We Saw a Chicken …

Category: computers suck

  • Do You Wanna Be In My Clan?

    If you play Kingdom of Loathing, and like Robyn Hitchcock, may I invite you to join my clan, The Worshipful Company of Fegs?

  • Normal Service Resumed, I think

    I just got my blog working pretty close to the way I want it to be again. I should be back up and posting.

    Big huge apologies to Catherine, with whom I was quite unnecessarily grouchy while this was not working. Sorry, Hen!

  • ***TypeBlog***

    typewriter blog entry, 19 Sep 2004

    — The above written on an IBM Wheelwriter 10 Series II, using the Thesis PS printwheel.

  • two companies that don’t get it

    Please, online companies, whatever you do, don’t send users’ usernames and passwords in clear over e-mail. I’ve just ordered from Future Photo and delivery.ca, and both do this. Worse still, delivery.ca (or at least their Pizzaville service) allows you to save credit card information on their site.

    As one who is just recovering from more than $8000 of fraudulent transactions on his card, this does not inspire confidence.

  • disgruntled domain for sale

    DISGRUNTLED-FORMER-EMPLOYEE.COM

    … is for sale. Enquire within. Being perfectly gruntled, I have no need for it.

    If you are a disgruntled former employee, or would like to start a forum for disgruntled former employees, this would be perfect.

  • Jings, fast photo!

    My Future Photo just arrived. I didn’t know that Canada Post could move so quickly. The quality’s great, too.

  • Linksys NSLU2 – Network Storage for the people

    I’d been looking for a backup solution for a while, and yesterday I found it in the very small shape of the Linksys NSLU2 – Network Storage Link for USB 2.0 Disk Drives. There’s been a lot of talk recently about hacking these tiny embedded Linux boxes, but I just want to store stuff from my Linux machines and Catherine’s eMac.

    I bought it, an external USB2.0 3.5″ drive case, and a 160GB Seagate driver yesterday from Canada Computers on College St for under C$350, including tax. It took about half an hour to assemble it, install it, and format the drive from the web interface.

    I find it’s easiest to make named users — and tell the unit to make a subdirectory for that user — than fiddle about with other methods of making shares. You’ll also need to enable smbfs (File Systems → Network file Systems → SMBFS support in your kernel config) on your Linux machines.

    I have created three shares: scruss (for me), craine (for Catherine) and mp3 (for our shared MP3 collection). I have created relevant directories from /mnt, and chmoded them to the appropriate user. These are the lines I have added to my fstab:

    //squirrel/scruss	/mnt/smb_scruss	smbfs	username=scruss,password=******,rw,users	0 0
//squirrel/mp3		/mnt/mp3	smbfs	username=mp3,password=******,rw,users	0 0

    I renamed the NSLU2 squirrel to fit in with the Canadian rodent theme I’ve got going with the other machines around here.

    With Catherine’s eMac, I’ve found I have to use the OS X 10.1 / .nsmbrc method. Once you have the shares defined in the .nsmbrc file, you can call them up by doing Connect to Server and specifying something like smb://netbiosname/share, like smb://squirrel/craine.

    The NSLU2 looks like it will be rock-solid. It has a couple of quirks — it formats the drive in Linux ext3 format, it will shut down at the slightest hint of a power glitch, and it’s rather slow — but I can put up with slowness if the data’s secure.

  • Mostly working

    Okay, WordPress works now. I’m keeping the old MT archives for now, as there doesn’t seem to be a sane way of getting Apache’s mod_rewrite to work properly here. I suspect PEBCAK, probably, with intensely arcane rewrite rule syntax as a mitigating factor.

  • Under New Management

    You’ll notice that the blog looks different. I’ve changed from Movable Type to WordPress. The latter is free, and looks more fun. All I need to do is work out how to reindex my archives.

  • nice scaling

    My Nikon D70 makes images that are too large for the web, so I have to scale them down. Most image scaling routines use simple linear interpolation, which can lose a lot of detail, but some packages use cubic scaling. This keeps most of the detail.

    I was looking for a scriptable cubic routine, and I found it in Image::Magick, aka perlmagick. The syntax is simple:

    $x = $image->Resize(geometry => '50%',
                    filter => 'Cubic');

    I used this routine to resize my 2004 Ontario Renfest pictures.

  • two cheers for sympatico

    Sympatico finally fixed my DSL problems last night. It seems that my account was set to fast mode, when the cheesy old copper we have around here really needs interleaved mode, which trades higher latency for error-correcting operation.

    I’m happy now, but why did it take two calls — the second of which I was on hold to the Bell DSL centre for nearly 20 minutes — to sort this simple problem?

  • photo printers

    I want to print some of my D70 pictures, so I asked the GTABloggers what they used:

    I’m looking for a non-proprietary upload system, so Ofoto is out. I’d like to try photocentre.ca, but I know no-one who has tried them.

  • Renfest ’04

    Hawk Landing
    (links to my Renfest gallery.)

    I went to the Ontario Renfest twice this weekend. On Saturday it was with Chris, Andi, Blair & Norvin (who was taking a little time off from promoting Zenon Membrane Bioreactor technology). Yes, there was merriment, in both liquid and meat form. Oh, and Zoltan the Adequate was indeed more than adequate.

    I went again on Sunday, after picking up Catherine from the airport. We mostly went to see the owl at the Canadian Raptor Conservancy flight display.

    I think we’ll definitely go again next year. Huzzah!

  • cron, gone

    fresh sweet cron
    This is the sign that used to be at the farm on the corner of Steeles and Warden. If you go there now, it’s just a mini-mall. The geese that used to roost there will be confused.

    This sign is vaguely amusing if you know the famous Unix scheduling tool, cron.

  • My race of Atomic Supersquirrels will destroy them all!



    (Photo Credit: Brian Gavriloff, Edmonton Journal)
    Yes, I’ve been using mind-control techniques on squirrels to get them to erase the environmental and sartorial stain known as golf from the face of the earth.

    Or alternatively, it’s just a picture from a silly-season story about Edmonton squirrels stealing golf balls. You decide. Remember, there is no conspiracy.

  • thanks, 1and1

    Thanks, 1and1! It’s taken me several hours to restore Gallery and Movable Type after you decided to delete all my dynamic content. Gotta love that customer service.

  • Bad, Naughty Sympatico

    Sympatico are hopeless. Not merely can they barely keep a DSL carrier open for a few minutes at our house, but they also have crazy support policies.

    They only way that they will support me is if I lug Catherine’s eMac downstairs, and have it hanging straight off the DSL modem. They won’t support any of my linux boxes, and they won’t consider talking to me if I have the Linksys router in place. The fact that I can see their modem losing carrier and trying to resync even when there’s nothing connected to it doesn’t seem to matter to them.

    And for this aggravation, I pay $60 a month. Their technical support seems to have got a bit more evil since they partnered with MSN. I think I’m in the market for a new service provider.

  • anniversaries

    Today is:

    • the 12th anniversary of Catherine and I meeting (on a boat from Aberdeen to Lerwick).

    • the 9th anniversary of my first post to fegmaniax, the only-vaguely-Robyn Hitchcock-related mailing list.

  • simple cheapo CF card adaptor and Linux

    As I’m about to go (almost) entirely digital, I’m looking for ways of reading CF cards on my Linux-based ThinkPad. I was in Henry’s clearance store yesterday, and they had PCMCIA CF card readers for $10. I’ve found that it works well, though it took me a while to get it going. Here’s what I did:

    You will need to install Card Services for Linux, if you haven’t already. After that’s done, you can check which cards are installed with cardctl ident:

    Socket 0:
  product info: "Wireless Network CardBus PC Card", "Global", "", ""
  manfid: 0x0097, 0x8402
Socket 1:
  product info: "LEXAR ATA FLASH CARD     ", "STORM  ", "ST BM"
  manfid: 0x4e01, 0x0200
  function: 4 (fixed disk)

    Ignore the Socket 0 output — it’s my wireless network card. The adaptor in socket 1 does contain a Lexar CF card; you’ll get a different message if yours is a different manufacturer.

    If you don’t get this, it’s likely that (somehow) your system isn’t preloading the ide-cs module; check the /etc/pcmcia/config file, and read the various pcmcia-cs manual pages.

    If you check the output of the kernel messages (with dmesg, or your tool of choice), you should see:

    hde: LEXAR ATA FLASH, CFA DISK drive

    You’ll want to make a mount point for this disk, so mkdir -m777 /mnt/flash. Then you can edit /etc/fstab, and add:

    /dev/hde1 /mnt/flash auto noauto,user,rw 0 0

    From now on, you can access your camera’s CF card from /mnt/flash. No messing around with USB required!