| An open letter to developers of autoupdating apps. |
[Apr. 9th, 2008|04:30 pm] |
Dear person who writes software with an autoupdater,
I live in a country where the internet is very slow and very expensive. I really like your application, and I would love to be running the latest, greatest version of it, but please let me decide when to update. You have no idea whether I am on free wireless at a coffee shop, the office's ADSL connection or my cellphone's GPRS.
Appropriate behaviour is to tell me that an update is available and then make a discreet "yes, I would like to update now" button available. This notification should not block what I am doing. This notification should not require immediate attention. There are two unforgivable sins in the autoupdate world:
1. Downloading tens or hundreds of megabytes without permission.
2. Requiring an unconditional restart.
The first is obvious once you consider that not everyone using your software lives in a first-world country with unlimited cheap bandwidth. The second should be obvious everywhere. If you must restart to complete the update, let us know ahead of time. Let us decide when to restart. Don't tell us the restart will happen in thirty seconds unless we say no.
Yours sincerely,
The guy who lost data and incurred nontrivial bandwidth charges. |
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| A tale of technology |
[Dec. 3rd, 2007|08:48 pm] |
Wherein our intrepid protagonist purchases a portable computing device.
I finally took the plunge and bought myself a laptop this weekend. Some readers may be somewhat surprised that the laptop in question is a second hand G4 iBook. My reasoning went as follows:
1. Someone was selling a G4 iBook for R3k.
2. Apple tends to make decent hardware.
3. It's hard to find decent hardware for that price.
4. I could afford to spend R3k on a laptop.
So I now own a mac. At some point I shall set it up to dual-boot ubuntu, but that means finding someone who has the PPC version and/or downloading it.
What the mac is like so far:
Leopard (and, by extension, OS X in general) is a bit too mouse-intensive for me. Fortunately, Spotlight makes launching stuff easy. cmd-space brings up a little window thing and I just type the first few letters of the app I want to start. The keyboard shortcuts are pretty decent, although the keyboard has option (which doubles as alt) and ctrl in awkward places. On the other hand, it's trivial to remap capslock into another ctrl key.
The Terminal app seems to be a fairly standard terminal. I had to do some fiddling to make some of the keys operate as expected and I'm still not entirely sure how to make home/end/pgup/pgdn work but it's perfectly usable.
I struggled to make Mail see my mailserver, but that was all my fault. I'd forgotten that the mailserver wanted my email address as a username, not just 'jerith'.
After a brief glance at iChat, I was told by a bunch of people that I should install Adium instead. They were right. The only issue I have with Adium is that I have the same gtalk contact in both my gtalk and jabber accounts. When I click on it, it allows me to choose the source account, but still defaults to gtalk.
I'm not a huge fan of Safari. It's a web browser, nothing special. Then again, it hasn't really given me any real problems either. I had a look at Camino, recommended by someone on IRC, and I don't like it much. I think I'll grab Firefox.
Aquamacs looks pretty and it's emacs. Can't go wrong there.
I have been told I should install QuickSilver, which allows one to set all sorts of hotkeys for various things. I did (because I want a button to launch a new terminal) but I haven't yet figured out how to make it do what I want yet.
I need to install pkgsrc and set up the whole open source thing. This is proving a little more tricky than expected, but that's mostly because the mac doesn't seem to like ftp much.
In general, I like Leopard more than I thought I would, but still not as much as I like fluxbox and my normal setup. I shall reserve final judgment until such time as I am more familiar with it, though. |
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| Rage and bitterness at Dell |
[Nov. 16th, 2007|09:46 am] |
My work laptop is a Dell. All in all, it's not a bad machine. It has crappy Intel audio and video chipsets that do weird stuff occasionally and the wifi is supported only in an OS I refuse to run, but this is common. On the other hand, it has dual-core goodness, plenty of RAM and a reasonably fast hard drive. The battery lasts a good two and a half hours if I'm not doing anything heavy with it.
The docking station, on the other hand, is a huge pile of almost entirely unmitigated pain. A docking station should be no more than a convenient port expander. Dell's docking station, on the other hand, requires its own power adapter because the laptop charger doesn't deliver enough to power the laptop and the docking station. It has a button that must be pressed before you take a running laptop off it. If there's a power cut, returning power triggers the ACPI suspend thing (which breaks the video card).
The reason for my rage and bitterness today is that I took the laptop off the docking station to use it in another room. I failed to push the "I want to take the laptop away" button because it's a stupid design and I forgot that it was necessary. The laptop worked fine, though. When I put the laptop back on the docking station, however, it hard-froze. No I/O whatsoever. It required a full power-cycle to put the machine back in a usable state.
To Dell: Get your bloody mind right. |
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| A collection of trivia |
[Jan. 23rd, 2007|11:16 am] |
A bunch of blogworthy stuff has happened since I last posted, so I'll collect it all here.
I have a shiny new(-to-me) silver 2003 Hyundai Getz 1.6GL. (Photos to follow when I can get my phone to talk to my PC again.) This means that my sister now has my mom's white conquest. I'll miss the little thing, but not enough to give up my Getz. ;-)
Government departments and banks, the two organisations most likely to screw things up. The condensed saga is that Nedbank messed up part of the transfer to the guy I was buying the car from, his bank messed up the paperwork so I couldn't register the car and the licensing people messed up telling me how to go about resolving the situation. I eventually got it all sorted out, though, and now all that remains is for me to have a set of CA plates made.
A bit of a rant about wireless networking:
My cousin has a wireless network that I added WEP and mac filtering to a while back. Now she has a new laptop (from work) that she wants to connect. Whoever wrote their router firmware decided that everyone needs to provide WEP keys in hexadecimal. Whoever wrote the laptop's wireless drivers decided that nobody should ever have to worry about that nasty hex stuff and only allows you to give it an ASCII text string. The other machines are somewhat smarter and allow you to use either.
And to end on a happy note, I was given a large-denomination Exclusive Books gift voucher by the cousins I house-sat for at the end of last year. (A completely unnecessary gift, since staying there was its own reward.) You are invited to recommend items to spend it on. People whose recommendations I take will win that warm glowing feeling you get when someone acts on your advice. |
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| My parents enter the wonderful world of ADSL. |
[Jan. 2nd, 2007|10:37 pm] |
First off, happy new year and all that. I begin this year with the same question I have begun the previous few: where the hell is my flying car? We are getting deeper into the realms of the science fiction movies, TV shows and books I have consumed voraciously since the late eighties. A substantial subset of these depicted the future of the early twenty-first century as a rosy place filled with flying cars, hoverboards and regular interplanetary traffic. None of this has yet happened. :-(
Anyways, to the point of the post. I convinced my parents not very long ago that dialup was prohibitively expensive for them nowadays, especially since my dad does a lot of work from home which involves emailing stuff around. They got everything set up, but some extra work was needed from my side.
As some of you may know, I set up a Debian box (henceforth referred to as "coruscant", that being its hostname and all) to do dialup, routing, imap, dhcp, dns, web proxying and all the rest. Since a lot of that is now done by the ADSL router, some configuration changes needed to be made. Since none of the people involved in setting up the ADSL for my parents knew Linux very well (and the stuff on coruscant is a bit odd anyway, since it was the first time I'd set up anything like that and I did quite a lot of tinkering) my expertise was required.
Doing this stuff over the phone is a bit tricky. A lot tricky, actually, since I tend to use passwords that look like line noise and take forever to tell someone. "No, caret. Or circumflex. Whatever you want to call it. The symbol above 6. No, not 6. Hold shift and push 6. Yes, that one." By which time they have already entered a bad symbol and you have to start again. We got as far as disabling DHCP so that the router and the Linux box wouldn't fight, but that was as much pain as we were prepared to endure for one session. So cunning plan number one came into effect.
I got my mother to log into the web interface and we made a surprising amount of progress navigating it, considering that she didn't know what most of it meant and I'd never seen it before so I had only the vaguest of reference points. Despite that, we managed to make sure the port forwarding was enabled, get me the external IP of the router and play with some firewall rules. Despite my best efforts, however, I wasn't able to get through to coruscant from the outside world.
This called for cunning plan number two, concocted on the spot by the most incredibly awesome person ever to post in this blog. (Also the only person ever to post in this blog, but let's not split that hair.) I gently led my mom through opening a PuTTY session to the server, sshing from there to the box hosted in the US that I share with a few other people (henceforth known as "elpis", see above) with a reverse port forward back to the ssh port on coruscant. This let me ssh in through elpis and the tunnel and do mutter the appropriate incantations to demote coruscant from supreme ruler of the network to a humble file/mail/proxy/print/some-other-stuff-I-can't-remember server.
However, this was not good enough. I got hold of my brother this evening (well, he got hold of me) and had him go through the same rigmarole, made easier by the fact that we were communicating by IM instead of phone and I could type the passwords for him to look at. While he was off doing something something else, I tunneled in again, this time setting up port forwards to get to the router's web inteface myself. A little fiddling with that and some dyndns-fu and I managed to get the firewall rules and port forwarding on the router working. So now I can get in without having to have anyone on that side involved in the rituals of power.
There are still some remaining issues, however. For some reason, some of the Windows boxen refuse to talk to http servers out on the web. I have been told that this is a "windows linux conflict" (which I refuse to believe -- the proxy server was broken, but a direct connection (bypassing corucsant) also fails) by someone who supposedly knows what they're doing. Also, we need to wait until our old ISP opens again so we can transfer our domain and point the mail stuff at the new server. But that is a job for another day and it is already past my bedtime. |
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| DVD authoring |
[Oct. 15th, 2006|05:11 pm] |
As some of you probably already know, I have recently acquired a bunch of divx files that I want to watch on a real TV. Also, I want to send my mother some DVDs so she can watch them too. Since there aren't any decent pretty GUI dvd authoring tools for Linux (at least, none that I've found) I decided to bite the bullet and spend the weekend automating the whole thing.
I've put it up on my website here. While I was in there I also fixed two little bugs -- one with punctuation in the 404 page and one with an uncaught exception looking at directories. |
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| BarCamp and people from Durbs |
[Jun. 21st, 2006|06:08 pm] |
This update is long overdue, which I blame on being busy and not having anyone prod me about it.
Anyways, this past long weekend involved much running around for me. Since BarCamp Cape Town was happening, both ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) the_5th_weel and Ralph came down to Cape Town.
Ralph came by bus, arriving 08h00 on Thursday morning (because he's a bit of an idiot and got the dates wrong) so he had to wander around the V&A Waterfront until 16h30 when I could leave work and come fetch him. From there, we crawled down the N2 at rush hour to collect the_5th_weel from the airport before coming all the way back to Seapoint to stay in his mother's timeshare. Thursday night was mostly catching up on what has happened since I came to Cape Town and Friday morning we headed off to BarCamp.
The first day of BarCamp is detailed on dewet's blog far better than I could do it. From my side, the point was more to meet the people than listen to the talks, so much of the time I was wandering around seeing what everyone was up to. In between I also hacked on the new version of my website, coming Real Soon Now to a webserver near you.
Saturday morning Ralph had to be back at the bus station at 05h30. That hurt. Next time I'll make sure he pays the extra and gets a plane ticket at a reasonable time of day. On the other hand, he's decided that two 26 hour bus trips are more than enough, so that shouldn't be a problem. After that (and breakfast) we headed off to BarCamp day two.
the_5th_weel and I hung around after cleanup and followed Conrad to the Waterfront where we drank beer that the BrauHaus kindly brewed just for us. They also made the best Wiener Schnitzel I've eaten since I was in Wien. Much fun was had by all.
Sunday morning I took the_5th_weel back to the airport, only to be informed later that he had managed to subtract the "arrive an hour before" twice and was way too early. The rest of the day was spent chilling at my cousin's house in Wynberg writing more python and trying to ignore whatever was on the TV people kept turning on. In total, I drove 300km for the weekend.
As a nice touch, Caffeine in Seapoint are offering a free coffee and muffin to anyone who blogs about them. This seems like a great way to get some cheap marketing and I'm quite happy to prostitute my blog for food and caffeine. |
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| Can't UKZN get their mailserver configured? |
[May. 2nd, 2006|06:16 pm] |
Today, I received a spam email in my UKZN account. Every now and then someone realises they can send an email to everyone in the campus address book. This time it was David Erswell (204500289@ukzn.ac.za) advertising a website. A quick ruby script (written mostly to improve my ruby) revealed that there were over 6600 addresses in the To: header, which was causing thunderbird to gag somewhat.
Why does the mailserver not bounce messages with more than 10 or 20 recipients listed? This kind of thing happens often enough to be a case they really need to handle properly. And handling it properly means not allowing it to happen in the first place rather than the current slap on the wrist to people who do it. |
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| Flamewars |
[Apr. 20th, 2006|01:50 pm] |
Shortly before I moved to Cape Town, I joined the Cape Linux User Group mailing lists. I shall let the email I sent to the CLUG-chat list today speak for itself:
Good day all.
What I say in this mail may offend some people here. However, I
believe it needs to be said and I have no desire to enter the
labyrinth that is "politically correct" phrasing. All I ask is that
if you want to flame me, keep it off the list.
In the relatively short time I have been on the various CLUG lists, I
have noticed a disturbing propensity for flamewars to erupt over just
about anything.
There seem to be two opposing camps involved, which I shall categorise
according to their apparent beliefs:
* Coddlers: "Let's coddle all the newbies in the hope that they
become productive citizens."
* LARTers: "Let's get rid of anyone who doesn't meet our unreasonably
high standards."
I don't seriously think anyone here believes in either extremes. On
the other hand, there are people on both sides who cannot agree on a
middle ground. Thus, the flamewars continue.
If the Coddlers have their way, the list would soon be overrun by
people throwing badly formed questions around rather than doing the
most basic research. This would drive away those who use the list as
it is meant to be used and the whole system would collapse.
If the LARTers have their way, the list would soon consist only the
LARTers themselves. This would, again, drive away most of those who
use the list as it is meant to be used and the whole system would
collapse.
The way I see it, the flamewars do more to make the list appear
hostile to newbies than the LARTers would while making it almost as
unusable to those with more experience as the Coddlers would.
I suspect we are mostly reasonable people here. The most recent
flamewar has been over two links which both contain fairly good
advice. If we coddle the newbies somewhat by providing links to
relevant resources and instructions on how to follow list etiquette
and LART those who consistently fail to heed such gentle instruction,
we may end up with a list that works better than it does now.
Failing that, it may be necessary to get rid of the extremists on both
sides in the interests of the general membership of the list. Or
perhaps just introduce some moderators with big sticks.
Thank you for your attention.
--J
I'm not sure that it will have the desired response of reducing the number of flames. Hopefully it will at least cause the offenders to look at their own behaviour a little more carefully. After the initial flame in my direction, of course.
Since I sent it, I have only had one response pointing out that the list moderators *did* reply to various offending messages. To which my reply was to point out the "big sticks" part of the comment.
Anyways, back to work. |
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| tuXlab |
[Dec. 11th, 2005|10:57 am] |
Yesterday I attended the first tuXlab installation in KZN. This is something I've been wanting to do for a while, but they've all been happening in the Cape.
The story actually starts quite some time ago when the school in question asked the Gift of the Givers Foundation for some sponsorship for a computer room. GotG haven't had much experience in such matters, but they got hold of the Shuttleworth Foundation who assisted them with finding cheap hardware (reconditioned machines to be used as thin clients and a heavy terminal server that will live in the back) and procedures for installation and configuration.
I got there a little late (the_5th_weel's fault -- we appointed him official scapegoat for the day) but we were still in time for everything. We all had a look at the computer room, which already had all the PCs unpacked and on the tables but no cabling, switches, etc., and went down to the staff room for some tea and biscuits. It turned out that this was an opportunity for everyone to make speeches (which not many of us were expecting) but we dutifully listened with only slightly glazed eyes. After that, we all went upstairs and were divided into teams for the cabling and installation. There were three teams: the guys from LEAD, the guys from PLEG and some teachers from the school. Hilton and Jonathan from TSF and Yusuf from GotG helped out as well.
Just as we were getting started, we noticed some of the machines wouldn't start up. (Second hand machines, remember?) A couple of us decided we'd take all the broken boxen downstairs and try make a few working ones out of the bits, so I got out of pulling and crimping cables which isn't really my strong point. Several of the "broken" boxen we were brought only needed to have bios settings for no-longer-present hard drives removed and to be configured to boot off the network. Most of the others had dead power supplies and several had dodgy processor fans as well. I don't remember how many machines we processed (I think it was close to 25), but eventually we had 10 dead (motherboard issues) and 4 that only needed PSUs. (An aside: While we were messing with hardware, we were brought two school PCs that weren't working. It turned out that they weren't working because floppy connectors had been jammed into the hd IDE connectors...)
Eventually we ran out of boxen to fix and went upstairs again just in time to be summoned for lunch. We were given a selection of fairly good curries and several varieties of bubbly beverage and after that a bunch of people left. Most of the LEAD guys were still upstairs making sure all the PCs were booting off the network and everything was happy, and it turned out that the people from PLEG weren't very good at cabling. We started investigating machines that wouldn't come up (one with a broken NIC, the rest badly made cables) and had a brief moment of panic when the server fell over. Further investigation showed that the server's power cable was one of those dual-power jobbies that had had the second kettle connector cut off. Leaving bare 230V AC wires and an earth. Unprotected. Flapping in the breeze.
I immediately shut down the server and found a new power cable. The UPS hadn't yat arrived (I'm not sure if they actually realised they'd need one) but I don't like the idea of bare copper plugged into mains voltage, especially on the same cable as a server's power. Some quick work with my leatherman rendered the offending cable unusable (Never leave dangerous items where they might be used unknowingly) and the server was back up. But the network wasn't. Eventually we discovered that someone had unplugged the server's cat5 from the switch. (the_5th_weel's fault again -- isn't it fun having an official scapegoat?) Plugging it back in made everything work again.
Eventually, we recrimped the last cable at about 17h00. While we were finishing up the last few machines (we only had enough tools/space to do one at a time) we chatted with Yusuf about how things had gone and improvements for the next time we do this. I think we made a fairly good impression -- staying late to make sure every LAN point worked, even the ones without PCs yet, after everyone else had wandered off probably had something to do with that.
Hopefully next time will go a little smoother. Most of our problems were based on people who were inexperienced and not really trained in what they were supposed to be doing. Also, Hilton seemed to have forgotten that none of us had actually done an installation like this before, so he didn't pick up some of the problems until they were too late. All in all, it went about as well as could be expected and in the end everything *did* work. |
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| Microsoft has Black Helicopters! |
[Nov. 2nd, 2005|10:59 am] |
And it hides them in your computer!
mirell did something very strange and geeky over here and piped his hard drive to his sound card. This got me thinking. Do different filsystems have different kinds of sounds? Can you tell what type of partition you have by listening to it? So I did an experiment.
Linux filesystems tend to have typical "data" sounds -- the kind of thing you would expect to hear from a modem. Windows filesystems, on the other hand, have instantly recognisable audio signatures. NTFS sounds like a helicopter. You've heard about Black Helicopters and now you can hear them in their secret base on your hard drive! More proof that Microsoft is planning world domination. FAT32, on the other hand, contains a warning siren for something. Perhaps it's a filesystem corruption alarm? Perhaps it's the scramble alert for the NTFS Black Helicopters? Only Bill knows for sure.
And that's my quota of weirdness for the day. And it's particularly weird today. Weird enough to elicit the following exchange with one of the weirdest people I know:
10:43 <@chalain> jerith, you are a straaange little monkey.
10:43 <@jerith> ...
10:43 <@chalain> ...and you need to teach me how to do this weirdness at some point. :-)
10:43 <@jerith> Coming from Chalain, that's *really* something. |
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| Monitor rant |
[Oct. 7th, 2005|08:57 am] |
<rant type="computer">
A couple of weeks ago, my beautiful 19" Dell CRT decided to snuff it. The replacement arrived yesterday (the delay mostly due to our sysadmin being away and then me being disorganised) and I set it up to my satisfaction.
This morning, less than 24 hours after plugging the thing in and after maybe 3 hours of actual use, the replacement monitor went the same way. Only much faster.
The first one went all big and fuzzy, and refused to display properly for a couple of days of testing. The second one stayed big and fuzzy for about a minute and a half and then switched off. Permanently.
</rant>
*sigh*
Why can't anything be easy? |
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| Back again |
[Aug. 13th, 2005|06:40 pm] |
I've been very busy for the last couple of months. Wind Band tour to the UK, which I won't go into detail about here because there's too much to say. Came back just in time to go to MICSSA, the local military comms conference. Got back from that in time to go to the Drakensberg on holiday with voyager and Charlie. The holiday wasn't particularly well timed, but it was scheduled and booked long before either the tour or the conference were possibilities.
In slightly more recent news, I now have two part time jobs. I'm an admin/developer for the campus Open Source Lab, which involves about 6 hours a week on scripting, troubleshooting, etc. for a very reasonable hourly rate. I'm also doing some embedded development for a company that does some pretty cool stuff. Hopefully they can get their code from the previous guys who were doing it, otherwise I'll have to start from scratch and rewrite all the code that already works. We haven't talked money on that one yet, but I'll make sure it's worth my while. It's also interesting enough work and it'll look good on my CV. Speaking of which, I really should update my CV...
I won't be writing here about the Wind Band tour, but I'll probably be putting up some stuff on my website. When I've fixed all the hand-hacking I did while I was in the UK.
Computers. I got back from the UK to discover that my PSU in my personal machine was dead. I've been trying to get a new one for a while, but various factors have conspired against it. One of the conspiring factors was me breaking my filesystem on my varsity machine, which required me to buy a new hard drive instead so I could back up my filesystem and fix it. I need a new drive, but I hadn't planned to get one so soon.
Anyways, at the moment I'm at rooijan's place where we planned to play some networked NWN. His spare PSU is only a 200W, which won't run my system. I suddenly realised I was an electronic engineer and took the broken power supply apart to see if I could fix it. The only obvious problem was a burned out piece of track on the board, which I fixed by soldering a piece of wire across it. The PSU's working now, but it's only a temporary fix. I still need to get a new one. Now I have a box again, and we're being foiled by incompatible NWN patch levels which won't talk to one another. So we have to download some patches. Over dialup. Well... ISDN, but still slow.
*sigh*
That's about all for now. Hopefully I'll find some time soon to update again. |
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| Weekends aren't long enough |
[May. 30th, 2005|11:40 am] |
Very busy weekend, starting on Friday.
I did some shopping for the Wind Band tuckshop -- cokes, chocolates and a few new items. I really should go to the other Makro -- it's further away, but there aren't nasty traffic jams all the way. While at Makro I was asked to please fill in for someone who couldn't work that evening and that I was the last person available. That meant going home first (30 minutes in the wrong direction) to get appropriate clothing and still being at work by 16h40. I made it, but I had to drop about an hour of paper writing to do so. A family dinner followed, since my aunt from Johannesburg was on holiday with friends in Umhlanga and she came to visit. Then I was off to my dentist's house to house-sit.
Saturday was the usual Wind Band rehearsal from 09h00 to 13h00, followed by packing the trailer. I really need to get a few more people help carry the percussion. I have a plan worked out for the tour, but there's enough variation in who comes to the rehearsals that it won't work here. Fortunately we didn't rehearse William Tell Overture, because I can't yet play the trombone solo at the beginning. Unfortunately, we have sectional rehearsals next week and our lead trombonist is out of town -- I'd better practice it.
After the rehearsal I went to varsity to meet my partner for the next LEAD presentation. We'll be talking about fluxbox (my favourite window manager). He was a little late, so I worked on my paper for a bit before he arrived. rooijan dropped in as well, for me to give him his spare PC back and to start installing gentoo on it. At 16h00 I left to feed and pay the gardener, but he had already gone when I got back to the house. Then I had just enough time to change shirts and go to Johnny Fox's (a local pub) for the mensa new members get-together. rooijan and the_5th_weel were there, the latter being one of the new members. After that I was lured back to his place to fix the audio on his PC with promises of dessert. We didn't manage to fix the problem, but the dessert was delicious.
Sunday morning the gardener arrived again to be paid. It turns out that I only missed him by a few minutes. I packed everything up, put on my concert clothes and failed to start the car. Apparently I left the lights on -- the second time I've done so in five and a half years of driving. A push start down the driveway didn't help (but I didn't expect it to) so I called one of the other guys in the band to bring some jumper cables. That made us "late" for the concert, but although we had to be there at 10h00 we were only playing at 11h00. Why do we have to be there an hour ahead of time? Even after we arrived we sat in the sun for half an hour doing nothing. We got paid a nice contribution towards our tour fund, but the audience was abysmal. The function was some sort of fun day thing and nobody seemed the least bit interested in us.
The only really interesting part of the concert was when the xylophone fell off the stage. We were on a raised platform in the middle of a field, and the carpet on top of the platform stuck out a few centimetres past the edge of the platform, making it seem like the xylophone was further from the edge than it actually was. One of our percussionists (the one playing the xylophone) grabbed for it and managed to keep it from falling off completely while one of the others ran around to put it back where it should be.
After the concert I went back to varsity for a couple of hours to work on the paper. At 14h00 I met my parents at the Botanic Gardens for lunch and to watch some military and pipe bands play. Good music, good food and all sorts of interesting people to watch.
Which brings me to Sunday night, when I collapsed on my bed for a couple of hours, woke up, wrote the start of yet another story (one of these days I must actually finish one...) and missed supper because nobody thought to call me. Ah well, warmed up leftovers (traditional Sunday night fare) taste the same whether you eat in company or alone. |
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| proxy servers and non-technical brothers |
[May. 4th, 2005|12:06 pm] |
Two things today.
First, I've finally gotten around to doing something about the campus proxy server setup. Details on my website.
Second, a little story about my brother, who is usually incredibly smart. This happened last night.
Brother: Jerith, my laptop's not working properly. The sound keeps getting softer and even if I turn winamp up to full I can hardly hear it.
Jerith: Brother, have you turned the hardware volume control on the side of the laptop?
Brother: I've played with every volume control there is!
* Jerith goes to laptop, adjusts hardware volume control on the side, sound comes back.
Brother: Wow! You fixed it! I was going to take it in for repairs tomorrow! The Toshiba guy said it's probably a faulty amplifier!
Jerith: Surely you've looked at your laptop in the several months you've owned it?
Brother: Yes, but not there. Who puts a hardware volume control on laptops anyway?
Jerith: Apparently Toshiba does -- along with most other laptop manufacturers...
Couldn't resist that. Of course, he'll probably read it here and revoke all use of laptop privileges for the next year, but that's a small price to pay for the entertainment this provided. Ah well, perhaps the flattery up at the top will make up for it. |
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| Music, LUG and TOP |
[Apr. 25th, 2005|04:06 pm] |
I've had rather a busy weekend. Friday night was a concert at the City Hall where we shared a stage with the KZN Youth Choir and the Durban Men's Choir. The concert went fairly well, even though we were a little shaky in Candide Overture. The finale where we played while both choirs sang was awesome. The audience loved us and we made some decent cash for our tour to the UK in July. Saturday morning was our normal rehearsal, but it felt a lot longer. Probably lack of sleep, caffeine and breakfast doing it.
Saturday afternoon was our local Linux User Group installfest. I had to leave early, but the turnout was a little disappointing. We did dish out some CDs and a few copies of tectonic magazine's first issue. The LUG has an advert in there which a bunch of us contributed to.
Sunday was the AGM of The OpenProject which you can find out more about by following the link. There was a fairly good turnout, a bunch of reasonable questions (some of which made us rethink things a little) and all-in-all a productive time was had by all. |
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| Dodgy hardware and data loss |
[Mar. 29th, 2005|08:21 am] |
On sunday night my hard drive crashed. This means annoyance rather than anything else -- all my important data's backed up -- but a lot of personal stuff (including all my NWN saved games) is gone for good. Guess I'm going to have to get a new drive now. I hope this one's still in warrantee... |
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