An offer you can't refuse
Seen on the Ballarat Courier today: Login or signup to continue reading $0/ $NaN/year All articles from our website & app Who can refuse that?
X configuration, part 4723
The good news about connecting up my new monitor was that it worked out of the box. Of course, it was connected to a running output (hydra:0.2) configured for 1920x1080, but it picked that up and ran with it. That was the good news. I wasn't expecting the reconfiguration to be easy, and my expectations were met. Although I had an output on the rightmost monitor (to become hydra:0.3, but currently hydra:0.0), the server and Nvidia software didn't want to know about it, thus the blue screen on that monitor: OK, run nvidia-settings.
The end of the SPARCstations
What's constant about these photos? Clearly not the image quality. Clearly not the aging person between keyboard and chair. Also not the location, nor the displays. Not even the keyboards, which I had to change before the last photo. But there is one constant: the monitors are mounted on SPARCstation pizzaboxes. I had long since stopped using them as computers, but they did very well at propping up the monitors, and they have been doing it for round 30 years.
Office restructure, next step
Spent much of the day moving monitors around. It shouldn't have been difficult, but there were constraints: Remove junk accumulated round the old monitors. No computer to be powered down. Remove mess from behind the monitors. Find cables of appropriate length and type to connect to the monitors. In the process, I found a lot of old documentation, including appointment cards dating back as far as June 2017. And I managed not to disconnect any cables. Sadly, the power connector to eureka was loose, so I did have to reboot it?exactly at a time where it had no monitor connected.
Can't save Emacs buffer
Writing an email today, I tried to save the buffer. No go: select-safe-coding-system: Loading charset map: No such file or directory, MULE-uviscii Huh? What's that? It seems to be related to the fact that the message contained non-ASCII characters. A bit of a web search brought this page to light, which helped me work through to discover the directory /usr/local/share/emacs/30.0.50/etc/charsets/. Previously it contained MULE-uviscii.map, but now it doesn't. Clearly it relates to my recent rebuild of Emacs, but how? I found an older version, and it doesn't look like something that changes frequently, so putting it in place worked around the problem.
A new monitor
Finally the monitor that I ordered last week?a day before the display card?has arrived. I paid for it on Sunday, 14 July, but it wasn't sent until the afternoon of Monday, 22 July. And to make up for that, it arrived today, less than 2 days after being sent, and it was delivered to my door. Not bad for free postage. Now the real work starts: tidying up the monitor arrangement that once displayed eureka, which has been there for over 9 years:
New display card
The display card that I ordered last week is there. For once it's not the fault of Australia Post: it arrived in Napoleons (sorry, NAPOLEON) a week ago, just after Yvonne did her shopping, and since it wasn't urgent, I waited until today. It's enormous! The package measured 31×43x6.5 cm, or 8.66 l! But most of it was air: the real package measured 29.5×21×5.3 cm, only 3.28 l: That's still ridiculous. The card itself measures 16×7×1.7 cm, or 0.19 l, only 2.2% of the volume of the package: Why do people do this?
Network failure out of sympathy?
What does ?riven? mean? It's clearly the past participle of a strong verb, but which? Does it conjugate like ?strive?? Off to check the found of all wisdom, the OED. Are you human? Oh, no. They've added a CAPTCHA to insult their users. But after correctly answering the CAPTCHA, I got another one. And another one. The thing was stuck in a loop. Called up the State Library of Victoria, where Tom confirmed that OED had changed something, and that they (SLV) had been having trouble, as had all other libraries, and that it wouldn't be solved today. In the meantime I had tried logging in to the National Library of Australia.
Understanding the CrowdStrike failure
A couple of days ago I engaged in guesswork about how the CrowdStrike bug caused the global system crash. Today Ginger Wolnik posted a reference to this video on the Tandem Alumnni mailing list: It pretty much supports my guesswork: a kernel module had an unrecoverable error. But the details are interesting. Microsoft has a bad reputation for security, but in this case it seems that it's not to blame. As I guessed, the CrowdStrike software includes kernel modules. But Microsoft tests all third-party kernel modules before giving them its seal of approval.
More X configuration fun
What's next with my X configuration? Where should I start? A good one would be to interface with the clipboard. I've tried this before, but it didn't work as I expected. Time to look again. Another answer in the page that described the xterm feature recommends adding this to .Xdefaults: xterm*VT100.Translations: #override \ Ctrl Shift <Key>V: insert-selection(CLIPBOARD) \n\ Ctrl Shift <Key>C: copy-selection(CLIPBOARD) But that's strange. I don't see anything like that elsewhere, and I'd prefer to do it with the mouse.
World network crash
Email from the Ballarat Courier today: Date: Fri, 19 Jul 2024 00:47:00 -0600 Subject: Breaking: Major IT outage impacting banks, media, airlines and supermarkets Why should the Ballarat Courier report that? Nobody else did. Well, for about 1¼ hours. Then the New York Times came up with this: date: Fri, 19 Jul 2024 04:01:28 -0400 Subject: Breaking news: Global tech outage grounds flights and hits businesses Reading headers is frequently interesting.
Here's a basket for all your eggs
I continue to get popups like this on random web sites: What a good idea! It makes it so much easier to compromise multiple sites if somebody gets your Google password. The real issue is, of course, that creating and maintaining passwords is too complicated, especially if you're using a mobile phone. I keep a non-standard list of passwords and associated email addresses, of which I have several hundred. Crack one of those and you have access to one site only. Spam me on it and I can remove it.
More ports pain
House photo day today, made more difficult by wind and threatening rain. But I got the photos done. The fun started with the processing: /usr/local/share/hugin/data/plugins/top_five.py CAT:Control Points NAM:keep 5 CPs per image pair fails @api-max What does that mean? Hugin complains about things all the time, but this one was fatal. My best bet is that it was a knotted python. OK, reinstall Hugin. ===> Registering installation for hugin-2023.0.0_4 pkg-static: Unable to access file /home/src/FreeBSD/git/ports/graphics/hugin/work/stage/usr/local/lib/python3.11/site-packages/_hsi.so:No such file or directory pkg-static: Unable to access file /home/src/FreeBSD/git/ports/graphics/hugin/work/stage/usr/local/lib/python3.11/site-packages/hpi.py:No such file or directory pkg-static: Unable to access file /home/src/FreeBSD/git/ports/graphics/hugin/work/stage/usr/local/lib/python3.11/site-packages/hsi.py:No such file or directory More ports agony!
New Emacs
My Emacs build finished yesterday without complications, and this morning I installed it, also almost without complications. Only this message: Emacs is now built with native compilation enabled by default, which requires GCC version 11 or later. However, it is known that some elisp applications don't work correctly when compiled. You can work around any such issues by disabling native compilation using the following steps... That's in /usr/ports/editors/emacs-devel/pkg-message. Is it something to worry about? Only, I suppose, if I get an ?application?
xterm clipboard access
A while back I found suggestions that X, and in particular xterm, can access the clipboard directly. I made a note of it in my diary, but not clearly enough: it took me 20 minutes to chase down this reference, to which I referred less than 2 months ago. It wasn't without issues, which I should chase up.
Emacs resources
So gradually my xterm configuration is close to where I want it, though the effect on the .Xdefaults file is clear: === grog@hydra (/dev/pts/23) ~ 762 -> l /eureka/home/grog/.Xdefaults .Xdefaults-hydra -rw-r--r-- 1 grog lemis 2,477 30 Jun 14:38 /eureka/home/grog/.Xdefaults -r--r--r-- 1 grog lemis 7,644 19 Jul 13:30 .Xdefaults-hydra Next, Emacs. And somehow things started all over again. Somehow the specified resources don't seem to have any effect. They do, however, have a couple of strangenesses. For example, I have: emacs*Geometry: 110x75 That's the xrdb syntax that I know.
Terse Directions
This post describes a service I want from my online-map provider. I?d use it all the time. Summary: When I?m navigating an area I already know about, don?t give me turn-by-turn, just give me a short list of the streets to take. I?ve been living in Vancouver for decades and, driving or cycling, know how to get almost anywhere. It helps that, like most North American cities, we have a fairly regular north-south-east-west grid. These days, when I?m going any distance by car, I get directions from Google Maps because it knows where the traffic is bad, and the traffic is usually bad somewhere.
More fvwm3 conversions
Continued with my X reconfiguration today, and discovered that I had forgot the details that I had investigated at the beginning of the month. Put them in, and they worked. But now I have even more multiple entries. Spent some time looking for ways to inherit resources, but there doesn't seem to be one. Now I have 163 mainly duplicate resources in my .Xdefaults file, and it looks like it might increase.
fvwm3: enough?
More playing around with fvwm3 today, and at least partially cracked the MenuStyle entry. Instead of this, MenuStyle black gold brown -*-*-medium-r-*-sans-12-*-*-*-p-*-*-* mwm I tried this: MenuStyle * mwm It didn't complain, but the colours were wrong. OK, we know that: Colorset. But no, it didn't want to know. It wants MenuColorset: MenuStyle * MenuColorset 5, mwm But with that, I finally have my configuration the way I want it.
Back to X configuration
Lately I've been doing very little, and the wait for getting VirtualBox running correctly?if at all?means that I have time to look at other painful things. So, today fvwm3. The more I look at it, the more it's a can of worms. There are two major problems: The documentation is oriented towards the developer, not the end user. It seems that the syntax for MenuStyle has changed. I used to have: MenuStyle black gold brown -*-*-medium-r-*-sans-12-*-*-*-p-*-*-* mwm But now it complains about the keyword gold.
Aussie does it again!
Mail from Aussie Broadband today with their inimitable asterisks: Subject: It's time to review your emergency contact details We?re just checking in to make sure all of your **emergency** details are correct. ... Address: **29 STONES RD DEREEL VIC 3352** Contact number: **0353184210** Well, no. They include the numbers of the four VoIP lines that they have half provisioned, but not the mobile phone that they also have on file. And two of those VoIP lines are not connected. Time to change things. Log in.
VirtualBox: enough!
So where do I go from here with VirtualBox? Discuss the matter on the FreeBSD mailing list. But I'm not a member, and something seems to have gone wrong with the signup. Enough! This is really very frustrating. I'll leave it for a while; after all, I do have Microsoft boxen that will do the job. Instead I'll turn my attention back to the new teevee. And for that I need a better display card than the GeForce 710 that I have been using. Apart from potential performance issues, the fan is noisy, and blowing it out with compressed air doesn't help.
A new monitor
It's been nearly 9 months since I got hydra.lemis.com, my new machine. And I still haven't completed the migration. One of the issues was the X configuration, of course, and I had run into trouble with my old Matrix monitor, which is probably on its last legs. I had kept it because of the lower resolution, only 2560×1440, while the new LG 27UP850 monitor is 3840×2160. But since my cataract operation, it seems that 3840×2160 is perfectly readable. So: another 27UP850. I know my way round the thing, it works well, and now it's over 25% cheaper, since it's last year's model.
More VirtualBox pain
More messing around with VirtualBox today. Why can't I save the state of a virtual machine? More experimentation showed that I couldn't do anything to stop it. No suspend. No ACPI shutdown request (was just ignored). No power off. All I could do was to shut down the VM from within (with the SHUTDOWN command). Clearly something's wrong there. Searching the web, found a reference to the user belonging to the vboxusers group. I knew that, of course, but I had expected a clean install to set it, and it didn't. But it didn't help. Tried starting as root, and that didn't help either.
The pain of cables
Osso buco for dinner tonight. For that, we need risotto alla milanese. And how about that, according to our freezer database, we have some in basket 9. Do I believe that? Not overly. But it's a good chance to bring the database up to date with reality. Print out the contents of 9 and compare. Oh. === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/7) ~ 109 -> echo 'select * from freezer where basket="9" order by description ;' | mysql household | a2ps ERROR 1064 (42000) at line 1: You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near '0~select * from freezer where basket="9" order by description' at line 1 Huh?
More VirtualBox fun
Spent a large part of the day setting up VirtualBox on Ubuntu. I have resolved at least one thing: to move a VM from one instance of VirtualBox to another, I need to press the ?Add? button, not the ?New? button. And that uses the configuration file (like despise.vbox), and it works up to a point. Clearly a saved image isn't going to work well, especially as in this case I had to reduce the memory from 24 to 16 GB and the number of CPUs from 8 to 4. But it's so slow! Well, at least the disks were. There was a difference: this setup uses normal magnetic disks, while my other instances have used SSDs.
VirtualBox on Ubuntu
My continuing pain with VirtualBox had established that the problem was not (only?) related to the hardware on which it ran: it also happened on quartet, a test ThinkCentre. So if it's a single point of failure, it's probably either FreeBSD or the specific VirtualBox port. OK, before I move quartet (as teevee) to the lounge room, how about installing Ubuntu on it and trying like that? I've been through the installation a couple of weeks ago, and I still have the install media. How hard can it be? Excruciating! It started with a broken copy to the USB card, but after I had done the install, I still needed to integrate it into the home LAN.
2009 Ranger
This week we?re vacationing at the family cabin on an island; the nearest town is Gibsons. Mid-week, we hit town to pick up groceries and hardware. Unfortunately, it?s a really demanding walk from the waterfront to the mall, particularly with a load to carry, and there?s little public transit. Fortunately, there?s Coast Car Co-op, a competent and friendly little five-car outfit. We booked a couple of hours and the closest vehicle was a 2009 Ford Ranger, described as a ?compact pickup? or ?minitruck?. It made me think.
More work on teevee
Finally got round to doing some more ?work? on teevee. Somehow this cable mess really gets me down. Spent a lot of time trying to get the correct cables in the right place, in principle only monitor and audio. And apart from minor frobs to get the mouse right and to mount the correct file systems, all worked pretty much out of the box. But the next step is more cabling in the lounge room, which is another horror.
Scam from Google Play
While looking for that most elusive of things, a good Android app, got this unsolicited popup: 221.236.211.162? That's not an IP that I use. A bit of checking showed: === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/6) ~ 204 -> host 221.236.211.162 162.211.236.221.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer 162.211.236.221.broad.cd.sc.dynamic.163data.com.cn. A traceroute failed after 13 hops, so it's clearly not nearby. What does that mean? Possibly the advertisement can't determine the IP addresses in use on my phone, but why use a fake address?
Quiet day
Today was one of those days where I didn't do anything worth mentioning, quite a difference from the last few weeks. When am I going to continue with upgrading tiwi (or teevee)? Somehow the issue with VirtualBox has thrown a spanner in the works. An obvious attempt to localize the problem would be to try the same scenario running Linux. And for that I need a machine for the installation?the same one that I need for teevee. What do I do? So far, nothing.
Q Numbers
This ongoing fragment describes how to match and compare numbers using a finite automaton, which involves transforming them into strings with the right lexical properties. My hope is that there are at least twelve people in the world who are interested in the intersection of numeric representation and finite automata. Background (Feel free to skip this part if you already know about Quamina.) This is yet another entry in the Quamina Diary series of blog posts. Quamina is a Go-language library that allows you to compile a bunch of ?Patterns? together and, when presented with ?events?, i.e.
Understanding mice
Yesterday's confusion with mice puzzled me. Wasn't there a way to set a button map? Yes, and I found it not so long ago: there's a button map that xinput is too polite to display with xinput list-props. Instead I need xinput get-button-map With that information, I've added this to my HOWTO page: Current (2024) versions of X don't seem to use moused any more. Use /dev/sysmouse: Section "InputDevice" # generated from default Identifier "Mouse0" Driver "mouse" Option "Protocol" "auto" Option "Device" "/dev/sysmouse" Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5" EndSection It's not clear if ZAxisMapping is of any ...
Understanding mice
More playing around with my new mouse today, on tiwi. Yes, it works, but how do I remap the side buttons? moused is started with root 36620 0,0 0,0 13112 1720 - Is 22:13 0:00,00 /usr/sbin/moused -3 -p /dev/ums1 -t auto -I /var/run/moused.ums1.pid That doesn't even match the entries in /etc/rc.conf.d: moused:moused_enable="YES" moused:moused_flags="-m 2=4" # Remap rear side button to 2.
A mouse!
I'm still planning to put in the new teevee.lemis.com in the lounge room Real Soon Now. The intention is to run it in parallel with tiwi until I'm happy. Until then, all the videos will be on tiwi. Things that are missing are: keyboard, mouse, display card (maybe). Surely I have lots of keyboards and mice? Yes, I do, but for some reason they ?don't work?, at least partially because all the dongles are unmarked, and none of my experiments in pairing them have worked. So when I was in town on Thursday, I picked up an el-cheapo wireless keyboard and mouse from Officeworks, total price $33.
Problems with NBN scheduled outages
It seems that I'm not the only person to get annoyed by National Broadband Network scheduled outages.
ANZ password: Groggy's fault
Checking my local web pages, discovered this: -r--r--r-- 1 grog lemis 6462 2 May 14:32 bank.php That's the page I use to access financial web sites. And it had a new password, one that I hadn't transferred to my password list. So the issues that I had on Tuesday were my fault after all. Did Gracia do the right thing then? No. she couldn't have known that, and her utter conviction that I had typed a special character in the password shows a lack of will to investigate the real issues.
Trip report: Summer ISO C++ standards meeting (St Louis, MO, USA)
On Saturday, the ISO C++ committee completed its fourth meeting of C++26, held in St Louis, MO, USA. Our host, Bill Seymour, arranged for high-quality facilities for our six-day meeting from Monday through Saturday. We had over 180 attendees, about two-thirds in-person and the others remote via Zoom, formally representing over 20 nations. At each … Continue reading Trip report: Summer ISO C++ standards meeting (St Louis, MO, USA) →
ANZ: You typed the wrong password
Time for my monthly check on my bank accounts today. But no, my ANZ web page told me that my password was wrong. What? It's stored in the web browser. I also have it written down, so I tried that. No, wrong. Please reset. How did that happen? It's definitely not my doing. Called up and finally, after nearly a minute of announcements, I was asked the reason for my call. ?I think my password has been breached?. WRONG. Another two minutes explaining to me how to use the ANZ App to reset my password. And then I was disconnected. Nearly 3 minutes for nothing.
bhyve: out
I've already had my concerns about using bhyve instead of VirtualBox, but another thing that concerned me was how to save a running instance. Once again Google Gemini to my aid. You don't: Unfortunately, as of July 1, 2024, bhyve itself doesn't offer a built-in feature to save the state of a running virtual machine. This functionality is under development, but there's no official release yet.
20 years of wrong directions
Twenty years ago today I started this idea of saving all my RCS files in a separate hierarchy. Bad idea, and it's still biting me.
X configuration: RTFM!
More searching for answers to the .Xdefaults issue today. What does the xterm(1) man page say? Much more than it did 30 years ago. Now there are 7,758 lines, about 130 pages. When I learnt X it was 253 lines, less than 5 pages. And much of this new version describes exactly what I'm looking for: a line like xterm-r*faceName: DejaVu Sans Mono refers to a name xterm-r, which is described in X(1): -name This option specifies the name under which resources for the application should be found.
Constructive translations
Google Translate is quite useful for reading labels on East Asian food, but it has its limits. Here's a particularly amusing one: Somehow Google Translate is just too eager to please.
Lies, damn lies and statistics
Last month was cold? How about this month? mysql> select year(date), min(outside_temp), avg(outside_temp), max(outside_temp) from observations where month(date) = 7 group by year(date); +------------+-------------------+--------------------+-------------------+ | year(date) | min(outside_temp) | avg(outside_temp) | max(outside_temp) | +------------+-------------------+--------------------+-------------------+ | 2017 | -1.8 | 8.386610996751084 | 17.2 | | 2018 | -0.5 | 8.84761882739429 | 19.7 | | 2019 | 1 | 9.319298495442224 | 18.5 | | 2020 | -0.8 | 8.394708139534231 | 16.7 | | 2021 | ...
Understanding Xdefaults
Now I have an almost functional fvwm3 configuration. How do I polish it? An obvious thing would be to move much of the specifications to the .Xdefaults file. I already have some stuff in there. For example, for xterm: xterm*Geometry: 100x50 xterm*faceName: DejaVu Sans Mono xterm*faceSize: 9 So I don't need to put those details in the fvwm3 config. But what about the others? Currently I have: + "hydra" Exec LC_ALL=en_AU.UTF-8 /usr/local/bin/uxterm -name "xterm" -s -sl 2048 -sb -ls -j -rw -display :0.3 -geometry 90x50+53+0 -e /usr/local/bin/bash & + "hydra" Exec LC_ALL=en_AU.UTF-8 /usr/local/bin/uxterm -name "xterm-r" -s -sl 2048 -sb -ls -j -rw -display :0.3 -geometry 90x50-53+0 -e /usr/local/bin/bash & That defines the xterm parameters for left and right xterms.
Donate somebody else's organs!
I've been planning to apply for an organ donor pass for years now, and today I found I can do it on the web. Only one minute! Well, 3. First I need to find my Medicare card and enter the details, and then enter my name in a form that the form likes (to match what's on the card). And that's it! I'm a certified organ donor! All I needed was my name, address and Medicare card number. I could do that for lots of people without them knowing. In an age where people are paranoid about security, it's amazing that I can get a spare kidney or two without the donor knowing (even before his death).