil Computing School to be called 'mister', thank you very much.

2011-06-20T21:45:25Z

So I actually forgot to ever actually post anything about finally ever handing over the books and forms and such and escaping the University for hopefully the penultimate time. That's done. I have a letter from the Student Services Officer informing me that the School Board is reccommending to the Senate of the University that I actually be awarded the doctorate and everything.

Maybe eventually I'll snap out of the death march mentality, stop waiting in dread for the other shoe to drop, and be a useful and productive member of society!

Or not.

Regardless, since I noticed the central University upload of my thesis ignored all the supplementary matter on the CD that the examiners wanted, this has been this evening's productive endeavour:

...along with putting up a better version on the departmental repository that does actually have all the supplementary kipple. (In true computing choose-your-brokenness style, the raw videos don't have any closed captioning because i) I didn't do it at the time ii) didn't have the time to work out how, if at all, you can/would embed them in a way that something might ever use them iii) didn't/wouldn't expect that to work anyway without a week of frustration; while the YouTube videos are at reduced quality. But also don't require you to have VLC installed which is probably their biggest advantage.)

As for the slow demise of LiveJournal and my use of it, if you're bookmark-inclined and still think I'm interesting for some inexplicable reason, you can switch to http://www.lionsphil.co.uk/blog/. For now it'll bounce you back here, but it has the advantage of letting me change that later.

...I'm sure previewing posts didn't used to require JavaScript. And didn't used to spew error traces from crashed styles. And if you can't comment then, uh, sorry, but it seems "comments from friends only" might be broken but is at least keeping the Russian spam out of my inbox.

Mr. Bond, you persist in defying my efforts to provide an amusing death for you.

2011-05-13T13:29:00Z

The PhD continues to linger, and thus so does this journal.

A couple of months late, I finally receive sign-off on corrections. All that leaves is to print, dump that on the binding office, and throw the results at the department office with a small handful of forms, right? Which is most likely to involve spending half a day trying to convince computers to talk to printers and printers to not chew the pages.

Hahaha. No, the printers worked fine. Well, the one that wasn't completely broken, anyway, but I was forewarned about that.

But we've lost our binding ability at the central print office at this University, and while back when I was soft-binding the viva copy they gave the impression that they'd send off copies to the outsourced third-party on student's behalf for a fee, now their entire contribution to the process is to hand out business cards. There's another binding office on campus (which I used to get the soft-binding done), and it does hard binding, in black, with gold lettering, on the right kind of board as far as I can see. Yet they claim the kind of hard binding they do is not suitable.

So, off to drive 900-odd pages carefully to a industrial estate in Romsey, since the Portswood binders are bouncing e-mail and have no website and don't have the ex-University staff and are recommended against by the print office for quality of hard binding and are basically looking like an iffy option at this point. (The print office thought the Romsey firm offered from-campus collection, but they don't; only delivery [by which point it should be in the more robust form of a book]. They can print themselves, but at an exhorbitant 7p/page for monochrome.)

Except there's a form to be bound into the middle of the frontmatter of the thesis, and that also needs to be in the electronic copy, although the guidelines as written are hilariously ambiguous on that. But that's OK; I have printed copies of it I can insert before binding and it'll only mess up the roman numeral numbering if people are scrutinising, and I can insert it into the electronic one with Ghostscript.

Except Ghostscript decides to helpfully "fix" hyperrefs and the PDF ToC when splitting and recombining PDFs, and since I'm splitting the (written) ToC and the pages it points to into separate files, it chews all the links up and spits them out into a complete mess.

There's probably a witty comment to make about hypertext there.

So, planning to rebuild the thesis, hoping it doesn't accidentally cause any stupid reflow changes since the signed-off version. Oh, right, looking at these guidelines, there's supposed to be a redundant copy of the title on the abstract page. None of us have picked up on its absence in the years this document has been drafted.

And there's the part of the LaTeX class file that should be adding it.

And there's the part of the LaTeX class file that clears \@title during \maketitle (and also redefines \title{} to be a no-op). This is a common idiom that I can find no justification for. So I bodge around that by reasserting the title. For the sake of anyone else wrangling this:

\makeatletter % Turn on ability to trample style things (@)
\gdef\@title{Your title goes here} % Restore this after maketitle wipes it
\makeatother % Turn off ability to trample style things

(I have no idea if this has subtly broken everything. I also don't care unless the breakage is sufficiently noticable to prevent award of a PhD. If you care more for your own documents I suggest you try to find out why on Earth \maketitle wipes half the document metadata in the first place.)

Of course, my abstract neatly fit one page, and now doesn't. So tighten the text a little and hope I'm not massively violating the sacred procedure here by making a tweak after the examiners have signed it off. And then I can care about rewriting the form from DOC to TeX and inlining it (which at least means the font and such matches), and since it's all-change may as well set "department" to "school", as I believe that is the current whim.

So this has been a fun little interlude in what should have been a simple procedure. And I'm back to the "printing" step, at least for the frontmatter. Which means trekking back into a lab I'd really hoped I'd seen the last of yet again.

This PhD is taking a lot of killing.

Anti-(anti-nuclear propaganda).

2011-03-22T17:35:11Z

Lewis Page's analysis could do with a wider distribution, given the continual torrent of nonsense spewing out of the "trustworthy" BBC.

Update: Yet more calling out the scaremongerers.

Blocking Windows Media Player's Folder.jpg

2011-02-08T01:50:54Z

If you use Windows Media Player under Windows 7 (say, because all media players are terrible, but this one at least vaguely integrates with the system), you may have noticed it has the worst heuristics for album art ever. The problem (well, a problem, and one which makes a lot of noise on Google) is the idiotic assumption that if any track (picked apparently at random) in a folder contains embedded album art, then this must apply to all tracks in the same folder without any art set.

If you have a folder of random MP3s from creative types on the Internets you can perhaps see how this could go wrong.

There is (as Google results seem to agree) no way to turn off this hateful malfeature. However, you can take the old UNIX-y approach of getting in the way. There are two files in the way (and if you have multiple folders to deal with I pity you since you're going to have to script something to do this for all of them): Folder.jpg and AlbumArtSmall.jpg. First you need to zap them, and since I kind of like keeping hidden system files hidden in Explorer, this is in a Command Prompt:

attrib -h -s Folder.jpg
attrib -h -s AlbumArtSmall.jpg
del Folder.jpg AlbumArtSmall.jpg

Note that if you try to feed attrib multiple files it'll bork at parsing its command line. Now, create some zero-length files to replace them. You can use renamed New Text Documents; I used Cygwin's touch command. Then (separately, else you won't get the Security tab) bring up each one's properties in Explorer, and drill down to the access control list for Everybody (you might need to add one). Leave these windows open, and make the files hidden and system so that they stop cluttering up the place:

attrib +h +s Folder.jpg
attrib +h +s AlbumArtSmall.jpg

(Please note that a plain old DOS-era attrib +r, or simply ticking the "read only" box, is totally ineffectual.) Now in the ACL windows, tick to Deny Write for these files (if you do this before hiding them, attrib will fail). Windows Media Player (and everything else) is now blocked from changing the JPGs to anything but empty files, and will be forced to resort to actually displaying the album art, or lack thereof, in the media it's playing instead, like it should have done in the first place.

So far this is working. I may yet end up editing it with a "nope", since the heuristic, like all the most hateful of its kind, it badly unpredictable.

P.S.: Replies of the form "you should have used media player X instead" will be summarily deleted.

No, this journal's not quite dead yet. Amongst other things, ljgrabber is vaguely Mac-specific due to using Safari cookies, and won't run on the old Perl install on my 10.4 Mac, which remains a 10.4 Mac until I no longer need it to build a corrected thesis. Update: As if to prove a point, within 12 hours it has attracted three foreign-language spam comments.

The End. Almost. Sort of.

2011-01-19T20:22:29Z

I think it's reaching time for ths journal to come to an end. Quite aside from LiveJournal's own decay in terms of everything but advertising, it's now my primary source of spam from the comment system. So I'm probably going to have ljgrabber lock all the doors and maybe one day I'll actually host something under my control that isn't full of JavaScript.

Also I'm now Dr LionsPhil. Or maybe Dr-pending-corrections-being-ticked-off LionsPhil. I'm not entirely sure how that works.

Useful metadata which your MP3 software will ignore.

2010-12-28T03:53:59Z

disctag is something trivial I just threw together (literally—it's past-midnight Perl, so if you care about it getting confused and chewing up your tags make backups first) as a post-step for abcde, a frontend for CDDB/cdparanoia/lame (et. al.) which—despite being a huge hairball of sh—remains one of the few ways to turn a CD into a bunch of MP3s in a vaguely automatic and sane manner I've found (iTunes' encoder is iffy and it tends to be funny about only using its XML database for metadata; Max.App is about equal to abcde except for the fact it uses a lookup service with incredibly patchy coverage; and EAC and CDex of the Windows world are both atrocious UI trainwrecks in every regard and also serial and only filling in half the metadata).

It sets up the TPOS ID3v2.3 tag for multi-CD albums. It also sets TRCK to include the total number of tracks, since no bugger ever sets that either. And renames the files iTunes-style to be prefixed with the album number, so 01.Dont_Stop_Believin.mp3 becomes 1-01.Dont_Stop_Believin.mp3 and everything lexically sorts helpfully in your filer or shell expansions.

With this correctly set, you can take off the atrocious hack of pretending that each CD is a separate album with " [Disc N]" suffixed on the end of its name, which makes media libraries that autoarrange files into folders less useful and also deeply offends anyone who would like their computer to have correct information to work with. (Computers working with incorrect information are a common cause of hateful behaviour such as not letting the "Play this entire album" button work.)

Of course, this is the lovely theory. The less-than-lovely reality is that iTunes—written by freaking Apple, whose usual view of other people's standards is that they're quaint little curiousities that they need support only as far as needed to help people migrate into the Apple ecosystem—is the only thing I've found that actually gives a damn about this metadata. foobar2000 doesn't understand it. Windows Media Player doesn't understand it. WinAmp, VLC, mplayer, MPC et. al. just play things in the order you specify anyway (WA3 had some kind of media library but also caused cancer in lab rats)—which is at least hopefully the correct lexical ordering from your filer. And when I say "doesn't understand", I mean that if you tell foobar2k or WMP to play an album so tagged, it'll play track 1 from every disc in the order it found them, then track 2 from every disc…

(And, of course, if you actually tweak this in the iTunes metadata editor—again, the only one I've found that'll show or let you change TPOS, although VLC at least shows it read-only buried in a tree in a tab in the extended metadata window, there is a good chance iTunes will replace your ID3 tag with nothing but strange hex comments and then ferret away all the metadata in its big XML database. Writing some Perl to dig the metadata back out [this part is at least done] and re-write it as regular tags is still on the to-do list. [iTunes is also the only one I've found to actually show explicit "out of" fields, rather than expecting you to have read the ID3 spec and know to type "1/18" as a track number.])

The virtual does not have a monopoly on the suck, of course. I broke the damn case trying to pry CD2 out. Which is at least better than breaking the disc. And it's only one of the incredibly stubborn plastic centre teeth, rather than the nefarious multiple hinges that were trying to flex the wrong way. I want to find whoever designed those 2CD jewel cases and beat them with textbooks on designing everyday physical artifacts to not be ridiculously fragile.

So basically it's almost 2011 and both mechanical plastic engineering and music library software still can't cope with the fact that sometimes an album has more than one disc. Hooray.

Oh good. At some point, LiveJournal broke recognizing HTML entity references and not escaping all the ampersands.

So much for getting the PhD over with for Christmas.

2010-12-15T11:27:33Z

Viva delayed some more until next year.

FreeChain for 64-bit Windows.

2010-11-08T18:38:17Z

Since someone e-mailed me about it(!), I've rebuilt FreeChain as a proper Win32 console application, which means it runs natively on Windows all the way up to 64-bit Windows 7 (something the DOS version won't), complete with hastily-drawn icon. In the process the sort-of-abandoned GTK+ port source is now up. I can't even remember what state that's in, although my SVN log seems to say about halfway.

It feels kind of odd having a codebase (tiny and simplistic as it may be) that compiles cleanly from that all the way down to proper 16-bit MS-DOS.

Your system is low on virtual memory.

2010-10-12T02:41:58Z

03:38 < LionsPhil> The great thing about having no short-term memory any more
                   is that I can keep looking to the left and being
                   pleasantly surprised that I have a glass of orange juice.
03:38 < LionsPhil> This has now happened five times for the same glass.

Argh.

2010-09-28T13:11:35Z

Motherboard probably not bad. Stick definitely bad. Now waiting for eBuyer testing to confirm so can has moneys back. Possiblygood. Edit: Good grief, they agree. Success.
~~Still no viva date.~~ Have now pretty much entirely forgotten PhD claims and all references will be out of date. Can't remember if I have a hardcopy of the thesis somewhere; I think I threw all the bound ones at the school office. Ungood.
Spent best part of a week trying to back up new laptop to new external drive. Eventually found new laptop has bad sectors already. Much stupidity involved in returns. Need to have zeroed drive by tomorrow morning (I find today, a courier arriving out of nowhere expecting a pickup, the last I heard being that everything was out of stock and deferred) and hope the image taken works on the new drive properly, despite tech support having to guess which drive they should send me because their system kept crashing and wouldn't accept my model number. ddrescue over CIFS to NTFS (don't ask) has already been going since yesterday and is getting exponentially slower. Estimated time remaining keeps rising. Ungood.
Have been lying down to avoid falling down and enjoying an exciting array of internal pains. Ungood.

Well, damn.

2010-09-16T15:17:04Z

That'd be a brand new replacement stick of memory. That was an expensive way to find my trusty old desktop box (where I do most of my creative, stress-relieving stuff) has had a motherboard socket go bad. Great.

In other news, as the peril of 30s looms ever-closer, apparently my eyes no longer work well enough to actually see the notches in DIMM slots without flooding the area with light. Which is nice.

Updated: Actually, it looks like Kingston sent me a bad stick (possibly as well). Thanks to a hateful Belkin KVM spontaneously switching to the wrong machine and refusing to acknowledge its switchover sequence, while the bad stick was the only one installed I wasn't able to get to the boot menu to fire up memtest instead of Windows, and the expected happens when you mount your system partition read-write with completely shafted memory:

Checking file system on C:
The type of the file system is NTFS.
One of your disks needs to be checked for consistency. You
may cancel the disk check, but it is strongly recommended
that you continue.
Windows will now check the disk.                         
The resident attribute for attribute of type 0x48 and instance
tag 0x19 is incorrect.  The attribute has value of length 0x48,
and offset 0x19.  The attribute length is 0x60.
Deleting corrupt attribute record (16, "")
from file record segment 92940.
The standard information attribute in file 0x16b0c is missing.
Deleting corrupt file record segment 92940.
Index entry rw of index $I30 in file 0x1a4c5 points to unused file 0x16b0c.
Deleting index entry rw in index $I30 of file 107717.
Cleaning up minor inconsistencies on the drive.
CHKDSK is recovering lost files.
Cleaning up 111 unused index entries from index $SII of file 0x9.
Cleaning up 111 unused index entries from index $SDH of file 0x9.
Cleaning up 111 unused security descriptors.
CHKDSK is verifying Usn Journal...
Usn Journal verification completed.
Correcting errors in the master file table's (MFT) BITMAP attribute.
Windows has made corrections to the file system.

Sigh. Thanks, Belkin and Kingston. Thelkingston.

I also got to see an exciting dialogue!

Which was nice.

Further adventures in irritating irrationality.

2010-08-19T21:59:53Z

So, the soft-bound copy of my thesis is finally in the right place that I am now just waiting for a viva. Since people have been randomly congratulating me today, this is presumably a reasonable checkpoint in the damage-control process of migrating "wasting four years of my mid-twenties for nothing but complete burnout" to "wasting four years of my mid-twenties for nothing but the ability to irritably correct people with regards to my title when they call me Mister Boulain".

It would be nice if my emotional state reflected this, since then I might be able to achieve something productive during all this effectively free time. As it is, I still seem to have the attention span and persistence in the face of adversity of a five-year-old on sugar, which is remarkably unhelpful when trying to focus on solving anything nontrivial. Right now merely having to go through the dance of configuring Debian Vim to behave like normal, sane Vim is enough to kill any momentum I gain. (I love new Linux installs.)

Bleh. Have a picture of a deep forest scene. The limited palette and resultant simplified shading is deliberate for a sort of half-way AGI/SCI feel (and not at all a combination of technical constraints and ineptitude with pressure-sensitivity).

Yes, it is also deliberate that it is neither true EGA palette nor 320x200 non-square pixels, since for its intended purpose that would work badly. (I actually used Legend of Kyrandia for reference pics, but I can't exactly compete with professionally hand-painted backgrounds.)

Order of the Stick could probably try for it, though.

2010-08-05T22:09:46Z

Observation: I find most written (i.e. novels) hard[-ish] sci-fi intolerable because it's part of the genre style to write as if your editor were asleep at the wheel. Drivel drivel, blather, drivel, clunky irrelevancies. It's like chewing a whole pack of dry Jacob's Cream Crackers just making it through that (ancient, by Internet standards, but new to me) parody.

Hypothesis: Webcomic hard[-ish] sci-fi is much more tolerable because you can't pull that kind of nonsense in three panels and still have room to draw the characters.

An exercise in frustration.

2010-07-24T12:42:51Z

One of these days I will learn to suppress my boundless optimism for expecting computers work work properly. (This post mostly exists to vent and document the few things I've got working and is not desperately interesting.)

Good old Flash 2 was actually simple to get running. Copy an installed version, copy the HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Macromedia\Flash 2\ registry branch, let it run once as admin to poke those keys, and it's happy. Since it's old enough to have a normal Windows interface, the jump list thing even picks up its most recent files. Unforuntately, it's acting slightly laggy with the pen, making everything sloppy and irritating—it's (thankfully, I guess) not the drivers or hardware, since it doesn't happen in GIMP.
Getting WinTab support? Phyrric victory. Gone is all the Win7 pen support, like handwriting recognition. If you look at page 1, it's alleged that Lenovo opted out of getting a driver that handled both. Crappy workaround: You can turn on a taskbar panel to activate Ink manually, which then seems to work as if you were handwriting with a mouse. (Why this won't sit as a compact notification area icon, I don't know.)
The way to get the middle mouse button to behave is, obviously, to set the Lenovo UltraNav settings to "smooth scrolling", not "leave this button alone".
For allegedly major build tools for Win32 open source software, MinGW/MSYS are in a horrendous state. There are multitudes of outdated setup guides, none of which align with the actual SourceForge downloads available. And, frankly, life is too short to download and unpack fifty-squillion separate tarballs through a web interface.
Cygwin (which is actually a hell of a lot more pleasant these days—mintty is a godsend) have removed -mno-cygwin and said "use a cross compiler" instead. Ok. The gcc-mingw packages have given me a /usr/lib/gcc/i686-pc-mingw32 tree, but no actual i686-pc-mingw* binary, despite the Internets claiming otherwise. Um. And gcc documents but doesn't understand -b. Nice.
There is apparently no official build of Glade for Windows which isn't broken. (The oldest installs two copies of the EXE and shortcuts to the one in the wrong place to find it's DLL; if you fix this, all the icons are missing. The newer "with GTK+" versions [...I'm installing a GTK+ dev tool, why are you assuming I don't already have GTK+?] appear to have completely confused installers that frankly I don't much trust.) There is a random top-Google-result webpage with binaries on, but they're from the version where the devs said "lol let's introduce major breakage in a stable series which we'll fix in the unstable one".
Visual Studio 2010 uses yet another runtime library, which means that GTKmm is currently broken unless you build it from source as they only have binaries (and preference sheets, although I managed to port those) for 2005 and 2008. (Confirmed.) SDL looks the same way. This one's excusable since they've not had much time; it's just frustrating because I'd like to dabble with GTK+'s tablet support and am currently hitting 0/3 for development environments.
It's 2010, and spaces in paths are still an issue. TortoiseSVN's "include for overlays" path list is newline-separated, but still needs doublequotes to actually work for "My Documents". This includes putting a glob inside the doublequotes.
Intel AMT can be disabled in the BIOS. So far nothing is screaming bloody murder. Oddly enough VT-x, an actual useful feature, was disabled by default.

I'm just going to link to this again before I go see what state Media Player Classic/Quicktime Alternative/Xiph.Org DirectShow plugins are in these days.

Edit: Oh god, it's forked.

Today in "PC vendors sabotaging their own kit" news.

2010-07-22T01:22:39Z

Shiny new ThinkPad "carrot for finishing thesis" tablet has arrived. Yay.

Lenovo "helpful" ThinkVantage crap attempts to autoupdate and fails on brand new out-of-box boot. Download was successful, the install just "failed". Nice. Sets off program compatability mode too.
Ten years later, and ThinkPads still have the physical middle mouse button crippled under Windows to do their own proprietary scrolling instead of being a normal MMB event. Supposedly disabling this and the magnifier should fix, but Firefox remains unconvinced.
Decent Wacom digitizer apparently not paired with correct drivers, reports on Internets that pressure sensitivity won't work until you shimmy Bamboo ones on there. Currently manifesting as it detecting clicks while the pen is still hovering way above the screen, thus rendering it unusable.
Speaking of unusable, the above is paired with the stock Windows handwriting recognition randomly locking up mid-word and turning the rest of your attempt at communication into a straight line. I am glad this is not a feature I actually wanted to use because it was apparently never tested.
My creaky old copy of Flash apparently has a 16-bit installer or some such fun, so bodgery lies ahead. Sigh.
I know everyone wants to rip off Apple, but, please, the display dimming works better when not matched with toggling Aero/compositing on and off, causing a flickery repaint.
"Intel Active Management Technology allows IT professionals to remotely discover, heal and protect your networked computer." Oh, hey, a preinstalled and pre-enabled rootkit. How cute.

Argh. I'm going to drink until I fall unconscious.

Jeremy Clarkson performs the classics.

2010-07-05T19:23:04Z

This may be slightly spoilerful if you have, for some reason, not yet seen last week's Top Gear.

I'm responsible for suggesting the combination, but all the video editing is Wolfie's work.

The rare modern film with a plot.

2010-06-14T14:06:55Z

For a while, I've been quoting Identity (2003) as the most recent film I can think of that has been truly excellent, amongst a sea of predictable, idiotically plotted, terribly paced, shakeycam, cheap-CGI-SFX dreck with writing so bad that I'd wince less Googling for fanfiction of 16-bit-era console games.

I am pleased to say that it has been usurped by Lucky Number Slevin (2006). Don't go reading about it on the Internet, though; it's one of those classic-style thrillers that makes good use of audience ignorance.

Sinister hover links, part 2.

2010-05-31T11:57:45Z

Following on from the middle of this about superflous page loads, now I'm getting addresses from "wd.sharethis.com" in my back/forward history while poking about here. More of them when poking embedded YouTube videos. Like the ads that do something similar on Wikia, this has no visible effect except from breaking the back button unless you jump back multiple steps in one go to get past them all.

This might be understandable if the "ShareThis"—apparently some Web2.0 provider of Internet Echo Chamber buttons—interface were visible. Or any ads.

Everything is deeply intertwingled.

2010-05-26T18:27:15Z

The capability for the human mind to make subconcious correlations never ceases to astound me. I was listening to Tori Amos' Cornflake Girl, and wondering why Billy Joel's I Go To Extremes was forcing its way into my head instead.

It's that damn overbearing CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH percussion. Go easy on the hi-hat, guys.

(Hunh, Billy Joel is playing a piano with his butt.)

This is why I can't have nice things.

2010-05-24T14:11:29Z

So, Altitude appeared during a free weekend while poking Portal, and it's a rather well-done multiplayer merge of Apricots¹ and Skyduel², a type of game I'm quite partial to. For less than the price of lunch, and thus limited risk of loss—and after an awful lot of scowling at Valve's hideous terms and trying to find a way to pay that didn't involve giving them the ability to make further no-refund transactions without explicit confirmation—I buckled and finally joined the weak-willed masses with paid Steam games to their name.

It's also a perfect kind of game for the Eee: short, sharp, not graphically demanding. I even managed to coax Steam onto the SD card (via the "it's written by DOS programmers, so move the install directory" method).

At which point, Steam kindly informs me that its support for Windows 2000 is ending, and after August, that's it. So the game could be left alone and would still run, but the DRM system must always be up-to-date, and will thus lock me out.

Sigh.

Also, I'm getting really tired of whatever hateful piece of JavaScript LiveJournal have added which means that hovering over a link on my friends page—say, the one to open it in full, with comments—causes a momentary page load, and somehow breaks open-in-new tab during this interval so that instead clicking it loads it in the current tab. When skimming down jwz's eclectic Internet findings and spitting them off into tabs, this damn thing triggering is somewhat disruptive. I guess it's something like that hover-preview thing no longer being properly disabled, or some advertising excitement reporting back which links I might be considering clicking upon. (This also seems to sometimes break the link-target tooltip, unhelpfully.)
Added: Just had it do it to a placeholder'd YouTube video, too, bringing up the inner frame as replacement whole page content. Something very weird there.

Oh, and Opera's latest trick on Mac is massive CPU spikes, half-to-full-second lag, and flashing the menu bar (which I believe is OS X convention) when using a keyboard shortcut. F-keys no longer work if focus is in a text box, including F5 to refresh if the cursor has been JavaScript-sent to a form somewhere, or—and this one is really getting to me—F8 to focus and select the address bar when already there to redo from start when broken autocompletion wakes up and decides to overwrite what I was typing. Copy/pasting filenames via the keyboard in file dialogues is also broken. Which is nice.

The one good software thing that I've encountered recently: Look, someone still handles low memory situations elegantly! Quit Evolution, unpause VM, continue.

¹ One of the first open-source projects I contributed a patch to. It was ignored.
² I actually made a really bad clone of this in a RAD tool for Windows many years ago. No, I'm not giving you a link.

New and Improved.

2010-05-13T00:01:24Z

I am getting really, really tired of Opera updates needlessly changing everything around. Apparently, in 10.53 (c.f. 10.10), the default monospace font has been overridden back to Monaco, and the meaning of shift in shift+cmd+click for "open in new [background] tab" has a) toggled b) stopped respecting the preferences.

Which is nice.

Meanwhile, I just freed up 6GB of space by deleting my Xubuntu VM in disgust, because upgrading to 10.04LTS broke it so hard that it can't even boot in recovery mode with the old kernel. Sigh. Well, if there's one thing I love it's unbreaking Debian's idiotic nonstandard config files in new installs, and trying to remember all the stupid packages to get a working build environment.

(And, of course, Opera rethemes itself every damn update. All the colour cues have gone from the icons this time, as this month the artist was feeling minimalist. On Mac at least this is platform-native, but WinXP supports colour display adapters, damnit.)

Addedum: Oh, and if anyone knows how to revert the stupid new gigantic address bar list that fits about five things on the screen before giving up to the old one-line-per-item one, that'd be good. I've tried turning off address bar history content search on my Winbox (which I don't really want to do anyway), and that's not it—it shows that stupid second excerpt line anyway. (Oh, oh, and the way images now progressive load to about 15% or so, then give up and just sit there until the download is completely finished? If they do so at all [half the gravtars on RPS are missing now]? Yeah, that's great, that one. Jesus, what is this, an alpha release?)

Addenda, apparently: Oh, yes, fie upon Windows' (pre-Vista, anyway) inability to re-mark incorrectly-detected bad blocks as clean after a full chkdsk /r /v /x, and/or fie upon ntfsresize for detecting badblocks even after ntfstruncate hackery upon the $Bad block map. And fie upon gparted for screwing things up so badly that ntfsresize thought a 60GB filesystem was a perfect fit for a 160GB partition, causing me to have to start over at one point and do it again with plain old fdisk and crossed fingers that everything lined up. (Yes, I've been spending today imaging to a new system drive. Tomorrow I get to do it again for my main machine, as apparently it's sector rot season. Conservation of Broken must have got bored with my Mac.)

(Recovery Is Possible Linux, however? Taking a liking to the way that, unlike Ubuntu LiveCDs, it can boot in under half an hour on an old machine and, unlike most rescue CDs, bothers to actually provides NTFS and CIFS tools so that you can, say, interoperate with the rest of the computing world when throwing disk images around. Also taking a liking to the way that it's unashamedly old-fashioned and hacky, thus you can work with its semi-brokenness [say, by starting it without X and fixing the config that sets an inappropriate refresh rate first], rather than modern Linux, which is glossy, obtuse, and hacky.)

In conclusion: I am rapidly depleting my cider reserves.

An excuse to post John Cleese from 13 years ago.

2010-05-04T15:03:05Z

Additional: How much of a vote you have. (This is not an excuse to not vote, thus ensuring that your area stays "safe".)

Dear Lazyweb,

2010-02-14T21:31:32Z

This stupid Twitter thingy. There is a conversation on it I am vaguely interested in, but the interface is abhorrent and isolates each participant's contributions.

Where is the tool for weaving these disparate threads back together which is not broken? Please test before suggesting, because I just got through a whole bundle of Google results claiming to do this which do not, in fact, work, or have been outright shut down.

Theoretically, Twitter is kind of interesting as a (needlessly centralised and content-crippled) IRC-alike where distinct channels are replaced with the ad-hoc ability to pay attention to certain selected topics, participants, or threads, and they even seem to capture the correct semantics for this (replies do seem to be tracked), but the apparent complete lack of an interface to make anything of these capabilities makes me wonder if they realise they've achieved anything else than (a needlessly centralised and content-crippled) way to tell people that you are currently jogging using your mobile phone. (It's certainly all the journalists seem to see it as—and, inexplicably, that that's somehow a notable achievement.)

(I suppose one could probably write a proper thick-client tool [so as to avoid web UI hate] to turn it back into an browsable IRC-like medium. [Actual gateways like tircd presumably lose explicit reply context, rending them IRC-but-now-implemented-even-more-badly, and—besides—assume you're being an active contributor, not trying to browse pre-existing posts.] A project for ~~another time~~ someone else.)

PhD? Response.

Too angry to sleep.

2010-01-19T03:44:56Z

Oh, hey, the insomnia's back, only now it's also brought its friend hypersomnia with it for a great tag-team that makes me perpetually cranky, tired, and largely ineffectual. This post brought to you by people (well, at least one person) nagging for updates. It is therefore content-light and uninteresting mopery (so, like most uses of "social software", then), save to remind you all not to do PhDs.

Current problem: I've run out of mere tedium like cross-referencing and appendicies to mutilate, and am onto the actively depressing process of twisting the thesis to appeal to the external examiner's research area, which solves precisely zero problems except how to best improve my chances in the viva to dredge a few name-letters out of wasting the last three and a half years of my life. This is complicated by my dwindling work ethic coming up against the brick wall of dealing with academic papers, the world's most ineffective and obfuscated way to convey information possibly imaginable.

I am so far past burnt out that I can no longer remember what the magic smoke smelt like.

On the bright side, I have made full use of this mental state to draft out my acknowledgements.

What do you mean Perl is cheating? They had Emacs!

2009-12-20T14:38:07Z

Most people who have more than a passing interest in UNIXen probably know the UNIX recovery legend.

I just managed to remotely reboot a cranky Linux system that had once again had a ATA whoopsie and decided to remount the root filesystem read-only, and throw I/O errors all over the place (hypothesis: everything not cached; generally the things which work are the things most [recently] used). It's some kind of exciting bug/fault which can be cleared with a restart (which is what Linux seems to try to do to the drive, but fails hilariously). init worked, but on Ubuntu that's just a wrapper around telinit, which was broken (along with shutdown, halt, and reboot). ssh was working (obviously), but scp wasn't.

13:19 <rjek> Or you write a program that calls the same syscall as reboot.
13:22 <LinuxPhil> Per that classic UNIX recovery story, I could probably cat a binary compiled elsewhere into /dev/shm and run it from there.

This involved statically compiling a program to call reboot(RB_AUTOBOOT) (/sbin/reboot -f would do this, but is dynamically linked, and I didn't have the exact same Ubuntu version to hand) on a VM on my Mac (gcc had snuffed it), base64'ing it (hooray for Perl—xxd was bust, and I have no UUdecode tools), and copy-pasting it between terminals. (chmod was dead, too: again, hooray for Perl—sadly I didn't have PurePerl MD5 available, and md5sum was broken, so I just had to try both ends on the working system, cmp, and hope Terminal.App's iffy clipboard support wanted to play ball.)

Interesting aside: ls locked up. I'm guessing dircolors hilarity, as echo * worked, so bash could read the directory contents. kill also did when trying to kill ls.

I feel perversely proud of finding a solution that didn't involve waiting until Monday for someone to be around to hit the power switch. Most surprisingly, it didn't take all afternoon, which is remarkably un-Linux of it.