Archive for the ‘computers suck’ Category
Saturday, June 28th, 2008
I like bbtracker -it’s a very simple GPS track logger for the Blackberry. It has (at least, at the current version) one problem - you can’t create waypoints in the way that most GPS applications would expect. You can, however, name trackpoints - so I wrote a little perl script to extract all the named trackpoints from an exported GPX files, and save them as waypoints.
Download bbtrackerwpt - converts named trackpoints from bbtracker GPX into waypoints. You’ll need XML::Simple for this to work.
I imagine this script has a limited audience, and quite likely a limited lifetime. The author of bbtracker has said they’d provide waypoint support in the next version. You know me and patience, though …
If I remembered more XSLT, I’d have done this the proper way. As is, I create XML using Perl print statements. I’m probably okay, as the name field is the only piece of free-form text, and I do some rudimentary escaping of characters that XML doesn’t like. The output seems to validate, which is more than the GPX that bbtracker produces does. The length of your GPS track may vary 
Tags: blackberry, gps, gpx, perl, xml, xslt
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Sunday, June 15th, 2008
Tags: firefox, link
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Sunday, June 15th, 2008
I was all exited about my 2000th post, because the dashboard is showing:
So I decided to tabulate my entries by number, and discovered that I really have 2261 (well, 2262 now) blog entries. This is the real story:
The numbering seems to have gone sideways in the last 1000 entries; entry #1000 is, as they say, what it is.
Tags: blog, wordpress
Posted in computers suck, goatee-stroking musing, or something | No Comments »
Monday, June 2nd, 2008
Outlook has now decided that I need all my e-mail text in huge. I have no idea why.
Tags: outlook
Posted in computers suck | 2 Comments »
Sunday, June 1st, 2008
My only real complaint with my Linksys NSLU2 is that it doesn’t have a very accurate clock. Tools like rsync expect identical timestamps, or flag source and destination files as different. This causes most of your files to be rewritten, even though the source and destination are in fact the same.
This fixes it:
rsync –size-only -av src dest
Tags: nslu2, rsync
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Friday, May 30th, 2008
MS Office’s menus may have been a mess, but that’s no reason to replace them with something equally complex but different.
Tags: ack, ptui, windows
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Saturday, May 17th, 2008
auplabels - extract times of tracks in an Audacity file for adding labels (download).
Audacity 1.3’s method of track splitting has always seemed a pain, so I wrote the above to help me.
Running auplabels file.aup will generate a somewhat sparse file of track offsets:
0.00000000
191.57333333
376.08000000
550.76000000
…
You’ll want to edit this to add track names (there should be a tab between the first column and the title):
0.00000000 Battle of the Blues
191.57333333 I Quit My Job
376.08000000 Ain't Goin' My Way
550.76000000 Wake Up Hill
…
If you use File -> Import… -> Labels… to import this into your project, the label track should exactly align with your track splits.
(Of course, this should really be an XML application since Audacity AUP files are XML, but issues were had.)
Tags: audacity, perl
Posted in computers suck | 1 Comment »
Saturday, May 17th, 2008
Debian and its derived distributions have a policy about packages not being able to modify the configuration of other packages. While this might generally seem like a good idea, for the TIMTOWTDI world of Perl, this causes problems.
The problem arises if you have installed Perl XML modules from both CPAN and the Debian (or Ubuntu, or whatever) repositories. Debian’s modifications subtly break the XML::SAX module, on which most Perl XML modules (including the brilliant XML::Simple) depend. If you’ve been naughty and used a module from CPAN, Debian gets its knickers in a knot, and won’t configure or run anything remotely related to libxml-sax-perl.
If you get the error Can’t locate object method “save_parsers_debian” via package “XML::SAX” at /usr/bin/update-perl-sax-parsers line 90, your system is affected. You might get the clue that any of your Perl XML handlers freak out and fail in weird ways.
Here’s a method (there’s always more than one, of course) to fix it. This was combined from a couple of sources, each of which was on the right track but didn’t entirely work. Actually, the first might’ve been right on the money, but my hiragana’s a bit ropey …
- make sure you’ve got your system up to date with
apt-get or aptitude.
sudo cpan CPANPLUS (this will ask you lots of questions, to which you should almost always answer with the default)sudo cpanp -u XML::SAX (this takes quite a while, and produces no output for most of it)LC_ALL=C sudo apt-get install --reinstall libxml-sax-perl (the LC_ALL=C might not be strictly necessary, but it worked for me)
You must remember never to pretend to be smarter than the Debian maintainers, and suitably chastened, may now return to your normal OpenSSH patching activities …
Tags: bug, debian, libxml, perl, sax, snark, ubuntu, xml
Posted in computers suck | 1 Comment »
Sunday, May 11th, 2008
I did just upgrade my server from the previous version of Ubuntu LTS to 8.04 LTS, and it went without a glitch. I had to edit one config file, and it’s all running smoothly.
Tags: server, ubuntu
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Saturday, May 10th, 2008
I’m quite happy with Ubuntu. If a user didn’t have to be tied into specific, Windows-only applications, I’d recommend it. It’s stable, fast, intuitive and pretty.
My one annoyance is what the latest release has done to CD/DVD drive naming. In the past, my machine’s first DVD drive was hda. For no reason whatsoever, Ubuntu decide to call it sr0. Similarly, the drive’s name for command-line tools now has a different specification.So all my applications need to be told where the drives are; a pain.
Maybe I’ve been at this too long - I still like to use applications that I can see what’s running in the background, so I use grip over gstreamer (mainly because, unless you’re using lame, I’m not listening to your mp3s), cdrdao over (whatever the young kids are using today to burn gapless audio). At the very least, I would have liked to get a summary of changes when I upgraded Ubuntu. Better still, I’d have liked a list of reasons for the changes. Unless my CD/DVD drive is now faster and more secure, why change?
Tags: cdrom, linux, ubuntu
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Sunday, April 27th, 2008
If you are finding your Ubuntu upgrade slow, I found it worth changing my default download server. Under System -> Administration -> Software Sources you can choose a new server. It has a Choose Best Server test, which pings all 185 Ubuntu download servers and picks the best one for you.
The default Canadian server is swamped at the moment, but the good people at Rochester Institute of Technology are the fastest for me.
Tags: download, ubuntu
Posted in computers suck, o canada | No Comments »
Sunday, April 20th, 2008
I like Songbird, even if its mascot has gas:
Tags: fart, music, songbird
Posted in choons, computers suck | 2 Comments »
Sunday, April 20th, 2008
Tags: firefox, mozilla, sqlite
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Sunday, April 13th, 2008
Tags: linux, ubuntu
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Thursday, April 10th, 2008
Coast Plaza hotel has a broken(ish) DNS — most web sites won’t resolve unless you hit reload about 8 million times (or use a shell loop to ping many many times). Aargh!
But it does completely block my office’s Citrix connections, so no work e-mail for me!
Tags: dns, rant, yay
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Thursday, March 27th, 2008
My company’s network is down today. All of it. All my files are there. All my work is there. I’m enjoying freedom while I can.
Have you heard of a large company not having redundant servers?
Tags: network, notwork, yay
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Monday, March 17th, 2008
Google Mobile Maps’ “My Location” from cell signal triangulation is fairly neat. It’s a few hundred meters off my true location downtown, but good enough if you were completely lost.
Tags: blackberry, google, maps
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Saturday, March 15th, 2008
I have an HP Photosmart C5180 scanner/printer thingy. It works fairly well, except when the drivers are being stupid under Windows. But it has one flaw so appalling that the first time it happened, I almost trashed the printer in a blind rage (yeah, I have some anger issues).
The power supply brick has a three-prong connector; pretty much the same as the “kettle lead” you get on PCs. But this thing, whether through vibration, heating and cooling, or just plain evil, slowly works itself loose. So you go to turn the printer on one day, and … nothing. You check the cables; all are plugged in. Check the wall socket; it’s (zap! ow!) live. After tearing some hair out, you troubleshoot every cable – all looks well until you notice that the plug is just a little farther out of the power supply than it might go. Snug it in a couple of millimetres, and a working printer is you.
This happens every few months. Even when I know it’s likely to happen, it still jars me. Wouldn’t have happened in Bill & Dave’s day.
Tags: c51x0, hp, printer, rant
Posted in computers suck | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, March 11th, 2008
I really don’t think that my ipod was supposed to do that. But then, it was playing Columbus Fruge’s Saut Crapaud at the time, which is enough to make anyone shift a few pixels to the side:
Saut crapaud
ta queue va brûler
Prends courage
a’va repousser
Tags: cajun, crapaud, demented, glitch, ipod
Posted in choons, computers suck | No Comments »
Sunday, March 9th, 2008
A weird imagination is most useful to gain full advantage of all the features.
— screen(1) manual.
Tags: gnu, screen, wisdom
Posted in computers suck, goatee-stroking musing, or something | No Comments »
