Category: computers suck

  • i want my svg

    Look, SVG has been the cool graphics format since 2001. And while WordPress now supports a bunch more embed formats, you’d think it’d work. Nope.

    Even to upload an SVG file, I have to bypass WordPress’s built in whitelist using PJW Mime Config, and manually add support for image/svg+xml. Otherwise, it’s refused as an insecure file. (All my files are quite well adjusted, I’ll have you know.)

    Say if I want to embed this SVG image. I’d probably want to do something like:

    <embed type="image/svg+xml" width="100" title="ford_script_fnord-plain" src="http://scruss.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/ford_script_fnord-plain.svg" />
    

    But this doesn’t end up being what the final code says:

    <object classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000" width="100" height="100" codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=6,0,40,0"><param name="src" value="http://scruss.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/ford_script_fnord-plain.svg" /><embed type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="100" height="100" src="http://scruss.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/ford_script_fnord-plain.svg"></embed></object>
    

    If I’d wanted Flash, I’d have asked for it. Do What I Mean, Little Computer!

    Update (after the comment below): Okay, last try:

    <object type="image/svg+xml" width="220" height="72" title="ford_script_fnord-plain" data="http://scruss.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/ford_script_fnord-plain.svg" />

    Yay, that sorta works – but it doesn’t scale the image. You know what the S in SVG stands for? That’s right – Scalable. Doesn’t seem to allow scaling. Kinda defeats the purpose, doesn’t it?

  • just in case it gets deleted again …

    sorry, reeling from an edit fight:

    Billy Faier

    From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

    Billy Faier is an American banjo player. Born in Brooklyn, New York on December 21 1930[1], his family moved to Woodstock, NY in 1945[2], and now resides in Marathon, Texas. He, along with Pete Seeger, was one of the early proponents of the banjo during the mid-20th century American folk music revival.

    Active in the Washington Square Park folk scene in Greenwich Village from the late 1940s, he recorded two albums for Riverside Records, The Art of the Five-String Banjo (1957) and Travelin’ Man (1958)[3]. In 1973, he recorded Banjo for John Fahey‘s Takoma label.

    [edit] Selected Discography

    In 2009, Faier decided to make much of his out of print and unreleased material available on his website.

    • The Art of the Five-String Banjo (1957 – with Frank Hamilton)
    • Travelin’ Man (1958)
    • The Beast of Billy Faier (1964 – with John Sebastian)
    • Banjo (1973)
    • Banjos, Birdsong And Mother Earth (1987 – with John Sebastian and Gilles Malkine)

    [edit] References

    [edit] External links

    source:

    
    '''Billy Faier''' is an American banjo player. Born in Brooklyn, New York on December 21 1930<ref>{{cite web|url=http://web.archive.org/web/20071111171835/http://www.billyfaier.com/
    |accessdate=2009-12-19
    |title=Billy Faier - The Five String Banjo
    |date=2006-08-07
    |description=Billy Faier. Born in Brooklyn, New York on Dec. 21, l930.  Moved to Woodstock, New York in l945 with family. Started playing banjo, guitar, and singing folk songs at seventeen, in 1947. Recorded for Riverside Records, Elektra Records, Tradition Records, and many other labels over the years.
    |GENERATOR=Microsoft FrontPage 6.0
    |keywords=billy faier, billie faier, banjo billy, five string banjo, the beast of billy faier, banjo, bille faier banjo, billy faier musician, Folk Music, Guitar; Woodstock, New York folk music, Newport Folk Festival, Berkeley Folk Festival, Winnipeg Folk Festival, Kerrville Folk Festival, Vancouver Folk Festival, billy fair, famous billy the banjo player, billie fair, www.billyfaier.com, banjo billy faier
    |rating=General
    |robots=All
    }}</ref>, his family moved to Woodstock, NY in 1945<ref>{{cite web|url=http://billyfaier.com/
    |accessdate=2009-12-19
    |title=Billy Faier - The Five String Banjo
    |date=2009-12-10
    |description=Billy Faier. Born in Brooklyn, New York on Dec. 21, l930.  Moved to Woodstock, New York in l945 with family. Started playing banjo, guitar, and singing folk songs at seventeen, in 1947. Recorded for Riverside Records, Elektra Records, Tradition Records, and many other labels over the years.
    |GENERATOR=Microsoft FrontPage 4.0
    |keywords=billy faier, billie faier, banjo billy, five string banjo, the beast of billy faier, banjo, billy faier banjo, billy faier musician, Folk Music, Guitar; Woodstock, New York folk music, Newport Folk Festival, Berkeley Folk Festival, Winnipeg Folk Festival, Kerrville Folk Festival, Vancouver Folk Festival, billy fair, famous billy the banjo player, billie fair, www.billyfaier.com, banjo billy faier
    |rating=General
    |robots=All
    }}</ref>, and now resides in Marathon, Texas. He, along with [[Pete Seeger]], was one of the early proponents of the banjo during the mid-20th century [[American folk music revival]].
    
    Active in the [[Washington Square Park]] folk scene in [[Greenwich Village]] from the late 1940s, he recorded two albums for [[Riverside Records]], ''The Art of the Five-String Banjo'' (1957) and ''Travelin' Man'' (1958)<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.wirz.de/music/faierfrm.htm
    |title=Billy Faier Discography
    |accessdate=2009-12-19
    |date=2004-01-31
    |ROBOTS=NOINDEX
    }}</ref>. In 1973, he recorded ''Banjo'' for [[John Fahey (musician)|John Fahey]]'s [[Takoma Records|Takoma]] label.
    
    == Selected Discography ==
    
    In 2009, Faier decided to make much of his out of print and unreleased material available on his [http://billyfaier.com/ website].
    
    * ''The Art of the Five-String Banjo'' (1957 - with [[Frank Hamilton (musician)|Frank Hamilton]])
    * ''Travelin' Man'' (1958)
    * ''The Beast of Billy Faier'' (1964 - with [[John Sebastian]])
    * ''Banjo'' (1973)
    * ''Banjos, Birdsong And Mother Earth'' (1987 - with John Sebastian and [[Gilles Malkine]])
    
    == References ==
    {{Reflist}}
    
    == External links ==
    * [http://billyfaier.com/ Billy Faier's website]
    * [http://www.wirz.de/music/faierfrm.htm Billy Faier discography] (with some errors and omissions).
    * [http://www.ibdb.com/person.php?id=102378 Billy Faier] at the Internet Broadway Database.
    * [http://www.lib.unc.edu/mss/inv/f/Faier,Billy.html Billy Faier Collection] at The Southern Folklife Collection, [[University of North Carolina]] libraries.
    * [http://archives.nodepression.com/author/billy-faier/ Articles by Billy Faier] in [[No Depression (magazine)]].
    * [http://thebanjoman.com/know-featured-archive.htm Feature on Billy Faier on The Banjo Man]
    
    <!--- Categories --->
    {{DEFAULTSORT:Faier, Billy}}
    [[Category:American folk musicians]]
    [[Category:American folk singers]]
    [[Category:American singer-songwriters]]
    [[Category:American banjoists]]
    [[Category:People from New York City]]
    [[Category:Living people]]
    [[Category:Riverside Records artists]]
    
    
  • the subtle image editor in WordPress 2.9

    While I still like 1&1, they have a fairly modest hard-coded PHP memory limit. This means that some WordPress plugins will exhaust memory, and fail.
    I’d been wanting to set up Scissors for Catherine‘s blog so she could more easily edit images without having to learn GIMP. But it wouldn’t work, running out of memory at every turn, and trying to set PHP’s memory limit locally cause WordPress to fail completely.
    So I was pleased to see that WordPress 2.9 had an editor built in. The upgrade went smoothly (I don’t miss the days of rm -i *.php and making sure you didn’t vape your config file), but I couldn’t seem to find the editor. (It’s early, I’m old.)

    It’s called up by that quiet little button under the image details:

    Works just fine. It probably zaps all the image metadata (Scissors did), but we’ll see how it goes.

  • can you see the computer hidden in this picture?

    Of course you can: it’s the laptop right behind the monitors. That’s more than our IT group could, though; they didn’t upgrade my computer ‘cos they couldn’t find it …

  • manifold: ur doin it wrong

    This is supposed to be a nice site map, but Manifold GIS has this impenetrable and counter-intuitive user interface. No wonder it has such an active user community; they’ve all paid for it and are desperately trying to get some value out of it.

  • iRed Lite – Takes Apple Remote Further

    iRed Lite
    iRed Lite is just the thing if you’re rushing to put a presentation together, and you want to use your Apple Remote to flip the slides

  • wrong in every possible (good) way

    deathchase on rockbox on sansaI found my bricked Sandisk Sansa E250 in a pile in the basement. I thought I’d give it one last try to get it going. After much faffing about, I found that applying this fix – Corrupted version.txt/Fw update not working in recovery mode? The solution !!! – Sansa e200 FAQ – abi>>forums (which resulted in a failed boot saying something about an mi4 not being found) followed by Recovering a bricked Sansa had it working with the fairly awful Sandisk firmware. So it was off to Rockbox for the latest version.

    I have to say, Rockbox 3.4 is pretty neat. They’ve now got proper USB reading/writing/charging, so that you never have to see the clunky Sandisk UI again. When plugged in, the player acts as a USB keyboard for controlling your music. Apparently the E250 can now support MicroSDHC cards, which it couldn’t before. But best (and least useful) of all, is that you can play 3D Deathchase and other ZX Spectrum games on it …

  • cheap databases for Mac

    Apparently they all use the wonderful SQLite, too.

  • wordpress visual editor not working?

    If it always doesn’t work, go to Users -> Edit Profile, then check ‘Disable the visual editor when writing’, then update profile. Now go back and uncheck ‘Disable the visual editor when writing’, and resave your settings.

    This worked for Catherine under 2.8.5. I’ve never had this problem myself.

  • renaming files to include datestamp

    My Marantz PMD-620 has a reliable internal clock, and stamps the files with the time that recording stopped. File times are remarkably fragile, so I wanted to make sure that the times were preserved in the file name. Perl’s rename utility does this rather well, as it allows you to use arbitrary code in a rename operation. So:

    rename -n 'use POSIX qw(strftime); my $mtime=(stat($_))[9]; s/.WAV$//; $_ .= strftime("-%Y%m%d%H%M%S",localtime($mtime)); s/$/.WAV/;' *.WAV

    which, for files 1007.WAV and 1008.WAV recorded last night, results in:

    1007.WAV renamed as 1007-20091024192436.WAV
    1008.WAV renamed as 1008-20091024193438.WAV

    To actually rename the files, remove the -n from the command line. I left it in so you couldn’t blame me for b0rking up your files if you typed first, thought later.

    There are probably smarter ways to handle the file extension. This works for me. Perfection comes later.

  • AddressBook 4.0 Help: Importing and exporting vCards

    vCard Splitter used to be teh way to split up the huge vCard file that Apple Address book creates. But it doesn’t work under Snow Leopard, but I discovered this tip from Apple: To create multiple vCards at the same time, hold the Option key when dragging multiple cards out of the Address Book window.
    To export all your contacts as separate vCards, select them all, hold down ‘Option’, and drag them to a folder in Finder. It would really help if this wasn’t the Desktop folder, unless you like major cleanups …

  • the old familiar way

    $ telnet cix.compulink.co.uk
    Connected to cix.compulink.co.uk.
    Escape character is '^]'.
    
    CIX Conferencing System
    login: ......
    CIX Version 3.4.3 of Aug 12 2005 running on Fri Sep 18 14:24:48 2009
    Copyright (c) CoSy Conferencing System, University of Guelph, 1984
    Portions copyright (c) Compulink Information eXchange Ltd, 1985-1999
    You are on line: 5
    Nickname? (Enter 'new' for new user) scruss
    Password:
    Checking your conferences
    You have 1 mail message(s) in your in-basket.
    There are 1 unread mail message(s).
    You are a member of 1 conference(s).
    
    Main:mail
    xdusraojwuvup   371170 . Thu Sep 17 23:42 2009. Just to be invited is a privi
    Mail:send
    To: scruss@.........
    Enter subject: You've had this e-mail address for 20 years
    Enter message. End with '.'
    >How does it feel to be that old?
    >
    > Stewart
    >.
    send/action:
    Sending..Memo 376095 sent
    Mail:quit
    Main:bye
    There is unread Mail, do you really want to quit ? (y/n)? y
    scruss, you have been online 2:12 on line 5
    Goodbye from CIX     !!!HANGUP NOW!!!
  • She’s so beautiful the love of my life. We drove into the sea …

    Screen shot 2009-09-12 at 19.28.46
    earthsurfer is the first computer application for years – perhaps decades – that has made me go “Wheeeeeeeee!” It’s a port of Monster Milktruck! to use the Wii Balance Board on the Mac through Bluetooth. It has no use whatsoever, but it is inordinate amounts of fun.

  • Light cyan and light magenta

    To echo Thomas’s post about HP light ink usage, my C5150 definitely uses them:

    HP C5150 Ink LevelsI think I’m on my second light cyan and magenta, while I’m on my fourth regular cyan and magenta cartridges.

    The one thing I have learned not to do is buy the six cartridge photo pack. While it looks a bunch cheaper (typically, $45 for six cartridges + 150 sheets of photo paper), the bundled cartridges have a much lower capacity than the singles – maybe 1/3 less. So you don’t really save anything, create more waste, and end up with far more photo paper than you can use.

  • Hotlink protection of images with .htaccess

    Since discovering a few of my images hotlinked on other sites, I now have Hotlink protection of images with .htaccess. We’ll see what happens …

  • I’m crap at tracing

    traced A, from GeorgiaI’m getting slightly better with my drawing tablet, but have a long way to go.

  • my beautiful neighbourhood

    Here’s a bike ride around my neighbourhood rendered in QGIS using Bing Maps imagery via OnTerra Bing Maps WMS Service:

    qgis rendering a bing map via wms

    (via)