OneAndOneIs2

This blog post is brought to you courtesy of an impulse buy. We went to a Best Buy store today and I made the fatal error of looking at the laptops. Because I needed a new laptop, you see...

Note past tense...

It's an Acer. It has a lovely screen, a superb built-in webcam, and two gigs of RAM. TWO GIGS... what the Hell do I do with that?!?

It also has a dual-core Intel CPU so I booted Knoppix just so I could see the two Tux emblems at the bootup for once :o)

The sad thing is, this means that this blog post is being written on Windows Vista.

I know, I know... I still hate it as an OS... but it's all I have available that can handle WiFi... and I'm still writing it using Firefox!

When I get home, I'll set it up to dual boot (If I have to pay the Windows Tax I'm damn well going to get some use out of it...) but until then... Vista it is.

Sigh.

Sorry

Yesterday, after a lot of messing around, I boarded a plane and set out across The Pond. I arrived and, after even more messing around, got to where I'm staying, where I managed to stay awake long enough to stave off jet lag issues.

So here I am in Phoenix, Arizona, where I'm spending my first Christmas away from the UK. It's weird - all these pictures of snow and penguins in a place that's usually scorching hot desert.

It's less than an hour away from Xmas back home, but it's still early afternoon here. So: Happy Christmas to everybody who reads this blog, hope you have a good one!

It's been freezing lately. As in I have to de-ice my car in the evenings because frost forms that early. And no wonder.

The Earth's core is molten - over 5000 degrees centrigrade at the core - about the same temperature as the surface of the Sun. This heat constantly, if slowly, radiates out through the crust and provides a significant level of warming, adding to that provided by the Sun, the greenhouse effect, and everything else.

It follows that if the Earth's core were to cease to be hot, the Earth's surface too would suffer a dramatic decrease in temperatures.

According to numerous biblical references, Hell is a very hot place located beneath the Earth.

In the news today: Microsft's next version of Internet Explorer will be so standards-compliant that it passes the Acid2 test

Wrap up warm, folks: Hell has frozen over.

I hate shopping.

Now more than ever.

Now as in "Every year in December" - not as in right this second. Although this second is in December.

Firstly, they don't do the sensible thing and divide the shops into a "Normal shopping" section and a "For the seasonal herds" section. So even if you're only after a loaf of bread, you have a mob of frenzied buyers to get past.

Then there's the "Hurry up and wait" issue - everybody is bustling around in a huge hurry to get everything bought before everybody else buys it, and yet they somehow manage to do it slowly. So it's impossible ever to find a pace that matches the crowd - you're always going too fast and having to shove everybody out of the way, or too slow and people are trying to shove you. (Emphasis on "Trying", because I don't really shove easily...)

But the real jewel in this year's Xmas shopping crown is the DIY checkouts at Sainsbury's

Where do I start?

It will come as no shock to anybody that I'm quite comfortable with technology. A scanner and a touchscreen interface poses no real problem for me. I can even figure out how to get items with no barcode to work. No problem.

So it's not much of a testament to the usability of the system that every time I use it, I still have to grab a member of staff to fix some issue, is it? Especially when it's never a "Oh, you should have done..." solution, but a "Hang on while I log in as admin and bypass that" instead...

The modern world, gadget-infested though it may be, is still well-populated by people who can't program their VCR and have issues with the complexities of using a credit card with chip-and-PIN. These people have neither the confidence to want to use these blasted machines, nor the knowledge to know when the machine is the thing at fault rather than themselves.

So what genius decided that the best way to roll out these buggy and unfriendly machines was to have them completely replace all the "Basket only" aisles?? Not offering them as an option to the techno-savvy shoppers with a small number of simple items to buy, but forcing everybody without a trolley to use the damn things whether they want to or not.

And so they have to bumble their way through, apologizing to the staff members when the machines break, hesitating and having little discussions with each other as to what buttons to press, and generally spending an age on navigating their way through the whole damn process.

Which means that the rest of us have to stand around in a queue and wait for them, because we can't use anything else either!

And when did they decide to roll out these untried-and-untested thing?

The end of the year. Just in time for the Christmas rush.

Genius.

If not for the ever-popular entry from the "Signs you've watched too much Star Wars" list: As you come up to an automatic door, you wave your hand to make it look like you're opening it with The Force, going into town would be too grim a prospect to even think about.

(Some had to be resized, so click for full-sized views)

Okay: My Secret Santa present

And the contents:

And my Xmas card, front:

Inside:

And back:

First time I've ever seen handwritten l33t-speak... :)

Today's my final day at my first school placement. I got a Secret Santa present yesterday - a "PGCE survival kit" which I'll post pix of later; and I struggled in this morning with 15 bottles of wine and 10 boxes of chocolate from France to give to the people I've worked with. (For which I really must remember to give my parents a cheque this weekend)

I also had my last-ever lesson, which I needed a "pass" grade on to continue the course. Year 10 boys, physics. By an external assessor who's never seen me with this class before.

So I was a little surprised when I heard some people coming in, looked around, and it was some girls. Sudden "Oh God, I'm not in the wrong room am I?" feelings sprouted.

Then I put names and class to faces and realized it was a deputation from my other year 10 class - the girls. The hardest class I take here. In fact, at least one of the girls in front of me had been in detention with me the day before.

Why had they come in?

To hand me a Christmas card they'd hand-made for me and wish me good luck because they'd found out it was my last day.

I was really quite touched.

And then I thought "How staged must this look to an outsider who's here to check on my relationship with my pupils?"

I'll put up a pic of the card when I get the chance, too. It's got a picture of me on it, the likeness is downright uncanny...

...to be this stupid.

I have a 40GB USB hard drive. Huge amounts of stuff are on it - all my coursework for university, for starters. I plugged it to my desktop to get something off it, and nothing happened. Other than the power light lighting up, no icon on the desktop, no window showing the file contents.. nothing.

Uh-oh.

But hey. I'm a geek, let's not panic. This is probably a software glitch, not hardware failure. And they can be dealt with.. let's see what dmesg has to say.

[175513.646532] usb 1-3: new full speed USB device using ohci_hcd and address 7
[175513.830370] usb 1-3: device descriptor read/64, error -62
[175514.106104] usb 1-3: device descriptor read/64, error -62
[175514.381851] usb 1-3: new full speed USB device using ohci_hcd and address 8
[175514.565682] usb 1-3: device descriptor read/64, error -62
[175514.853410] usb 1-3: device descriptor read/64, error -62
[175515.133150] usb 1-3: new full speed USB device using ohci_hcd and address 9
[175515.540767] usb 1-3: device not accepting address 9, error -62
[175515.716603] usb 1-3: new full speed USB device using ohci_hcd and address 10
[175516.124229] usb 1-3: device not accepting address 10, error -62

Yep. Software. No problem.

If this were Windows, it'd be the ubiquitous solution: Shut everything down, reboot, and it'll be fixed.

But it isn't, it's Linux. The USB drivers are modules, so just reload the modules and they're "rebooted" without losing anything else.

I've done this exact thing before, when I was trying to get suspend-to-RAM working and it broke USB. rmmod, modprobe, and boom, it's back up.

So off we go:
rmmod ohci_hcd

So far so good
modprobe ohci_hcd

Umm...

modpr...
mod...
m
mmmmmmmmmm

Oh, for...

What had I forgotten?

Go on, guess.

Yep. I had forgotten that my keyboard and mouse are both plugged in via USB. Which I had just disabled. And couldn't re-enable without typing a command..

Catch-22. Bugger. This is why I hate USB mice and keyboards. The PS/2 ports are there for a REASON!

Okay, we can fix this: My desktop is still running SSH, just connect from my laptop and reload the module remotely.

Only.. I don't know the IP address on my new home LAN. How to find out where I'm SSH-ing to?

Let's try the Trinity approach: nmap

nmap -sP 192.168.1.1-255

Ah, there it is! Right. SSH time at last, and modprobe ohci_hcd

And my keyboard lives again!

And, at long last, I plug in my hard drive and it opens.

Sigh.

Five minutes to fix something as simple as a slightly-buggy driver. Next time, remind me to use the "&&" operator or something..

As long-term readers may remember, I've been a chronic pain sufferer for some years - RSI being the main one, making my job of 8 hours typing a day a very, very long one. Ergonomic keyboard and chair, wrist supports, painkillers... all combined, they just about made it possible to make it through the day. Even so, my wrists were on fire most of the day.

Fortunately, I found that it was all posture-related, and the postural problems were themselves related to not getting enough excercise - ironically, RSI is blamed on too much movement when in fact it was too little that does it. Read Pain Free if you want to know more.

The point being, I had to take up a daily regime including a bunch of yoga-like stretching exercises and some real exercise to - jogging being my choice. I took it up when my neck and shoulders were so stiff and painful I couldn't even lay down comfortably. Jogging loosened them up again. I stuck with it ever since, with only the time changing - from afternoon to early morning.

But lately, it's proved impossible to get to bed early that I can wake up at 5:30 in the morning and leap out of bed, raring to go.

Actually, I've never done that. But I haven't even been able to haul myself painfully out of my nice warm bed in order to stretch and go jogging in the cold and (usually) wet. I've just hit the snooze button a few extra times and had a hot shower.

Result? Decided lack of comfort lately. I can't even sit straight. Driving is the worst - my car makes it very hard to sit straight anyway, the steering-wheel being slightly off-center.

So when I got up this morning and couldn't face the idea of spending all day sitting and typing.. I spent a while stretching out, and went for a long jog. Even managed to fit it in between the bouts of rain.

Felt a LOT better for it when I got back. Burned off a lot of calories, I'm sure, and that's always supposed to be a good thing.

Eating half a crispy peking duck after the shower may have eroded that particular virtue ever-so-slightly, but hell, nobody's perfect...

Besides, if I put on weight I'll be able to skip buying a new belt ;o)

Comment from: billy [Visitor]
Hey, I didn't read your whole guide, but it frustrates me immensely when computer gurus use technical jargon when it's not appropriate.

You say yourself that this page is for newbies. Then why do you use a logical operator in the page title? Most people don't know squat about programming, especially those who have zero experience with *nix. It doesn't make you look smart.

that is all.

Hmmm...

penguin! equals wavy colourful squares is admittedly rather abstract. That's why the page title and the big, bold page heading are there. Do you really need to be a programmer to understand that this is an article about Linux not being Windows..?

#include <stdio.h>

int main()
{
        char a[] = "not";
        char b[] = "think";
        char c[] = "I";
        printf("%s %s %s", c, b, a);
        putchar(33);
        putchar('\n');
        return 0;
}

I have an alarm clock.

It has one cool feature - it projects the time onto the ceiling in big enough numbers that I can read them in the dark without my glasses. It also never gets the time wrong because it uses some radio signal or other. DST never catches IT out.

I've had it for.. Hmm... three years? Four? Something like that. And I've woken up to it almost every working day of each of those years. Hundreds and hundreds of times.

But do you know what the alarm sounds like when it goes off?

No. Neither do I. I'm too darn tired when I wake up to actually commit the sound to memory. And that's even with my habit of hitting "snooze" a few times most days, which doubles or triples the number of times I've heard the damn thing.

However.. it's a bit of a pain to alter the time the clock is set to go off at. So I usually just turn it off and set my phone to wake me instead.

What idiot at Nokia thought it'd be a good idea to replace the old-fashioned beeping with a woman's voice saying "It's time to wake up!"

I was up till 1am last night, what with marking books and planning for today's assessed lesson (which I passed, by the way, even if I didn't think it was a very good lesson) so I gave myself an extra half-hour in bed.

Under five hours of sleep later, I blearily wake up to hear some annoying woman telling me to get out of bed. I halfway expected the bossy cow to tell me to hurry up in the bathroom because she needed to do her hair.

On the plus side, I suppose, at least you can take comfort in knowing that it only take a quick prod and she shuts up for ten minutes.

But really...