Catsidhe

Elbows deep in computer guts.

2012-06-14T12:11:30Z

Mim's desktop was getting more and more unreliable. First it started playing sillybuggers on boot by turning the CPU fan full blast and refusing to turn it down unless the box was soft-rebooted. Then it started refusing to turn on unless the button was mashed for a while.

Then, on the Queen's Birthday, it decided to refuse to boot at all until I started futzing with it.

So I went looking for a new power supply. Only to find that while the required model of PS costs a bit over $30 on the internet, no-one in Melbourne has one to sell. The nearest I could find was a $99 case of the right sort, with the power supply included.

And then, this evening, when I opened it up, not only was that PS of a subtly different model, but I couldn't get the old one out without removing the motherboard anyway. So I did a full transplant of the old guts into the new box.

And, sure, I've been doing this sort of thing for twenty years, but there's always a held breath when booting a computer you've done this sort of work to, and a long sigh of relief when it boots.

And a happy little skip when it works better than it used to.

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You fail Computers forever.

2010-04-18T11:22:43Z

Angela: “So we look at the email headers of the letter, and it was sent to this IP address...”

Sweets: “What just happened?” as the screen changes to a view through a webcam.

Angela: “... and now we have complete control over the computer that email was sent to.”

Cue Mimdancer glaring at Catsidhe as he gives a burst of hysterical laughter.

No, seriously. There is so much very much wrong in that two seconds of Bones that I don't think it's possible to adequately describe the fractal wrongness to anyone who does not already get it.

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Triskadekaphobia

2009-11-15T11:44:26Z

So, last Friday — Friday the thirteenth — was sufficient to make Richard Dawkins superstitious.

First, I hear that there was a burst water main on Punt rd, and traffic was likely to be horrible.
Then, I am passed by a police car on its way to a car accident just up the road (and on my way), where a car had gone into a front yard over a brick wall, and ended up on its roof. This was not long before I passed it, and Hatzolah (the Jewish ambulance service) already had the driver on the lawn. That's all I saw as I passed, and I know no more of the matter.

Then, at work, I find there's a small crisis. The previous day I had investigated the troubles of one of my users, who had trouble with her roaming profile. (A common situation when the users go over quota and don't realise, which they don't with roaming profiles until it's too late.) As part of this problem, there was a directory which shouldn't have been there, where her profile was being put, which means she had two copies of her profile, which made her that much more over quota, and in my efforts to figure out what was going on, I made her account unusable. I asked the sysad what was going on, and he got curious and fiddled (with a very old, very complicated, very brittle Samba v2 (!) installation, and managed to break it, and several people were unable to log in. And for about a year, that Samba install has been broken, such that we couldn't actually join any computers to it, which means we could fix those users until the other problem was fixed. Luckily, he did, and fixed the other problem too. But the morning was written off. And the afternoon was given over to a machine with (I think) a virus which made the machine unusable, and while it did work in safe mode, the virus checker didn't, and and and arrgh.

And there was Drama in a certain list.

And I thought that was that.

Then on Saturday morning, I got a phone call from my Grandmother.

It seems that while I was having a dies horribilis, my Grandfather's ashes were being interred, and my family hadn't even bothered to tell me. Neither did my mother know about it until Friday evening. And my Grandmother was very upset when she discovered that I wasn't there because no-one had told me, which is why she called.

Leaving out any other family drama on that front, it feels very much like that branch of the family is writing us (my mother, sister and myself) out of it. And it seems that they aren't extending the favour to the third branch either. My cousin only found out and was able to attend because he coincidentally asked his mother the night before what she was doing that day.

I don't even know where he is interred, beyond ‘Eltham’.

Yes, I'm upset. But what really is pissing me off is that this isn't an isolated incident of forgetfulness: I had to chase them up to find out when the bloody funeral was, and when there, discovered that they had divvied it up between themselves. I wasn't even asked if there was anything I'd like to say. Only the children of that branch of the family got to speak.

I was willing to overlook it then, give the benefit of the doubt. But this just pisses me off. And I have had no contact from them since, either.

I intend to have a quiet word at Christmas. Let's see what they say.

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Sick

2009-10-19T11:01:52Z

Sinus infection. Sinus headache was so bad this morning, I thought I was about to start throwing up. Distinctly unpleasant.

I am on horse tablets of Amoxycillin and something called ‘Clavulanic Acid’.

And thanks to a “please think of the children” moral panic, where the risk/benefit analysis was done by insane lobotomised monkeys, products like Pseudoephidrene with Codeine are simply no longer made. Excruciating sinus headache? Better hope that Pseudoephidrene with anti-inflammatories will do the job, or else Phenylepherine with Codeine, because that's all that's available. Turns out, it doesn't do the same job, and I've been headachy and vaguely nauseous all day, because I might take my twenty tablets of Pseudoephidrene and make a couple of moles of speed with it.

In the meantime, I have tripped over a bug in Xorg, whereby X stops passing mouse clicks and keypresses to its clients. Mouse still moves, but clicks do nothing. Keyboard still does something, but nothing gets passed to clients. (Switching to virtual consoles works, because this is outside of X proper, and when in the console everything works, because this has nothing to do with X. But nothing works inside X any more. And it seems that in Ubuntu 9.04 (in all desktop manager versions), they helpfully turned off CTRL+ALT+BKSP. (it can be restored, apparently, by typing sudo dontzap --enable), but luckily, logging on to a virtual console and sudo /etc/init.d/[kg]dm restart still works. Still ugly, but less bad than a hard restart. The chatter in the bug tracking communities says something about an IRQ conflict involving the NVidia driver, but that doesn't help me.

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What now?

2009-09-29T05:31:27Z

So, for quite some time now, I've been working on a Great Project.

It started as something simple: I wanted to take the Irish Annals from the CELT project, and make an index of the names therein. So that I'd have a handy reference on hand at SCA Heraldry meetings where we discuss the historicity of proposed persona names for registration.

( What I have done, and why... )

In summary: I have

one Perl module (actually a small set of interconnecting modules) which provide an SGML parser (and a specific TEI parser, and a specific CELT parser) in pure Perl.
A program which uses (1) to display an SGML file in a human-browseable way (although not yet able to edit or meaningfully search that file).
A program which applies rules from a bespoke language to apply simple transformations to an SGML file (parsed with (1)), sufficient to generate output which is a compilable LaTeX file
A METAFONT font for Gaelic, which includes the full Roman character set and several paleographic characters, in an entire family of shapes. A bit of work with Fontforge can easily turn this into a postscript or truetype font (indeed, I have done this to an older version, and those bits which are displayed in this font in the output from (3) are also displayed in this font on screen when I view it in (2).

And I have a question for those of you in the programming community: now what do I do with them?

None of them are complete to my satisfaction, but then, it's entirely possible that they will never be, if I hide them from the world and continue to do all the work in my copious free time whenever I have a flash of insight or a moment to get into it.

I imagine that the SGML parser module could be submitted to CPAN, and the font to CTAN. But I've been putting it off and putting it off, partially because I don't know where to begin, partially because I'm just really nervous about putting my code out there for others to pick over.

As for the other stuff... Sourceforge? For all that I've been supporting others with subversion and the like, I've never used it in anger myself, and find that worrying about this is yet another excuse to hold off doing anything.

Indeed, I've been meaning to post this cry for advice for weeks now, but kept ... putting it off.

So: what do I do with all this now?

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