Death by *nix
chown state: you
chmod o+x you
./you
Cheers,
Steve
ts=07:38
May 05
2008
May 03
2008
Earth Hour haters strikes back
Earth Hour was today at 8pm. I turned the lights off, and happily gamed away in the dark. Not many people appreciate the point of Earth Hour, one of them is Tim Blair. I came across his "opinion" page in the paper today. I have to say it is one …
May 03
2008
Tim Blair is a moron
Why would Keating (who has accomplished one or two things despite his educational handicap, such as becoming the prime minister of Australia) envy academics, massive faculties of whom by and large accomplish nothing and who these days aren't even allowed to feel up first year students?
Says a man in …
Apr 28
2008
{} I <3 thee
Firstly, I am the kind of guy who likes tabs over spaces, because I don't like forcing my particular preferences on to other people. To wax poetic, I like to give other people the freedom of choosing how they want their code indented. This of course brings me into the …
Mar 28
2008
eeepc, likes and dislikes
Likes:
-
nice and small
-
all the hardware works, including sleep/suspend
-
runs debian based OS by default
-
can run an external monitor at decent resolution
Dislikes:
- uses fastinit which only boots into single user mode, so user "user" is always logged in. Endless frustration playing with X11 startup in vain …
Mar 15
2008
esd and esdrec under OS X Leopard
If you try to use esdrec under OS X, you will find it will simply exit with the following printed to stdout:
usage: program_name [address][:port]
The reason for this is because libesd checks for ipv6 capabilities and if it is present will use it. It prints the above message …
ts=07:28
Mar 09
2008
Cyberpunk - get it right damn it
I have been reading the Whole Wide World, and I am finding it difficult. It is not that the plot is boring or the characters uninteresting, it is the mere fact the author gets the technology wrong. It means I can cruise along with the main character, immersed in the …
ts=14:23
Mar 02
2008
Programming 16F84As with piklab-prog and JDM programmer
Finally got around to using piklab-prog to program my surplus 16F84As. The command line options are a little confusing, so here is what I used:
piklab-prog -d 16F84A -t /dev/ttyS0 -p direct -h 'JDM classic' -c program led_test.hex
For some reason there is a hardware option which doesn't …
Mar 02
2008
Science, its not part of economics
The Australia 2020 summit is a great idea, but at the same time it goes to show why Australia isn't a great country for developing revolutionary technologies or making breakthroughs in science. There are 10 special interest groups in australia2020, and not one of them dedicated to Science/Technology. Sure …
Feb 15
2008
Allow only virtual users to login to proftpd
Locate the AuthOrder line in your proftpd.conf and change it to:
AuthOrder mod_auth_file.c
Cheers,
Steve
Jan 06
2008
Finally, PIC under Linux made Easy
I have been looking for software to work with my PIC-PG2 programmer under Linux for a while now. Previously I have been using windows and PICPROG which while nice, still involved messing with windows and stuff. The situation back then (around 2006) was bleak - there were no up to-date and …
Jan 01
2008
YAITM - Yet Another Incompetent Telecommunications Minister
It seems a competent telecommunications minister is hard to come by in Australia. Our new telecommunications minister, Senator Conroy,recently demonstrated that he does not understand a) the Internet; b) freedom of speech; c) the concept of the slippery slope.
Firstly, Senator Conroy’s lack of understanding of the Internet …
Dec 31
2007
html2pml
I was tired of converting all my HTML ebooks to rtf, then to pdb using Palm Doc Converter only to lose all the nice touches like bold, italics and headings. Since there didn't seem to be a HTML to PML converter for OS X, I wrote one to get more …
Dec 30
2007
Hugin Preview Tip
When setting the field of view in Hugin via the preview window, the restitch and remap of the images takes a fair bit of time when the panorama consists of many high resolution images. This can make the process of finding an acceptable FOV frustrating. One way to speed up …
ts=12:41
Dec 27
2007
It is already paying off
ars technica reports that the Rudd Government is going to scrap Human Services Access Card, the national ID card in disguise.
Voting for Rudd was definitly the right choice.
Cheers,
Steve
ts=13:12
Dec 24
2007
Articles
informative / instructive
ts=12:46
Dec 24
2007
Fitting A Round Peg Into A Square Hole
The Australian Government is busy fitting an outdated concept into the modern world - they want to censor the Internet the same way TV and movies are censored. The Communications Legislation Amendment (Content Service) Act 2007 (Content Service Act) was passed on 20th of July 2007. This Act inserts a new …
Dec 13
2007
MacPorts-teTeX and TeXLive-2007
texLive2007 and macports teTex.
If you get an error like this:
/usr/texbin/mktexfmt: line 333: /opt/local/var/macports/build/_Users_steve_usr_macports_dports_print_teTeX/work/destroot/opt/local/share/texmf/texconfig/tcfmgr: No such file or directory
fmtutil: config file `fmtutil.cnf' not found.
I can't find the format file `latex.fmt' …
ts=09:47
Dec 13
2007
Computing Oddities
Two strange and weird things happened to me recently. One is my /dev/null disappearing from leopard!
A large number of programs, both Cocoa and *nix relies on /dev/null being present. As you can see I could not gain root privileges, and thus could not recreate /dev/null (character …
Dec 12
2007
So you have been RickRoll'd
So my fellow netcitizen, you come here to seek help to banish
Cheers,
Steve
ts=06:39