When you release a piece of software into the world, then you expect there to be problems. That’s where release number taxonomies come from.
Firstly, let’s define things. There is the Major number. This normally means ‘big things’ have changed. By this, we mean that something so fundamental in the system has changed that there is a good chance that stuff that worked previously won’t work now. It is also referred to as a ‘sea change’ – basically, so much stuff has changed that we can’t guarantee that things will work in the new version because too much stuff has changed. This approximates to the differences between IE7 and IE8 – they tried, but the combination of changes made it impossible to guarantee backwards compatibility.
Then there’s Minor number. This generally means that somethings have changed, but it is compatible with the prior version. You should not need to change things in order to work in the new system. You proably can’t go back, though.
Then there’s the micro version. This means it’s a code change that doesn’t affect the product in any way except to fix issues. This means no config changes, no stored data changes. You *should* be able to swap between micro versions without any issue.
They keep forgetting I already paid…
This is kind of silly… paid and renewed ages ago. There is a huge backlog of checking this, apparently.
Very heavy requirements
I have been buying sound cards for a loooooong time – my first add-on card was for a 512K Amsdrad PC512 and it produced either MIDI-based sound or replicated sample audio. It was not a cheap purchase at the time – I can’t remember the price any more, but it was quite a bit of savings at the time.
It came with a literal ‘wodge’ of 5.25" driver diskettes. you could use it to steady a table there were so many of them.
Later on, the disks changed to 3.5". This meant that they were thicker than the older disks, and amounted to a pile that simply got progressively larger. By the purchase of my last soundblaster card, I was looking at IIRC 10 disks, only a few of which were usable for drivers for DOS, the remainder were ‘assistant’ programs such as Dr. Sbaitso, which were to purposes useless.
I spent a long time kind-of caring about my sound card. I bought an SB live card for my main desktop and for several years things just worked. About 2 years ago got an SoundBlaster X-Fi card for notebooks for my Dell Insipron M1710. Honestly, the internal card was better than the add-on card. I didn’t really care as I paid for it in Yen, so it didn’t count towards cost.
In the last 6 months I bought a new rig. Reasonable price, and harkening back to my memories, I got an SB X-Fi XtremeGamer card. Not a large outlay (<€80). It no longer comes with a wodge of disks – it downloads software and updates from the internet.
The smallest update for this software seems to be 50MB. The sum total of the latest software update (to fix problems and to increase compatibility on Vista) is 235MB. I am 44MB into the update and I’m being told that there’s another 2.5 hours to go. I’m not on a slow link either. It just seems to be on their side.
Just to put this into perspective – The download for my soundcard is about 1/2 the size of a reasonable Linux distro… and it’s as slow as a wet weekend in June. By the time this update has downloaded I could have watched the entirety of the latest Harry Potter movie and still had time for a pint. It’s damned slow.
This is a sound card. Not the World Management Software Suite®. The update for my graphics card was 90MB and that was Driver + Support Software + PhysX Drivers. And it downloaded in less than 10 minutes.
Now that I recall, all the problems I seemed to have on the older machine could always be traced to limitations or issues with my sound card. A driver that wasn’t playing by the rules. Maybe it thought it was being edgy? I’ve seen too many BSODs to want edgy. I just want something that works…. and doesn’t need a 250MB update (that’s twice the size of OpenOffice)…
Oh, and Windows Live Writer — please convert euro, trademark and em-dash symbols before posting… we’re not all using UCS-16 encoding here. Some of us actually try to use the web in a platform independent manner…
Can you people please collate FFS
Nothing more than a rant….
It’s not that tough – when using most english locales, we sort case insensitively. a==A, B==B and so on. Pragmatically, the only reason for picking a locale other than UTF-8.generic is because I would really, really like these rules obeyed.
I am sick to death of having to work around stupidity.
I’m just complaining as I look at the output from ls and it’s pretty much a case sensitive sort. I’m sure that accents are sorted correctly in EN_ie – after all á is the same as a, but apparently it’s different to A.
Sorting it difficult… the rules are so complicated… stop complaining! you’re able to perform at least 600 million operations per second, and a table lookup for a case insensitive sort is probably going to cost 20.
Bear in mind that the number above was a quick back of the envelope number of an iPhone. I’m sure a real computer will be able to do something a little better…
Update:
Looks like it’s not Linux, it’s only Leopard that doesn’t understand EN_ie collation. Oh well, that’s life I suppose…
Vodafone Ireland IPCC file for the iphone
Created a little icon (it’s the white quote mark in the red loop), added MMS information and tethering support.
To install it, rename the downloaded file without the .zip extension (it should be Vodafone_ie.ipcc). Quit iTunes.
On the mac open a terminal and type: defaults write com.apple.iTunes carrier-testing -bool TRUE
On windows(32 bit) in a cmd prompt type: “%CommonProgramFiles%\Apple\Mobile Device Support\bin\defaults.exe” write com.apple.iTunes carrier-testing -bool TRUE
On windows(64 bit) type: “%CommonProgramFiles(x86)%\Apple\Mobile Device Support\bin\defaults.exe” write com.apple.iTunes carrier-testing -bool TRUE
Restart iTunes, option/alt click on the ‘Check for updates’ button in the iphone’s Summary page.
Get the Vodafone Ireland IPCC file.
Internet bandwidth usage
This is one of those odd things. For several years I have paid a data plan on my mobile phone to read my email. I think at the first time I paid it, they were looking for about €10 for 10MB of data (up and down). As time has passed I have still been paying this internet tax for the phone, only in the last two years with the purchase of a Nokia N95 has it become something of a complete fraud.
I’ve just lost this entry due to it being (a) a web 2.0 item and (b) not capable of dealing with the downing of my internet connection. Not making me a happy camper.
I bought the phone, while I still had my €13 for 10MB data connection plan. There was nothing better available. I assumed (more fool me) that there would be an option for a better data plan as I was buying a phone which required a half decent packet connection. Apparently, my mobile company were unaware of the fact that my phone was using the packet connection until I was in excess of €300 in the hole, and that was a paltry 2 weeks after getting the phone. Something to do with them being complete pillocks.
After a while, a plan became available that allowed for 1GB data per month. I barely use 100MB on the phone (I have a broadband dongle and am paying for broadband access in two locations simulataneously). I will be using my phone to tether my laptop. This is a given.
Apparently, the new phone plans for the iPhone and tethering will ask for a supplemental €15 which is epletivingly ridiculous. You cowboys have been charging us 10cent per 160 7bit message which is 64cent a KB or €655 a MB. All the code to deal with these is built into the system. The messages themselves pass through a mostly unused D-channel. They are free. Stop taking the piss. Data access should be a right – just like food and shelter.
On the assumption that these are monthly stats…
This is a list of the top players of a game from GameTap. Kind of similar to the stats that are maintained by steam. The only issue is that those numbers are a little large – after all there’s only 744 hours in a 31 day month. It’s not actually a good piece of information to be displaying – 2032 hours is almost 3 *solid* months of gaming. If you flip over to another game you see 10274 hours – which is 428 days. These stats are kind of scary.
The total number of hours this month for may: 1053020, Number of sessions: 10376 which is 101.5 hours per session for the month of may. Assuming that a session is one launch -> termination of the game this is a really insanely long time.
I question the veracity of the statistics.
Anyone got any World of Warcraft stats?
URL shortening…
Not a lot of code. We create a rewrite rule for apache to remap any 5 character requests at root to this script.
RewriteRule ^/([A-Za-z0-9][A-Za-z0-9][A-Za-z0-9][A-Za-z0-9][A-Za-z0-9])$ /cgi-bin/shorten.cgi?$1 [PT].
Requests for http://site/….. lookup the entry in the database, requests to shorten.cgi?URL return the shortened uri in a text/plain output when it works.
There isn’t a lot of checking, and you probably need to create the db/ directory with mode 777 so you can update the database under cgi, but it… works on my box 😉
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
# shorten or unshorten a url passed in
use strict;
use DBI;
use Sys::Hostname;
my %keys;
my $value=0;
# 26 + 26 + 10 = 62
my $keys = join("", ‘A‘..‘Z‘) . join("", ‘a‘..‘z‘) . join("", ‘0‘..‘9‘);
my @keys = split(//, $keys);
for my $i (@keys) {
$keys{$i} = $value++;
}
my $file = "shorten.db";
my $dir;
my $var;
if (defined($ENV{‘SCRIPT_FILENAME‘})) {
$var = $ENV{‘SCRIPT_FILENAME‘};
} else {
$var = $0;
}
($dir) = $var =~ m/(.*)\/[^\/]+/;
$file = $dir . "/db/" . $file;
if (! -d $dir . "/db") {
mkdir($dir . "/db", 0777);
chmod(0777, $dir . "/db");
}
my $dbh = DBI->connect("dbi:SQLite:dbname=$file", "", "") || die "Could not open $file";
chmod(0666, $file);
$dbh->do("create table if not exists mapping (id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY, url TEXT)");
$dbh->do("create index if not exists mappurl on mapping(url)");
exit(0) if (!defined($ENV{‘QUERY_STRING‘}));
my $qs = $ENV{‘QUERY_STRING‘};
if (length($qs) == 5) { # from short -> long
my $key = 0;
map { $key = $key * 62 + $keys{$_} } split(//, $qs);
my $ary = $dbh->selectall_arrayref("select url from mapping where id = $key");
if ($ary) {
my @ary=@$ary;
print "Location: " . $ary[0][0] . "\n\n";
}
} else {
my $sth = $dbh->prepare("select id from mapping where url = ?");
my $ret = $sth->execute($qs);
die "Failed to execute " . $sth->errstr unless($ret);
my @row = $sth->fetchrow_array();
my $value;
if (!@row) {
$sth = $dbh->prepare("insert or replace into mapping (url) values (?)");
$sth->execute($qs) or die "Failed to insert" . $sth->errstr;
$value = $dbh->last_insert_id("","","","");
} else {
$value = $row[0];
}
if (defined($value) && ($value > 0)) {
my $op = "";
while(length($op) != 5) {
$op = $keys[$value % 62] . $op;
$value /= 62;
}
my $base;
if (!defined($ENV{‘HTTP_HOST‘})) {
$base = hostname();
} else {
$base = $ENV{‘HTTP_HOST‘};
}
print "Content-Type: text/plain\n\nhttp://" . $base . "/" . $op . "\n";
} else {
print "Content-Type: text/plain\n\nFailed to shorten $qs.";
exit(0);
}
}
# vim: ts=4:sw=4:et
Classy error from XCode
Apparently I forgot to plug out my null before quitting the application. That’s a shame as I thought I had two or three nulls floating around
bash pip-isms or right hand side of pipe variables
Unlike my default shell (zsh), bash has a wonderful feature where it doesn’t keep variables that are set at the other end of a pipe, so for example:
i=
cat foo | while read bar; do
i=$bar
done
echo $i
Yields an empty line. I’ve been stung once or twice on this as I prototype the code initially in an interactive shell, which doesn’t exhibit the issue.
The simplest solution is to use a named pipe.
i=
mkfifo /tmp/foo$$
cat foo >/tmp/foo$$&
pid=$!
while read bar; do
i=$bar
done </tmp/foo$$
This gives the last line of the file in the i variable.