December 2008 Entries
By popular demand, I updated my list of PCs to better reflect my current holdings.
It's 10:35, I guess that's not too bad...
Google Maps says the round trip is 2.8 miles. So if we subtract the two minutes spent at the bank, ten minutes at the store, and another five minutes at the post office, that's... what, three miles an hour, excluding the time spent waiting for traffic to stop at intersections and resistance from 55mph wind gusts? To Antony: Don needs to get fit.
I'll post when I get back.
'Twas the Night Before Christmas, at my Family's House.
There were no sounds of stirring, save the click of a mouse.
For 'twas just like a childhood Christmas except
I'd forgotten the hours that normal folks slept
Merry Christmas, everybody.
I woke up this morning at 7:30 to my alarm clock, which I had no memory of setting. To the right of the time display was a Post-It note that read, "Take batteries off charger in basement."
I've concluded that I have a very strange way of giving myself reminders.
What do you get when you cross a snowstorm, Web server, webcam, and an ironing board?
At the time of this writing, the storm hasn't started yet. The photos this thing is taking are available over here, updating every five minutes, or at least while it doesn't get too dark for the camera to see anything but it's not updating anymore since it's dark out.
So I think I've kludged together a way around this problem.
Run mbox2eml on my Thunderbird mailbox
Import resulting e-mail files to Windows Mail (aka Outlook Express)
Import Outlook Express e-mail to Outlook 2007
Write a VBA macro in Outlook to open each e-mail, delete all attachments that are HTML copies of the plaintext messages, and finally remove all recipients that aren't my e-mail address, saving each message.
Import the resulting Outlook mail back into Thunderbird and EIS for Palm
...
Remember when I blogged about those pesky 700k e-mail messages that various school staff send out?
Did you know that those things crash Eudora for Palm OS?
11 minutes, 37 seconds. Why?
Walk into library, find computer in the lab with the good computers. Wait for the machine to log in. Meanwhile, upload assignment to school mail server from laptop.
Get kicked out of the good lab because a teacher wants to use it for a class.
Go to the other lab, begin picking computers based on availability. The fifth one is actually connected to the school network's Active Directory server, and it takes three minutes to log in. Wonder why one lab is good and...
I greatly admire the Palm OS developers right now. They were able to load phone and interface settings, 57 address book entries, my date book and task list until January, a week and a half of assignment lists, and a couple of backlogged e-mail and SMS messages... into a footprint of just 128kb of memory. Not to mention there's a (much relatively) whopping 8MB of memory available for addressing on this thing. Well done.
In other news, I now hear that the iPhone can run GLQuake... How long until Quake usurps Doom from the position of most-ported reference benchmark game? (Oh,...
I recently found myself in the market for a smartphone. Today's selection of smartphones is pretty miserable, if I may say: gPhones, iPhones, BlackBerrys, and a bunch of Windows Mobile handsets. Instead of producing good-quality smartphones, it seems like the cellphone industry is focused on on creating more useless features and less usable gadgets. So, presenting a decent smartphone:
The Handspring Visorphone was arguably the first commercially successful "smartphone" (before that, Nokia had a few communicators, and Kyocera had created what was essentially a Palm III with a phone kludged onto the bottom). Seeing as we already had a Visor Deluxe...
Earlier on I blogged about the two discolored lines down my laptop's screen. Unfortunately I now have five of them, and it looks like a sixth one might be developing. I'm stumped as to where they're coming from; if I bend the screen just right, they'll disappear, so maybe it's a broken trace or a loose cable. Either way, some of you have known me long enough to remember the ultimate fate of my old HP laptop's screen, which was much worse:
A few people have asked why I don't send it back for repair. Yes, the three-year warranty came standard,...
Upgrading to Subtext 2.1 on this server was a rather painful process. Database operations take forever to complete due to the 233MHz CPU, causing the web-based installer to time out... So I ended up pulling the SQL scripts from Subtext's SVN repository and installing them manually, which took somewhere around five or six minutes.
After installing the scripts in the wrong order twice, I got it right and found out that Subtext 2.1 is miserably slow. It takes just over a minute and a half for the site to compile down to HTML now. Be glad for caching and NGEN, or...