Firefox: In page "Bookmark" tip

When scrolling through a long web page, you sometimes need to refer back to an earlier part of the page. This would entail scrolling back up and visually searching for the reference.

Firefox allows you to enable "cursor key navigation", or "allow selection using the keyboard" in FF 2.0 and 1.5 respectively. Essentially this just means that you have a normal text cursor that you can use in text to cursor around and select text using normal keyboard selection keystrokes (like shift-cursordown will highlight a line).

However, you can also use this as a sort of bookmarking facility. Click the mouse on the text where you want to refer back to, and a blinking cursor will appear.

Now scroll down to read the remainder of the document. If you need to get back to the point where you left the cursor, just hit left or right arrow. All this does is move the cursor you left behind left or right, but ff will also jump back to that position to show you it moving!

Not Quite so Pedestrian

This is the first, and potentially last, in a series about the ways of Australia. This is so that visitors to this interesting country can be prepared...

In some places in Australia there are a different kind of pedestrian crossing. These are crossings where pedestrians give way to vehicles. That's right. You stand at the side of the pedestrian crossing and wait there until there are no cars, and then you can cross.

Now the first thing you might wonder is, "well how is that different to any other stretch of road? What makes it a pedestrian crossing?".

Well first of all the road is raised slightly. This is primarily to catch out newcomers, hence this post. The crossing are signposted of course, with the rules stating you should wait, but most people already know how a crossing works.

So they will stand at the side and expect the cars to slow and let them cross. The great thing about this system is that the cars do slow, but because there is a raised patch of road. This suggests to the unwary that the car intends to stop, and so they step out. And get run down.

It is even better when you are a driver new to a town where these crossings are. Because you will already know that pedestrians get right of way on a pedestrian crossing - hence the name. So you will approach, see people are getting ready to cross, and slow down to stop.

Of course, those people standing there will now believe that you are simply lying in wait. That your intention is to encourage them to cross so that you get pile into them. So you end up with a kind of Mexican stand off until someone gives in.

It is inspirational.

Windows Symbolic Links

Just found out about "junctions" which is NTFS speak for linux style symbolic links.

There is always a battle with Windows with getting stuff installed where you want it.

Documents and Settings, and Program Files, default to the system partition. This is exactly where they shouldn't be. The system should be on the system partition, and the rest of your stuff should be elsewhere, partitioned off sensibly.

And where is the "advanced" button in Windows to specify where you want the default locations? Doesn't exist. The best you can do is modify the setup.inf on the cd - which means burning it of course. I must do this at some point, but several installs later I cannot be bothered fixing something that should not be broken.

So after each install it is a case of moving stuff and hacking the registry to make it all work. And does it all work? No. Moving Documents and Setting is *hard*. My last install I caved. 2004 was my last rant about it. So right now it is sitting on the system partition.

But now I find that auto-updates don't work. And this is because I have moved Program Files, along with the contents, and fixed the registry so it knows. And yet Windows Update insists that it cannot do what it has to because it has moved. Why? WHY?

So what if there was something like symbolic links for Windows? Then you can move stuff wherever you like and just link it, and windows will think everything is where it is "supposed" to be.

Well, of course, there is. Called "junctions". There is a utility over at sysinternals to allow you to create them, and it works a treat.

I consider this a compromise rather than a solution.

Optical Illusion as Web Design Technique

Look at this website. It is an Australian company that sells and ERP product. Whatever.

But look at the way the graphic above the main menu makes the menu itself look as though it is thicker at one end rather than the other.

I imagine this was entirely unintentional by the company web designers, and the end result looks a bit disconcerting.

However, it did lead me to wonder if there might be some room for using optical illusions to create subtle design elements on a web page.

I'll add it to my list of millions of things to consider...

Firefox Proxy - Yahoo.com

I have firefox configured to use my proxy server. I do this using Foxyproxy.

I have just discovered that if my proxy server is out of commisssion, Firefox attempts to make a connection to yahoo.com on port 65535.

Now why would this be?

Technocrati

Technorati Profile

Jalapeno

Most food can be thought of as a jalapeno delivery system. However, there are some food types that are not suited to being a vehicle for jalapeno consumption.

It is quite likely that these foodstuffs are not good for you.

Compiz XGL

This took a bit of getting going, but it works now. This is on Ubuntu on a laptop with an ATI X600 onboard.

The error I was getting referred to "Support for non power of two textures missing"

This suggests that the driver I am using cannot handle anything other than square textures, and googling showed that I should be using the fglrx driver rather than the standard ati driver.

Thats great, but I was already using the fglrx driver, so something else must be afoot. I tried a bunch of things, even AIXGL, but couldn't get passed this error - which was coming from compiz.

So I gave up and went back to X vanilla. But back in X I found that ordinary GL apps were running slow - max 5 fps.

That is when I discovered that dri - direct rendering - wasn't being loaded. So no 3D acceleration. And it was simple enough, the composite option was enabled in xorg.conf:

Section "Extensions"
Option "Composite" "Enable"
EndSection

Composite cannot coexist with dri - and once disabled, GL apps sped up. glxgears went from 100 fps (which I actually thought wasn't a problem - that is a high frame rate in the scheme of things) to 1400 fps.

So I fired up XGL again, and bam, my windows are now wobbling around my cubic desktop just like they should.

I hope someone else lands here and this helps....

Wired? Forget it.

Okay, it is a little bit disappointing - the progress that we are seeing today with technology. For example, there are no flying cars; manned space travel is... not exactly progressing. We don't have foldaway screens, we don't have a decent method of inputing data into handheld device. Batteries are rubbish; mobile data seems to be as good now as wide data was two decades ago. In some areas it is as good now as it has ever been - absent.

So it would be great if the technologists would pull their finger out and get some these things working. Working like all the technologies we currently take the granted. However, I would almost prefer that every single person currently working on a technology project would stop. And they wouldall get together and solve the one problem that plagues technology today.

Wires. One of the main problems in overcoming the wires problem is the fact that batteries don't work very well. It makes Bluetooth as a wireless solution - well - crap. However, I am not necesserily saying that the solution to the problem of wiress necessarily has to be wireless - it could be more intelligent wires. Wires that whatever you do, can't tangle up with themselves and other wires. Memory metal may be.

Just some solution where I can put my headphones on, take them off and put them in my pocket. And when I take them back out of my pocket, it doesn't take several hours to untangle before I can use them again.

We've achieved many things, as a species, but we have had wires for many decades and been untangling them and tripping over them for all of that time. And it needs to end.

Save the Sharks - for now

New Scientist reports that the Cronulla Fisheries Centre in New South Wales has a new plan to save the endangered Grey Nurse Shark.

Grey Nurse Sharks start with around 40 embryos per pregnancy. However the embryos have a tendency to eat each other in the womb, meaning that only a couple make it to term.

CFC are building a series of artificial uterus' so that each embryo can be removed from the mother and brought to term. "No eating your brothers and sisters now!"

Ok.. this sounds like a good plan on the face of it - except for a couple of things. An artificial uterus? Pregnancies are hard to pull off even using the original equipment, so it will be interesting to see how successful an artificial womb is.

But aside from that, nature rarely does things without reason. Not mindful reason of course, but billions years of trial and error reason. Forty embryos are fertilised each with the capability of coming to term, so what is the evolutionary benefit of wasting this energy in a cannabalistic feeding frenzy?

Nutrition? Why convert energy into an embryonic shark only to then use it as a food source? Efficiencies are lost in this process.

Many animals "stress test" embryos for suitability before allowing them coming to term. Even in humans as many as one in three embryos don't make it. It would seem that the most likely explanation what is happening is that the world that these sharks will be entering is a harsh one, particularly when they are young, and this process helps weed out all but the strongest of the pups to be - those with that have the greatest edge.

So while interfering with this process may increase the quantity of sharks born, surely the quality will be diminished.

These sharks are near extinct, so while the idea of bringing as many into the world as possible would seem a good strategy, the consequences of releasing so many sharks that would not normally be brought into the world could have longer term detrimental effects - the gene pool quality is reduced and this would surely have an impact on the long term survivability of the species.

It's getting hot in here

The Register reports that CO2 levels are at their highest ever in nearly a million years:

Ice cores reveal historic heights of CO2

Deep ice cores from Antarctica reveal there is more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere today than at any time in the last 800,000 years.

The data comes from analysis of tiny air bubbles buried 3.2km down in the Antarctic ice sheets. These provide a record of the ancient atmosphere and give insight into how climate was affected by CO2 levels in the past.

I am sure there will be those that come out and say this could still be a natural cycle and human activity isn't the cause of the "hockey stick" hike in all things warm.

But my question is this: "So what?"

Take away the causative and the problem still remains. If it does turn out that humans are not the cause of the changes in our environment that are inevitably leading to climate catastrophe, does that mean that we should sit by and do nothing and let it all happen?

It has been a while since humans have accepted what nature has to offer, and not to meddle, so this would be a refreshing change. But what would be the outcome? C02 rises, and the temperature increases. Greenland melts. The sea rises - perhaps by 6.5 meters. Historically, severe climate change always occurs in response to high CO2 levels.

And billions of people lose the means to survive.

Clearly something would need to be done to avoid this no matter what the cause is. And the first thing to do to reduce the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is to stop dumping more of it in there - ie cut emissions, and to stop removing the planets capability to sink the carbon that is there. By not chopping down the plantlife that achieves this.

Get on with it.

Please Start Again

I can't help it; I want her to start smoking again.

On TV in this neck of the woods is a advertising campaign for a smoking preventative. A lozenge or gum or patch or knitting needles or something.

It is presenting in the form of a video blog of a woman's successful battle against cigarette cravings. And somehow they are the most irritating they could possibly be. Of course she is happy about cigarettes not getting the best of her. And her kids are supportive. And the story about visiting her two pack a day mother with all its mental imagery is heart warming. In the most opposite sense of the phrase.

So I want her to start smoking again. So the ads will go away. So she will stop her 2am musings on the plight she is overcoming.

But K had an extra insightful insight... There is another way to stop her - and that is if everyone stops smoking. If everyone stops smoking, then there would no need for nicotine supplements, and then no need for these ads.

For a moment I wondered if this was the intent of the ad. But it isn't being run by an anti-smoking company, it is a company that makes products for smokers to help them stop. Except of course, these companies wouldn't want people to actually stop smoking, because their market would evaporate like so much smoke in the wind.

So I can only conclude that this ad is serving two simultaneous goals. To raise awareness of their product line, and also to annoy reformed smokers to the point that they take up smoking in desperation after seeing the advert, and hence need their products again.

Zencore Takedown II

An interesting sequence of events - and the moral of the story (always best up front) is: If you use a DNS host, do not use one of the domains they host for you for the email address you register with.

I use 123-reg.co.uk, who are based in the UK. I am in Australia. My website is hosted in Florida I think. So cogent in Florida got their routing mixed up and the IP address my sites are on went dark. Cogent apparently were going to take their time fixing the problem, so my web hosts gave the servers a new address.

So all I need to do is repoint my dns at the new address and viola. So I go to log into 123-reg, and hmmm... what is the password?

No problem, I forget every time, and all that needs to happen is I go through the lost password routine and they reset it and email it to me. I probably had the old one in an old email somewhere, but it was on another machine.

I realised my blunder as I clicked submit. Because now they have changed the password from something I had recorded somewhere, to a new random password and they have emailed it to my domain. The one that is broken.

Damn. Ok, so now I have to leave them a support call. The half a quid a minute phone line is out, as it cannot be called internationally. So I use the webform.

Days pass. Nothing happens.

Damn... try the fax number! Nope. Nothing happens.

Email has been down for several days now. So time to get creative. First I try skyping the 0900 number - perhaps skype can break out to pstn locally, so it isn't an international call. But no - barred.

So 123reg is a part of pipex, so I call one of the other pipex companies. Lots of hold music later, I get a guy who cannot help, but gives me the number for "123reg" that can be dialled internationally.

Of course it isn't really, it is another pipex company that still isn't 123reg. Their tech people tell me the only support provided to international customers is via email. I explain that I have already sent an email and got no response, so actually, there isn't any email support to speak of. And then I point out I sent a fax too.

He repeatedly tells me there is nothing he can do - even though when asked said he had a number for 123reg, but couldn't give it to me.

He said try customer support. Fine. Whatever.

With customer support things got better. The woman tried to divert me a couple of times, but I stood my ground, and finally she capitulated and put an email together to 123reg. She took all my details, and I had the new password minutes later.

I am finding it amusing in hindsight that the best way to get responsive support from 123-reg is to actually phone a different company entirely.

Screen Screen

Continuing my enthusism for screen, the terminal multiplexer (on most linux dists), I found the


following post in response to another post about the wonders of screen.

Basically, some tips for using screen within screen - which comes in handy when you want to kick something off but still have a terminal session attached to it - and you already have a screen session in play.

The deal is that the "outermost" screen hears the Ctrl-a sequence and responds to it.. so detaching from inside the second screen sessions detaches the first (you'll understand when you start using it)...

For anyone that dislikes C-a as the command key (e.g. emacss or bash users) one of the two following keys may be convenient. Put one of these lines in a file called ~/.screenrc:

#to use C-] as the command key
escape ^]\
or

#to use C-\ as the command key
escape ^\\
it’s useful to use different escape sequences on different machines so that ssh’ing from one to the other and running screen within screen doesn’t cause an aneurism.

another useful customization is to show the current screens at the bottom of the page:

hardstatus alwayslastline ” ] H]{= Bw} %w %=”

notice that that has a ] as the first character; this helps me remember which escape key I’m using at the moment. On a machine with C-\ as the escape key, it should be:

hardstatus alwayslastline ” \ H]{= Bw} %w %=”

Blacklander at Dilbert.blog

Scott Adam's blog is good reading at any time. But this post wasn't even by him. Scott recently caused a new wave of commenting in response to his recent post and follow-up where he considers the effort required to fear all the things that we are required to these days.

Some serious discussion came out of this, along with the usual Bush-banging and Bush-loving nonsense. But out of it all came a comment that Scott thought so well of that he promoted to a post.

Blacklander offers incisive thoughts about the reality of the "us" and "them" rhetoric we hear every day, from the perspective of "them".

Cliffskis Mumblings...: Kudos Video Trailer

Oooh, excellent, Cliffski has posted a google video of his latest masterpiece, and it is looking good:

Cliffskis Mumblings...: Kudos Video Trailer

Check out other Positech titles here: Positech Games

Dark Ages

With Dark Energy, Dark Matter and Inflation, I can't help but think that in 50 years or so that cosmologists and physicists are going to snigger a bit about the lengths we would go to to protect a deep belief in relativity.

Perhaps a few years more than fifty, as doctrine often takes a long old while to shake off.

So you start with the axim that relativity is right - and absolute. Then find a bunch of observations that say that it doesn't seem to fit the whole picture... then rather than look for ways to refine it, start inventing undetectable stuff that makes it all hang together just like Einstein says.

Inflation - the universe looks the same in all directions. So what? Well the universe is too big for light to have traversed it in the time available considering how old it is. So there hasn't been time for all the everything to even out like that.

Dark energy and matter were invented to cater for the fact that there isn't enough gravity to hold galaxies together.

Of course there is no conceivable explanation for inflation, or for what dark energy and matter might be.

So if it was me, I would be saying "yes I know that relativity is excellent and all, but it doesn't work at small scales or high energies so should we seriously be focusing so much time and effort trying to make the universe fit to it (when quite frankly, it doesn't give a damn), instead of trying to find a theory that better matches observation? A theory being something testable remember?"

Making the command line more commanding

Nircmd is a great little utility for making the Windows command line just that little bit more useful.

nircmd will let you manipulate many aspects of what is going on in your windows session, such as closing, minimising and restoring windows (even by class), stop/starting services, turning off the monitor, shutting down, even making windows varying levels of transparent.

This greatly enhances what you can accomplish with batch files without having to resort to vb or other scripting languages.

Screen is the Answer

The question is "How can I make my command line life easier in linux (and other unix style os')?"

Screen is the answer, but it is the answer even if you aren't asking the question. Screen is so fundamentally useful that should be a fundamental part of the kernel if you ask me.

So what is it? So there you are, connected to your linux box, and you kick of a compile. Before you know it, there a zillion dependencies to consider and it is going to be there a while. So now your session is tied up, so if you want to get on with something else, you need to make a new connection to the box. But what if you need to restart the machine you are connecting from while a day long compile is taking place? Killing your connection to the linux server will kill any processes associated with that session.

Or what if you want to try something in one session and see the output in another session? SecureCRT is a great ssh client, and version 5 supports tabs, which is cool. But of course each time you need make a new session, you need to authenticate.

Anyway, "screen" is the answer, as you already know because I told you at the start.

What screen does is decouple the console session from the console itself. When you create an ssh session, you are providing an input/output tty. So that you can tell the box what to do, and it can talk back to you.

What screen does is provide a proxy for that session. So screen is where your input and output go to, and you can either be connected to screen or not. When you are running screen it is transparent, it is just like you are carrying out a normal session.

But if you close your ssh session, and then reconnect from another terminal, typing screen -r will let you carry on where you left off. And it doesn't matter whether that is another ssh session, or a telnet session, or if you walk up to the physical console.

So thats useful right? But this isn't all of by a long stretch. screen isn't limited to one console session. You can have a number of them. You could have 10 different sessions going to your linux box simultaneously and then disconnect them all and resume them all somewhere else.

screen is controlled with the ctrl-a meta by default, and here are a bunch of useful commands:

ctrl-a c Create and enter a new screen
ctrl-a n Switch to next screen
ctrl-a p Previous Screen
ctrl-a " List screens
ctrl-a M Monitor screen for activity (will bell other screens if something happens)
ctrl-a S Split screens
ctrl-a Tab Switch between split screens

So there is a handful, and note that you can cut and paste between screens, which makes it massively useful when on the console.

This concludes this screen article and it will now sit amongst the millions of others on the net. There is a reason why they are all there: screen is the answer.

Windows Redefines "Don't Delete"

Finally it was time to build Windows from scratch again. I had been using the same Windows XP installation for the past three or four hardware platforms. I know, this is sheer lunacy, but Windows takes such an effort to get together, and after all these years I had it working how I want it, and to start over always seemed too daunting a task.

Except for all the bluescreens of course. A few too many, and a windows build of several years old almost takes as long to boot up - so a bluescreen is a double wammy. I lose whatever I was working on, plus have to wait 15 minutes boot time before it is usable again.

But the point of this story is user account deletion under Windows XP. At one point in my migration from old to new, I needed to delete the account on my old windows install and recreat it on the new. This was carried out in the new Windows installation on a new partition, but the user account profile I wanted to delete was pointing to the old Windows installation on the old partition. If that makes any sense.

Nevermind. So I just wanted to delete the account. Just the userid. And when you attempt to delete an account, Windows says "do you want to delete it all, or just the account and leave the files?"

Which is great - I just wanted to delete the account. And leave the files. So I agreed to this with good old windows, which then informed me that it would move all the files of the user to a folder on the desktop. And off it went. Now the old profile and the current profile were on different partitions, so this move would actually be a copy and delete - so would take forever to move the 4gb profile I had accumulated (thanks Google Desktop Search). So I waited.

Then bing it was finished. So the account was gone and the files were in this folder here, and I could start moving them to my new account. Except of course they weren't. Oh the folder was there, and in it was another couple of folders, containing my old desktop icons, my documents, my music and my photos. But nothing else.

So where was the Application Data folder? Where was the Local Settings folder? Gone. Deleted. Deleted even though Windows promised me that it wouldn't. Because now I discover that what it meant was: "I'll copy every thing that I think you should be concern with, but delete the rest." And of course, why would I want to concern myself with all those system folders? Apart from the fact that the Application Data folder contains my email. And my bookmarks. It also contains a whole ton of other data that the various applications I use rely on.

And I'll bet bottom dollar that if I was using outlook, it would have saved the pst, and if I was using ie, it would have saved the bookmarks folders.

But no, apparently "don't delete" means, delete most things, but leave the documents. The moral is to not use the control panel account management for this, but to get into the Users and Groups MMC plugin and delete from there.