Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:04 AM | Comments (7) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Grr.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:48 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Do not panic!

It doesn't help.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:22 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:52 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:28 AM | Comments (6) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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More than that: If you believe that astrology might sometimes work, might have a kernel of truth to it, is anything other than a two-thousand-year-old scam feeding off a five-thousand-year-old blunder, then you are an idiot.

Thank you.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:56 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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It's an unusual and powerful thing, this freedom that our founders gave to the press.

The founders recognised a pre-existing freedom, and wrote the Bill of Rights to protect that freedom:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

That pillock Keller again:

The power that has been given us is not something to be taken lightly.

Draping yourself in the Constitution at this point is not going to convince anyone.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:16 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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SESSION is an associative array (aka Dictionary). When the session times out, things like 'Tempfile' are no longer defined. (PHP has an unset() function that undefines a reference.) But when PHP sees an undeclared reference, it doesn't error out -- instead it substitutes '' (a blank string) if the reference occurs within a string. So now the user is executing

rm -r /var/public_www/

As you might imagine, this behavior makes PHP very dangerous in the hands of an idiot.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:25 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Need to get my HTPC set up next. I'm typing this on my notebook's keyboard, but using the TV as the screen. Again. it's on VGA so it's not sub-pixel perfect like DVI, but it's more than good enough.

But first: Minx. I'm switching the munu comments system to Minx tomorrow, so there's a bit of tweaking and testing I need to do.

Oh, and a very good episode it was too.

Aargh! Stuck pixel! Stuck pixel! Didn't see it before. Stuck pixel!

Red. It's always red.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:26 AM | Comments (7) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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There's this thing I call information density*. Regular expressions are extremely information-dense. So are (for example) Forth and APL. With any of these, you can express a very complex algorithm in a very short sequence of symbols, but that comes with a cost.

People are used to dealing with information density within a certain range. For the most part, the information we receive has massive amounts of redundancy; you can often miss half the message and still understand it. Not so with regular expressions - every single bit matters. There are no (or almost no) cues to what is going on; you have to inspect each symbol one at a time, parse them into groups, interpret the groups, work out the relationships between the groups... And do it all correctly.

Computers are good at that. Humans not so much.

Well, computers are supposed to be good at it, anyway.

The subject arose because I needed a string-formatting language for the templating system in Minx. Python has fairly good formatting for numbers, dates, and times, but it has no equivalent formatting library for strings. It thinks it has several, but it doesn't. What it has is libraries that format things into strings, but nothing to format the strings themselves.

Except regexps.

So I used those. And the first example - not particularly complicated - sent the template engine into what appeared to be an infinite loop. Worked fine in the examples I tested. Worked fine for the first three items on the page. Raised an exception for the next item (quite validly). And then tried to process the item after that and was never heard from again.

I'm sure I could fix it, but it remains that it happened to me, and I wrote the blasted thing. If it happens to me, then a week after launching the software I'm going to find the server with a load average of 700 doing nothing but processing regular expressions for ever and ever.

So I wrote a little text-formatting library instead.

With plugin support.

Sixty lines of code, does almost everything I need.

* There's a specific term for it, but I can't recall it at the moment. But it relates to randomness and entropy.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:03 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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I'll try swapping drives again this weekend.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 07:57 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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It's not the disk - checkdsk runs fine, and my applications have no problems.

Windows says it's a disk problem but it acts like it's a memory problem.

What can cause that?

The pagefile. The evil, good-for-nothing, rat bastard pagefile.

I thought to myself If this were a real operating system, it would have a log of all these errors.

Then I thought, It is a real operating system. A crappy one, but a real OS nonetheless.

And it has crappy log files, but they exist, and they were full of errors - all relating to the pagefile.

As soon as I manage to get the darn thing to boot, I'm going to disable it.

Again. I already disabled it, but it didn't take. Who knows why; this is Windows.

Okay, it finished booting, and now has no pagefile.

Let's see if it crashes.

...

So far, so good. I did get one of those "delayed write failed" errors (so maybe it is the disk after all), but I managed to watch last week's episode of Haruhi Suzumiya on my new TV without anything catching fire, blowing up, crashing, or collapsing into a closed space.

Which is good enough for now.

Tomorrow I send the motherboard from my new PC back for replacement. Then I plan to (finally!) get the forms processing working in Minx. This is an example of what you can do with fairly simple templates; I intend to expand on that. A lot.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:19 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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For those who haven't been following the story: I can download Paint Shop Pro online for $59. Except I can't, because I live in Australia.

I can buy it in a box for $79, less a $30 mail-in rebate. Except I can't, because I live in Australia.

Because I live in Australia, it costs me two hundred and ninety-nine dollars.

But at least they have acknowledged the problem.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:01 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Joy.

Update: Memtest-86 is on the third pass without finding any errors.

Not the memory, then.

Not the disk drive, since I swapped that yesterday and it died within ten minutes.

It happens whether I'm on battery or mains power.

Grr.

Dell is having a sale right now...

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:26 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Swapped drives in my notebook: BSOD within 10 minutes.

Pulled out the original 256MB of memory: No BSOD so far.

Windows Explorer has restarted a couple of times, but that is not exactly unusual. I'm going to run another checkdsk, because if the memory was playing up, there could be some nasty things lurking in my filesystem.

No progress on the media centre box; looks like that will have to go back for the friendly folks at EYO to take a look at. I've been buying stuff from them for years, and this is the first time something has just plain not worked. Video cards that don't run under Linux, sure. Network cards that are incompatible with my motherboard, yep. And the Hard Drive Destruction Bunny is always lurking around the next corner. But this is the first time I haven't been able to get a new toy to at least boot.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 07:33 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Clara Bow was the IT girl.

Then there came pixie misa. Who has watched server farms glittering in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 07:28 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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It doesn't work.

Oh, and my notebook died about thirty times last night. It may or may not be the hard disk. It was working this morning, but when I got to the office and tried to bring it back from standby it cold booted.

I do have a backup.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:14 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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I haven't even watched the latest episode of Haruhi Suzumiya yet.

I have a brand new HDTV, and I haven't watched anything on it.

<Dies.>

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:38 AM | Comments (11) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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"Interesting" isn't the term I'd use, though. "Bloody irritating", perhaps.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:34 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Got home, plugged the 360 into the new TV (a Samsung LA27T51B), loaded Oblivion and -

Niiiiice.

I was playing it on my computer monitor before. That's a 19" Samsung multifunction, with DVI/VGA/Component/S-Video/Composite/TV inputs, and it's a very nice computer monitor. But it's only 19", and it's 4:3, not widescreen. Effectively (if I can still extract square roots in my head correctly) it's about 17" for a widescreen image.

The new set is 27", which doesn't sound that much larger, but it is.

And the picture quality, even on component input, is superb.

Let's see what my notebook makes of it...

Hmm. Works - almost.

At 1280x768, I get a perfect picture. But it's not a 1280x768 screen, it's 1366x768. 16:9, and bugger sensible resolutions. So if I run it in that mode, everything will be about 6% wider than it should be.

My notebook actually recognises the resolution, and offers an option for 1360x768 (which is what the manual says it should do). But either the notebook or the monitor (and I hope it's the notebook) gets the timing wrong, and the image starts about one fifth of the way across the screen; the leftmost fifth is blank.

1280x720 would get rescaled, but would have the proportions right. But the monitor comes up Mode not supported. Bah. The manual says that it supports all modes between 640x480 and 1360x768, but that don't seem to work so well.

Hmm.

Okay, let's see what we can adjust on the monitor. Fiddle, fiddle, fiddle. Damn. Even at the maximum settings, I can't get the picture quite right. Well, let's try the Auto Adjust, just for laughs.

Hmm. Close, but there's still grey bars down the left and right, which will get kind of annoying. If I could get rid of...

Oi!

What?

Your wallpaper is 1280x1024, right?

Yes?

And this monitor is?

1360 by... oh. Right.

Okay, now that it's working perfectly, let's fire up some widescren video, like, oh, the Kamichu! opening.

...

Okay. I'm sold.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:47 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Timings:

For last 500 entries on Munuviana. All times in seconds. Offer void where prohibited by federal, state or local laws, regulations or institutional policy. Offer ends June 30, 2006. Benchmarked on a Pentium D 820 running Centos 4.2. Python 2.4.2 compiled with GCC 3.4.4. Mileage may vary. Contents may ship during shrinking. Do not eat iPod shuffle. Sanitisation of comments only guarantees valid HTML. The content is your own problem.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:58 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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It's still got a VGA input, but that's just stupid.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:03 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Paint Shop Pro does 90% of what I need, image-editing-wise, so I'd be happy to buy it. Especially since there's a special trial offer: If your 30-day-trial has run out, you can buy it for just $59, with free copies of Corel Photo Album 6 (which I don't need) and Photo Album Pastel Collection (which I very don't need).

Except that only one of those two is free, and you can't remove either one from your order. By clicking remove you can toggle which one you get for free, but you can't actually get rid of them.

And the offer only applies to US and Canada.

If you live in Australia, it's $299.

And though they have a link for Other Countries, it leads you to a search which cannot find anything.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:42 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Okay, so it's an LCD and only weighs 12kg. Pfft.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:39 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Both funny and moving. This is turning out to be quite a good series.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:10 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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