They are my oldest and deadliest enemy. You cannot trust them. If Hitler invaded Hell, I would give a favourable reference to the Devil.
Wednesday, June 15
Adventures In Windows 10 Land
I upgraded Chika (my ultrabook) to Windows 10 yesterday. Azusa, my full-size notebook, already got Windows 10, but I did that as a clean install.
It... Works. Even Start 8 works, and that's a specifically Windows 8 only application.
You do need to go through and turn off all the default-on spy options but one. The one to leave on is checking web pages against malware lists, but that only matters if you use Internet Explorer or the new Edge browser.
Meanwhile, Microsoft announced two new Xboxen, a little one which is the current Xbox One shrunk down and ships in August, and a new model which is a half-generation upgrade with four to five times the graphics horsepower - up from about 1.3 teraflops to 6 teraflops, due next year. The original Xbox One has problems running some games smoothly at 60 frames per second. The 2017 model should have no such issues.
If you want the same thing right now, just upgrade to Windows 10 (free) and get an AMD RX 480 (coming at the end of this month for around $199).
That just leaves Kei, my main desktop, which I shall remedy... Now.
Well, not now now, it takes ages to download. But it's on its way.
On all three I've installed StarDock's Object Desktop, which turns Windows 8 or 10 into a nicer version of Windows 7. Or if you're feeling perverse, of MacOS or even BeOS.
Tip: Just buy Start 10, which is $5. On checkout, you'll get an offer for a 60% discount for the complete Object Desktop suite, which takes it down to $20.
Update: Kei is tenified. I have one cheap netbooky thing around somewhere running Windows 8, and one survivor from ~2008 running Vista, but everything else is now well and truly sorted out.
Update: Except that suddenly I can't commit to Git. Which puts just a teensy cramp in my workflow, since that's where all my work is. It seems that Windows 8 can run a 64-bit executable from a 32-bit one, but Windows 10 doesn't, so I needed to install a 32-bit copy of Git to match the 32-bit version of Java that JetBrains ship with PyCharm.
Which is easy enough, except that all you get when this happens is the error "Resource temporarily unavailable" and a stack trace.
I don't know if you still consider IE to be worth supporting.
The "add link" tool doesn't work in IE under Win 10-64. At least it didn't work for me. I switched over to Firefox and it worked fine there.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Thursday, June 30 2016 09:33 AM (+rSRq)
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Yes, still lots of people using IE. I'll take a look at that.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, June 30 2016 01:27 PM (PiXy!)
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Any hope of reviewing Minx support for commenting/posting through mobile browsers? Trying to get an embedded link to work through Firefox mobile is like playing wack-a-mole looking through a straw.
Posted by: Will at Friday, July 01 2016 01:30 AM (i0T0B)
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IE11 throws a console error when I hit the Insert button: IndexSizeError on hyperlink.htm, line 288. Seems to work if I change Document Mode to IE10 in F12 tools.
Posted by: Rick C at Monday, July 04 2016 10:43 AM (FvJAK)
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Seems like it works OK in Edge, but then the comment won't post, and there's no error: the page refreshes, and the name/mail/captcha are cleared.
Posted by: RickC at Monday, July 04 2016 10:45 AM (FvJAK)
I changed some of the settings on my Ubuntu Venial Vermin VM, and broke it. Rather than fiddle with it for an unknown amount of time, I zapped it and built a new one.
And found that Ubuntu desktop by default doesn't even install SSHD.
And once I got that working, and tweaked the settings on my terminal emulator (XShell) so it would work, realised that using the same OpenSSH-specific settings might allow me to SSH cleanly into Taiga, my iMac.
And they did. Had that Mac for six months and only now am I able to log in remotely directly from Windows. (Logging in from Linux always worked, because it was OpenSSH on both ends.)
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Convert your normal openssh key (id_rsa) to putty format and then add it under Connection->SSH->Auth and you're good to go.
As in, the private part of the public key that you put into authorized_keys on the Mac.
Posted by: Mad Mike at Wednesday, June 15 2016 08:21 AM (2+r2s)
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Yep. MacOS is Unix, but Apple have to make it just different enough to be annoying. Doesn't help that until I got the new iMac late last year, my last Mac was a 15 year old Power Mac G4.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, June 15 2016 05:09 PM (PiXy!)
Well, crap. Condolences to everyone affected by this atrocity.
Meanwhile, the burying-the-lede contest is on:
CNN: 0 mentions of Islam, prominent link to story on the dangers of guns.
New York Times: 0 mentions of Islam, prominent link to story on the dangers of guns.
Washington Post: 0 mentions of Islam, prominent link to story on the dangers of guns.
ABC Australia: Mentions Islam, mentions recent shooting in Miami, but no lectures.
The American mainstream media are consistently to the left of one of the left-most institutions in Australia.
Oh, and Reddit is a total train wreck on this story. Just amazingly bad. The moderators are deleting anything that doesn't fit the narrative, or that questions why so many posts not fitting the narrative are being deleted, or that questions why so many post that question... Train wreck is putting it mildly.
This is what it looked like:
Update: CNN now has a mention of Islam. The Washington Post, to its credit, has made that their headline. And the New York Times... Has a picture of Obama.
And it looks like a second attack was stopped by police in Santa Monica. Details are still sketchy.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
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Sunday, June 12
Went Shopping Today
Survived.
Bought two keyboards, two mice, two HDMI cables, two USB cables, a four-port USB charger, a 16GB USB 3 thumb drive, a 16GB micro-SD card, and... Wait, that's the lot.
Carted it all home and installed Ubuntu 16.04 LTS on Tsumugi. After close to twenty years of using RedHat releases (original RedHat, Fedora, RHEL, and CentOS), I thought I'd give it a try. It has a pretty impressive feature list for what I want to do (ZFS, LXD, OpenStack, MAAS) and despite being a stable release (supported for 5 years) the packages are right up to date (Python 3.5, Ruby 2.3, PHP 7, MySQL 5.7).
Slight irks: The server install has no GUI. Okay, it's a server install, fine. The desktop install occupies 4GB and includes zero server components. Not even MySQL, which is usually hard to avoid (and a pain when you're installing your own preferred release like Percona). Oh, and DO NOT enable full-disk encryption when installing under VirtualBox. It works, in theory, but it is verrrrrry slow.
Also, there's no real GUI package manager installed by default. The desktop version seems to be very much the idiot edition, while the server version is the expert edition, leaving something of a gap.
Apart from that, it works, and it's usable and looks fine at 4K. I was hoping that 4K screens would finally fix Linux's perennial problem with ugly fonts, and they do. On both my 4K 15" notebook (Azusa) and my 4K 28" desktop screen (plugged into the notebook, hence the need for HDMI cables) it looks great. 4K at 15" is a crazy high resolution and almost everything looks good, but it's nice to have confirmation that the Linux desktop no longer looks like poop due to inadequate font hinting.
The problem with having a 4K 15" notebook is that I want to run it with two windows side-by-side the way I do with my desktop - generally my IDE on the right and terminal/email/web browser/Word on the left, depending on what I'm doing. But while 4K is more than enough resolution for that, 15" just isn't big enough. It drives an external 4K monitor with no problems, but that leaves little for its own 4K screen to do.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
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Thursday, June 09
Outrage As People Hurt By Things, Film At 11
So, a knife-wielding madman was shot by police at the local shops today.
I live fairly close by so I had news helicopters hovering overhead for an hour - for several minutes, directly overhead.
No-one killed, but three bystanders injured apparently by ricochets or bullet fragments. Which is causing the usual Twitter fuss on Twitter. (Of course, the same police force was roundly criticised for not shooting the gunman in the hostage crisis in the Sydney CBD 18 months ago, and that time people did die.)
These are the same local shops where someone was murdered in public three months ago, the same ones that got clobbered by a tornado two and a half years ago. Must have been built on an AIBG.
A mentally ill man who was shot by police at a busy shopping centre was granted day releasefrom a mental health facility, despite allegedly telling his nurses and doctors he wanted to kill police.
About the speculation that they were shooting low, that sounds like it was right. Only three shots were fired, and at least two and possibly all three hit the target, but it it looks like one or two passed through, fragmented on the paving, and injured four bystanders. (The news article says three, but there was a fourth who didn't need treatment.)
But if they'd aimed higher and missed, they could easily have killed one of those bystanders, so they probably made the right call.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, June 11 2016 11:17 PM (PiXy!)
The authors regret that there is an error in the published version of "Correlation not Causation: The Relationship between Personality Traits and Political Ideologies†American Journal of Political Science 56 (1), 34–51. The interpretation of the coding of the political attitude items in the descriptive and preliminary analyses portion of the manuscript was exactly reversed. Thus, where we indicated that higher scores in Table 1 (page 40) reflect a more conservative response, they actually reflect a more liberal response. Specifically, in the original manuscript, the descriptive analyses report that those higher in Eysenck’s psychoticism are more conservative, but they are actually more liberal; and where the original manuscript reports those higher in neuroticism and social desirability are more liberal, they are, in fact, more conservative.
(My bold.)
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
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Tuesday, June 07
Elevated
First, watch this video. Then check the spoiler.
This entire video was generated in real-time on a bare Windows PC (nothing installed but the video drivers), in 2009, using 4 kilobytes of code.
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Real time fractal terrain generation sure has come a long way since Rescue on Fractalus.
Posted by: Kayle at Tuesday, June 07 2016 05:48 PM (y53xD)
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Also helps that the guy who did this is a fractal graphics wizard. Went to work for Pixar (all those forests in Brave - that's him and three assistants) and is now at Oculus working on VR tools.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, June 07 2016 06:06 PM (PiXy!)
That's a group of really neat kids, you know that? It's promising that hardly any of them recognized Evangelion. I suppose it was inevitable that they would all know Pokemon, given that it's still running.
But I bet they would have completely whiffed on "The Slayers". Most of them knew Kamehameha but I bet none of them would have known Dragon Slave.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Monday, June 06 2016 01:15 AM (+rSRq)
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Of course, they kinda gave it away since it actually SAYS Pokemon in the Theme song.
Posted by: Mauser at Monday, June 06 2016 07:45 AM (5Ktpu)
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It occurred to me that for these kids the 1990's is ancient history. It happened before any of them were born. (Doesn't that make you feel good?)
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Monday, June 06 2016 08:13 AM (+rSRq)
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I liked the girl who was "Okay, okay... Trigun!" - I wouldn't have been at all surprised if none of them had heard of it. And that they all loved the Cowboy Bebop opening.
Also that all of them were singing along to the Pokemon theme.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, June 06 2016 12:49 PM (PiXy!)