Spin Cycle

I made another website

jugboy — Wed, 20 Sep 2006 17:43:19 +0000

Yes, that’s right. This last week I’ve been exercising my minimal web-monkeying skills cooking up http://www.minutemanbristol.com/ for my friend Peter who is setting up a Minuteman Press shop in Bristol. I finally found myself forced to use PHP, which I had been resisting for years, since it seemed to be the only scripting language available on the IIS server he’s using.

AVG detects virus in Firefox’s xpiclean.exe – false positive?

jugboy — Wed, 20 Sep 2006 00:04:40 +0000

I just went to update firefox from 2.0 beta 1 to 2.0 beta 2, but AVG antivirus stopped me, telling me that firefox’s xpicleanup.exe contains virus PSW.Generic2.ILX.

I asked around on IRC and apparently this is a false positive. In fact, asking AVG to update its virus definitions stops the detection.

It seems today’s update fixes the problem. Previously I was using yesterday’s virus definitions.

“send to friend” feature in Azureus beta

jugboy — Thu, 29 Jun 2006 04:44:53 +0000

I just installed the newest Azureus beta, 2.4.0.3_B49 and noticed a new little green icon next to each of my torrents. It turns out it’s for sending torrents to friends, or blogging them – so let’s see what it does:

Download ubuntu-6.06-alternate-i386.iso

OK… So that’s what it does. On closer examination the icon is of a white page with a green arrow on it, but the icon is displayed on a white background making the page part almost invisible. Still, it’s a beta, so what do you expect?

FreeNX rgb.txt configuration

jugboy — Tue, 20 Jun 2006 22:14:35 +0000

I recently installed FreeNX. It's a very fast remote-desktop server – like VNC or Remote Desktop, only much faster over slow connections.

All was well until I tried running Emacs inside a FreeNX session. Emacs refused to start, complaining:

Undefined color: "black".

It turned out that FreeNX's nxagent program has the path to X's rgb.txt file hardcoded inside itself:

$ strings /usr/lib/nx/nxagent | grep /rgb
/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/rgb

Whereas the real location of rgb.txt is /etc/X11/rgb.txt. I worked around this by making a symlink:

sudo ln -s /etc/X11/rgb.txt /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/

Then when FreeNX looks in /usr/X11R6/lib/X11 for rgb.txt, it can find it, and Emacs is able to start up.

The Sound of Storensay

jugboy — Sat, 17 Jun 2006 00:37:21 +0000

My friend Peter is writing a book. I've been helping him get the website for the book up and running. After a hideous day with the website's crappy website builder software I persuaded him to switch over to a simple hosting account, so I can update the site using FTP instead of having to fight with the nasty WYSIWYG site editor.

The site is here: The Sound of Storensay

Oh, fuck off, you fucking stapler

jugboy — Mon, 12 Jun 2006 21:17:35 +0000

A funny scene about 10 minutes into episode 7 of series 2 of Green Wing:

Martin is in Sue's office asking advice about how to spend his scratchcard winnings. Sue is working a ventriloquist's dummy…

Martin: Right. I have enough money to get rid of me debts, right, and buy a really nice jacket, but, not enough money to buy a castle.

Sue: Right, an-and-and do you want a castle?

Martin: No.

Sue: What do you want then?

Martin: Uh, well I just wanna be told, you know, what, what is the best way to spend my money so that I don't feel guilty once it's all gone.

Sue: Yeah well that's, um, that's, um. That is, that is a tricky one.

Martin: Yeah, I know.

Sue: Let me think, um, what to do, what to do?

Dummy: Give Sue White all the money.

Martin: Gi… What, what was that? G… What did you say?

Sue: I didn't say anything. I was just, you know, thinking.

Martin: Just thinking out loud.

Sue: No, no. Just. Just time. Lemme think.

Dummy: Give Sue White all the money. Go on. Give it to Sue. Give it to Sue.

Stapler: No, I don't want to … give…

Dummy: Oh, fuck off, you fucking stapler.

Hapland 3

jugboy — Wed, 17 May 2006 13:02:04 +0000

I greatly enjoyed the first 2 games in the series – and here's the 3rd and final game:

Hapland 3

Bon Echo (aka Firefox 2) Alpha 2 Released

jugboy — Mon, 15 May 2006 03:05:13 +0000

Firefox 2 Alpha 2 was recently released. At first glance it doesn't look very different from Firefox 1.5, but I do like the addition of on-the-fly spell checking for multi-line text boxes. The only problem with that is that it doesn't seem to work when I'm composing email using gmail's web interface, and it also doesn't work in the wordpress page I'm typing into right now. Maybe this will be ironed out before the final release.

You can download it here.

Previously On… » Season Finale: Casino Night

jugboy — Sat, 13 May 2006 00:43:50 +0000

Previously On… » Season Finale: Casino Night

Wow, I didn't realise there were any more episodes this season. I was feeling very let down with the ending of the last episode. At the end of season 2 of the UK version of The Office, the Jim character and the Pam character headed off into the sunset together, so I was expecting something similar from the US version. I guess I won't be disappointed when I get to see it?

Burroughs Book Covers

jugboy — Fri, 12 May 2006 23:40:05 +0000

Burroughs Book Covers