Plantagenet Penguinista

This will probably make it more difficult for Micro$oft to shamelessly swipe Android features fast enough to give the appearance of keeping up, as they evidently did prior to releasing Windows 8. Hmmm... that would be really worth my exploring in particular for one child for whom I could most definitely adjust software in order to simplify their reconciliation of an unconventional approach with the unreasonable demands of specific others who regard that approach as defective (& would write that false assumption into all of their interaction)... except that those same others would suspect me of altering the software to report location information on the device & all manner of other delusional rubbish which I have never had the will nor intention of ever doing. If I could deal with the others frankly, the message would be “The whole world does not think like you do. Your self-image may be staggeringly grandiose yet highly fragile, leading you to regard any lack of instant co...

OK, so I was a Lego® kid... Problem: a LibreOffice Writer document (pasted in from from a web page a while ago) has the original URL in every footnote link... which doesn’t make for such an enjoyable off-line reading experience after has been PDFed. If this was an MS-Word document?   “Raise hands in air, exit stage left, screaming...” However, we are dealing with Free/OpenSource Software here, so... fire up Konsole... cd Documents mkdir XYZZY cd XYZZY unzip ../original_document.odt vi content.xml :s_originalURLuptothehash__g ZZ zip ../new_document.odt $(find .) rm -rf XYZZY Done. The document new_document now has the URLs sans host & path ( http://www.frednurk.ufo/in/this/dir/filename.htm#65535 becomes #65535 ).

So... a DVD needed a prequel video by way of brief introduction... what to do? The basic problem solving process is to break a problem down & solve each smaller piece separately, so... Using GIMP , annotate a brief set of explicatory slides. Using Imagination , turn those slides into a silent video clip. Using Audacity , record a narration while the slideshow video clip is playing. Select a no-speaking part of that recording, axe all of the noise. Using tiMIDIty , fabricate some gentle classic background music. Using SoX , fade the music in, blend it with the narration, fade it out at the end. Using avconv (part of libav ), tack the resulting sound-stream onto the silent video clip. Using DeVeDe , morph that & the main video clips into a standard video DVD. Every single byte of that is FOSS . Total cost of entire production: $0. Some selfish sucker will find a way to botch this system. It works too well for the Pagan god Murphy to avoid interfering with.

If this is you , now is the time to realise that all of your problems are the result of your own choices & own actions, admit that you cannot make it any better, & turn to others for real help. The number of people recorded as entering remission without first acknowledging this essential hopelessness is zero . None . Nada . Zippo . The single most difficult part of any task is to begin. People who procrastinate never seem to quite get around to doing anything about ending their procrastination. So pick up a pen now , & write a list like this one (continue listing, don’t end at four): Counsellor Psychologist Support group HeadSpace Now grab the Yellow Pages & look up at least three of each, writing the numbers down. When trading hours next happen, call to find out what constructive things can be done to end the embarrassment & futility.

Planets — Hmmm... this one looks a bit inevitable... & seems somewhat unchangeable as it involves no politics, religion or finance that I can make out. Quixotic — it never ceases to amaze me & please me when I run across those who have landed in circumstances with arbitrary limits, such as a job or a restrictive social group, yet in various ways they expose their greatness . Your character is defined by how you treat people who can do nothing for you, & so very many people, while not in situations where this is absolutely clear, betray their greatness by how other people (& often also animals) both treat them, & react to others in their presence. If you are sure that nobody notices what you do, think again. They may simply not have expressed their understanding, yet that does not define it as absent. Rage — adding a few small clues has suddenly made the reasons for me being physically attacked without warning (a handful of years ago) much more ap...

Grumble, grumble... A post vanished in an instant while I was in the process of adding a comment... thank you, Anonymous, your suggested bitmap changes have been integrated. /* * display text using a 5x7 bitmap font in ASCII letters */ static unsigned char font [] [5] = { { 0x00,0x00,0x00,0x00,0x00 }, // 0x20 32 { 0x00,0x00,0x6f,0x00,0x00 }, // ! 0x21 33 { 0x00,0x07,0x00,0x07,0x00 }, // " 0x22 34 { 0x14,0x7f,0x14,0x7f,0x14 }, // # 0x23 35 // { 0x00,0x07,0x04,0x1e,0x00 }, // $ 0x24 36 { 0x2e,0x2a,0xff,0x2a,0x3a }, // $ 0x24 36 { 0x23,0x13,0x08,0x64,0x62 }, // % 0x25 37 { 0x36,0x49,0x56,0x20,0x50 }, // & 0x26 38 { 0x00,0x00,0x07,0x00,0x00 }, // ' 0x27 39 { 0x00,0x1c,0x22,0x41,0x00 }, // ( 0x28 40 { 0x00,0x41,0x22,0x1c,0x00 }, // ) 0x29 41 { 0x14,0x08,0x3e,0x08,0x14 }, // * 0x2a 42 { 0x08,0x08,0x3e,0x08,0x08 }, // + 0x2b 43 { 0x00,0x50...

...I ran across a few distractions, a glimpse of which is/are included here: Much else there & in Barker, had a chat to the postal pixies, apparently they’ve had another Mt Barker 6324 postie actually come in & work there before. All day transport ticket here is $3.80 rather than $3.20, much of a muchness.

This is a fairly primitive toy I threw together today for a specific purpose, published in case it’s any use to others... feed it a list of words as command arguments, which it will then display as a 5x7 ASCII dotmatrix with ‘#’ as a dot & ‘_’ as a blank. /* * display text using a 5x7 bitmap font in ASCII letters */ static unsigned char font [] [5] = { { 0x00,0x00,0x00,0x00,0x00 }, // 0x20 32 { 0x00,0x00,0x6f,0x00,0x00 }, // ! 0x21 33 { 0x00,0x07,0x00,0x07,0x00 }, // " 0x22 34 { 0x14,0x7f,0x14,0x7f,0x14 }, // # 0x23 35 { 0x00,0x07,0x04,0x1e,0x00 }, // $ 0x24 36 { 0x23,0x13,0x08,0x64,0x62 }, // % 0x25 37 { 0x36,0x49,0x56,0x20,0x50 }, // & 0x26 38 { 0x00,0x00,0x07,0x00,0x00 }, // ' 0x27 39 { 0x00,0x1c,0x22,0x41,0x00 }, // ( 0x28 40 { 0x00,0x41,0x22,0x1c,0x00 }, // ) 0x29 41 { 0x14,0x08,0x3e,0x08,0x14 }, // * 0x2a 42 { 0x08,0x08,0x3e,0x08,0x08 }, ...

I’m pleased to note that you can lose your Internet connection partway through upgrading Oneiric Ocelot Kubuntu to Precise Pangolin at the point where the GUI doesn’t actually work, then reboot it into text mode (RunLevel 1), bring up a network connection by hand, apt-get upgrade then hand-install the numerous things it held back on... ( dpkg does an interactive dance routine a few times, catching up on half-done things) & it all works! Better than that, the final recompile of dvdauthor is not suffering the lack-of-menu-backgrounds in the final product when invoked via devede which several previous versions did.

I am in the habit of collecting knowledge. In walk-a-mile see-a-mile mode, I can just about glimpse — in the very farthest distance — hints of the horizons of mortal knowledge. In short words, we don’t know nuffin’! :-)

This realisation came last Friday when my 11yo daughter took 394 fairly good photographs in under 43 minutes, mostly on the AirWalk near the Huon River. Her interest then turned to jumping at exactly the right pace (on the end of the walkway pictured above) to cause adult tourists (on the more stable sections) to grip the handrails fearfully as her 40kg got the whole thing oscillating in a matter of seconds. Not as overt as her brother’s technicality, yet the source is obvious.

I faced an ancient program this week, written in C ( gcc dialect, thankfully), which had a nice, neat, universal association between struct definitions & file-handles, another between the filenames of the files containing those structures (no ISAM here, only flat files) & file-handles... almost. Of maybe 60 structures, manual exceptions would be required for about 7 of them. Of maybe 80 filenames, manual exceptions would be required for about 13 of them. One needs to invent mythical file-handles to make the connection, where no “natural” connection exists. Factor that out for approximately 91 combinations, & no simple diagnostics for any of them. This is akin to Wiley Coyote watching the dust clear mid-pursuit... to discover that he’s almost standing on the edge of the canyon (queue whistling noise, dense <thud>). This association has to be definitively made in order to export the data into a database format which is actually useful. At that point, this prog...

...unusual. $ ssh -Cp2222 $HOSTNAME Host key fingerprint is 77:56:7a:9c:d5:7e:9f:e0:79:74:2d:18:ce:0f:0f:c2 +--[ RSA 2048]----+ |                 | |                .| |            . . o| |         . o * +.| |        S E X.=.=| |         . +.*+.=| |             ooo.| |              .  | |                 | +-----------------+ user@$HOSTNAME's password:

I’m currently amidst solving problems with a PERL script designed to send PDF-containing emails as faxes. Apparently, the command it invokes uses pdftk (which is a C wrapper around a Java library named iText ) to translate each PDF into an image (or images) to send. Pre-processing the PDFs with figjam , another set of PERL scripts working through LaTeX, reduced the damage in that the PDFs are correctly oriented so that pdftk only elides a little over a cm about 1 / 3 of the way along each page. Up to that point, most of the page would be blank. The simplest way to send flawless PDFs seems to be disassembling the email into PDF components, then butcheing the PERL script to use ImageMagick’s convert command to turn each PDF into a set of TIFFs, then send those unaltered through HylaFax’s sendfax module (HylaFax is a set of C++ modules). I really appreciate the “software Lego™”approach of Unix (in this case Linux), in that all of the pieces are included, so replacing one chunk ...

Despite being a member of a group which reckons that the ideal situation is to own nothing yet to control everything , the financial adviser to a certain member of royalty is the second-wealthiest individual in the world. Their personal nett worth is four hundred trillion (4E14) dollars. If you spent that all on brass pins (as used in pin-up boards) at one pin for a dollar, the mass of your collection would roughly equal 2½ million of RMS Queen Mary 2, the world’s largest ocean liner. You wouldn’t deposit that in a bank, you would buy several countries with it (banks included). You (or I) cannot even comprehend that large a number, let alone how much money it represents, let alone spend it (if an average Australian citizen spent $150,000.00 every second , 24x7, from the instant they were born, they would not be able to spend it all in their lifetime). Inequality? Just a little... yet getting angry about it would be the very last thing you would do, as that would make you...

Company acquires new PC from OfficeWorks for $388.00. PC includes MS-Windows 7 Home Edition. Company requires PC to use MS-Windows XP. No problem. Push in Windows XP Black Edition CD, reboot PC, tell BIOS to boot from disc. Installer bluescreens before asking any questions. Bummer! Push in a Kubuntu Oneiric Ocelot DVD, reboot. Fully functional PC five minutes later, set to auto log in. Now select VirtualBox in the packages installer, & install. Start VirtualBox. Add an XP instance. Push in XP Black Edition CD, installer works flawlessly. Add icon to desktop, including the option --fullscreen . Duplicate the windowsXPblack virtual disk file, mark the duplicate as read-only for the user. From now on, user presses power button. Uses all facilities under Kubuntu. If they desperately need the MS-Windows XP feel, they double-click an icon, & 30 seconds later are facing XP. By tapping a LeftCtrl-S they can save a complete screenshot of whatever they're doing ...

Jason Hall-Tipping describes the course of events which led from a Sudanese girl dying of thirst to the technology for solving many problems... I reckon that this is how engineering should more often be used...

...that everything worthwhile has been invented, a new way is discovered of producing constructive results when adult stem cells are deployed against 72 different diseases (so far). Eddie doesn't miss many tricks, & seems to have hit on a brilliant way to improve your health... so... do what I'm doing — take a good, long, hard look at what has a 90-year-old bloke so interested in longevity.

I know Eddie, & he’s always very careful & very effective in what he chooses to become involved with... This neat system will likely do much more than help you to discard excess mass!

Issue: reinstalling MSWinXP on a workstation, driver to operate hp 1022n printer over the LAN required, staff don’t know if the printer arrived with a disc — & if it did, have no clue where it would be. Remedy, download 2MB driver file (.EXE) from hp, run it. “Turn the device on & plug it into the USB socket.” Oops. [Cancel] Consider downloading the 370MB full driver suite over a slowish ADSL link with limited quota. Hmmm. Try adding a printer anyhow (after defining a TCP port on 192.168.42.25) in case a LaserJet II or the like is close enough to start with, discover that the EXE had installed a 1022 driver anyhow. Wow! It’d accidentally done something useful!