I was concerned that my nose and hands were too large
so I went to a plastic surgeon and asked for a nose and hand job
continuing series of updates at early o'clock
Ages ago I did an update about minesweeper high scores. It used tables with width="100%" in their tags. I had found this stopped the table being repelled by the menu thing on the right. It looked terrible. So, yesterday afternoon, on a whim, I decided to fix it.
However, when I put it back in the database the script changed the upload time! It's only supposed to do that if the time is missing or invalid. It seems the conversion process had many of these old upload times out by a whole day, but because the time part was correct I never noticed.
It's a year since the php site went live. It's been fucked up for all that time and I had no idea! Gods damnit, I was making fun of "Our schedule (for technical reasons) does not currently show programs that begin after 11pm" and then I bloody find this shit.
PS I took The Warwick Job off snafu yesterday after it closed and its owner asked me to do so. That means this site is the only founding site left. Arguably one of the others still exists, but in a completely different form. It became so full of nauseating romantic drivel that I refused to read or link to it.
there goes the freshness of my web pages
rjy@baron:/tmp$ curl -I forums.somethingawful.com
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
[...]
Via: HTTP/1.1 ntl-site (Traffic-Server/5.2.2-59134 [cMsSf ])
To be honest there was always amazement that I wasn't behind one of NTL's moronic transparent proxies.
unbelievable
socket(); gethostbyname(); connect(); send(); recv(); close(); exit();
I made a program in C that connects to a remote host via TCP. It only took me ten hours! Holy shit. This was very helpful.
WORK THAT SUCKER TO DEATH COME ON NOW
Holy shit guys I got so much sleep last night I should do that more often
sisc
I added a few more shitty features into sisc including a crude implementation of hangman (crude in both quality of code and in the error messages it returns) and a few other hacks like a 'do' command to make it issue commands directly to the server (/msg sisc do join #testicles)
Then I remembered something I've said a lot in the past: you can code something in a high level memory hogging language if it just runs once and exits, but for long running processes that hang around pretty much indefinitely (i.e. until they crash) you should code in something that doesn't hog system resources so much.
So how do I program internet shit in C? No wait. How do I program at all in C? I pretty much stopped using C when I started on perl two years ago and now I can't remember shit. I didn't even know you couldn't have functions and variables with the same name.
work
Uh okay I still do cards and now know the ultimate solution to fixing the card printer when it plays up: switch it off, reboot the computer, slap the data cable around a bit, switch it back on again. Also it likes it if you say hi.
I was moved up the office again to a place right next to where I originally was, and thus next to Sparkette who promptly tried to nick my stapler and post-it notes I was like what the fuck bitch get your own.
I had to do some stuff with a spreadsheet and excel corrupted it and I had to type half of it out again but it's done now. They said "we don't need to check this, we trust you" I was like "it's your funeral"
I nearly quit but I didn't.
HAPPY GIBISECOND DAY!
If I think of anything specific to do to celebrate this artificially momentous occasion I'll edit it into this update
PS Yes of course I fiddled the times. Also, I apologise for "gibisecond", but they are standard SI units so you have to be specific.
SLEEP WELL
Use reverse psychology on your brain by deliberately trying to sleep badly
One full quarter of a 32-bit epoch has already gone!
A few years ago nerds around the world celebrated one thousand million seconds since the start of the unix epoch. I missed it. I didn't even have internet access at the time. Also I didn't have a unix machine. I only had RISC OS which instead of measuring seconds from the start of 1970 it measures centiseconds from the start of 1900 (and uses five bytes to do it in)
However, everybody knows that 210n = 103n closely enough that they can steal the SI prefixes* It would be much more appropriate for nerds to celebrate the power of two version. But when would that be?
Well, stoatfuck, I wouldn't be posting this if it weren't just coming up, would I?
rjy@caco:~$ bc -ql
2^30
1073741824
rjy@caco:~$ date -ud '1970-1-1+1073741824sec'
Sat Jan 10 13:37:04 UTC 2004
Bonus points for us all in the GMT timezone - it happens at 13:37, the most elite time of the day! I'm sure some shitbreak has posted this on slashdot already, but happy two to the thirty seconds nevertheless!
* Don't give me any of that kibi/mebi/gibi shit, anyone who says they have 512 MenInBlacks of RAM deserves a slap
i'm not a bad guy
2324 -!- Netsplit *.net <-> *.split quits: @The_King, abattis, Yertle,
@graeme[dog], @doorbell, NoddyHolder, @graeme, @Growler, @Drakon,
Timberwolf, (+7 more, use /NETSPLIT to show all of them)
2325 <RjY> uh
2325 [Users #warwick]
2325 [@blasmo] [@mf ] [@Stik[Munchin]] [ MFJ ] [ RjY]
2325 [@L ] [@oliford] [@Vin ] [ Myla]
2325 -!- Irssi: #warwick: Total of 9 nicks [6 ops, 0 halfops, 0 voices, 3
normal]
2325 -!- Netsplit *.net <-> *.split quits: @oliford, @mf, MFJ, @Stik[Munchin],
Myla, @Vin, @L
2326 [Users #warwick]
2326 [@blasmo] [ RjY]
2326 -!- Irssi: #warwick: Total of 2 nicks [1 ops, 0 halfops, 0 voices, 1
normal]
2326 <RjY> hey blasmo just you and me
2326 <RjY> ? lonely
2326 <blasmo> RjY: Answer to "lonely" is yes.
2326 <RjY> oh well
2327 <RjY> ? the channel sucks
2327 <blasmo> RjY: Answer to "the channel sucks" is yes.
2327 <RjY> it does now i know
2328 <RjY> everyone takes me seriously and i am hated
2329 <RjY> i'm not a bad guy
2329 <RjY> i dont mean any harm
2329 <RjY> i just like being rude to people for fun
2329 <RjY> i wish they learned to respond in kind and not take me seriously
2329 <RjY> ? is RjY a bad guy
2329 <blasmo> RjY: Answer to "is RjY a bad guy" is no.
2330 <RjY> oh you know all the right things to say
2330 <RjY> well
2330 <RjY> thanks for listening
2331 -!- Netsplit over, joins: Draconas, Alphaman_24, abattis, Blood_God, MFJ,
Yertle, Timberwolf, Skumby, Myla, @doorbell (+12 more)
THE STORY OF CACO
An epic saga of the revivication of a sickly and intractable base unit, in several parts. Here are parts three, two and one. This is pretty much the last part. Thank goodness. However I have to go back to work tomorrow. I am not looking forward to it.
4. Dubious NICs and Clamorous Fans!
Time to resolve part three's cliffhanger. The reason caco wasn't booting was... another damn network card.
Fortunately it wasn't the extra one I'd bought specially (see part one.) It was the card the previous owner had added. It had been working perfectly for three weeks. I hadn't touched it when I'd opened caco in August. Thus it never crossed my mind it'd be the problem. I didn't bother to try booting, having removed it.
That card being removed meant that caco now only had one network interface. However, I had had some suspicions about this and the repair guy confirmed them.
- The motherboard actually had a network interface built in.
- The case made the network port, located to the immediate right of the USB ports, inaccessible. The thin metal panel in the back has holes cut in it for all the ports except the network. Seeing as the dates of the components in caco ranged between 1998 and 2002 it was entirely feasible the case had been made before motherboards with network ports were common.
I thought "either wait to buy yet another card, or lose the panel" Needless to say within an hour of its return caco was completely in pieces and now has a gaping hole in the back where the panel used to be.
Digression: As I've said I seem to have a bad history with network cards; the first one I had turned out to be the reason my internet connection never worked properly. But in a remarkable twist of irony, that card which had so screwed up in baron worked fine in caco! I put caco's working card into baron, and laughed a lot.
So, it's all good. Everything was running sweetly! Well, almost everything. The noise was still unbearable.
- PSU Fan: Quiet enough not to be a problem
- Case Fan: (aka chassis fan, you know, it goes in the receptacle at the bottom of the front of the case) Also sufficiently quiet.
- That weird extra fan that screwed onto the bottom of the hard disc: This would be pretty quiet if it ran smoothly. However every few seconds it makes a horrible rattle and stops spinning completely. I couldn't stop it doing this so I took the damn thing out entirely.
- CPU Fan: This was by far the worst, it made a godsawful racket even on its own but, when installed over the CPU, it made the whole damn case resonate. It was only a five centimetre fan, so it had to spin faster to compensate. It must have been fully twice as loud as the one in baron, which was only a basic six centimetre fan.
I tried to reduce the noise of the cpu fan by padding the screws where it attached to the heatsink; it made a slight difference but nowhere near enough. I couldn't keep swapping the cable modem from baron to caco at weekends and then back again, because something else weird was going on; if I rebooted the cable modem it would take usually until the next day to reacquire its signal.
I knew the only solution was to get a decent fan. The following weekend, I went shopping and managed to find what was apparently a slightly newer model revision of the fan in baron. Thus being fairly sure of its sound properties, I bought one. I also bought a case fan for baron (as I said above there was one already in caco, which gave me the idea. They seem to be more than quiet enough not to cause any trouble.) I took the boxes apart, fitted the fans, put it all back together and powered up. That was the one. It was all over and we were triumphant. The only reason I didn't immediately post "CACO LIVES" on here was that I'd rebooted the modem to swap it to caco, which of course made it lose its signal.
So, finally, the whole thing was a success. It had been long and full of drama, but, like all crap Hollywood movies, finally had a happy ending. I felt at last able to make a start on getting caco to do something useful...
oh my gods first update of new year!!
shut the fuck up
wow, those alarm clocks are good
I set my clocks to go off at 9am. They woke me up at... 6am.
Well, I woke up of my own accord at 6am having had about four hours sleep. I'm just glad I don't have to go back to work until Monday
No, asshat, you will have to reboot it
I'd repartitioned my spare hard disc and was trying to make mke2fs recognise the new partition table without rebooting the whole system, by screwing with hdparm options marked in the manual page as "do not use this option"
Don't try it, kids. One by one my rxvts stopped responding and eventually all of X froze too. baron was responding to pings from caco (having two boxes is great isn't it) but I couldn't ssh into it. Eventually I had to kick the reset button. Oh well, it's all fine now.
CC2
CC2 is off to a bright start. Doomworld have set up a forum for it. The more experienced mappers seem to have got more done on their maps in a couple of days than I have in a year. That's also due to the fact that all these fucking Windows based editors make it really easy to do all the tedious shite that Yadex makes you do manually. Everyone raves about Doom Builder since it came out a few months ago. Even I got interested when I heard about it. Then I realised that there wasn't a hope in hell there was a Linux version. I was right. It was a good few seconds though.
Oh well no-one's objected to my participation in spite of as yet totally unproven mapping ability (unless they have since last night, I haven't checked the forums today) and at least I'm nowhere near the biggest idiot ahahaha
HR2
Hell Revealed 2, the full version came out yesterday and as expected it's really fucking difficult even on the lowest skill level but having got into the demo release over the past six months or so I am loving it nonetheless.
I got 104 out of 368 kills on map15 on HNTR and I thought I was doing really well!
