As I may or may not have mentioned, I have a friend and her daughter living here for a while, before they find another place to stay. Now, she bought a new portable PC this fall, an ACER and this runs Windows Vista.

One early problem was that the DVD-drive, which also handles CDs didn't work right out of the box. I googled this, and found the fix was removing some strings from the Registry.

Now she installed Nero 8, and the drive went MIA again -- presumably the same problem, and the same fix. Which I'll record here, so as to be able to find it again. Rant will follow. Kudos to someone, name of Ryan for this. The recipe is as follows:

Go into the registry under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SYSTEM/CURRENTCONTROLSET/Control/Class/ then 4D36E965-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318 and wipe out any string-values named Upperfilter and Lowerfilter as these may exist.

So I did this, and lo and behold, the disk drive came back into view. So far so good.

However, since I use Linux on most of the machines here, I haven't had any problems with the disk drives disappearing like this at all. Neither do I have to install anything like Nero for burning disks either, it just works right away.

How come windows-depemdent people even think this is supposed to be the normal way of the world, that things won't work until finer surgery is done on them? No car buyer would accept that, in order to open the trunk, you'd have to disconnect certain wires under the hood.

Whatever happened to fitness for purpose? Even if not having certified the system for use in situations where life or limb is in jeopardy, one does have a reasonable expectation of things at least appearing to work right! Never mind EULAs and legal weasel-wording, if it is broke on delivery that is bad P.R. My friend is on the verge of writing an angry letter to Bill Gates, and ask him what kind of rubbish his company is pushing.

What are these filter-things supposed to be for anyway? Since things actually work when they are removed? They worked fine until Nero put them back in, then I had to look up the Martian phone number for the fix again. The last part of that number looks like a MAC address, and I noticed it was the first of a series of entries, where only the first set of digits were different. So the GUID becomes something else to ponder, but what is going on in there. Unfortunately there is no source code, so I can't have a look....

I see the paper has a headline "MS Explorer sank i natt" (which is the title in Norwegian, "MS explorer sank during the night" would be this title in English). MS Explorer is a cruise ship that ran into iceberge, but unlike the more famous Titanic, everyone on board had been rescued and are safe now that the ship has sunk.

But to me with my IT leanings, names like "Server" and "MS Explorer" have other connotations than ships. Servers, ships or otherwise, at least agree on crashing as a common failure mode, but the MS Explorer, well, "sinking" isn't the most likely failure mode there -- "Blue screen" (as opposed to the big blue sea (as opposed to C)) just appears a lot more plausible.

Thus leading to the initial question, what is up with the naming of the ships. Will we see some ship named Excel or maybe Fortran crash or sink or something, next?

I've been getting the suggestion for meta-moderation again, and this time several of the posts were from June onwards. It is as if I wonder if all the hullabaloo about the 10th anniversary pushed the metamod-invitation out of the way, and not everyone keeps remembering to go look at metamod.pl every now and then...

This meta-modding activity has also brought another set of 5 mod-points to be spent on the worthy, so things seem to be in fine order.

Now, the thread of interest was some meta-discussion on "Interesting vs Insightfui" as a flamewar with a set of jokers posting mild flames and another set of jokers moderating them Insightful or Interesting... Since the whole topic is about flamewars, this isn't really offtopic, but it is strictly not Insightful, though whether it is Interesting is more a matter of opinion. Informative it certainly isn't either, as it brings no new knowledge on the table. Funny? Could be, like Interesting, it depends on the audience. But did this post really show insight? Not obviously, though as a statement of opinion it could well be it did. Time to go look at the context.

And this one made me laugh: Someone with the name ov lexical (842527) says: I can't wait for these posts/mod to show up for meta-moderation....

Guess what! It just did, after some 5 months.

I won't reveal whether I considered the metamod fair or not.

What has been happening recently...

September 15 was the Ekeberg Market. There I bought a set of rubber gaskets for the doors and trunk of the old car, I managed to replace the one on the left front door so far, before the foot went sore: strange how it seemed just tired on the Saturday, but was hurting terribly on Sunday morning.

I had been walking too much or some such, and the shoes I had were quite worn, that might have contributed to the malady. I thought I'd try resting it for a couple days to see if it got better. In particular, trying to walk down stairs was not pleasant at all. So any trip down to the basement became a planned excursion, making sure I would not have to go back up for some tool or whatever.

Now since I work mostly with programming, the sore foot wasn't much in the way there, apart from the general painfulness that was not good for concentration. And then there were a couple of customers that wanted visits those days too, so I had to go out there. After having had to walk up and down the stairs at one of the on the Tuesday, I was not feeling very mobile on Wednesday. Sort of the "spoons" thing that Solemdragon used to talk about as a measure of exhaustion. This was the left foot, so I could still drive the E-car, fortunately. And I got a ride with a friend into Oslo when having to visit another customer there, then I could take a streetcar back towards home and save some walking that day.

As the foot still hurt after a week, it was time to see the doctor. Which appointment was after another 3 days. By then I'd gotten used to the pain in a way, it would be coming and going, and occasionally I'd feel something, a tendon or muscle shift around inside the foot, with a sense of tension and relief when it hit the detente. The doctor said this seemed to be inflamed tendons, and I should try to keep the load off, and take these "BREXIDOL" pills for a week. Now, these pills would be hard on the stomach, and another common side-effect would be a headache, so I thought, gee, now I'll be having a pain in the stomach and in the head in addition to the foot --

Fortunately, the headaches did not appear. The pills were large, hexagonal, with a slot right across them, looked like the heads of certain bolts more than anything else. So I got the week's worth of these, and they actually did help. I didn't even get more than slight nausea either, so they worked and the doctor was right.

Now, a month later, there is still some pain in the foot, but it is a lot better than it was. I don't have to plan my trips to the basement anymore either, and that is just as well, since I've been busy clearing stuff out of the rear rooms, since a friend and her daughter will be coming to stay here for a while, and I'll have to make room for them and their stuff.

Like the sin(x)/x function for a large negative x -- I sense the approach of a change, today I found a magazine addressed to this friend in the mail, one of the first concrete signs. Having been living in this big house by myself for years, there will be some re-adjustment when two others will come here to stay.

Now what's up with this?. The article title is translated as "Soon she will be lying floating outside the Opera house" and it refers to some sculpture or work of art that has the title "She lies".

Now, this looks more like a dead ship than anything else, so presumably the "she" is a ship and not a woman -- I am reminded of the West Pier in Brighton, which has been derelict for years, and it collapsed partially a few years ago. Now Oslo gets to have what looks like its own collapsed pier, right from the start.

First the Peace Price goes to Al Gore and now this? I don't know what to say, but I think the government needs to change come the election in 2009.

I can now say my age is the same as the telephone country code for Sweden... Just upgraded from Denmark's, and will be Norway's next year.

This is also a semi-prime, a composite number consisting of two distinct prime factors. This is not a very rare number, there are 30 of these below 100.

I got some books, so I'll be away reading...

Ah, finally, when there's two days left of the vacation, there is something looking like consistent summer outside.

I've used some of the previous days, in between rains, to cut down some trees in the yard, removing them with a borrowed trailer and scrape up the side of the car whilst backing with said trailer. Today I was supposed to back it into another driveway and then I hit and smashed the garbage box there (where the rubbish sacks are set up). Me backing up with that trailer seems to be an expensive activity... I had the repairs priced, it will be some 12000 kroner (US$ 2000 or so). Ugh. But it's gotta be done.

And tomorrow another friend is clearing out her place, as she and her daughter are moving to Bergen, so she's been busy packing her stuff. I've been helping her some, amongst other things, begging for banana crates from all the stores around here, fortunately bananas are in high season, but so are the crates -- a lot of other students are moving these days. Anyways, I'll be borrowing this big trailer for a final cleanup there tomorrow, so beware all mail-boxes, gate-posts, and dumpster sheds! Ashtead is at large with the big trailer again!

I've also got a set of new tires for the old Mercedes. We have its kind of weather here now, so I have been using it quite a lot. I still have another 2000 km to drive it this year -- it is insured for 5000 km per year, and it really ought to be driven most of these in order to stay in good repair, so that for example the brakes don't start rusting or seizing. After all the car gets to sit in the garage all winter. These tires probably will last another 8 or 10 years as things are.

As for electronic stuff, I've got another ten Picotux devices, and now I'm thinking of using them for putting various things on the network here. These are interesting units, I keep thinking up more and more kinds of hook-ups; the only drawback becomes that the little Picotux ends up in the corner of a big board full of chips, which kinda negates the size advantage... though it still beats having to keep some old PC hardware (Pentium 100 vintage) alive.

I also got me a new air compressor, so I have all the pressurized air I ever need. This is a big heavy unit, with 150 liters tank and a 5.5HP 3-phase motor. I found out, that on delivery, the compressor motor was connected for 400V, Wye configuration, so I had to change that to the Delta, to match the 230V that I have here. It is common to have 3-phase power in residential areas here, most older areas have 230V, but the newer ones are 400V. We use a lot of power to keep warm during the cold winters....

Which are months away. Right now it is 28 degrees C outside, that is nice and warm -- I think I'll go for a swim in one of the nearby lakes.

Even at the top of summer (the sun will be at its theoretical top point in a couple hours from now), there are talks about "ghost trains" showing up on the tracks in the Oslo Tunnel.

The phenomenon is that the track circuits that are supposed to detect trains present, get confused by electrical noise and fail as designed, that is, they indicate that there is a train present.

I guess the easiest way to fix this would be to add camera surveillance of the tunnel, so if some suspected ghost train were indicated, the controllers could have a closer look to see what was going on.

In related news, King Harald's model train set is on display.

The cucumbers are big and early this year....

Notwithstanding the fact that the world's oil extraction is more like squeezing a sponge than emptying a bathtub, that is, it only really ends when it becomes unfeasibly expensive to squeeze the sponge harder -- it is said in the news that the oil will end in 2047.

Well, so does the address-range of a 2416, 6116, 2716, or other 2K by 8 or similar memory. Although that tends to be more commonly seen as 0x7FF -- or 111 1111 1111 binary... so does that mean that the oil-years counter only has 11 bits in it?

The y0x800 problem? try explaining that one :)

Inspired by the signature of stuff and such, I began investigating the position of my own uid in pi. Googling revealed this site where one may try to search for some number as a substring of the decimal sequence of pi.

And so I found out that my uid, 654610, occurs starting at position 400314, counting from 1 at the 10^-1 position (the 1 in "3.14"). Guess one could then go ahead and find the meta-position, which for me would be where the sequence 400314 appears (at 159158 as it happens), then more meta^n positions following. I guess one eventually might end up in some kind of loop, or maybe at some location where the index and the value of pi's decimal sequence come out the same.

Another question then comes to mind: how long a sequence of digits of pi is required to be able to locate all 2-digit, 3-digit etc. numbers? The site has 200 million digits, how far up does that go?

The other day I noticed a stick with a little sign on it was placed in the dirt outside the gate by the road here. Further up and down the road there are more such sticks, outside of about 1/3 of all the houses here.

This is Viken Fibernett who is announcing that "fiber will be installed here", and presumably all the households that have placed an order for high-speed fiber to their house have such a stick planted outside their gate. Now for a little while it will be rather obvious to world+dog where the haves and the have-nots live...

Welcome to the fiber overlords anyways!

I've just read that the sun is going to have its most violent period for the last 460 years. Anyone care to remember what the weather was like back in the 1540s?

This is just a note to myself lest I forget to investigate the matter further.

A large regular hexagonal structure or feature or weather pattern, or something, on one of Saturn's poles has been re-discovered -- it looks like it has been there for years, and it remains in place.

Now, maybe it is just a giant version of the oil drain plug on my car which looks similar. Don't know about where to get such a large wrench as would fit here, as this is some 15000 miles across, and the largest wrenches they sell at Biltema are 65 mm or so.

And the oil drain plug is only 19 mm, but then the car is nowhere near the size of Saturn the planet either.

Chances are however, that this is some kind of long-lived, chaotic, semiperiodic stationary pattern of gas streams, just like the more commonly seen storms on several of the planets. But I find the drain-plug theory to be more interesting: what would happen if the plug was unscrewed, would the whole planet deflate and zip away like a giant balloon?

This one made me laugh, but I'm not surprised really, as I have long been of the opinion that defining a specific boolean data type never was a good idea. And here is Exhibit N, GetMessage(). To wit:

BOOL GetMessage(LPMSG lpMsg, HWND hwnd, UINT wMsgFilterMin, UINT wMsgFilterMax)

Now, BOOL was originally ment for the Boolean, two-state "Yes/No" kind of value, such as in the original intention of indicating progress or halt for this particular function. But this turned out not to be future-proof: Further down on the page there is:

Warning Because the return value can be nonzero, zero, or -1, avoid code like this [...] The possibility of a -1 return value means that such code can lead to fatal application crashes."

Well, I'll say! Nice of Microsoft to tell us this. Nevermind the original, and now ossified definition of BOOL, which fortunately was just the same as an int back in the day.

And note, this isn't MS bashing. I have never found the concept of explicit Boolean typed variables to be particularly useful anywhere under any operating system. Flags and bits in variables, being 1 or 0 or on or off or some other dichotomy, yes, but these are always very context-specific, much like the original pass/stop meaning of GetMessage() above. Booleans work fine for logic gates where all signals are Low or High, not for code where values appear as 0 or 1.

There is a fairly old meme, enum BOOLEAN {TRUE, FALSE, FILE_NOT_FOUND} which illustrates this perfectly on the Daily WTF site

(For some reason (very likely some corporate misgivings causing the site to be banned because of profanity) this has recently been sanitized from the traditional "What The Fuck" to the arguably safer for work "Worse Than Failure".)