I’ve known for a while that Konsole (the KDE shell/terminal program) can do transparent backgrounds on a per-tab basis. I’ve rarely used it due to the slowdown it’s created. However, the $work PC is fairly powerful (dual core, 2 GB RAM), so I turned it on today using the Transparent, Dark Background schema. It’s no slower than a non-transparent Konsole, and I get a bit of a view of my rotating backgrounds (KDE’s backgrounds-as-slideshow feature) as I work on code etc.
Nifty :)
I think I’ve ranted (mildly) about this before.
I hate web browsers - different ones will render markup differently, requiring hacks to get around the borked behaviour. However, that has nothing on what Firefox just did to me for about an hour. Load a page in my development environment. Everything looks right. Click on one of the links that performs an action, sets a message in the session, and hands back to the code to render the message and update the page. That works. Click refresh - the message should go away (and the exact same code on other pages has always worked). The message doesn’t go away.
Check the contents of the session - the message area is emptied, which is correct, so there’s no content to be displayed. Hold down Shift and click reload. Message is still there. Check the server side cache of the template - the message isn’t there. View source, the message is there. The only thing that’s changed since I was last testing this code was a Firefox update.
Set Firefox’s cache to 0, and the problem goes away.
I hate web browsers.
Some time last year, Mum handed me one of her CF cards that supposedly had photos from my parents’ trip to Lisbon on. I poked and prodded gently, but couldn’t see any photos that matched that description. I made an image with dd, and handed her disk back - with the intent of trying to get a DOS VMware image up, and present the image of the CF card as a drive so I could use the old undelete tools in DOS (the CF card is formatted with FAT16). This plan didn’t work too well, VMware didn’t want to make the image available as a drive that DOS could see. I tried replaying the image back onto one of my CF cards (same size), but couldn’t get my PCMCIA or USB adapters to show up in DOS.
Earlier I wrote about TestDisk (which saved me hours of work on the CEO’s machine). The other tool made by the same guy is PhotoRec, and it does exactly what it says on the tin! I’ve taken the replayed CF card, jacked it in to Windows and told PhotoRec to search the entire disk. It’s pulled off 350ish files, though they’re not all from the Lisbon trip. At least 5 are from several years ago when we went on a cruise through the Panama Canal. PhotoRec is now another tool that will be staying on my Kubuntu stick (and in memory, in case I wipe the stick :).
I think Mum will be happy :)
Well, it looks like my sort-of-shiny Sempron box isn’t going to play very nicely with me any more. Windows is constantly complaining about USB devices not working properly, even though there are no devices plugged in. That means that one of the hubs has probably gone and fried itself. More evidence of this comes in the fact that when I plug my USB 2.0 memory stick into certain ports (that I know full well to be 2.0 capable), Windows tells me that it’d do better on a 2.0 port.
Booted Kubuntu to double check, and it pretty much confirms that at least 2 of the 4 USB sockets are fried (or the hub behind them is), viz:
usb 2-4: new low speed USB device using ohci_hcd and address 111
usb 2-4: new low speed USB device using ohci_hcd and address 112
usb 2-4: new low speed USB device using ohci_hcd and address 113
usb 2-4: new low speed USB device using ohci_hcd and address 114
When I connect the keyboard to a working port, I get:
usb 1-3: new low speed USB device using ohci_hcd and address 4
usb 1-3: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
input: CHESEN USB Keyboard as /class/input/input5
input: USB HID v1.10 Keyboard [CHESEN USB Keyboard] on usb-0000:00:02.0-3
input: CHESEN USB Keyboard as /class/input/input6
input: USB HID v1.10 Device [CHESEN USB Keyboard] on usb-0000:00:02.0-3
One of my hopes for this year was to upgrade to a Core 2 Duo system (or an AMD X2) with a 7xxx series card from NVidia, or the equivalent from ATI/AMD. Unfortunately, part of the funds to do that was going to come from selling a working Sempron box with 1 GB of RAM. I could get a replacement motherboard, but that’s £41 shipped - which would probably be 50%+ of the price I could get for this machine without Windows on it. Doesn’t help that it’s a Socket 754 with AGP - both of which are essentially in the EOL stage of computer hardware. The other thing I can try is selling the parts on the Ars Technica Agora - tried it once before without any luck, but the second time might be the charm.
$CEO at $dayjob brought his daughter’s HP desktop in to work today. Apparently it just stopped working (and has been knocked off of the table at least once) one day. So, we boot the machine, and there’s nothing. No BIOS, no POST, no beeps, no boot. We scratch our heads (me and my boss), and wonder if the video card is fried - at one point in PC history, if you yanked the video card, some motherboards wouldn’t even try to POST. We change out the card. Nothing. We pull out the additional media cards (wireless, sound etc). Nothing. We disconnect anything that might be a power load other than the primary hard drive and CPU fan. Nothing.
Round two - it’s taken a fall, so we reseat the RAM. Presto, it beeps and tries to boot! No bootable device media found. Try the other hard drive. No bootable device media found. Plug in my oh-so-handy Kubuntu memory stick. Boots!
So the BIOS is able to find bootloader instructions. We let Kubuntu boot all the way, and I interrogate the first hard drive with fdisk -l /dev/sda. No partition table. Well, that’d be why the BIOS couldn’t find a bootable device. Now, in the past, when I’ve encountered this, I just say to heck with it and re-install the OS - there weren’t any free tools that could recover the partition table.
However, in the computer field, things are constantly changing. A bit of searching with Google, and I found a tool called TestDisk, supplied by cgsecurity.org. In several words, it’s a partition table management tool, including recovery of lost partitions, that runs under most operating systems. Told it the heads value for the drive in question, told it to analyse the drive, and 30 seconds later I had a recovered partition table. Two minutes later I was staring at a Windows XP boot logo.
The $CEO is happy.
I decided to take the D80 out for a spin today, as it was a sunny day (with occasional cloud). My original intent was to go to the Peak District, and take some shots of the rock formations (A75 shots are in the gallery). However, as I was passing through Longsdon on the way to Leek, I noticed a sign for Deep Hayes Country Park, and decided to divert that way instead. It turned out to be a good diversion, and I spent about 2 hours there, getting used to the camera. Quite a few shots are absolute rubbish, where I misread the amount of light available, but there are a few shots that I’ll be cleaning up and posting to my gallery.
Here’s a teaser:
Squee! :)
Much quieter shutter slap than the Konica-Minolta 5D, much faster autofocus. Hopefully it’ll be a sunny morning tomorrow, and I can get a shot I’ve been wanting to take for about 3 months! The thought of only fitting 100 images on a 2 GB card tells me I really need to address my backup solutions, online storage solutions and processing power.
