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.
I organize my trip…
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.
Plucking dell battery!
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
bugfixed ‘find lowest subprocess’
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!
Waiting on Clannad
Yes, sad to say I’m kind of anxious to see the new Clannad anime (ANN). Airing on the 4th, so really soon then.
Shim me baby one more time
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.
Double spaced
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.
Just a little bit frayed
Watching an AMV with the backing tune from The Fray, called How to Save a Life, it reminds me that I have an awful lot of Anime to watch at the moment, as well as an awful lot of books, as well as an awful lot of other things to do.
Limited interest, really
vmware – moving a network address
Every time you reinstall vmware it seems to recreate your network interfaces, and at the same time reassigns the ip addresses that you had set up. If you want to move them then you need to edit a file and a couple of registry entries.
The first file is %APPDATA%\VMware\vmnetdhcp.conf. On XP it’s normally C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data, Under Vista that’s C:\ProgramData. Note, however that when UAC is enabled, this folder experiences redirection on write by unprivileged users, so editing this file as an ordinary user will have no effect, so make sure that you use a privileged editor when altering this file.
The content you want to change are the Subnet and Range entries to match your original subnet entries you had. You can also put in entries for the domain-name and router. When you add this information it gives you the ability to mark a the subnet as identified under Vista, so you can be in an identified network, and thus be discoverable. Please note that doing this and then putting an insecure OS on the client vm is your own fault.
The other entries that need to be altered are in the registry. The first one is HKLM\Software\VMware, Inc.\VMnetLib\VMnetConfig\vmnet? entries – the IPSubnetAddress entry needs to be changed to match the entries that you set in the .conf file. The next one is a little bit tricky – it’s HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\VMnetDHCP\Parameters\VirtualEthernetSegments\?, the value is HostIpAddress – and it needs to be mapped. The value is a endian-reversed representation of your address so if your ip address is 192.168.22.1 the value would be 0x0116A8C0, C0==192, a8==168, 16=22, 01=01. Use Calc to get the values that you should put in there.
Restart the service “vmware dhcp service”, and then you should be OK.
Truth in advertising
It’s really a big lie when they promise you the data rates. This is a snapshot of the data rates I’m getting from my 3 data modem. The numbers listed for the transfer rates are in kilobits per second, not kilobytes per second. There is a factor of 8 difference in the rates, and I’ve never seen the damned thing go much above 1000. I’ve tried, using the blacknight Irish ISP speed test, and have not seen it rate my line as much better than ISDN download and 56k modem upload.
Then there’s access to various web sites. I will regularly get cut off downloading – a lot of times I can never download the damned stuff I’m trying to get at. This is particularly annoying with google and youtube videos – they stall about a minute in and I can’t see anything else from them.
Every time in the last three weeks I’ve tried to access del.icio.us, it’s been a bust – it simply does not make the connection, I’m left with a stupid error message.
Every time I try to download my email from my pop provider (indigo.ie – i.e. pre-eircom), the connection times out. I can connect using any other provider. Waulgh! This is just not worth it for only having it for the weekends. I should get eircom into the house in Kerry, that way at least someone else can get some use from it.