| "I want a unicorn, okay? I used to want a pony, but I've matured." |
[Nov. 6th, 2009|11:25 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  confused | ] |
| [ | music |
| | Lament of the Chiming Wedgebill, The Lucksmiths | ] |
This week has sucked.
So, instead, I shall tell you about horses.
Apparently Google Reader has decided that I am fascinated by horses.
I have had to remove "Tacky tack", "Shame in the Horse Show Ring", "I Hate Your Horse", and about ten others from its list of recommendations.
I'm guessing "Being female" is sufficient reason to have obviously always wanted a pony.
In fact, Google Reader, at no point in my history do I ever recall being fascinated by horses. You can stop now. Really. I honestly won't hold it against you.
-Mmaster |
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[Nov. 2nd, 2009|09:01 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  frustrated | ] |
| [ | music |
| | Possibility, Lykke Li | ] |
Hooray hooray.
My enrolment for next year is currently screwed. A while back, they dropped one of the core subjects of my course, replacing it with a free elective.
Unfortunately, they've changed the administration system. The new system doesn't seem to know of the change. It's going "Oh. You need ITPS. I can't give you ITPS. Oh well!". I guess I'll have to go fight with uni bureaucracy again, I suppose, when I have time. ...Alternatively, I'll need to figure out where they've hidden the e-Request system in the new website. Of course, submitting an eRequest tends to require you know what you want to do, and I really don't.
In other topics of fail, Connor's got issues. Like, really bad issues. I turned on his screen this evening to be greeted by a parade of "This program has had an error and must be shut down." messages. I rebooted, he got to the desktop, and then crashed. Not just a blue screen of death, oh no. A corrupted blue screen of death. The text was all overlaying itself at random lines. He is now going through a boot-crash cycle every few minutes while I download a Live CD to try and save my data.
...My father claims it's a conspiracy. "Windows 7 came out last week, so this is Microsoft trying to convince you to upgrade." ...Hmm.
I was intending on spending this evening doing my data mining assignment, but I got a little distracted. Oops. I'll probably do a bit before I go to bed. I really can't do much more for Connor at the moment than make sure that there's a backup of everything. I have too many other worries on my plate right now.
The question also becomes refresh or replace. Connor's pretty decrepit, but I don't really use him that much any more. Chris thinks I should just stick with Mike, who also barely gets used, but Mike can't make use of a lot of Connor's hardware, like the surround speakers and the tape deck, and Mike has very few USB ports, to boot (even compared to Connor).
Why me?
-Mmaster
EDIT: To add to the list of complaints, trying to type on Bianca has been doing strange things to my wrists. It got to the point where I had to strap both wrists this afternoon. The fact that I only have one actual wrist brace meant the other was tied with a double-wrapped handkerchief. I went a bit overboard on the one with the actual brace, though - when I realised that my hand was turning blue, I decided it was probably time to loosen it a little. In some ways, the handkerchief's probably better, because it's hard to make it into a tourniquet one handed.
In possibly more promising news, I think it's just a software problem with Connor - he stayed up for a couple of hours running off the Puppy Linux live CD I made while I copied the essential data from the C:/ drive onto my secondary drive. (People talk about Ubuntu live CDs, but unless things have changed, they're terribly slow to boot compared to Puppy. Ubuntu probably makes a better permanent operating system (more packages, for starters), but Puppy is nice if you just want a quick alternative for whatever reason - if nothing else, the installer's a quarter of the size for a full GUI interface.) There were a few strange occurrences, - windows disappeared into the aether, and at one point the screen turned entirely black except for the semi-unresponsive taskbar - but I have a feeling those were more from Linux being glitchy than the hardware failing in some fundamental fashion.
The "Possibly more promising" stems from the fact that the prospect of re-constructing Connor fills me with little-to-no enthusiasm. I've uninstalled the apps that I could stand to lose and he's still unstable, which means it's a program I actually want. A fresh install of Windows takes me days. (Though hopefully it would be less so, this time, because the media files can stay on their current drive.) |
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[Oct. 10th, 2009|08:26 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  amused | ] |
| [ | music |
| | Personal Jesus, Depeche Mode | ] |
Aww. In Hotmail, you're not allowed to mark emails coming direct from Microsoft as spam.
*pouts*
-Mmaster |
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[Sep. 18th, 2009|11:30 am] |
| [ | mood |
| |  blah | ] |
| [ | music |
| | Tech Support For Dad, Tom Smith | ] |
I had been wondering why the data mining notes had a picture of Bonzi Buddy on the first slide of every week.
...Then I realised that it was, in fact, perfectly appropriate.
-Mmaster |
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| This isn't the first time this has screwed me over, either. |
[Sep. 17th, 2009|04:49 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| | blah | ] |
| [ | music |
| | Push, Smash Mouth | ] |
PROTIP:
If you're trying to use FTP, and you receive this error message:
Timeout detected.
Could not retrieve directory listing
PORT command successful
Error listing directory '/'.
But it seems to have made the handshake okay, it's just failing at the directory listing?
Your sysadmin probably hates FTP and kills the port with fire.
Signed,
The person who spent maybe an hour or so sporadically trying to connect, assuming it was on the webhost's end, before plugging in to the CompSoc port and having it work first time.
...And no, before you ask, they don't support SFTP as far as I've seen.
-Mmaster
EDIT: Or maybe it only works with passive FTP connections, whatever that means... |
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[Sep. 1st, 2009|02:38 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| | amused | ] |
| [ | music |
| | Mother And Child Reunion, Me First And The Gimme Gimmes | ] |
Has the definition of "Comma Separated Value" changed while I wasn't looking?
It seems that Excel interprets CSV files as tab delimited by default, even though I can't see any uses of tabs in the entire document.
Sigh...
-Mmaster |
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[Aug. 18th, 2009|06:58 am] |
| [ | mood |
| |  accomplished | ] |
| [ | music |
| | The Boy Does Nothing, Alesha Dixon | ] |
I mostly don't have a big problem with Internet addiction. Last night I hung out at work a little longer than I should've (after I'd clocked off) in order to read about George Orwell's 1984 and associated bits and pieces, but it wasn't too bad.
The only website that gets me to compulsively click every link is TV Tropes. One night a couple of weeks ago, I accidentally stayed up till 3am reading, and then woke up the following morning with like 40 tabs still open - half of which pulled me straight back in so I spent half the following day reading it as well.
It was at that point I decided that prevention was a good idea. I installed BlockSite, a FireFox extension that prevents access to specified websites, and then added TV Tropes to it. I figure if I do want to read it, I can open it in a separate browser, and at least that way I'm very aware of what I'm doing.
This morning, that effort came into its own. This entry was posted. I have work today. The link was not present, merely the text. Perfect.
-Mmaster |
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[Aug. 11th, 2009|11:25 am] |
| [ | mood |
| | blah | ] |
| [ | music |
| | We Are Not Alone, Karla DeVito | ] |
Access is... uh... interesting. I don't think I've heard of anyone else use "-1" as the default value for "True", though I suppose it's just a creative interpretation of "0 is false, everything else is true"...
-Mmaster |
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| Definitions. |
[Aug. 10th, 2009|10:23 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  hungry | ] |
| [ | music |
| | And They Say I've Got Talent, Tom Smith | ] |
According to The Oxford Dictionary Of Computing:
nerd Derogatory Slang Someone who spends excessive time using a computer, often with unreasonable enthusiasm. (The term is also used more generally.)
geek A person who [is] knowledgeable about and talented at developing or working with computer systems, but to an excessive and often unworldly degree. A geek is distinguished from a nerd by having talent.
So there.
-Mmaster |
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[Jul. 28th, 2009|10:24 am] |
| [ | mood |
| | accomplished | ] |
| [ | music |
| | World Falling Apart, Bowling For Soup | ] |
Everything is fast for small n.
I have a macro that was okay for small n (300 rows - maybe 5 minutes; not efficient, but if you're only going to run it once, it isn't a big deal), but got awful at an n even a little larger (1000 rows - I'm estimating, based on as much as I could stand to watch of the process, 10 hours).
So. Optimisation time!
Step 1A: Toss in the standard "Don't refresh the screen" instructions everywhere.
Step 1B: Discover that the script is still slow, funnily enough.
Step 2: Toss in lots of Print statements to figure out what is taking time that shouldn't. Answer: the macro consists of a set of four sub macros, each of which performs a similar set of operations: empties a series of cells and then inserts updated values. Both steps were unreasonably (and untenably) slow.
Step 3: Change the way the first half of the script operates. Its previous implementation was a loop that goes from i to n and changes the value of three cells in the row to empty to a set of three "Empty this column between x and y cells" operations. Each iteration of the loop (for n iterations) was taking 4 seconds. So this brought this particular step down from a theoretic hour-long task, to a less than one second task. And that type of thing was happening four times! (Hooray for modularisation!)
Obviously, Step 3 had cut out an awful lot of the time taken for the macro to run; but the second task for the script was harder to optimise simply: it's another set of loops (at the most vicious level, three nested loops - two of which are decrementing rather than incrementing), and there's no included functionality that will perform the same sort of task built-in, as far as I know.
So, how to improve the second step?
Step 4: As the macro doesn't rely on progressively updated values (unlike some of my other ones), I simply disabled automatic cell recalculation (and then re-enabled it at the end of the script). Suddenly my multi-hour script takes less than a second. Whoo! Go me!
Bow before glory! ...I detect lack of bowing!
-Mmaster |
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[Jun. 11th, 2009|02:44 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  nerdy | ] |
| [ | music |
| | Khe Sanh, Cold Chisel | ] |
I'm pretty sure that the initial reaction from most people upon obtaining a copy of Guess Who? is not to try to solve it.
-Mmaster
(Incidentally: My solution for twenty people maxxed out a five or six deep. I'm sure it's possible to do better.) |
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| Well, that takes talent. |
[May. 1st, 2009|11:28 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  geeky | ] |
| [ | music |
| | The Wanderer, Johnny Cash with U2 | ] |
I don't know what the hell DJ's done to itself, but for some reason it's now managing to give me 403s when I load anything related to the website in IE (It still works fine in FireFox and Chrome). This irritates me, because the update page's Javascript doesn't play nice with my FireFox extensions somehow (it confuses itself into thinking I've logged out even though I haven't), so I've used IE View's "Always view in IE" to load the page into a different browser with a single click.
Unfortunately, that ability has been broken. So after waiting hopefully for a couple of days in the belief that it would mysteriously fix itself in the same way that it mysteriously broke, I finally decided to switch the application being used to Chrome. Unfortunately, I don't like Chrome all that much, despite admiring its technical innovation (which is unusual for me, I'm something of a Google fangirl); as with iTunes, it doesn't play nice with GridMove, and I have no idea where any of the options are since they've disguised the toolbars (which is why I'm still running IE6). But at least the update page works.
I might actually make a further switch and change the thing to Opera, which doesn't have the problems I've complained about for Chrome. But not tonight, Josephine.
In the process, I discovered that Bianca's copy of Chrome is installed in a retarded location; I don't know which version she's running (or who's fault it was), but it's been installed to something along the lines of:
C:\Documents and Settings\Mm\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\application.exe. WTH?
(When I recited this to Andrew Harkness, he said "Whatever happened to good old Program Files\Google\Chrome?")
Connor's, on the other hand, uses the more common path:
C:\Program Files\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe.
Don't ask me what the hell the difference is; I have a feeling one's running the beta and one the stable, but I'm blowed if I can remember which is which.
In vaguely related news, I now have Dreamwidth account, but more or less don't plan to use it unless people actually migrate over there (and even then, possibly not). I'll probably wait till they implement imports from DeadJournal, (they already support imports from LiveJournal) - and then cross post (they have a button for "automatically cross post this"). But that's a worry for a day when they have, in actual fact, implemented it - purely theoretical at this point. But if you happen to have an account, tell me, and I'll add you to their equivalent of the Friends list...
-Mmaster |
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| We don't realise our faith in the prize unless it's been somehow elusive... |
[Apr. 25th, 2009|11:40 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  sleepy | ] |
| [ | music |
| | Eric's Song, Vienna Teng | ] |
You come to realise that you may have read a few too many puzzle books, when you get an IQ puzzle game and realise that you've heard at least a third of the questions before.
You also realise that the cards aren't meant to be worked through in one sitting when you notice that several of the questions are repeated between the cards. (Even though often the repeat was as a secondary question on an existing card... It's still retarded.)
Oh dear.
-Mmaster |
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[Apr. 24th, 2009|09:50 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| | amused | ] |
| [ | music |
| | Sugar We're Going Down, Fall Out Boy | ] |
Haha! Zac Efron had a one-scene appearance in Firefly! ...I thought it was him!
-Mmaster |
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[Mar. 31st, 2009|08:50 am] |
| [ | mood |
| | accomplished | ] |
| [ | music |
| | Private Helicopter, Harvey Danger | ] |
You might remember some months ago, I made a comment about the shininess of GridMove.
I just made my own grid for the work machine. Being unwilling to join the GridMove forums right now, you guys get to hear about it instead. I'm not sure how well it works, but it works the way I had anticipated, so...
The grid has two implemented configurations:
* 1/2, 1/2, 1/2, 1/2
* 1/3, 2/3, 2/3, 1/3
Of course, you can maximise a window on one screen, or use a combination of halves and thirds between the two screens.
To use the halves, you drop it in the top half screen. To use thirds, you drop it in the bottom half of the screen. It's not quite as intuitive as the grids where the trigger covers the entire panel area, but it seems to work.
If you want to try it out, the grid is here. Of course, you'll need to install GridMove first.
-Mmaster
EDIT: I found I was using the thirds more than the halves for most applications, so I created a second version. It works in exactly the same way, except that you drop on the top half of the screen for thirds and the bottom half for halves. |
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| Heroes in a half-shell! Turtle power! |
[Mar. 29th, 2009|09:54 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| | dorky | ] |
Chris knows (at least some of) my obsessions a little too well.
I now own three DVDs' worth of Ninja Turtles. The proper stuff, none of this silly "Men in suits" thing.
Ginger durdles!
-Mmaster
PS: I can't help but be amused by the back of the case, which lists the region encoding variously as "NTSC" and "Region 4". Well, which is it?
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| All the elegance of a broadsword. |
[Mar. 28th, 2009|04:04 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| | working | ] |
| [ | music |
| | Build God Then We'll Talk, Panic At The Disco | ] |
I program by brute force. Sometimes this does not end well.
-Mmaster |
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[Mar. 24th, 2009|06:34 am] |
| [ | mood |
| | sleepy | ] |
| [ | music |
| | Ruler Of The Land, Keating! | ] |
Gods! I'm even dreaming in SQL!
-Mmaster |
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