December 2005 Archives

I finally had my first flight cancelled on me yesterday. I suppose given that I've been flying a few times a year for at least the past 8 years (even if it's only back and forth to Northern Ireland) I should consider myself lucky.

I arrived at Belfast City Airport at about 8am, for a 9:45am flight (the last time I flew from Belfast we hit really bad traffic, so we ended up overcompensating). On check in I discovered it was delayed by 15 minutes. Shortly after I'd made my way through security it was delayed by 45 minutes. Then they delayed it until midday. Then at 11:30 they said they'd have an announcement at midday. And then at 11:45 they cancelled it.

Now, I was flying from Belfast to Norwich. There's only one such flight a day. So I'm a bit stuck. And by the time I get to the front of the refunds queue they've filled up the flight today (Saturday), leaving me the option of a direct flight to Norwich on Sunday, or any other flight leaving Belfast City on Friday that they have seats on. So I go to London Gatwick, supposed to leave at 14:30. And it gets delayed by 45 minutes straight after I check in. Thankfully it does actually take off at 15:15 and I manage to get to England. On the wrong side of London for Norwich, but hey, the trains are running. I negotiate the Gatwick Express, get a tube to Liverpool Street and get on a train to Norwich. Which then gets delayed for 25 minutes because a train breaks down in front of it. Bah.

I finally get home just after 9pm, rather than the 11:30am or so I would have managed if my initial flight had taken off on time. The house is still in one piece, the plants haven't died, I have food again. Rar.

And I know this is small fry compared to American flight horror stories, or the potential problems we could have had when Uncle Steve lost our clothes en route to Brazil, but it's the first time I've had a major problem with flights.

(We'll ignore the fun I had when turning on my desktop machine and seeing "GRUB Read Error" displayed. Damn scanner had decided to frob the SCSI bus enough that the BIOS could boot grub but grub couldn't then see sda.)

So, the delightful Kathy bought me a Marks & Spencer USB Missile Launcher (unfortunately out of stock at present or I'd have linked directly to it. Try searching on eBay / Google to see what I mean.) Problem. WinXP/2k only drivers. That's no fun.

Plugged it in to my laptop (as you do). dmesg reports:

input: Tenx Nonstandard Devic as /class/input/input6
input: USB HID v1.10 Device [Tenx Nonstandard Devic] on usb-0000:00:1d.1-2
input: Tenx Nonstandard Devic as /class/input/input7
input: USB HID v1.10 Device [Tenx Nonstandard Devic] on usb-0000:00:1d.1-2

lsusb says:

Bus 002 Device 004: ID 1130:0202 Tenx Technology, Inc. 
Device Descriptor:
  bLength                18
  bDescriptorType         1
  bcdUSB               1.10
  bDeviceClass            0 (Defined at Interface level)
  bDeviceSubClass         0 
  bDeviceProtocol         0 
  bMaxPacketSize0         8
  idVendor           0x1130 Tenx Technology, Inc.
  idProduct          0x0202 
  bcdDevice            1.00
  iManufacturer           0 
  iProduct                2 
  iSerial                 0 
  bNumConfigurations      1
  Configuration Descriptor:
    bLength                 9
    bDescriptorType         2
    wTotalLength           59
    bNumInterfaces          2
    bConfigurationValue     1
    iConfiguration          0 
    bmAttributes         0x80
    MaxPower              100mA
    Interface Descriptor:
      bLength                 9
      bDescriptorType         4
      bInterfaceNumber        0
      bAlternateSetting       0
      bNumEndpoints           1
      bInterfaceClass         3 Human Interface Devices
      bInterfaceSubClass      0 No Subclass
      bInterfaceProtocol      0 None
      iInterface              0 
        HID Device Descriptor:
          bLength                 9
          bDescriptorType        33
          bcdHID               1.10
          bCountryCode            0 Not supported
          bNumDescriptors         1
          bDescriptorType        34 Report
          wDescriptorLength      43
         Report Descriptors: 
           ** UNAVAILABLE **
      Endpoint Descriptor:
        bLength                 7
        bDescriptorType         5
        bEndpointAddress     0x81  EP 1 IN
        bmAttributes            3
          Transfer Type            Interrupt
          Synch Type               None
          Usage Type               Data
        wMaxPacketSize     0x0008  1x 8 bytes
        bInterval               1
    Interface Descriptor:
      bLength                 9
      bDescriptorType         4
      bInterfaceNumber        1
      bAlternateSetting       0
      bNumEndpoints           1
      bInterfaceClass         3 Human Interface Devices
      bInterfaceSubClass      0 No Subclass
      bInterfaceProtocol      0 None
      iInterface              0 
        HID Device Descriptor:
          bLength                 9
          bDescriptorType        33
          bcdHID               1.10
          bCountryCode           33 US
          bNumDescriptors         1
          bDescriptorType        34 Report
          wDescriptorLength      23
         Report Descriptors: 
           ** UNAVAILABLE **
      Endpoint Descriptor:
        bLength                 7
        bDescriptorType         5
        bEndpointAddress     0x82  EP 2 IN
        bmAttributes            3
          Transfer Type            Interrupt
          Synch Type               None
          Usage Type               Data
        wMaxPacketSize     0x0008  1x 8 bytes
        bInterval               1

The Windows software appears to consist of TenxHID.dll (24k) and Missile_Launcher.exe (908k). TenxHID only exports DeviceIni, ReadBuffer and WriteBuffer AFAICT. Which implies the higher level stuff is done in the exe to me. I think it's a job for USBSnoop and a Windows box, but that'll have to wait for a few days until I get back to a WinXP box I can use to fiddle. Unless someone else manages to write a driver in the meantime. :)

I can't believe I did this, but:

You are Hulk

Hulk 70% Spider-Man 70% Iron Man 65% Supergirl 60% Catwoman 50% Green Lantern 45% The Flash 45% Superman 45% Robin 40% Wonder Woman 35% Batman 35%

You are a wanderer with amazing strength.

Click here to take the "Which Superhero are you?" quiz...

When I had a real job I used to hate having to iron shirts every week. While I'll occasionally wear one when I go out it's not something I'd choose to wear to code in, so it grated that I had to expend effort in order to be able to wear something I didn't really want to.

These days I'm a lazy layabout who largely works from home and I can wear what I like. However I still have to deal with socks. Now, at least I like wearing socks, but they're still a PITA. Pairing them up in particular. I think the problem is that almost all my socks are plain black and while you think that would make things easy it really doesn't. They're different shades of black for starters. Or different shapes. Or feel different. Or are lost for months and then suddenly turn up and the other half of the pair that kept annoying you out of the corner of your eye has suddenly disappeared. Gah.

I'm feeling somewhat stupid. I sat down tonight to have a look at writing a basic fire/flame demo thing under X (the sort of thing people used to write in 3 bytes of x86 assembly 10 years ago). See, I'd quite like a funky xdm/login thingy for my laptop, so random people who see me use it on the train think "Woah, cool". I'm sad like that. Anyway, my idea is a ring of fire with the login prompt in the middle. This seems simple. Except when I try to get involved with programming X.

Now, I'm not a graphics programmer by any stretch of the imagination. But all I want is a nice simple framebuffer I can store pixels of 24 bit colour into. Or 8 bits with a colourmap is fine too. If the functions for dealing with the colourmaps are decently documented. This isn't much to ask, is it?

Perhaps the issue was that I assumed Xlib would just provide me something that could do this. Or that I'd be able to find decent docs easily. Or that I had more than 2 braincells to rub together. But I've given up now. I really don't understand how to get Xlib to just let me XSetForeground to a 24 bit colour and then XDrawPoint. I tried to fight XAllocColor. I even accepted defeat and had a quick look for a simple X framebuffer library. No joy.

So, can someone point me at the right docs to inhale for this sort of thing? Or a really lightweight C library that'll make it all really easy?

Today I'm a cube. 3³ to be precise. It's probably the last time I'll be a number raised to itself; I'd like to reach 256, but can't see it happening.

If you're in or around Norwich I'll be in the Fat Cat from 7:30ish onwards. Do feel free to drop by.

Sometimes I love Perl. Thanks to Chris Ball, whose article on WWW::Mechanize I always seem to come back to for this sort of thing.

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

use Data::Dumper;
use HTML::TokeParser;
use WWW::Mechanize;

my $openid_server_url = 'https://the.earth.li/openid/';
my $openid_username = 'noodles';
my $openid_password = 'password';
my $openid_url = 'http://www.earth.li/~noodles/blog/';
my @ljusers = ('beccus', 'brrm', 'dpash', 'karen2205', 'lnr', 'padzor');

my $agent = WWW::Mechanize->new();
$agent->get($openid_server_url);
$agent->form(1);
$agent->field("username", $openid_username);
$agent->field("password", $openid_password);
$agent->click();

print "Logged into OpenID server.\n";

$agent->get('http://www.livejournal.com/openid/');
$agent->form(1);
$agent->field("openid_url", $openid_url);
$agent->click();

print "Logged into LiveJournal.\n";

foreach my $user (@ljusers) {
        print "Fetching feed for $user.\n";
        $agent->get('http://www.livejournal.com/users/'.$user.'/data/rss');

        open(RSSFILE, ">$user.xml");
        print RSSFILE $agent->content;
        close(RSSFILE);
}

I have a remote control doofer for my car, to lock/unlock the doors. Why is it, even if there are hundreds of miles between me and my car, that if I knock the buttons on it pulling my keys out of my pocket I worry I've accidently unlocked the car?

I currently use Google Reader to read most of the blogs I track. It seems to work in a way I like.

However I'd like to be able to aggregate in Livejournal using my OpenID so I can read friends-locked posts. I don't think it's appropriate to use a public service like Google or Bloglines for this, which means running something myself.

I've had a look around but not found anything that's close to Google Reader. I like just having all the posts in chronological order, not listed under each source feed. Most things I could find give you a sidebar of a tree for each feed and then you have to look at each feed in turn. I just want my content splurged at me goddamit! Planet does this, but I also want content I've read to go away by default, which Planet doesn't handle (being a generator of a static web page).

So, any suggestions? I'm using Firefox under Linux, but I'm not tied to an in browser solution (I've a feeling it would be easier to get my OpenID stuff working that way though). So far I've tried Sage and Wizz. I've also looked at Straw but not installed it as it looks a little unmaintained. Liferea looks like it could be an option, so I think I'll go play with that for the moment.

It seems everyone is talking SCMs these days, usually touting their favourite option while deriding everyone else's. (I exaggerate for effect.)

Years ago we mostly used CVS and were happy. Some people are still happy with it. I still have a bunch of code in it, though migrating it to something else is on my list. Why? Niceties like being able to rename a file. Or atomic changesets. Things that all the new breeds of options can do. For the tress I manage myself distributed working isn't a big issue, so they'll probably just get migrated to Subversion as the easiest option.

However I'm not really tied to any SCM. I've used at least Arch (tla), BitKeeper, ClearCase, CVS, Monotone, PVCS and Subversion for both checking out and committing files, and handful more to check out files from things I wanted to look at. The only one that is unusable is PVCS. The rest have all been fine for whatever I've used them for.

So, if I don't care about which SCM, why blog about them at all? Because I care about how they get used.

I'm a big fan of small granular commits with descriptive commit messages. Not huge big dumps of code with "check in new code" as the comment. Gah.

Take, for example, the Linux kernel. Commit messages are fairly descriptive there and if you have enough time you can read through the changelog since the last release and really know what's gone on. This is great. Also the changes are granular enough that if you hit a problem it's likely that you can narrow it down to a single commit that doesn't do a lot other than break things for you.

Not all projects I have been part of manage either of these. People often seem to view the SCM as a punishment, using it only under sufferance and as infrequently as possible, leading to large commits of many items at once. Which then means they don't see the advantages of it and are more likely to hit merge problems as the tree has changed under them. Meaning they end up hating it more and avoiding it as much as possible, making it all worse. Not good.

Or, you get people who'll commit alright, but without any sanity testing at all. Like, even a compile. What's the point? I know you can roll it back, but if you're not sure it works and haven't even compiled it, what the hell makes you think it's suitable for committing? Bah.

I can't see that my desired usage is that unreasonable. Am I missing something?

Kathy and I had a nice long weekend in Dublin this weekend past, celebrating 10 years of hell together. Was good, except for getting rained on lots on the Friday (solved by buying umbrellas) and Kathy starting the weekend with a cold and me finishing with one. Bah.

I realised it's been about 5 years since I was in Dublin itself, rather than just the airport. Various comments:

• The traffic lights still explode. This is fantastic and I think more places should do it. They sort of beep while waiting to go red (so a pedestrian can cross), then make an exploding noise and tick until going green again.
• It's very expensive. When we arrived we ordered room service as it was late and though the prices quite high. And then discovered that they weren't really that bad when compared against the normal cost of eating out. What gives? I'm sure it didn't used to be so bad. That was pre Euro - is that the difference?
• The Elephant & Castle still do the best chicken wings I've ever had.
• Ryanair are bastards. I'd bought a cup of coffee just before they started boarding and they wouldn't let me take it on. They mumbled some nonsense about turnaround times or something, but given you can buy coffee on the plane I think it's fairly clear they just object to losing the chance to sell you something.
• I'm not convinced Guinness in Dublin is any better than a good pint of Guinness in England. Maybe that's due to the fact it's all brewed in Dublin these days.

As I've previously said I bought a Toshiba Portégé R200 a few months ago. It's lovely and wonderful and makes my old laptop (a Compaq N200) look tiny, but is still quite small.

However I discovered it wouldn't hold charge. If I unplugged it and used it I'd quite happily get 3-4 hours use off the battery, but if I charged it up while off, then unplugged it (leaving it off) and didn't touch it for a couple of days it wouldn't power on and needed fully charged again. This is a bit of a bummer, but I hadn't got round to sorting it out as I wasn't finding it too inconvenient.

I decided I should really get it dealt with before I go back to my parents' for Christmas, so rang up Toshiba's repair line a few weeks ago. Told them what the problem was and they said they'd ring back in the morning to arrange a pickup time. Except they actually rang back that afternoon. It was too late for collection the next day, but they said they'd pick it up the following day in the afternoon. Also I wasn't to pack it or provide any of the accessories; just the bare laptop. Handy. Lo and behold the nice man from DHL turned up when Toshiba said he would, had a piece of paper with the right reference number on it (though in quite small print) and didn't want the laptop packed up as he had a suitable box already prepared.

Time passed and I heard nothing. I was getting a bit worried, but Tosh say it can take 5 working days and it hadn't been that long (and given the nature of the fault I guessed they'd need to charge and discharge to check). But it was a bit weird that they'd not asked me to do any of the stupid things you're normally asked to do. (Have you rebooted? Reinstalled? Repented?) Plus the laptop only has Linux on it, so I was worried they'd be freaked by that (though they'd been fine when I mentioned it on the phone).

It came to day 5 and I decided I'd ring them the following day. And then the nice man from DHL turned up with a big, well padded, box containing my laptop. At first glance it appeared to only contain my laptop, but when I opened up the laptop there was an A4 sheet saying that the battery had been replaced and the BIOS upgraded.

Since then the laptop has actually held charge, so it looks like they did the job.

So, congrats to Toshiba. More communication would have been nice, but it got fixed, you didn't wipe my Linux install (though I'd backed it up and removed any personal data anyway) and it was done within the period you claimed. I've not had to get a laptop fixed before, but iDunno hasn't had fun with Acer in the past, so I was prepared for the worst.