December 01, 2006

Geek

Ahaaaaaa!!!

Video card fried and/or scrambled.

Replaced my nice speedy GeForce 6600GT with my emergency backup card (a Radeon 9200), and I'm back in business.

It's a pretty slow card - a quarter the speed of what I had - but it works.

If I can't get the 6600GT to work again, I think I'll pick up a 7600GS to replace it. Or maybe an X1650Pro.

I'd like a card with dual DVI ports, but there aren't any*, because video card manufacturers are dicks.

* In decent AGP cards under A$500, that is.** If I was looking at PCI-E, I'd have no problems. But I'm not. Bah.

** Well, there's this, but it's not actually available yet, so it doesn't count.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:25 AM | Comments (509) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

November 30, 2006

Geek

Martina, In The Living Room, With A Network Card

Hmm.

I ran memtest86 on Martina*, the FRUDSed Linux box, overnight without any errors. Then I restarted the backup (yay for rsync) and after a few more gigabytes it crashed again. And again. And again. And again. Best effort between crashes was 13GB; worst so far was 3.

So I said, buggre alle thiss, and actually logged into it and wrote a little script to repeatedly md5sum 30GB of bzipped Usenet data. It's just completed its fifth pass.

If it's not memory, and apparently not the CPU, and not the disks or the controller, that only leaves one thing in the chain. One thing that is very easy to replace. As soon as I find one.

* Lina, Naga, Amelia and Sylphiel already being taken.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:57 PM | Comments (31) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Anime

Not A Distinction You'd Necessarily Want

Guess the anime:

This is one of the first mainstream anime series about incest — here, a romantic relationship between siblings — to be widely marketed in the U.S.
(From Wikipedia)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:37 PM | Comments (206) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Rant

AAAARGH!!

Before you make major changes to a system that is in daily use by over a hundred people, it is generally advisable to tell the person who has to support it.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:19 PM | Comments (519) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

November 29, 2006

Rant

AAARGH!

I got home this evening to discover that there'd been a blackout while I was away, and all the computers had shut down. So I power them all back up, and the Linux boxes seem to come up (even the broken one - see comments to previous post). But not the Windows box. Oh no. It won't even try to boot. I put the Knoppix CD in, and it doesn't seem to like that either.

I want to check on the Linux boxes, but I normally access those via SSH, either from my Windows box - which is dead - or from my Notebook - which might as well be dead, since after I got it back from "repair", where it was wiped and reinstalled, I wiped it and reinstalled it again, whereupon it promptly went back to its crashy ways so that I never managed to install any sort of useful software on it.

So I have:

One Linux box which has the best part of two terabytes of fansubbed anime on it, and which I can now ping, and that's about it.
One Linux box which was working fine right up until I tried to do a backup, whereupon it developed a severe case of FRUDS.*
One Windows box which will not boot, apparently, from anything.
One Windows notebook which is just about capable of playing a round of Minesweeper between reboots. If you choose the smallest game area.

At least when that iTunes upgrade destroyed my boot drive I had a mostly-working notebook. (And a good thing too, because it took two weeks to recover from that one.)

Right now - just so you know - right now I am typing this on a screen running at 800x600 in 16 colours. I managed to boot into Windows repair mode (which is crappy, but not completely useless) and repair the boot drive to a bootable state, but along the way it ate half my drivers. Which was fun when it came to trying to get networking working again.

Oh, and my old DVD combo drive has gotten stuck the way my CD burner did. Just plain will not open.

Dum de dum.

I should have a video driver in another five minutes or so.

De dum...

The disk drives seem to have survived, mostly.

La la la...

Why don't Nvidia have an Australian mirror, dammit? This would take 30 seconds from my ISP's FTP server.

Dee dee dee...

iTunes does not work in 16 colour mode. Seriously. It's unuseable. You just get this overlay of text on your previous application. No buttons, no window borders, nothing.

Doo doo doo...

And when the text is in Japanese but the character set is screwed up so that it shows random gibberish, this doesn't really do you much good at all.

97%... 98%... 99%... Ping!

Install install install. Oh, now I get to reboot. How sweet!

So I tell iTunes - which is running, of course - yes, fuck off, I really want to reboot right now, and then wander off to the bathroom, and when I get back I have a Windows desktop with no applications.

Now it clearly hasn't rebooted, because (a) it didn't have the time and (b) it should be at the login screen, not at the desktop. So I go Start->Shutdown->Restart, and off it goes.

And doesn't come back. It won't boot.

So I put the Windows CD back in, and while it's booting I go into the kitchen to make some dinner, and when I come back it's gone straight into recovery mode and is asking which installation I want to log in to, the options being (1) C:\Windows, and nothing else. So I press Enter.

And this being Microsoft, and Microsoft having the user-interface design sense of a dead bug, it reboots.

Now while I was waiting for the video driver to download I was at least able to SSH in to my Linux boxes and restart the DNS and proxy and file servers and stuff, so at least at this point I can go and try the notebook and maybe at least bring up a web page. Which I do, while Windows crawls back toward its suckovery mode.

And I run another chkdsk, and naturally it finds some more errors, and then I reboot again, and Windows comes up.

Still in 800x600, 16 colours.

I will cut short the next hour and a half of screwing around, of uncounted reboots and failed driver installs. Needless to say, I am still at 800x600, 16 colours. A little surprisingly, I have had no further problems with rebooting, which is a good thing considering how many times I have had to do so.

The situation is, as far as I can tell, this: I have an Nvidia 6600GT. It was working perfectly this morning, as it has done every day since The Sims 2 was released.** I have the latest drivers installed.

Windows chooses not to use it. It says, not entirely helpfully, this:

This device cannot find enough free resources that it can use. (Code 12)

If you want to use this device, you will need to disable one of the other devices on this system.

Click Troubleshoot to start the troubleshooter for this device.

I have disabled every non-essential device. (Ignoring the fact that it all worked this morning.) I have scoured the interweb, and learned that this can be caused by problems with the motherboard drivers. I have installed the latest drivers, since it appeared that I was running a very old version. This required three attempts and three reboots, and has not resolved the problem, or, as far as I can tell, done anything at all.

The troubleshooter is as helpful as ever; that is to say, not in the slightest.

What I can do at this point is open the case, take out the current boot disk, put in the new 320GB disk, put the current boot disk in the external case, reinstall everything from scratch, and copy all my files back again, having had a working computer for just over two months this time round.

Or I could heave the damned thing out the window and take up basket-weaving. Two problems with that: First, I don't know how to weave baskets, and don't expect that I'd make much money at it even if I learned; second, I live on the ground floor.

Oh, and iTunes has apparently decided that my iPod is broken and wants to wipe it clean and rebuild it.

The iPod itself is working just fine, except that I can no longer update it.

I was going to write a short post about that, but then I found a more interesting topic.

But until I can resolve this, I can't listen to any new episodes of the Penn Jillette show on my way to work.

Update: Aha!

My notebook crashes if you ask it to do anything involving I/O or heavy processing, but the screen works.

My desktop works fine except for the display being stuck in 1986.

Remote Desktop! I get everything except for ClearType. I'll live.

Update: Aha part two! Too many USB drives means that the iPod collided with one of my network drives. When that happens, iTunes goes insane. I mean, what else would it do? Going into Disk Management and changing my iPod to drive A sorted that out. Of course, it's now completely blank, but that just means I leave it to sync overnight.

I hope.

Update: Actually, changing it to drive A seemed to drive iTunes insane. Insaner. Changing it to drive Z, though, that did the trick.

And running iTunes over Remote Desktop is an education in itself.

* Frequent random unlogged death syndrome.

** My old ATI 9600XT crashed when I ran The Sims 2, which necessitated a sudden upgrade.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 07:28 PM | Comments (316) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

November 28, 2006

Geek

Falling Out Of Love

Has anyone else noticed that when you leave VMWare Server running for a prolonged period on a Windows PC it slugs everything up, including itself? It's not so bad on my office machine, but on my home machine, a lowly 2.6GHz P4, it gets pretty painful.

So much so that I gave up, and started pricing a new Linux box.

But then I realised that I have a Linux box right here.* Okay, so it's got 500-odd gigabytes of stuff on it that I'd have to get rid of so that I could reformat and reinstall, but some of that is probably duplicates, and I could just get another 320GB external drive for the rest, which is, like, heaps cheaper than a new PC.

So I did.

I got another of the evil Blue-Eye cases I bought last time - two actually, the second so I can put my semi-dead former C drive in and try to scrape some more data off. (When I was recovering data from it I frequently needed to power-cycle the thing, which becomes a lot simpler when it's in an external case. Which, yes, has a power switch. Right on the front.)

Had to slide my monitor a couple of inches to the right to hide the new one too.

I have a couple of 120GB drives sitting around unused, so when I've done with Mr C, I can pop one of those in. Which will give me three three-port powered USB2 hubs on my desk.

And an eerie blue glow when the lights are out. Okay, an eerie blue glow that you can read by, but the thought is there.

* This is my old Linux box. I'm not touching my main Linux box, which has a couple of terabytes of fansubbed anime on it. That one is sacrosanct.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:45 PM | Comments (166) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Anime

Those Wacky Japanese...

And their funny product names.

I had that once. Well, sort of. It was just a case of eating too much... um, something. I've forgotten now. Thankfully.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:47 PM | Comments (20) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Geek

To Plesk Or Not To Plesk

Anyone out there who uses Plesk? Either as a server administrator or as an end user?

I'm thinking of installing it on the servers for New Project, just to have a convenient web interface. It only adds $10 per month, doesn't look like it will get in the way, and saves me from setting up a few things that I would otherwise have to install myself.

Also, it's pretty.

I'll probably get the $99 10-domain version and install it on a server at home and see how it behaves.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:19 PM | Comments (19) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Geek

Speaking Of Which...

The scanner I bought last year (a Canon Lide500F) has been superseded by the Canon Lide600F, which has twice the resolution. 4800dpi instead of 2400. Same price.

I wonder if it makes any practical difference whatsoever.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:16 PM | Comments (165) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Geek

It's A Scam, Dammit!

256GB on an A4 sheet of paper? The solution to all your storage needs?

No. It's physically impossible.

Also, about 50% of the people on Slashdot have no understanding whatsoever of information theory. More surprisingly, the other 50% do.

Same goes for the discussion here. Half the people are pointing out that it's completely impossible, an obvious scam, and the other half are saying "But what if I use lots of colours/shapes?" Even after it's been explained fifty times that this does not help.

A bit is a bit is a bit. Yes, with a 3x3 grid of pixels, you can display 512 different shapes*, but that is still just 9 bits of information. If each pixel can be one of 256 colours, that's 256^9 different combinations (not 256*512), but only 72 bits of data.

* Ignoring all types of symmetry for the moment.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:54 PM | Comments (1461) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

November 27, 2006

Rant

Why?

I needed a small server for a project I was working on with another company. They said no problem, they'd either find one or buy one and send it to me.

It arrived today.

It's a quad Opteron.

It doesn't have a CD-ROM drive.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:48 PM | Comments (198) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

November 26, 2006

Blog

Gerroutovit You Sicko Perverts!

Or, why I hate Google Image Search

Bad Example is a typical mid-list blog. It's actively updated, it has a certain number fans, it gets a decent number of readers and comments.

It's been trucking along at 20 to 30GB of bandwidth per month, until last month, when it suddenly spiked to nearly 100GB. So far this month it's over 130GB. And I couldn't work out why.

Until I trawled through the Apache logs.

And found 25,000 hits to the archive page for September '05 in the past five days.

Turns out that page just happens to be the number 2 hit on Google Image Search for "olsen twins nude".* And the number 1 search is obviously an error, so...

So. Here's Pixy's Tip of the Day: Forget all that SEO crap. It doesn't work. Just post pictures of the Olsen twins wearing butterfly pasties, and watch your server go up in smoke.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:26 AM | Comments (917) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

November 22, 2006

Geek

IPS

We've been having power glitches at the office all afternoon, just half a second or so. My PC rebooted earlier, but it has a cheap power supply, so that was no surprise. Most of the other, older, machines survived.

One of the servers rebooted after the last glitch. It's on a UPS.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:26 PM | Comments (400) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

November 21, 2006

Anime

Roses Are Red

Violets are blue. *

My DVDs arrived.

Probably won't get to watch anything until the weekend, though.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:50 PM | Comments (671) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

November 19, 2006

Art

A Keen Sense Of... Something

From a review of Stephen Baxter's Omegatropic:

As a critic, Baxter pulls no punches. His comments about others' work on similar themes to his own books (future history and space opera, etc) are often strident but also highly perceptive. Unsurprisingly, it is American writers that are the main targets of Baxter's incisive analysis. He's justly intolerant of implausibility in both plot development and character motivation, and derides US authors for their lack of any sense of irony. Baxter seems to suggest that this last bit of typically British sensibility is an essential part of any SF writer's mindset, irrespective of their nationality. This is not to say that Baxter slams optimism, only that American blue-sky thinking ought to be tempered with an awareness and deep consideration of the alternatives.
Riiiight.

I've just read Baxter's Timelike Infinity and Ring, the second and fourth books of his Xeelee sequence. The first, Raft, is out of print (or nearly so); the third, Flux, I bounced off after two pages.

With the small size of my sample set noted, it must also be noted that the plots of the two books I have read, and indeed the overall plot arc of the Xeelee sequence (which is outlined in those two books), is only possible if the great majority of Baxter's characters, and indeed of all sentient life-forms in his universe, are either brain-damaged or insane.

They build a starship to go on a five million light-year cruise, dragging one end of a wormhole with it, and their primary concern is the stability of the society on the ship during the cruise. The ship is churning across five million light-years of space at a velocity so great that only a thousand years will pass on board (and that includes deceleration and the return voyage!) and they are worried about social interactions. Medical techniques have advanced to the point that at least two of the original crew survive the journey; computer technology has advanced to the point that human minds can be (and are) uploaded into machines and so are effectively immortal, and they can't keep a starship crew functional for a thousand years. One of the characters is five million years old, and they can't...

And then they drop the wormhole and break it.

They have time travel. They have working time travel. In both directions. They've actually used it. And they still can't get anything right.

And while this is going on, the human race takes over the galaxy, gets wiped out by the race that controls the rest of the universe, which is then destroyed (for a rather dubious value of destroyed) by something even the humans have known about for five million years (and which has been around for twenty billion years, and just happens to crop up now), and apparently no-one involved ever bothers to talk to anyone else.

The astrophysics are complete baloney too. If you artificially cool the hydrogen core of a main-sequence star so that fusion ceases and it collapses under its own gravity, you might very well get helium fusion in the surrounding layers and something that resembles a regular red giant. But the hydrogen core is still there, even if it's collapsed into degenerate matter, and if you ever remove the artificial cooling you'll have an instant supernova.

And, and, and, red dwarfs are among the most useful stellar objects for a species planning seriously for the long term. A small red dwarf can keep up hydrogen fusion for a trillion years or more, a long time even to the Xeelee. And they're everywhere. Space is littered with the blasted things. Oh noes, we have no yellow stars, we are done for! What crap.

All of which criticism would not be nearly so mordant, if it were not for that one sentence from that review:

He's justly intolerant of implausibility in both plot development and character motivation, and derides US authors for their lack of any sense of irony.
Yeah, well, Baxter certainly has a keen sense of... something.

P.S. American blue-sky thinking ought to be tempered with an awareness and deep consideration of the alternatives. Yeah. Baxter's characters manage to commit suicide on behalf of not just the human race, but almost all life in the galaxy, through wilful and persistent stupidity. Mr Baxter, I have given deep consideration to your alternatives, and they suck.

P.P.S. I'm off to watch Sumomomo Momomo. Add half an eye-sparkle to my earlier review. It's no classic, but it's silly and fun.

P.P.P.S. That line about "American blue-sky thinking" still has me steamed. But having not read the book in question, I don't know how well it represents what Baxter actually wrote - it could well be something the reviewer read into it rather than something that is actually there - so I'll lay off awaiting further data.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:27 PM | Comments (195) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Anime

I Hate It When That Happens

Missing volume 1 of Card Captor Sakura.

I wasn't sure if I'd bought the complete series; turns out I had. But now I have the complete series minus one.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:35 PM | Comments (363) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

November 18, 2006

Anime

A Day Of Rest

Today, I did nothing.

And, while I was busy doing that nothing, I decided to watch some anime. Now that my notebook is back from repair - not actually repaired, mind you, but back - I plugged it in to my shiny new* TV and took a look at the new season.

So:

That Boku Show

Watched: 10 minutes
Rating: 1 boku out of 5

Review: I, My, Me: Strawberry Eggs, only with worse artwork and animation and an even more contrived plot. If there even is a plot. Pointy chins.

Kanon

Watched: 4 episodes
Rating: 3 uguus out of 5

Review: Our hero, Kyon Yuuichi transfers to a school in Siberia, in a town where all the girls have had their memories erased. Except that would be interesting. Beautifully animated and very cute, but dull as dishwater. In the preview for episode 4, there was a hint that something might actually happen. As it turns out, it was just a preview of a hint that something might happen. So far, nothing has.

Pretty, though.

Himawari

Watched: 1 episode
Rating: 2.5 kunoichi out of 5

Review: Don't take the dramatic introduction seriously. The show certainly doesn't. Looks like it's a nonsense slapstick comedy (with ninja girls), and I'm willing to watch some more to see how it develops. Art and animation are unamazing but decent.

Sumomomo Momomo

Watched: 1 6 episodes
Rating: 3.5 eye-sparkles out of 5

Review: Ranma ½ meets Rizelmine. If the writers can keep the male lead from becoming an idiot, they may have something. If not, that rating may plummet.

I'll see if I can watch some more of this now; my video player (I use Core Media Player) has stopped working, something that is almost certainly not its fault. I have Media Player Classic on the notebook as well, so I can probably get by with that until I get a chance to reformat the little bastard again.

Updated: Continues to be a very enjoyable and very silly show. I was surprised to see that it's slated for 26 episodes - I expected it to be 13 - but the pacing does become evident by epsiode 6. I don't know how well they'll keep up the humour over that length, but for now, I'm going to keep watching.

* And hardly used.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:57 PM | Comments (253) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

November 17, 2006

Geek

Two Steps Forward, One Kick In The Pants

One: Internode turns on ADSL2 Annex M. That means upstream speeds of 2.5Mbits, up from 1Mbit.

Two: SoftLayer launches quad-core servers. Including dual-processor quad-core models. And they're not much more expensive than the dual-core versions.

Kick: One of the munu sites has a leetle hole in it, and has been used as a spam relay. Not Movable Type or Minx, but a PHP app somewhere. I've had to disable outgoing email until I can find out which PHP app. Which shouldn't be that hard, except I'm otherwise occupied.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:26 PM | Comments (518) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

November 14, 2006

Geek

Install Install Install...

I also got my notebook back from HP repair, where it's been for the past two weeks. I mentioned that it has a small problem with intermittently dropping dead without warning or apparent reason. A couple of weeks ago, this stopped being intermittent.

After I swapped out my 100GB drive for the original 40GB unit, removed my 1GB memory module, and re-installed Windows from scratch (twice, since the system crashed the first time), it was intermittent again, but kind of useless since I no longer had any software or files installed, so I gave in and sent it in for repair.

Where they plugged it in, loaded up their test routine, and left it running for days without any sign of error.

So they called back and told me this, and I mentioned two things that I knew had crashed the machine: smacking the screen with your hand (it was an accident!) and installing Windows.

Which they did. Install Windows, that is. I guess it's one of those immovable object vs. irresistable force thingies. On the one hand, any complex machine sent for repair with an intermittent fault will work perfectly until the engineer gives up and sends it back.

On the other hand, installing Windows.

So it crashed, and they traced it to the memory, which they replaced, and they ran the soak test again, and it was good, and they sent it back.

And I plugged it in, and I ran a soak test of my own, and it was good, and then I closed the lid, and it crashed.

And then I re-installed the 1GB memory module, and it crashed, and it crashed, and it crashcrashcracracracrashed. Gatling-gun BSODs.

So I pulled out the memory modules, and swapped them around, and ran Memtest86, and it was fine again.

And the reason this matters, when I have three fully-functional desktops at home (two of them not even infected with Windows)?

I use the notebook to watch anime. So yes, I have watched no anime for two weeks. Two weeks! And before that I was ill, and before that I was on holiday, so four weeks.

My VHS tapes were starting to look good.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:45 PM | Comments (286) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Geek

Format Format Format...

I've had a 320GB drive sitting on my desk for a few weeks, waiting for me to work out how to get it into my Windows box, which currently contains one (1) failed disk and hence one (1) spare SATA port... but not where I can get at them easily. And I have a 600GB spanned volume in there, and I don't want to find out what happens if I get the cables mixed up.

Meanwhile, μTorrent has been torrenting away; iTunes has been sucking up podcasts; I have some new and not-exactly-small VMWare systems to run; I have a bunch of DVDs to DVDshrink; and of course there's the ever-growing collection of stuff.

I needed that drive.

So I got one of these.

It is what it says, as far as I can see. It takes either IDE or SATA drives (it has both connectors on its circuit board, and fiddly little cables), and connects to your PC via either USB or eSATA. 480Mbps today; 1.5Gbps tomorrow!

I popped it open, attached the drive to the circuit board with the screws provided*, slid it back in... pulled it out, tucked the SATA cable down so that it didn't get trapped, slid it back in successfully this time, plugged it in, and turned it on.

Storage manager found it, and it's formatting away.

It also has a three-port USB hub; haven't tried that yet, but I will.

So, plusses: It works; it's reasonably inexpensive; it takes SATA drives so that you can take them out at a later date and put them in a machine; eSATA option; USB hub. Not especially ugly. Power and backup buttons. Backup software.

Minuses: Those darn blue LEDs are pretty bright; I've tucked it away behind my monitor so I don't have to look at it. No fan.

Overall, I'd rate this a crackers... oops, too much Anime Pulse... a doesn't suck much. And I'm good for disk space for the next three months.

Now all I need to do is swap out my buggered CD burner (which is stuck closed with my Hordes of the Underdark CD in it) for my new 16x DVD burner. And then! Then I will have a somewhat slow and elderly but reasonably capable PC with too many drives attached to it.

* Which, being very flat, make good replacements for the lost screws from my 4-drive SATA backplane. The external case has enough clearance for normal screws; the backplane doesn't, but as I said, I lost the screws.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:22 PM | Comments (518) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

November 13, 2006

Geek

Door Number Three!

I'm working with a variant of XSS-countermeasure 3 from my earlier post. I still sanitise comments (though there are some holes in the current implementation), but I won't bother with the posts or templates. Yes, the owner of a blog will be able to steal your cookie. I've just set things up so that the cookie isn't any good to him.

Which means (yay!) users can Ajax all they want* and (yay!!) I don't have an arms race with people trying to work around my sanitiser script. (Well, again, maybe in comments, but all that happens then is the comments get deleted by the bloggers.)

Which leaves just one component of the system that isn't a variation on something I've done before - trust metrics. Fortunately, while there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of stuff written about how to prevent XSS attacks (or at least, not much useful stuff**), I trip over interesting stuff on trust metrics everywhere.

* Minx is Ajax-agnostic. A page is a page; a request is a request. HTML vs. XML is just a difference in the template. And since the Minx user interface is built in Minx, this gives me a fair bit of flexibility.

** A lot of the advice consists of "Sanitise your pages really carefully. Bob didn't pay enough attention to his sanitiser script, and his company lost $50 million. Bob now washes windscreens for a living." The one worthwhile thing that I've seen come up is the first commandment of computer security: Default deny.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 07:06 PM | Comments (498) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Geek

Harsh

Seems that some fans aren't happy with the new Neverwinter Nights:

Dungeons and Dragons is a very rule intensive, complex game... and Bioware tamed that beast. Obsidian simply fired tranquilizers at it until it couldn't fight no more. I'm really looking forward to reading a post mortem of this game; it'll probably be more interesting than the game itself.
With NWN2 sidelined for at least a few patch cycles, and FFXII not due to hit Oz until an unspecified date in '07, the only thing I have to look forward to this Christmas is... uh... Dead or Alive: Xtreme 2?

Somehow, I think I might get some work done over the holidays.

Update: Definitely not happy.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:58 PM | Comments (513) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

November 12, 2006

Anime

Buy The DVD!

Even if you already have the fansub, hot from the Japanese TV broadcast, there are often very good reasons to buy the DVD.

(Examples from Renkin San-kyuu Magical? Pokaan)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:33 PM | Comments (176) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

November 11, 2006

Rant

Shitheads

I hate spammers.

But spammers are at least trying to do something constructive for themselves. Sure, the damage they do to others far outweighs any possible economic benefit to themselves, but that's another matter. (That's why we have laws.)

There are worse people. Like the cretin in the Netherlands who just downloaded 20,000 copies of a 2.5MB file from a dormant blog here at mu.nu. That's why I enforce bandwidth quotas, by the way. I don't mind at all if someone like Ace or Rusty is using 200, 300, 400GB a month if that's going to real readers.

But when some idiot chews through 50GB in three hours - and the best explanation I can think of is referrer spam, the least effective marketing tool ever invented - I want CPanel to lock down that account.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:59 PM | Comments (81) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Rant

Crappy Piece Of Crap Of The Day

Today's crappy piece of crap is Yumex, a remarkably bloated and sluggish graphical front-end to Yum, written in (sad to say) Python. It's using 97MB of memory and 20% CPU and not, so far as I can tell, doing a goddamn thing.

And that's once I managed to actually get it to run (I almost said "work", but I have no sign of that); for hours it was complaining that something else had locked yum and wouldn't run at all.

I tried running it using X over SSH - locally - and sshd was chewing up 40% of my CPU.

I swear that Fedora Core 4 didn't suck this bad.

Update: OKay, I'll give it some credit. If you wait the fifteen minutes or so it takes to start up, and put up with its wallowing GUI, it will actually let you browse packages and install them.

Just.

Very.

Slowly.

Update: God, this thing is just excruciating. It's using 177MB of memory now - resident. I tried the category view. Clicked on Applications, and then on Educational Software. Nothing happened for a couple of minutes (but the CPU was very busy). Then, nothing continued to happen, although now the application responded to mouse clicks.

Then I found out that in the category view, it divides packages into Mandatory, Default, and Optional. It defaults to Mandatory, and since there are no mandatory educational applications, it didn't show anything.

There's no indication that it's busy - other than the fact that it locks up.

There's no All tab.

I clicked on the Engineering and Scientific category a few minutes ago, and it's still frozen. Okay, so that bloody beagle-build-index thing is still running (620 minutes of CPU time now). Okay, so I'm running under VMWare with only 400MB of memory allocated. I expect it to be a little slow; that's part of the reason I set it up this way. I want performance problems in my code to be obvious so that I can catch them early.

I wish someone had taken the same approach for yumex, because it is pure, distilled suck.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:31 AM | Comments (35) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

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