Category: computers suck

Sharing images between WordPress and Gallery

I like WordPress, but its image handling is pretty poor. I also like Gallery, but it doesn’t know how to talk to WordPress.

Here’s a quick way to get an image stored in Gallery into a WordPress entry:

  1. Select the thumbnail of the image you want in Gallery.
  2. Right-click, and “View Selection Source”.
  3. “Select All” in the DOM Source window.
  4. Paste the HTML into your WordPress entry.

The result is a small image in your entry which, when clicked, takes you to the main image in Gallery. It saves disk space, and it means you can use Gallery‘s excellent image tools.

More Gnu Smugness: Give me help when I want it

Following on from the ‘head -n’ debacle, here’s another annoying gnuism:

$ egrep -h
Usage: egrep [OPTION]... PATTERN [FILE]...
Try `egrep --help' for more information.

So I’ve asked it for help, it knows I’ve asked it for help, but it insists that I do things its way. The utility has even sequestered the ‘-h’ option to give me this useless message. It would have been much better to call the usage option whether I gave it ‘-h’ or ‘–help’.

Computers should do what I want, when I want it. In fact, someday soon I want a computer with a DO MY STUFF NOW, LOWLY COMPUTER key, that issues an NMI to make the computer return to what I want it to do. I think that’s what the Esc key was originally for, but all too often, the operating system thinks it has more important things to do than I have.

why I hate windows, part 314

I’m due to give a presentation now. It was prepared in WordPerfect Presentations. Exporting it to PowerPoint breaks the formatting. Exporting that to OpenOffice breaks it even further.

You’d think that printing from WordPerfect Presentations to Adobe PDFWriter might give bearable results. You’d be wrong; the formatting’s off, words are missing, the whole thing’s really ugly. Bleah.

Avoiding Copy-Protected CD suckage with an iRiver H120

  1. Hook your iRiver H120 to the optical output from a CD player
  2. Start recording on the H120, and play the CD
  3. Stop recording at the end of the CD
  4. Transfer the very large MP3 file across to your Linux box
  5. Use mp3splt to split the tracks from a freedb track list
  6. Result! 😉

Now I can listen to Fountains of Wayne Welcome Interstate Managers without hassle.

Oh, and if anyone says that an H120 recorder doesn’t have legitimate use, please see my field recordings.

it’s not cheap being green

I got some spam^H^H^H^Htargeted marketing e-mail from thegreenwebhost.ca. Their prices seem deeply off; they charge C$109.95 (about US$83) for 7.5 gig monthly transfer, 2 gig storage and 100 e-mail addresses.

By comparison, I pay 1and1 US$10/month for 50 GB monthly transfer volume, 2,000 MB web space and 500 POP3 accounts.

While I’d consider paying a premium of perhaps up to 50% for green consumer items, there’s no way I’m paying more than 8× the price.

not *that* Gold Disk, I hope

I see that a company called Gold Disk Canada Inc is being sued again over spamming. I do hope it’s not a remnant of the the old Amiga software company of the same name. The Gold Disk I remember used to write neato DTP and publishing tools in Mississauga

I used to think Mississauga must’ve been quite the place, back when I used to compute away in my suburban Scottish bedroom. I guess Cumbernauld (the Scottish new-town equivalent) might sound exotic to denizens of the Land o’ Hazel.

using MIME::Lite from ActiveState Perl on Windows

Wouldn’t you know it, but Windows just has to do things its own way. I’ve just started writing periodic system monitoring programs for our met station network, and needed to send e-mail. Under Unix, it was a simple matter of using MIME::Lite, and calling:

$msg->send();

But Windows doesn’t do sendmail, so you have to talk to the SMTP server directly:

$msg->send_by_smtp('your.SMTP.server.here');

That seems to work.

the joy of spam!

Hooray! I got my first bit of comment spam on this blog. This means two things:

  1. my blog is being found on search engines.
  2. WordPress is being used by enough people to make blog spamming worthwhile.

Of course, I’m not going to let any through, but it’s a wee piece of serendipity while I’m waiting for the furnace repair person to come.

my monitor crashed!

I use a Samsung SyncMaster 171s, and it has this weird quirk every now and again. It decides to fade to white with chilling slowness. I used to think it was Windows 2000 crashing, but the system’s okay if I hit the ‘Auto Calibrate’ button on the monitor.

Maybe it needs exorcism.