Author Archives: admin

Long-lived software

2006/02/28 – 22:39

I was just pondering today that one of the more useful and stable day-to-day utilities I’ve ever used, less, I’ve been using for 15 years. That’s a long, long time in software-years. There are few other bits of software that I’ve used so much over so long. So, a salute to you, less, you old pile of bits ya, and to your author Mark Nudelman.

LESS

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Complications

2006/02/21 – 04:20

So, you ever decide to upgrade the storage on your living-room server, buy a hard drive, realize that the hard drive is SATA, which means it won’t work on your server, then figure, “hey, I have SATA on my desktop, might as well try that out”, then realize that your SATA is also RAID-0 capable so you might as well buy another drive and take advantage of that, only to find out after a couple experiments that it’s really not RAID but FakeRAID, and after you find a disk-clone utility that works with FakeRAID, you get the partitions cloned, but now GRUB won’t load due to some error that you don’t understand, so you reinstall the Windows MBR just to see that Windows will at least boot, but you can’t find the XP CD any more so you have to find some random MBR utility on the web and hope it works, but it does indeed work and Windows now boots, but of course Linux doesn’t because neither GRUB nor your installed kernel can deal with FakeRAID, and you finally get GRUB reinstalled but it still gives the error, which is number 18 which turns out to mean that GRUB can’t address your Linux partition through the BIOS, so you figure you might as well try updating the BIOS even though that seems unlikely to fix the problem, and since you don’t have a real floppy in the system and the BIOS makers haven’t graduated into the 19th century or whenever this is and they don’t make a CD-bootable flasher, you have to get the USB floppy from your laptop, make a flash floppy, make a bootable CD from the floppy, boot it only to find that you downloaded the wrong BIOS, repeat that process twice more until you do get the right BIOS, which then stuns you by actually fixing the problem, so now GRUB boots and can get you back into Windows but you still need to get dmraid installed in your initrd in your Linux kernel so you can boot that, which requires that you find a rescue CD that supports dmraid so you can even get to your Linux partition to do the initrd thing, after which you find an article that explains how to install dmraid in initrd, which thankfully works and now you finally are back to the point that everything works again, and it’s kinda cool?

I just did.

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Data Translation

2006/02/03 – 11:43

By various sorts of happenstance, I’ve had quite a bit of exposure to data/file-type translation in projects I’ve been involved in. Given that, I don’t know why it still surprises me how difficult it can be. I think what gets me is that the broad strokes always seems pretty simple (“both formats are basically just a bag of polygons, right?”), and you can even get promising results based on that naive view. Fueled by that initial success, you start charging into the deeper details, and uh-oh, suddenly there’s some ‘little’ detail that threatens to swallow the whole project.

Another factor is that you don’t want the users of your translation facility to have to think about whether some given feature carries over perfectly into the translated realm, so you go nuts trying to support every little corner case, probably many that no user will ever encounter.

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Produced IT humor

2006/01/31 – 23:47

Huh, it’s pretty cool what the Brits can do with their low-budget TV ways. Spreading the money around lets them explore farther out-there.

I’ve watched the first episode of “The IT Crowd” online, and I have to say that it was pretty darn good, with actual production values and real scripts and actors and stuff. Not world-class, but British-class for sure. Easily one of the best IT-focused bits of comedy television I’ve seen, but then, well, you know… it’s the only bit I’ve seen. The Dilbert cartoons don’t count cuz they weren’t really IT-focused.

Anyway, I can’t tell from the site whether this is an ongoing concern or whether there are just the two eppies, but in any case, hit these if you can:
The IT Crowd.

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Field v. Google

2006/01/27 – 13:50

Wow, how amazingly different. Today I read a legal document, for fun, and found it readable and informative, and it did not raise my blood pressure.

This is a pretty interesting case. It highlights some of the complexities surrounding copyright law, and comes to what I consider to be reasonable conclusions. One almost thinks that Field tried this not to win, but to lose and thereby establish some precedent for further decisions, or to at least draw some public attention to the matters.

So if it turns out that this is all an elaborate ruse by some intellectual freedom fighter, or Google itself, you read it here first. Just don’t cache it, OK?

google_nevada_order.pdf

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“Analog Hole Bill Would Impose a Secret Law”

2006/01/23 – 13:46

I wonder what other such gems can be found in the land of the intersection between technology and law…

Freedom to Tinker » Blog Archive » Analog Hole Bill Would Impose a Secret Law

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Marketplace of ideas

2006/01/21 – 22:54

The idea of the Internet (or any other cloud of technology you might choose) as a “marketplace of ideas” is an evocative one. But it occurs to me that the idea brings along one of the flaws of marketplace thinking that could be even more damaging in the realm of ideas than in the realm of products-and-services.

Just a moment ago, on a blog that I follow, I read an article that made me a bit sick to my stomach. It wasn’t that the author was totally off his rocker, just that I couldn’t agree with his premises and found his conclusions to be way off the mark. This being the worst of three or four times that I’ve had that reaction to articles on the blog, I removed it from my feed list.

That’s the flaw I’m talking about. “If you don’t like it, don’t buy it” is the rule by which I make many decisions in the “real world”, and also in the “world of ideas”. That’s also an argument I hear advanced against someone who complains about a product, service, company or idea. But that’s a pretty weak sort of choice, “yes or no!”. What about some “yes, and…”, “no, but…”, “here’s another choice…”, etc.

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Acausal acts of kindness

2006/01/20 – 14:49

If you get a chance today, try doing an acausal act of kindness. Do something nice for someone for no reason, and preferably without them knowing you did it. Of course, I encourage causal acts of kindness as well.

If you want to get really rigorous, try this: do one such act for every bad thing you hear in the news, and for every negative judgement you mentally make today.

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The success trap

2006/01/10 – 02:01

I’ve seen lots of articles or books or whatever with that title, or similar. However, I haven’t really seen many that talk about this particular trap. The trap I’m talking about is believing that your definition of success fits everyone else.

It isn’t a good idea, says I, to think that other people would have to have the exact same circumstances in their lives as you have in yours for them to feel happy.

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“Remember mismatched domains” extension for Thunderbird

2006/01/08 – 18:52

Oh yeah, once again the open-source world provides abundantly for me. Thank you Andrew Lucking!

I have a shared webhost for my email domains, so when I turn on SSL for my POP3/SMTP connections, I get an error dialog at every first connect that tells me the domain name is mismatched, because the shared host’s SSL certificate is for the host’s domain rather than mine. This extension lets Thunderbird remember these mismatches and the fact that I’ve OK’d them, freeing me from having to hit ‘OK’ about twenty times a day, and in the process making my connection a bit more secure (since I’d hit OK on that dialog even if it really was a security risk).

Anyway, if you know what I mean, you know what I mean, and will love the extension. If you don’t, don’t worry about it.

Remember mismatched domains at andrewlucking.com

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