We Saw a Chicken …

Author: scruss

  • 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.

  • fastest TTC journey ever

    Kennedy Station to Union in 30 minutes — just as well, really, as I was absurdly late.

  • Not that I do, of course

    Friends who orienteer are the best, given that you (and they) know where they are.

     — Jonas Wolff

  • frail out!

    Who knew that boingboing would actually register when a banjo tutorial fell under creative commons licence? The How and the Tao of Old Time Banjo

  • 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.

  • first frost, and deer

    It’s definitely autumn; first frost on the roof of Port Credit station, and there were deer in the fields in Burlington. It’s defintely getting crepuscular later on us these days.

  • wee heidbanger

    Downy Woodpecker, Thomson Park, Scarborough
    A downy woodpecker, doing its thing.

  • 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.

  • life advice #31a

    Don’t put your business card holder through the wash.

  • big, real big

    RePower 5M
    RePower have installed the world’s largest wind turbine, the 5MW RePower 5M. With blades 126m in diameter on a 100-120m tower, this isn’t for the home scale wind enthusiast.

    Their site’s incredibly slow just now, as it has just been discovered by SlashDot …

  • Uncle in The Oldie

    uncle article from The Oldie
    My favourite elephant got a good writeup in The Oldie, a magazine I’m not quite old enough to read. The PDF of the full May 2004 issue is currently online if you wish to read it.

  • 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.

  • two blue herons

    standing in a field at the edge of Burlington; standing close enough to be together, but obliquely apart, like a couple who have said all they ever will.

  • 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.

  • Russia ratifies!

    Russia Ratifies Kyoto! So that leaves those other backward countries out in the cold.

  • half a turbine: wee deid speug

    We found a dead sparrow (= speug, in Scots, pr. sp-yug) outside the front window when we took the recycling out. It had hit the window. Sorry, little dude.

    So that’s me used six months of the avian mortality of the ExPlace wind turbine.

  • big bogging box

    Every day, I walk past some fields in Burlington. They’re alive with the ringing of crickets, the autumn crops are coming on nicely, and Canada geese pad around warily. Idyllic, no?

    Today I discover that this is slated to become a Wal-Mart. Yuk! Can there be anything more hideous than a Wal-Mart? Always Low Wages … Always! should be their motto. Catherine’s hometown square has been destroyed by a gargantuan Mal-Wart just outside the city limits. These stores are ugly, and they smell.

    I don’t often find myself agreeing with a Toronto Sun columnist, but Marianne Meed Ward wrote:

    What’s right and fair is a living wage. Until Wal-Mart (and other discount retailers, restaurants and businesses) provide it, it’s not ethical to shop there.

    in her June 27th column, titled Lining up for poverty.

    So, please, Burlington Ontario doesn’t need another Wal-Mart. It needs green spaces.

  • ttc kalimba

    Kalimba player, Bloor subway, about 7pm.

  • 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.

  • almost open wireless

    I think I’ve found an open 802.11b network at our workplace; hurrah!