shimweasel

Unfortunately, I seem to be stuck on deeply inappropriate songs. So far:

• “Guilty of Being White”, Minor Threat
• “I’m an Asshole”, nomeansno (no, it has nothing to do with Denis Leary.)
• “My Shit’s Fucked Up”, Warren Zevon
• “Friction”, Television
• “Love comes in Spurts”, Richard Hell and the Voidoids

This can’t end well.

apparently in Doha, there’s a common filing section for shoes, socks, and nunchucks. Who knew?

I think I may have just bought the worst webcam in existence.

$10 doesn’t buy you what it used to.

Amida got back to me with an ftpd package. No sshd, unfortunately, but ftpd and telnetd matched with “curl -T” and “expect” on the other add up to pure one-click goodness. (Or keypress, anyway. I spit me of pointing devices.)

Three times today, and I still see no evil.

Occasionally my mania for automation gets out of hand.
For instance: my current work cycle is this:

1. Edit code, hopefully improving it.
2. Hit compile button in Emacs, which regenerates the headers using makeheaders, invokes the compiler, the linker, and the stripper, and finally copies the executable to the ssync directory
3. Switch screens to the godawful obfuscated TCL program Silo, hit copy button
4. Switch screens to the xterm logged in to the Amida and start the program
5. Pick up the Amida and try to crash it.

Oh-ho, sez I, steps three and four are redundant! I could do all that from within the makefile, and hence from within Emacs, thus reducing my workflow to:

1. Edit code
2. Hit compile button, causing heavenly choirs to chime with joy at my infernal cleverness
3. Try to crash the Amida, which should by now be so intimidated by my leetness as to work perfectly, even if step 1 involved replacing every callback with a sonnet dedicated to the glory of Voltron. (The original series of Voltron, before that cat rubbish. If you’re oldskool you’ll know what I’m talking about.)

This would have saved me a good 5 seconds on each compile.

I have now spent a whole morning chasing this elusive dream. More, if you count my abortive efforts to get sshd to play nice. These ranged from searching for an ancient program called ‘tip’ which apparently helps automate serial comms, to pleading with minicom to do the right thing, to learning all kinds of arcane minutiae to do with stty, rz, and sz (anyone remember zmodem? God help me, I’m about to lapse into a nostalgic BBS trip), to attempting to decipher the source code of Silo, which, while looking like a UPX-encoded executable, is in fact nothing of the kind, and I can only assume has had some dumbass security-by-obfuscation variant of UPX applied to it to … what? Protect Amida’s source code? Given that there’s no actual key there, the process of recovering the original source can’t be that hard, especially given that I’m pretty sure it’s just a TCL hack.

Anyway. For this to make sense in terms of time management, I’d have to be working on this project for months. Once my inner obsessive-compulsive gets out, he doesn’t stop until the carpets are clean, the light fittings are scoured, and little robots are wandering around asking if you’d like a drink.

Ought I be worried?
Perhaps I need to make my vowels a little more ocker…

So, which of you smart-arse C hackers wants to make fun of me for writing this code?

#define error(format, …) printf(“fatal error %s.%d:” format “\n”, __FILE__, __LINE__ , __VA_ARGS__); exit(1)

…
if(!dir)
error(“Couldn’t open directory %s\n”, LIGHTSHOW_DIR);
…

Go on, laugh, you bastards.

(grumpily inserting brackets into macro defs as we speak)

after only a day, the people at Amida Simputers got back to me and sent the newest version of megawidgets. Now, you can bounce on comboboxes all day if you are so inclined, with nary a segfault. Granted, a pickier programmer might ask the question why they can’t make the code available on their site, rather than waiting for developers to stumble across the bug and ask for the update, but I’m so happy that it works that I’m in no mood to carp. I’d been contemplating porting the project to gtk, which would involve not only a fair amount of programming work but a shitload of deathly boring cross-compiling, and all the grovelling around with shared libraries that entails. Thank Christ, it won’t come to that.

This is my setup. The laptop on the left is an awful POS Dell with a busted touchpad and a butt-ugly version of Mandrake installed. The Amida with the blue tape has updated megawidgets code on it; the other doesn’t. Bluetape Amida is hooked up via usbnet to POS Dell, as well as via serial so I can transfer code to it. (Neither ftpd nor sshd were too happy about running on the amida, remember.)

The laptop on the right is my aging but beloved loki, a 17” PowerBook. It’s controlling the POS Dell (also nicknamed pigdog and fivepoundbag) using synergy, a lovely little bit of software that lets you share a mouse and keyboard between two (or more) machines. And the headphones connected to the iPod are my new pride and joy, a pair of Sennheiser HD 555s, through which Mission of Burma is tearing “Careening with Conviction” right up. They’re twice the headphones Chris has, almost literally.

No-one who knows me ought to be surprised by what a mess this is, nor by the fact that in the first two photographs I took, there were elements of the super-hush-hush opening ceremony visible. Oops.

7th gen Qataris get free petrol. Unlimited free petrol.
7th gen Qataris tend to drive Hummers.