2007-02-22
Posted in Geek Stuff, Web Wandering & Opinion
at 21:45
Have you ever worried about the lifetime of your stored data? You should.
- Google did a study that has shown an hard drive reliability to be even lower than previously thought.
- Professionally pressed DVDs and CDs have a shorter lifespan than recordable ones due to the materials involved. (Sorry, no link. Let me know if you have one.)
- Hard drive density is now so high that error correction is constantly active (Again, let me know if you remember where I read this)
Now that I’ve scared you a bit, you’re probably asking about the one format type I seem to be leading to. Recordable Optical discs.
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Posted in Geek Stuff
at 2:10
Yes, there is a legitimate reason for removing devices, and a special way to do it. In my case, I needed to because my cheap USB numpad exported two evdev-compatible devices with the same name. This confused evdev-plug… especially since one of them is completely inert.
The trick is to find the modalias for the troublesome interface in question. That will uniquely identify that evdev interface file leaving the other one untouched. Assuming the device node is /dev/input/event6, this should do the trick:
udevinfo -a -p `udevinfo -q path -n /dev/input/event6` | grep 'ATTRS{modalias}=="usb'
Take the output of that line and substitute it into this udev rule: (See my previous post for details))
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2007-02-20
Posted in Site Updates
at 4:18
Well, I’ve finally got my blog back up. It seems that there’s some kind of bug (impossible to trigger in the default configuration, I’d assume) in the newest version of PHP 5 which causes ./ and ../ includes to fail, and which doesn’t play nice with apache’s DirectoryIndex-based redirection. (the feature that lets www.foo.com load www.foo.com/index.html) WordPress makes use of such things in several important places.
I’ve managed to work around that by using symlinks for the ../ includes and by removing the ./ or ../ wherever I found it, but I don’t know what the security implications of such a change are and the post preview window doesn’t work correctly now.
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2007-02-17
Posted in Geek Stuff
at 15:10
As programs start to take advantage of the evdev interface for input devices, it’s only a matter of time before you trip over the default permissions. The big problem is that you can’t just edit the default udev rule for /dev/input/event*, because that would also allow any other user on the system to read your keystrokes. Your passwords, for example.
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2007-02-09
Posted in Web Wandering & Opinion
at 1:45
*sigh* I just spent the last two hours helping my brother customize the look of his MySpace page and my only conclusion is that the MySpace developers are either idiots, or coding with their hands tied behind their backs, metaphorically speaking.
For example:
- MySpace has the worst site design, usability and intuitiveness-wise, of any site I’ve ever visited. Maybe that’s why teens like it so much. Their parents can’t understand a single thing about it.
- MySpace pages aren’t valid HTML.
- MySpace “HTML” is almost devoid of classes and IDs
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