MindlessCode.net

http://ned.ucam.org/~sdh31/maths/pointnine.html: Proof that 1.0 = 0.999…

As if the bozos who give away money in Washingtion DC (I’m sorry, make laws) making “Daylight Savings Time” longer wasn’t enough, the British are going to try something even worse:

However, the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents has suggested the introduction of Single/Double Summertime in a bid to reduce road accidents.

Under this system, clocks would no longer return to Greenwich Mean Time in October but would remain one hour ahead until March, when another hour would be added.

Oh, that sounds awful. I don’t believe one word of it.

I don’t know very much about politics in the UK, but if it’s anything like it is in the US, then it will probably go though. Ugg.

We’re pretty much in a feature freeze now and getting ready to release 1.1.2 for testing. New features for 1.2 include: C++ ABI fixes! LZMA Compression! (Some) NPMI (Native Package Manager Integration)! Automatic KDE 3.x MIME Type handling! New super-easy-to-use Binary Relocation Library! And More!

As always, we’re in need of testers and developers, so if you’re looking for a project to work on, swing by and say hi!

Also, someone has emailed Mike and Me about using Autopackage for Firefox 1.5. Not the official package, but it hopefully won’t be hidden. Way cool!

Yay, CJS (Corvallis Junior Symphony) started today (well, tonight). The music is hard, fun, and exciting. I love playing with a full orchestra, hearing the strings, winds, brass, and percussion turn into music. It’s great to be back and playing music with people.

The whole 1^st violin section moved up to CYS this year. All my friends are gone. I miss them. I miss my old stand partner. I miss seeing my musical friends every week.

It’s orchestra and I love it!

How to Collect LED Pocket Calculators. It sounds kind of strange, but it’s a pretty neat page. Check out the pictures, it’s pretty cool to see how the calculator has changed into what it is now (see The Bowmar).

Rules for Good Grammar #4.

1. Don’t use no double negatives.
2. Make each pronoun agree with their antecedents.
3. Join clauses good, like a conjunction should.
4. About them sentence fragments.
5. When dangling, watch your participles.
6. Verbs has got to agree with their subjects.
7. Just between you and i, case is important.
8. Don’t write run-on sentences when they are hard to read.
9. Don’t use commas, which aren’t necessary.
10. Try to not ever split infinitives.
11. It is important to use your apostrophe’s correctly.
12. Proofread your writing to see if you any words out.
13. Correct speling is essential.
14. A preposition is something you never end a sentence with.
15. While a transcendant vocabulary is laudable, one must be eternally careful so that the calculated objective of communication does not become ensconsed in obscurity. In other words, eschew obfuscation.

Thanks /usr/games/fortune

I’ve been using Last.FM for about a month and have finally decided that it’s pretty neat. The idea is that you listen to some of the music you have on your computer and use an AudioScrabbler plugin to submit the info to Last.FM. After about 300 tracks, Last.FM calculates your “musical neighbours”. Musical neighbours are people who listen to the same kind of music that you listen too. For example, if you listen to a bunch of Shostakovich then you’ll be paired with people who listen to modern Russian music. If you listen to a lot of Nickel Creek, then you’ll be paired with people who listen to bluegrass.

So, that’s all very cool and interesting, but here’s the neat thing: You can listen neighbour radio. That is, Last.FM will stream music that you and your neighbours listen to. For example, right now I’m listening to my neighbour radio and hearing Arthur Rubinstein playing Choplin. A minute ago I was hearing some bluegrass. (Yes, I know “Now Playing” doesn’t say that, that’s because Now Playing is reading my data from amaroK–I’m working on getting it integreated with Last.FM too…)

Be warned that the Last.FM player is a little flakey, and certainly doesn’t work all the time. It susposedly works on Linux, Windows, and OS X (uses a statically linked Qt 4), although I can only that confirm that it works on Linux.

It’s a great way to hear music that’s similar to what you like to listen to but most likely have never heard before. Oh, and did I mention that it’s free? Rock on!

I recently sent a tech-support request to D-Link because I had a problem with our D-Link DI-514:

Hello,
I’m trying to configure my DI-514 router and am having an issue with the firewall. I have 3 entries for SSH in my firewall that are disabled. They look like this:
Deny, SSH, WAN,*, LAN,192.168.0.100, TCP,22

I have no entries for SSH in my Virtual Server config. The problem is that I cannot delete these entries, as there is no delete button next to them. (Screenshot here: http://www.wildgardenseed.com/Taj/firewall1.jpg)

How can I get rid of these rules? Using Firmware 1.03,Tue, 20 Jul 2004.

Thanks!
–
Taj

And, the reply:

You can delete entry by clicking on trash can at the end of each policy.
[canned addition]

Umm…did they even look at the screen shot? There is no trash can. (Yes, they did look at the screen shot according to my Apache logs–3 hours before sending a reply. :)).

The only workaround I’ve found is to resest the router.

In other news, what do you think of this website mockup? Suggestions, comment?

I’ve been working on the design of a new webpage and discovered I decided to use a custom image bullet with rollovers for the navbar. The obvious thing to do was be to use list-style-image and use the :hover puesdo-class to change the image. It worked great in Firefox and Opera, but IE5/6 just refused to use the custom image and rollover, making for a very ugly navbar. The solution? Make the bullet the background!

This is the code I used for sub-menus:

#avmenu li ul li a {
background-image:url(bullet2.gif);
background-repeat:no-repeat;
background-position:left center;
padding-left:14px; /* Image is 12px wide */
}
#avmenu li ul li a:hover {
background-image:url(bullet2-over.gif);
background-repeat:no-repeat;
background-position:left center;
}


No Rollover	Rollover

I had to use GIFs instead of PNGs, which kind of made me mad (IE doesn’t support transparent PNGs–Grrrr), but other than that it works great in IE5, IE6, Gecko, Konqueror, and Opera! I hate Internet Explorer.

If this post doesn’t make any sense, it’s because I was up until 12:30 AM this morning playing with Guitar and Mandoline with Kit. The quote:

I was attempting to cross-tune my Guitar by tuning the G string up to an A. I had just gotten it up to G#, and was saying “I wonder if this thing is going to brea…” when SNAP! went me string. Kit: “That is so Taj.” Lesson of the day: Don’t tune your Guitar strings too far up.