the art of writing is discovering what you believe
I am in Windows 2000 right now and have looked at this weblog in IE 5.00.2920.0000 and Mozilla 1.0. IE manages to trash the layout of the page if the window is narrowed to squeeze the right column, while Mozilla just squeezes it all proportionally.
I suppose IE 6 fixes that, but this is IE 5, not 1 or 2.
Arcgh. I needed to extract some images from a digital camera we used today (first day of kindergarten for my son and heir, so photos were required, the APS camera film hid from us, we took our old Casio QV-11 as well as my Nikon 8008).
So how to get the pictures out? Hmm, no modern Macs have serial ports, and this camera predates USB, so that’s out. I have used gPhoto before, but for some reason it failed to establish a serial connection. OK, I’ll see what I can do in Windows.
Hmm, the software that came with the ^*&^(*&)() camera doesn’t work: issues with the serial port. Now I’m getting annoyed. Windows says it can see the camera in its troubleshooting mode, so I Google up a freeware application from a UK software design consultancy, and by gum, it works. No serial issues, no whinging, just images, 78 of them (over a serial line, that takes a while).
Now, obviously the serial port is fine, so what happened? Why did two guys who did this just as proof of concept succeed where Casio and the gPhoto team were stymied? It’s especially annoying that gPhoto worked in the past and doesn’t now.
Hmm, so now I tried the Casio software and it worked. So once again, I have to wonder how these other guys managed to make this work, such that it works with other applications now. I did some power-cycling that presumably cleaned up any lingering connections, yet it failed until I tried QV (the freeware thing I found).
Interesting, in a frustrating sort of way.
Usage Statistics for blue.paulbeard.org – September 2002
I noticed some referrals from search engines for technical/HOWTO stuff: if you found the stuff you read here useful (or especially if I was wrong), let me know.
I’ve found requests for SNMP, SystemStarter (OS X/Darwin), samba, and Windows XP (d:\i386\asms errors) on a regular basis.
—–BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK—–
Version: 3.12
GL d+ s: a+ C+ UB++++ P++ L- E- W++ N+ o+ K- w–
O- M+ V– PS+ PE Y+ PGP t- 5 X– R- tv– b+++ DI++ D
G e++ h— r+++ y?
——END GEEK CODE BLOCK——
Martin Cracauer’s FreeBSD Page
[ . . . . ] in the FreeBSD/Linux case the base OS is very similar and the emulation layer doesn’t provide a full emulated system, but is a very thin layer to map the difference of the Linux and FreeBSD API. Since both are UNIX derivates, these differences are very small. No hardware emulation is required.
I was trolling through my referrals and found this page: very interesting overview of FreeBSD, both relative to Linux and in its own right.
According to this, calling FreeBSD’s Linux ABI an emulation layer is not accurate.
It clarifies some of what I have already learned, and supplies more detail (the stuff on how the ports collection works is interesting), and in general praises the FreeBSD team and their methods. Using the ftp archive at cdrom.com as a proving ground is interesting but I had no idea it was a single box. That’s walking the walk . . .
The bottomline is that FreeBSD is a complete system and through either a Net connection or media, you can update and support your system(s) without the headaches of any of the other packaging systems. NetBSD’s pkgsrc collection is similar: I thought it was joy to work with as well.
My advice to graduates is to do anything except what you are trained for. Take that training to a place where it is out of place and stimulate ideas, shake up establishments, and don’t take no for an answer.
spotted on http://www.onfocus.com/ and attributed to Nicholas Negroponte.
I followed the instructions, added the missing amd.conf file, and it looks like it works. But it doesn’t. Something like the cdrom device gets mounted, but nope. There’s nothing there.
The author replied to me that he would amend his article to include a reference to amd.conf, but I think it needs more than that.
Following bad information doesn’t cost anything but time, in a sense, but it devalues the good stuff.
UserLand.Com: What is a permalink?
News sites, or weblogs, begat the need for a concept that would make sense for newspaper websites too — the permalink.
[ . . . ]
Sometimes the time of the post is linked to the permalink.
This is how MovableType handles it, though I confess, it seemed non-obvious to me at first.
Why permalink? do we need a new pseudo word for this? Why not just “link?” As in “where’s the link to this entry?” Sometimes a thing doesn’t seem real unless it has its own jargon. I’m not trying to hold back the creativity of language, but some of it just seems needless.
And as the lads at http://winerlog.inspiredsites.net have noted, permanent isn’t, necessarily.
Daemon News : Fun With Automounting on FreeBSD
Now you have almost all of the info to duplicate my solution to that big noisy hard drive mentioned in the introduction.
This looked like a really helpful article, except the author left out any mention of the amd.conf file, without which amd won’t run.
I’m sure that’s not what he meant by “almost.”
A slightly edited version of the one in the amd.conf man page will work: just adjust the maps at the bottom.
I still haven’t figured out how to make it work for NFS mounts.
A weird imagination is most useful to gain full advantage of all the features.
From the amd(8) man page