Today I wanted to make some yummy apple puff pastry, so I turned my laptop on to put up a recipe and.. the screen blipped and went off. This machine (an IBM x40) was so old that I wasn’t at all surprised. The laptop went with me through school (when I rode bicycles and buses …
Continue reading The end of an eraI don’t think it’s a great idea to blog about my finances but this one surprised me so much I’ll share this personal piece of info with the internet: on the 29th of January this year I had an ING Direct account. Last saturday (in the middle of the night) I wanted to log in …
Continue reading ING Direct: “Planned temporary outage for maintenance”Do you remember the first time someone told you about fork()/exec() for Linux? Do you remember beeing completely confused? I do, and it’s an ongoing pain in the ass for me – every time I want to call something simple without blocking and without worrying about pipes or the structure of exec()/execl()/execlp() parameters, or the …
Continue reading CreateProcess for LinuxOnce a year or two ago they were lending out power meters at the Richmond Hill library, the sort of thing that you put in between an electrical device and the power plug in the wall to see how much power the device uses. Trying to find it again.. PowerStream’s Watt Reader Loan Program, could …
Continue reading How to save 10$ a month on the power billCheck this out: andrew@littlesvr:~$ uptime 00:20:16 up 730 days, 15:13, 1 user, load average: 0.57, 0.22, 0.11 At 4AM this morning it was 730 days, that’s exactly two years! The server would have been up for about 6 years if I didn’t decide once to upgrade the hardware, once to upgrade Slackware, and once to …
Continue reading Two years of uptimejust finished my master’s so I’m allowed to quote Wikipedia again :) In 2008 WorldDMB adopted APNG as a backward compatible extension to enable animation as part of the MOT SlideShow user application for Digital Radio. “APNG 1.0 Specification – Animated Portable Network Graphics” is included as normative Annex A in the ETSI standard TS …
Continue reading What’s digital broadcasting got to do with animated images?APNG has very slowly (but steadily) gaining popularity. One of the recent things I was told about is the current list of most popular ideas Ubuntu Brainstorm: APNG Support. I’ll put a screenshot here for posterity: That’s pretty cool. The thing that makes me feel best is the overwhelming positive votes. Looking at the rest …
Continue reading The people want APNG!I’ve been having a really hard time on my new job. I had to help out on a project where I knew nothing about the technology or the code or even the basic concepts. It was so bad at times I thought I would go crazy or else my head would explode. Then I got …
Continue reading Dealing with stress – some truths to helpSuspend and hibernate have been a sad story on Linux for a very long time. Typically the hardware makers are blamed, saying “oh they all do it differently none of it’s documented”. That may be true but it’s a bunch of horseshit anyway – hardly any of the hardware that works at all or perfectly …
Continue reading Suspend and hibernate in LinuxAt some point in the distant past I’ve set up my own email server, running Sendmail for SMTP and the UWO imapd server for IMAP. Part of the setup process is creating certificates – so that you can have a secure tunnel for free, using self-signed certs. Like a good boy I followed the instructions …
Continue reading Certificate expiry