Rhetoric, Life, and Everything

Things to try: No-delay video on Hauppauge PVR150

2010-04-28T07:28:00.000-07:00

v4l2-ctl -v width=720,height=480
v4lctl setinput "Composite 1"
ivtv-tune -c1
aplay -q --buffer-time=100 -f dat /dev/video24 &
mplayer -rawvideo format=hm12:h=480:w=720:fps=29.97 \
-nocache -demuxer 26 /dev/video32 -framedrop -vo xv -monitoraspect 16:10 -aspect 4:3
killall aplay

DSL Line stats

2010-04-21T08:51:00.000-07:00

Step 1: telnet into the modem
Step 2:

adsl info expand=true

Converting and chunking single-file CDs (with CUE sheets)

2010-04-20T15:11:00.000-07:00

Issue 1: You have a number of files with .ape extension, for which there is no default player on Ubuntu.

Solution: Convert them with ffmpeg:

for f in *.ape; do ffmpeg -i "$f" "${f%.ape}.wav"; done

Issue 2: You have a music CD which you ripped to .ape, .flac, or whatever else, but instead of splitting the file you just created a CUE sheet for re-burning and would like to split it for your digital music player.

Solution: Use shnsplit:

shnsplit -o flac -f [file].cue -t "%n. %a - %p - %t" -m \ _ [file].flac

Replace [file] with the appropriate filename (or wildcard). If your input file is not .flac (e.g. .wav, as per the .ape file converted above) just use the appropriate extension. Check the manpages for shnsplit for additional configurations.

TeX woes

2010-04-19T20:14:00.000-07:00

After a recent macports update I had issues getting TeX to recognize the local files installed in

~/Library/texmf

. I re-ran texhash, but to no avail. Long story short, it turned out that the issue was not with texhash, but with the search path for kpathsea in

/opt/local/share/texmf/web2c

. Changing the 'TEXMFHOME' variable to the default setting did the trick. In addition, to prevent further updates from overwriting the change, edit the first line and alter the word 'original' (to, for example, 'custom').

The sorry state of cross-platform GUI development in Ruby

2010-04-07T19:29:00.001-07:00

Let's take a look at the contenders:

* fxRuby. Yeah, this one's a dinosaur. Pass.
* ruby-tk. Won't play nice with system libraries on Snow Leopard.
* wxRuby. Ditto.
* Shoes. Works, but does not play nice with already-installed gems, since it uses a separate system. It's own system will install but not run with Nokogiri.
* hotcocoa (via Macruby). Won't install Nokogiri because it references the C library libxml2, and Macruby does not like that yet.

So, what is one to do? Well, you could either give up on Nokogiri (fat chance), or say to hell with developing a GUI in Ruby and just go implement it either natively, or in Java if you need it to be portable. Then you can either re-parse the files, or use IPC to connect to a ruby daemon script.

Classification algorithms, the easy way

2010-03-31T11:16:00.000-07:00

Weka is a wonderful, wonderful tool.

Nokogiri: DOM vs XPATH...

2010-03-31T11:09:00.000-07:00

... FIGHT!

In the one corner: The object-oriented approach to selecting certain child nodes,

 node.children.filter( "criteria" )

In the other corner: XPath,

 node.xpath( "criteria" )

Who will be the champion?

It's a knockout! XPath just wipes the floor with its opponent!

Lucid OSCAR

2010-03-31T10:53:00.001-07:00

Getting Oscar to run on Ubuntu Lucid is not a terribly arduous task. For the most part you can follow this guide, with some modifications of course:

* Don't install Tomcat from the Ubuntu repos. You'll only find Tomcat 6, and it's too much of a hassle to get Oscar to run on that (for now - word is in the Oscar scene that they'll release a new official version around June, and I'll bet you dollars on a dime that it will support the new Ubuntu LTS out of the box). For now, just grab Tomcat 5.5 off of the Apache site, and follow any run-of-the-mill installation guide for it.

* Just go with Ubuntu's default-jdk.

* If you're comfortable with Ubuntu's upstart you don't need to restart the machine, just (re)start the necessary services.

* ~~Don't use the Oscar snapshot referenced in the guide.~~ You may use the Oscar snapshot referenced in the guide, but do not use the pre-archived (09.06) snapshot on the Oscar download page. The MySQL scripts of that version are broken. ~~I've had no problem with the bleeding-edge CVS snapshot.~~ Sometimes the bleeding-edge CVS snapshot breaks, but it works most of the time.
** When running the MySQL script with the bleeding-edge CVS snapshot, where the guide instructs you to just enter the password instead of ****** you need to enter both the username and password, i.e.

./createdatabase_on.sh root <mysql_rootpassword> oscar_mcmaster

* ~~The SSL certificate line probably won't work for you. I haven't played much with it yet, but until you change it you won't be able to log into Oscar.~~ The oscar.war file contain its own oscar_mcmaster.properties file which WILL override the oscar.properties in your Tomcat directory. For the most part that is no huge problem, except that it also overrides the MySQL password that you set, thus making you unable to log in. You can either set the MySQL password to be the same as the original one in the oscar.properties file (BAD idea), or you can change the oscar.properties file BEFORE running ant.

Lenovo G550 wireless with Ubuntul Lucid beta

2010-03-23T15:44:00.000-07:00

Forget about it. Kernel 2.6.32 is borked with regards to the compat drivers. 2.6.34 has compat built in, so you can use the ubuntu-supplied b43 drivers, but the firmware is still (pardon my French) fucked up. Save yourself a lot of headaches and just get yourself a nice USB wireless card using a Ralink rt73 chipset. They run for $15 these days and work just peachy.

The G550 has a bcm4315 chipset (4312 rev01). It is a royal pain in the neck to work with.

First of all, forget the default drivers.

Second, forget the automatically-suggested non-free drivers.

So, what DO you do? Well, you visit linuxwireless.org and install the 'bleeding edge' compat-wireless drivers (Search the page for those words). Installation is fairly straightforward, just download, untar, and follow the README.

THEN you go to the b43 firmware page and follow the instructions for the 'LP-PHY' cards (again, search for the quoted text). Do NOT use the Ubuntu guides, they won't get you the correct firmware.

Finally, you update initramfs with `sudo update-initramfs -vuk all'.

Epiphany

2010-03-19T19:37:00.001-07:00

Epanaphora = Continuity.

OSCAR (not the grouch)

2010-03-17T18:07:00.000-07:00

Interested in getting OSCAR up and running? Skip the VM image - it's corrupted. Good luck with the .ISO installer - It does not like rebooting. So what is one to do in such cases? Why of course, go and roll your own installation. Wish me luck... It's going to be a long night.

Ruby and XML

2010-03-08T17:11:00.000-08:00

Working with Ruby and XML can be a hassle if you use the default parser, REXML. Fortunately there is Nokogiri, a feature-rich XML and HTML parser with good performance and a significantly better API (albeit lacking in documentation). It is not a strict DOM parser, but it is SAX, SAX2 and XPath compliant, and can handle DOM-like work fairly decently so that you won't feel too much like a fish out of water if that is what you are comfortable with.

Bell Canada Lies

2010-03-08T16:57:00.000-08:00

When I receive a telemarketing call, a sensible service representative will apologize, put me on the list, advise me that it may take X days for it to take effect, and we're both happy and go our way. Not so with Bell.

See, Bell Canada service representatives will turn a deaf ear to your requests to be put on their do not call list, claim to know that you are a customer of [major rival company] (which you are not), constantly drone on about how their service is better than what they think you currently have, and hang up on you when you ask them if they understood your words. Rinse and repeat every two weeks.

Bell Canada is a hive of scum and villainy, they will lie to your face about their services, and they engage in uncompetitive business practices (such as naming their copper DSL service 'Fibe' -- Which is awfully close to 'fiber' and will confuse customers who are not savvy in tech matters).

Bell Canada's own support representatives are constantly pushed to sell Bell services when a customer calls in with a support question. Actually helping their customer is not valued, only average handling time and amount of services sold. Bell's own policies promote service mediocrity, and their call centers have a horrible turnover rate.

Scroo Yoo, Rogers!

2009-09-11T19:41:00.000-07:00

I has an unlock.

E-reader on the Mac

2009-08-08T08:27:00.000-07:00

You know, when you search "mac+lit" on Google, the top results tell you that you can't read those files unless you convert them. BULLCRAP I say. You just need to get Stanza.

Steps

2009-07-07T00:59:00.000-07:00

* Chunk by DOC tag
* Strip DOCHDR data
* convert to plaintext

Compacting VirtualBox image - Ubuntu edition

2009-07-04T10:37:00.000-07:00

It is well documented among the VirtualBox community that 'dd' is not enough to zero out a disk image for compacting. The preferred tool to do so is 'zerofree'. Now, the issue is that it requires the disk to be mounted as readonly. This is fine and dandy, except when you only have one partition to work with. My workaround is to use the Ubuntu minimal CD. The steps necessary are:

* Before booting the minimal CD, make sure you've got zerofree installed
'sudo aptitude install zerofree'
* Boot the minimal image.
* Enter recovery mode.
* In the language selection screen, select "Go Back" instead of picking a language.
* Start a new shell.
* Make a mountpoint, e.g.
'mkdir /mnt/r'
* Mount the disk image,
'mount -n -o ro -t ext2 /dev/sda1 /mnt/r'
* Copy zerofree and the necessary libraries to the tmpfs:
'cp /mnt/r/usr/sbin/zerofree /bin/; cp /mnt/r/lib/libext2fs.so.2 /lib/; cp /mnt/r/lib/libcom_err.so.2 /lib/'
* Run zerofree
'zerofree /dev/sda1'
* Profit!

XMonad compositing

2009-07-04T04:47:00.000-07:00

Enabling compositing in XMonad is easy.

Setting an image as the background is a little bit more difficult. Normal methods like 'qiv' will not work with compositing. Fortunately there's 'hsetroot'. One donwside though is that it does not let you set an offset for the image. This is annoying when your virtual screen is taller than the image's resolution, as I found out when using it on my dual-display machine. I have yet to find a good solution for that.

Installing Ubuntu in VirtualBox

2009-07-02T18:47:00.000-07:00

These steps are for OSX Leopard as a host, Ubuntu Jaunty (9.04) netinstall.

* Don't use the default network adapter. Use the Intel one instead.
* I set the partition manually to just have one big partition, ext2. No swap partition was set up because a) I have enough memory allocated, b) I can always set up a swapfile, c) having a swap partition increases the disk image file size,
* gksu, make, and linux-headers-generic are required to install guest additions.
* The video driver was giving me problems. Installing the guest additions with xserver-xorg-video-vesa alone did not work for me. I've narrowed it down to either xserver-xorg-video-vmware, xserver-xorg-video-fbdev, linux-headers-virtual, or a combination thereof. Afterwards I've removed all but xserver-xorg-video-fbdev and things are still working.
* localepurge and debfoster are your friends when minimizing the disk image size.

.xsession and XRandR

2009-07-02T15:38:00.000-07:00

Note to self: check spelling of lines in the .xsession file.
xrandr --output VGA --mode 1280z1024
is not
xrandr --output VGA --mode 1280x1024

Sixty Symbols

2009-07-02T15:05:00.001-07:00

http://www.sixtysymbols.com/

Non-Drowsy Reactine

2009-06-22T14:38:00.001-07:00

"Warning: may cause drowsiness".

FUCKING LIARS.

Jailbreaking to 3.0

2009-06-21T19:47:00.000-07:00

If you're going to install a jailbroken 3.0 OS on the iPhone/iPod Touch, remember to first install the vanilla version. If you have the .ipsw for it from another one of your machines, place it in "~/Library/iTunes/iPod Software Updates/".

Once the device has been upgraded to vanilla 3.0, you can upgrade it to the jailbroken 3.0 with redsn0w.

Yay for DSLReports

2009-06-17T15:06:00.001-07:00

To enable pinging of a ST780 from WAN:

* Telnet into the router.
> :service system ifadd name=PING_RESPONDER group=wan
> saveall
> exit

Green Screen

2009-06-16T15:31:00.000-07:00

If your HBC backups don't load, change your cIOS38 to rev 13a (not 13b), and use a loader that can apply the 002 error fix, such as USBLoader GX.

SpeedTouch 780 - Firmware Upgrade

2009-06-14T22:35:00.001-07:00

Ok, so Google is completely unhelpful for this. I ended up finding the German SpeedTouch forum, which has a pretty complete list of firmwares.

Lessons learned: SpeedTouch 780WL is NOT SpeedTouch 780 DXT. If you have a firmware that says 7.4.4.7 or similar, DO NOT USE IT. It will not brick your router, but you will have to use the Bootp method to downgrade the firmware to a compatible version, because otherwise it will stay stuck at the factory settings with no chance of letting you log in.

If you did make the mistake of installing the wrong firmware, don't panic! What you will need to do to fix it is the following:
* Get the firmware upgrader (you probably already have it, since you installed the wrong firmware).
* Get the correct firmware! For my router it was ST780_SIP_62T2_bant-r.zip because it has a BANT-R board.
* Unzip it, keep it at a handy location.
Shut off the power to the router. With a pen or toothpick, push down the wee little reset button on the right side of the back panel (near the VoIP ports), keep it pressed, and at the same time turn on the power again. Hold the reset button until the front LEDs change from one red to one green and a flashing orange (some models may have alternating red/green flashing LEDs. Either way, you should be able to notice when the change happend).
* Start the firmware upgrader. It will scan your network for the router. If it doesn't detect it, close the upgrader, and restart it. I had to try several times before it worked for me.
* Select the appropriate firmware. You may have to check a box acknowledging that you are downgrading the firmware before you can hit next. Do the upgrade.
* If it fails, run it again. The process seems to have a tendency to break if you as much as breathe on the router, so 2-3 tries may be necessary. Don't give up too quickly.
* Once it finished upgrading, the router will be set to factory defaults. Go to the setup page, configure everything, and off you go.

Note to self: For future upgrades, the settings are VPI 0.35, PPPoE, user@host / pass.

Merging IM accounts

2009-06-13T22:40:00.001-07:00

I'd been toying with the idea of collecting all my IM accounts and routing them through an always-on server. Something like bitlbee, with an IM client on one end, not IRC. Jabber is *almost* what I want - I can run a server (e.g. Openfire) at home just fine, and it supports all transports. The donwside is, though, than I cannot use multiple transports of the same type on one jabber account, e.g. have two MSN or AIM accounts linked to my jabber login. It will also disconnect me when I close my client. So back to good ok' bitlbee it is, I guess.

Tomcat on OSX

2009-06-12T10:59:00.000-07:00

Forget about using macports. It wants to get xercesj 2.9.1, but apache only serves up to 2.9.0. Instead, I followed the instructions listed here.

Jon Lajoie

2009-06-11T22:02:00.001-07:00

I giggled.

Sunburn!

2009-06-11T21:56:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I had a beer with N and S. It was a gorgeous day, with enough sunshine that we ended up just lounging outside and basking in the sun. Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time. Now I'm a lobster. At least I was wearing my hat.

Homebrew on the Wii

2009-06-11T21:45:00.001-07:00

Since I did not have Zelda: Twilight Princess, and I do not like modchips, I had never gotten around to installing homebrew on my Wii. Last month I got around to do that, however, thanks to the bannerbomb exploit. It did not go too smooth, however. The Homebrew Channel installed fine, but bootmii and DVDx did not, and I could not install any .wad files. It turned out to be due to a missing cIOS. Some sleuthing turned up a package that let me fix that. I also ended up trying a bunch of homebrew apps, and this is the setup I ended up with:

System 4.0u
HBC
Ultimate USB loader 7.1 (based on Waninkoko's 1.5 loader)
Wad manager
Homebrew browser
Mplayer
bootmii as boot2, loading HBC by default

The USB loader is a blessing. I ended up loading all my games onto a USB disk. It's nice not having to get up to swap disks, and it's great for when we're visiting the family, because we only need to pack the usb hard drive instead of 2 dozen dvd boxes.

One problem, though, is that Wiiconnect24 sometimes crashes the games, so I had to turn it off. No big problem there, huh? Well, no, except that with Wiiconnect24 off, turning off the Wii also means turning off power to the USB ports, and thus preventing the wiimotes and the balance board from recharging. Not to mention that I cannot have the usb disk plugged in and charge both peripherals at the same time, because there's only 2 ports. I wonder if a powered USB hub will let me charge the devices.

Cleanign up my Ubuntu package list

2009-06-11T21:33:00.001-07:00

After testing it on the Ubuntu Parallels VM, I decided to remove all Gnome-related packages from old cicada. I'm using slim instead of gdm, wpasupplicant instead of network applet, and of course xmonad. The login manager still defaults to 1204x768, but I suspect that's because the laptop screen only supports up to 1280x768, but it tries to maintain the external monitor aspect ratio. In any case, I managed to get both screens to work at the same time. The trick was to toggle it before grub booted, and voilá, 2 screens. I found a new coolness about xmonad, too - the 2nd monitor will display the last workspace seen, AND xmobar will tell me which desktops each screen is displaying. I'd still like to figure out how to automatically set the resolution for both screens on bootup, but for now I'm a happy camper with xrandr. For those with a more mouse-oriented mind, there's arandr.

Oh, and did I mention that wpasupplicant is much more reliable than network applet (not to mention wifi-radar, which sucked so hard it could pull a golfball through a garden hose)?

I found out that xmonad will keep the background that slim uses. That works nicely on my VM where the screen resolution stays the same, but on poor cicada it has a tendency to maintain the image at the old resolution and tile it. Bleh. I figure though that I just need to find a nice image for tiling (which slim also supports), and Bob's your uncle.

Installing FreeBSD on Parallels: Corrections

2009-06-11T21:21:00.001-07:00

Use pcm0 for the mouse driver

That should say use psm0.

The 5GB installation size is probably due to fragmentation on the image. Not much I can do about it - Parallels Tools offers disk compression on Windows, but not on FreeBSD. I did save some space by taking a snapshot of the powered-off machine so that Parallels does not have to store the RAM contents.

I got rid of everything Gnome, including `gdm'. I've tried `slim', a shiny and minimalistic alternative. Barfed on me, gave up and decided to stick with startx. I found out though that xorg does not like the .xsession file. Linking .xinitrc to it did the trick though.

Jailbreaking

2009-04-04T14:48:00.000-07:00

Having recently purchased an iPod Touch 2g, I figured I'd go ahead an jailbreak it. Being on a mac, that was a little bit more difficult than normal, particularly since I was running the 2.2 firmware. But following the steps here I managed to get that done all right. Some particular notes:

* The rslite tool didn't recognize my macports copy of libusb - I had to make a symlink for the required file.
* I also found that I did not need to run DFU mode on my macbook running OSX 10.5.6. This was odd, but probably just a side-effect of me running other development tools. I'm not going to count this gift horse's teeth.

One thing I'm still peeved about is the weak antenna on the Touch, it would be nice to have a way to boost its power, particularly when dealing with medium-range networks.

Installing FreeBSD on Parallels

2009-03-11T14:44:00.000-07:00

To get networking to work, don't use ipv6.

Xorg settings: Use pcm0 for the mouse driver, sysmouse won't work with the trackpad. Use the default keyboard model (not macbook) vesa for the video card driver. Fullscreen mode is 1280x800

xmonad: Works fine, remember to get xmonad-contrib. xmobar works, but won't be able to get cpu/mem/etc info from /proc. Haven't tried dzen2 yet.

I wonder if I can get a smaller image size if I use a different disk partition. ~5GB for a minimalistic install seems a bit much.

VMWare vs Parallels - It's not about the speed

2009-03-09T16:22:00.000-07:00

There's plenty of VMWare vs. Parallels comparisons, but none yet that covers the most important thing for me in a virtual machine: How much of a pain in the neck is it to install something that's not Windows, onto a non-default VM? In my case, Parallels wins that one.

Screen resolution

2009-03-05T22:39:00.000-08:00

GDM doesn't like to play nice with /etc/X11/xorg.conf . It insists on using a different resolution, which is annoying when one doesn't want to use the Gnome control center. Enter xrandr:

xrandr --output VGA --mode 1280x1024

Now all I have to figure out is how to re-enable the laptop screen with the external monitor plugged in.

xmonad mystery mending

2009-03-05T22:35:00.000-08:00

I had been baffled because on the machines where I had set up xmonad I could not get the alleged exit keystrokes (Mod+shift+Q) to work. Turns out, it was a remnant from when I had experimented with using xmonad instead of Metacity in Gnome. Changing the main method in ~/.xmonad/xmonad.hs from gnomeConfig to defaultConfig fixed that.

Memories fom yore

2009-02-25T18:43:00.000-08:00

The man who counted was the first book that really got me interested in math. Great reading material for young and adults alike.

Safari 4 tweaks

2009-02-24T13:56:00.000-08:00

Disable `Google Suggests':

defaults write com.apple.Safari \
DebugSafari4IncludeGoogleSuggest -bool NO

Also, Safari 4 breaks the GrowlMail bundle. Oh well.

Installing Opera from tarball without sudo priviledges

2009-02-24T07:57:00.000-08:00

The online documentation in the Opera KB says to use

--prefix= to install everything to .

. That however is not enough I find, as the script won't create the necessary directories. Hobo solution: Check the error log from the install script and create them by hand.

PS: If you use Gnome (or at the very least gnome-terminal), don't forget to change the default browser in gnome-control-center (I tried the gconftool way first, but no dice).

Safari 4: First impressions

2009-02-24T07:32:00.000-08:00

The tab bar has been moved to the top of the address bar. While this is space-saving in that it is now merged with the title bar, I see one major inconvenience with it: The `new tab' button is awfully close to the top right screen corner when Safari is maximized, and if you have that corner active it's rather annoying.

They certainly took a page out of the Firefox book with listing the top used sites first when you type into the address bar. I am not so happy, however, that Safari first lists the page title, then the actual address (and that one is grayed out so it's hard to see).

Rendering of new pages seems to work nicely so far. I'll have to fiddle around more to see what breaks and what doesn't.

It seems to be a bit more resource-greedy on startup, but not by a large margin, and I'd have to see how it behaves on the long term to really compare things.

Magenta DOES exist

2009-02-18T11:45:00.000-08:00

It seems that it is necessary to help with the damage control.

Beginner instructions for OpenNLP

2009-02-03T12:35:00.000-08:00

Build the tools, as per the readme.
Download the models and save them to
[opennlpdir]/opennlp.models/[language]/[modeldir]/[model]
Make sure your classpath is set, e.g. before your run the tools, go to your opennlp dir and type
CLASSPATH=`pwd`/output/opennlp-tools-1.4.3.jar:`pwd`/lib/maxent-2.5.2.jar:`pwd`/opennlp/lib/trove.jar:`pwd`opennlp/lib/jwnl-1.3.3.jar/
Now you can continue with the examples in the readme.

Script debugging

2009-02-03T12:26:00.000-08:00

fork: Resource temporarily unavailable

Forget the top Google answers. Instead, check that your script doesn't go into an infinite recursion.

ARGH!

2008-11-18T20:32:00.000-08:00

Supervisor: I need you to take over development of X.
Me: Sure. What do you want me to do?
S: Oh, nothing for now. Focus on Y and Z (both long term goals) first.

(a month later)

Me: Ok, whoever wrote this in the first place didn't plan for any changes - in fact, most of the code is either broken or held together with spit and string. Here is a list of things that don't work.
S: Ok, but keep forcusing on Y and Z. Also, we don't have funding for X any more, so we're putting it on hold.

(2 months later)

S: WHERE ARE THE FIXES FOR THE BUGS YOU FOUND? THIS IS DUE IN 2 WEEKS!
Me: ... Ok, I'll get on it.

(next day)

Me: Ok, here is a demo of the things I changed to fix (half the bugs on the list + others that I found while coding)
S: OMG WHAT ARE YOU DOING, YOU SHOULD ONLY FIX THE PROBLEMS, NOT ADD ANY FEATURES.
Me: ... These ARE the bug fixes.
S: NO NO DON'T CHANGE ANYTHING UNTIL I APPROVE IT, WE DON'T HAVE FUNDING FOR IT! JUST FIX THE BUGS.
Me: (just shoot me now)

Repeat after me:

2008-11-17T16:59:00.000-08:00

A master document is not a tree. It can be viewed as a tree, but when an element has more than one parent, it is not a tree, no matter how badly you wan to call it one. NOT. A. TREE.

Also, displaying the content of a set of elements is not coupled to how said elements are stored. That's called designing before implementing, and using wrappers for displaying.

STOP!

2008-10-17T12:23:00.000-07:00

One of these days I'm going to flip out. I'm sick and tired of almost getting run over by drivers that think that a red light or stop sign mean "slow down in case there's a cop around watching". AND THE BIKE LANE IS NOT A DAMN TURNING LANE!

Robot drivers. I can't wait for them.

F you, GE and Sylvania

2008-10-17T12:19:00.000-07:00

I really loathe GE and Sylvania for advertising their extra-bright headlight bulbs. No, people don't need to see further so that they can drive faster. People need to get a bloody clue and not drive at breakneck speeds at night, and they need to learn to use the damn high beams. There is NO reason for having excessively bright headlights on at all times.

DON'T PANIC!

2008-09-29T21:10:00.001-07:00

I'm getting tired of all the news articles regarding people being outraged at the CERN staff for building the LHC. No, they're not going to blow the Earth to smithereens. Or have it sucked into a black hole. Or turn it into cosmic gravy. Or open a portal to the 8th dimension. And for chrissakes, don't feed trolls like Mark Millar. It's already bad enough that he's a narcissistic, sexist bastard. Don't make him a preacher.

Anathem

2008-09-14T19:21:00.000-07:00

I recently picked up Neal Stephenson's latest work, Anathem. It is a fascinating piece of literature, not only because of the science fiction in it, but particularly because NS's novels are very well-researched. He covers topics from a wide variety of fields, spanning geometry, rhetorics, metaphysics, cosmology, and sociology among others. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in a fictional work that does a great job at meta-inspection of the knowledge of Western society.

2008-09-07T11:57:00.000-07:00

Leopard firewall issues:

Symptoms:

The firewall will ask you if you want to allow configd and mDNSResponder when you boot up.
Adding the above to the allow list for applications does NOT fix the issue.
Restoring the com.apple.kerberos.kdc keychains does NOT fi the issue.
Setting the firewall to "allow all incoming connections" temporarily fixes the problem.

Probable cause:

You removed the battery from your machine, or let it drain, or the OS was not shut down before powering off the machine.

Solution (for me):

Reset the firewall configuration by restoring /Library/Preferences/com.apple.alf.plist

Edit: Nope, that didn't fix it either. And coreaudiod is on the fritz too. I'm thinking of just disabling the alf altogether (e.g. prevent it from starting in the first place).

Rodent woes

2008-07-16T18:39:00.000-07:00

The other day I was worried because my mouse (a VX Revolution) was acting up. It was jumpy, laggy, and generally unresponsive. Nothing I did to the mouse would make it work better. I changed the battery - no change. I Unplugged and re-plugged the receiver - no change. I changed to a different mousepad, to the table surface - no change. I was despairing, because the mouse is no older than a month, and other than that episode of unresponsiveness, it was working great. And then it hit me. The mouse works on the 2.4GHz band. My router works on the 2.4GHz band. I was, at the moment, doing a CVS checkout of considerable size. Putting 2 and 2 together, I stopped the download, and BAM! - The mouse was working again. Lesson learned? Not everything wireless is wonderful. I am still keeping my mouse - but I am considering switching my home network to 802.11n gear and let it work on the 5GHz band.