Eric TF Bat's Journal

Roundabouts Comma Swings Full Stop

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 12:07:10 GMT

I like daylight saving. Really I do. I consider it a good sign when a government notices that the world is round (which it apparently only is south of Queensland, but there are two possible explanations for that and I'm not sure which one is better). Having the Boy Wonder crawl all over one's face at 5.30 in the fracking morning was so much No Fun that there's a picture of it in the dictionary under "Bleagh". So it's a relief that he's now going to be doing that an hour closer to the slightly less ugly end of the morning.

But still.

Having him take an (apparent) hour longer to go to bed at night is going to suck for a while too.

In other news: I seem to be over the Bubonic Leprolurgi, and feeling much more civilised. Wish I could say the same about work's network; they were still trying to fix it this afternoon. The good news is: it appears I haven't been smugging into a bucket all this time. Tomorrow morning, before our system administrator pops overseas on another of his trips, the company will be signing the paperwork to convert over to Internode. Win!!!

(The fact that this means loads of free streaming radio stations is neither here nor there, of course. It's the principle of the thing: why put up with a bunch of incompetent losers like Netspeed and TransACT when there's a real ISP available? I am so glad the message got through, after only half a dozen network outages this year.)

Now: back to trying to work out an open-source way to programmatically produce PDFs (try saying that three times fast with a bowling ball between your teeth). Joy.

Plans and Vans

Sun, 05 Oct 2008 12:05:05 GMT

The Beloved has a Plan. It is a Clever Plan, although some bits of it will need tweaking or it will never work. But you get that with The Beloved's plans. But we need some help, possibly from a Canberran LJ Friend.

"Oooh," I'm sure you're thinking. "How can we be of assistance in your Plan of Clevertude?"

I'm glad you asked.

We are looking to borrow, for a month or more, one of these blighters:

... Or something like it. A caravan. Naturally, any such borrowing would include a suitable rental, payable using actual money or sexual favours (although we drew straws and it's the cat who'd be providing the sexual favours, so I recommend going with the money). If the plan works well, we'll only need to borrow it for a month or two because then we'd get our own. And if it doesn't go well, ditto, except we wouldn't then get our own.

Anyone able to help? You know where to find us...

Various Things That Don't Work Currently

Sat, 04 Oct 2008 12:50:04 GMT

Apologies for current slark-arsedity in the region of this LJ; I am down with some kind of gastrobubonic leprosy/Lurgi combo, and feeling like I lay on the wrong side of the bed in one of those commercials with the mattress and the steamroller, which is a comment that would have been wittier if I'd been able to find a YouTube of the thing, but I guess you'll just have to imagine.

Hey ho.

My work's network has been down since Friday morning, apparently, because their ISP is Netspeed, who go through TransACT, and TransACT are the Chinese Government of ISPs: large but useless. Every time their connectivity disappears and they're running around like headless chooks trying to contact their users and make sure everything's still working, I like to just casually mention the number of times that Internode has been down since we signed up with them at home, which is never. Sooner or later they'll get the hint, I'm sure.

After my recent rants/reviews of programming tools, I've been giving Lazarus another go. As usual, it's pig ugly because it uses the old GTK1 libraries by default, and the instructions to recompile with GTK2 are less than illuminating. But I'll keep trying, I guess, and see if I can make some headway.

There was more, but I'm ill, so I'm going to sleep now. Good night.

Two Big Ifs

Sat, 04 Oct 2008 09:11:23 GMT

You know, if there's a majority of American voters who aren't utterly insane, and if the next president is an honest man who will give credit where credit is due, then the president's inaugural speech on January 20, 2009. will absolutely have to include a heartfelt thank-you to Governor Sarah Palin for helping President Obama into office.

Given that the Republicans (or their advertising company - same thing, really) are so stunningly good at keeping Americans scared and ignorant, and given that the Democrats are, not to put too fine a point on it, totally clueless and out of touch with reality, it was looking like McCain was going to win by default. But his choice of one of the most worthless and talentless politicians in recent memory (and remember: we're including George W Bush and Dan Quayle in "recent memory") may be the mistake that will save the US.

Here's hoping, anyhow.

Ping?

Sat, 04 Oct 2008 08:23:58 GMT

No new entries in my Friends list since 2.23 this afternoon? That seems improbable, even for a Saturday afternoon. Is nobody out there? Or is LJ malfunctioning in some weird way...?

Linux Irritations Fixed While-U-Wait

Thu, 02 Oct 2008 23:46:44 GMT

There are a few irritations built into Linux. Here's where I list the fixes:

Pressing Ctrl+Alt+Backspace kills everything you're working on and restarts the X windowing system: fixed!

Firefox puts a close button on each tab as of version 2.0, where previously there was one close box at the right, making it easier to close multiple tabs with the mouse: fixed! (I found this a while ago, but I'm repeating it here for completeness' sake.)

Double-clicking files in the Firefox Download Manager doesn't open them. This is something I broke when I installed it, since for a while it was trying to open everything in a PDF viewer: not fixed yet. Deleting the mimeType.rdf file got part of the way there, but now it tries to open every file with the same type, and therefore the same application, which is stupid. This one is driving me mad!

Dolphin, the new file manager, has an "Open As Root" menu command, but Konqueror doesn't; sadly, Dolphin is godawful and I much prefer Konqy, so what to do? Fixed.

More as I find them.

The Beige Plague and the Turning Tide

Thu, 02 Oct 2008 11:58:20 GMT

I took yesterday off due to general lack of sleep caused by an evil Boy Wonder who shall remain nameless. Today I felt much better, but by the time I got in to work I was dead on my feet; I went home after lunch and went to bed. I woke up and, again, felt much better, and was thinking that was the end of it... until certain biological processes had their effect and I realised that the truth was otherwise. I think I'll be attempting to keep my fluids up and staying close to a dunny for a few days. Ewwwww.

I found this song on YouTube and learned it to sing for the BatPup. It's an old favourite since seagoon introduced me to Roger Waters' Radio KAOS. It's inspired by LiveAid, when, for one shining moment, it looked like the human race was going to use technology to bring about a real change in how the world saw the world. The results were not, perhaps, as wide-ranging as they could have been, but at least we live in a world with only one communist government now (nobody counts North Korea any more) and they're an incompetent joke too busy trying not to poison their own children to have much chance of nuking the planet. So that's a change. Yes, we have Islamic and Christian terrorists and rogue states now (Iraq, Iran, Texas, etc) but they're a step down: like replacing Lex Luthor and Brainiac with the Toyman, really.

So: this song. The BatPup loves it, and so do I. Share and enjoy!

(Oh: and, if you don't mind a little propaganda from one of the small number of hopeful voices left in the world, there's this too.)

Quick Look, Part II: KDevelop

Wed, 01 Oct 2008 11:59:32 GMT

Let's try KDevelop instead. It's the standard GUI tool for development on KDE, the windowing system I use. It's old, so it should be stable, and surely it's what the KDE developers themselves use, so it should benefit from them eating their own dogfood. How does it stack up?

+ Installing via Add/Remove Programs is quick, and you get a submenu under the Development menu, exactly as one would expect. Documentation is included, and the icons are clearly labelled. Good start.

Let's see how far we get without cracking open the doco.

+ File | New isn't what I want, but I could have guessed that. Project | New Project gives me a tree of options. Let's pick... let's see... Application framework. Oooh! A sample icon and a description of what it includes. Sweet! And there are plenty of options, many of which are gibberish to me, but that's OK: I'm no expert; but if I were, this would be ideal.

I'll pick Simple KDE Application, I think.

+ I like the way the wizard gets you to choose a license and a version control system. Good discipline. The "eat your own dogfood" principle is showing.

Let's select Build | Build Project. It does a huge amount, including creating makefiles and running ./configure. Then it stops with an error: "Can't find X libraries. Please check your installation and add the correct paths."

OK: on the one hand, this is Ubuntu's packaging system letting me down again, and I'm kind of used to that by now. But on the other hand, for a serious dev tool, it makes sense that you'd have the source at hand. Let's google the error and see what we get... No wait! Let's check the onboard documentation! Trying to search gets me the KDE equivalent of the old Help Installation wizard that Joel Spolsky rants about. The result is less than satisfactory -- something about an external search library that's not installed -- but at least it gives clear, concise explanations on how to fix it. This is very obviously written to assume some kind of package management system like apt, and that's good.

I don't expect to be using this full time, so I won't bother chasing dependencies. Off to Google with an error message and a couple of turtle doves as a sacrifice.

+ (Ah... error text is selectable and can be copied into the clipboard. This is the sort of little thing that shows that the developers are actually using their own product on a daily basis. It's not the sort of thing that makes a dotpoint on a magazine review, but it's appreciated nonetheless.)

A couple of false alarms, but eventually I settle on sudo apt-get install xlibs-static-dev, because xlibs-dev is apparently not available. It seems to be loading sensible stuff. Let's see how it goes...

And no, that doesn't work either. There's not much via Google, which suggests that whatever I'm doing is something that's covered in the help files and is fairly obvious.

... Aaaaand... the help files aren't installed by default. OK, I'm giving up here, because it's late.

Verdict on this one: KDevelop is obviously a better product than MonoDevelop, primarily because it appears it's actually in regular use by real programmers, whereas MonoDevelop must only be used by half a dozen masochists who don't submit bug reports. If I had to choose between the two, I'd pick KDevelop, even despite the necessity to use C++, the COBOL of the nineties. But before I did that, I'd need to hunt down all the extra components that Ubuntu doesn't install by default, and that's a pain.

This is pretty clearly the fault of the people who look after packaging. They're just not focused on testing their stuff to see if it works for real users. But at least they're always improving, so I have faith. If I ever need to do real GUI development in Linux, I'll know where to start.

Edit to add: installing the kdevelop-doc and kdelibs4-dev package was all it took. Apparently the latter is the package for KDE3, which I needed, not for KDE4. The fact that 4 = 4 fooled me. Everything compiled and ran, and I have comprehensive help files. Woot!

MonoDevelop: A Quick Look

Wed, 01 Oct 2008 11:14:12 GMT

I'm playing around with MonoDevelop, the UI for C# development in Linux. It's version 1.0, so we expect it to be feature complete, tested and reasonably robust. Let's see how we go...

- The help files for GTK, effectively everything that handles the user interface of a program, aren't installed by default. Perhaps that's Ubuntu's fault, or Debian's? But no: if Miguel hasn't heard of Ubuntu yet and taken the time to check that his baby is being treated right, the ball is firmly in his court.

- Double clicking on a "signal" (real UI programmers call them event handlers, but never mind that) doesn't create a new handler; you have to type a name. Double-clicking the name doesn't jump to the source code window. What - event handlers are too rare and obscure to deserve mouse support???

(Helpful hint to UI designers: find out the ten things users do most. Assign simple key commands to them. Find out the next thirty; assign more obscure keys to them. Leave the rest in the menus. The sheet music editors that don't have a key for "play" are clearly a special case, having been written by gibbons; but every Linux program suffers from the flaw to a greater or lesser extent.)

+ The editor handles tabs the right way, ie like Emacs. That's a Good Thing. Too many editors treat the Tab key as meaning something like "please insert this invisible ASCII character here so my program won't print out properly and my cursor will jump around like a wallaby with Parkinson's Disease". The Tab key should be the key that formats the current line the correct way according to the appropriate language's standards; anything else is lazy programming.

- There are loads of window frames cluttering up the UI; even on a 1280x800 screen, the individual windows are too small - I get maybe 40 columns of source code and no space for error lines. There's too much chrome -- toolbars, tab bars, list headers, resize areas -- and not enough screen real estate given over to the actual source code and debugger.

- When you open the Edit | Preferences dialog, you get a standard tree down the left and a panel on the right with controls in it. However, the default control page on the right appears to be a page called "Title" containing only the word "label5". Poor testing here; someone forgot to set a default page index.

+ Fortunately, setting the font to 8pt and setting toolbar icons to "smallest" makes the layout a bit more usable.

Interestingly, the MessageDialog class requires a Destroy() call; automatic garbage collection doesn't do what I expect, somehow. I think the problem is that what they call "Destroy", I would call "Close"; and it's helpful to have control over when a dialog box closes, so I don't mind having to call an explicit function to get rid of it. But the naming is odd.

So: I have a simple Hello World: one button, labelled "Press Me", that when you press it pops up a dialog box saying "Please do not press that button again". Simple stuff. Now let's see if it's possible to put this application in the KDE equivalent of the Windows systray, officially called the Notification Area.

- The "Toolbox" has some toolbar icons, but no hover tips to tell me what they do. Clumsy implementation again. Even Microsoft gets that sort of thing right.

Nothing there for what I recognise as the systray icon widget, but that's not surprising; it always seemed odd to me that Windows GUI programming languages conflated visual widgets like buttons and edit fields with non-visual ones like application-specific settings. Maybe GTK and/or Mono decided to do things more cleanly.

+ Pressing the "+" button on that toolbar is interesting; it seems we have the ability to add more suites of widgets. Could be valuable!

- No help available for any of them, and what labelling they do have is verbose and meaningless.

Never mind; I'll pick the "DesktopPanelWidget", which sounds like the Linuxy equivalent.

- Nothing appears to happen when I do... No, wait: it added an extra widget... without a custom icon. D'oh!

- I drag the widget onto my form. I get an "unhandled exception" error.

The second time I try it, it puts something on my form. Let's run it and see what it does.

- "Cannot find metadata file..." pointing to version control and a testing system called nunit. What the fuck? What does that have to do with a desktop panel widget? I delete the widget, but the error remains. The widget seems to have hosed my application. Pity I didn't save what little I'd achieved.

I think I'll give up here.

Verdict: it's not usable. I loathe Visual Studio, but Mono makes even that look stable. I can't imagine having to rely on this to do any serious work. It seems that, for GUI development, I'll have to look elsewhere or stick with Delphi in Windows. I wonder if Lazarus (the Free Pascal Delphi-lookalike) has improved in the last few months...?

An Idea For A T-Shirt

Tue, 30 Sep 2008 11:49:39 GMT

Here's an idea. You could wear this around town on a t-shirt. If anyone asks, you just explain that it's the German version of Face Book. I wonder how that would work...

If You Want To Live Forever, Stay Away From Apples

Mon, 29 Sep 2008 13:02:00 GMT

The Beloved needed to get at some old files tonight, urgently (*coughprocrastinatingcough*). She was worried because they were originally on her now-defunct Apple iBook. Luckily, I made complete backups before we sent it off on its final voyage to the Apple Shop, so I grabbed them. Apart from a bit of dicking around with thumb drives because her CD/DVD drive is unhealthy, it was easy to get the files she needed.

Opening them was a different matter.

Turns out she did a lot of work in AppleWorks, an old word processor. And I do mean old: if this were an aeroplane, it would have ashtrays. And OpenOffice won't read AppleWorks files. A prayer to Google brought relief: apparently AbiWord can read AppleWorks files if you load the right plugins, so one trip to Synaptic was all it took... to discover that AbiWord only reads AppleWorks 5 files, and these are AppleWorks 6.

Now, as it happens, we anticipated this problem and converted the files over to .DOC format, so a bit more rummaging among backup CDs was all it took. And I'm sure that if I couldn't get the files to open, infoaddict could have come up with half a dozen ways, since she's fond of ~~whitegoods~~Macintoshes.

But it should be easier than that.

There's a lot of data out there that's already unreadable. All the stuff I wrote in my first five years as a geek is now inaccessible, even if I could remember where I put the 5¼" floppy disks, because it's in Commodore CBM 8050 format, and that uses a multi-speed disk format that was never used before or since on any other hardware on earth. And many of the programs I wrote in Delphi 1.0 and 3.0 won't come anywhere near compiling in Turbo Delphi, only five or six versions later. It's lost forever. It shouldn't be, because the cost of software to maintain a link to the past is surely infinitely less than the value that could potentially be lost (my first 6502 assembler program! priceless!) but somehow the chain gets broken.

Ah well. Just have to keep producing new stuff, I guess, and uploading lots to the web as I go along.

And if I want to have my old files, the lesson is clear: put them in a format so popular that someone will always need to maintain a conversion path to the modern day. That means: no fruit machines. Sorry, Steves!

I Laugh At Controversy! (I Cry At Weddings!)

Sun, 28 Sep 2008 11:40:23 GMT

Via kareina, a supposedly controversial questionnaire. I'm obviously too fringe, 'cause this all seems very ho-hum to me.

[01] Do you have the guts to answer these questions and re-post as The Controversial Survey?

Duh.

[02] Would you do meth if it was legalized?

I don't even do legal drugs (caffeine, tobacco, alcohol). So: no.

[03] Abortion: for or against it?

Against it, because it's barbaric. But because it's impossible to eradicate the need for it, I am firmly in favour of it remaining legal and accessible. Banning something to make it go away is like closing your eyes to make the sun set.

[04] Do you think the world would fail with a female president?

That is a stupidly parochial and ignorant question.

[05] Do you believe in the death penalty?

There are two kinds of crime: those that deserve the punishment of life in maximum security prison without possibility of freedom, and those that aren't that bad. Even if you make the assumption that nobody ever makes a mistake or abuses the legal system (note: see entry on EBay for "Brooklyn Bridge"), the death penalty is still ridiculous because it gives the worst offenders an easy way out of suffering for their crimes. The idea that the religious right champion the death penalty as a good thing is therefore utterly insane.

[06] Do you wish marijuana would be legalized already?

Relatively harmless drugs like marijuana and heroin should be legal; the illegal ones should be the really nasty killers like alcohol, tobacco and sugar. But see above re: the futility of making things illegal. They should all be legal... and taxed. And the taxes should go to the health system.

[07] Are you for or against premarital sex?

Depends who with. I could give you a list! Very much in favour of postmarital sex, but that doesn't get as much coverage, presumably because it's much rarer.

[08] Do you believe in God?

Yes, but not in the way you think.

[09] Do you think same sex marriage should be legalized?

I think all marriages should be de-legalised. That is, marriage should be a matter for religious institutions, and the law should only cover the concept of the civil union, for legal matters. Then, if any two consenting adults want to get married, provided they can sign their names the law can say "fine, go for it". Having a law that calls that marriage is stupid, because marriage has always been a religious thing; but having a law that calls anything marriage is stupid. There's no law regarding the legality of baptism, is there?

[10] Do you think it's wrong that so many Hispanics are illegally moving to the USA?

It's wrong that it's (a) illegal and (b) necessary because Mexico is such a hellhole. But Americans are as dumb as a box of hammers (made in Mexico by slave labour; solid in Walmart by illegal immigrants) when it comes to stuff like that.

[11] A twelve year old girl has a baby, should she keep it?

Why did she have it? Because some adults stopped her having an abortion when she wanted one? Then they need to put their money where their knee-jerks are and support the mother and child in perpetuity. Or what -- the twelve-year-old was supposed to understand everything about sex and consequences and never get into that situation? With what kind of sex eduction, exactly? And when adults can't even understand the concept of "unsecured mortgage", the repercussions of which last considerably longer than nine months.

In short: stupid fucking question, stupid fucking world. Cure the disease; stop whinging about the symptoms.

[12] Should the alcohol age be lowered to eighteen?

In civilised countries it already is.

[13] Should the war in Iraq be called off?

Why hasn't it been already? Who's is helping exactly?

[14] Assisted suicide is illegal: do you agree?

Putting aside the "hey look, I'm sixteen and I've created a meme!" grammar for a second: assisted suicide is just another unstoppable, like abortion and drug use. Make it legal so it can be controlled. Duh.

[15] Do you believe in spanking your children?

At times... but I think it's wrong, so I'd rather not.

[16] Would you burn an American flag for a million dollars?

Hell yeah!

[17] Who do you think would make a better president? McCain or Obama?

Obama. That's not even open to debate. A retarded turnip would make a better president than McCain. How can there be so many Americans who haven't figured that out? Are they really so nunbuggeringly thick?

[18] Are you afraid others will judge you from reading some of your answers?

Bwahahahahahahaha!!!

Another One

Sun, 28 Sep 2008 07:00:35 GMT

via Tegan:

The BatPup is having a big adventure today: staying over at Nanny and Pa's farm for the first time. Her first night away from Mummy - ever! So I can't show her this. Dang!

Practice Makes...?

Sat, 27 Sep 2008 10:59:08 GMT

I used to keep a paper journal back in the eighties, one foolscap¹ page per night, every single night for about six years. I stopped because my girlfriend convinced me that all this regular omphaloskepsis² was doing my head in. Also, shortly after I had my old brain surgically removed and created Me 2.0, I burnt the lot of them, for much the same reason, and was glad of it.

So doing one or more LJ entries every 24 hours (Canberra time) has a precedent. As of today, the 271st day of the year, I've done 390 entries this year, most of them public. And I was thinking today of the various unpublished writers I know, all of whose blogs are filled, so to speak, with variations on the lament that they just haven't written anything good lately. I wonder: is that because they're not writing at all? Would they be well served by doing what I do, setting their standards attainably low and simply writing something, anything at all, each day without fail?

Honestly, I think probably not. Looking at my writing on January 1 compared to now, I don't think I've gotten more fluent or more entertaining. I've got a few filks I'm proud of and one or two witty quips that have received a good response, but in general I don't think I'm any more of a writer than I was then. If practice makes perfect, it takes more practice than I've put in.

But I'm OK with that. I'm not a writer; I'm just someone who writes. Writing, unlike programming and bardic singing and being a Daddy, is not an important aspect of my self image. If I remain pedestrian and uncommercial for ever as a blogger, it won't stop me writing software or scurrilous songs, or cuddling my babies.

If you, gentle blitheree, are a writer, and you wonder if you can improve your hit rate with a similar dose of regular monomania, all I can suggest is that my experience is inconclusive. Perhaps writing more than I do -- one or two or five thousand words a day, say, instead of bursts of prolific blather interspersed with memes and rants on PHP's namespaces -- might stretch your writing muscles enough to have some benefit. Or maybe you're better off concentrating on quality instead of quantity. I'm not the one to ask.

When I used to keep a journal every night, I don't know if I got to be a better writer, but I do know my handwriting improved and got highly streamlined. And doing this LJ every night has improved my typing. So there's that. Will that do? It's not perfect, but what is?

¹ 8½ x 13½ inches, apparently.

² Navel-gazing. Thank you to lauredhel for introducing me to that word, many years ago.

Hallelujah: Postscript

Fri, 26 Sep 2008 11:07:20 GMT

I played the Jeff Buckley Hallelujah video to the BatPup tonight as a treat, and you should have seen her: light in her eyes, utterly rapt. I have to agree that the late Mr B. was a one for taking songs and making them shine. I think it might be the BatPup's new favourite. Very good indeed.

Heh. Just sang the Boy Wonder back to sleep with two verses of it, too. That's powerful stuff!

Uncle Llewen

Thu, 25 Sep 2008 13:19:41 GMT

Some years ago I was at a court, almost certainly in Rowany, up the back mucking around with Uncle Tom, aka Llewen the Unruly. We were both old farts, of course, so sitting quietly in court was not what we cool kids did. But one Gui de Bragelonne, now Baron Gui von Oberhausen of Rowany but back then just a fresh-faced collegian, stood up to make a presentation. I'm not sure what it was now, but when he was finished speaking there wasn't a dry eye in the hall. Llewen leant over to me and sotto vocéd in his best Darth Vader voice: The Dream is strong in this one.

I've always wanted to write a song about that, and this is it. stellar_muddle is responsible for the fact that it's a filk of Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah...

Uncle Llewen

I saw there was a royal court
Where heralds spoke and stewards talked
But I don't really care what kings are doing.
I stood up back with Uncle Tom
He muttered snark, I played along,
Ignored the king, had fun with Uncle Llewen
Uncle Llewen, Uncle Llewen
Uncle Llewen, Uncle Llewen

When Gui got up with a little speech
I didn't care to hear him preach --
But something in his tone was worth reviewing:
He spoke of honour, friendship, truth,
His words so wise despite his youth,
And on his lips a smile had Uncle Llewen
Uncle Llewen, Uncle Llewen
Uncle Llewen, Uncle Llewen

Young Gui a simple gift had made
I don't recall now (memories fade)
Exactly what -- but no one there was booing.
I watched him giving his gift away,
I found no snarky thing to say
In a hall beside a glowing Uncle Llewen
Uncle Llewen, Uncle Llewen
Uncle Llewen, Uncle Llewen

He whispered, with his trademark tact,
His judgement on this simple act,
I laughed, but he was right, there's no undoing:
In deepest voice, he said: "The Dream
Is strong in this one", eyes agleam
And every word was true from Uncle Llewen
Uncle Llewen, Uncle Llewen
Uncle Llewen, Uncle Llewen
Uncle Llewen, Uncle Llewen
Uncle Llewen, Uncle Llewen

Shuffle: The Answers

Wed, 24 Sep 2008 02:21:34 GMT

Only four that nobody got - not bad! The four remaining ones are:

3. Tried To Be True by the Indigo Girls, from the Beloved's collection I believe.

4. Stray Cats by the Deadly Nightshades, a killer band from Sydney that my friends and I used to try to catch any time they played live. Lisa Hill is in Perth now, last I heard, but I suspect she's too busy being a Mum now to put on any more concerts.

5. Breakaway by Art Garfunkel, title track to the first CD I ever bought. A morose little number that always reminds me of my third girlfriend (only because it was one of her CDs).

20. Not sure of the name -- the piece by Matthew Orlovich, composed for the Brisbane IV in 2000. It's very modern, but I love it. I should post it somewhere and see what everyone else thinks of it.

So there you go. You all did very well. Back pats all round, I think.

The Known Words

Tue, 23 Sep 2008 11:48:35 GMT

It's time. If you have any interest at all in bardic singing in the SCA, please go download a copy of The Known Words, First Ethereal Edition AS XLIII, and help me out with proofreading.

The newflurf site is the pre-release version N+1 of flurf.net, and as such has no pretty stylesheets or much content right now, so don't pass the URL around too widely because it will only disappear when I move things over.

Share and enjoy!

Shuffle

Tue, 23 Sep 2008 05:57:03 GMT

From alpha_angel:

Put your music player on random.
- Post the first line from the first 32 20 (who has time?) songs that play, no matter how embarrassing the song.
- Let everyone guess what song and artist the lines come from.
- Bold the songs when someone guesses correctly.
- Looking them up on Google or any other search engine is CHEATING!

1. Heh heh heh heh... Riding in my big black rocket Rhombus, Spaceman - jwm shares Z's tastes, evidently; I've never even heard of these guys!
2. Here we come walking down the street - The Monkees, The Monkees - catsidhe, but wenchilada got the title
3. From baby to best with no second test
4. There's so many stray cats in this big city
5. Shattered dreams, worthless years, here am I encased inside a hollow shell
6. No point in askin', you'll get no reply - the Sex Pistols, Pretty Vacant, although I was listening to the Andrew Denton Triple M cover by the Delltones - seagoon gets full points anyhow
7. I'm still young, but I know my days are numbered - Crash Test Dummies, At My Funeral - well spotted, evildrakey!
8. Load up all guns, bring your friends - Nirvana, Smells Like Teen Spirit - catsidhe, but wenchilada got the title
9. I've watched your face for a long time, it's always the same - New Order, Thieves Like Us - jwm
10. Flash! Aaaah! - Queen, Flash - doushkasmum
11. You walk out on the high wire, you're a dancer on ice - Dire Straits, Love Over Gold - seagoon
12. What a lot of fun, you guys have been real swell - "Sweet" (Hinton Battle), What You Feel (reprise) - midwifealice
13. You know you don’t love me but you still want to touch me - Headless Chickens, George - jwm is doing well, since I had to google that to figure out what she was singing
14. Confusion in her eyes that says it all - Joy Division, She's Lost Control - which sounds like it's right up the accident-prone evildrakey's alley...
15. Oh the new chum went to the back block run - Wallis & Matilda, Last Week - evildrakey evidently needs to be introduced to their work
16. American Woman, stay away from me - Lenny Kravitz, American Woman - catsidhe
17. Don't go changin' to try and please me - Billy Joel, Just The Way You Are - doushkasmum
18. I can see the Southern Cross tonight - Eric Bogle, Something of Value - mostly identified by leadegroot
19. A long, time ago in a galaxy far away - Weird Al Yankovic, The Saga Begins - catsidhe
20. There are days, there are days when the world buckles under the sun

Hint: a lot of my music collection is ~~stol~~ off-site backuped from basal_surge. And yet there's no Crowded House or Split Enz here, which is odd...

Another hint: only Sydney people will get #4, and possibly only my sister would get #15 and #18. Many choristers might remember #20.

The Chinese Mystery

Tue, 23 Sep 2008 02:59:21 GMT

Here's what I don't understand.

A lot of news comes out of China. Every week there's another mine collapse, another earthquake, another rash of poisoned babies. And the fundamental problems, all originating in the realms of physics or geology or biology, are exacerbated by the unsafe work practices and government corruption, leading to a far greater loss of life and property than one would otherwise expect. Building codes, employment standards, testing, certification -- all of it gets thrown out in favour of bribery and cronyism on a scale to make Tsarist Russia look like the Little Company of Mary.

So my question is: why isn't the entire Chinese government held up to ridicule? Why aren't there cartoons depicting the ruling party as the Keystone Cops, or the provincial governments as Sir Humphrey with chopsticks? Is it a misplaced fear of appearing racist? Or is it just fear? If the 19th century was the British century, and the 20th was the American century, then the 21st is pretty much certain to be the Chinese century. Perhaps nobody wants to go on record as thinking the entire Chinese government needs to dig itself a hole and climb in, and let someone else take over. At this stage, I don't think even the US republicans could do a worse job...

Equality

Mon, 22 Sep 2008 13:17:16 GMT

Say what you like about Linux, one thing is true: that the ideal of equality finds its highest expression in the Linux community. As Tom Lehrer said, Linux "has carried the American ideal to its logical conclusion, in the sense that not only do they prohibit discrimination on the grounds of race, creed, and colour, but also on the grounds of ability".

Case in point: this documentation file from the Ubuntu community documentation project. Here's a taste:

The detailed configuration of syslogd is beyond the scope of this guide, and the reader is encouraged to seek additional information via the Resources section of this guide for information on correctly configuring, and modifying the configuration of syslogd. The file which configures the behavior of the syslogd daemon is /etc/syslog.conf and consists primarily of two fields, the selector, and the action. The selector field consists of a facility, to be logged, such as for example the auth facility which deals with authorization, and a priority, or level to log such information at, such as info, or warning priorities, which would log all messages at the informational priority and higher, or only at the warning level and higher respectively.

I have never, in all my, days, seen such egregious, abuse of, commas. Captain Carrot, Ironfoundersson, would be, thrilled.

And the rest of the article is repetitive, redundant, poorly written and filled with breathless gibberish.

So yeah, Linux fanboys (PS: bite me), I know what you're going to say: if you hate it so much, why not fix it? So I did. The newer version is shorter, clearer and (I believe) better. Unfortunately, once I removed the copy-paste bullshit, what was left was obviously inadequate, so I may need to revisit the file to add some actual content. But for now, I've done my part and maybe made the Linux world a little better.

Beats working, anyhow.

Fun With Chainsaws: How To Not Waste A Weekend

Sun, 21 Sep 2008 12:57:24 GMT

Yesterday around lunchtime, the Elder Daughter of DOOOOM and I got on our bikes and rode to the servo (that's "gas station" for any Northern Hemispherians) at Jamison, where we began the weekend's great and exhausting adventure. We hired a ute with a tray cage, and followed that up with a hired electric chainsaw and a hired storage unit. Four hundred dollars later, we were on our way home.

I got going with the chainsaw first. We've got a bunch of unruly trees about the place, and one was half dead and leaning worryingly on the Shedtress of Stuffitude, aka the Green Shed out the back. So I proceeded to chop it into bite-size pieces and laboriously drag them into the ute. The BatPup and I drove out to Mitchell to the green waste drop-off at Canberra Sand & Gravel to drop it off, but we were three minutes late (the guy sits there from 7.30 to 4.30 every weekend, keeping an eye on the place, amid dust and flies; I don't blame him for shutting the doors bang on closing time) so we took it to the tip instead, because I didn't have time to cart it all back out again the next day.

The next morning, I did more chainsawing, including of a huge, mostly dead and very ugly wattle out the front. I took another load of green waste to CSG, then a load of rubbish to the tip, then a load of boxes to our new storage unit. After that, with a back yard looking better than it has in years and a front yard looking better than it ever has, I called it a day. "By the power invested in me by the State of Utter Exhaustion," I told my Beloved, "I declare this weekend well and truly closed."

I was wrong of course. It's lucky I didn't take the ute back early, because tonight the BatPup started having a steady but unpleasant stomach pain. I booked an appointment with CALMS, the Canberra After-hours Locum Medical Service (1300-4-CALMS -- write that down!) but the nice woman on the phone suggested taking her to Accident & Emergency first, on the off chance that we might get in earlier there. As it happened we did, and the friendly and conscientious doctor examined her carefully and prescribed paracetamol, sleep and a plastic jar to wee in to test for the outside chance of urinary tract infection. The paracetamol did the trick and she went off to sleep. The Beloved will take the sample tomorrow, but it doesn't look like anything more than a stomach bug. Hope so, anyway.

So I shall take my bruised, battered old body (four hundred and seventy-something years old, remember!) off to bed now. Job well done all round. What a pity we'll be doing more of it next weekend...

Random Thought

Sun, 21 Sep 2008 12:38:25 GMT

I enjoy Talk Like A Pirate Day as much as the next scurvey lubberin' bilge rat, aye, but sometimes the incongruity gets to me. Sure it's all in good fun, but there's a historical truth behind all the romanticism, and it's not much to do with Johnny Depp's version of it.

What I wonder is: if we tried to promote October 19, say, as International Talk Like A Violent, Dishonest, Thieving Rapist Day, how would that go down, do you think?

Ah well... a couple more hundred years and they'll be celebrating September 11 with funny costumes and fireworks, à la Guy Fawkes Day, and that'll be normal. Hey ho.

A Day Late, But What The Hell

Sat, 20 Sep 2008 09:32:44 GMT

This. Is. HUGE!!!

For Any Conservatives In The Audience

Fri, 19 Sep 2008 23:53:26 GMT

Curse those bleeding-heart liberals who won't admit that the Surge was a success!

Statistics: they tell truth, they lie. Welcome to reality (which has a well-known liberal bias).