October 2007 Archives

Half life Orange box. Buy now. You will like, and you will understand

I would have to say 'serves you right', but even with a reasonably fast cable modem connection X blows goats on remote displays. vnc is an improvement, but the windows remote terminal system kicks ass on a 56k ordinary modem connection. Hmmm....

Got the replacement battery in the post yesterday. I send a message asking what to do with the other one.... Response: 'You do not need to return the faulty battery. Please dispose it.' Talking about being completely annoying on this. Previously it was a replacement power supply. This time it's a battery. They really aren't taking this WEEEEEEE thing seriously.

And they change the office move date by a week. It's bleeding typical to have something like that happen, as after all as my mother says, you can't get away with anything.

Aargh, I just saved my laptop from exploding/catching fire. Literally minutes/seconds away from a potential disaster (losing my hard drive - time to do a backup today).
A dell laptop, with a battery model of C5447 - one larger than the number listed in the dell battery recall program. The battery was really really hot - I mean pretty much frying-pan hot heat on the battery. I've contacted dell support. I wonder what's going to happen with this

It turns out there's a bug, due primarily to testing on zsh and putting the script into bash.

function find_lowest_subprocess() {
    local -i parent=$1
    local pids
    typeset -a pids

    pids=($(pgrep -P $parent))
    while ((${#pids[@]} > 0)); do
        if ((${#pids[@]} > 1)); then
            parent=${pids[0]}
            local i=0
            while ((i < ${#pids[@]})); do
                local sub=$(pgrep -P ${pids[$i]})
                [[ -n $sub ]] && parent=$sub
                ((i=i + 1))
            done
        else
            parent=$pids
        fi
        pids=($(pgrep -P $parent))
    done
    echo $parent
}

Someone, somewhere forgot about the parenthes around the array assignments. Shame on me!

Yes, sad to say I'm kind of anxious to see the new Clannad anime (ANN). Airing on the 4th, so really soon then.

I was reading the 'Basics on how shims work', and all I could think about was the old linux/unix trick of using LD_PRELOAD to intercept library calls in dynamically linked applications (used to great effect to bypass timebombed applications).
It is one of the reasons why I think that static linking is just horrible - after all, it breaks things, and makes you have to use terribly complicated tricks like disassembling and binary patching to fix problems because you don't have the source code. You don't get the advantages of page sharing, which is kind of important when you consider how many libraries are loaded by the typical gnome application (last check on nautilus was 117 libraries, excluding VDSO and the binary itself, firefox has 151, excluding fonts and other pango related nonsense). Yes, indeed, winners don't use static linking.
As a tangent, it's one of the reasons for not using application compression tools on binaries - after all, the only thing you save is on the distribution size, not on the run-time. The binary itself acts like a static linked blob, and doesn't share the text segment (program code) amongst the other instances, like other binaries, so every instance can use a lot of private memory, leaving less physical memory on the machine for other things like playing high resolution video.

Aargh, how many times do I see double spaced text where the author understood that this meant put two spaces after the period, not that there should be a whole line of space between the lines (for all those comments and notes silly!). Plus, putting two spaces after a period collapses into one under HTML. The CSS style for double spacing is 'line-height:200%;', which is nice.