A blog about skating and cycling, or vice versa

Booted out#

Thu, 06 Sep 2007 03:44:03 +0000

You don't get a LIM race report, because I didn't race at LIM. Although I was expecting to, but while swapping wheels before the skate I noticed a bit of flex on the frame: then I took the frame off the boot and found that the problem was that the mounting block for the rear bolt had come away from the carbon. So, uh. Boots are now on their way back to Germany for Daniel Junker to look at.

This week I have been mostly finding a new flat. And adding 3d Secure support to Stargreen. And playing with my new mixer. I got sucked into running the development version of Mixxx (because it works out of the box with the x-session) which, being C++, taxed my poor old 512MB RAM like nothing since the Roman Empire. So, now 2GB heavier and circa 60 quid lighter - let's hear it for Yoyotech, a bricks & mortar central London computer parts shop whose prices are, unlike Maplin or PC World, vaguely comparable with what you'd pay if you were patient and went mail-order.

I ATENT DEAD#

Thu, 20 Sep 2007 14:20:50 +0000

Right now, I'm too angry to be dead, but this is a natural result of attempting to use GNOME. In general I'm not dead but too busy (and with too little internet) to be blogging about it right now.

but for the moment I leave you with this: the point of Unix is that you can tell what's going on, and have a clue where to start looking when nothing is apparently going on. To get GNOME Network Manager (apparently the approved thing for a wireless laptop) working is needlessly complicated when (a) the icon which I guess should appear doesn't, (b) the manual doesn't actually explain that there even should be an icon (as I said, I guessed), (c) googling - thank goodness I still know how to configure interfaces manually, eh? don't know what the GNOME Typical User would do here, other than reinstall Windows - is the only way to find out that nm-applet is the magic thing to start, (d) googling again for the error message it produces when it starts directs me via a snotty message to /usr/share/doc/network-manager-gnome/README.Debian (again, I wonder how the Gnome Typical User would find this) which says I should add myself to the netdev group, (e) having done all that it produces a list of local wireless networks and/or a swirling thing in the top right hand corner of the screen, but doesn't actually connect to my wireless router - even after asking (twice, now) for my WEP key

Running iwconfig and dhclient from a terminal works perfectly (and is how I'm connecting to post this), so I can't even guess what the error message it's hiding from me might me. It's been sitting there swirling for the entire time I've spent writing this, though.

If any of the developers of this misbegotten creation stumble across this blog entry, they will probably even now be muttering "so send a bug report" at their screens. Because rants like this aren't helpful, and reports are. Let me be absolutely clear about this, because I'd hate to be misconstrued: I have no intention of helping. The purpose of reporting bugs is to produce better software, and this software is so completely misguided that I have no interest in making it better. It's one thing in normal use to hide technical messages from users that might be confused by them, it's quite another to hide them when the bloody thing doesn't otherwise work.

I don't think this GNOME installation is going to last the day, to be honest.

Nice laptop (HP nc2400), though.

Not Invented Hier#

Fri, 21 Sep 2007 12:58:00 +0000

The other day I was musing:

as we get more and more email of different kinds, a generic mail-with-lispy-bits-in package would be increasingly useful.
and then I thought for a few minutes, and continued
Er, maybe that's what text-template will do for us.

In the spirit of Mark Jason-Dominus' Text::Template perl module, though much less featureful, text-template is at http://www.cliki.net/text-template and has been for nearly a year. Not sure what I think about that.

⟪Aug 2007 Oct 2007⟫