Apparently there is a Notepad conspiracy where it hides certain text from the user. The problem is that it isn’t hiding it, it’s just guessing the character set incorrectly. Raymond explains things a lot more eloquently than I. It seems to be a similar problem in the gnome notepad (gedit) utility – when it can’t guess the character set it puts up a D’oh, I can’t interpret this file message.
And another thing…
It’s the world’s most advanced operating system? I mean really, that’s an overstatement. Hello! that’s nothing more than a brag as there’s nothing to back up the statement. Advanced for what? File systems? zfs! observability? dtrace! pretties on the screen? XGL! The ability to perform more than one name service lookup at a time? [ok, that’s a cheap shot, I’m sure they fixed this]
Pants, complete pants I tell you!
Commander, my commander
It’s an interesting one. I seem to be less capable of commanding troops in Company of Heroes than other games. The problem stems, I think from the feeling I have that the troops in CofH are real people, I empathize with them when I see them being cut to ribbons by machine guns. I hate it when my snipers get shot, and I get angry when a tank runs my men over.
Then we have Warhammer 40k, Dawn of War. I have no compunctions to sending wave after wave of troops at the opposition, slowly eroding their numbers until I can actually wipe them out. Entire squads get wiped out and I just send more in. I just don’t have the same connection to them.
Strange that, and it’s only a computer game.
Space/time tradeoff for disk access
It’s significantly slower to access a disk than it is to access memory. When given a choice between using a bit more processor power to decompress the information once it’s been read into memory or pulling more information from the drive then you really should make the smart choice.
Even if disk space is cheap/free, it doesn’t make sense to spend the time reading the information whan you could be using it. The problem is of course, using a sensible and fast compression/decompression algorighm, and also realizing that it really screws with the whole ease of write on the disk. You end up with some change one byte means completely altering the on-disk image so you need to write a lot more information. This is probably why we use transparent compression on files that don’t change that much.
Whee, ain’t science fun.
Just so you know… the palm database file format
Trivial, I know, but some people need to know these things.
From the start we have the header, appinfo (optional), sortinfo (optional) followed by the record entry headers.
The header is:
| Field | Size | Value |
|---|---|---|
| Db Name | 32 | Ascii Database Name |
| attributes | 2 | See DataMgr.h for meaning (dmHdrAttrResDB) |
| version | 2 | Version number an application would use this to decide if the content was compatible |
| creationDate | 4 | Creation date of the database – time from the palm epoch when it was created |
| modificationDate | 4 | Last modifiied date of the db. creationDate by default. |
| lastBackupDate | 4 | date last backed up ina hotsync |
| modificationNumber | 4 | when changed this gets bumped |
| appInfoID | 4 | Offset in this DB to the appinfo block (0 if it does not exist). |
| sortInfoId | 4 | Offset in the DB to the sortinfo block (0 if it does not exist) |
| type | 4 | the 4 character type of the pdb |
| creator | 4 | the 4 character creator of the pdb |
| uniqueIDSeed | 4 | Stumped – I don’t know what this is for, leave it at 0 |
| This is the end of the header structure, the next is the record entry information | ||
Record list:
| Field | Size | Value |
|---|---|---|
| nextrecordList | 4 | Address of the next record list (only used for really bit pdbs) |
| nRecords | 2 | Number of records in the recordlist |
| pad | 2 | Number of records in the recordlist |
| nRecords items | 4 * nRecords | Addresses of the records in the pdb |
The address of the first record usually lies immediately following the appinfo and sortinfo data. As this data is consumer defined, the only way of determining it’s size is to use relative calculations. For example, the size of the appinfo structure it’s local address up to min(addr(sortinfo, Address of any data records)) – 1. The size of the sortinfo structure is it’s local address up to the min(Address of any data records) – 1. They are application defined, and as such should not be messed with.
Finally got XGL working properly
It started off not displaying on the screen correctly – it turns out that I had 16 bit visuals enabled. Changing to a default depth of 24 made that go away. It is really pretty. Prettier than vista. All I need to do is not waste time on it.
credit for gambling thoughts
Well, it’s all about the legislation. There has been renewed interest in the legislation considering banning the use of credit cards to pay for gambling debts. Personally, I think that bannig it is incorrect. It should instead be treated as another form of a cash advance. I am reminded of an accountant friend of mine (yes, they do exist) who told me that it’s illegal to use one credit card to pay off another (without an agreement). Basically it’s all about credit, cash and debt.
Using cash for a bill means you owe nothing after the transaction.
Using credit for a bill means you owe something after the transaction.
Using credit to pay for a pure credit transaction is just plain cheating (and the banks and law says so most of the time, and in most places).
Using credit to pay for gambling debts is nothing more than an extension of the previous point. You should not be using credit to pay for what should be a cash transaction only; because the last thing you want to have is people owing money to ‘easy’ firms when they should really be owing money to ‘hard’ firms.
Sarcastic statement? somewhat. I’m a bit of a pragmatist on things like this. The only problem is that I don’t believe you should be cheating by laying off a debt for a month when you should be paying money for it.
New power brick
Next business day does mean next business day.
Dead power brick on the laptop
The power brick on the laptop died. I have about 4 hours of juice left. It’s the weekend, and support is closed. Thank crap for the warranty and NBD support. Grrrrr.
ID3 tag type was the issue with Media Player 11
When I converted the id3 tags to v2.3 all the album art went to the correct format. Interesting issue that. By noting it here I hope that it will help someone else. iTunes has been great for this as it can convert between various tag types (from v1.1 through). I’ve shoved my collection to version 2.3 tags, and it seems to have solved the problem with the screwed up album art.
Let’s see, a bulk change of many thousands of tracks should take all night.