May 2007 Archives

It's been just over a week since my father passed away. I am so tired in the evenings. I need to get a bunch of vitamin supplements. I'm back in the city, thinking about all the work I need to get back to and it's not making me very happy. I nearly had a panic attack in Tesco yesterday, the people were getting on my nerves and I was not operating on all cylinders.
My father was deeply loved by all the people in both Castleisland and Castlegregory - so many people came to give their respects that we were overwhelmed.
It rained as we lay his body in the family tomb. You may think this is some hoity-toity thing, but in that tomb are my great-grandfather, grandfather, grandmother, grand-uncle Dick, who was the doctor that delivered my father and my own father. There is an immense amount of family history there in one place.
Sorry, can't really continue with this.

My father passed away last night following a heart attack. It was sudden and completely unexpected.
The removal takes place tomorrow evening in Tagneys funeral home, Castleisland from 5.00pm until 7.30pm.
The funeral mass takes place in the church in Castleisland on Tuesday at 11am.

He just forgot his safety word. Thank you PCH.
And now to brunch...

Well, it all depends. It really should be a compact flourescent light bulb, and if you're replacing one of those you should ask yourself why you're replacing one a I've never experienced one blowing out in my lifetime and I've asked people and neither have they so the entire problem is one of faulty wiring in your house so you should probably get that seen to.

This is the official declaration of a patch for the linux kernel. It provides for the replacement of all GPL only exported symbols with generically exported symbols.
While the code is trivial, I hereby declare that it is copyright 2007 Pete Shanahan.
It is, itself subject to the GPL, so there.
Starting from the kernel source directory issue the following command:

for i in $(find . -type f); do
sed -i -e 's/EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL/EXPORT_SYMBOL/' $i
done

If someone is putting multiple symbols on a line, then you have my permission to use:

for i in $(find . -type f); do
sed -i -e 's/EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL/EXPORT_SYMBOL/g' $i
done

Gosh, now that wasn't difficult, now was it?
This developer created this patch while under the influence of several personally made martinis, a couple of beers and a few shots of vodka (it was nice, though), so if the spelling of any of the code is incorrect then feel free to correct it, send me a patch and I'll add you as a contributor to it. After all, we're all pragmatists together.

The GPL is a difficult beast.
all those MODULE_EXPORT_GPL symbols.
F**k them.
I'm just going to release a patch that remaps them all to MODULE_EXPORT.
The patch is GPL.
F**k you I'm a pragmatist, not an idealist.
This was written at 3am, I am drunk and I'm bitter. You know who I am.
I don't prefix my posts with 'yes, I drink...', you should know what I'm like, after all; you're here

This is one of the typical messages. The fun thing about this one is the grammar says the opposite of what they meant.

We recommend you to install a firewall module and it will stop e-mail sending.
Otherwise your account will be blocked until you do not eliminate malfunction.

So, in other words if I don't install this patch, you won't block my email. Ain't it sweet :)

It turns out that if the privileges on a file/folder contain users/groups other than the standard set (Owner - explicit or CREATOR OWNER, SYSTEM and for the most part Administrators) then it assumes that you're sharing it - even if the users in question have no privileges on the file. While I agree with the idea in concept, the terminology is too vague. There's sharing, in the local concept - which is to say that the privileges are relaxed enough to allow access to the file by users other than yourself and then there's sharing in the remote sense - which is to say that the file can be accessed from a remote system. Honestly, I'd not have used the moniker of 'sharing' the file.

Well vista is being a bit of a pain. When hardware DEP was switched on in XP service pack 2, I immediately went and turned on the 'opt out' policy - i.e. I would selectively switch on the applications that needed to have hardware DEP disabled. Most of my applications worked well, and the few exceptions were easy to take care of.
For some bizarre reason I don't get the option of disabling hardware dep on applications that crash under vista; or at least it may be selective.
dvdidle pro is one of those applications which started crashing under Vista. The problem was that it only said 'this program has stopped working', no explanations given. When I went and manually disabled DEP for it it all started running just fine again. I prefer to have a longer lasting battery, thank you very much.

Sorry kids, I know what was being attempted. Unfortunately it just killed. The pacing was all over the place. There were too many bad guys. The character development was surreal.

In the vein of utter an total enjoyment. Last night was Eurovision night - more fun than a room full of exploding baby tigers. Seriously, our country needs to get it's act together for this, as last place is an utter embarrassment (5 points). Ireland will rise again! Let's see... we don't have any death metal, and our ability to choose anything even slightly good has been officially eliminated - seriously, vox populi does not work.
On the plus side, we are officially rid of our flatmate on Thursday. I have a bottle of Chopin, a bottle of Tanqueray and a bottle of Noily Pratt. Well, maybe half a bottle of Chopin by the following weekend - it really is scrummy. It's a martuni party, and at the strength I make them - it's martuni's for everyone.
Monday is the last round of viewings for the apartment,but unless something irrational happens, we've already made our decision.
Well, it's 7am, I've been awake since before 6. I'm supposed to be seeing the third spiderman movie tonight. all good!

Here I am trying to maintain a system that was originally 'designed' by an idiot. Dates are stored using unix timestamps. When there is even the slightest kerfuffle involving the timezone everything gets horked as all the code referencing the dates uses the local time to determine when things happen. Blargh!

Forrest Gump is a good movie. I hate movies that make me cringe, this one doesn't. It is a carefully crafted collection of ups and downs designed at the end to make me feel more happy than sad. I do wish there could be more movies that end on the proper inflection. Sad is more likely than happy, and reality is a drug best served on it's own.
Grumpy? not really, just watching another of those convincing movies...

How can you tell if your website is usable by anyone? Well one of the simplest ways is to use a text mode browser. It gives you a good idea as to how easy it is to navigate without having to spend the effort getting in a UI designer at infinity$/hour just to tell you that your links should be purple, and not help you in the least bit.
links is a pretty damned good text mode browser. It makes it obvious if you've made a mess of the UI for navigating, which is always a good thing. It makes it obvious when you've forgotten to put the bloody ALT tags into all your images - like a good designer should. Spacer gifs are evil and must be stopped :)