+day macha+

unit testing

Mon, 14 Sep 2009 13:41:01 +0100

Note to self: you don’t really understand your function until you unit test it.

"There exist counterexamples to this, but in general, great things are accomplished by small groups..."

Mon, 14 Sep 2009 13:40:25 +0100

“There exist counterexamples to this, but in general, great things are accomplished by small groups of people who are driven, who have unity of purpose. The more people involved, the slower and stupider their union is.”

- nomo zilla (via bikeshed)

Errors: Alsa, dmix, unable to open slave

Sun, 13 Sep 2009 13:32:57 +0100

If you’re getting error messages like this

ALSA lib pcm_dmix.c:864:(snd_pcm_dmix_open) unable to open slave

when you try to run Firefox in linux, or any other application for that matter, I may have the solution.

There’s plenty of fairly complicated stuff on the internet about that error. None of it helped me. My problem was actually mplayer.

I had it running in the background. But it was using OSS instead of ALSA. So when an ALSA application tried to run, like firefox, it freaked out, and displayed the above error.

Simply by running mplayer with -ao alsa passed to it my problem disappeared.

rsync, mkstemp, fat32, No such file or directory

Tue, 25 Aug 2009 17:13:00 +0100

When you rsync to a fat32 device you encounter problems. Problems because fat32 is an awful, awful filesystem. If you can simply not use fat32, do so. If you’re forced to use it (Hello) then here’s how to get around it.

On to the error messages. The first one you may encounter is:

rsync: mkstemp “YOUR_DEST_DIR/.FILENAME” failed: No such file or directory (2)

This mean rsync is trying to create a temporary file (that’s what mkstemp does), but fails to do so on your fat32 device. If you decide to get around this by giving rsync a new parameter —temp-dir=/tmp you encounter yet another error:

rsync: rename “FILE_IN_TEMP_DIR” -> “DEST_DIR”: No such file or directory (2)

A little searching[1] tells you that these error messages only come up when rsync tries to copy files from an all uppercase directory onto the DEST_DIR. Basically, rsync preserves file or directory names written in lower, upper or mixed case. And fat32 devices do not.

To force your fat32 device to preserve upper, lower or mixed case file and folder names mount it with the shortname option set to win95 or winnt (see man mount; win95 worked for me). Do something like this:

mount /dev/sda1 /media/storage -t vfat shortname=win95

Then your only problem is that fat32 devices poorly timestamp their files, and rsync depends on good timestamping. To make rsync ignore timestamps and go by file-size only give rsync the option:

—size-only

Now you’ve pandered to fat32’s awfulness, everything should work fine.

[1] http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=203549

These days... [police arrest photographer for being too tall]

Tue, 21 Jul 2009 22:20:36 +0100

These days... [police arrest photographer for being too tall]:

Government passes anti-terrorism laws.
The police use anti-terrorism powers to harass citizens.
Citizens no longer trust the police.
Citizens no longer trust the government.

Yet Mark Thomas, Scholar and Gent, brings us: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/feb/09/liberty-central-stop-and-search-police

http://www.eflorenzano.com/blog/post/my-thoughts-nosql/

Tue, 21 Jul 2009 19:24:54 +0100

http://www.eflorenzano.com/blog/post/my-thoughts-nosql/:

good summary of non-sql datastores

"The professor was disturbed that game rules encouraging competition and varied tactics hardly..."

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 00:49:03 +0100

“

The professor was disturbed that game rules encouraging competition and varied tactics hardly mattered to gaming community members who wanted to preserve a deeply-rooted culture.

He said his experience demonstrated that modern-day social groups making use of modern-day technology can revert to “medieval and crude” methods in trying to manipulate and control others.

“If you aren’t a member of the tribe, you get whacked with a stick,” he said. “I look at social groups with dismay.”

”

- The article’s actually hilarious.

‘City of Heroes’ character ‘Twixt’ becomes game’s most hated outcast courtesy, of Loyola professor - NOLA.com

"I assume he’s not a benchmark pro, but he did a decent job already. We can nitpick his..."

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 09:39:00 +0100

“

I assume he’s not a benchmark pro, but he did a decent job already. We can
nitpick his sampling methodology - but it won’t change the result. He is correct that many procs is far more memory consuming than single proc, and we already knew this.

This is a tradeoff we made consciously and deliberately. When firefox crashes, all tabs go down. When firefox memory is compromised (security), all tabs are compromised. In chrome, we don’t have those problems, but instead use more RAM. Further, Chrome is also able to implement per-tab prioritization, so that background tabs don’t make foreground tabs go slow. Firefox can’t do that.

”

- http://groups.google.com/group/chromium-dev/browse_thread/thread/f97adb063b97a81

I always wondered why Chrome was faster than Firefox, and it turns out it’s not because it uses less ram. The priorisation seems to be why, unless my addons weight firefox down significantly.

"Sociologists have long suspected that, for example, children of factory workers would be implicitly..."

Mon, 08 Jun 2009 20:30:43 +0100

“Sociologists have long suspected that, for example, children of factory workers would be implicitly taught that the best way to succeed was to keep your head down and obey authority. And while this might in fact make them more likely to succeed in a factory, it would also stifle their chances of upward social mobility.”

- Sensemaking: How intellectual pollution has crippled America’s children

"The man of system… is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of..."

Sat, 30 May 2009 03:50:00 +0100

“The man of system… is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it… . He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess–board. He does not consider that the pieces upon the chess–board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess–board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might chuse to impress upon it. If those two principles coincide and act in the same direction, the game of human society will go on easily and harmoniously, and is very likely to be happy and successful. If they are opposite or different, the game will go on miserably, and the society must be at all times in the highest degree of disorder.”

- Club Troppo » Adam Smith 2.0: Emergent Public Goods, Intellectual Property and the Rhetoric of Remix

The people versus IP and copyright law.

Figures of Speech - Teach a Kid to Argue

Sat, 30 May 2009 03:30:00 +0100

Figures of Speech - Teach a Kid to Argue :

Ah, Logos, Ethos and Pathos. The article also convincingly argues that arguments—using logos, ethos and pathos—reduce not increase conflict.

It’s amazing how much this, and the trivium, is missed in society. An emphasis on such, as was the case in the middle ages, would increase our ability to live peacefully by reason—providing we use the scientific method and not religion for our facts this time.

"Smith also gives us a more compelling portrait of the psychology of motivation and achievement. For..."

Sat, 30 May 2009 03:20:00 +0100

“Smith also gives us a more compelling portrait of the psychology of motivation and achievement. For homo economicus the attraction of power, fame or wealth is simple greed for more. Smith is a better psychologist. “[T]o what purpose is all the toil and bustle of this world?” Smith asks about the human drive towards avarice and ambition? Smith concludes “It is the vanity, not the ease, or the pleasure, which interests us.””

- Club Troppo » Adam Smith 2.0: Emergent Public Goods, Intellectual Property and the Rhetoric of Remix

I’ve been thinking the same thing recently. All my daydreams of fame through creation always centre on me as the creator, and the acknowledgment of such by others.

I want to separate my need to be loved from my need to create by accepting people will love me simply for who I am—as I do with friends—not for what I create.

Then, I suspect, I shall gain solace and unfetter my ability to create. That is to say, I don’t agree that pleasure is excluded from all our toil, but that vanity vexes it and us greatly.

azspot: The Sound of One Hand Inking

Tue, 26 May 2009 19:57:45 +0100

azspot:

The Sound of One Hand Inking

azspot: Matt Bors

Tue, 26 May 2009 19:49:47 +0100

azspot:

Matt Bors

"Private capital tends to become concentrated in few hands, partly because of competition among the..."

Tue, 26 May 2009 19:46:24 +0100

“Private capital tends to become concentrated in few hands, partly because of competition among the capitalists, and partly because technological development and the increasing division of labor encourage the formation of larger units of production at the expense of smaller ones. The result of these developments is an oligarchy of private capital the enormous power of which cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organized political society. This is true since the members of legislative bodies are selected by political parties, largely financed or otherwise influenced by private capitalists who, for all practical purposes, separate the electorate from the legislature. The consequence is that the representatives of the people do not in fact sufficiently protect the interests of the underprivileged sections of the population. Moreover, under existing conditions, private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio, education). It is thus extremely difficult, and indeed in most cases quite impossible, for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions and to make intelligent use of his political rights.”

- Albert Einstein (via azspot)

"Books ought to be so cheap that we can throw them away if we do not like them, or give them away if..."

Tue, 26 May 2009 19:46:11 +0100

“Books ought to be so cheap that we can throw them away if we do not like them, or give them away if we do. Moreover, it is absurd to print every book as if it were fated to last a hundred years. The life of the average book is perhaps three months. Why not face this fact? Why not print the first edition on some perishable material which would crumble to a little heap of perfectly clean dust in about six months time? If a second edition were needed, this could be printed on good paper and well bound. Thus by far the greater number of books would die a natural death in three months or so. No space would be wasted and no dirt would be collected.”

- Virginia Woolf. (via Tomorrow Museum) (via dailymeh) (via somethingchanged)

via 20.media.tumblr.com

Sat, 23 May 2009 21:21:20 +0100

via 20.media.tumblr.com

Meditation: Why Bother?

Sun, 17 May 2009 13:57:56 +0100

Meditation: Why Bother?:

An excellent peice against desire.

"XML is like violence - if it doesn’t solve your problems, you are not using enough of it."

Fri, 15 May 2009 23:07:44 +0100

“XML is like violence - if it doesn’t solve your problems, you are not using enough of it.”

- Classic Programming Quotes | Storm Consultancy Blog (via continuum)

dear god.

The last word: Advice from ‘America’s worst mom’ - THE WEEK

Fri, 15 May 2009 22:42:00 +0100

The last word: Advice from ‘America’s worst mom’ - THE WEEK:

On my bus home this evening two passengers started to argue. It was over in a matter of seconds. Nevertheless, this sharply and uncomfortably raised my anxiety levels. I pondered why and decided that by increasing my anxiety levels I could have been protecting myself from a possible escalation. But perhaps the extent of my anxiety was too great, considering the very mild threat.

And so, I wondered, two thirds of the way though of this article, if anxiety may be linked to over-protective parents. What if over-protective parents fail to equip their kids with the ability to deal with difficult situations later on in life? If a kid grows up with an exaggerated understanding as to what is and is not likely to be dangerous, that kid may grow up believing far too much is dangerous, and his or her anxiety levels may act accordingly.

Still, I’m not sure if this will help my anxiety levels in the short term—I’ve recently decided that strong emotions, which more often than not emerge in childhood, are far more powerful than reason. But, at least, not impossibly so. Time for a few mantras perhaps.