Was having a really strange problem today; getting qtip (1.0.0-rc3) and fullcalendar (1.4.5) to play nice. No matter what, it was erroring on line 139:
$(this).data('qtip').current = $(this).data('qtip').interfaces.length
Thankfully the intertubes had a very helpful post; changing line 134:
if(typeof $(this).data('qtip') == 'object')
to:
if(typeof $(this).data('qtip') == 'object' && $(this).data('qtip') !== null)
made it all happy. Good coding practice FTW…
Ya, it’s been a while since adding content to this site, I know. It’s on the todo list.
While helping my lovely wife and my grandfather-in-law get their blogs online, I realised I’ve mostly neglected mine. It’s not because I don’t love you, sweet internets, but because I’ve found that the free time I once had for ranting online has almost vanished. It’s honours project time, my final year of uni, my victory lap. Although I don’t have exams, it feels like I’m being tested every day. It feels like it’s no longer fun whimsical nonsense, at uni and at work. And as much as I thought it never would, I want it to be over quickly.
I gave up writing for Nexus; not because I didn’t enjoy it, but because I felt my writing was getting to the stage of interestingness. Throughout all the articles of The Nerdery, you’ll notice a certain “shit, gotta get this done before Monday” feel to them. They were forced. And then, something happened at the start of the year; I felt like I had something to say. I felt like I had to educate the masses. Unfortunately, this came at a time where the new editor felt that Nexus had evolved too much over Josh’s tenure, and decided to take it back a notch. I felt like I no longer belonged.
It’s the sort of feeling I’m starting to find from places where I thought I had permanent membership.
Anywho, that’s enough emo for one night.
I’ve been looking all day for this, and almost gave up and went back to Java. If you’re like me and want a simple PubSub server for Twisted, go here.
Why did this take all day to find? Why can’t common things like this be explained in the Twisted documentation, the book, or even linked as example code? Something has to really frustrate me to make me want to use Java…
I apologize in advance for the lack of coherency in this post; it’s late, and I’m tired.
So, I have a custom backup script (mostly because I know I can do it better for my workflow than some off the shelf solution). It uses tar’s listed-incremental function to do, as you can guess, incremental backups over a monthly cycle. It’s been working well since I made it on Tiger, except today, the first time I’ve tried to take a backup since upgrading to Snow Leopard. It straight off failed, claiming it doesn’t understand listed-incrementals.
I’m scratching my head as to why (it’s really not a complex script), before I realise it’s using an older version of tar than what shipped with Tiger and Leopard (or it’s using BSD tar as opposed to GNU tar… but I can’t verify what Tiger/Leopard had, all I know is it worked previously). Hmmm… ok. So I open Macports, install the latest version of gnutar, removed the crappy Snow Leopard tar and all keps going happily… except I now have a wiggling suspicion in the back of my mind that there is another disturbance in the force…
I dig a little, and it’s not long before I discover that Apple also decided to ship bzip2 1.0.4, which has a security exploit that was fixed 1 year 6 months before 10.6 was released…
WTF Apple? Is anyone paying attention to software releases over there? It makes me wonder, what other outdated, exploitable software is installed on my laptop?
So, me and Bev like coffee. In the morning, in the afternoon, in the evening. We also like sleep, and so our coffee time in the morning often results in getting 2 to go. Which is fine, because BP’s Wild Bean coffee is actually pretty good, and as we have travel mugs, quite reasonably priced.
We collect the free coffee cards, and enjoy it. Except this morning, we notice that they’re phasing out the paper system in favor for a keyfob barcode. It’s ok though, if you register your keyfob online, you still get 6 for the price of 5, contradictory to the way Subway did it when they introduced their Subcard, when Subway sneakily increased the cost of a free lunch.
But the BP offer isn’t without a catch. To get the 6 for the price of 5 deal, you have to not only give them your email address, but also opt-in to their… well, it doesn’t actually say what I’m opting-into. For all I know I’m opting into daily advertising, or perhaps a free coffee on my birthday, or perhaps they’ll forget about it entirely and we’ll all just go about our days.
Will people accept Spam for slightly cheaper Coffee? It’s an interesting concept, I wonder how effective it will be…
… has been postponed.
However, do not loose faith, it is happening. Unfortunately we just couldn’t do it in the first week back.
Watch this space!
So, I’m procrastinating from writing my Java app. And when procrastinating, I like to listen to music. Except my laptop speakers suck, and as I’m home alone I would like to listen comfortably without headphones. Long story short; I need to hijack music form my laptop’s iTunes, and stream it to my desktop’s VLC or Windows Media Player.
Instantly I turn to an old favorite; Soundflower, which provides virtual inputs and outputs for MacOS. Except, it stopped working in Snow Leopard, the dialog:Â System extension cannot be used The system extension “/System/Library/Extensions/Soundflower.kext” was installed improperly and cannot be used. appears. Thankfully, it’s actually a simple problem and a simpler fix.
If you go:
$ sudo kextutil /System/Library/Extensions/Soundflower.kext
/System/Library/Extensions/Soundflower.kext has problems:
Authentication Failures:
File owner/permissions are incorrect (must be root:wheel, nonwritable by group/other):
/System/Library/Extensions/Soundflower.kext/Contents/Info.plist
/System/Library/Extensions/Soundflower.kext/Contents/MacOS/Soundflower
/System/Library/Extensions/Soundflower.kext/Contents/Resources/Soundflower.xcconfig
See, simple permissions problem! Running chown and chgrp cleans it up nicely. I’ve submitted the fix in the bug report, and hopefully soon a fix will be officially released.
Now, back to streaming my music…
So, since buying my iPhone 3GS, it’s been plauged with speed issues over WiFi. Not the awesome Lightwire service on campus, but my home, with my Cisco Aironet 123AG access point, the last place in the world I expect to have problems.
For those lucky enough not to experience slack WiFi, the problem is that is some applications are completely unusable. Using the http://i.dslr.net/tinyspeedtest.html website, my iPhone (on good days) gets ~4000ms pings and I~50kbps. But there should be no reason for this; The speedtest.net app works fine, showing speeds of ~14Mbps… Curious…
So, I did some packet captures (the capture point being on wired ethernet, directly after the AP); the iPhone takes seconds to ACK the TCP packets when running Mail or Safari (didn’t bother testing any other applications).
My logic may be failed, but if I run the test and get 256ms and 3500kbps on my MacBook, there should be no reason why this isn’t possible on my iPhone. My MacBook uses .11a, while the iPhone 3GS seems to only use .11b/g (which is very odd, because the chipset is there to support 802.11a), so each device isn’t sharing radio space with the other.
So I tried screwing with the settings, and the thing which had the most profound effect was the Beacon Interval. By changing it from 4000 Kusec to 40 Kusec, instantly I went from having ~4000ms pings to ~330ms pings, and a usable data rate of 864kbps! I then lowered it to the absolutely lowest time possible, 20 Kusec, and now have ~285ms pings and ~1500kbps to http://i.dslr.net/tinyspeedtest.html.
This does, however, bring one very pressing question;Â Why does this only affect my 3GS? Beverley’s original iPhone worked fine before changing the settings, as well as our 2 laptops, and various visitor’s laptops. In fact, I used this and 4 other identical APs at the NZ WCG, providing internets to ~25 different laptops and PDAs of various descriptions, all roaming around the event, with the exact same configuration I started with, and not a single complaint. It obviously can’t be the fault of the AP… can it?
So I was in Melbourne last week (I was going to blog about it, I swear) doing the RH300 rapid track course. I learnt a lot, especially to do with troubleshooting. The instructor, Rohan Sathe, was excellent. And now, I’m a Red Hat Certified Engineer!
I strongly recommend the course to anyone who wants to take the exam; there are things in the exam that you simply won’t have experienced. If you do the course, provided you pay attention and complete all the lab work, there should be no reason why you can’t pass the exam. Which is important, if your employer is paying a lot of money to fly you from New Zealand to Australia, and repeating the journey might take a bit of convincing.
Just on a side note, when did the Australian government start requiring ID to purchase prepaid SIM cards? The form I had to sign appeared more concerned with how many prepaid services I already had, and not at all with the actual phone number (I could have missed something though).
Ok, so given as how I haven’t actually posted these as of writing, I don’t think anyone can blame me for skipping out a few days, yes?
I’ve come to the conclusion that Australians, at least [Melbourneites,Melbourneians]? are the worst drivers in the world. They drive recklessly and never slow down, I swear most would rather crash then give you a break. I compare them to driving in Auckland, which is reality is pseudo-chaotic. Everyone thinks it’s this giant disorganised mess, but in reality, if you have confidence driving you’ll love Auckland drivers. They will hold up 3 lanes of rush-hour traffic just to let you turn right down a small side street! In can even compare them to Seoul drivers, who are far more reckless, but everyone will let everyone in and will slow down when necessary.
Rant out of the way, I’ve finally bitten the bullet and bought an Elgato eyeTV DTT. After purchasing it I immediately tried it out in the car, and it picked up SBS no problem. However, reception in the suburb I’m staying in is very poor; at most I’ve been able to get 40% signal strength with a proper UHF antenna, although the small one that comes with it isn’t far off. Once back in NZ, I plan to get myself a Mac Mini (preferably a used one off TradeMe) and set up a recording system / file share / backup server.
On a final note, don’t forget to check out Global Game Jam, which will be happening all over the world (and in particular at Waikato University) very shortly. The idea? 48 hours to create a game based on a predefined theme. I’m not talking super 3d immersive graphics level, just something fun and playable.
