< mari
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
chi >
[ Page 23 of 76 ]
From: David Cantrell Date: 23:45 on 15 Jan 2007 Subject: GNU rm Galloping gay christ, how on earth can you fuck up something as simple as rm!?!?!? # cd some-place-only-root-can-read # sudo -u peon rm /some/file/the/peon/has/permission/to/rm rm: cannot lstat `.': Permission denied I can not even begin to comprehend why anyone thought that rm should be able to read the current working directory.
From: Yossi Kreinin
Date: 09:57 on 14 Jan 2007
Subject: I need a screen saver
<30>yosefk@rostov:~> screen -d -r
There are screens on:
7614.pts-2.rostov (Dead ???)
12001.pts-4.tomsk (Dead ???)
11610.pts-12.naryanmar (Dead ???)
Remove dead screens with 'screen -wipe'.
There is no screen to be detached.
Nice. Someone killed my screen at rostov. And it says there's a dead one at
tomsk. Although I've just used one and it looked very lively. Well, what do you
know, maybe I had two screens there. I do have two running directories there.
OK, let's be friendly to the environment and follow screen's advice (I wonder
why it doesn't do it itself though):
<33>yosefk@rostov:~> screen -wipe
...
3 sockets wiped out.
OK.
<1214>yosefk@rostov:~> ssh tomsk
<34>yosefk@tomsk:~> screen -d -r
There is no screen to be detached.
<35>yosefk@tomsk:~> screen -r
There is no screen to be resumed.
How unpleasant. No more `screen -wipe`. /Now/ I am grateful that it doesn't bury
the alleged bodies itself. Well, at least the process I ran under screen is
still alive, which is still better than a bare ssh session...
Waitaminnit. What do you mean "the screen is dead and the process is alive"? The
process should have been kill by a broken pipe.
<54>yosefk@tomsk:~> ps -fade | grep SCREEN
yosefk 12001 1 0 Jan07 ? 00:00:15 SCREEN
Aha! So there's a screen all right. But the little screen doesn't notice the big
SCREEN. Why? RTFM:
<55>yosefk@tomsk:~> man screen
-d -r ...
-d -R ...
-d -RR ...
-D -r ...
-D -R ...
-D -RR ...
OK. I think I'll pass at the moment. I have scripts to check the status of that
process. So I don't lose /that/ much. I'd like to know WTF is going on though.
From: Andrew Black - lists Date: 19:31 on 12 Jan 2007 Subject: XNEWS - This may take a while Subscribing to at news://hates-software.com/hates-software.all and Xnews tells you Retrieve entire list of newsgroups from the server? (This may take a while) Takes you longer to read the message, find the button than to fetch the entire list.
From: Yossi Kreinin Date: 13:04 on 12 Jan 2007 Subject: Textual Studio 2005 Have you ever seen a Windows machine going to /text mode/ when Visual Studio 2005 builds a project? It's a spectacular scene. You get a black screen with a white cursor you can move around with your mouse. Nice entertainment for the build time. I don't really know what it takes for this to happen, I've only seen it on one machine. In particular, it might only happen on Windows ex-pee.
From: Jon Nangle Date: 09:22 on 12 Jan 2007 Subject: VBA So I've been running iozone, and I've got an .xls file as output with some numbers in it. Sweet. Now I start to think about visualising all of this data, and oh look, there's a message on the iozone web page which says: Contact XXXXXX@xxxxxx.xxx to purchase the Excel spreadsheet with extensive Visual Basic macros to automatically generate the 3D graphs. "Purchase"? Nah. That's for the birds. I can bash that out in no time. How hard could it be? 3 hours later, I find out that you have to do: chart.SetSourceData dataRange chart.ChartType = xlSurface UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES should you do: chart.ChartType = xlSurface chart.SetSourceData dataRange or you'll get a helpful "1004 (Object Failed)" runtime error. Not that it's documented anywhere. And oh yeah, if you're drawing other types of chart, it doesn't give a shit which order you do things in. What a piece of crap. Look, I'm sorry. Next time, I'll pay for the spreadsheet. Just make the pain stop. PS: VBA, either use objects, or don't. Don't provide objects for all your stupid Office crap like Balloons, but not for things that people might actually want to use, such as strings. That's just fucking annoying. Your object browser may be craptacular, but it beats searching through your shitty help files hands down.
From: Nicholas Clark Date: 01:57 on 12 Jan 2007 Subject: mtr Dear mtr, So you claim to be able to operate as some nice X11 based thingy. So I background you. So what's with this shit about: Resolver error: Received reply from unknown source: 62.156.61.1378 to fd 2 which is the tty which stops you dead in your tracks. Just fucking work. Is that too much to ask? Nicholas Clark
From: Bill Page Date: 00:57 on 12 Jan 2007 Subject: Convenient & helpful power-saving feature! Wow! I sure am happy that my video camera turns off after 5 minutes of "no use"! That helpful battery saving feature makes it impossible to use it for time-lapse capture over firewire, which is of course a silly thing to be doing in the first place anyway. I was really glad that it forces me to have the camera recording to tape the whole time I want to use it for something else, it has really made my life more convenient - stopping every two hours to rewind the tape helps me keep focused on the important things, like forgetting to do it. Thanks, Samsung and others, you really do think about "the little man" when you design your gear! Not providing a way of turning that feature off or changing it in any way has made the interface just that much less cluttered and easier to use. Why, if that were included, think of the useful features that we'd have to go without! Things like the well-named and easy to understand "Q-Easy" and "PB DSE", not to mention the useful demo mode were worth the inability to use my camera in any way other than the ways you tell me to, which is much better for me as a person. Just a short note to recognise the contribution you've made to making my life that much more full of creativity and cheer. Thanks Samsung!
From: Andy Armstrong
Date: 15:52 on 11 Jan 2007
Subject: PHP sucks dick through a straw
Humph. I'm writing PHP (again) today. I'm just doing a bit of munging on
a data structure - basically turning a hash of objects some of which
have another object in the same hash as their parent into a tree
containing the same objects. It'd be trivial in Perl. In PHP it's not
quite so simple. PHP really likes every assignment to be a deep copy. In
mitigation it dangles the carrot of pretending to support references
using the =& assignment operator. Except that:
"Complex arrays are sometimes rather copied than referenced. Thus
following example will not work as expected." [1]
<?php
$top = array(
'A' => array(),
'B' => array(
'B_b' => array(),
),
);
$top['A']['parent'] = &$top;
$top['B']['parent'] = &$top;
$top['B']['B_b']['data'] = 'test';
print_r($top['A']['parent']['B']['B_b']); // array()
?>
There's plenty of madness elsewhere on the same page too. In PHP4
something as innocuous as
$obj = new Object();
actually makes a deep copy of the newly created object! So the idiom
is instead
$obj =& new Object();
Which is OK once you get used to the ugliness - but
"Since PHP 5, new return(sic) reference automatically so using =& in
this context is deprecated and produces E_STRICT level message."
So it's impossible to write code for something as simple as creating a
new object that works right in PHP4 and still works without warnings in
PHP5. Which of course means you give up on using E_STRICT, which means
you don't see all the other shite that's going on - some of which might
actually be informative.
Somebody remind me why do so many people use a language that can't even
get this completely basic stuff right.
[1] http://uk.php.net/manual/en/language.references.whatdo.php
(reposted from london.pm)
--
Andy Armstrong, hexten.net
From: Yossi Kreinin Date: 14:31 on 10 Jan 2007 Subject: lacking authority This is probably very old, but it's new to me. yosefk> bk pull ... wait ... /usr/X11R6/bin/xauth: timeout in locking authority file /homes/yosefk/.Xauthority ... go ahead ... 1. Why does bk lose this way, unlike other commands working with remote machines? 2. Why did it work for years and stopped now? 3. The part I really like: if bk (or whatever it spawns down it's guts) *successfully proceeds* after reaching this timeout, wouldn't it be a nifty optimization to go ahead without even *trying* to lock the "authority" file, whatever that means? My admin suggested One Hell of a Workaround: `unsetenv DISPLAY`. That surely handles the timeout and is especially useful in scripts running bk. Somewhat tiring in interactive sessions though.
From: Yossi Kreinin Date: 17:56 on 09 Jan 2007 Subject: Massacre During the last weekend, X running on my Linux desktop crashed, taking about 5 ssh sessions (spawned for running about 50000 automated tests) with it. My admins refused to believe that (no messages in some log file). The fact that Alt-F7 showed a textual login prompt, and Firefox (started after running xinit and /some/path/startkde or the like) detected a corpse of it's twin, asking if I wanted it to continue the nuked sessions, and the ashes of my test script processes (in the form of log files last modified at about 4 AM) were not convincing enough. Who knows - maybe I didn't /notice/ my X. "What's your (mandatory due to a 'security policy') screen-locking screensaver?". "A black screen, obviously". "Hmmm..." Speaking of black screens, after restarting and fscking some of the fs, the machine displayed one good one. It also refused to react to peripheral devices (I tried a keyboard, a mount and a ping). And then I pushed a nice biggish gray button, which is the best peripheral device on this machine. Anyway, no more ssh sessions outside of screen. I have a dying local machine and deadlines, that's more than enough death, I don't need dead remote processes. screen works pretty good, especially when I `setenv TERM xterm` to satisfy hordes of brain-crippled statements scattered throughout my .fuckrc files which I copied from other people and never understood. It wouldn't respond to things like Shift-Page Up to view large chunks of stdout, but I never counted on shell sessions to survive for too long, so luckily I also have all those log files to grep. But I'd still be happy to find out there's a workaround. I saw a Mac laptop today. GUI without X. Inspiring. I think I'll go take a photograph.
< mari
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
chi >
[ Page 23 of 76 ]
Generated at 10:28 on 16 Apr 2008 by mariachi