jmoiron.net

On a short jaunt in Okinawa last week, I was perplexed/upset/disappointed to see that my trusty Tamron 17-50mm F2.8 lens had apparently crapped out, giving an internet-famous "Err 01: Communication between the camera and lens is faulty."

I recently went to a family gathering where a cousin of mine who was just finishing up some schooling for aviation maintenance and repair was asking me what bearing binary had on programming. He confessed that binary logic, as you'd encode on a circuit board with gates, was a difficult concept to get his head around, and he wondered how much of that was really necessary in "modern" programming.

The focus model in OSX is absolutely, completely broken. Unfortunately, it's not only a question of the window manager being woeful (although it is), but it has to do with the whole application/window philosophy required with a shared menu bar.

I've finally decided to get a mac computer for myself. The main things I look for in a laptop is something that is fairly small, light, with good build quality and good battery life. In the past, a Toshiba r200 and a Lenovo x201 have served this purpose, but this time around I could not make a case for not going with one of the new airs.

I was asked about getting some "monitoring" going the other day, and decided to ask someone with expertise. I told Wei that we had just had an issue with our logs filling up the /var/ partition, and wanted to make sure it didn't happen in the future. His answer was pretty enlightening; he said: "Don't do that. Fix the problem."

My thinkpad works pretty well in Ubuntu 9.10, but one thing thing that is not fixed is that my wireless ceases to function when I resume. If you remove and reinsert the kernel module for it, it will work again. Back in the day, you'd put this in /etc/apm/resume.d/, or more recent, in /etc/acpi/resume.d/, but as with other seemingly fine technologies Ubuntu has recently deprecated ACPI. The new location for the script is /etc/pm/sleep.d/.

I finally got sick and tired of my iPhone disconnecting from wifi when locking, not actively in use, or feeling unloved, and did some research this weekend. There seems to be two issues that are not easily overcome:

I've used Mozilla's flagship browser since before Phoenix, the first version of Firefox, existed. Been using Chrome on Linux for a few months now, and I've mostly moved my day to day habitual browsing to it. Although there are some "Linux just seems to suck at doing this still" issues, like having audio always just work, they aren't unique to Chrome. Still, I've found a few things that I miss from Firefox, or I wish chrome would do given its additional features.

In order to offset the increased monthly costs of my new phone, I recently decided to migrate one of my two dedicated servers to a VPS. After mulling over bargain basement offerings and some major ones, I decided on linode. I figured that most of the services I run on my weaker dedicated server (mail & webmail, DNS, etc) would live as happily on a $20/month VPS as they would on a $65/month dedicated server, and although I've had a long time to start the switch, I commenced last night (with 10 days remaining) by moving my wiki and my dev site.

Been looking at ways to write attractive presentations half-way semantically in Linux. The "semantically" there is important; I want things to just generally look alright without having to agonize over bullet style. Two things sort of led me to S5: the sorry, sorry state of affairs of creating presentations in Linux, and Ian Bicking using S5. These are somewhat related.

I finally buckled down and got an iPhone recently. I had a lot of reasons for getting a phone I can't readily write applications for (without jailbreaking); among them: I need my phone outside of apps, so I can't have something that I am breaking constantly; I want a GSM carrier w/ 3g coverage; the iPhone is the only touch-screen next gen smart phone that has had a few hardware revisions under its belt.

Been having a sort of chronic problem with my phone over the past couple weeks where songs would skip. Didn't think it was too big of a deal, but transferring some more music over to it the other day somehow my pictures all disappeared. I take fairly frequent backups, but this caught a few that weren't on the memory card. I checked dmesg, saw end_request: I/O error, dev sdg, sector 48728, and knew that I was probably in for some problems.

After a year or two of incremental updates to gmail and youtube and general software announcements or releases that were not very exciting to me; notably mondrian and app-engine, google has released a torrent of interesting software in the past week that look fairly exciting to me!

I don't even understand why it's notable anymore that something tragic is or isn't announced on the internet. Isn't it past time now that everyone owns up to the fact that the majority of communication for this generation and at least the next few future ones will happen over the internet?

The past 2 days I've had a few perplexing technical problems that have had interesting answers. After a long weekend of drinking, eating, and lest I forget drinking, I got back to Cecilia's late last night and felt like doing a little digital maintenance on my computer, when I noticed that it was down. It's never down.

Setting up a new linux software raid tonight I noticed some new behavior from mdadm that I thought I might share quickly. It looks like, as of around version 2.6.4, mdadm has started creating new raid devices in auto-read-only mode. In this mode, the array flips to read/write after the first write attempt.

Unfortunately for those seeking pimps or the services of their employees, this is sadly about editors. Seriously.

In Japan, copyright infringement is a criminal offense (unlike here, although our corporate fascist leanings might push it there in due time), so file sharing is a dangerous game. Because of this, sophisticated anonymizing and encryption techniques have been built into Japanese peer-to-peer programs for at least 5 years now.

Haven't been writing mostly for want of time. Wanted to drop this, for what it's worth.

Usually i try to write these titles in the proper alphabet, but I'm too tired and frankly I have no idea where to find a resource for even the most simple Thai phrase (hello!).

I really like open source software. I think the quality of most popular open source software is pretty good, and on average it is at least on par with the quality of closed source software. At the extremes, there are open and closed projects that are unmatched; for every Photoshop and Skype there is an openssh and apache. This short blurb is about why open source software matters to you: my mother, my steel-working friend from high school, my friend from university, the intergalactic electric rodent. As various large organizations continue to lobby to remove all of our "digital" freedoms, a few reasons why open source software (and the freedom of data in general) are important to even non-technical people, and decided to write some of them down.

I just started my new job this week at attila, and there are some things I want to talk about, but I want to kinda mull over it for a few weeks and then describe the whole situation in full in a few weeks. Any American (aged 18+, or thereabouts) knows that April means income taxes, and because most of the standalone software is for Windows or MacOSX, and I also have a need to run some graphics utilities that are windows only for my Canon 400d RAW format pictures, I decided to set up my laptop to dual boot again, installing Windows XP Service Pack 2.

I missed what seems like quite a few get-togethers of jeremy's, and when people asked my why the only excuse I could muster was that I don't like sushi. It's a pretty valid excuse, but I think if the company had been different I would have gone.

Perfectionists may never let Linux be ready for the desktop. I don't think its quite there yet, although projects like Ubuntu have me a little hopeful. Still, what projects like Ubuntu and SuSE and the like do are iron out all of the irritating inconsistencies with their own set of standards. It usually works alright, but patches sit around for a long time, even in central packages to important projects:

For those of you possibly uninterested, this is going to almost entirely dwell on esoteric computer usability discussion.

Been using ViM for a while, and decided to use the X version (gViM) for my Java class. The X version comes with a fairly gorgeous color theme, and I wanted it to actually come up every time I used it. I searched quickly for some way to do this in the GUI, but since its Vim I figured (rightly) that most things were done through the RC file. A little research on the Vim irc wiki got me a few options that I've wanted for a while, so I figured I'd share them:

Courtesy of OS Galaxy blog syndication came a link about Mockup, which is actually a bit hard to explain; or at least, its relations to the rest of my thoughts on the subject of desktop Linux (which I feel is still somewhat of an oxymoron.) The Register gave some light play at this Linux desktop perdicament today, and I mostly agree with their take on the freak mainstream and linux's preparation thereof.

Just when you figure you have something figured out, changes happen which change the dichotomy of the argument. The way QT4's Windows license is going to work out is that if you want to develop and distribute programs for free on Windows using QT, you can; provided that your work is released under the GPL. If you want to develop and distribute programs and not share the source, you can, provided you purchase a commercial license.

I began what was quite an interesting day waking up at 8:47 and wondering just exactly what time it was. 8:47 was apparently not enough of a reference point, and was certain alien when compared to the likes of the "7:30" that I had set my alarm for. I stumbled out of bed anyway, donned some ostensibly business-like garb and set out for the bus, which thankfully arrived on Ferry St. shortly after I did. I sat next to an odd fellow this morning; Long hair, beard, and an "Independent" backpack with a button that I liked very much. It read: "The problem isn't Bush" in small letters circling the top, and in large letters on a white banner "It's Capitalism!".

For about a week now, I've had a problem. Linux just wasn't cutting it for two of my devices; "my" 802.11b card (which I conveniently stole from Krause) and my Canon Digital IXUS 400. Both hardware's I knew were in working condition, and both were discovered and utilized through some manner of hotplug system, but both simply did not work. It was a major headache; in part because I knew that both of them had been working and I was happy in my "linux is great" little world.

Let us suppose that you were me. You just got finished with a day in which you got 3 hours of sleep, went to all your classes, went to work and accomplished great things, did well on two tests absolutely necessary for graduation, and get most of the presentation that is due the next day done. At around 9:00, you're ready to pass out. So what do you do?

Testing website stuff in Opera has; rather than make me understand why friends of mine, some who's technical prowess I respect, and some who's technical prowess makes me giggle; has done very little to convince me why anyone would use such a program in the first place.

I've been trying out a few console only programs in the past week; a few programs that I had been meaning to try for some time. One of them was swaret, the SlackWARE Tool, and the other is Screen, the UNIX tool.

Every so often, random people stumble upon something brilliantly useful. In this case, it comes in the form of x2vnc, which Jerumu deserves 50% of the credit for (the other 50% going towards the author). Anything that allows me to control a machine running OSX, Win2k, and Linux 2.4.21 with one set of keyboard and mouse and no extra hardware can win a link on my site any day. However, things do not come so easily.

Well it came; I got a new Canon Powershot s400 Digital Elph camera. How is it? The proof is in pudding. Jerumu was stunned, and Firu seemed quite impressed; needless to say, its for reasons such as these that I require a camera.

At work today it occured to me (through my discovery of various rsync related things) that Rsync combined with some daemon that ran on a directory could in essence create an automatic uploading situation through an ssh pipe (that can be opened and closed as needed) for any directory that I want. This has its obvious benefits, but in my current situation, they are numerous.

My thumbs seem to be any color except green, a contributing factor to the apparent slow and painful death of my new foliage. They are, however, rather adept at writing compilers; as I was able to finally compile useful code today with my pascal compiler (fibonacci and factorial). Will it ever be completed? The world will never know.

After a long downtime, and probably another few days of a transitional period, my backend is finaly back to an order that is working enough for me to update with it. Or at least, so things seem. I promised lots of things; pictures and at least a little blurb about the rally I went to, and a few other things, and these promises will be delivered eventually. For now, though, I have to pass on them.

My god has arrived in the shape of a demon. That's right, far beyond just being trendy (or, more to the point, more obscure and considerably more oldschool), I've come to like; no, adore BSD. And its not really BSD in general, I suppose, but FreeBSD.. and there's one simple reason why.

When I started to use Linux full time a few months ago, it was something else. It was special. Not many people were doing it, and those who were really had something. I decided to join in on the revolt against Microsoft. And indeed, others have joined me in this. In fact, just today..

he phrase come sweet death was never such a misnomer. For some reason, I can't find my MSI and Rage Against the Machine cd's, so at work I've been listening to Evangelion OST's that I leave there just in case. Angel's Attack! is great bugfix music.

Today has, to a large degree, been a mixed bag of things that piss me off and things that inspire an undescribeable ammount of awe. Lets take it from the begining, shall we?

from slashdot, article here: