Stuart Hacking

I am forced to use a Windows based laptop in work and one of the more frustrating features is the updates that get pushed out by the IT ‘services’ group. Of course, updates are a good thing, but we do them during downtime when it won’t disrupt actual work. Here are the things I most hate about these Windows updates:

Do it now, or else.

There are updates available for your computer. You can install them now or they will automatically be installed in 15 minutes. After installation your computer will be restarted.

I’m sorry, were you busy?

As if point 1 didn’t irritate me enough (which is most certainly does), updates frequently occur right in the middle of a large task. Copying a large file or set of files is doomed to failure. In other cases the updates will simply interrupt anything you happened to be doing, forcing you to break your concentration.

Update Dependencies

OK, I’ll install your updates already! Tick, tick, tick… *reboot*
Your updates have been installed. There are new updates to install.

Yes, some updates rely on the presence of previous updates so it takes a couple of runs to get them all installed. which also means a couple of reboots; a couple more minutes of your precious day.

And one of my personal favourites: The “Your computer must be restarted dialog” which always stays on top of other windows. In case you forget.

Software Computers, error, Windows

This is a test post using weblogger.el for Aquamacs 1.6*. If it works
I’ll probably use it as my main offline blogging client.

Aquamacs is a Mac port of the popular multi-purpose program
Emacs. Emacs is used for many purposes such as tetris, email,
calendar and organiser…. There are even rumours that it can be used
for editing text!

Self, Software cool, Emacs, fun, Software

This is an automated message from corporate I.T.

We shut down your computer last night.  Oh, we installed some updates first.  You are too dumb to manually install updates, so we force them upon you at inconvenient times.

Sorry for any inconvenience, loss of data, waste of time, closing all your browser pages, etc.

Enjoy getting back to that state in the morning.

Self, Software Computers, incompetence, inconvenience

I almost missed this.  Here’s a video of a very smart chap (Stephen Fry) celebrating 25 years of Free Software.  In doing so he provides a clear and simple insight into the meaning and importance of freedom.

http://www.gnu.org/fry/

Self, Software Computers, Freedom, GNU, Software

Or rather, here are a couple of images. Sweet, Innocent images of Apple keyboards. The first of which has been left blank, for your enjoyment; the second is a rendition of the Dvorak layout on OS X (as best as I can map it – it seems to be correct on my MacBook)

These images are fairly harmless.  They go from being harmless to useful if you drop one of them into “/Applications/Mavis Beacon/Resources/English.lproj/Keyboard.png”.  (Substitute the correct path to Mavis Beacon if necessary, and don’t forget to back up the original keyboard image.)

Ok, Part 2 went pretty well.  At least I’m now looking at the correct layout on screen.  I’ll do a bit more work to neaten it up at some point but for now I’m happy it’s there at all.  Now if only it were possible to remap the positions of the keys themselves.  Stay tuned.

Hope this was helpful.

Self, Software dvorak, hack, typing

In order to cast off the shackles of messy typing I grabbed a copy of Mavis Beacon 2008 for Mac- only to discover on installation that Dvorak support has been dropped since version 5.  The website has this to say:

 
After installing Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing® 16, you want to know if practice lessons for the Dvorak keyboard layout are available in the program. The remainder of this note provides additional information.

The Dvorak layout is an alternate keyboard layout. Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing® 16 does not include lessons for the Dvorak keyboard layout.
 

Notice an interesting use of past tense in this statement but I guess I should have done the research first.  Who’d have known the #1 typing software didn’t support Dvorak?

Here is part one of a solution to fix the problem.  Downloading mb_abcdvorak will give all the lessons (1 – 29) of A Basic Course in Dvorak already converted to The Mavis Beacon custom lesson format.  You can import these by going to the Media Center.  If you wish you can also download txt_adbdvorak which simply contains the text for the lessons.  All I’ve done is the boring work of conversion – Many Thanks to Dan Wood for producing the course.

This is all well and good but when you are actually running Mavis Beacon that little helper keyboard still shows qwerty layout.  How can one get to the stage of learning the Dvorak layout without learn it separately first?  In Part 2 I will provide an alternative keyboard graphic using the Qwerty layout.  (I will peobably also explain how to use this within Mavis Beacon unless the EULA explicitly states not to – but providing a picture of a keyboard violates no EULA!)

Further to that I will investigate changing the positions of the keys used by the animated fingers and highlights which appear in the software.

Self, Software dvorak, hack, typing

I just went over and picked up On the Rain Slick Precipice of Darkness Vol. 2 (The new Penny Arcade adventure) from Greenhouse Games. So far I’ve only watched the opening cutscene but it looks like it’s gonna be both awesome and hilarious.

These guys are delivering serious fun for only $14.95!

Gaming, Self, Software fun, Gaming, webcomics

While my MacBook typically runs as happily as ever, I have started to notice that various folders are becoming somewhat messy.  There is no explanation other than the laziness of the user.

My ‘documents’ folder, for example, is fully of unclassified .c, .h, .tex, .pdf – all the files of the day with cryptic titles to boot.  Such examples include: al_7.aux and booktest.log.  Months on I can’t remember what happened to the ‘Als’ which preceded number 7, nor can I remember which book I was testing.  In short, I really need to clean up my documents.

I’m somewhat reluctant to start though in case I decide to buy OS 10.5 soon – *gasp* yes, ok… My ‘last-year’ MacBook is still running Tiger.  I will join the 21st century yet!

Self, Software documents, laziness, life, mac

I often feel a little sad that – being a child of the 80s – I will never have the chance to operate a Lisp Machine.  They were popular around the time that AI was the big buzzword in Computer Science, then they died out when that bubble burst.  Today the buzzwords are ‘Cloud Computing‘, ‘Virtualisation‘, ‘Agile Development‘ and all kinds of terms related to abstraction of services, infrastructure and development.  (The very things that Lisp offered.

As an homage to these archaic list processing behemoths, I have followed the instructions on clisp.cons.org for setting up Common Lisp as a login shell.  So far it’s looking surprisingly good.  It has the features of bash – for the most part – infused with the ability to directly evaluate lisp expressions and save the definitions out as you work.

The instructions on clisp.cons.org call for a lot of package compilation and dependency walking but if you are running a fairly recent debian or ubuntu system then you should be able to get up and running by installing the following packages through apt-get:  clisp clisp-dev cl-ffi libreadline5.

So – that’s the shell now running through Lisp.  Next step is to have a separate processor performing symbol tagging and type checking, hardware implementations of primitive lisp procedures, … etc!

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Self, Software fun, life, lisp, shell, Software, unix