Why do they have to be so damn difficult?

I’ve been working on upgrading my grandmother’s machine from a five or six year-old eMachine PII/300 running Windows 98 to a brand new Compaq deal I got at CompUSA along with a monitor and printer. The machine is reasonably fast, and, after I uninstalled all the crap that it came with and threw on some more reasonable software, I’m nearly at the point where it works the way she can use it.

Frustration 1. Moving files from one machine to another. I knew I wasn’t going to be able to use the network, as the old machine doesn’t have ethernet. New machine has no floppy. I could have uploaded all of the files via modem (probably get about 2 kB/sec), but that would have been painful. Easy, though, I’d use my USB memory key. Except that Win98 doesn’t natively support USB keys. Download the drivers… discover that they all want Win98SE, and won’t install. Grind teeth. Outcome: Success — finally had to use a USB CDR I had at home, since it at least had drivers on CD for Win98.

Frustration 2. Printer failure. The HP Deskjet 3915 just sits there flashing its light. Figure it’s a driver problem, so download 8MB of updates (over that mighty 2kB/sec connection). Still, nothing. Paper manual says that I should read documentation on CD. Documentation on CD says that I should consult the error code provided by the HP software. HP software says everything is fine. CD documentation’s best suggestion is to reboot. Windows thinks the driver is fine; HP thinks the printer is fine. The printer queue says it’s printing. Nothing ever happens. Reinstall drivers. Repeat. Outcome: still unsolved. Next step — call HP tech support. Oh, joy.

Frustration 3. Importing old mail from Netscape 4.8 to Thunderbird. Importing address book was simple — worked beautifully. But for old email, no such luck. There’s a tool “Wizard” for importing mail. But it doesn’t allow you to point it at files, it wants you to pick the profile. But it doesn’t see any profiles. I try putting the Netscape 4.8 user directories in all of the reasonable places (no, really. I tried all of them), but it never sees them. Documentation doesn’t yield any help. Try other directories. Try copying mail files directly into the appropriate directory in Thunderbird’s profile to no avail. Outcome: gave up.

I’ve been working on a script to do a bunch of crazy manipulation of images in Photoshop. Basically, it sequentially opens all the image files in a directory, and displays a dialog box requiring user interaction to determine what to do with the image.

I was having the problem that the dialog box would come up before the image could redraw (in the case of large images), so the user would be asked what to do, but would be unable to see the image in question. This, of course, doesn’t work.

I tried writing delay code, to no avail. I had a very hard time finding help, because I didn’t know what search terms to use. None of “delay,” “repaint,” “refresh,” “sleep,” and “wait” yielded anything useful when combined with”Photoshop” and “Javascript.”

Finally I found this posting by Tom Hart in the Adobe forums, where he provides a function called WaitForRedraw which solves the exact problem!

Here’s a link to Tom’s Posting.

This is probably obvious to everyone in the universe but me, but I was having a problem where my outbound email was being scanned by sa-exim, in addition to the desired scanning of incoming email.

The trick is in setting your SAEximRunCond in sa-exim.conf correctly. This is probably documented somewhere, but I totally missed it. In any case, assuming you want to skip scanning of email originating in your local network (e.g., IP address of 10.3.2.0/24) and that you changed the secret SA-Do-Not-Run header’s name to SA-Do-Not-Think-Of-Running, you would use the following line in your sa-exim.conf:

SAEximRunCond: ${if and {{def:sender_host_address} {!eq {${mask:$sender_host_add
ress/24}}{10.3.2.0/24}} {!eq {$h_X-SA-Do-Not-Think-Of-Running:}{Yes}} } {1}{0}}


Voila, outbound emails are no longer checked. Of course, if you are sending spam, please do not make the above change, but instead please swallow whole six to ten large, unpeeled pineapples.

So, courtesy of the DWP, the Meier Quagg was without power for about 7.5 hours today. It’s not clear what was wrong. The other side of the street had power, as did several parallel streets nearby, but this side of Meier was out, as were patches of Venice like the Oakwood.
Anyway, when the power came back up, most of the servers came back with it. Intervention was required for the Golem, Pylonhead, and Sekhmet. Sekhmet was the worst. I only got the “LI” of LILO, which says that the /boot/boot.b file was bad, or the drive geometry was hosed.

So I tried my trusty Debian rescue disk. Typed rescue root=/dev/hda1 at the boot: prompt. The boot failed with a complaint that /dev/hda1 was an MSDOS partition. uh-oh… MSDOS?

Of course, it turns out that I was using the wrong rescue disk. I was using a Woody ISO, and I had upgraded the machine to Sarge — and EXT3, which evidently was not compiled into the rescue disk. When I finally tried the correct rescue disk, it came up neatly, repaired the journals, and gave me my precious root prompt.

I did the LILO replacement trick (lilo -u /dev/hda; lilo), popped out the CD, rebooted, and held my breath. Then I decided to breathe. It’s my second fastest server, but it’s still a four-plus-year-old Dell Optiplex. In any case, it came up cleanly and there was much rejoicing.

Now it’s just a matter of waiting for the mail secondary to forward on all the queued up spam.

In the not-so-distant future, the average person will find information falling into one of three categories:

1. Forbidden Information (circuit diagrams, satellite ephemeris, “intellectual property,” etc.)
2. Purchased Information (“Entertainment,” music, movies, games)
3. Pushed, Mandatory Information (advertising, propaganda)

Forbidden information, while available to some small group in order to perform their jobs, will be increasingly restricted under the twin guises of Intellectual Property and Homeland Security. Within twenty years, it will be illegal to design even simple circuits outside of sanctioned workplaces; similarly, computer programming will require licensing and security clearances.

Purchased information will be controlled by The Almighty Google Corporation (TAGC). Even information that people are permitted to create on their own will only be sharable to the world through a Google-controlled mini-payment system. Purchased information will also be inextricably meshed with Mandatory Information — to view your cousin’s wedding pictures, you will be obligated to view advertising from banquet companies or wedding registry providers, or perhaps even a Public Service Announcement on the evils of divorce.

The twist on all this is that bandwidth will be free. TAGC will have the world blanketed in a high-speed wireless network. You’ll site down in an overpriced coffee chain, open up your computer, and immediately be connected to virtually unlimited bandwidth so you can download as much Entertainment as you can afford. TAGC will, of course, use you location and search histories to inform you that you’re only a mile from a franchise of your favorite Bagel place, and it’s nearly lunchtime, and if you go now, you won’t get anxious and depressed later, so you can quit taking Paxil (that is why you were searching for information on the side-effects, isn’t it? Admit it. You sent a Gmail Message to your doctor on the subject too). What’s more, on the way, you’ll pass a Multinational Flower Distributor Outlet on the way, and you might want to keep in mind that you had a bit of a spat with the significant other (based on the frequency of the Gmails the other day, and the mood-assessor’s analysis of the vocabulary used), so this would be a good opportunity to patch things up — we would have recommend the Fancy Chocolatier across the way, but your significant other has been searching for diet information, so better play it safe…