Info
2008-11-20 been to some unusual places
Seems I've done some travelling in the Thames Valley in the last thirty days.
HP training in Hook, Sun training in Camberley, Siemens training in Frimley and a BBC tour in Whitecity (not Ireland).
Travelling back on the M4 at 21:00 is no different traffic wise to 19:00.
As far as programming projects go, I've not touched anything new for the past four months and am struggling to find time for the things that I have been working on and wish to complete.
2008-11-13 advent 4211
The refund request is not going quite as planned. At first I requested a refund of the license to which they (pc world) stated:
As the item is sold as a package (PC + Software), the only way we can do this is by refunding for the whole unit on its return.
This I find unsatisfactory and an insult. The item (advent 4211) is a nice looking laptop that functions well for my purposes however it does come with a licence and some closed source drivers which makes it otherwise less than fit for my purposes. This is nothing short of frustrating and PC world should know better than to target their devices at people who want to just surf the web. This is not just a rant, this is a matter of principle for me. The device should have an optional desktop OS, there are enough of the net books around running a linux variant for the manufacturer (PC world) to recognise that not everyone is running Windows, or wants to run Windows.
2008-11-04 mistake with last post
There was a little mistake in my last post, namely a null mistake. That doesn't meant there was no mistake, it was just that the input field was defined by the bash variable IFS:
IFS The Internal Field Separator that is used for word splitting after expansion and to split lines into words with the read builtin command. The default value is ‘‘<space><tab><new‐ line>’’.
When passing arguments into xargs, it's quite important that the IFS values are not abused, since a malicious file inside the Maildir with the file name "mail file\ \/\ " could cause the xargs program to go through the root file system looking for files to delete, as the white space characters before the / would be considered a new argument. To get around this problem there are many programs that have options to consider null characters as parameter separators. I've bumped the script version so that you may compare the two.