Is the art of handwriting dying out?

Writing about web page http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/7907888.stm

Coincidentally I was thinking about this the other day. I was trying to recall when I last wrote anything more substantial on paper than a few brief notes in block capitals during a meeting. I came up blank and still have no idea.

I never did really learn to write very well. I know perfectly well how to write in theory but legibility has always been a feature notable only for it's absence. Even my block capitals often come out barely legible. Partly because I'm prone to attempt to join them up. I recall writing joined up numbers in Maths at school. A teacher once described my handwriting as looking like a drunken spider had fallen in a pot of ink and then wandered across the page. Come GCSEs I was turning in essays done on a word processor. (*)

I have in the past joked that my poor handwriting skills are an attempt to cover up my poor spelling skills. Sometimes my spelling appals me to the extent that I wonder if there is some sort of course I could take. It hasn't yet appalled me enough to seek out such a course though. I just carry on accepting the spellchecker's corrections and failing to learn from my mistakes. I had to spell check the word appals. For some reason the spellchecker is marking learned as a mistake and suggesting totally different words instead thus causing me to seek a second opinion, because even though I thought I knew how to spell learned my confidence in my spelling ability is such that I have to check. It turns out that learned is a perfectly valid word which means exactly what I thought it did but according to askoxford.com it's the American English variant of learnt. So not only am I a poor speller I also use Americanisms. At least I still spell colour with a u despite having been forced to write it as color in every programming/scripting/mark-up language I've used over the last twenty years.

(*) This was circa 1990. Sometimes using what I think was a Compaq Portable II . Last time I looked my Dad still had the machine tucked away in a corner of his office so I must check next time I'm there. Also a BBC Micro Model B with a word processor that was on a ROM chip. I've spent about ten minutes on Google trying to remember the name of it. Possibly it was called VIEW. Software that comes on a chip and you have to open your machine up and install it sounds like a crazy idea in retrospect. We also had an art package that came on a ROM chip which I know was called Super Art.

Mike Willis : 26 Feb 2009 22:09 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

All that glitters is not tasteful

Writing about web page http://gadgets.boingboing.net/2009/02/24/the-worlds-most-expe.html

Adorning a vacuum cleaner with Swarovski crystals seems like a good way to poke fun at the practise of sticking aforementioned crystals on to mobile phones, laptops and the like in the mistaken belief that the end result is something other than tacky or generally a bit silly looking. Either Electrolux have not defaced one of their products for satirical purposes or they're being very subtle about it.

Mike Willis : 25 Feb 2009 13:01 |  Comments (1) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

x250

16MB circa 1989 vs 4GB circa 2009.

Mike Willis : 22 Feb 2009 23:45 |  Comments (2) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

This is not just a jam sandwich

Writing about web page http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/02/18/jam_sarnie/

Except it is.

Those readers who are a) too busy to remove bread from a packet, b) physically incapable of opening a jar or c) untrained in the use of a knife, will be relieved to learn that as of next Thursday Marks & Spencer will be punting a 75p jam sandwich featuring, er, bread, butter and strawberry jam.

I have to admit that the first thought that came to mind was that 75p seems really cheap for a sandwich from M&S, even if it just jam. I can't imagine that I'd ever want to buy such a thing even at 75p though. For starters I wouldn't put butter in a jam sandwich. Also I was raised thinking of jam as being something which was made from fruit picked in the back garden and have always somewhat frowned upon the store bought variety. It ain't strawberry jam if there aren't lumps of strawberry in it that you have to squish down with the knife.

On a tangental note I was once passenger in a car that was stopped for going a bit too fast near Edinburgh. The policeman who pulled us over said "You're lucky I wa nae a jam sandwich".

Mike Willis : 18 Feb 2009 13:31 |  Comments (1) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Do you know where yours is?

Writing about web page http://hitchhikers.preloaded.com/universal-towels

Buy any three towels from our extensive range and get a free pair of Joo Janta 200 Super Chromatic Peril-Sensitive Sunglasses.

I wish it were a real store.

Mike Willis : 12 Feb 2009 13:16 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Seven levels of wet.

Car Park 15 - an open sided structure with uneven floors from which water mostly fails to leave via any process other than eventual evaporation.

(Click for larger.)

Mike Willis : 10 Feb 2009 19:20 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

zypper equivalent of yum —downloadonly

Looking at moving from yum to zypper I found myself unable to work out how to get zypper to download packages but not install them. Yum can do this with the downloadonly plugin:

yum -y update --downloadonly

According to this bug report, zypper should be able to do it but I couldn't find any explanation as to how. In the end I emailed the guy who marked that bug report as fixed and he was kind enough to reply and point me in the direction of the keep-packages option. This is a per-repo setting which means download packages are kept in cache. Knowing this a Google search took me here where it is mentioned along with the --dry-run option. So to get zypper to download updates but not install them, enable caching of packages on all repos with

zypper mr -k -all

and then use

zypper -l -y  update --dry-run

Mike Willis : 02 Feb 2009 12:28 |  Tags: Linux Opensuse Suse Yum Zypper |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Lloyds lifts

Lifts on the outside of the fantastic looking Lloyds building in London.

Mike Willis : 01 Feb 2009 17:29 |  Comments (2) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Buy consume obey

Writing about web page http://www.hotukdeals.com/item/329419/thirst-pockets-high-school-musical-/

Sometimes marketing tie-ins puzzle me to the extent my brain hurts a little. A few weeks ago in Tesco I was perusing the discounted bakery goods section and noticed a packet of Hanna Montana cake rolls. Why does this product exist? How are small pieces of rolled up cake relevant to the secret identity of a fictional teenage girl that sings? A Hanna Montana karaoke machine I can understand, but what sort of minds came up with the idea of Hanna Montana cake rolls?

If you haven't already followed the writing about webpage link it goes to an entry on a deals website for High School Musical 3 branded kitchen roll. Again... who, how, why, WTF? I haven't seen High School Musical 3, nor do I ever intend to, but I doubt that kitchen roll plays any significant part in the proceedings. This product is if anything even more baffling than the Hanna Montana cake rolls. I can recognise that there is a good percentage of the Hanna Montana target audience would also be partial to cylindrical sugary snacks wrapped in shiny foil, but I find it hard to imagine an overlap between the target audience for High School Musical 3 and kitchen roll. How many twelve year old girls are interested in the efficient cleaning up of kitchen spills?

I guess what it all comes down to is the Disney's desperate desire to squeeze every last possible cent from their franchises regardless of how incongruous the endorsement, coupled with the knowledge that if they put a picture of unrealistic idealistically styled digitally tweaked tween idols on a box then there will be children who ask their parents to buy it regardless of what the product is and some of them will have parents who make the purchase rather than take it as an opportunity to explain their offspring the concepts of merciless brand exploitation and mindless consumerism.

Mike Willis : 01 Feb 2009 11:35 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Asus Eee PC vs WPA–PSK when all you have is a hex key.

So far the Asus Eee PC 901 with it's default Linux install have been capable of everything I've asked of it wireless wise. However the GUI configuration tool provided for setting up network connections hasn't been as capable and last weekend failed me for a second time (the first time) when I wanted to connect to a WPA-PSK encrypted wireless network.

The wireless at my parent's house is set up using WPA-PSK. When setting it up I gave the router, a Windows XP machine and a wireless ethernet bridge a randomly generated 64 character hex string as the key. So the only key that I have for this network is that 64 character string.

When connecting to the network using the Eee's GUI tool I was asked to enter a key and specify either WEP or WPA. So I gave it the 64 character key and selected WPA. The Eee then completely failed to establish a working connection.

I hit Google and discovered this thread where in April last year someone says that Asus told them "Linux Xandros is not compatible with WPA-PSK security". The next post is someone describing how to use wpa_passphrase to generate configuration for wpa_supplicant which when will then establish a connection to a WPA-PSK protected network. This looked promising but attempting to give wpa_passphrase my 64 character hex string made it tell me it wanted something ASCII and at most 63 characters long. Evidently what wpa_passphrase wants is an ASCII passphrase which can then be combined with the ssid of the network being connected to create a suitable hex key. The clue is in the name really. I didn't have a passphrase to give it, but I did have a hex key already. So I came up with the following solution:

$ wpa_passphrase ssid_of_network_to_connect_to  a_few_random_characters > out.conf

The contents of out.conf looked like

network ={
               ssid="ssid_of_network_to_connect_to"
               #psk="a_few_random_characters"
               psk=generated_hex_string
}

I replaced generated_hex_string with the 64 character string I had. Then used wpa_supplicant to establish the connection

$ wpa_supplicant -i ra0 -c ./out.conf &

Then I waited a few seconds until the output indicated that the connection had been successfully established then invoked the dhcp client

$ dhclient ra0

and I had a working connection. Convoluted, but it worked. I'm not really sure why the GUI tool failed to set up a working connection. Perhaps it too wanted an ASCII passphrase despite the fact that the field is labelled key.

I've been left with a slight nagging feeling that maybe my problems were caused by my not understanding WPA-PSK properly. But having read the Wikipedia description of how it works that seems to match how I think it works. Maybe I should have set the router up using a passphrase rather than giving it a hex key I'd generated myself but the fact that the other devices I'd attached all happily worked using that key would seem to indicate that using a key was a valid thing to do.

Mike Willis : 01 Feb 2009 11:17 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem