I just bought an iRiver H120 portable hard disk/audio player/recorder. It seems to work quite well with Linux, so far. Even at over 9MB/s, it’s taking a while to transfer my music collection.
I bought it from the terribly-named G-Wiz store in Scarborough Town Centre. I think it might’ve been a store return — there was some truly execrable music on it (Eminem and Kylie Minogue … bleah!), and the packaging was slightly open. Hmm.
I make Scots Tablet; in fact, I’m almost famous for it. I also roast my own coffee, which I get from Merchants of Green Coffee. What harm could come from combining the two, I thought?
Plenty, is the answer. By adding ¼ cup (measured before grinding) of finely-ground coffee beans to a half batch of tablet has resulted in almost black tarry lumps that combined sugar, butterfat and caffeine into a mallet-to-the-back-of-the-head rush.
Next time, I might use just a smidge less coffee. At the moment, it’s like a cross between full-on Rademaker’s Haagsche Hopjes and Uncle Ump’s Umpty Candy. I suspect that the RCMP will come knocking soon.
A routine that I prototyped in Perl took 7 hours 45 minutes to run on this P4-2800. The Fortran version completed in 192 seconds.
I suspect it’s comp.lang.fortran‘s second most frequently-asked question, but the language has no concept of stderr, the POSIX error output stream. Or at least, there’s no standard IO unit attached to stderr, if it’s defined at all.
Since writing to stderr is my usual debug message method, this is going to be a slog …
Just found one of my old Fortran-77 fractal programs, output of which is shown above. Reminds me of the days I used to consume (and ocasionally write for) Fractal Report avidly.
Being able to see this represents quite a bit of work on my part. It’s the output from WAsP‘s map editor, reprsenting some terrain roughness data exported from Surfer.
The original data set looks a bit like this:
It’s a grid of values. Unfortunately, WAsP wants the boundaries, and it took me a while to work out a (rather inefficient) algorithm to find them.
Now I have to go off and recode this in Fortran 90. I’m glad that the Intel® Fortran Compiler for Linux is available free.
HSBC Canada Bank discriminates against Linux users. On April 18th, they “upgraded” their online banking facilities. Before this, they were slightly clunky, but worked just fine on almost any browser and computer I’d care to try.
Since Sunday, though, this is what I get when I try to access my bank details using Mozilla 1.6 on any of my Linux boxes:
To access internet banking, please use:
* Internet Explorer version 5.0 or above; or
o Netscape Communicator version 4.72 or above (version 6.x currently not supported)
So I mail them about this, and get this reply:
We apologize for the inconvenience; however effective April 18, 2004, when we launched our Personal Internet Banking update, the browsers that our Internet Banking will support are as follows: Internet Explorer 5.5 and up, Netscape 6.2.1 or 7.1.
I dutifully install Netscape 7.1 on my notebook, and what do I get?
To access internet banking, please use:
* Internet Explorer version 5.0 or above; or
o Netscape Communicator version 4.72 or above (version 6.x currently not supported)
And this is with the real bloated-as-life Netscape 7.1
[Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030624 Netscape/7.1 ] browser.
Things got really weird when I tried Mozilla 1.6
[Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040113] under Windows 2000 — and it worked just fine.
My usual browser identifies itself as [Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040406]. Looking at HSBC’s browser-sniffing code (eww!) I find that it’s looking for Windows or Mac more than it cares about the actual browser.
I’d best go tell Evan, who maintains the very useful Banks ‘n’ Browsers page, that HSBC must really hate Linux. They really don’t need to give me yet another reason to switch banks.
How apt that, in order to join have_moicy (the Holy Modal Rounders discussion list), I got the above captcha.
Oh, and did I say that we really enjoyed hearing Chris Smither play at Hugh’s Room last Friday?
Okay, so I’ve got two wireless cardbus cards — an SMC 2435W and a D-Link DWL-650+. Both use the same chipset. Which to keep?
Yes, this evening saw Stewart wandering about his street in Scarborough seeing where each card gave out. I got some strange looks.
I think the D-Link card has the edge in range, being able to connect from across the street. It was a bit more expensive, and it has a bulkier aerial. The SMC is more svelte, and was less than half the price. I’d probably recommend both cards, if you can handle the hassle of building the acx100 driver.
I should really test their battery drain. I have a felling that the D-Link’s a bit of a hog, as my battery is dropping quite fast.
So ufile.ca did actually work for us, but only under Mozilla on Catherine’s eMac. The process was actually quite painless, and their user interface is nice — if if works with your browser.
It’s strange that they claim that their system works with Linux, yet got into such a terrible mess with me.
Anyway, that’s our taxes filed. I’ll try not to spend all of my refund in the one shop.
After only weeks of messing about with this ThinkPad, I’ve finally got the D-Link DWL-650+ wireless card working. So I’m enjoying the luxury of composing this entry unplugged, emerging some Gentoo packages, and listening to MC Honky. The joys of new computing facility are always short lived; it’s like the first and only time you go “Wow!” at how fast your new computer is. After that, it’s just how fast a computer should be.
(Talking of “wow”, the speakers on this T21 are just the perfect sound and separation to listen to lofi. The playlist has just skipped to Neutral Milk Hotel, and Jeff Mangum has just hollered I Love You, Jesus Christ like to raise my nape hairs.)
Anyway, I got the DWL-650+ working by following the instructions all the way through. Radical, no?
I also had to do some rescue work on the T21, as I’d accidentally found a way to bork /sbin/init (to none Unix types: about the same as deleting some choice DLLs in the System directory) by giving Gentoo a USE flag suggested by emerge -p -v baselayout. How was I supposed to know that the relatively innocuous build option is a special low level guaranteed-not-to-actually-build-this-don’t-even-think-of-using-this option.
With Holland, 1945 wailing out of the tiny tinny speakers, I can retire to bed happy.
ufile.ca is seriously broken under Mozilla 1.6. I’ve wasted the last hour or so trying to stop their weird menus from overlapping. Online tax filing’s supposed to be quick, isn’t it? I wonder if I can charge the time I’ve wasted (at my usual contractor rate) to them?
It’s very strange to be getting back into a language as different to Perl as it is possible to be. I’m fairly conversant with the weird bits of Perl — map, grep, hash usage, objects — but Fortran has a completely different toolkit
That’s not to say it’s a bad toolkit, just very different, F’rinstance, trying to find all the distinct values in an array. In Perl, you just walk through a hash, parallel to the array, incrementing each key for every value found. In Fortran — well, it’s a different story.
My voice is now on the GMU Accent Archive. Yeah, I really sound like this, minus the earth loop hum, of course.
Oh, and my first day at my new job was great.
Breaking radio silence to say that I’ve finally got a semblance of Gentoo running on the ThinkPad. I’ve had more fun.
Gnome installation is currently broken under Gentoo. That stalled it for a couple of days, at least.
In the last 12 hours or so, I’ve been getting a new kind of comment spam on this blog. The text is fairly harmless: “very interesting article”, or “if you are using Linux or unix you can take a look at sourceforge.net”, but the link goes off to one of those pharmacy sites, or to russian car registration people.
Yes, I can run MT-Blacklist manually on them, and they are a bit lower key than the older style ones, but they’re still very annoying.
I’m building Gentoo Linux on my laptop. Every little package that wants to build goes off and calls a configure script, as built by gnu autoconf. Every one checks the presence of features by compiling a little test program.
This gets slow. Quite why a system can’t cache autoconf results, and tell configure that it has this, that and the other. My computers seem to spend half their time somewhere in a configure script (serves me right for using Gentoo), but there has to be a better way than the status quo.
Yes, it’s just a generic-looking KDE desktop (you’ll probably have to sleect the thumbnail to see the full-size image). But this was from an IBM T21 laptop I bought from Laptop Closeout.com today. I plugged the network cable into my router, stuck the USB key in the back, and booted from an old (3.2) Knoppix CD. You can see it found both the network connection, and the USB key. Oh, and it can play MP3s too.
No configuration was done. I just booted, and this is what I got.
I love it when stuff just works. Plug it in, check dmesg to see what it says:
hub.c: new USB device 00:02.2-1.1, assigned address 7 scsi3 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices Vendor: Generic Model: STORAGE DEVICE Rev: 1.02 Type: Direct-Access ANSI SCSI revision: 02 Attached scsi removable disk sdb at scsi3, channel 0, id 0, lun 0 SCSI device sdb: 512000 512-byte hdwr sectors (262 MB) sdb: Write Protect is off /dev/scsi/host3/bus0/target0/lun0: p1 WARNING: USB Mass Storage data integrity not assured USB Mass Storage device found at 7
So we know from the /dev/scsi/host3/bus0/target0/lun0: p1
line that the filesystem is at
/dev/scsi/host3/bus0/target0/lun0/part1. Create your
mountpoint as root: mkdir -m777 /mnt/cruzer, then edit
/etc/fstab, and add:
/dev/scsi/host3/bus0/target0/lun0/part1 /mnt/cruzer vfat noauto,user 0 0
Any user can mount the device with mount /mnt/cruzer,
and next time Nautilus starts up, the device can be mounted from the
desktop. Easy!
The hardest part was opening the packaging, but you know what I
have to say about SanDisk packaging …
