Schinckel.net

I’ve been playing with (and loving) Komodo Edit for a few days, and I’m about to try Komodo IDE. Basically, for one reason: debugging. Particularly for teaching kids how to code, I think being able to step through a program line by line, and see all of the variables and their effects would be useful. I assume that Komodo IDE can do this (it’s being downloaded as we speak). I’ve managed to get some buttons to help with using Komodo Edit working, however there is one thing I’d love to be able to do, and that’s end the currently running script if it is running before attempting to execute the next one.

I’ve been with Wild Internet & Telecom for about 4 months now, which is my longest ADSL supplier. Admittedly, the one month I spent with Opti Internet (before Veridas went south) was the only other ADSL I had, so take that with a grain of salt. Anyway, a month or so ago, Wild IT went into Voluntary Administration. Which basically meant they weren’t viable as a company, or were being so badly managed they were about to go out of business. They were very quiet on the subject on their own site, however there was a huge debate on the Whirlpool forums regarding their imminent demise. And then, GoTalk stepped in and purchased the customers. Almost immediately, my speeds became very slow - but I put this down to the fact I had gone over quota about two days before the end of the month, and my shaping hadn’t been removed. So I put in a complaint. Then I received a phone call from a Help Desk operator, basically saying that their network was under significant load. Which I thought had to be a load of shit, since with the talk of the demise of Wild, customers had apparently been leaving in droves, which meant that for all of March, I was downloading at basically full speed for the whole month. Apparently, 1,955 MB is about as much as can be downloaded at 256kbps in one day. So, I felt that basically the concept of their network being congested was rubbish. And this was confirmed, at least partially, on Whirlpool, where people had comments from GoTalk stating that all users were being shaped. They claimed that it was because of network congestion, but I think it was to annoy all of the heavy users, and cause them to want to change ISP. I wasn’t able to get speeds faster than ~64kbps for about a week. Happily, that seems to have now changed. When I grabbed the latest Azureus 3 update from the BT network, it came down at 26kB/s, which is about flat out. Hopefully, this is the end of the crappy speed, and with Timmy B no longer being in control of my ISP, hopefully it’s the end of heaps of the bullshit. Having said that, I’m going to read the Gotalk terms and conditions very carefully. If they don’t match up with what WildIT was offering, then I might just have to go elsewhere. I was looking for a way to get out of the exit fee anyway…

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I’m loving Komodo. I’ve just discovered it, and I’m playing with the free “Edit” only version, not the full IDE. I’ve set up a couple of macros/commands to make coding in python easier, one which just executes the selection using python, and another which saves the current file, and then executes that. This should make it possible to replace most of what I do that requires a seperate window, however, the fine-grained ability to $ python -i Source.py and then type in commands is missing. I might need to try to build an extension that does that - allows for active manipulation of python code within the defined namespaces. Oh, and it works with just about every language, and on all major platforms. Bonus.

I’ve finally gotten access to an Intel Mac, and have installed Parallels on it. Pretty snappy, and easy to install. Currently installing AutoDesk Inventor, as that’s the only PC-only (other than Eve!) program I use. Actually, running Eve in a VM would be great, as then if it crashed my system the whole machine wouldn’t go down. Not that I’m sure it was Eve causing the crashes anyway…

I’ve commented before on how people use my template conversion, and remove the attribution to myself, and more importantly to Patricia, the original person who did all of the work on the template for vanilla wordpress. What is quite funny is that they remove the tags that attribute me, but usually leave in the AdSense code. Which means anyone clicking on ads on their blog will be doing me a favour. Not that I’ve ever got anything from AdSense. I can’t even log in, since there is a clash between my original AdSense login and my new hosted domain google account. Which they haven’t fixed, last time I checked. Perhaps I should write into the code that attribution needs to be left in. I must check…

Microsoft to blast Google for its copyright policy - Yahoo! News “Companies that create no content of their own, and make money solely on the backs of other people’s content, are raking in billions through advertising revenue and IPOs,” says Rubin, who oversees copyright and trade secret law at Microsoft. Okay, let’s examine Microsoft’s record. MS-DOS 6.0: Stac successfully sued Microsoft for patent infringement regarding the compression algorithm used in DoubleSpace. Softimage: Microsoft was found guilty of software piracy last year (2001) by a French court. Windows Media Player: Microsoft used a cracked edition of Sony Sound Forge 4.5 to make the sound files for the Windows Media Player tour. And it’s fairly well understood that MS don’t make good stuff, they buy good stuff from other people, and make it worse… Pot. Kettle. Black.

I haven’t tried this software yet, but it looks great: Versomatic is automatic version control for all of your files. What it does, is set a service running that monitors changes in the filesystem. When changes are scheduled to be made, the service automatically backs up the previous version of the file. Of course, there’s some flexibility bound to be built in. After all, you won’t want to be backing up cache files, and so on. I suspect you’ll be able to choose particular file types, particular locations, or even just particular files to control the revisions of. Of course, the less work the user has to do, other than install it, the better. Getting back a previous version appears fairly simple, too. You can either right-click on a file and choose a previous version to edit, or use the Version Manager to see all managed files. You can, apparently, set the amount of disk space that will be used (I assume that after this older files will be discarded, or some method of choosing which ones to keep). Apparently there’s little extra resource usage, since it just copies the files to the revision archive, however this would also make disk usage more of an issue. Having a difference between files stored instead would save space, but use a lot more CPU time. Oh, and it’s OS X and Windows.

I don’t have the newspaper article in front of me, but I am riled up by this story. Basically, some church-type fellows have raised a petition about some “anti-religious” laws, that, apparently, “limit people’s right to free speech.” Now, before we get started, let me state that Australia, and South Australia do not have the same rights to free speech for citizens as the USA. Secondly, one of the arguments that is made by the preacher in the article is that it will erode moral values. What makes Christians think they have the dibs on morality anyway? Because the bible tells them so? Let’s have a quote from the bible:

Suppose you go to war against your enemies and the LORD your God hands them over to you and you take captives. And suppose you see among the captives a beautiful woman, and you are attracted to her and want to marry her. If this happens, you may take her to your home, where she must shave her head, cut her fingernails, and change all her clothes. Then she must remain in your home for a full month, mourning for her father and mother. After that you may marry her.

Okay, so according to Deuteronomy 21:10-14 you can take a woman against her will. Nice. We call that rape. But it doesn’t stop there:

Make ready to slaughter his sons for the guilt of their fathers; Lest they rise and possess the earth, and fill the breadth of the world with tyrants.

Hmm, it’s okay to punish people for what their ancestors have done. (Isaiah 14:21) I’m really sorry, Australian Aboriginals.

When a man strikes his male or female slave with a rod so hard that the slave dies under his hand, he shall be punished. If, however, the slave survives for a day or two, he is not to be punished, since the slave is his own property.

Wait, this one’s a triple-whammy. Firstly, it’s okay to own slaves. Secondly, it’s okay to beat slaves, as long as they don’t die from it. Thirdly, if they survive for a day or two, and then die, well, that’s okay too. (Exodus 21:20-21) So, how’s your moral superiority looking now, Mr. ne’er-do-evil god-bothering preacher. I’d guess more people have been killed by believers than non-believers. I reckon it’s we atheists who can take the moral high ground. I spit on your vile, disgusting, misogynistic, racist, slavery-supporting, hate-creating religions. Ahh, that feels better.

The other morning, my power went off. I almost slept through my wake-up time, but just made it to work on time. However, the power failure must have caused some sort of a problem with my NSLU2 server. For some reason, I was no longer able to connect to it in any way shape or form. Samba connections failed, and even SSH-ing in didn’t work, with any of the users I had set up. I finally figured out that it had something to do with not being able to boot off the disk properly. It was booting up, then beeping loudly three times (two different tones). Then, it was responding to pings, and accepting ssh connections, but not authenticating. So I connected using the root account and the default password, and it worked. And, true to form, the disks were recognised, but for some reason not mounted. I tried the turnup disk /dev/sda1 command, which doesn’t do anything destructive, but tells the machine to boot up from that device. It failed, with the following error:

turnup: /dev/sda1: partition does not seem to be a valid root partition The partition must contain a full operating system. To ensure that this is the case it is checked for the following, all of which must exist for the bootstrap to work: 1) A directory /mnt. 2) A command line interpreter program in /bin/sh. 3) The program chroot in /sbin or /usr/sbin. 4) The program init in /sbin, /etc or /bin. One or more of these items is missing. Mount /dev/sda1 on /mnt and examine its contents. You can use turnup disk

nfs -i -f to copy this operating system onto the disk, but it may overwrite files on the disk.

Okay, that might help. A quick mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/sda1 showed that the partition was valid. But no /mnt directory inside there. Create one, then run the turnup disk /dev/sda1 command again. Then shutdown -r now. Upon reboot, only a single beep (which, IIRC, I put there!), and everything is normal. Phew!