Testing…

Is this thing on?

It Lives!

Ok, the DBD::MySQL problem that’s been vexing me for about a week is taken care of. I had to reinstall the entire MySQL system from binary packages to do it, but it all works now.

For you non-computer types out there, installing from binaries after trying to build a program from source is sort of the equivalent of having some engine trouble, trying to fix it yourself, and then buying a new car that looks almost exactly like your old one rather than dealing with the smoking heap of twisted wreckage that your inept wrenchwork created.

tar -xzvf

tar -xzvf

tar -xzvf

I’m putting this up here because, frankly, I seem to be something of an idiot and can never remember that tar -xzvf is used to eXtract a Zipped File, Verbosely.

If this doesn’t make any sense to you, don’t worry. It’s just something bothering me.

Oi…

Ok, quick reminder to self – the hand-rolled RSS feed for comics won’t behave correctly if you forget to update the year. Should be fixed now, for folks who get their automatic comic updates from here:

feed://141.214.84.74/~matt/comic/index.xml

Oh dear.

So.

I’m working on repairing a co-worker’s laptop. Seems he ran a disk utility to defragment the drive, and it didn’t update the catalog file correctly. Part of the OS got overwritten. Then the catalog file got overwritten. This is a bad thing.

Normally, I’d do up a post at this point warning folks off and recommending against that particular software. Unfortunately, he doesn’t remember the name of the utility, apart from it being “Disk Something”.

So here’s my warning to you all: If you find a program called “Disk Something”, DON’T USE IT. It will eat your hard drive.

Making the rounds

This music video has been getting some circulation from various folks on-line. Enough so that I can’t remember where I first ran into it (Fark? Wil Wheaton? Andy Ihnatko? Decafbad?)…

Anyway, the video for Keith Schofield and Wintergreen’s song When I Wake Up gives a brief history of the abysmally bad Atari 2600 video game based on the movie ET. The tune is pretty cool. The sight of a bunch of hipsters digging up a desert landfill in search of old video game cartridges is quite chuckleworthy too.

Just so cool…

A very cool little applescript:

If you have OmniGraffle, you can download and run the AppleScript below. It’ll trawl through your iTunes library, map out all the artists, hi-light the most popular, and connect it all so you can arrange it as you will. I’d say that qualifies as suitably neat yet pointless…

Alas!

Looks like it’s a hardware problem.

The laptop is gonna be heading in for repairs this afternoon. Last night the screen went dark and the clicking sound started up again. And after rebooting, the screen stayed dark. So far as I can tell, everything is coming up and running, it’s just that the backlight is out of whack so I can’t see anything.

Good news, bad news

Looks like the total wipedown & reinstall of the OS on the powerbook worked: complex 3D no longer causes the system to go all pear-shaped. As something of a bonus, I was able to trick the OS installer into restoring all of my user files & preferences from my backed-up system. The only stuff it didn’t grab were the UNIX specific things that I’d installed.

Fun with PHP

The comic is quite the learning experience… For example, I’m poking around a bit more with what can be done using PHP. And also what kind of problems crop up with having different versions of Apache and PHP on my laptop and on the server.