mind you
Sunday, May 11th, 2008I 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.
Archive for the ‘computers suck’ Category
my only gripe with the heron
Saturday, May 10th, 2008I’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?
need for speed
Sunday, April 27th, 2008If 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.
smalle fowles maken melodye
Sunday, April 20th, 2008
SQLite Manager
Sunday, April 20th, 2008
I like SQLite Manager for Firefox.
new and improved
Sunday, April 13th, 2008coast plaza = dodgy dns
Thursday, April 10th, 2008Coast 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!
on stravaig
Thursday, March 27th, 2008My 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?
pretty neat, i guess
Monday, March 17th, 2008Google 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.
most annoying thing ever
Saturday, March 15th, 2008I 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.
glitch out
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
words to live by
Sunday, March 9th, 2008A weird imagination is most useful to gain full advantage of all the features.
— screen(1) manual.
like a virtual workspace manager for the shell
Saturday, March 8th, 2008How did I manage to go for so long without knowing about screen? screen allows you to create several connection sessions to a terminal, switch between them, detach from them, then reconnect from anywhere. I’d previously had to to set up long-running remote jobs as background jobs, relying on nohup and various methods to prevent terminal output. But no more!
This page taught me all I know about screen: screen: Keep Your Processes Running Despite A Dropped Connection
barcodes of miscellaneous things found on my desk
Thursday, March 6th, 2008021205009544 043100455349 051122172625 073999738360 093074013021 5099680001525 9780176224509
You can tell I found my cuecat, can’t you?
guess my music competition
Thursday, March 6th, 2008So I could listen to semi-disposable CDRs in the car (and with that phrase, my green cred has vanished) I wrote a program that converts directories of mp3s to WAV files and TOC files for cdrdao. It works rather well.
In order to get sensible file names, the program truncates album names down to eight letters. I will send $5 canadian by paypal to the first person to guess correctly the album and artist of the following four names:
dancetun darlingc hepooscl maggotbr
Answers in the comments only, please. They’re all official releases, before you accuse me of getting you to guess my mix CDs.
happiness
Monday, March 3rd, 2008
not my favicon
Thursday, February 28th, 2008I’m trying to make Firefox on Windows XP like Firefox with the GrApple theme on OS X. I don’t have to have it look the same, just compress all the bookmarks in the toolbar into the width of the screen.
This is how I want the bookmarks toolbar to look:
And this is how it looks right now on Windows:
I can find any number of links about only showing the favicon, but none about turning it off to save space. Aargh!
stupid hp, part deux
Thursday, February 28th, 2008HP’s Photosmart driver proved its genius once again:
The download figures would have made more sense if it was working in kilobytes. As is, that’s quite a buffer overrun.
once mighty edifices crumble and fall
Friday, February 15th, 2008Friends: After discussion with the other list managers, we've decided to end our policy of asking that list members not "top post" their replies. That's the default behavior of most email clients, and just reminding people of our recommendation to "bottom post" or interleave your replies has become more trouble than its worth. From this point forward, top posting is no longer an issue. Dan Knight, list owner publisher, LowEndMac.com
Rise Up Singing! in freedb
Sunday, February 10th, 2008It took me a while, but I finally put all the track information for Sing Out!’s Rise Up Singing teaching CDs (also on the artists’ website) on freedb. I was given the data just over a year ago by Mark D. Moss, the editor of Sing Out! magazine.
The discs are:
- Rise Up Singing: The Teaching Disc A
- Rise Up Singing: The Teaching Disc B
- Rise Up Singing: The Teaching Disc C
- Rise Up Singing: The Teaching Disc D
- Rise Up Singing: The Teaching Disc E
- Rise Up Singing: The Teaching Disc F
- Rise Up Singing: The Teaching Disc G
- Rise Up Singing: The Teaching Disc H
- Rise Up Singing: The Teaching Disc J
- Rise Up Singing: The Teaching Disc K
- Rise Up Singing: The Teaching Disc L
- Rise Up Singing: The Teaching Disc M
- Rise Up Singing: The Teaching Disc O
- Rise Up Singing: The Teaching Disc P
- Rise Up Singing: The Teaching Disc R
- Rise Up Singing: The Teaching Disc S
- Rise Up Singing: The Teaching Disc T
- Rise Up Singing: The Teaching Disc U
- Rise Up Singing: The Teaching Disc W
- Rise Up Singing: The Teaching Disc Y
Perhaps what took longest was working out a UTF-8 safe processing workflow, from converting the original Excel table to e-mailing the entries to the freedb server. Let’s just say that OpenOffice, sqlite, and Perl were very helpful here.
