Having never put a single devil into hell before, the girl found the first experience a little painful.
I am still not sure it was worth the trouble, but it appears to work fine.
Showing posts with label computers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label computers. Show all posts
Wednesday, March 26, 2014
Friday, November 30, 2012
Stupid imageView bug
Posting this only because I tried to google the problem and failed.
If you create your own custom ImageView, and the end result is that on zooming or moving the image only a part of if gets zoomed or moved even though the matrix is computed right, check that you haven't hidden view.getMatrix() by accident.
Yeah, silly, I know.
If you create your own custom ImageView, and the end result is that on zooming or moving the image only a part of if gets zoomed or moved even though the matrix is computed right, check that you haven't hidden view.getMatrix() by accident.
Yeah, silly, I know.
Wednesday, July 14, 2010
Evil scrollbar, KDE
Suddenly, for no good reason at all, my scrollbars started misbehaving. A new computer doesn't constitute a good reason, especially since both the new and the old one are running Ubuntu Lucid Lynx with KDE.
It was absolutely nuts. Usually, when I drag a vertical scrollbar up and down, the horizontal movement of the mouse doesn't make a difference. I can understand a system that would stop scrolling if the mouse gets too far away. There is absolutely no excuse for jumping back to the initial point when the mouse gets too far away, which is what it did.
Turns out it depends on the widget style, but is not mentioned in any widget style description, nor in the fine manual. Finding the appropriate widget style by trial and error was easy, but I am still annoyed.
That's the problem with the new KDE: lots of configurable stuff and no place to configure it. I mean, having themes is nice and all, but the user should be able to configure anything the theme creator can configure, without having to read a manual on how to create a theme. I much rather quickly choose a theme that seems nice and reconfigure the few things that I don't like than wade though hundreds of themes looking for one that fits my specs the best.
Some things (the color themes, for example) actually work that way, but most don't.
It was absolutely nuts. Usually, when I drag a vertical scrollbar up and down, the horizontal movement of the mouse doesn't make a difference. I can understand a system that would stop scrolling if the mouse gets too far away. There is absolutely no excuse for jumping back to the initial point when the mouse gets too far away, which is what it did.
Turns out it depends on the widget style, but is not mentioned in any widget style description, nor in the fine manual. Finding the appropriate widget style by trial and error was easy, but I am still annoyed.
That's the problem with the new KDE: lots of configurable stuff and no place to configure it. I mean, having themes is nice and all, but the user should be able to configure anything the theme creator can configure, without having to read a manual on how to create a theme. I much rather quickly choose a theme that seems nice and reconfigure the few things that I don't like than wade though hundreds of themes looking for one that fits my specs the best.
Some things (the color themes, for example) actually work that way, but most don't.
Decided to start using Facebook more, and am working on it. I find Facebook to be a rather inconvenient format, but on the other hand it is a useful tool for maintaining an intermittent connection with the people with whom I don't maintain a daily connection by IRC, blogs and email.
Monday, December 14, 2009
Evil Eclipse and voodoo programming
My Eclipse (currently run in Ubuntu Karmic, but the problems started earlier) has been having some nasty problems for a while now. Quite weird really, boxes were not responding to the OK button, new software sources were not being added, you could commit stuff to SVN but not tag it, etc.
Turns out it's due to changes in GTK+, and can be completely cured by saying export GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=true before starting Eclipse.
It just feels so much like learning a magic spell in a roleplaying game.
Turns out it's due to changes in GTK+, and can be completely cured by saying export GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=true before starting Eclipse.
It just feels so much like learning a magic spell in a roleplaying game.
Sunday, September 13, 2009
Linux
In response to my previous post Markku said that I make it sound as if Linux were but a constant source of grief for me, and ask to write some balancing thoughts.
In fact it hasn't. There is of course the factor that I, like everybody else, tend to write about problems, and not "my computer has been working so well and I am so happy". But most of all, the source of my problems is not Linux or any other thing in the outside world, but my own tendency to update, upgrade and configure everything to death. Although I must say that in spite of all the grief it gives me, it's quite a lot of fun. That's why I do it all the time.
As for Linux: I wish I could be really persuasive about how it is so much better than everything else. Problem is, I can't. All I can say is that I have been a very satisfied user for the last 15 years, and intend to remain so in the future.
The reason I can't easily praise Linux over everything else is that I don't know that much about anything else. I don't touch Windows every year, and the last time I touched a Mac was before the LCD displays became popular.
All my experiences with Windows so far have been rather unpleasant, and part of it was surely due to inexperience, but some of it was clearly objective - for example, the last time I spent a few days in front of a computer running Windows I asked people who had Windows of their own how to make window focus follow mouse, and they couldn't tell me.
Linux does everything I want it to do, and any grief is rare and far between. It is quite distribution-dependent, too. I tend to like Debian, which is great otherwise (lots and lots of packages and very easy updates) but tends to be a bit behind on hardware drivers. I also tend to run the less-than-stable versions of it, because, you know, new! shiny!
To the people who do not consider tinkering with their system to be a great way to spend an evening I'd currently recommend Ubuntu. I have two different Ubuntus installed on two of my home computers (the regular 9.04 on the desktop in the bedroom, and Easypeasy on the little laptop), and both installed without any problem and work like a charm.
In fact it hasn't. There is of course the factor that I, like everybody else, tend to write about problems, and not "my computer has been working so well and I am so happy". But most of all, the source of my problems is not Linux or any other thing in the outside world, but my own tendency to update, upgrade and configure everything to death. Although I must say that in spite of all the grief it gives me, it's quite a lot of fun. That's why I do it all the time.
As for Linux: I wish I could be really persuasive about how it is so much better than everything else. Problem is, I can't. All I can say is that I have been a very satisfied user for the last 15 years, and intend to remain so in the future.
The reason I can't easily praise Linux over everything else is that I don't know that much about anything else. I don't touch Windows every year, and the last time I touched a Mac was before the LCD displays became popular.
All my experiences with Windows so far have been rather unpleasant, and part of it was surely due to inexperience, but some of it was clearly objective - for example, the last time I spent a few days in front of a computer running Windows I asked people who had Windows of their own how to make window focus follow mouse, and they couldn't tell me.
Linux does everything I want it to do, and any grief is rare and far between. It is quite distribution-dependent, too. I tend to like Debian, which is great otherwise (lots and lots of packages and very easy updates) but tends to be a bit behind on hardware drivers. I also tend to run the less-than-stable versions of it, because, you know, new! shiny!
To the people who do not consider tinkering with their system to be a great way to spend an evening I'd currently recommend Ubuntu. I have two different Ubuntus installed on two of my home computers (the regular 9.04 on the desktop in the bedroom, and Easypeasy on the little laptop), and both installed without any problem and work like a charm.
Thursday, September 10, 2009
Lessons of yesterday
1. It's really quite easy to make a new Ubuntu installation over an existing encrypted LVM:
- copy your /etc/crypttab to /home,
- boot from an alternate install CD into the rescue mode,
- give the passphrase when the installer asks for it, use the partitioner in the normal way, install,
- boot from an alternate install CD into the rescue mode, again,
- copy the crypttab from /home back to /etc/crypttab,
- update-initramfs -k all -c -v,
- happy happy joy joy.
2. If your laptop's (in this case Dell Latitude E6400) screen suddenly goes black when you activate some display manager, and does not react to anything at all, try taking the damn thing off the docking station. Then boot it, find the power management setting and fix it so that it doesn't do it anymore (in this case, told it not to react to AC poweror closed lid).
- copy your /etc/crypttab to /home,
- boot from an alternate install CD into the rescue mode,
- give the passphrase when the installer asks for it, use the partitioner in the normal way, install,
- boot from an alternate install CD into the rescue mode, again,
- copy the crypttab from /home back to /etc/crypttab,
- update-initramfs -k all -c -v,
- happy happy joy joy.
2. If your laptop's (in this case Dell Latitude E6400) screen suddenly goes black when you activate some display manager, and does not react to anything at all, try taking the damn thing off the docking station. Then boot it, find the power management setting and fix it so that it doesn't do it anymore (in this case, told it not to react to AC poweror closed lid).
Thursday, March 13, 2008
Hardware upgrade during a flu
To anyone who might have been wondering about my absence from irc and web forums, the blog not being updated, and my being unresponsive to email: I ain't dead, but bad flu and a broken computer at home were sure a bad combination.
On the brighter side, I finally understood what people mean when they talk about muscle aches during a flu. On Monday I felt hung over in spite of not having drunk anything on Sunday, and all my muscles hurt, especially the ass and lower back. By Tuesday afternoon I realized that I have spent most of the day in bed without having done anything about the computer hardware upgrade in progress, which in my book doesn't even count as sick, but rather as dead and buried.
But anyway, now I am mostly up from the dead, but tired and sleepy and my nose is bright red. The computer works, though, and I also assembled another one from the extra parts. I've always dreamed of having a computer in the toilet; probably should buy a monitor.
The motherboard that my father has sent me (ECS NForce 570 Slit-A) turned out to be deader than Lenin. You know there is something wrong when the thing doesn't even say "beep" on bootup and rotates the fans at the wrong moments. So I bought a Asus P5K Intel P35, which beeped and generally behaved.
Note to self: next time, before you take the old computer apart, use it to create an installation CD. More particularly, make sure that the installation CD you have just burned actually works. Mine turned out to be corrupted.
I had another installation CD, made during the dark times when dinosaurs roamed the Earth and cavemen beat each other over the heads with AMD Socket 939 motherboards. It was too ancient to recognize my dvd drive. The damn thing had a hell of a nerve, telling me that I don't have a CD drive while sitting in that drive. Ugh.
Finally I got an installation CD, the newest Debian stable (I am not gonna tell you whether I had to sell my soul to the devil for that, or my body to the entire Debian project, or to assemble yet another computer).
The first install (and several others) failed, apparently because Debian is not fond of small partitions nowadays. The disk had 5Gb for /, 15 Gb for /usr and another 5Gb for /var, and the install kept trying to write past the end of the partitions. Once I combined them all into one 25Gb partition the thing started working.
Then it turned out not to have any drivers for the onboard LAN. I have a large collection of PCI Ethernet cards around the place, so I just stuck one in. It utterly and completely refused to work on account of IRQ conflicts. IRQ conflicts are a sort of black magic to me, so I performed all kinds of rain dances known to me, setting kernel options to noapic and noacpi, trying to reassign the irq, etc. Nothing worked. Then I remembered that I have an ancient laptop and a USB stick, and simply downloaded a newer kernel (2.6.22-3). Worked like a charm, the onboard LAN started working, and we lived almost happily ever after. "Almost", because the motherfuckingboard had no PS/2 connector for a mouse, and the separate connector I had was evil. I bought a new USB mouse and everything started working fine, except that it glows bright blue for no apparent reason.
I am usually very suspicious of NVidia video cards (my father sent me one of those too) and their drivers, but this one (GeForce 7300 GT) worked with the nv driver with no trouble at all.
On the brighter side, I finally understood what people mean when they talk about muscle aches during a flu. On Monday I felt hung over in spite of not having drunk anything on Sunday, and all my muscles hurt, especially the ass and lower back. By Tuesday afternoon I realized that I have spent most of the day in bed without having done anything about the computer hardware upgrade in progress, which in my book doesn't even count as sick, but rather as dead and buried.
But anyway, now I am mostly up from the dead, but tired and sleepy and my nose is bright red. The computer works, though, and I also assembled another one from the extra parts. I've always dreamed of having a computer in the toilet; probably should buy a monitor.
The motherboard that my father has sent me (ECS NForce 570 Slit-A) turned out to be deader than Lenin. You know there is something wrong when the thing doesn't even say "beep" on bootup and rotates the fans at the wrong moments. So I bought a Asus P5K Intel P35, which beeped and generally behaved.
Note to self: next time, before you take the old computer apart, use it to create an installation CD. More particularly, make sure that the installation CD you have just burned actually works. Mine turned out to be corrupted.
I had another installation CD, made during the dark times when dinosaurs roamed the Earth and cavemen beat each other over the heads with AMD Socket 939 motherboards. It was too ancient to recognize my dvd drive. The damn thing had a hell of a nerve, telling me that I don't have a CD drive while sitting in that drive. Ugh.
Finally I got an installation CD, the newest Debian stable (I am not gonna tell you whether I had to sell my soul to the devil for that, or my body to the entire Debian project, or to assemble yet another computer).
The first install (and several others) failed, apparently because Debian is not fond of small partitions nowadays. The disk had 5Gb for /, 15 Gb for /usr and another 5Gb for /var, and the install kept trying to write past the end of the partitions. Once I combined them all into one 25Gb partition the thing started working.
Then it turned out not to have any drivers for the onboard LAN. I have a large collection of PCI Ethernet cards around the place, so I just stuck one in. It utterly and completely refused to work on account of IRQ conflicts. IRQ conflicts are a sort of black magic to me, so I performed all kinds of rain dances known to me, setting kernel options to noapic and noacpi, trying to reassign the irq, etc. Nothing worked. Then I remembered that I have an ancient laptop and a USB stick, and simply downloaded a newer kernel (2.6.22-3). Worked like a charm, the onboard LAN started working, and we lived almost happily ever after. "Almost", because the motherfuckingboard had no PS/2 connector for a mouse, and the separate connector I had was evil. I bought a new USB mouse and everything started working fine, except that it glows bright blue for no apparent reason.
I am usually very suspicious of NVidia video cards (my father sent me one of those too) and their drivers, but this one (GeForce 7300 GT) worked with the nv driver with no trouble at all.
Thursday, March 06, 2008
Modem
Got a new modem from Verkkokauppa today. When I brought it there last week they said they were gonna try to fix it, but obviously they failed, so I got a new one.
The modem used to die for unknown reasons, and need to be reset by hand, which is not fun when I am not at home, and not even when I am. Last Thursday a reset did not help, and I took the damn thing back to the store.
Now I got a new one, with a note saying that the old one works fine, but they changed it just in case. The new one seems to work fine, too.
The weirdest thing seems to be that I used to be unable to access http://www.freebok.net/ from home, and used to wonder whether the problem was with this site, my ISP, or my network settings. The funny thing is that it turned out to be the modem. The new one accesses freebok.net just fine, with the exact same settings.
The modem used to die for unknown reasons, and need to be reset by hand, which is not fun when I am not at home, and not even when I am. Last Thursday a reset did not help, and I took the damn thing back to the store.
Now I got a new one, with a note saying that the old one works fine, but they changed it just in case. The new one seems to work fine, too.
The weirdest thing seems to be that I used to be unable to access http://www.freebok.net/ from home, and used to wonder whether the problem was with this site, my ISP, or my network settings. The funny thing is that it turned out to be the modem. The new one accesses freebok.net just fine, with the exact same settings.
Friday, February 29, 2008
Ei oo helppoa
The list of people whom I will order publicly flogged as soon as I become the queen of the world is growing. I have added to it:
- the people who manufacture several slightly different kinds of hardware, and believe that the same manual suits all of them, when it clearly doesn't,
- the people who manufacture several slightly different kinds of hardware and never tell you which one of them you are holding in your hands (as in "this motherboard comes with either 10/100 Mb LAN or with gigabyte LAN. We are not gonna write it on the box, so take a wild guess."),
- the people who say "this motherboard works with all the processors of the XXX series", meaning "this motherboard works with all the processors of the XXX series manufactured up until now, and we are not gonna bother listing them",
- the people who make modems that appear to work in a routed mode with a static IP, and let you put that IP in the confs, but have no place in the confs for the netmask and the gateway. At least not anywhere findable.
Do I sound a bit stressed?
Saw some weird nightmares lately. One on them involved a small airplane, a huge dick with balls, and a number of palm trees.
Went karting with coworkers, stressed a bit about that in advance. It was even worse than I imagined but nothing acutely evil happened. I could never understand the fun of driving little carlike things when you can drive actual cars, and I feel uncomfortable in the open vehicles in general (note to my army of admirers: you won't impress me with a ride in a convertible, so don't even try). In addition to that the karts had small seats that heat up under you until you become seriously concerned about your ass becoming a smoked ham, horrible smell, weird steering wheel, and the helmets, while obviously necessary, were very unpleasant to wear. On the positive side: the thing constitutes a very efficient ass massage.
My modem croaked yesterday morning. It died on me and needed a reboot and sometimes a reset several times before, but yesterday neither reboot nor reset helped. The amount of stress and rage with which I reacted to it surprised even myself. Anyway, the modem went back to the store. Instead of giving me my money back or a new one, they decided to fix this one (why? why? it never works! every time some company takes some piece of hadware back to "fix it", it ends with them giving me a new one back), and let me borrow another one in the meanwhile. Of course theirs did not support Annex M. Worse, it didn't have a manual. "You just stick it into the wall and into the computer and it will work." - "I have a static IP and it needs to be configured." - "It's work anyway, just wait and see."
Well, did it work? Right... Luckily I had a manual of a similar modem, but even that wasn't of much help.
On top of that, gynecological unpleasantness. No, nothing dramatic or dangerous, just routine maintenance. The routine maintenance in this case involves removing a metal object from the cervix and sticking a new one up there. No fun.
On the brighter side of life:
A nice dinner with coworkers in a Greek place called Minos in Kamppi, and some beer afterwards.
Saw the new Rambo. Very violent, very therapeutic for a person who just had a major fight with her modem, and went for a beer with a friend afterwards, which was also fun.
The motherboard and video card that my parents sent me finally arrived, so can perform unnatural acts on my computer.
Nebula customer support rocks! They really helped me with the evil modem, so now I have the Net connection again.
Friday! Hurrah!
- the people who manufacture several slightly different kinds of hardware, and believe that the same manual suits all of them, when it clearly doesn't,
- the people who manufacture several slightly different kinds of hardware and never tell you which one of them you are holding in your hands (as in "this motherboard comes with either 10/100 Mb LAN or with gigabyte LAN. We are not gonna write it on the box, so take a wild guess."),
- the people who say "this motherboard works with all the processors of the XXX series", meaning "this motherboard works with all the processors of the XXX series manufactured up until now, and we are not gonna bother listing them",
- the people who make modems that appear to work in a routed mode with a static IP, and let you put that IP in the confs, but have no place in the confs for the netmask and the gateway. At least not anywhere findable.
Do I sound a bit stressed?
Saw some weird nightmares lately. One on them involved a small airplane, a huge dick with balls, and a number of palm trees.
Went karting with coworkers, stressed a bit about that in advance. It was even worse than I imagined but nothing acutely evil happened. I could never understand the fun of driving little carlike things when you can drive actual cars, and I feel uncomfortable in the open vehicles in general (note to my army of admirers: you won't impress me with a ride in a convertible, so don't even try). In addition to that the karts had small seats that heat up under you until you become seriously concerned about your ass becoming a smoked ham, horrible smell, weird steering wheel, and the helmets, while obviously necessary, were very unpleasant to wear. On the positive side: the thing constitutes a very efficient ass massage.
My modem croaked yesterday morning. It died on me and needed a reboot and sometimes a reset several times before, but yesterday neither reboot nor reset helped. The amount of stress and rage with which I reacted to it surprised even myself. Anyway, the modem went back to the store. Instead of giving me my money back or a new one, they decided to fix this one (why? why? it never works! every time some company takes some piece of hadware back to "fix it", it ends with them giving me a new one back), and let me borrow another one in the meanwhile. Of course theirs did not support Annex M. Worse, it didn't have a manual. "You just stick it into the wall and into the computer and it will work." - "I have a static IP and it needs to be configured." - "It's work anyway, just wait and see."
Well, did it work? Right... Luckily I had a manual of a similar modem, but even that wasn't of much help.
On top of that, gynecological unpleasantness. No, nothing dramatic or dangerous, just routine maintenance. The routine maintenance in this case involves removing a metal object from the cervix and sticking a new one up there. No fun.
On the brighter side of life:
A nice dinner with coworkers in a Greek place called Minos in Kamppi, and some beer afterwards.
Saw the new Rambo. Very violent, very therapeutic for a person who just had a major fight with her modem, and went for a beer with a friend afterwards, which was also fun.
The motherboard and video card that my parents sent me finally arrived, so can perform unnatural acts on my computer.
Nebula customer support rocks! They really helped me with the evil modem, so now I have the Net connection again.
Friday! Hurrah!
Friday, July 27, 2007
A new motherboard?
As I have read in way too many places lately, one cannot really go against one's own biology and basic instincts, and my biological computer upgrading clock is ticking very hard, and I keep having wet dreams about a new motherboard and lots of memory and a huge monitor.
Anyway: has any of Debian users who read my blog acquired a new AM2 motherboard recently, how much hassle has it been installing it, what to buy, and what not to buy?
(Yeah, I know, a smart person would have asked at some Debian forum. I might yet.)
Anyway: has any of Debian users who read my blog acquired a new AM2 motherboard recently, how much hassle has it been installing it, what to buy, and what not to buy?
(Yeah, I know, a smart person would have asked at some Debian forum. I might yet.)
Monday, May 14, 2007
I want resolution!
Why do all the monitor listings tend to list them by size, and I have to click every damn monitor to find out its resolution? Can't they list the damn things by resolution too?
I've been also wondering how come so many people managed to switch from CRT to LCD already. I am only consideing switching now, and probably not gonna do it till the fall, because decent resolutions are becoming affordable only now. How could one switch from 1600x1200 to a 1280x1024?
Also: is there anything particularly good about widescreen monitors, except that they fit widescreen movies?
I've been also wondering how come so many people managed to switch from CRT to LCD already. I am only consideing switching now, and probably not gonna do it till the fall, because decent resolutions are becoming affordable only now. How could one switch from 1600x1200 to a 1280x1024?
Also: is there anything particularly good about widescreen monitors, except that they fit widescreen movies?
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