I recognised Ian Wright on the TV. I don’t care one jot about football. It’s official, I should be down t’pub to watch footie games.
Depressed? You have no idea
Things are often left unsaid. I regularly don’t say what’s on my mind where my emotions are concerned. This has been a disaster as far as relations are concerned. I had one more chance to say what was on my mind, but no, I chickened out. Now I’m depressed. How much longer will it take to say things?
Waiting for Vista
It’s my own limited homage to Samuel Beckett. 🙂
Direct3D 10 (AKA DirectX 10) is a Vista only item. Considering the driver model changes for Vista I can see how you would have a problem shoehorning the API back into XP. The problem is that they keep delaying the release for various reasons meaning that the games keep being delayed. The longer you delay the OS the later it will be adopted. I’m not planning on an upgrade until I’ve heard a reasonable amount of feedback as I can’t afford to waste time troubleshooting problems. Considering that everything native I’m developing has to be backwards compatible with Windows 2000, my upgrade path has been restricted somewhat.
The new toy has the dreaded ‘Windows Vista Capable‘, which is a tad suspicious.
Never had a hibernate problem with 1GB ram
Christ, but it was annoying – I close the laptop case and shove it in the bag. I pull it out a while later and there’s a dialog saying: ‘Insufficient system resources exist to complete the API. And my hibernate tab is missing. A bit of googling led me to and entry in Bryce Yehl’s weblog. I followed the guide, contacted Microsoft, got the hotfix and now hibernate seems to be working just fine. I’m running Delphi, SQL server Visual Studio have a few mounted CD images and things seem to be just fine – everything hibernates just dandily. All this because I have more than a gig of RAM? That’s annoying to say the least.
When it comes to security a handwaving answer is not enough
This is one of my biggest bugbears when it comes to getting information from someone about the security facilities that are in a system. They comment that the system is secure wave, wave, there’s no chance of somebody defeating the security wave, wave, no-one would try to break in wave wave. It’s silly to assume that because you’re dealing with money that nobody would be interested in your system.
I suspect that paypal have had to deal with substantial issues in their tenure as the de-facto e-money system on the internet; Mind you I think that Second Life, with their exchangable Lindens are some form of competition to this (not serious yet).
A statement such as ‘this is secure’ needs to be backed up with proof.
When you perform secure internet transactions the communications take place over an encrypted channel. These security measures are built into the web browser. When a website tries to communicate with you it hands over a digital certificate that says ‘this site is www.foo.com’ and ‘this authority’ assert that I am who I claim to be. Several checks are made. 1. is the site www.foo.com? 2. is the authority ‘this authority’ an authority that is trusted by the browser? 3. Is the certificate ‘in date’? If all is found to be in order then the assertion that the site is ‘www.foo.com’ is to some degree established. That’s it, the only thing you know at that point is that the website is called ‘www.foo.com’.
If you’re trying to go to ‘www.f00.com’ then you’re in a bit of trouble here, though!
More thoughts later, I need to get some lunch.
Depends, really
Some people think that make is a terrible piece of software. Honestly, it is just awful for modern projects with large numbers of dependencies. Header file dependencies become a problem. There are options to auto-insert the dependencies on header files into the makefile. Subdirectories are a problem – isolating certain code in directories is tricky. You can use the VPATH feature to provide a certain level of automatic path traversal without over-complicating the makefiles, and for trickier features you have the :sh= [svr] or $(shell …) [gnu] options to pass the work off to the shell or a script. Still the best thing about make is that it completely evaluates the dependency graph for targets; explicitly forbidding loops (or self reference).
Then we come to software releases, and their dependencies. You can’t install X without Y. you can’t remove X without remving Y. Removing X will break Y therefore you can only remove X and Y together. Good idea. Difficult on customers, though. They want an ‘add/remove programs’ option which installs and uninstalls all the needed components. I recently bought Sin Episodes from steam. It auto-installed Sin 1/Sin Multiplayer. I wanted to uninstall Sin 1/Sin Multiplayer. You can’t Sin 1 depends on Sin Multiplayer. Sin Multiplayer depends on Sin 1. Perfect cyclic dependency preventing you from uninstalling. Uninstalling means going in and deleting the .gcf file. Ah well, that’s life, I suppose.
Does ‘x’ mean close?
Depends on the application. Most applications on windows will take the clicking of the red x to mean close the application. Others take it as a hint to minimize to the notification area. However most applications will give you the choice once and remember it from then on. KDE applications tend to take the minimize to notification area, gnome applications go away (but fear the one process gnome-terminal). Close should mean close.
Close to hidden is even worse – I’ve seen a few applications close to a still running, just hidden from you, mode. They run as a service while they’re in that mode, even if they’re not designed as such; it is a cheat for quick start.
gedit character set interpretation
gedit has this nice feature where it asks you what character set encoding a document is in if it can’t decide this for itself. I’m not familiar with the mechanism that is being used for this, but it probably has something to do with ninja badgers, character counting and a telepathic link to the borg collective. The problem is that if it has to give up on guessing what the file is, there’s no way to force the file to be opened as any file type at all. I encountered this when trying to access some old data that had trailing NULL characters at the end of the file. The problem is that there’s no ‘mangle it to this file type and show it to me‘ option.
Firefox/Flash crashing in Linux
Disable the Composite extension in /etc/X11/xorg.conf
For me, this solved the problem.
Where’s my ROT13?
There i am reading rec.humor.funny and I encounter a ROT13 joke. I can’t find the ROT13 button/choice in the menu structure of Thunderbird. Has this arcane skill been lost to us? <sarcasm>I must compose a letter of complaint to the Times. I think they should know about such an egregious omission</sarcasm>.