Category Archives: Tech

Generation Gap

Note: This entry has been restored from old archives.

Now I know the meaning of the phrase… previously I’ve internally used the term to describe the differences between me and my own generation. Most of my life I have felt out of place within the groups I’ve inhabited, I suspect this is a fairly common way to be – but not the norm. Anyway, add my usual feeling of separation to the real meaning of the term Generation Gap and you may understand how unusual yesterday evening seemed to me. Add some culture shock on top of that.

Oh, and the British have a huge breast fetish. I don’t hold this against them at all of course… I’ve just amazed by how fixated they on the subject of massive tits.

I’d talk about the meals at this point, but don’t really feel like it. They were apparently pretty decent, I found them a little dull but it was good food. Better than most meals I’ve had since getting to the UK actually, all bar a couple of very good Indian dinners I have had.

I’m working on some code at the moment that requires more than 600MB of memory to compile and my machine has only 512MB… painful.

I believe I have the worst mouse on the planet. It seems to be tuned to be perfectly annoying, a completely dead mouse would be better. I’ll be selecting something and almost always the cursor will stop moving just before the last character of my selection, I’ll still be sliding the mouse but the cursor just jiggles on the spot. I bang the mouse on the table a couple of times and the mouse slips down, thus selecting the whole line, and then it wont go up! I have to release the button and thump the thing a few times to make it work again. Then there is a 50/50 chance of a repeat performance. We grabbed me another mouse from downstairs, but this one goes down and right at half the speed that it goes up and left at and often refuses to go right at all. So, since the replacement mouse is unusable (thus not an annoying mouse) I am forced to use the usable but terribly annoying one.

Strange But Universal(?) Editor Feature

Note: This entry has been restored from old archives.

I was wondering why some of my results were going wrong when doing some pattern matching in Perl. I have a file that gets generated by a script and has one big RE on a line that is read into another script and executed. For some reason the RE doesn’t match what it should… just then I accidentally discovered that it does match and then doesn’t match if I have had the file open in vim, so even though all I am doing is opening the file and then immediately doing a :wq (should just be a :q then I wouldn’t have had this problem, but I do also need to tweak the RE a bit at times) the file content is modified!

What is weird is I then tried the same thing in nvi and then in pico and they do the same thing! At this point I’m checking the difference using md5sum. Each editor spits out the same slightly modified file?!?!

What’s the difference? The file ends up one byte longer… all three editors add a ‘n’ to the end of the file without being asked to.

At first I thought it was something to do with line length (my RE is over 400,000 chars long) but the editors do this for files with a single line only three chars long too… so why do they do this? If three out of three editors tested do the same thing it indicates that it might not be a random decision. As far as I know the editors have completely different codebases, so it isn’t just a shared bit of buggy (unless something in a shared library is doing it). I have a suspicion that there is a reason for this and I wonder what it is!

For now I’ll just add the chomp to my Perl script (it should have been there in the first place) and seek enlightenment later.

Accellerated Perl

Note: This entry has been restored from old archives.

Hardware accelleration from perl! Argh, don’t tell the sales guys. Played with SWIG today, which I have done before in darker days, it easier to get working than I recall. Though I haven’t found a good reference for hooking it into an automake system, most people seem to use it with Makefile.PL stuff and the two automake examples I found were both autotools shells around Makefile.PL build setups. It is a simple enough process, so I guess I’ll do this one from scratch.

Today at lunchtime I wandered into town to buy an umbrella, I decided I was probably going to need one and better get one soon. Halfway there I got well and truely rained on, no shelter in sight. Just one of those funny things… I do have an umbrella now though.

I also tried to get some photos of my little Aphrodite printed, out of three photo places only one could deal with USB… but there USB port was broken today. Broken? How do you break a USB port exactly? Anyway, no photos for me today. Next time I’ll go armed with a CD and also a SD card, damn hippies.