Can you turn that racket up?

A long time ago, well a few years back, in a land far far away (from any roving Death Stars) I wanted to expand the sound of my malleable music mp3s beyond the squeaky speakers of the little laptop.

So, as is fitting for a young hero at the start of a quest, I wandered on down to the nearest large settlement. Slight problem with trolls along the way (see here for more details) but I arrived at the palace of wonders eager, agog and aging.

Therein to gaze eagerly, longingly (and otherly as a real writer might say) on the Goodman's Wireless speaker and headphone socket. Oh that a such wonderful wonder could be so wondrous !

(Any real writers out there ? Need help, quick !)

I can't link you in to any particular catalouging of the charms of this wonder because Goodmans don't blow their own trumpet as loudly as the intertubes allow. More your behind-the-scenes, beavering-away, growing-great-gear -type company.

And this was great gear! Still is. Music outside of an evening, music in the shower, music while cooking, ... battery-powered speakers go anywhere. And better yet is that the broadcasting starts as a 3.5mm plug. And provides a pocket-sized, battery-powered 3.5mm socket.

It takes standard AA batteries and any ear-buds I want, not just stuck with the headpones "they" thought were good, and is cheap enough to allow a few extra euros on ear-buds. So, ... music while hoovering, music while my bed-partner sleeps, good music while she's got that "BIG music" on again!

For many years the kingdom was living happily ever after, until one day the evil witch turned up and said "Mu ha ha ha, you're still stuck on CDs in the car, n00b." Oh well, better get a TuneBase then.

ysh

Ok, here's the thing

I have this fag in a whalebone corset dragging his dick across my cheek, so I thought I should share.

If you do not understand basic build jargon you're gonna be, like so bored already, so a quick sanity check: if 4.5/RC11 is the not the current candidate for the latest release you should go here

And here's the thing, it's the same thing (or slight variations) every time. What is interesting between the release 4.5/RC10 and 4.5/RC11 is the crashes due to rpm-scriptlet failure within AGB in the former, and loss of GGW to MSC link in the latter. Do you have any idea how many "diff-instance-allowed-because"-type rules you have to get through before you notice that ?

Me neither, but they are playing "The (beautiful) Tennessee Waltz", so let's find out:

You'll need some background:

We build four projects, which I'll call

1. RGW
   • includes AGB, compiled one way
2. GGW
   • includes an AGB compiled another way
   • also includes APG, just for spite
     
3. OMC
4. RIAS

We build on many distros which I'll call Manriva/ake, Fedora Core and CentOS.
We have versioned (and other) branches, and just behind the trunk is 4.5. And if you are suprised that the latest release candidate is 4.5/RC11 then you really should go here.

Now, here's the input thing: thousands of log lines for every release, looks like

• cmd
• • stdout
  • stderr

I need to prove (before Monday) that (and you, if you can login here or are an auditor, can check out the proof that) "Ok look, it's not a real problem, and sorry I'm out of office till Wednesday"

No, I lied, we need to prove (before Wednesday) that, like, whatever, today on this program you will hear gospel and rhythm and blues and jazz all those are just labels we know that music is just music. Gospel, gospel,must mean that I'm living in a world of blues, gospel, ...

--
al

P.S. An amazing guitar before he ... well ... yer man in the mission. Come back Andrew. There's more to forgive.

Why did I switch?

This very nice blogger re-opened comments on his post too late, so I had to answer here:

1. When did you switch?
2. Which version of Windows did you switch from?
3. Which OS did you switch to?
4. Why did you switch to your current OS?

1. September 1989

2. Windows 3.11

3. Xenix

4. We could get 12 users on the same 80386 as used to be able to handle just one.

Interesting fact from before Internet Time™: Xenix - Microsoft's version of Unix !

Progressed from Xenix to VMS, AS400, BSD Unix, OS/2, Solaris, RedHat, Mandriva and currently running on a MacBook with OS X (4.1 - reason for current OS: I wanted to try the full set of PC OSes, and someone else was paying.)

Interesting opinion from when the dinosaurs still roamed: AS400 - even worse than DOS ! (Hell's bells it was worse than CP/M. I carried on a career from a CP/M machine, couldn't get an AS400 to say "Hello World")

Most fun you can have with a computer ?
Throwing VAXen down the stairs.
But I'm mumbling again't I?

Never did quite get away from Windows - too many

• students
• customers
• users
• spouses

using it to let me free.

I think the whole question is becoming less relevant (OK, OK, so I'm a web developer and might need to be ahead of the crowd on this but) this laptop allows me to switch OS X -> Windows XP -> Mandriva 2008 with a couple of keys. Each of which then gets me the same network connections and gets me into (woo woo) the cloud.

Whatever the Next Big Thing™ is on all these platforms I can guarantee you

• it will not be an OS
• it'll be here sooner than you think
• probably here already
• the legal term for that guarantee is "null and void"
• whadya want for two cent?

Why Ronny?

Sometimes being able to invent real email addresses while offline is worth the few measly currency units for a domain.

The email below is a straight copy and paste from just before I hit "Send".

Well, some names have been changed, obviously.
Have you seen the size of the lads at The Breezes B&B ?

Lovely scenery though. And a huge bay window to sit in and snap away. I'd recommend it if you're on The Ring of Kerry. Especially with the big bay window just across from the fire. We were there in ... probably this time last year, and I would've spent the afternoon in that chair if flowers in the garden hadn't been calling for close-ups. So I guess it was March or April because there was more colour than just daffodils. And just around the corner was one of those "tunnel photos" I love so much. Not quite as good as this one, but home was to the right of this one so I'm not being fair.

Anyway, that's not the real story. The fish in Glenbeigh was the real story of that trip ("We don't serve chips, just fish") but it was the lads in the B&B that finally found the email address this year.

---

Dear breezesbandb@eircom.net,

Please consider yourself blacklisted, for sending unsolicited commercial email to a previously unused email address.

BTW, do you know the Sneem Breezes ? I have some nice photos from when we stayed at their B&B, but I know where they are if they'd like to see them.

Dear info@spamfighter.com,

Are you aware that people are using SPAM to promote your products?

Looked like it was a good product too - helluva lot of awards on the WWW site!

Unfortunately I shall now not be able to download it and see whether it would have stopped the SPAM below. This being gmail it wouldn't've done much good anyway, but such are the sweet little ironies that get us through the day.

Bye now, gotta blog.

--
Alan

On Jan 23, 2008 8:02 AM, breezesbandb@eircom.net wrote:

I use a good spam filter, and you probably do the same.
I have whitelisted you and that means that I will receive all the emails you send to me.
I would appreciate it if you would whitelist my email address: breezesbandb@eircom.net in your spam filter.

If you don't have a spam filter, I can recommend SPAMfighter. It is a highly effective free spam filter for Outlook and Outlook Express.

You can get the free SPAMfighter here:
http://www.spamfighter.com/Pro

I hope that you will whitelist me, so we can continue to communicate safely via email in the future.

Best regards

breezesbandb@eircom.net

Why go to college ?

When you can invent your own course ?

Stiff seems to have created (crafted) his own course, and it makes for very interesting reading. I seem to have opened 15 links in new tabs before I got from his blog to mine (not counting the links which went to Amazon, can't afford that these days).

Given the quality of the links Stiff comes across as erudite and experienced, so it was a surprise to see his real age. But his age may also be garnered by the comment that Swing is "the best GUI toolkit programming-wise I’ve ever saw ... its a pity its sucks user-wise".

Two dead giveaways for youth in a programmer:

1. A program is "for" the programmer
2. "My code has no bugs"

Actually the latter is my one consistent interview question. I only started coding in my 30s, and the last guy I gave a job to seems to have started in kindergarten, so I'm always aware that age is not a good measure of experience. A much better measure is "What percentage of the new code you write has bugs ?"

An experienced humble programmer should reply "100"

An experienced arrogant programmer may reply with somewhere above "80". (And any programmer who manages to retain arrogance about his chosen profession doesn't have exnough experience yet :-)

A junior will use numbers less than "50".