Below are the 19 most recent journal entries recorded in Brolin Empey's LiveJournal:

Tuesday, September 29th, 2009
4:01 am	Dream log begins. I just had a scary dream similar to The Matrix. I usually stay in bed instead of getting up to record my dreams because when I get up I usually end up staying up until I would normally get up, which means I do not get enough sleep for work, but this time I wanted to share my dream. A similar thing happened 2 weeks ago, after I met Tamara Poustie for the first time: I dreamt of her (I forgot what I dreamt), then awoke in the night. I was considering sharing my dream with her, but I did not because I decided to stay in bed so I could fall asleep again so I could get enough sleep for work. :( She dreamt of me too, but I do not remember what she dreamt and I do not even remember if she remembered what she dreamt about me. I dreamt I had a sort of nightmare, which is strange because the dream containing this dream could be considered a nightmare. I dreamt I knew I could not wake. It started when I thought I tripped on Pasha in the ground floor kitchen, but I knew he was actually in the ground floor living room. There were 2 electronic devices affecting my dreams, but they did not agree on what I should dream. One was something about a SIM for a GSM cell phone. It was something for a cell phone that was battery-powered and that people wore while sleeping. The other was something line-powered (dependent on the mains), but I cannot remember what it was. The dream conflicts created by these 2 devices explained my nightmares: for example, one device would make a door creak in front of me, but the other device would make a distant door creak behind me because it did not agree with the first device. In this example, I was scared because I thought someone or something was following me because of the unexpected sounds. Anyway, the only time I could experience the true reality, unaffected by the 2 electronic devices, was when the mains failed for long enough that the battery powering the battery-powered device fully discharged. If the mains failed briefly, the line-powered device would stop affecting my dreams, but the battery-powered device would still be powered. Maybe this dream reflects how I realise first-hand how dependent/reliant we are on electricity every time the mains fails because I e.g., automatically try to turn on the light every time I enter a new room, cannot do anything work-related at work without my PC, etc. Cue Joni Mitchell song Big Yello Taxi: “Don’t it always seem to go, you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone.” That is so true. I hope this post makes sense to someone other than me, because that probably means it will make sense to me too months or years later. I know my thoughts now (Later, I may likely forget what I was thinking now.), but I have to rely on language to express them, but I can easily use language incorrectly because I know what I mean to express, but not necessarily how my expression can and/or will be interpreted. Current Mood: sleepy Current Music: K:\win_d\users\brolin\music\mod\st-00\classic\tubular-vectors.mod (Comment on this)
Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009
4:30 pm	Dumb software = simple code. Smart software = complex code? This 46-line bash script essentially copies 2 files. The 46 lines includes whitespace, comments, and debug code (print statements) and the files are copied conditionally and intelligently, but still — is there a simpler implementation that avoids duplication and can be configured to back up additional files by changing the word list of a single for command? root@Repository:~ [0] # cat -n bin/qb-backup 1 #!/bin/bash 2 3 #2009-07-15 brolin: Forked from pv-backup. 4 5 WORKING_DIR='/home/data/Admin/Accounting/QuickBooks' 6 BACKUP_DIR="${WORKING_DIR}/backup" 7 8 do_backup () 9 { 10 working_copy_basename="${1}" 11 backup_glob_pattern="${2}" 12 backup_regex="${3}" 13 14 15 working_copy="${WORKING_DIR}/${working_copy_basename}" 16 # backup_glob="${BACKUP_DIR}/${backup_glob_pattern}" 17 18 19 #declare -p working_copy_basename backup_glob_pattern backup_regex working_copy #; exit 20 21 [ -e "${working_copy}" ] || exit 1 22 23 cd "${BACKUP_DIR}" || exit 1 24 ls -1r ${backup_glob_pattern} &>/dev/null && most_recent_backup_copy="$(ls -1r ${backup_glob_pattern}|grep -E "${backup_regex}"|cut -d $'\n' -f 1)" 25 26 #declare -p most_recent_backup_copy #; exit 27 28 if [[ -z most_recent_backup_copy || "${working_copy}" -nt "${most_recent_backup_copy}" ]]; then 29 #echo foo 30 [[ "${working_copy_basename}" =~ '([^.]+)(\..*)' ]] || exit 1 31 #declare -p BASH_REMATCH #; exit 32 todays_backup_copy="${BASH_REMATCH[1]}-$(date -I)${BASH_REMATCH[2]}" 33 #declare -p todays_backup_copy #; exit 34 cp -p "${working_copy}" "${todays_backup_copy}" && chmod a-w "${todays_backup_copy}" 35 fi 36 } 37 38 working_copy_basename_extension='QBW' 39 backup_glob_pattern='*.QBW' 40 date_regex='[[:digit:]]{4}-[[:digit:]]{2}-[[:digit:]]{2}' 41 42 for company_name in 'Techsol' 'zPoint Products'; do 43 #declare -p company_name 44 do_backup "${company_name}.${working_copy_basename_extension}" "${backup_glob_pattern}" "^${company_name}-${date_regex}\.${working_copy_basename_extension}" 45 done 46 root@Repository:~ [0] # Current Mood: thoughtful Current Music: Artem Neba, Dj Kex, Tagir - M For Music (Ekala Remix) (Comment on this)
Thursday, August 28th, 2008
12:06 pm	A concrete example of my everyday frustrations with lack of software usability I do not need formal education in Computer Science to not believe in determinism: everyday, end-user office work is sufficient. I was asked to add information to a table in a Word document. This Word document was saved by Word 2007 in Word 97-2003 file format. I am using the Ubuntu package of OpenOffice.org v2.4.1 on Ubuntu Linux v8.04.1. Judgeing by the file types in its common dialogs, OpenOffice.org supports only up to Word 2002. I opened the Word document in OOo Writer. The document appeared to be formatted correctly. I wanted to delete the last 5 rows — the rows themselves, not only the cell contents in the rows — from a table. I dragged the mouse to select the last 5 rows. I started dragging in the top left cell, between the left table border and the left edge of the text in the cell (the start of the English text, since English is written from left to right). The entire 5 rows were selected, not only the cell contents. However, when I pressed Delete on the keyboard, only the cell contents were deleted. I experimented with Row -> Delete from the context menu and Delete -> Rows from the Table menu. In both cases, only one row was deleted. I asked the document author how to delete table cells in Word because I thought OOo Writer would use the same procedure. In Word 2007, the table cells can be deleted by dragging the mouse to select the cells, then pressing the Delete key.¹ This seemed intuitive. I experimented some more with OOo Writer. I discovered there are two ways of selecting table cells: 1. Use the I-beam cursor to start dragging from inside the top left cell. 2. Use the right arrow cursor to start dragging from left of the left (outside) table border. The tooltip says "Select table row". In both cases, the appearance of the selected table cells is identical. In other words, I could not tell how the cells were selected by the resulting selection. I discovered that pressing Delete after using method 1 to select cells deletes only the cell contents, not the cells themselves. Pressing Delete after using method 2 deletes the cells themselves, not only their contents. This was my original goal. By this point, I was frustrated. Why does the behaviour of the Delete key depend on an invisible state? This is extremely counter-intuitive, illogical, and confusing. I demoed this invisible state behaviour to another person. The illogical behaviour was at least reproducible. I explained my observations to the Word document's author. Then I tried to get back on track: I used method 2 to select the 5 rows I wanted to delete. I pressed the Delete key. What happened? Only the cell contents were deleted! What the hell? How illogical is this — I can no longer reproduce the illogical behaviour! Maybe OOo's state changed when a backup copy of the document was automatically saved? To worsen this mess, I discovered another confusing behaviour: After using either method to select cells, the entire cells are selected. After pressing Delete, the cells are empty and nothing is selected. This makes sense. However, after undoing the Delete, only the cell contents are selected: the text in the cells is selected, but nothing else. I frequently have similar experiences — at least once per month in quantifiable terms — but I usually try to avoid getting sidetracked even further by documenting how I got sidetracked in the first place. Update (2008-09-20): ¹ This needs to be confirmed because I may have observed only one of multiple selection methods. Yes, I know I am inconsistent when referring to the Delete key. Current Mood: frustrated (Comment on this)
Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008
7:30 pm	Sanity is a full-time job, in a world that is always changing Do you believe in sanity? I never question my insanity. I almost hit a pedestrian whilst driving home today because I was trying to drive as fast as I was thinking of non-driving subjects whilst driving in a residential street, which requires allocation of extra CPU time to driving processes. Fortunately, no misfortune ensued, other than both of our surprise. Of course, I justify my excessive speed by pointing out that the ped, to use Carmageddon terminology, which I find funny because I find others's misfortune hilarious, chose to cross the street at the worst possible place: behind (from my perspective) a parked truck, so neither of us could see the other until our hit test almost returned TRUE and the following run question returned FALSE. Anyway, to get back on track and talk less of incriminating subjects in public, I rhetorically ask why I was thinking so much about so many subjects. Well, I implied a question instead of asking directly, which makes it a rhetorical statement, if such a thing exists. Of course, the rhetorical statement contained a question, so it was, in effect, a rhetorical question. Speaking of which, statements and questions are an everyday example of reductionism: reducing all (natural) language to two (classes|forms|categories|types|kinds|blah|blah|blah). The preceding, parenthesised expression was a regular expression, for the so-called "regular" people who are evidently sufficiently irregular to be ignorant of regular expressions. Moral of the story and obligatory pun: Speed of thought can be a Bad Thing™ when driving on residential streets. English is an illogical language. Why do I use an illogical language to write about logic? Because English is supposedly my "natural" language. Which means it is natural for me to remember how to express myself using countless exceptions to rules, which may be natural for me, but are still counter-intuitive. Yay for Sidetracking 101™. Anyway, my del.icio.us bookmarks are proof — or evidence, to continue the (il)legal theme I started by retelling my potentially incriminating story — of how extremely sidetracked I get. My bookmarks begin to quantify how many times I have started what becomes Yet Another Unfinished Project™. And yes, I almost got sidetracked by inserting a proper em dash instead of two, successive, ASCII, minus symbols. (Update: I fixed the em dash.) So yes, I am extremely tangential and constantly sidetracked. I wonder whether I am the most tangential and sidetracked person on Earth. My neurons were transporting so many thoughts as they raced around the closed circuit of my mind before I sat down at my PC and began to write this, but now I fear I have already forgotten much of what I wanted to write. My mind is racing. My obsessive-compulsive tendencies are causing me to quickly and repeatedly press Shift whilst thinking of what to write. What is language? A set of symbols understood by an interpreter. In this case, I am a human interpreter: whilst staring at the light, which, in addition to referring to starting at my monitor, could refer to starting at the so-called "light at the end of the tunnel", which suggests I am dead, which is not corroborated by my quantity of rambling output, ... too sidetracked. Whilst starting at the polarised light from my Thin Film Transistor Liquid Crystal Display video (terminal|monitor), photons hit photoreceptors (Update: rods or cones?) in my eyes, which (excite|stimulate) nerve endings (?), which send electrical impulses, which reminds me of weapon key bindings in Quake I, to my brain, which performs optical character recognition to interpret strings of English characters as (lexical units|words), which are associated with memories from my (non-volatile memory|permanent storage), which, unlike a *nix file system, seems to contain many files with 0 links. These files can be accessed only when a recognised pattern causes me (my mind) to associate a sense with a memory -- or file, to continue the *nix file system analogy. Speaking of which, file systems are a specialised database for the hierarchical disorganisation of named bitstreams (files). I wanted to read about file systems on Wikipedia, but had forgotten about this desire until now. Which illustrates my previous point. Which suggests humans do, indeed, think visually if I chose the verb "illustrate" to explain how my rambling created a new link to my previously inaccessible memory. Speaking of rambling, is DDR3 the current (SD)RAM bling? ;) Summary: Brolin's mind is: racing overanalysing everything causing (mass|grave) sidetracking and consequent derailing sending impulses to control his muscles to cause his fingers to press the right keys at their memorised positions to write synonymous — or at least related — verbs as regular expressions because he cannot choose the most apt verb and does not want to get sidetracked by trying to choose the best verb (Yes, I know I am repeating myself.) Why am I writing this? Because I want to record my thoughts. Why do I want to record my thoughts? Because I want to make sure they are committed to permanent, non-volatile storage with permanent links, stored on magnetic, non-volatile storage, as opposed to biological memory, which may be non-volatile, but which often loses links. And by links I mean hard links, but a reader with knowledge of *nix file systems should know hard links are implied. Why do I want to commit my thoughts to such storage? Because I have to sleep? Why do I have to sleep? Because I am a human. Humans have circadian rhythms and are diurnal. And because sleep deprivation is not fun. Why do I have to sleep? Oh right, I already asked that. Why do I have to sleep? Because I have to get up in the morning. Why do I have to get up in the morning? Because I have to go to work? Why do I have to go to work? Because I need money. Why do I need money? Because I need to pay for rent, transportation, and food. Why do I need all these things? Because my extremely tangential and eternally sidetracked mind is contained within a physical body. Why do I need to maintain this body? Because I cannot use my brain once it stops living. Why do I need my brain? Because I need to live? Why do I need to live? Because I want to record my thoughts. Why do I feel like I am going in circles? Because I am. And yes, I know this post contains many mistakes. I know this because I proofread the read-only preview version. Which reminded me why it is better to proofread (editable|writeable) copy. But now I can't be arsed to go back and reproofread my copy to correct my mistakes. I dislike the word "writeable". I usually write it as "writable", then have to go back and add the missing 'e' before "able". Update (2008-07-23): I have reparsed my post and unborked my English syntax errors. Current Mood: thoughtful Current Music: Fanboy Brolin - The Sound of Fans (Comment on this)
Saturday, June 28th, 2008
4:00 am	It's time to Turn That Frown Upside Down™! My previous post was too negative — time for a positive note (pun intended): DJ DiNexx - The Nexxia is the best and most memorable psytrance (or goa trance?) track I have heard. I cannot recommend this track enough. It is a perfect example to cite when asked what type of music I like. It even samples Kraftwerk (one of the tracks from Computer World)! Update (2008-06-29): DJ Ziki - Best of Noga mix is another example. I will update this post each time I have a new example.¹ "What if there were no hypothetical questions?" — George Carlin, many of whose quotes sound exactly like Brolinisms™ :) Update (2008-09-20): ¹ I have evidently failed to update this post. However, I like most tracks on Digitally Imported's Trance channel. I have been listening to DI's Trance channel for weeks — at least 1 month by now? Interestingly, my hit-to-miss ratio is higher on DI's Trance channel than on DI's Goa-Psytrance channel. This is interesting because my hit-to-miss ratio was higher on non-DI Goa and Psytrance channels, such as Philosomatika and "Psytranceradio and Goaplace". Current Mood: thoughtful Current Music: DJ DiNexx - The Nexxia (Comment on this)
Sunday, June 22nd, 2008
3:05 pm	Why Firefox is not my favourite Web browser I am going to record everything I dislike about Firefox here. 2008-06-22: 1. When saving a page, Firefox downloads the page again instead of saving the cached copy. This may not matter for static pages, but it is the Wrong Thing™ to do when saving the output of a server-side script: Real-World example: I placed an order through Bow Wow Auto Parts. I wanted to save a copy of my receipt. I did not need a paper copy, so I tried to save a copy of the page. Firefox already had the page in memory; why could it not just save this cached copy? Instead, it downloads the page again. This fails because the page is a server-side script: if you use a GET request to download the page, all the parameters, which are normally passed via a POST request, are missing. The result? The saved page says my credit card could not be charged instead of listing my order and payment details. Why does Firefox still do this? (fail) This one design flaw is enough to justify using Opera instead of Firefox. 2. The Find bar's messages², which seem to have been copied from Vim¹, lack parallelism: For example, "Reached end of page, continued from top". If the search reached the end, then it should continue at the beginning. If it continued from the top, then it should have searched until it hit the bottom. 3. The Find bar lacks a "Whole word only" option. 4. The Search bar seems to censor suggestions from certain search engines. For example, "fuck" finds suggestions with Wikipedia, but not with Google nor Yahoo. However, I am not sure whether Firefox is responsible for this censorship. 2008-07-10: 5. My choice (that sounds strange for some reason; I want to use "decision" instead of "choice" because it sounds more "natural" to me, which is redundant, because who else who I be referring to when I am writing in (the?) first person? "for some reason" is redundant too: how could I have any feeling without a reason? Anyway, that is getting too philosophical again.) to edit this post illustrates how extremely tangential I am. This may well explain why I feel time is flying by faster than ever: because even my thought processes get extremely sidetracked, leaving me always feeling like I always have a list of things I not only want to do, but to think about, that grows far faster than items are completed. Back on track: I decided I wanted to try writing the Prove It! (complete with marketroid-style, trailing exclamation mark (as if there are other types of exclamation marks? Well, there are in Spanish (and French too?), but not in English)). Now the only thing missing is CamelCase! Which sounds like a box (case) of Camel cigarettes) Bollocks, I have nested too many levels of parentheses again; Firefox does not highlight matching parentheses, presumably because "normal" people do not get so sidetracked whilst writing that they not only nest parentheses, but nest sufficient quantities to cause them to lose track of closing the previously-opened parentheses. Fail fail fail. Where was I? (fail) OK, I wanted to try writing my chosen Prove It! multiple-choice tests again. I went to the ... now I have to get sidetracked yet again by copying ... well, I can't paste it until I have copied it... Prove It! Web site. (I may as well use Vim to edit this post, so I can use markers. Of course, I think I must be getting a little too sidetracked if I need to use markers whilst (or "while", in this case) writing English, which is a so-called/supposedly "natural" language — it certainly is not always natural to me, even though I am a native English speaker. Sidetracking 101, by Brolin Empey. I went to the Prove It! (it would be cool if I could use keyboard shortcuts with Klipper to choose which buffer to paste, like with the " prefix in Vim) ... I fail at focusing. I went to the Prove It! Web site, complete with CP/M- and Micros~1-style, 3-letter, truncated .htm file extension in default.htm, which exhumes Micros~1 because only IIS uses default instead of index by default for its equivalent of Apache httpd's DirectoryIndex ... I was going to say "directive", but I think the directive is what sets the value. What do you call the value of the directive? Just "value"? or "variable"? It depends on the target audience, level of abstraction, naming conventions, style guide, programming language, ... STOP GETTING SIDETRACKED! OK, now I can't even explain that I went to the Prove It! (amazing I still have that in my clipboard buffer!) Web site without getting sidetracked by the filenames used. So yes, the default.htm and stereotypical/cliche, marketing-fantasy, smiling-person-using-a-laptop-because-she-is-so-happy-she-stares-at-other-than-her-computer-display-whilst-working, businessperson (have to be politically correct here, since she is a businesswoman, after all) image and tagline/slogan. In this case, the marketing fantasy was at least somewhat realistic because it did not show someone using a non-line-powered laptop, but the part of the laptop with the computer (not the display, which I think is called the lid) is not shown in the photo, so, for all I know, it may be the standard marketing fantasy of using a battery-powered laptop because "Look at me, I'm so productive because I can work anywhere for all of what, 3 hours at the most until I need to find an AC outlet before my battery dies!"... This really is the story of my complete lack of life/antisocial life, even though I cannot claim my middle name is sidetracked because I do not have any names starting with 'S'. I do have Thomas, though, which, in addition to "tangent", could stand for the "tracked" in "sidetracked". I went to the Prove It! Web site. I could not log in because I could not remember my "Session ID" (how can it be a session ID when I use the same ID for multiple sessions? (fail)). Firefox, AFAIK, has no equivalent to Opera's Wand dialog, which lets me choose from the remembered logins for the current page. I know I have saved a login for this page, but I cannot remember what it is, never mind what it starts with. I need to know what the login (username for those not familiar with *nix terminology)... well, actually, in this case it is called a "Session ID", as confusing as that name may be, so I could at least try to be consistent. I need to know what the saved login starts with because Firefox cannot show all saved logins for a page. Which is my Firefox complaint #5. Which is why I got sidetracked by editing this post in the first place. Yay, it has only been what, at least one hour since I started editing this post in order to add my Firefox complaint #5. And yes, I am always this sidetracked. And yes, I wonder if I must be the most tangential and externally-sidetracked person in the world — or on Earth, to avoid using a certain phrasal idiom, which sounds more "natural" to me. Now, I need to copy this rambling post to my clipboard buffer before submitting this form, in case LiveJournal eats my post, or, more likely, my Internet INTARWEB connection has been borked lost again because I am using a wireless link to log in to my Web banking... oh shit, I wasn't supposed to say that, was I? ;) ¹ And from where did Vim copy these messages? ² I know, these messages are part of the language pack, not Firefox itself. Is it acceptable for footnote ... what do you call them? anchors? ... to be unordered? In #2 above, I (not surprisingly) added footnote #2 after #1a, but then #2 comes before #1. If I really wanted to know, I could test with OpenOffice.org Writer to see how it handles this scenario. However, I do not want to get that sidetracked. I am already sidetracked by editing this post because I got sidetracked whilst trying to log in to the Prove It! Skills Testing Website, which led to #5 above. a I have, once again, found myself writing footnotes to footnotes. To avoid confusion, I decided to use letters instead of digits for my second-level footnotes. Speaking of second level, the point of this second-level footnote was to explain that I originally wrote "the second footnote", but decided to use cardinal numbers instead of ordinals to reference the footnotes because using ordinals to refer to cardinals gets confusing when the cardinals start at 0 instead of 1. This leads to the coinage of the "zeroth" ordinal, the use of which can be avoided by using cardinals to refer to cardinals instead of using ordinals to refer to cardinals. Anyway, in case anyone is actually reading this, and in the less likely chance my reader actually understands this rambling, this illustrates how extremely tangential (and perhaps circumstantial too, but I keep putting off looking up this word in a dictionary) I am: I decide to try writing ... this is supposed to be point #5 above. See #5 above. Update (2008-09-20): #5 is merely an inconvenience because I can search in Firefox's Saved Passwords window. Current Mood: frustrated Current Music: Psytranceradio and Goaplace - Hamburg (Comment on this)
Sunday, June 15th, 2008
10:38 pm	LiveBlackMail LiveJournal uses the file extension .bml. bml = Black Mail, of Dutch Breeze fame. Mix-E-Load! Joyport girl! Posting to LiveJournal instead of learning to create electronik free art. Linking to URLs without checking to make sure they are still what you think they are, rather than spam portals or Russian lolitas. Nabokov references. Sting references to songs that reference Nabokov. Overuse of loose association. Stream of conciousness. iostream stdio.h C > C++. Tangent. Playing with my cell phone whilst walking around aimlessly and consequently feeling like a stereotypical teenager, even though I am no longer a teenager. Going to Main Street in the City of Vancouver on Father's Day and, as usual, being too shy to talk to anyone I do not know. Hoping I don't die in a car crash whilst writing SMS messages whilst riding in cars with boys (not riding in boys with cars). Juvenile humour. UK English > Canadian English > * > US "English". Pretentiousness. Missing Firefox functionality whilst using Opera, but still preferring Opera. Listening to Machinae Supremacy promo songs over and over. Contemplating buying a real C64 system for 30 CAD, but choosing not to. Being born on an airplane = being airborn(e). Airborn(e) boy = airmale. AOL notification of new "arrival" = You've Got Male! You have mail. A fatal exception 0E has occurred in module FOOBAR at SOME:ADDR . Alt-tabbing to Amarok because I can't be arsed to create a proper playlist. Enjoying spamming my LiveJournal. Being frustrated by the Software Borkout® that is OpenOffice.org v2.4 on my Ubuntu v8.04 installation. Realising how coincidental it is that 2*4=8. Being greatly irritated by people who incorrectly and colloquially refer to OpenOffice.org as OpenOffice. (fail) Being pedantic. Of course. Using fragments for stylistic pretentiousness and pontification. Not looking up new words when reading, but keeping the unknown words in memory and spending more time speculating about their meaning that it would take to look up the actual definition. OpenOffice.org v2.4 breaking my report, which worked fine in v2.1 on Gentoo. Thinking Ubuntu is less great than I initially thought. "Oh noes, these drivers and applications are not Free Software. Heaven forbid some companies might want to protect their intellectual property." Wondering whether tasteless and/or low-brow pornography is still considered intellectual property, then realising I already thought of this, but not being sure whether I already blogged about this. Hi2u run-on sentences. Say hello to the period: Your Friend at the End®. Registering for DreamHost. Wondering about the US Patriot Act. Once upon a time, there was a shy boy named Brolin who liked to play with his personal computer. Then Brolin had to live on his own and consequently died because he was too lazy to eat or exercise. Speculation. Specular. Bump-mapping. Doom3 engine. Okular. KDE4. Vistaesque. Vista bad. 164 = all the way to death. 168 = all the way to prosperity. Questioning my insanity because I think I hear someone calling me. Noticing the Freudian slip I made by writing "insanity" instead of "sanity". Sanity. English, Amiga demoscene group. Jester of Sanity. Volker Tripp. Living in the past. "Man who lives in past has his back turned to future." Paraphrasing ... forgot the word ... not Aeosop's Fables... inconsistent spacing before horizontal ellipses, which are really three sequential periods instead of a Unicode horizontal ellipsis character. Paraphrasing ${WORD_I_FORGOT} because I can't be arsed to Google for the correct quote. Wondering how anyone survived before hypertext and computer networks -- I would have had to go to physical library, which is much father away than /lib/ or /usr/lib/, but I am so lazy that I cannot pull answers from Web reference sites. However, I justify this laziness by explaining that I do not want to get even more sidetracked than I always am. Uh oh — I actually wrote a complete sentence! Using the ability of computer networks to copy information immensely quickly to contribute to the already infinite source of misinformation and misquotes. Failing at life. "Relax, it's just life." Constantly choosing to cross my legs like a girl, even though it cuts off my circulation and makes me worry about whether my body is going to fail because I have poor circulation and avoid physical exercise. Mental masturbation. Adding "like a girl" not because there is anything wrong with crossing one's legs, but because I felt like it. Wishing I had a girl with whom I could be affectionate. Thinking of a vocal trance song in which the female singer sings "Sleep with me, tonight. Dream with me, tonight." Fucking myself both literally and by procrastinating. ("Speaking of procrastination, ...") Boy, ("Girl, "?) I sure know how to give the wrong impression! I had no lustful thoughts when I wrote that; I believe the "Sleep with me, tonight." lyric has literal meaning, not sexual nor lustful meaning. DOT DOT DOT. US Department of Transportation. USA. Greenhouse gas factory. Global warming. We're all going to die. Of course. What was my point? 72 points per inch. Volkswagen Pointer. Dereferenceable integer containing a memory address. Having obsessive compulsive tendencies. Backspacing the two — not one — spaces after a period, then inserting them again. Repeat. Seagate on Disc Drive. Apple on Infinite Loop. fscking /proc/self Greetz fly out to: THIS SPACE FOR RENT OK, what was I doing? Update (2008-06-19): I updated the text preceding this appendage by correcting oversights and clarifying some points I communicated poorly. This illustrates the great importance of not only proofreading immediately after writing, but days later too, when I am in a different mood. I think WORD_I_FORGOT='proverb'. My OpenOffice.org Base v2.4 borkout was solved by using Sun's JRE instead of the FSF's JRE, which Ubuntu includes in the base installation. See openoffice base crashes when loading robust form on Ubuntu Forums; my post is #3. OpenOffice.org has definitely not inspired great confidence for me: my Base report broke after upgrading from OpenOffice.org v2.1 (on Gentoo) to v2.4 (on Ubuntu). I am not alone: there are multiple topics in the OpenOffice.org Forum. Many of these topics were started soon (within weeks) after the release of OpenOffice.org v2.4. I found no solution; the only workaround that worked for me was to completely recreate my report. This was feasible because my database has only one report. However, I cannot imagine a business or other organisation that depends on a database to accept having to manually (interactively) delete and recreate possibly hundreds of reports! I wanted to use TM symbols, but used ® instead because I could not remember the HTML 4 character entity for TM and did not want to get sidetracked by looking it up. Speaking of Main Street: The Rolling Blackouts - Overload on Mains Street. :) Speaking of mains, the following psytrance track contains a recording mentioning "the future belonged to alternating current": Botanic Blue - Spiritworld (Psy-Trance February Mix) (Klipper is such an essential application! How can anyone live without a clipboard history? :)) I love this style of music so much! (This post still contains known (that is redundant.) grammatical errors, but I am leaving it as is. Otherwise, I would spend too long obsessing over trivial details.) Tangential connection: I mentioned Jester of Sanity. One of Jester's MOD files contains a vocal sample exclaiming "keep this frequency clear!". Dj Single - God Of Happiness contains a different vocal sample (different voice) exclaiming1 this same phrase. 1. See, I did learn something in elementary school1: I caught myself writing "saying" instead of a more descriptive and specific verb. :) 1. I am, of course, being silly: in terms (no pun intended!) of academic, school subjects, I may have learned more in elementary school than in high school — at least in terms of practical things I use every day. I do have a very strange and unusual unique educational history, though. Well, not only in terms of lack of formal education. :) How often do footnotes require further footnotes? :D For other writers, I mean. ;) Footnotes to footnotes are nothing new for me! Current Mood: high: 'lo medium hi (hello) Current Music: Machinae Supremacy (Comment on this)
Saturday, May 31st, 2008
1:40 pm	Bill Gates == 666 $ ./string_sum 'BILLGATES' 663 Bill Gates the 3rd. +3 = 666 Incidentally: Current Mood: silly (Comment on this)
Monday, May 12th, 2008
3:30 pm	Is Imperative Reaction guilty of copying Purple Motion? Listen to 2nd_pm.s3m, then Guilt by Imperative Reaction. Is this similarity coincidental? Current Mood: curious Current Music: DNA Lounge Radio (Comment on this)
Thursday, May 8th, 2008
3:17 am	Text, Drugs, and Rolling Puns Date: Thu, 8 May 2008 02:50:37 -0700 From: "Brolin Empey" <brolin@brolin.be> To: "Mehlinda Heartt" <harpistry@hotmail.com> Subject: Text, Drugs, and Rolling Puns Dear Mehlinda, Have my tactile, tremendously tangential, turbocharged, typed (Telus?) telephone transmissions detrimentally and dangerously downshifted you from idle reception to clutching your cellular computer's (cell phone) chassis as you revv past the red line, torquing you until you become cranky, having been at the distracted drivetrain of thought's end of my sidetracked shaft (crankshaft)? OK, that last one was a squealing straight stretch of far-strung flats, at the opposite end of the seat scale, beginning its descent from my sharp notes of increasingly ingenuous intervals. Have I harmed you with harmony, mended your Mainland melody, helped your Heartt of the Harping head of the House, wrought reverberating, Reimer rhymes to your rhythm, or added acid to your bass? And now, as I worry about how to end my allusion to Ian Dury in a hurry, writer's Block falls on my Head, as my engine block begins to knock. Love, Brolin PS: As I quiver to deliver my manic note to you, I rest between presses of the space bar to end on a narcissistic note to notify you of my immediate intention to publicly post my personal penning by spinning my transposed, transmitted record to my Weblog of flowing octet streams of wordplay consisting of English characters. :D Hopefully, the inhabitants of the bit bucket do not byte. Oh no, look at the time! The bed bugs have bit my clock again! Now my sleep cycle will suffer from clock skewing. PPS: Does an untuned television consume static power? Or does a static screen use dynamic power? ;) PPPS: When the instruction stream of power management software causes a buffer overflow, does the resulting over current flood the memory banks? ;) Speaking of memory banks, do I need to consider bank switching if my account balance wraps around? ;) Speaking of wrapping around, no wonder one is the most lonely number: the twos get all the complements. ;) No thesaurus was used in the compilation of the preceding character string. :) Current Mood: silly Current Music: chiptunes! (Comment on this)
Wednesday, April 9th, 2008
11:03 pm	A Practical Application of a Personal Computer + a Printer, a Popular Peripheral: Printing Web pages Yay, I completely filled the Subject field. Anyway, I wanted to print shoe knots - the ins and outs. I have the same problem on my PC at work and at home: The headers and footers, which are present in the Print Preview, are absent from the printed page when using Linux v2.6.18 on i686 architecture + Firefox v2.x + CUPS + Samsung ML-2010 printer + splix driver. At first, I thought this indicated a print driver problem. However, the headers and footers are present on the printed page when using Opera v9.00. Opera also produces a significantly different printed page than Firefox. This adds another item to my list of practical reasons to use Opera instead of Firefox. I did not try printing with Konqueror; I now have little motivation to do so because I have a satisfactory solution. Today I realised that the "More, More, More!" jingle from Save-on-Foods's radio advertisements is from the song of the same name, composed by Greg Diamond and performed by Andrea True. I suppose the saying "Everything old is new again" is especially true when a pop song, which is 11 years older than me, is reused in an advertisement. :) On a more technical note, All Music Guide seems like a perfect example of how not to design URLs (or URIs, to appease the W3C): Consider the following example: http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=17:1014822~T00C This URL exposes both the mechanics and implementation of accessing AMG's database (amg.dll) and the integral indexes of the database (the "sql" parameter). By contrast, MobyGames is almost a perfect example of how to design URLs. Consider the following example: http://www.mobygames.com/game/genesis/sonic-the-hedgehog/screenshots This URL hides all the mechanics and implementation of accessing MobyGames's database. Furthermore, the URL, which consists of only English letters and common punctuation1, is hierarchically organised. I say MobyGames's URLs are almost perfect because the URL for a particular screenshot still exposes the name of a database field: gameShotId. 1. The AMG example URL uses at least two characters that I do not classify as common, English punctuation: '=', which is a mathematical operator equivalent to the word "equals", and '~', which is a diacritical mark used with letters in languages other than English. However, even in the 21st century, '~' is commonly used as an ASCII approximation of ≅, the "APPROXIMATELY EQUAL TO" character in Unicode. I hope this demonstrates that my blog has not completely degenerated into puns, jokes, allusions, and alliterations with a recurring theme of sexual innuendo. I think this recurring theme gives the wrong impression of me, and may even cause some to underestimate my intelligence, due to its low-brow, juvenile, proletarian, <insert pretentious, pontifical adjectives here> nature. Speaking of nature, after writing this post for over 2.5 hours, nature is calling me. I mean that in the sense of sleep and circadian rhythms, not as a euphemism for the need or urge to urinate or defecate. :P /quit bedtime 01:46 * Brolin has quit (bedtime) $ type sleep sleep is /bin/sleep "sleep" is "peels" backwards I think my second initial really stands for "Tangent". Current Mood: accomplished Current Music: xmms.m3u (Comment on this)
Friday, March 28th, 2008
1:58 am	The Pontificial, Prententious, Pedantic, Parasitic, Peculiar, Pacific Pisces posts plentiful, psycho Hi2u fixed-length Subject buffers! logically perturbing, personal, perverted, precipitated packets of plentiful, pleasurable, phallic product. And by that, I mean grammatical ejaculations, or psychologically pleasurable, mental masturbation. Alliteration ate all of America's auspiciously autistic, Aspergerian Aspies. OK, now I am using words ("auspiciously") with which I am unfamiliar (cannot remember the definition of) with for the sole sake (yay alliteration!) of alliteration. Black storm clouds loom ominously over the alliteratively associated, personal packets of the peculiar person I call myself, which are, to further the alliteration, produced by a (little-endian micro)processor, packetised and pushed over the Peripheral Component Interconnect bus to a PHY transceiver on a most-important peripheral present on all modern personal computers: a (Fast) Ethernet interface, which drives (PNP? :)) transistors to propel panicing electrons over the luminous ether, physically perceived as Category 5, Unshielded Twisted Pair cables to a Fast Ethernet switch, which, by associating MAC addresses, routes packets to a plastic port connected by cabling to an Asus WL-330gE, which presently functions as an IEEE 802.11g WLAN to star-topology, packet-switched, twisted-pair, Fast Ethernet, wired LAN. Did you notice the alternating order of alliteration in "packet-switched, twisted-pair", complete with sequential initial letters: Packet-, (Q), (R), Switched, Twisted-, (U), (V), ... I mixed up 'V' and 'P', presumably because I am a Reimer (rhymer). I think Mental Masturbation may be more aptly appropriate than I previously perceived (or recognised, to break the alliterative ascent). Mental Masturbation means exhaustively exploring (considering) every possible permutation. If you understand the plentiful processes that cause my train of thought to violently derail from its already sidetracked path, you will become closer to understanding me. $ JOYSTICK="/lib/modules/$(uname -r)/kernel/drivers/input/joystick/analog.ko"; find /pub/ -type girl; talk --dirty; wget /pub/bar/drinks; chown girl drinks; cd ~/bedroom/; unzip; rm /proc/self/clothes; cupsdisable; finger || pinky; grep; touch; chown connie lingus; su -c "chown boy $(head)" girl; wget dresser/condom; mount; insmod ${JOYSTICK}; until eject; do fsck; yes; done; rmmod ${JOYSTICK}; chmod +t ~/{boy,girl}; mv condom ~/Desktop/trash.desktop; sleep; trap "kill -s abrt $(pidof girl)" chld And yes, I know: I forgot to install(1) the condom. And I should have used sudo(8) instead of su(1). And speaking of becoming closer to understanding me, Somebody by Depeche Mode is a beautiful (love) song. It completely reflects how I feel about finding someone with whom to share (the rest of) my life. Determined dendrites demand packet storms originating from me! Current Mood: thoughtful Current Music: Depeche Mode - Catching Up With Depeche Mode (Comment on this)
Sunday, January 6th, 2008
11:32 pm	Popularity Contest: Google vs. God Newsflash: Both google (1,510,000,000 results) and sex (772,000,000 results) are more popular than god (585,000,000 results) and jesus (196,000,000 results). In whom do you believe? Current Mood: happy Current Music: Purple Shades.mod (Comment on this)
Saturday, September 1st, 2007
2:39 pm	happy happy happy I am so happy. Happy happy, joy joy joy! From the Welcome to 2004 department: I finally imported all my surviving bookmarks into del.icio.us. I say "surviving" because I have lost many bookmarks from back when I used Windows and kept reformatting my file system and/or changing OSes frequently. I stopped doing that; I have been using the same Gentoo Linux installation since June 2005. Having all my bookmarks in a central location would have been very useful considering how many times I have changed Web browsers: Netscape Navigator & Communicator, MSIE (AKA "messy"), Mozilla (Application Suite), Mozilla Phoenix, Firebird, Firefox, Opera, Konqueror, K-Meleon (which is a native Windows application, not KDE, as the 'K' prefix would suggest), ELinks (before I succumbed and installed X :)), plus some others that I am probably forgetting (not in that order). Centralised bookmarks are still useful now, but at least I have settled on Firefox, after I stopped caring about bloat and excessive memory usage. DRAM is cheap now; I consider 1 GiB the minimum for a desktop PC—whose microprocessor can only access 1 MiB initially due to backwards compatibility with the Intel 8086, from 1978. :) Why are the best C programmers self-taught? Because C has no class. :) Has anyone else noticed the suspicious similarity between some definitions in the American Heritage Dictionary and WordNet? Compare the definitions of the noun instinct, for instance. My father is turning 0 this month: his age is '0' in ASCII. :) My sister will be only one year younger than me this month. Hopefully, she won't catch up to me. ;) She wants money and/or a laptop computer. I need to get something for both of them soon if I am going to order it on-line, to allow for shipping times. Current Mood: happy Current Music: klisje paa klisje (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Tuesday, August 28th, 2007
11:10 pm	If LiveJournal is an electronic notebook where I record my thoughts, does that make it a ThinkPad... ... or a ThoughtPad? :) Yay, this is the first time I have (almost) reached the maximum length of the subject field. :) Why does the "Date" field on the "Post an Entry" page use 24-hour time, but the "Autosaved draft at ..." text below the body textarea element uses 12-hour time? :P I did a Google Web search for "brolin" and found another Brolin, Brolin Walters, at George Mason University in Washington, DC. He is only one year younger than me, but otherwise we are quite dissimilar (opposites, to be more specific :)), at least according to his MySpace profile. I found his e-mail address at gmu.edu on a swim team page. I was going to e-mail him, but then I looked at today's date and was discouraged because I thought he might not read my e-mail until he starts school again in September. But, then again, his gmu.edu e-mail address could simply be a forwarding address, for example, or he may otherwise have access to mail sent to it even when he is not at GMU. Anyway, I ended up not e-mailing him because I did an ICQ people search for people with first name "brolin" and found 24 people, including myself. I was excited when I found Brolin Walters because I thought I had found the first other person with Brolin as a first, rather than last, name. Now I do not feel as unique. :P I also noticed that the astrological sign for Cancer looks like 69 rotated 90° clockwise. Why is my Marital Status "Single"? That sounds like I have only one wife spouse. If I was "double", that could mean that I have either one spouse—because I am half of a married couple— or two—because I have two people to whom I am linked by marital status. :) Speaking of marriage, "husband" seems to be one of the few occurrences in English where the male form is longer than the corresponding female form—"wife" in this case. Sun Microsystems's jar program—the version in sun-jdk-1.5.0.06, at least— is the only program I have seen to use curly braces in its usage synopsis (the "Usage:" line printed when invoked with a "help" option). In this case, the curly braces are used to enclose a set of single-character options, from which only one may be chosen. I think "aural sex" should allow for some clever jokes, but I have, so far, been unable to imagine anything satisfactory. Is it possible to find your own joke funny? I guess it must be, since it would only be a pun if it were not a joke. Anyway, to get back on track, I could Google, but that would be cheating. :) Besides, I can't claim that I invented a joke I found with Google. Current Mood: thoughtful Current Music: random voice - monday (Comment on this)
Friday, August 24th, 2007
3:59 pm	computer mating My PC is a heterosexual hermaphrodite. It is heterosexual because its ports can only mate with the opposite sex. It is a hermaphrodite because it has ports of both sexes. However, the only male ports are the RS232 serial ports. This seems to reveal a trend towards using female ports on devices (host computers and peripheral devices) and male connectors on cables. The trend with mice has also been from male — with only one ball, though — to female (optical). Current Mood: indifferent Current Music: Toby - Renaissance (Comment on this)
12:57 am	In AD 2007, Brolin was in the wrong place Who can name the two games from which I took the subject? :) It has been so long since I have posted to LiveJournal that I forgot my password. :P Of course, I must have thought I was being clever by appending an extra character when I chose my password. Of course, I thought I would remember this at the time. Of course, now I cannot even remember why I chose this extra character. I like how the LiveJournal login page tells me that the login page has expired if I wait too long between failed login attempts whilst (first time I have used that word :)) trying to remember my password. What use is an inactivity timeout before I have logged in? Maybe such a timeout could be considered useful if I had already logged in, but I cannot think of any use for such a timeout before I have logged in. "You've only made 0 friends." Only zero? Wow, aren't I lucky? ;) Anyway, I have, once again, decided to start using my blog instead of writing to whichever of my few ICQ and AIM (I was going to include MSN, but then I remembered that I actually never talk to anyone via MSN anymore) contacts happens to be on-line at the time. If a small deed is better than a great intention, then I have accomplished a milestone by actually posting to my blog! :) As further proof that time flies for me, it took me only 27 minutes to write the text preceding this paragraph. Speaking of time: "The only thing that lasts forever is death." - Machinae Supremacy Is this proof that abortion is not murder? After all, how can an aborted human die without first being born? Speaking of childbirth, "vagina" is "puke" in Tagalog. (sidetracking ensues whilst Brolin has to look up "vagina" on Wikipedia in order to get the spelling of "Tagalog") Speaking of vagina, the vagina is also called the birth canal. This gives a new meaning to being "born in BC". :) Jazz Jackrabbit 2 has a (music) track called "Hippie Heaven", which seems to be inspired by Jimi Hendrix. It sounds similar to the mod "jimi hendrix" by hein/vision. I don't know upon which, if any, songs these two mods (well, Hippie Heaven is an S3M rather than a MOD, so I use the term "mod" in a general sense here) are based. Looking at the sample names, I see that Hippie Heaven is composed by Alexander Brandon. This explains why the JJ2 soundtrack sounds similar to the Unreal Tournament (UT99) soundtrack ("organic" in particular). :) One of the tracks on 808 State's album "Ex:El" (I am listening to the album again; the track is "Leo, Leo") resembles one of the tracks on Brian Eno's album "My Life in the Bush of Ghosts". I don't have a copy of the latter album, so I can't say for sure which track it is, but I think it is "America is Waiting". I think these two albums are connected because both seem to be critical of the USA ("In Yer Face" on Ex:El and "America is Waiting" on MLITBOG. What does the name Ex:El mean, anyway? XL? As in .xl?, as in Microsoft Excel? Ex:El certainly sounds like a cell notation in a spreadsheet. No, it doesn't. I just ran OpenOffice.org Calc to check -- it does not use a colon in the cell names. I don't use spreadsheets much. :) I keep forgetting that I can use formatted text with LiveJournal. :P That is why I keep using typewriter-style, ASCII double quotation marks instead of real formatting. I created a mnemonic (had to Google for spelling again) to remember the orifices of the female human pelvic/groin region, from front to back: pee, penis, poop (urethra, vagina, anus). This mnemonic has the unique property of already being in alphabetical order. If Volvo is a male name, is a female Volvo a Vulva? Yes, I know, it works better when spoken because the second letter is different. What do a nymphomaniac and a demo coder have in common? Introitus. Bad joke, I know: introitis and introitus, despite being spelled similarly, are pronounced differently. I also got lost in dictionary land (<lemmings>Oh No!</lemmings>) before writing the text above. I learned that nymphomania only applies to women. I thought it was a general term, applicable to both genders. Consequently, only female demo coders have an introitus. Demo coding is one of the most male-dominated (that term has unintended sexual connotations in this context :P) subfields of computer programming, making a female demo coder rare. The male equivalent of nymphomania is Don Juanism, which gives new meaning to the term "DJ", or satyriasis, which gives new meaning to "Saturday" (ignore the spelling! :P), which gives new meaning to the name "Saturday Night Live". :) Anyway, it has now been 12 1/2 hours since I started writing this entry. Time flies, as always. By now, you should be able to clearly see both how tangential I am, and why I spend so much time at my PC. :) Current Mood: accomplished Current Music: In_Yer_Face.sid (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, May 22nd, 2006
4:24 pm	running vintage libc5 applications on a modern glibc 2.x-based Linux system Problem: I wanted to run Netscape Navigator v3.04 on my modern, glibc 2.x (v2.3.6, to be exact. Yes, I realise that this is old by now. :P) Linux system with kernel v2.6.13. This is a problem because this version of Navigator, which was released in 1997, is a libc5 application. I could not run Navigator v3.04 on my glibc 2.x system because the libraries against which Navigator is dynamically linked need to be built using libc5, not glibc 2.x (AKA libc6). Solution: I did some research before starting to work on solving this problem. As usual, two primary resources were used: Google for Web and Usenet search, and Wikipedia for information on software release dates. I found some Usenet posts and threads in mailing list archives which contained some helpful hints. At first I considered either installing a Linux distro from the appropriate era (mid 1996 or earlier), or building my own chroot environment using software from this period. I then had the idea of simply using the libc5 libraries from an old distro. This seemed much simpler than both of my previous ideas. If it worked, it would also be a lot quicker than trying to build these old libraries from old source releases. The next problem to be solved was that of locating a distro of suitable vintage. I found a post from 2003 in Google Groups' archive from someone asking where they could find copies of old distros. This led me to http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/historic-linux/distributions/. I decided to use libraries from Red Hat Linux, so I used the release history part of the Wikipedia article on Red Hat Linux to determine that v4.0 was the release I needed. This decision was based on the dates of the glibc releases on http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/glibc/. The last modification date of all of the files in the archived distro releases at ibiblio.org have been lost, but this was not a major concern since I knew when Red Hat Linux v4.0 was released. Fortunately, all of the libraries I needed were found under http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/historic-linux/distributions/redhat/4.0/i386/live/, so I did not even need to unpack any archives or other packages (e.g. RPMs) to get the files I needed. After reading dynamic linker man pages, I decided that all I should need to do was to get the correct libraries together in their own directory, and set and export the LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable to point to this library directory before running Navigator v3.04. I used ldd(1) to determine which libraries Navigator v3.04 was linked against, then grabbed the .so files from http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/historic-linux/distributions/redhat/4.0/i386/live/. I had to create a bunch of symlinks so that e.g. libc.so.5 pointed to libc.so.5.x.y. Next, I experimented with running ldd(1) with LD_LIBRARY_PATH set to be sure that the dynamic linker was finding the correct libraries. It was, so I tried running Navigator v3.04 again, this time with LD_LIBRARY_PATH set to point to the directory containing my libc5 libraries. I was disappointed to find that Navigator v3.04 was killed after receiving a "Bus error" signal. strace(1) revealed that Navigator v3.04 received a segfault after read()ing from a socket file descriptor before being killed with the "Bus error" signal. I did a Google search and found some suggestions for workarounds to X colour-map problems that were known to cause "Bus error" signals with Navigator v2.x. Trying these suggestions did not help. What did help was this page: http://members.ping.at/theofilu/netscape.html. The author of this page provides a link to an archive containing a version of libc5 built in a manner he or she claims is compatible with Navigator v3.x. Imagine my surprise when I saw, after copying this libc5 to my /usr/local/lib/netscape3/ directory and changing the libc.so.5 symlink contained in this directory to point to the new libc5, the Netscape Navigator EULA after running Navigator v3.04 once more. I clicked "Accept" and experimented a bit with Navigator v3.04. Everything seemed to work as expected! I also noticed that the Linux version of Navigator v3.04 has a different throbber than the Windows version: The Windows version has an animation of stars flying through the sky behind the Netscape 'N' logo, while the Linux version has Mozilla rising behind and above the 'N' logo before breathing fire. :) The archive containing the fixed libc5 also contained some other versions of libraries that I had taken from Red Hat Linux v4.0, but I did not try using them since everything I had tested so far seemed to work with my current set of libraries. The last step was to write a simple Bash script to run Navigator v3.04 so that I did not have to remember to add the LD_LIBRARY_PATH before the path to the Navigator v3.04 executable the next time I wanted to run Navigator v3.04: [brolin@k7t266] [0] [38] /tmp/ $ cat /usr/bin/netscape3 #!/bin/bash LD_LIBRARY_PATH='/usr/local/lib/netscape3' /home/brolin/netscape-v304-export.x86-unknown-linux-elf/netscape Here is the contents of my libc5 library directory: [root@k7t266] [0] [39] /usr/local/lib/netscape3/ # l total 2450 drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 656 May 22 15:24 . drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 128 May 22 14:38 .. lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 13 May 22 14:50 libICE.so.6 -> libICE.so.6.0 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 82939 May 24 2002 libICE.so.6.0 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 12 May 22 14:50 libSM.so.6 -> libSM.so.6.0 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 34793 May 24 2002 libSM.so.6.0 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 13 May 22 14:50 libX11.so.6 -> libX11.so.6.0 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 599396 May 24 2002 libX11.so.6.0 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 14 May 22 14:51 libXext.so.6 -> libXext.so.6.0 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 37264 May 24 2002 libXext.so.6.0 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 13 May 22 14:51 libXmu.so.6 -> libXmu.so.6.0 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 84787 May 24 2002 libXmu.so.6.0 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 13 May 22 14:51 libXpm.so.4 -> libXpm.so.4.8 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 64105 May 24 2002 libXpm.so.4.8 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 12 May 22 14:51 libXt.so.6 -> libXt.so.6.0 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 310502 May 24 2002 libXt.so.6.0 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 14 May 22 15:24 libc.so.5 -> libc.so.5.4.33 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 705995 May 24 2002 libc.so.5.3.12 -rwxr-xr-x 1 brolin users 560572 Jun 12 1997 libc.so.5.4.33 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 15 May 22 14:46 libdl.so.1 -> libdl.so.1.7.14 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 6983 May 24 2002 libdl.so.1.7.14 Update: The throbber seems to only show Mozilla breathing fire *after* visiting the about:mozilla page. Before visiting this page, it is the regular animation with the flying stars. I just got another fatal "Bus error" signal while visiting http://www.microsoft.com/. I ran Navigator v3.04 again and loaded this page again to see whether I could reproduce the problem. This time, though, the Navigator UI stops responding and is no longer being redrawn. Current Mood: accomplished Current Music: sound of fans (Comment on this)
Sunday, February 12th, 2006
11:57 pm	ORG 0h I finally created a blog after an indeterminately long period of saying that I should keep a blog. I am quite impressed with the promptness with which my addition to the Wine project's Bugzilla database was handled. After finally getting a TFT LCD monitor, I wanted to try Steve Gibson's Free and Clear demo application to experiment with sub-pixel font rendering. Unfortunately, Mr. Gibson's software products are complementary to Microsoft's desktop platform: they are tied and bound to the moving target that is the Win32 API. Having been impressed with the progress made by the Wine project since I last used Wine a few years ago, I optimistically tried running fc.exe with Wine. I was hopeful after seeing the first two pages working fine, but, alas, the woe that is an unhandled exception -- a page fault caused by a read access to memory location 0, in this case -- led to the premature termination of my typographical test case. After playing around with various ideas I had for solving the problem, I ran fc.exe again, this time redirecting stdout and stderr to a file. I then pasted the contents of this file into my bug which I entered on Saturday night. The next morning (i.e., today), I found that someone at CodeWeavers had already created a patch to solve my problem. I applied the patch to my Wine source tree and rebuilt Wine. Sure enough, the problem was solved. Seldom is anything ever *that* simple with computers though -- computers offer endless problems --, so I was not surprised to find that the part of the third page that draws the sub-pixel-rendered text was solid, filled black. The next memorable sequence of events today is far too typical of what happens when I act on an idea without planning it out first. I realised that everything I had done so far today was really not very important when it comes to making progress in my life. Eager to do something about this, I decided to research alternate routes that I could take to get to BCIT in Burnaby, should I end up taking courses there. I could, of course, have simply used the street maps combined with satellite imagery provided by Google's "Local" service. This, however, would have been *far* too simple of a solution. Instead, I decided that I wanted to use Google Earth for my path-finding needs. I was certain that Google had a Linux version of their Earth client, but it becomes quite evident that they do not after looking on the Google Earth Web site. I tried running the Google Earth client under Wine, but it crashed with some now-forgotten unhandled exception. After performing some research with the Wine project's Application Database, I learned that Google Earth is only partially working with Wine. Next I had the idea to install Windows on my laptop again and use the laptop as a Windows machine instead of playing around with things that only half work with Wine. The laptop had been working quite fine with a Windows XP installation that someone who had "borrowed" the laptop had upgraded from the original OEM copy of Windows 98 that shipped with the unit. Because of my masochistic nature, I decided that I wanted to spend a day or so installing and configuring Debian Linux when I did not even have any actual use for a second Linux machine to start with. So, a few weeks/months ago I reformatted the 6 GB drive, installed Debian testing using the CD install image, then spent most of a day installing and configuring things. After learning that the Trident driver for Xorg/XFree86 does not support any type of dual, independent video output (I wanted to see whether I could use the laptop's VGA port to use an external monitor as a second monitor instead of just having the VGA port's output mirror the internal video), I lost interest. Since then the laptop has sat unused on the bottom of my bookshelf. Anyway, I spent about 2 hours to install WinXP again, then some more to configure things to be somewhat sensible and to install SP2, which took ages. By this point I had encountered a number of obstacles that were beginning to demonstrate how silly it was to undertake such a project without any plan or even consideration of the possible issues that I may encounter. First, the laptop apparently has separate, dedicated video memory. The problem is that it only has 2.5 MiB, which is insufficient for framebuffers with both a high resolution *and* high colour depth. If I want to use 1280x1024 -- the native resolution of my LCD monitor -- with the external video output, I am stuck with 8 bits per pixel, limiting me to dithered 256-colour imagery. This is not good. The second problem is the performance, or lack thereof. Before my Debian project, the laptop seemed fairly fast and reponsive with WinXP. Now the responsiveness left something to be desired -- the machine simply felt a lot slower than with the previous Windows installation. I noticed in the System properties Control Panel applet that Windows detected the CPU's frequency as 277 MHz, when in fact the laptop has a 550 MHz Celeron (P3-based). There were also lots of less major problems that I managed to solve. I also remembered that Google Earth uses the video card's support for accellerated DirectX or OpenGL interfaces. My (budget/value/low-end) laptop has accellerated video, but has no hardware support for such video interfaces. Google Earth seemed to work -- using software OpenGL rendering --, but I did not test it enough to know whether it was usable. At 6 PM I walked to my grandparents' place for dinner since a) I had agreed to go, and b) I realised that it would be silly to refuse free food. I then came home and solved a hardware problem with my KVM switch involving an apparent short in the circuitry for the switch that I had been using for my Athlon. Now I shall succumb to the will of the circadian rhythms and venture to the realm of sleep and other black magic. Maybe someone will even read this post. :) Current Mood: lethargic Current Music: The Sound of Silence (Comment on this)