Watch it all the way through. I dare you.

Writing about web page http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1cX4t5-YpHQ

Adding comments has been disabled for this video.

A wise move.

via: Microsoft's grinning robots or the Brotherhood of the Mac. Which is worse?

Mike Willis : 28 Sep 2009 21:17 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

More? No thank you.

Writing about web page http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8273960.stm

Conservationists say there could be more spiders and daddy longlegs than usual this autumn because of favourable breeding conditions.

This is not what I wanted to hear on the radio as I was waking up this morning. A big spider ran across my living room floor the other night. It's inside the vacuum cleaner now.

Mike Willis : 25 Sep 2009 12:51 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Not the first, won't be the last

Apple iBook + small hex key + small flat head screwdriver + filter for use with camera flash unit + little bit of sticky tape =

It's a deeper red than it looks in the photo.

Update: I'm chewing on a strawberry creme from a tin of Quality Street and thinking the translucent red wrapper is just the right size to use for this mod. So don't buy flash filters or similar, buy a box of Quality Street. It'll probably be about the same cost but you get tasty treats in addition to the bits of translucent plastic. The wrapper will be all crinkly though of course so it probably won't look as good. You could try ironing the wrapper flat, but I don't recommend that unless you've already decided you want to buy a new iron anyway.

Mike Willis : 08 Sep 2009 20:57 |  Tags: Apple Ibook Mod |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Pine used to be considered a fancy way to read your email

The University's off campus homepage viewed in Mosaic. Because someone recently said to me in jest 'go run Mosaic then'.

(Click for larger)

Despite looking nothing at all like it does when viewed in a modern web browser, the page is perfectly coherent and usable. Though I've scrolled down to hide the CSS that gets displayed at the top of this and every other webpage I've tried. I guess people don't bother to test their sites against browsers for which development ceased over a decade ago.

If you're the sort of person who feels the desire to give this a go then this is how I got it running:

• Take one Linux machine, preferably one you don't care if you screw it up. I used a virtual machine with the latest Ubuntu installed that I had already.
• Grab a copy of Mosaic ftp://ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Mosaic/Unix/binaries/2.7b/Mosaic-linux-static-2.7b5.gz unpack it and make it executable.
  
• Grab http://www.jwz.org/hacks/netscape-linux-libs.tar.gz and unpack it in /  (See, this is why I used a virtual machine I don't care about.)
• $ modprobe binfmt_aout
• Install the Net::Server::Fork perl module. In Ubuntu you want the libnet-server-perl package. In openSUSE it looks like the relevant package is perl-Net-Server.
• If you don't have a group called nobody, which Ubuntu doesn't, create one. I gave it gid 65533 because that's what openSUSE uses.
• Grab http://www.jwz.org/hacks/http10proxy.pl which serves as a proxy to translate the HTTP/1.0 that Mosaic speaks in to HTTP/1.1. Run it. Without it you can't access any websites with Mosaic. (I found it refused to run complaining there was no group called nobody hence why I created that group.)
• Run the Mosaic executable. Select File > Proxy List and add a proxy. Scheme is http, address is localhost, port is 8228.
  
• Visit websites!
  

This method is condensed from http://jwz.livejournal.com/856745.html which has instructions for other operating systems besides Linux.

I've found the delete and backspace keys don't work in Mosaic. I have to enter urls using File > Open URL then type without making any mistakes. There may well be a way to get backspace/delete working but I've not tried.

Having first got online during Eternal September I can just about remember when Mosaic (and usenet) was relevant, though I didn't use it much as my 'net access at the time was mostly limited to *nix systems used via telnet or kermit

Mike Willis : 03 Sep 2009 22:03 |  Comments (3) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

2GB

Follow-up to x250 from Mike's blag

(Click for larger)

A SanDisk 2GB M2 card circa 2007 atop a Seagate 2Gb harddisk circa probably 1994-ish

Mike Willis : 31 Aug 2009 12:25 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Any any any

Someone is currently driving round the neighbourhood sounding a horn and shouting 'scrap iron'. It's like being in the 1950s(*). Except I can blog about it.

(*) Maybe. I wouldn't know, having not been there. One day though lightning will strike the Town Hall and I'll get that 1.21 jigawatts.

Mike Willis : 23 Aug 2009 10:39 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Dan Brown is most unwanted author says Oxfam

Follow-up to Kindle, Schmindle from Mike's blag

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/08/21/oxfam_donations/

See, told you they'd have some.

Mike Willis : 21 Aug 2009 23:26 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Does not compute

After downloading and installing a program, I ran it and got this:

Mike Willis : 19 Aug 2009 12:43 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Unexpected item in the bagging area

I just used one of those self serve supermarket checkouts for the first time. The over all process was quicker than using one where an employee does the scanning and takes your money but only because there happened to be a shorter queue. The actual time spent scanning my stuff and paying wasn't any quicker and was on the whole rather irritating. E.g. It turns out that you can't scan a second item until you put the item you just scanned down on the bagging area, which is about a foot off the floor. So I scan my magazine, drop it on the bagging area, scan my other magazine,  drop that on the bagging area, then pay, then bend down to retrieve both magazines. All this wondering why I couldn't just keep the magazine's in my hand. Perhaps it's less irritating if you actually put your items in bag, which I didn't. From this experience I can only conclude that self service checkouts are a cost saving exercise (one employee can hover around half a dozen self serve check outs in case there's a problem so that's five fewer people need to be employed) and offer no tangible benefit to customers. It's not like you get a discount for doing the work an employee would otherwise have done.

Mike Willis : 18 Aug 2009 13:09 |  Comments (2) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Fun with files that are actually zip archives.

Earlier today someone sent me an image by embedding it in a Microsoft Word .docx file. An illogical (to my mind) and entirely superfluous but all too common practice which often makes the image much more difficult to view because it's had to be resized to fit within the margins. Anyway... I had to send this image on to someone else and so wanted to extact the image to send on it's own. After spending 30 seconds failing to see how to do that in OpenOffice I remembered that .docx files are Open Office XML files, (I think Open Office XML is a horrible disingenuous name but that's another story), which are actually zip archives. So I just unpacked it:

me@mine:/tmp> unzip foo.docx
Archive:  foo.docx
  inflating: [Content_Types].xml     
  inflating: _rels/.rels             
  inflating: word/_rels/document.xml.rels  
  inflating: word/document.xml       
 extracting: word/media/image1.png   
  inflating: word/theme/theme1.xml   
  inflating: word/settings.xml       
  inflating: word/webSettings.xml    
  inflating: docProps/core.xml       
  inflating: word/styles.xml         
  inflating: word/fontTable.xml      
  inflating: docProps/app.xml 

And there in bold is the image file. Which is nice. A few minutes later I realised I was being very thick and the way you save an image from within OpenOffice is to right click on it and select 'Save Graphics'. But I like that you can unzip a docx file and get at the innards.

It reminds me of another blog post I was going to write but never got around to. A while back I had an OpenDocument Text file containing numerous images (and text, not just images!) all of which I needed to replace. After manually replacing the first few images I decided that changing them all manually was going to be far too irritating. OpenDocument files also zip archives. So I unpacked the .odt file, copied the new images over the old ones and zipped it all up again. Much faster than repeatedly deleting an image and then inserting a new one.

This sort of thing is also a good demonstration of how those three letters on the end of a filename mean nothing more than someone has decided to put those three letters on the end of the filename. Filename extensions are a useful convention but they don't necessarily reflect the type of file and they're not even required. Which is why, as I've found myself having to explain more than once, renaming a file to put a different set of letters on the end of it's name doesn't make the file a different type of file. Call it what ever you want and it's still the same type of file

me@mine:/tmp> file trans.png 
trans.png: PNG image data, 1 x 1, 8-bit/color RGBA, non-interlaced
me@mine:/tmp> mv trans.png trans.jpg
me@mine:/tmp> file trans.jpg
trans.jpg: PNG image data, 1 x 1, 8-bit/color RGBA, non-interlaced
me@mine:/tmp> mv trans.jpg trans.whatever
me@mine:/tmp> file trans.whatever
trans.whatever: PNG image data, 1 x 1, 8-bit/color RGBA, non-interlaced
me@mine:/tmp> mv trans.jpg trans
me@mine:/tmp> file trans 
trans: PNG image data, 1 x 1, 8-bit/color RGBA, non-interlaced

Mike Willis : 14 Aug 2009 13:25 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem