Five Minutes

        public void init() {
                findRoom();
                buyWater();
        }

        private void findRoom() {
                search(Buildings.ONE_WHICH_LOOKS_LIKE_WAGYL_THREW_UP_ON_IT);
                try {
                        regardArchitecture();
                }
                catch (VomitException e) {
                        shrug();
                }
        }

        private void buyWater() {
                try {
                        Machine.insert(0.20);
                }
                catch (MachineSwallowedCoinWithoutReasonAgainException e) {
                        System.err.println(Person.SWEAR);
                }
        }

        public void doGet(HttpServletRequest req, HttpServletResponse resp) {
                readExamPaper();
                winceAtPoorlyWrittenQuestions();
        }

        public void doPost(HttpServletRequest req, HttpServletResponse resp) {
                writeResponses();
                makeJoke(Lotus.NOTES);
                finish();
        }

        public void doDelete(HttpServletRequest req, HttpServletResponse resp) {
                leaveCampus();
                forgetEverything(java.lang);
                $var = ... oh, shit;
        }
}

I enjoyed the exam about as much as the rest of the unit (that is, not at all), but I’m pretty sure I did enough to pass. I must remember to read sample exams more closely, though — I was completely broadsided by the 15 mark question on Java GUI construction in a unit supposedly about building Java-powered Web sites. Obviously applets are back in vogue.

Now for the nervous wait for results in about six weeks.

My suspicion last night that ndiswrapper would cure my wireless ills appears to have been correct. It’s a bit of a step back, really, since it means (a) that I’m reliant on the Windows drivers and (b) that I had to switch to a 32-bit Ubuntu install since Apple don’t provide 64-bit drivers for the AR5418 wireless chipset on the Leopard DVD, but I’m not getting dropouts and stalls every couple of minutes now, so I guess I’ll have to grin and bear it.

Happily, everything else has worked out of the box in Ubuntu Gutsy. In fact, it’s probably all worked a bit too well — I had an afternoon of tinkering with things planned, but everything got configured much quicker than expected, which now means that I have no real excuse to avoid studying for tomorrow morning’s exam. Damn you, efficient FLOSS developers!

Oh yes, the in-built webcam works, too. That promises to be… minutes of fun. Oh well, it’s still better than studying.

General catch-up post, since I haven’t blogged in a while:

• Not dead. Just been busy.
• Now done with uni, bar one exam and my computer science project, which is complete apart from a couple of bugfixes and some documentation which are due in Monday week. I’m looking forward to having some actual time to do things outside of uni. Who knows, I might even get Dubnium 0.2 out at some point.
• Went and saw Muse tonight, who were good, but not quite great in the way they have been the other times I’ve seen them. In fairness, I think some of that was due to the crowd, who (at least in my area) weren’t quite into it the way I expected. Against that, they played Citizen Erased and Fury (the latter for the first time in almost three years, apparently), so I’d forgive them almost anything for that. Looking forward to seeing them in Brisbane in a couple of weeks.
• Got my new MacBook Pro yesterday. It’s very speedy compared to the venerable G4 iBook it’s replacing (indeed, I’m pretty much certain it’s quicker than my dual core Athlon 64 desktop, too), but there’s a couple of things that irk me, most notably the fact that the Linux Atheros wireless chipset driver may actually be flakier than the Broadcom chipset in the iBook, and I never expected to say that. I suspect I’ll need to sit down with ndiswrapper at some point and look at getting that set up. On the bright side, suspend actually seems to be working, bar Atheros-related flakiness.

Hopefully it won’t be another three weeks before my next blog post. No promises, though.

I’ve donated in the past to Wikimedia and probably will in the future, but seriously, who decided that donation box should be added to the English Wikipedia? Two minutes of its <marquee> style antics this morning and I already have a headache.

Still, it was a great incentive to log in and kill it via a custom style sheet, which I’d never before played with on Wikipedia. If you’re logged in and using the default Monobook skin, it’s as simple as this:

1. Go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Mypage/monobook.css.
2. Edit the page and add the following line:

   
   .fundraiser-box { display: none; }
   

3. Force a reload using whatever method is appropriate for your browser.

Actually, it’s probably a good incentive to log in generally. No more anonymous edits for me when I’m lazy, and it was all down to one poorly conceived fundraising banner. Good job, Wikimedia Foundation!

My bank balance has worn one — actually, several — for the team, but I’ve finished a very productive day arranging the various bits of travel that I have planned for this summer. In order, I shall be inflicting myself on gracing the following cities with my presence:

• Brisbane (and any parts of Queensland I can get to during the five days I’m hitting the road that aren’t infested with schoolies): November 20 to 30, ostensibly to attend OSDC. Also the Muse concert on the 21st. I’m still not sure which one I consider more important.
• Shanghai: December 5 to 20, for a university study trip. I also have about 24 hours in Singapore (which I’ve never been to — well, outside the airport, anyway) on the way back, so if the lazyweb has any suggestions for things to do there which could be fitted into, say, a morning, I’d love to hear them.
• Mel8ourne: January 27 to February 3. I note that an open day has been scheduled for my birthday. How good of the LCA organisers to give me such a nice present.

Simplistic maths suggests that I’m going to be out of Perth for ~45% of the time between November 20 and February 3. Sounds like a summer of fun to me!

This is probably old news, as I rarely use Windows, but I was given this prompt this week after getting the notification that a new version of Java was available.

Of course, that’s as opposed to OpenOffice’s normal high price.

I’ve seen three people ask a variation of how can I get a list of installed PEAR packages from within my PHP script in the last few weeks on IRC, and two just in the last day. Because I’m a helpful sort, here’s a little morsel of code that will do just that:

include 'PEAR/Registry.php';

$reg = new PEAR_Registry;
foreach ($reg->listPackages() as $package) {
    print "$package\n";
}

This should work with pretty much any version of PEAR.

(Update: Ken has a nifty bit of code in the comments to check for a specific installed version of a package.)

I’ve just released version 1.7.13 of PEAR’s DB package. This includes a couple of minor fixes for the MySQL, MySQLi and SQLite drivers, none of which I’d class as particularly urgent. Grab it at your leisure from a PEAR server near you.

Important note: It’s been this way for a couple of years now, but I’d again like to reiterate that DB is deprecated in favour of MDB2, which is pretty DB-like if you load the Extended module. If you haven’t already made plans to migrate your programs depending on DB to MDB2, now might be a good time to start.

Particularly in light of this post to PEAR-DEV, which I predict is going to create considerably more e-mail for me to sort through. Short version: I’m considering setting an end-of-life date for DB at 8/8/8, the same as PHP4’s end-of-security-fix-life date. If you want to address the open questions in that post, feel free to reply to PEAR-DEV or my e-mail directly. My e-mail address is on the sidebar both on my blog home page and my about page.

I wonder how many of the series being pitched in my university’s Television Scriptwriting unit this semester are edgy, sexy shows about the life of a struggling writer in a big city? Three episodes in, Californication does seem like writer porn of the highest order. It’s the life every young writer dreams of — babes, smooth talking, throwing up on paintings that deserve it, more babes…

Well, the guys, anyway.

(OK, some of the girls, too.)

In unrelated news, post-production for science fiction shorts less fun than previously expected. Damned bluescreens.

I doubt anyone in recorded history has had to put an NSFW warning on a link to a backtrace and .xsession-errors dump in a bug report, but I’m going to have to here.

The lesson is: don’t paste logs containing references to media files you might not want to admit to having.

With thanks to Davey for the tip. One thing still disturbs me about this: how the hell is A Shark’s Tale sandwiched between Little Miss Innocent and, well, a video it’s probably better I don’t copy the title for? The thought process boggles my mind…