dolphinling’s weblog

Whee! Both mplayer and gstreamer (which rhythmbox uses) both had their ogg flac decoding bugs fixed recently, and it should be fixed in the next release of both. I can finally stop decoding my music to wav before playing it!

So today I was looking through my firefox search bar’s history, and along with things like “how to raise your iq by eating gifted children” (it’s a book apparently) and “fraught with all manner of spiky-haired cute things” (no results, this page will be the first), I found ‘quercivorous nepheliad’.

And of course, I immediately recognized what I was doing when I searched for that: “Hey, it’s a googlewhack! I wonder if it still works.”

So I tried it, and it almost worked, except the passage it was written in had been quoted a bunch of times. But I also noticed that google suggested “quercivorus” instead of “quercivorous”.

Obvious choice of action, test it out and see which one gets more search results. Which I do, and see quercivorus gets 500 results, and quercivorous gets 15300. And wow! My blog is at the top of the results for quercivorous! That’s awesome! But wait… these look like mostly just word lists… the results for quercivorus looked a lot more scholarly… yeah, they do. And oh… 15100ish of the 15300 are all one site.

GAAH. I misspelled my own favorite word, and it’s at the top of google’s results for it to boot.

So I went and edited my post. Made a note about my misspelling it, and corrected the spelling for the future, in hopes of google putting me back high in the rankings for the right spelling.

But just before submitting, I thought to myself “I wish I had my OED, so I could check what it says.” Of course, I don’t, because no one brings their OED to college with them, at least, not anyone studying computer science.

But maybe the library has one. So I walk over there, and yes, it does! And then I look it up… And it says I was right all along! It really is spelled quercivorous! Yes!

A bit more research shows that there are 4 species (probably of insect) named Something quercivorus. Removing those, there are practically no results. I cancel the edit to my old post and write this one.

The moral of the story: The OED may not know everything. But in its niche, it’s smarter than even google.

How would the stock market react to us suddenly finding martians?

The soda machine here lights up and makes noise when you walk by it.

I don’t like being marketed to.

The scene:

• Grey clouds on top, light blue sky in the middle, hills underneath.
• One bare tree in the midleft, and to the right another bare tree, with an evergreen behind and slightly farther right.
• In the front and center, illuminated by sunlight, a tree, bright yellow with its fall leaves.

It may be rather gloomy and brown, but it is stunning.

1. We need namespaces in HTML.
2. We need a syntax for declaring those namespaces in HTML.
3. A very good, fitting syntax has already been invented for use in XML, and is understood by a significant number of authors.
4. That syntax has been corrupted through misuse by many pages. Is it worth trying to save, or do we need a new one (or is one of the premises wrong)?

I keep rediscovering that when I take a walk, I’d rather have dirt and grass under my feet than pavement.

Today was Software Freedom Day, and while I certainly could have done more to publicize it, I did take it to heart for myself and my computer.

Today I finally uninstalled the last bit of proprietary software I was using, Flash, and am compiling gnash to replace it. This will certainly be a bit of a drop in functionality—there’s a long list of things unimplemented—but it’s worth it to finally have my computer clean. Macromedia/Adobe hadn’t released any version of flash for linux since 7 anyway, so I was already starting to get locked out of sites. I just hope my game site doesn’t accidentally detect it as me cheating—I’ll probably be the first person ever to use it on their site. :P

(I also got rid of a few old (unused) java plugins that were lying around. I still have some games installed that I can’t see the source for; I treat those as media, the same as music, and while I don’t listen to music from companies I don’t like (read: any RIAA member), I don’t restrict myself to only openly licensed music if the money’s going somewhere decent. Feel free to try to convince me that I’m wrong (or right) about that.)

For the past few days I’ve been struggling with enabling SSL (actually TLS) encryption in vsftpd. I followed the directions, but every time I try to connect it gives the message

Connected to xx.xx.xx.xx:21
220 (vsFTPd 2.0.4)
USER anonymous

530 Anonymous sessions must use encryption.
Disconnecting from site xx.xx.xx.xx

(Several hours later)

Apparently it’s not a problem with vsftpd. ftp -z ssl xx.xx.xx.xx works fine. It’s just the ftp clients I tried (gFTP and Filezilla) don’t encrypt the connection. For gFTP I found an FAQ entry that says

You must add the public key of your self signed CA to your OpenSSL certs directory.

but I’ve done that, because I had to put it there for vsftpd to use it!

Edit: Firefox apparently doesn’t have support. That’s annoying.

From Gentoo’s default /etc/conf.d/rc file:

# Set to "yes" if start-stop-daemon should attempt to kill
# any children left in the system.

RC_KILL_CHILDREN="no"

With settings like that, how can you not use Gentoo?

According to my dentist, flossing is now more important for the health of my teeth than brushing is. While I really should be doing both multiple times a day, flossing often, brushing occasionally is better than brushing often, flossing occasionally. This is very nice, as I can keep floss at my desk, and do it while I procrastinate^W think of what to write, instead of having to get up and go to the bathroom to brush my teeth.

Also, the floss I’m using has surprisingly strong mint smell/taste, much more so than the previous mint flosses I’ve used (even though it’s the same brand and type…). Yum.

This is not medical advise. It’s entirely possible I misheard or something like that.

I’m now at college. I’m at Vermont Technical College, in Randolph Center, Vermont. So far it’s gone pretty well, with some complaints but not many.

My courses are Java 1, Calculus 2, English, History of IT, ECT Orientation, and Computer Networking. Java is all right; I’d rather be taking C, but I’ll get to that next semester; most of it so far is familiar, but that’s 4 classes’ worth and I expect there to be new stuff later on. Calc 2 I’m retaking, as I haven’t taken any organized math in three years; it should be, and has been, very easy. English is not actually English, it’s Pseudo-Philosophy From the Context of Literature, like nearly all “English” classes are; it bores me to tears, but so far I’ve actually done all the work. History of IT is very fun; having spent my life around computers I know > 1/2 of it anyway (so far closer to 90%, actually), but the teacher is very good and it’s nice to rehear some of it. ECT Orientation is a once-a-week, one hour thing, which is boring, stupid, useless, and required; there is no work, no tests, you merely have to show up and listen to people talk at you for an hour; perhaps I’ll bring textbooks and do some reading then. Computer Networking looks to be fun, like Java and History of IT; I’ve known everything in it so far, but I expect it to get new soon too.

The people and food both average to mediocre, but have enough high enough above that average that I’m okay, the rooms are all right. The internet connection is faster but more restrictive than I’m used to (no bittorrent, even for legal things, and although I’m used to external ping being blocked, now I can’t even ping computers on the network). Other than that, everything’s about normal

If you ever buy me a CD, please first make sure it is not released by a member of the RIAA. Thank you.

I’m happy to report that although approximately 1/3 of my CD collection is RIAA-affiliated, not a single one of those was bought by me. In terms of how much I actually listen to them, it’s more like 1/10, soon to drop farther as I finish putting the rest of the independent CDs on my computer.

Using target in (X)HTML Strict. If you need to use the target attribute, either stick with Transitional DOCTYPEs, or add the target attributes dynamically using semantic scripting, e.g. based on semantic class names.

(from http://tantek.com/log/2006/07.html#d27t1218)

NO NO NO NO NO! Your page is just as invalid if you add target in with script as if you put it in your markup.

If you absolutely must open a new window, make it a normal <a href=""> and use window.open() and cancel the default action for the link. But if you weren’t providing any size or chrome info (which are impossible with target anyway), then you don’t have any reason to be opening a window in the first place. Just don’t do it.

The STIX Fonts have all been made, and just need to be packaged now! Wooo!

# emerge -Dtau world

These are the packages that would be merged, in reverse order:

Calculating world dependencies... done!
...
[ebuild  N    ]  games-misc/fortune-mod-chucknorris-0.1

To anyone using hard drives as an archival system: Will you have an IDE motherboard in 20 years? In 100?

• There is a master sound volume. Only root can change this.
• There is a per-user sound volume. A user can only change her/his own.
• There is a per-application sound volume. This is what applications change with their sound control. Applications do not change the per-user volume unless they are specifically for that purpose, like alsamixer. A dedicated volume control program can control application volumes, in case the application doesn’t have a control.
• If an application wants to provide more detailed control over its sound (e.g. a music track and a sfx track) it ??. Mixes them itself, and only sends one track to the OS? Sends both, but after changing their volume, and with the same application name so the per-application control affects both? Exposes both to the OS entirely, and requests separate volume controls for them (which it then affects using its own in-app controls)?

All values are, of course, multiplied before affecting the sound. Values greater than 100% are allowed.

This does not specify how it interacts with the actual speakers (perhaps volume control on the speakers changes the master volume?).

I’m considering switching back to the 1.8 branch again. There’s a giant memory leak on trunk that it seems only I can see (yes, I’ve tried safe mode) that I’m having trouble narrowing down. Cairo is still incredibly slow on Linux. The tab scrolling thing that just landed is incredibly stupid, in my at least partly-qualified opinion, and interrupts my workflow a lot.

And to add to all that, ever since going to a music festival for 4 days and not using a computer at all, I’ve stopped really wanting to spend so much time on it in the first place, and I just want it to do what I want.

So yeah, I might switch back, to take some of the hassle away. That would also mean I’d file fewer bug reports…

I’ve just enabled Bad Behavior here. If it gives you any problems, please contact me.