function-key-placement-peeve

Function Key Placement Peeve

Yes, I am moaning about the keyboard again. Or in this case, the software function assignments made to the keyboard. Specifically, in Safari, COMMAND-W closes tabs. That is as it should be. However, COMMAND-Q quits the open application. In the case of Safari, generally without warning. That is not how it should be. Allow me to explain. One of my more disgusting vices is to click randomly through wikipedia, opening new tabs as I go, and then reading from the top down, closing tabs as I go. Except, sometimes I hit the quit combination, causing Safari to vanish. Grr.

more-rubbish-from-ratzinger

More Rubbish from Ratzinger

The Catholic Church has come out with a new, incredibly offensive, policy on gay priests. It's filled with babble about homosexuality being an over-comable 'tendency', it seeks to associate homosexuality with paedophilia, while also, apparently, stressing the church's deep respect for homosexuals, who should not be discriminated against. Ratzinger, who encouraged American bishops to oppose the legalisation of homosexuality on various states in that unfortunate country, might not agree wholeheartedly. Anyway, another fine piece of doublethink from the Church. How they retain any respect is a mystery to me.

whither-editors

Whither Editors

I wonder does anyone know of a decent programmer’s editor for the Mac? Textwrangler is okay, but not great. I’m ideally looking for something that can do syntax highlighting for lots of languages, auto-indent for things like PHP and Perl, and auto-complete, even if it’s only stupid autocomplete as provided by Emacs. Right now, I find myself using a mixture of Emacs, vim and jEdit (which meets all criteria, but is disgustingly slow and weird). Xcode is great, but language-restricted; ditto for Eclipse…

banking

Banking

Had to transfer money from my account to another bank recently. So, went to website. Website only allows transfers to other branches of same bank. Hmm.

Next step, go to bank. Man behind desk recoils in horror; obviously is completely outlandish request. Apparently, other bank once allowed this sort of thing, but not any more. Am advised to withdraw money, and deposit at other bank. Yes, really. That's technological age for you.

So, last resort, phone bank. Navigate through horrible menus and give top-secret authentication details like my phone number, eventually get to speak to human. Human seems mildly amazed at request; obviously no-one does bank transfers anymore, preferring instead to transfer money in form of gold ingots or similar. But, does it anyway. Fine. Money vanishes from my account instantly, will appear in other account in a few days. Bank avoids paying interest. Everyone happy.

Next, I haven't phoned in a bit, so bank person wants to confirm details. Address, fine, top-secret security question phone number, fine. And then: "Is your date of birth still 25-05-1985?" Would have given smart answer, but was too shocked, and in any case might be arrested as terrorist or similar. So, said, yes, and went on my way. (Also wanted to know if married. After date of birth request. Are any 20 year olds in developed world married?)

Hmm, reading back on that, what on Earth happened to my writing style? Looks a bit like Bridget Jones or Robert Heinlein or similar. Weird.

finance-o-vision

Finance-o-vision

In gay bar in Dublin last night. In the toilet, there was one of those fake movie posters advertising... pensions! First, this is an odd thing to advertise in a toilet. It wasn't even a company; it was from the Pensions Board. But the good bit is... the fake movie is presented in "Glorious Finance-o-vision"!

ducss-room

DUCSS Room

The Dublin University Computer Science Society, DUCSS, of which I am treasurer, recently got the use of two rooms from the Distributed Systems Group. We're getting a small grid computer too! Rooms are cool: Photos Here.

lecture-incident

Lecture Incident

In the middle of our two-hour Computer Engineering lecture with Michael Manzke:
(Someone comes to door)
Someone: This is <some lecture>.
Manzke: No it's not!
(Someone leaves)

mac-blog

Mac Blog

I started a stupidly named blog thingy to keep track of my transition to MacOS. Hopefully it'll be useful to other people doing the same thing, or just randomly interesting.

Here.

ad-hoc-networking

Ad-Hoc Networking

Today, I was playing with MacOS’s ad-hoc wireless networking abilities with a few other people with Mac laptops. Very, VERY impressive. Just do “Create Network” on the the wireless menu, get the other people to connect to it on their wireless menus, and you’re done. IPs and so on just happen; Bonjour (Rendevous) shows you the other computers locally, and you can connect to their network shares, use iTunes sharing, use iChat… All with no configuration whatsoever. Very impressive. Sharing access to other networks is also very easy, as is basic link security, if you want it.

iTunes doesn’t let you copy songs from other peoples’ music collections, however this does, very effectively.

If you do a lot of this stuff, you may find iStumbler handy; it shows you local wifi networks and Bonjour systems. For Bonjour systems, it shows all the services being advertised, as well.

wireless-networking

Wireless Networking

First, the iBook’s WiFi adapter has extremely good range, compared with laptops I’ve used before. It can also reach impressively high speeds - I’ve seen it manage over 3mb/s.

Now, a downside; you can’t change the MAC (hardware) address easily. I had cause to do this recently (don’t ask), so went looking. Here is what I found. Awkward, but it works (if your computer explodes, blame him, not me.) Note also that if you update the operating system, it may revert to the original driver.

The wireless client software seems to be quite good. You can connect to a LEAP or PEAP-protected network in seconds; in Windows (at least 2000) this generally requires several amusing hours installing odd updates and patches, while in Linux is requires the horrible XSupplicant. The first time I put it on my college’s wireless network, I was amazed; it was just so easy.

Interestingly, if you’re downloading OS updates over wireless, updates to the Airport (Apple calls wifi Airport, for nefarious reasons of their own) drivers will be deselected by default, presumably lest they break the wireless. This is a nice idea, but the naive user presumably runs the risk of letting their drivers become terribly out of date if they only use wireless.

Airport cannot, it seems, operate in infrastructure mode. This isn’t too surprising, as most modern cards can’t. It does, however, have a nice peer network setup thingy, allowing painless Bonjour and sharing of internet connections and so forth.

back-from-belfast

Back from Belfast

I'm now back from Belfast. Belfast was, erm, interesting. I had maybe 4 hours sleep over the weekend... The backstory is that I was helping organise a get-together event for LGBT students in USI affiliated universities. 200 of them.

So, we had a hostel with 200 gay students in it. (Plus a few random frightened Student Union people). That in itself was asking for trouble, really, but all things considered we had very little. Various workshops in the improbably huge Ulster University Jordanstown campus went well.

The first night we went out to a gay bar on Union Street, followed by going to a large club (Kremlin) owned by the same people. Both were presided over by a nice bouncer with a terribly impressive moustache. The second night we just went to the nightclub. It has lots of Soviet propaganda reproductions all over it, for some reason. Music was very gay - not necessarily a bad thing.

The second night I accidentally got in free; I was dragging a wheelchair up the stairs at the time...

Neither night did I score, even though just about everyone else in our group did, yea, even unto the wobblebottoms. Yes, fat people, in some cases even with thin people (before the angry comments flood in, my incredulity is is jest). Even though as Working Group I was worth 50 points in a perverse little game being played by some; where kissing an ordinary mortal was worth 10 points, and kissing Charlie, our lovely leader, was worth 500. *grumbles* Apparently, even 50 points in the pointless pervert-game couldn't cause people to overlook my terrifying visage. Even the fat ugly people. Yes, I'm bitter. I think I may have to become a monk or something.

On the plus side, I had quite a lot of fun chatting to various fun people from college, whilst I was supposed to be doing stuff.

Train journey home was passed in solitary splendour, listening to music, reading a not-very-good book, and drinking coffee. Sometimes, I need to get away from people for a bit.

Sorry this wasn't up to the usual high standard you expect here (*listens for snickers, or indeed any Master Foods product*); I'm sleepy. I will talk further on the subject later.

belfast-again

Belfast Again

Am in Belfast now. It's a really, really strange place... We couldn't find our hostel last night; that was a bit scary. We found it eventually; it was run by a nice hippy-ish American and a crazy sergant-major-type American. We're in a different, bigger one tonight though. No delegates yet.

belfast

Belfast

Going to Belfast for USI LGBT conference. Right now. Fun. Maybe.

itanium

Itanium

Very interesting article on the Itanium, the chip of the future, seemingly. It is certainly a nice design; it has conditional execution of operators, like ARM does (so, if statements without branches!)

this-is-getting-silly

This is getting silly

Yes, more from Andy/Vince/whatever. Fun. Silly me actually thought he'd given up on it...

madsense

MadSense

Adsense went a little mad today:
look here.

Hmm. It now uses an iframe for universal Google login thingy, which seems to be causing problems...

and-the-coffee-machine-has-sa

...And the coffee machine has satellite television

I was in a newsagents today, in Dublin. Among the mess of wires behind the counter that is these days required to tether the hoards of credit card machines, phone credit machines, ATMs and so forth that such an establishment nowadays requires, there was a DSL router. With one connection. Labelled 'lotto machine's DSL'.

I hope they at least had the decency to give it a slow link....

mouse-oddities

Mouse Oddities

As shipped, one cannot click by tapping the trackpad. This is unusual, and unnecessarily confusing for new users; it can, however, be easily enabled in software. Go to System Preferences > Keyboard & Mouse > Trackpad and check ‘clicking’.

To make up for the irritation, however, the trackpad has a very cool feature; if you put two fingers on it at once, you can scroll in two dimensions. I was surprised by this; I knew that the Powerbooks did it, but hadn’t realised that the iBook did as well.

Mighty Mouse is just plain cool; you can scroll in two dimensions, right-click (to right-click with the track-pad, you must CTRL-click) and summon Dashboard and Expose instantly. It is, of course, optical. It requires software installed before the cool features work.

getting-the-mac

Getting the Mac

First, my computer was shipped through a place in England called “Nuneaton”. This isn’t terribly relevant to anything; I just thought it was a fun name.

Now, there are lots of jokes about peoples’ reactions to getting a Mac. Here’s an only somewhat negative one; I recommend not watching this cretin (warning, link is to a Quicktime movie) if you have a sensitive stomach. I’m happy to say my reaction was more like that from the first link; though I realise that that is only a good thing in relative terms. But yes, very much an ‘aawwh, pretty’ reaction, rather than a ‘crazy deranged psycho’ reaction.

iBooks take a disturbingly long time to cold-start. As in, press the button, wait ten seconds, something appears on the screen. Brrrrrrr.

buying-a-mac

Buying a Mac

First hurdle; buying the Mac. Now, Apple have an online store for Ireland. They just don’t like admitting to it. You can go to apple.ie; it gives you a mildly customised version of the main page; click on “Store” and it brings you to the US store. Obviously. To get the Irish store, you must go to Apple UK, click on store, then choose “Ireland” off the little map to give you a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT store in a DIFFERENT CURRENCY. Why, precisely, does this make sense?

This wonderful attention to ease of use on their websites doesn’t really fit in with Apple’s reputation, to be honest… Anyway, after running the gauntlet of the website, I managed to order a 12″ iBook G4 and a Mighty Mouse. Yay! I decided on the iBook over the Powerbook mostly on a price basis; the extra cost of the Powerbook just doesn’t seem to be justified by extra features, and I sort of prefer the way the iBook looks anyway. In any case, I’d be getting a 12″ one (I don’t see the point in having a laptop if it requires a small lorry for transport) and the Powerbook series had just been updated, except for the 12″. The 12″ Powerbook is now about a year old; it is quite long in the tooth.

pet-milk

Pet Milk!

If you have lots and lots of patience, listen to the second item here. (The first item is interesting; it's American radio news from the day Warsaw fell; it is not, however, remotely as wacky as the second). The 5 minute rant about milk at the end is great. Give your baby IRRADIATED Pet milk!

the-horrors-of-rentacoder

The horrors of RentaCoder

RentaCoder is a website where people compete to do programming work very, very, very cheaply. On list of jobs "10,000+ line VB6 program to debug. Price: <$50". Hmm.

oh-dear-its-the-crazyboy-saga

Oh dear, it's the Crazyboy saga again

I thought the fabulous saga of Smeggle was over with him going off in a huff pretending his wacky legal threats and whining at boards.ie moderators were all a friendly joke. It keeps coming back to haunt me, though, it seems. I got two lovely comments about it. At first I assumed that they were from my malefactor, Vince Collins/Smeggle (they had the same general style, but were slightly more literate); however, they were not posted from his satellite connection, rather seemingly from a large international software company's Dublin branch (I won't name and shame). Anyway, they're interesting.


Posted today:

Man Rob, what this definitely does prove is that you are:
a/Pedantic.
B/ a complete tosser with an overinflated sense of self worth.

The post in question details the legality of linking to websites (Collins accused me of this heinous crime). So, seemingly, it is pedantic to attempt to show that a legal threat made against one is spurious. Imagine this court scene :

Judge: I find you guilty of murdering John Smith.
Defendant: But he's sitting right over there!
Judge: Guilty of murdering John Smith and pedanticism! (Puts on black cap)

And I have a vastly over-inflated sense of self-worth; after all, I expected the law of the land to apply to my dealings with Collins. I should, instead, have accepted his made up legal system. And the poster, unless he has a camera installed in my underwear or similar, has no right to comment on the first part of item B.

But wait, there's more!

Hell hath no fury like a Nerd scorned, eh Robby, what a dickhead you are again.

Nerd should not be capitalised; learn to speak English please.

And scorned? I had no particular desire to shag Vince, thanks; he's not my type :)

cheap-and-frugal-lesbian-supp

Cheap and Frugal Lesbian Supplies

Found on USENET: Cheap and Frugal Lesbian Supplies. On misc.consumer.froogle. Worth a look.