March 25, 2011
Alcyone's sick
Rats. Starting a couple of days ago, every once in a while Alcyone would start buzzing loudly and vibrating. It sounds just like a hard drive dying. To make it stop, I have to turn the computer off and then rap the case sharply a few times.
I didn't need this.
Alcyone has two 500GB drives, and I just now looked it up. They're ST9500420AS, which turns out to be Seagate. I just checked, and Newegg sells the same size drive from Toshiba for just $70. I trust Toshiba the most of all HD makers. I've never had a Toshiba drive fail on me.
So maybe it's about that time.
(By the way, all my computers get backed up daily by Deneb, the NAS. So data loss is not really an issue here.)
UPDATE: Just thought I'd mention that I'm working on another flash to run April 1, like I had last year. But if Alcyone dies on me, I might not be able to complete it. I ordered the replacement drives and they should arrive next week some time, but installation and recovery-from-backup might be challenging.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Computers at
11:39 AM
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I feel like I must have said this before: I know you name your computers after stars, but because some manga artists use star names for various characters, at least one is also named after a manga/anime character.
"Alcyone" is a villain in
Magic Knight Rayearth,
I name my systems after anime/manga worlds; the laptop is Seiren and my old P3 was Escaflowne; this machine is Cephiro. But I've run out of names I like; hopefully something will come along that grabs me by the time I get a new machine.
(The network is "Roshtaria" so that's already taken, worse luck.)
Posted by: atomic_fungus at March 25, 2011 01:11 PM (7IkA9)
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Well, the iPAQ is named "Uiharu" and the Slate 500 is named "Saten" and my WiFi hub is named "Railgun."
But if I buy another big computer, it'll get the name of another star. I might use Mintaka; I haven't used that one before.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at March 25, 2011 01:32 PM (+rSRq)
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I've always thought you should name one of your computers "Zubenelgenubi", just because it'd be fun to say.
Posted by: Wonderduck at March 25, 2011 03:53 PM (W8Men)
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I'm not sure I can figure out how to say that! Besides which, it's probably an obscenity in Turkish.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at March 25, 2011 05:29 PM (+rSRq)
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I used to set up test networks fairly frequently, coming up with 10 or so names with a theme without getting boring got to be a challenge. Several times I picked an anime series and named everything based on characters or places in that series, but that got to be too mundane, I'm sure there are a million machines out there named Rei, Haruhi, or Motoko. One of the last networks I did in that job had names like Hyde, Kryv, Febdash, Ablïarsec, Aptic...
Posted by: David at March 25, 2011 09:57 PM (xcVNq)
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When I worked at BBN, we were using Sun 3 workstations. (Sigh, 1982.) The sysadmin grew up in the Bay area, and all our computers were named after BART stops.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at March 25, 2011 10:31 PM (+rSRq)
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One could probably use the list of admirals from LoGH. I heard there were hundreds.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at March 25, 2011 11:10 PM (9KseV)
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Besides which, it's probably an obscenity in Turkish.You make it sound like that's a bad thing...
Posted by: Wonderduck at March 25, 2011 11:41 PM (W8Men)
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I started college at Clarkson University. The computers in the student labs had themes like the seven deadly sins, the seven dwarves, the Jetsons (I used Rastro quite a bit) and there was a lone Mac named "idared" because someone said you couldn't get it on a TCP/IP network.
Posted by: RickC at March 26, 2011 07:30 PM (VKVOz)
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In our labs at OSU, the original rule for themes was "something with at least a dozen items that would look good as screensavers on a black-and-white Sun monitor". Fish, trees, dinosaurs, musical instruments, etc.
Over time, we relaxed the rule, and added themes like "no" (shirt, shoes, service, parking, spitting, etc). The annoying new professor who had insisted on having one of our very few high-end graphics workstations in his office received the one named "clue".
-j
Posted by: J Greely at March 26, 2011 08:40 PM (7CyNp)
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J, which "O"? I went to Oregon State, but that was 72-75 and there weren't any networks back then.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at March 26, 2011 09:20 PM (+rSRq)
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Ohio State, Eighties; when I got hired, we were installing dozens of shiny new Sun 3/50 workstations. 4MB of RAM, and 1.5 MIPS!
-j
Posted by: J Greely at March 26, 2011 09:42 PM (7CyNp)
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March 20, 2011
Windows Upgrades
So, last night I used the "Windows Anytime" gizmo in the control panel and upgraded to Win 7 Pro.
It was painful, even though it didn't really have to download all that much. But it did have to download, and later I found out why. Microsoft just release Win 7 SP1, and the update server is getting hammered. I installed it last night and this morning.
It was taking forever, last night, and I got to the point where I couldn't keep my eyes open. So I went to bed, and this morning I pressed the "restart now" button so the installation could finish.
Saten is downloading it now. It ran blitz-quick until it got to 31% downloaded, and then stalled. Ten minutes later it's up to 33%. It's 9:00 now and I figure it'll finish about noon at the rate it's going.
Probably worth getting, y'all, but definitely worth waiting a bit longer.
UPDATE: 9:30, and 96% downloaded! Ahead of schedule!
UPDATE: 10:00 and all's well! After an hour of downloading and 20 minutes of installation. Whew!
UPDATE: I spoke too soon. It took 15 minutes for the restart.
UPDATE: By the way, SP1 installs .NET, and a program called "mscorsvw.exe" runs fully CPU bound in the background. To make it stop, you have to do this afterwards.
Open a command prompt with administrator privilege.
cd C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727
ngen.exe executequeueditems
(Entering that command on the Slate seemed daunting, so I created a .bat file and ran that.)
UPDATE: I should mention that the ngen takes a long time, especially if you only have a single CPU, because while it's running, mscorsvw continues to run in the background trying to suck CPU cycles. The Slate has a single CPU but it's hyperthreaded, so ngen got one thread and mscorsvw got the other. Even so, it took something like 20 minutes to finish.
Alcyone is a quad-core system, and its CPUs are a lot faster, so it only took about five minutes.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Computers at
07:56 AM
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1
I'm still on Vista. Sometime in the next week or three I'm planning on backing everything up and seeing how the upgrade process goes. I'd do a clean install, but I don't really fancy reinstalling 748 applications...
Posted by: Pixy Misa at March 20, 2011 10:52 AM (PiXy!)
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I did the Vista-to-Win7 upgrade (on my previous machine, now retired due to a hardware faillure) and it was easy and clean. Backing up first is definitely wise, but I don't think you need to worry.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at March 20, 2011 11:05 AM (+rSRq)
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Enh. I'm still on XP. Mostly. Misaki is still on 2000. I do have XP on the laptop, and a copy of Win 7 OEM that I'm going to install at some point on Lyar.
Posted by: ubu at March 20, 2011 11:18 AM (GfCSm)
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March 19, 2011
DRM: "Software Defender"
Am I willing to install "Software Defender" on my computer?
That's required in order to play Cosplay Fetish Academy. But there have been so many horror stories about DRM packages totally fucking up computers that I'm a bit leery. Anyone know anything about this one?
Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Computers at
07:02 PM
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I might do it, inside a VM.
Posted by: RickC at March 19, 2011 07:47 PM (VKVOz)
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I have a physical victim machine for it. Not handy with VMs when Windows is involved.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at March 19, 2011 07:59 PM (9KseV)
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Pete, have you used this particular DRM package? Or are you speaking generically?
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at March 19, 2011 08:12 PM (+rSRq)
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Sorry for the noise. I do not know anything about Software Defender specifically.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at March 19, 2011 08:52 PM (9KseV)
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I wonder whether I could do this with a VM? I'd have to upgrade to Win 7 Pro, though. Way I understood it, there's a VM package that comes with Win 7 Pro, isn't there? Or Win 7 Ultimate, maybe? I heard that it was one of the features included in the more expensive versions. Anyone know about that?
Time to hit the Microsoft site and see if I can figure that out.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at March 19, 2011 10:01 PM (+rSRq)
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at March 19, 2011 10:04 PM (+rSRq)
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Actually, Virtual PC doesn't need Win7 Pro, I think--but it doesn't come with the client XP image, so you'd need an extra XP license floatign around you weren't already using. Windows XP Mode is what you're thinking of, which does require Pro.
The interesting thing about XP Mode (in addition to the fact that there's a free license for XP) is that when you install an app inside the VM, you can run it and have it appear on your Win7 desktop, which,. AFAIK, you can't do with regular Virtual PC. I use XP Mode at work for a couple of 16-bit apps that won't run under 64-bit Windows.
Actually, now I'm not sure about the requirement, because if you go to the download page, it lists Win7 Home Premium as an available OS.
Posted by: RickC at March 19, 2011 10:46 PM (VKVOz)
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Ok, this is fairly stupid. XP Mode will download and install on Home Premium, and then when you try to run it, it will tell you you are not allowed to run it on Home Prem. That's pretty stupid.
Like I said, Virtual PC (without XP Mode) will work on Home Prem, but then you have to install XP yourself in the virtual machine, so you need a license.
Since you've mentioned you already bought Pro on another thread, using it and XP Mode (if you're going to play with virtual machines) is a better idea anyway.
Posted by: RickC at March 20, 2011 03:27 PM (VKVOz)
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Obviously there's no technical reason for such a restriction. They're doing it for product differentiation reasons -- so that you have to pay more to get more.
I don't really see anything wrong with that, myself.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at March 20, 2011 03:53 PM (+rSRq)
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Some product differentiation is crazy (like Intel's recent efforts), but XP Mode is quite legitimately a "pro" feature - it's designed specifically for running legacy apps that haven't migrated past XP, so that Microsoft can sell Windows 7 into the enterprise market.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at March 21, 2011 12:25 AM (PiXy!)
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I am not complaining about them limiting it to Pro and up. I am complaining about them letting you download and install it on a version of Windows on which it will then not run. That's not very nice.
Posted by: RickC at March 21, 2011 10:01 AM (OtZl8)
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February 26, 2011
(Relatively) new CCCP version
I've been having trouble with Zoom Player, especially when watching 1080p shows. If I skip around, sometimes it would take several seconds for the video to start playing, even though the sound was running.
And once in a while when I pause playback, upon continuing play the sound would be gone, and wouldn't come back. I'd have to stop playing entirely and reload the video file.
Today, just for the hell of it, I decided to see if there was a new version of the Combined Community Codec Pack, or "CCCP". (And yeah, their logo is a hammer and sickle, which I think is actually pretty cool.) And it turns out there was a new version of it last October.
So I downloaded and installed it, and now playback works fine. Video picks up and plays immediately after I jump around, and sound doesn't die on pauses.
UPDATE: Meanwhile, I really wish Victorique would finish ep 8 of Gosick. I'm having to avoid writeups on other people's blogs, for fear of spoilers. But from what I've seen, some people liked it and some despised it. It finishes off the current plot arc, and the question is whether that got botched. My bet is "mostly yes", but I won't know until I can watch it.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Computers at
03:09 PM
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I download the Insurgent CCCP codex (01-01-11) and it does absolutely nothing other than trying to register suffix. Re-installed the 10-10-10 version...
Posted by: BigFire at February 28, 2011 01:27 PM (Kwn4z)
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I thought Insurgent was just a debug tool.
-j
Posted by: J Greely at February 28, 2011 02:01 PM (fpXGN)
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Thanks for pointing to this. I've been running Matroshka for the longest time or maybe K-lite. Even though I kept Media Player Classic up to date, I was having problems. I haven't had much chance to WATCH a lot of stuff with all the overtime I've had lately, but what I have definitely seems to run better.
I do wonder if, since I have a 64 bit processor but 32 bit XP, if 64 bit codecs are usable at all.
Posted by: Mauser at March 05, 2011 05:58 PM (cZPoz)
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If you're running a 32-bit operating system, then the answer is "no". It cannot run any 64-bit software at all, no matter what it is.
But I believe the question is moot, because I don't think there are any 64-bit codecs. All the ones in the CCCP are 32-bit.
Fortunately for me, and people like me who are running Win7-64, 32-bit software (including 32-bit codecs) work fine. They're just not as fast as they could be if they were 64-bit.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at March 05, 2011 09:08 PM (+rSRq)
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February 20, 2011
How to do this?
The problem: you have a directory full of ".as" files, which are pure text. (They're Flash actionscript.) You need to find the one that contains a certain text string, which might include kanji or might be normal roman letters. It could even be just a number. (I can live without being able to search for Japanese text, but it would be nice to have.)
How do you search them to find that one?
In XP, Windows Search could search the contents of files as well as the filenames, but in Win7 I can't find any way to do that. Is there some other utility available with the OS which can do it? Or is there some utility I can download which will do it?
This is a job for grep! Except that I don't know where to find that, either. (I used to have those for Win, but that was about four computers ago and I don't know whether I have backups going that back that far.)
UPDATE: Here's what doesn't work: Organize -> folder and search options -> Search -> Always search file names and contents
It seems that Windows search doesn't recognize .as as a text file extension, so it doesn't search inside them even if you tell it to.
And I do have indexing enabled, and this directory is indexed. Doesn't help.
UPDATE: I found my archive for Arcturus, the HP workstation, and I didn't backup that particular directory. Rats.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Computers at
11:39 AM
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Erk. Is this a solicitation for advice, or just a rant?
Windows search
is one of the most spectacularly useless things in the entire OS, right up there with "diagnose network problem."
Posted by: Douglas Oosting at February 20, 2011 11:50 AM (N9Lwt)
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I use wingrep (wingrep.com) for this kind of thing. I'm not certain it supports kanji searches, but it should give you what you're looking for.
Posted by: bkw at February 20, 2011 11:50 AM (34O+x)
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OK, I'll give WinGrep a try!
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at February 20, 2011 12:03 PM (+rSRq)
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Well, it works, but man is that a clumsy interface. Anyone got anything better?
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at February 20, 2011 12:14 PM (+rSRq)
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Cygwin runs a unix shell on top of windows, gives you all the commands you'd expect.
Notepad++, as well as being an excellent mutli-doc editor, has a 'search in files' function that is very robust.
Both of these are GPL freeware...and *should* be unicode-aware. (I've never had to search for kanji, so I can't speak to that)
HTH.
Posted by: Douglas Oosting at February 20, 2011 12:51 PM (N9Lwt)
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Real grep (also awk, diff, tar, etc) is available as part of the
gnuwin32 packages. Searching for kanji
works with these tools, but the standard cmd.exe window has display and encoding issues. One workaround is to put the kanji you're searching for into a file and then pass that to grep with the -f option.
(this is not like the pseudo-Unix Cygwin environment; they're just standard Windows command-line tools in a normal shell, which is much easier on the brain)
-j
Posted by: J Greely at February 20, 2011 12:55 PM (2XtN5)
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JGreely(this wrote:
Unless the enemy has studied his Agrippa...which...no, wait, wrong context. If one has already climbed the learning curve of cryptic commands and sh behavior, it's easier. All about the tool that works best for the user!
Posted by: Douglas Oosting at February 20, 2011 01:07 PM (N9Lwt)
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JGreely wrote:(this is not like the pseudo-Unix Cygwin environment; they're just
standard Windows command-line tools in a normal shell, which is much
easier on the brain)
Unless the enemy has studied his Agrippa...which...no, wait, wrong context. If one has already climbed the learning curve of cryptic commands and sh behavior, it's easier. All about the tool that works best for the user!
Also, PIMF. *sighs*
Posted by: Douglas Oosting at February 20, 2011 01:08 PM (N9Lwt)
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When someone says "this is a job for grep!", it's safe to assume Knowledge Of The Hidden Mysteries.
Also, Cygwin is equal parts evil and suck, and has no place on a modern Windows box.
-j
Posted by: J Greely at February 20, 2011 02:16 PM (2XtN5)
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At Tektronix, I started using Unix in 1978, on a PDP-11/45. We were running what was known as "V7", which means version 1.7. This was the era in which saying "Berkeley mods" to another user of Unix resulted in a knowing nod. (And yeah, we installed Berkeley mods.)
When I lived in Boston, late 1980's, my internet provider was "Software Tool and Die", and what they ran was Unix. You purchased the right to access their system and use it.
I also used Unix on Sun 3 workstations about 1985 when I worked at BBN.
Don't lecture me about Hidden Mysteries; I was doing them likely before you were born. (Damned kids.)
Anyway, a lot of my objections to WinGrep was the awfulness of using its menus to find the directory. When I posted that I hadn't noticed that they tossed in a right-click menu choice, which drastically improves the usability. It does what I need it to do, so I think I'll stick with it.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at February 20, 2011 03:52 PM (+rSRq)
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To the extent that I would have trouble with the Hidden Mysteries these days it would mostly be due to brain decay. I just don't think as well now as I once did.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at February 20, 2011 03:58 PM (+rSRq)
Posted by: metaphysician at February 20, 2011 04:20 PM (hD30M)
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If we told you, we'd have to kill you.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at February 20, 2011 04:27 PM (+rSRq)
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Windows has an equivalent to grep built in, findstr.
findstr /i "string" *.as
/i is "ignore case" and there are a bunch of other parameters. If you want to search for a string, you use /c:"search these words", or else it will search for any of search, these, or words.
Posted by: RickC at February 20, 2011 06:08 PM (YB9ey)
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Rick, how much you want to bet it only works on file extensions that Microsoft knows are text?
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at February 20, 2011 06:57 PM (+rSRq)
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well, I don't know what I did wrong, but it just hung. No CPU usage, no response, no nothing until I hit Control-C. I rate that one a fail. Anyway, WinGrep already solved the problem, so I don't need any more suggestions.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at February 20, 2011 07:00 PM (+rSRq)
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"Rick, how much you want to bet it only works on file extensions that Microsoft knows are text?"
Nothing at all--I literally use it all the time. It's entirely unrelated to Windows Search, so it doesn't have that limitation.
It's NOT a grep clone, however--the syntax is different, and it won't give you a nice progress bar or anything, so if it's scanning thousands of files, or a large amount of data or whatever, it will certainly APPEAR to hang.
Posted by: RickC at February 20, 2011 07:16 PM (YB9ey)
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It was in a directory with only ten files, and the CPU use meter showed 2%, which is what it shows when the system is idle.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at February 20, 2011 07:42 PM (+rSRq)
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I bet it was waiting for input. I didn't specify any file names, and I bet it was waiting for STDIN.
But I don't really care enough to do any more experimenting with it.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at February 20, 2011 08:03 PM (+rSRq)
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at February 20, 2011 11:04 PM (+rSRq)
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But be warned: as soon as you do it, the indexing service kicks in and indexes all of your hard drives -- and the damned window can't be minimized. (I've got it mostly slid off the screen just to get it out of the way, and I suspect I'll have to leave my computer turned on all night.)
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at February 20, 2011 11:16 PM (+rSRq)
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10^100 Desktop is often effective. The downside is obvious.I'll check out findstr, with thanks.
Posted by: amarigatachi at February 21, 2011 04:15 AM (smT8Q)
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Steven, yeah, if you didn't specify any file names, it was waiting for a list of them on stdin, which IIRC is the same thing grep does. Glad you found a workable solution.
Posted by: RickC at February 21, 2011 02:11 PM (NatD7)
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Just thought I'd mention: this morning Security Essentials informed me that I was infected with an adware package called "Win32/Opencandy". I think that it might have been a hidden gift from when I installed WinGrep yesterday afternoon.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at February 21, 2011 02:18 PM (+rSRq)
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Actually, it looks like it was MediaInfo that did that. I told Security Essentials to do a full scan, which took about three hours.
MediaInfo still seems to work, which is nice.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at February 21, 2011 07:22 PM (+rSRq)
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Yeah, I installed MIRC (IRC client) the other day and got warning about the same thing. IIRC it was a low risk item.
Posted by: RickC at February 22, 2011 04:53 PM (YB9ey)
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February 06, 2011
Flash upgrade
I just bought the upgrade to Flash 11 AKA Flash CS5, and downloaded it and installed it.
Adobe shuuure wants me to install the Google browser toolbar, you know that? What with various downloads (the upgrade, patches, and so on) I had to tell the installer three times that I didn't want the damned thing, even though it was free (and "could easily be uninstalled later" as I was assured).
There are a lot of people out there using it, but I don't want anything to do with it.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Computers at
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Huh. I installed the CS5 Design Suite recently and it didn't try anything like that.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at February 07, 2011 01:53 PM (PiXy!)
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The main upgrade didn't do that, and neither did the humongous patch job when I told it to check for updates.
But I also wanted to see if there was a new version of the Flash runtime, and that's the thing that kept nagging me to install the Google command bar.
By the way, they seem to have cleaned up a bunch of stuff that really caused me trouble. Flash 10 kept locking up on me, or outright dying. Sometimes saving an FLA file would take minutes -- and this is not a slow computer. Those same files seem to save really fast with Flash 11, at least based on this morning's efforts.
I assume there are new features, too, but I doubt I'll even bother to see what they are. I got the upgrade because I hoped for bug fixes, and they do seem to have done that.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at February 07, 2011 03:04 PM (+rSRq)
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Oh yeah, the Flash runtime installer is an evil piece of crap. We hates it.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at February 07, 2011 04:42 PM (PiXy!)
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All of a sudden, the rotation picture is showing in the top page (instead of the "no bandwidth theft" sign). Is that because of the new upgrades?
Posted by: muon at February 07, 2011 08:18 PM (JXm2R)
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It's always shown up there, unless you use a bogus URL to access this site.
Access to the top rotation picture is controlled by .htaccess here on my server, based on the referer. If you access this site as anything other than chizumatic.mee.nu then you'll get the bandwidth theft image.
For instance, if you use www.chizumatic.mee.nu it won't work.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at February 07, 2011 08:32 PM (+rSRq)
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The Big Game
I really couldn't care less about the Superbowl, but it gives me an excuse to use Saten for something. I've got Saten connected to the NFL's web site, where there's a flash animation which shows the state of the game in real time. It's actually pretty cool, showing each play as a colored bar on graphic of a football field.
If this isn't the ultimate hyper-geek way to "watch" a football game, I don't want to know what is.
And Green Bay is kicking Pittsburgh's butt. I didn't think that Green Bay had been competitive since the days of Vince Lombardi. I wonder what happened?
...You know? I watched the very first Super Bowl with my dad. (He was a Green Bay fan. My team was the Los Angeles Rams.)
UPDATE: Nyaahaahaa! And a person with an iPad couldn't do this because they can't run flash!!!
UPDATE: Well, as best I can tell it's turning out to be a pretty good game. Too many SuperBowls have turned out to be mismatches.
Pittsburgh started slow, but they seem to have come out for the second half breathing fire. But Green Bay's defense isn't rolling over dead, and it looks like Green Bay's offense still has some drive left.
UPDATE: Looks like both team's defenses have got their teeth in it now. Neither offense seems able to do anything.
UPDATE: I didn't know the NFL permitted 2-point conversions. Can't say I'm surprised that Pittsburgh tried it. Now they can tie the game up with just a field goal.
UPDATE: Gonna be an exciting ending. 2:10 to go, Pittsburg is behind by six, and they have the ball. If they make a touchdown and get the extra point, they lose. If they get a touchdown and miss the extra point, we go into overtime. And if they don't, then they drown their sorrow in the locker room after the game.
UPDATE: And in the end Green Bay's defense was just too tough. Congratulations to Green Bay for a hard fought game. And to Pittsburgh. How many Superbowls have we had where the game was still in doubt during the last two minutes? Not all that many.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Computers at
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2-point conversions were put in over a decade ago, in response to too many people asking the sensible question of how the NFL was the *only* level of play not to have it. They don't get used very often, of course, because they *are* riskier. I'd say, all in all, it was a very appropriate and fair addition to the game. The current incarnation of Instant Replay is based partly on the college version, and I think works about as well as replay can be made to work in the sport.
Speaking of iPads... the Commercial Bowl has been somewhat lackluster for most of a decade, but there were a few decent ones, in particular a Motorola ad that deliberately took Apple's old 1984 ad and slapped them in the face with it, while selling a new Android-based tablet. I laughed my head off as soon as I caught on to what they were doing.
Posted by: BigD at February 06, 2011 11:31 PM (LjWr8)
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Steeler's resurgence in the second half can be attributed to Packers loosing some of their best defensive players to injury. Steelers still lost the game.
Posted by: BigFire at February 07, 2011 11:22 AM (jSRcl)
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February 05, 2011
Snore...
This is dull, but I ain't gotta else to say.
This morning my torrent machine was at a standstill. The traffic graph showed it running 100% right up to maybe 2:00 AM, and then shutting down completely. No torrents running at all.
In fact, I couldn't even do a tracert to any place, even though that worked normally on the other computer.
Oddly enough, when I turned on WiFi on the torrent machine, it was able to access the net normally. So I took a look at the TCP/IP settings for the ethernet interface, and it was no longer set to use the Qube as a gateway.
So once that got fixed, it was back online just like normal. I have no idea why it got shut off, but my suspicion is that IP lease ran out and the DHCP server on Deneb didn't provide the right information.
But I looked at it, and the DHCP server is set up properly. So I'm confused.
IP leases currently run out weekly. Next Saturday it'll be interesting to see if the torrent machine falls to its knees again. Or to see if either of the others do before then.
Meanwhile, it occurred to me today that I never fully cycled Saten's battery. When I get a new device with a lithium battery in it, I like to run the battery through a full charge/discharge/charge cycle once. I got told one time that it would make the battery work better.
With older battery technologies you had to do that on a regular basis, but with lithium batteries once is enough.
And even if it's not helpful, it certainly won't hurt anything. And I'm also curious to see how long it lasts. I changed the power settings to leave everything running full forever on batteries, and I've got a flash animation running that's keeping the CPU at about 40%. It's been 40 minutes so far, and the battery shows 92% full, which isn't too bad.
UPDATE: After 3 hours, it still says 33%, which is not too bad. Under real use it would probably last even longer, because normal use doesn't load the CPU like this.
UPDATE: Just shy of 4 hours when I got the 10% warning and decided to bail.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Computers at
05:02 PM
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January 30, 2011
Saten -- we got subtitles!
Zoom Player installed easily, and it shows subtitles. So now I have something I can use while laying in bed to watch fansubs.
Though I probably won't do much of it. It's more of a "I gotta make this work" thing, like getting fansubs to run on Uiharu, which I've then never used.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Computers at
08:10 PM
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January 29, 2011
Saten -- connecting to Deneb!
Saten, the HP Slate, can see Alcyone and Arcturus, the two computers, but it didn't see Deneb, the Windows Home Server. Connector was able to see Deneb, but I couldn't open it as a file server (or to access fansubs).
Tonight I figured out why: I hadn't updated the "hosts" file. That's in Windows\system32\drivers\etc and it needed a line with Deneb's IP.
And now this means I can watch fansubs on Saten by wireless.
I wonder if Uiharu, the iPaq, has a hosts file?
UPDATE: If there is, I'll never find it. No file search.
UPDATE: And for my next trick I'll figure out why mplayerc shows subtitles on Alcyone but not on Saten, when playing exactly the same file.
Or maybe I'll have to install zoom player on Saten.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Computers at
08:27 PM
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Try this (found by a quick google for "hosts file windows ce") http://www.1800pocketpc.com/2008/10/10/hosts-file-editor-for-windows-mobile.html
Posted by: RickC at January 30, 2011 08:53 AM (YB9ey)
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