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Day Fifteen: Dumb Luck

Selkcip — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 02:15:27 +0000

We had lunch at the club with the English relatives again. Lunch was meh. Afterward we drove forever to get to their house. It apparently took forever because of a football (soccer, duh) match, various road work and diversions (look! a unicorn), and the buying of a book of notes on another book. On the way we passed a bunch of idiots posing in the middle of the crossing at Abbey Road. When we finally got there we re-met my…second cousin once removed? My father’s cousin’s daughter. She’s now thirteen, slightly older than I was the last time I was here. She had the pre-requisite amount of makeup for a thirteen year old. After chatting for a bit my (I’m going to just call him my uncle) uncle got down to business, that being his website. Apparently he had some Indian guy working for him, making a website, working on fancying up his PowerPoint presentations, and something else. My uncle felt he wasn’t getting what he was paying for and made it known. In response the guy up and quit leaving his website leaning to the left and generally broken. It is his hope that I can fix this. After retrieving and changing the passwords for the control panel and the FTP account. We talked about what he wants. Nothing too fancy, but professional. I think that I can do that…I hope. I never tried to sell my coding services because I didn’t feel they were up to snuff and people would get upset and call it shit…like what happened to this Indian guy, but his really wasn’t all that great, hopefully I can do better. We then took the tube home and decided to give the fireworks down at the Thames the finger. Over the course of the day I had been rebuilding my N810 internet tablet as the backup I had used had stuff I didn’t want and some junk files that messed up Bluetooth syncing. By the time we got home, I had most of the applications that I wanted installed. I then tried one last ditch attempt to get my tablet to show up as a networked computer on Windows. By chance I found a number of installs claiming to be Samba, a Unix network filesystem that I had heard people throwing around when I first tried this. After a bunch of fooling and googling around I found info telling me what I should do to get it to work. Meanwhile my tablet had showed up in the network browser, only it wouldn’t let me open the folders as the root user so I had to figure out how to add a user. It worked. I was happy. Then I tried deleting a file. Copying a file. I didn’t have the permissions to do it. I think googled everything I could think of to give my new user read/write/execute rights. Nothing seemed to work. I thought I’d reboot it and try logging in as root again. When it came back up it was still using the same user “eriq,” damn. Oh wait, it just let me delete a file. Apparently restarting did something. And now it works. I have two wireless drives that I can easily move stuff to and from–so much easier than the USB cable or taking the Micro SD card out of the Mini SD card adapter out of the hard to get at slot on the tablet and putting it into the Micro to SD card adapter and into the reader on my computer. Wireless is awesome.

P.S. (Access N810 over network with samba server) If that sentence there brought you here looking for a way to get that working, leave a comment.

Moving

Selkcip — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 04:37:59 +0000

In case it isn’t obvious, I plan on moving my blog here and setting up my main site as a portfolio-ish thingy.

Flickr

Selkcip — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 06:23:40 +0000

Souvey has a Flickr account, so I thought “why not.” It’ll likely get more views than this blog, which may move sometime soon, still not sure. Here are the photos I’ve uploaded.

This is Some Odd Spam

Selkcip — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 02:53:21 +0000

Ok, holy shit. Today there was a comment in moderation and so I looked at it and it looked ok. Then, I noticed that Askimet apparently had caught 72 spam comments, but these aren’t the normal viagra shit. Here’s an example:

Congress have no power to disarm the militia. Their swords, and every other terrible implement of the soldier, are the birth-right of an American… [T]he unlimited power of the sword is not in the hands of either the federal or state governments, but, where I trust in God it will ever remain, in the hands of the people. TENCH COXE, Pennsylvania Gazette, Feb. 20, 1788.
Room service? Send up a larger room — Groucho Marx

Inanimate objects can be classified scientifically into three major categories; those that don’t work, those that break down and those that get lost — Russell Baker
A militia, when properly formed are in fact the people themselves…and include all men capable of bearing arms. RICHARD HENRY (LIGHT HORSE HARRY) LEE, Additional Letters from the Federal Farmer (1788) at 169.

They’re all similar to that, just a bunch of random quotes. I went to write this post, but then thought I’d see when they were posted. In doing so, I noticed that the askimet spam counter was not at 72, but 719…holy shit. This, I think, makes more sense. I guess I never noticed because the spam had been way down as of late, but it looks like they were all posted on the 20th, so I’m thinking that someone was trying to take down my site by using up my bandwidth (I’ll check now to see how much they used)…hmm, maybe not, my bandwidth usage is only at 128 megs, which is nothing. Maybe they were trying to use up my cpu quota, whatever it was, it looks like they failed. Odd.

Birthdays Suck

Selkcip — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 09:10:35 +0000

Not really, but writing a plugin to display them on the correct days does. I just spent most of the day and morning working on this thing. Pretty much I can add names and birthdays to the database and then a box appears up at the top of my blog when one of those birthdays occurs. If it’s still before the 22nd then you will be seeing said box above this post right now. Now I just have to ask if my friends are ok with having their first name or nickname, their age, and birthday plastered on the internet, I assume they won’t mind since it doesn’t really tell much about them, other than, obviously, their age. I got stuck for a long time trying to get the stuff showing up on the correct days and displaying the right time, when I fixed one thing the other broke and I spent a good while trying to figure out what I had done. Of course it was one of those stupid errors that you don’t see because you thinks it’s right, but it’s not. Turns out I was trying to shove a month in the form of a string into a parameter that wanted a month as an int. I’m too tired to do any more.

Finals and Bands

Selkcip — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 04:15:40 +0000

Today had my History and poetry finals. History was ok; that is, I thought I did well, until my teacher came to my poetry final and told me to come to study hall when I was done. i thought it was because my second essay was near complete shit, but then that doesn’t actually make sense, he wouldn’t give me time and force me to fix it. No, it turns out that I missed a entire page of multiple choice questions and he didn’t want to have to take away all those points, so he let me finish them. It makes sense that I missed some because when I was taking it, I reached the end of the first set of multiple choice and was surprised because it hadn’t taken me that long. Poetry on the other hand was horrible, we had to prepare 3 outlines for different essays before hand and we would be told in class which to write. Turns out that we got to choose, unfortunately I didn’t really know what to write for any of them, so It came out as complete and utter shit. Too bad since it’s worth 100 points.

Today, instead of studying for Trig, which I will likely regret, I wrote a plugin that makes a list of bands that I have had stuck in my head and displays the latest one beneath the site title. There is also a page that display the list accessible on the sidebar or by clicking the name of the current band.

Nope…

Selkcip — Sat, 08 Dec 2007 06:53:29 +0000

No new ideas or motivation.

Weekend!!

Selkcip — Sat, 08 Dec 2007 01:35:44 +0000

Huzzah! Hopefully I’ll think of something to make, because I really want to program. If I can’t think of anything to make in Flash, then maybe I’ll add stuff to the site, and if I can’t think of anything for that, then I’ll just watch TV.

Fucking Piece of Shit

Selkcip — Sun, 04 Nov 2007 07:30:31 +0000

This is the second time I had to post this…

So I updated to WordPress 2.3.1 today. Everything was fine except that I wanted tags for all of my posts preceding the update. I was going to try to write a script when I discovered it had already been done. It was supposed to take my categories and add tags to all the posts, but it only converted some of my categories and then deleted them. So, I had a few categories left and a few tags and I couldn’t figure out how to fix it. Finally, I gave up and just deleted the entire thing; yes the entire site. Then, I had fun trying to reinstall it. After a number of tries it eventually cooperated. While trying, I realized I didn’t have a backup of my upload folder, I’ll have to re-upload those sometime. Hopefully everything works now. Oh, I also lost a couple posts, but only one was really any good.

In Case You Didn’t Notice

Selkcip — Sat, 18 Aug 2007 06:44:45 +0000

Today I finally made the switch to WordPress. Let me tell you, the admin interface is waaaaaay better than the crap I wrote a year ago. Friggin awesome! At the moment the only thing that’s here is my blog, but in the following days I’ll bring back the video, flash, and picture areas. Also, I didn’t lose all of my posts from my old site, I just wrote up a php script that generated a WordPress export file by looking at one of said files that I got from my test site, although, all of the images and flash movies no longer exist, so some of the posts before this one have beheaded html tags…ignore those. Goodnight.