Info
2008-05-13 night with a new layout
The keyboard arrived first class as promised by the seller, which has pleased me - but there are some obvious problems
- home keys
these are still f/k but in different locations - backspace
rocks only on the left hand side - key pressure
the build quality is such that each key requires a lot more work to operate than a board like the logitech ultra tech-x
I still think that the effort to learn this will pay in the long run as the keyboard is very much here to stay for a very long time. This will be only a short post tonight due to more time needed with the typing tutor.
Some applications that bind control keys are not mapped to their dvorak equivalents. This can be very annoying!
2008-05-11 how to fail at business and succeed
Throughout my days of being drunk I have been surprised with some bar service in the Newbury area.
One normally expects to be served at a bar for rudimentary items such as beer or soft drink. It is the bread and butter of the pub trade. It's quite unusual to be told that thee are no beer glasses. This happened maybe six months ago at Chicago night club. It was quite surprising to be told that there were no glasses my chin almost hit the floor. How can someone run a bar without glasses - isn't that what bars are in business for, to serve customers with beer in drinking vessels?
It was equally shocking at Liquid night club in Newbury when I was told that they could not serve beer because the pumps were not working. Yet again, second week running, the pumps at the bar have failed. Surely they would want to stay in their current business plan and serve punters with beer?
What hurts the most is that both these establishments can remain in business quite easily because the sub standard service is not told to the punter until they have paid to enter the establishment and upon arrival at the beer taps find that the service is unavailable. This can be likened to getting in a taxi and paying the fair up front, to be driven anywhere except your desired destination.
It would be perfectly OK I think, if the punter did not have to pay to enter the bar, entrance should be free in cases where the service is unreliable or incomplete. Upon leaving the bar, the door fee should really be refundable. It's not good at all to charge the customer for something which they cannot receive.
2008-05-09 hatebook
The facebook script does what I'd intended now. Unsurprisingly though while it was running and doing the work I wanted (and just can't be arsed to use the awkward facebook interface), it occured to me to take a look on cpan and see if someone has already done something that provides an abstract interface. Yes you guessed correctly, all that hard work of mine is pretty much redundant since my task is not pioneering at all.
Anyway as usual, the code is available in the code directory named facebook. So if you think this can be of use to you also (and you don't like paginated interfaces) then by all means please download and do what you want with it.
Some people in my last job were surprised why I would not join to facebook in the early days. The reason for this (and why I call it hatebook) is simply because I don't like the idea of people having direct access to personal information. Some examples of this can include spoofing another person's identity (as I've seen some people doing in the past with the much older 'friends reunited' website) and simply building a catalog of personal data.
What is to stop someone impersonating another using something like facebook. It's not too hard to take advantage of this situation. We already know of cases like this where vulnerable teenagers are isolated through bullying online with public social networking sites. This is also sensationalised by the media to extents where a new phrase is coined and then the craze grows exponentially.
2008-05-08 cant get enough of that vi
Today I found that it's possible to set vi key bindings to bash. This is great news as it means you need only to remember the vi bindings (which is probably your favourite editor). Things like ^$ bw yp etc etc all work as one should expect. Simply just type
set -o vi
at your prompt or add to ~/.bashrc or ~/.profile to enable this.
2008-05-07 stacking up
Things just begin to stack up on me as I'm getting older and seriously I'm starting to think about making a pictorial stack of the things that I'm putting off from doing.
For example, I'm part way through reading several books; have several programming projects going on; have several file system projects; and above all I have to get my stuff in order.
As time goes on, new things force their way onto the stack and old things get pushed out the other side in a non-complete state. What would be better is if I could just hold up this picture for people and point at it asking where they would like their item to be inserted and what they'd like to have removed from the stack in order for this transaction to complete.
Seems like a really nice idea and I wonder how I could make this web 2.0 ish.
2008-05-06 hatebook
I've noticed the growing trend in people putting things onto facebook rather than using other better services like flickr, where photos are preserved much better.
Despite the horrid interface to facebook I've thought about putting my own set of library functions together so that I can browse my published photos without the horrid facebook interface.
As soon as this is sorted out I'll put it in the same location as the rest of my code, maybe it can turn into some use by someone else with better ideas.
2008-05-01 update on phones and stuff
Ok. I've put my SIM card in my old phone (Nokia 6100) so if you want to get hold of my just dial the normal number (who knows - I might answer). With regard to the old phone, o2 have helpfully given me a return address to send it. Unfortunately I cannot change the model during this exchange, which would have been more useful to me since I could then purchase something like a HSDPA phone which would give me much more efficient use of the internet. GPRS/EDGE gives me about 300kbit/sec, which is a shame given that HSDPA is much more capable. Anyway, before sending it back I'm taking a disk image and wiping the contents. Here's how:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/phone/file bs=64K rm /mnt/phone/file umount /mnt/phone dd if=/dev/sde of=./phone.img bs=64K mount /mnt/phone rm -rf /mnt/phone/images/* rm -rf /mnt/phone/video/* dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/phone/file bs=64K rm /mnt/phone/file
Firstly we fill the disk with a large file that is full of zeros, this is to clear the empty space of the disk and make the raw image compress much more efficiently. We then remove the file as we don't need it in the image.
Next we unmount and create a disk image using dd and store that to the current working directory. Then remount the phone and remove the various data we don't want to send to the manufacturer, then fill the disk space with zeros again - so that it's not so possible to recover. Finally we remove that file. The only information left is in the FAT table itself. In typical DOS file systems to mark a file entry as deleted a NULL character would be stored on the first character of the FAT entry, the remainder of the file information would be left untouched. I don't care about the manufacturer getting this as it's not useful to them anyway - it will only reveal file names dates and sizes (possible the cell information at the time - but so what).
Oh yeah at some point in time I'll be adding a tag could to this - when I get time to code it that is.
I've also made a simple searchable database because I don't like running find on NFS shares. This is available here fat.pl it depends on sqlite3. Have fun - it's public domain and doesn't really do anything unique but it's for general use.
2008-05-01 iron man
Today I had some time to spare so I decided to go to the cinema and watch a film that caught my eye on a Sky trailer - Iron Man. The special effects and theme were both brilliant and absorbing.
Ten GBP will get you a seat and a regular sized fizzy drink, which isn't really a great value for money. If you're in a position where you have to get a drink from a fast food style counter you should ensure that you avoid having ice as this is just their means of holding back on the fluid which is more expensive for them than some ice in the cup which has the effect of padding.
Still this film is great and I advise that you watch it when you can. On some levels it is a lot like transformers but with a slightly more sinister plot.