Isn’t youtube great. It’s a Dell XPS laptop, the display does this wierd tearing thing like it can’t determine the refresh rate of the display. It happens occasionally on Windows, normally in a game when switching display modes. It happens with annoying regularity on Linux under XGL/Compiz, which leads me to the belief that it’s a driver problem.
Makefile default shell
This one is a bit of a gotcha that I encountered in the ieee80211 and ipw3945 source. The make files used some convoluted shell syntax to check the state of the kernel. The problem is that it uses particular non bourne-shell isms, such as the [[ syntax, which simply doesn’t work in bourne, because it’s so bloody simple.
The short solution was to put SHELL=/bin/bash at the start of the Makefile, which causes the shell that is used to be bash instead of sh. This is of course one of the regular issues between the different versions of Linux that float around. Some use bash as sh, which technically speaking is a bit of an evilness. It can hit you time and again in writing rc scripts as well, where the choice of shell is not generally determined by the magical ‘#!’ on the first line, but by the rcX script (X is generally S, 1, 2, 3, …).
Again, the quantity of run levels is determined by the provenance of the Operating System – for example the machine I’m currently working on(Ubuntu) claims a run-level of 2, while the fedora core desktop I’ve just checked claims a run-level of 5. Solaris makes thing really fun by informing you that tour run-level is a legacy state that you should stop considering to be useful, after all it’s about the services that you have enabled, not the run-level.
I so fracking love science fiction
I always feel that hope when I see the day the earth stood still. How I would like our options to be that black and white.
There is no notepad conspiracy
Apparently there is a Notepad conspiracy where it hides certain text from the user. The problem is that it isn’t hiding it, it’s just guessing the character set incorrectly. Raymond explains things a lot more eloquently than I. It seems to be a similar problem in the gnome notepad (gedit) utility – when it can’t guess the character set it puts up a D’oh, I can’t interpret this file message.
someone(/thing) doesn’t understand menus
The msnbc website’s entertainment drop down is utterly insane… It can be disabled but on my screen those little teeny tiny targets are difficult. Fitts’ law anyone?
Double agent… enjoyable, but buggy
Finally deactivated that fracking red mercury bomb. For the last mission I decided that all bets were off for all the other characters in the game – really should not have done that as it sent my stats into the floor. Prior to this mission it was practically 100% intact bad guys, for some places. Well, leaving the boat blow up doesn’t count, does it?
Guys, guys, you really should check the strings…
Splinter cell Double Agent’s auto updater seems to have a little bit of confusion as to what it’s updating. The dialog says that it’s the updater for the previous game. I do realize that it’s mostly recycled code, but this should be a configurable. Thank crap they dropped the starf**ce protection system. It was really annoying, with subversive device drivers on the machine.
gerrymanderers are us…
It turns out that I’m registered to vote. Apparently the road I live on is split in two. Just a little on the scary side.
You have just received an html email…
Another stupid email. Just some text and a ‘click here’ link that simply directs you through doubleclick/edgesuite. Put some effing useful information in the email instead of trying to data mine at every possible occasion. And no, the message says you have received an html email, but the content… it’s all plain text.
Bleugh, for a message that claimed to be a piece of customer service information, the fact that it directs to a data mining site angries up the blood.
Victory will be mine! Look ma, no panics
Well Solaris express doesn’t panic my laptop any more. I had one of those wierd variants of a bge card. Now all I need is wireless.
and sound…