Need to convert from celcius to fahrenheit? From miles to kilometres? From yards to stadia? units will give you this.
You have: tempF(41) You want: tempC 5
What could be simpler?
The more we build
The more things stay the same. I am a 100% pass person. Any deviation from that is considered failure.
Evil steam keeping the prices jacked up
Steam is a great idea. You get to download your games and you can play anywhere that you can log in to steam. The problem is that the prices of the games are a bit on the high side. For example today Eidos have announced a load of their games are now on steam. Hitman: blood money is $35.95. It’s cheaper to walk into your local game store and get it there.
For some reason the re-release on steam pumps the price up over what you can get in the stores. And then it stays there. You get the occasional reduction in price, but overall the price of each game remains reasonably static for it’s life on the system. Which is frustrating.
it’s a tomato
Well, having had enough of the dd-wrt firmware for the linksys router. It was annoying, slow and irritating and every time we enabled QOS it lost the connection to the WAN I upgraded to the tomato firmware. So far it works. It successfully QOSes the p2p stuff down to the lowest category. It has pretty graphs! Whoopee!
Stealing someone else’s tag line
Apparently the PS3 has this new thing called ‘home’. It’s basically second life for all those people who bought a PS3. Or there, or something equally as silly. The benefit of it is that sony don’t have to program for every GPU on the planet – they only need to get it working for the PS3 and they’re golden. Everyone on the site has at least one thing in common, and they don’t need to congratulate each other again and again. Based on the sweet graphics, I’m presuming that just about everything on it is small-c configurable, rather than big-c configurable (involving lots of downloading).
The keyboard on my little baby laptop isn’t good
Someone is bound to rat me out for this one. I’ve resorted to using a sun type 6 USB keyboard when typing on the small laptop. For those times when I couldn’t be bothered dragging the XPS out of the backpack I just need to reach over to the keyboard and plug it in. Dayamm, but it makes a huge difference. The response is just right. The laptop’s keys are just that little bit too wussy.
If there ever was a reason to buy an xbox 360
It’s a clip from idolm@ster, a bit like dungeon master except with your own idol group. it is so kawaii.
Don’t just install everything into /usr/local
If you use windows then this is probably going to be very, very boring.
Every now and again you find yourself needing to install some piece of software on your computer from a source package. You tar xjf the package and descend into the subdirectory and type ./configure.
At this point I would yell stop! Rather than putting it into the default location of /usr/local, consider putting it in /usr/local/<package-version>.
How does this help I hear you ask. Well, using a simple script (in the extended entry), you create a set of symbolic links in the /usr/local directories which reference the files in the /usr/local/<package-version> directories.
If you decide to remove the package then simply remove the /usr/local/<package-version> directory and all the symlinks become broken. By using symlinks -rd /usr/local you clean the file system up and everything is peachy. If you don’t have a copy of symlinks, it is available from the debian repository, where you should find the source package somewhere near the bottom.
#!/bin/bash -p
package=$1
destdir=${2:-/usr/local}
me=${0##*/}
[[ -z $package ]] && {
echo "Usage: $me <package> [destination = /usr/local]"
exit 2
}
cd $destdir/$package || {
echo "$me: package $package does not seem to be installed"
exit 1
}
# build the directory structure - this is a weakness
find . -type d | cpio -o | (cd $destdir; cpio -id)
find . -type f -exec $echo ln -s $destdir/$package/{} ../{} \;
Oh, and for solaris, as I’m using the file in various locations surrounded by symbols you will have to just pass it into a sub-program to execute the link command. Apparently solaris doesn’t just substitute the name of the target for the link; instead it will only substitute the name of the target when it is isolated (i.e. you would need to use the {} on their own without anything surrounding them – which explains the space between the closing brace and the backslashed semicolon – old habits). I supposed I could throw a bit of perl at this problem but… it works on my box so frell the rest of you :).
Meh, the entire problem is annoying; generally I would always have to create a program to process the {} operation anyway to prevent space characters from getting in the way but as we say in the trade 99% is better than 0%. If you want a 100% solution you need to add a script that performs the link – one per line produced from the find.
My Frelling Documents
The old new thing has a short article about the use of the My Documents, which links to a short entry about the use of the Documents folder on the Mac.
Let’s see how many folders I have on my little box that are not of my creation
05/05/2006 13:39 <DIR> ACT Projects 05/05/2006 13:40 <DIR> AdobeStockPhotos 24/11/2006 19:30 <DIR> Bluetooth Exchange Folder 04/12/2006 22:29 <DIR> Borland Studio Projects 23/08/2006 17:15 <DIR> History 04/05/2006 14:02 <DIR> InterVideo 06/12/2006 22:01 <DIR> Java Development 12/10/2006 13:07 <DIR> My Albums 05/05/2006 13:49 <DIR> My Data Sources 01/11/2006 15:29 <DIR> My Digital Editions 29/12/2006 03:06 <DIR> My Downloads 05/08/2006 16:19 <DIR> My DVDs 08/08/2006 18:26 <DIR> My Games 05/05/2006 13:53 <DIR> My MMS 25/12/2006 21:04 <DIR> My Music 28/12/2006 11:42 <DIR> My Pictures 11/05/2006 10:19 <DIR> My Received Files 05/05/2006 13:53 <DIR> My Shapes 05/05/2006 13:53 <DIR> My Skype Content 11/05/2006 10:19 <DIR> My Skype Pictures 27/12/2006 22:10 <DIR> My Videos 07/12/2006 14:43 <DIR> My Virtual Machines 21/12/2006 09:34 <DIR> My Widgets 12/12/2006 10:11 <DIR> Nero Recode 05/05/2006 13:53 <DIR> NeroVision 27/11/2006 14:40 <DIR> PSP Games 27/11/2006 14:56 <DIR> PSP Sync 06/10/2006 17:18 <DIR> Rogue Trooper 05/05/2006 18:23 <DIR> SimCity 4 15/10/2006 23:57 <DIR> Source Insight 05/10/2006 20:16 <DIR> Tomb Raider - Legend 05/05/2006 13:59 <DIR> TT Installer Logs 14/11/2006 12:14 <DIR> Updater 05/05/2006 13:37 <DIR> Visual FoxPro Projects 17/11/2006 22:39 <DIR> Visual Studio 2005 25/09/2006 18:02 <DIR> Visual Studio Projects
I mean, what the frel is TT Installer logs? For the most part, all code goes into a version controlled sub directory, which is not under my documents (that would be silly). Bleugh… the save game location being under My Games is fine, but not in my documents; maybe under Application Data/Local Settings/Games would make more sense. You can’t load them except from the game so why have them there.
Anyone else seen this happen to their laptop?
Isn’t youtube great. It’s a Dell XPS laptop, the display does this wierd tearing thing like it can’t determine the refresh rate of the display. It happens occasionally on Windows, normally in a game when switching display modes. It happens with annoying regularity on Linux under XGL/Compiz, which leads me to the belief that it’s a driver problem.