howto, hack
I invented a word today
disasswimble (v) To take a portable elecronic device apart so that it might dry after an unfortunate dunking
Thanks to @jerith for formulating the definition and the true life incident that lead to us discussing it.
Dell Vostro A860 NIC and Wi-Fi issues in Ubuntu (Intrepid)
Soon after I had installed Ubuntu 8.10 on my new laptop I realised that something was not well with the networking.
XML processing in Elisp
Compiling Emacs
So, I'm back to trying to compile emacs-nt again, having discovered that the required W32 headers are in fact conveniently supplied by Mingw (albeit in a different package). Now I'm getting an "Unknown Processor" error. gcc -dumpmachine tells me I have an arm processor on my PC... perhaps this is the problem o_0
UPDATE: It turns out the Symbian SDK also provides a gcc, and this was in my path before the Mingw one. Hence the strange architecture.
Opening an image in Opera 9.5 spawns multiple tabs
I recently started seeing a bizarre problem in Opera. I believe it only happened in Opera 9.5 but I may be wrong. I suspect it may also be linked to Irfanview. Basically, when ever I opened an image via the context menu, or clicked on a image link, a gazillion (ok, 10 - 20) tabs would open, trying to load something from the cache directory - yet still no image.
I found the solution to the problem yesterday, in the Opera Forums:
Seems like something got mixed up in your file type associations. Probably the best thing is to reset them all.
Emacs as an IDE
At work we recently started using an Eclipse-based IDE. It integrates with a gdb-based debugger, but everything is very unstable and I have to constantly power-cycle the box and programmer that I'm working with.
Since I've been playing with emacs the last few months, I decided to see whether I can get the compilation and debugging working from within emacs. (pause for effect)
Yes, indeed it is possible. (applause)
Creating a Blogroll the Drupal way
My shiny new blogroll is built using the Drupal modules Content Construction Kit (CCK) and Views. The CCK lets you create new "content types" very easily and without writing a line of code (which is a good thing in this case).
Everything in Drupal is/should be a node. This post is a node, of the type Blog. CCK lets you set up a collection of data fields into a new node type or add custom fields to existing node types.
Bluetooth/GPRS setup
How to set up GPRS modem over bluetooth
Step 1: turn on bluetooth on your phone
Step 2: start bluetooth on your box (as root)
# /etc/init.d/bluetooth start
Step 2.5: (not sure whether this is actually necessary but it won't hurt)
$ kbluetoothd
Step 3: Pair your computer and your phone in the usual way
Step 4: find your phone's id and DUN channel
# sdptool search DUN
Inquiring ...
Searching for DUN on 00:17:4B:19:17:01 ...
Service Name: Dial-Up Networking
Service RecHandle: 0x10007
Service Class ID List:
"Dialup Networking" (0x1103)
Beaming files across a network
The following script copies files given in a text file. It preserves the tree structure, and copies it to a base directory. It uses a nifty mkdir-like function that takes a lot of the nitty-gritty out of the process.
import os
import os.path
import shutil
def makepath(path):
""" creates missing directories for the given path and
returns a normalized absolute version of the path.
- if the given path already exists in the filesystem
the filesystem is not modified.
- otherwise makepath creates directories along the given path
