Way back in the days of yore, you could make a PIF file for windows 3.x with a "?" in a certain place (memory fails me on where, probably "command arguments", under the advanced part of the pif editor) and this would throw up a neat little dialog box where you could type in a line to use as the arguments to a command.

I know there's an easy way to do that with XUL/java; fuck if I can be bothered to figure out what it is, though. Which is a shame because then I could add bookmarks right from my firefox bookmark bar (yes, I can add the url and then fill out the information on /.; it's not the same).

Anyway, I like the /. bookmarks idea, now when I half-read a news item and think "wow, /. would love this" I no longer have to stop to read the article; just ^v&^c the url and submit.

Actually, this is neat, simply because I regularly see stories and articles on here I would like to go back to later. I can see myself amassing a collection of links on this thing. I wonder what the limit is?

It's a neat feature (unlike the tagging, which is wtf?), it's a shame that Taco, et al have waited so long to revisit the slashcode and add interesting feature and inter-activity (shit, k5 beat them by 6 years on that one!). Think for a minute what /. would be like if we had this in 2000.

Sorry for the wank and lack of substance, but at least I didn't post any dogdy links!

Funny how my next entry here after such a long time would be about Opera once again. :-)

Just writing to say that Opera 9 will now start coming out in weekly betas!

Great news for those of us who like Opera, and like cutting edge stuff. :-)

This is the URL to memorize: http://my.opera.com/desktopteam/

The first weekly has actually already been released for Windows and Mac.
They say not *nix this week, so I assume it'll normally be planned.

Some 25 million years ago, humans and vervet monkeys diverged from a common ancestor. In very rough terms, perhaps one and a quarter million human generations, or five million vervet generations, have been brought forth upon the Earth since that common ancestor lived. Of course, many differences have evolved between humans and vervets in those 25 million years: among other things, human parents choose toys for their children; vervet parents do not.

But after all that time and genetic change, and despite studies attributing human children's toy preferences to adult stereotypes, a new study by Dr. Gerianne Alexander finds that vervet males, like human boys, prefer toy trucks and balls, while vervet females and human girls prefer dolls and toy cooking pots. What's more, the vervets play with the toys much as human children do: males roll trucks on the ground, females inspect dolls (apparently) for genitalia. Previously on Slashdot: Harvard president Larry Summers and his daughter's "baby truck", Gender and gaming.

[Submitted and, of course, rejected.]

I've got a number of fans, and I've never asked for anything other than that you appreciate my comments here.

But now I need your help.

A spark jumped from my finger and now my Touchstream LP keyboard is dead. Like the parrot in the Python skit. Dead.

Windows plug-and-play doesn't recognize it at all.

So I need your help.

Can anyone either

• suggest possible repairs
• or, tell me where I can get a replacement?

Neither of these are easy: the keyboard uses capacitance to track fingers, so the spark may have burnt those out, or -- since it doesn't respond at all -- the main circuit board may be fried.

And the manufacturer of the Touchstream has been bought up, and Touchstream keyboards are no longer manufactured.

Please, Obi-Wan, ^HHHH er, Slashdot fans, you're my only hope.

Out of curiosity I did a quick scan back through the archives to take a stab at when I joined. Judging by my UID it must have been around 10/2000. Five years ago.

It feels really weird to be reading and posting on the same site for that long, unnatural, really. I don't feel so much sentimental as much...odd.

No real insights, sorry. Anyways, from time to time a good story comes up with comments that justify hanging around here.

Still...five years....eeeewwwwwwww

Quoth the Net:

code such as:

#include int main()
        {
        cout << "Hello world!" << endl;
        }

        results in errors such as: incl.cc:5: error: 'cout' was not declared in this scope

        This is becuase C++ 1998 requires cout and endl be called 'std::cout' and 'std::endl', or that a proper using directives such as 'using namespace std;' be used.

Other than that, not much going on. I have found and played with gambas, which is sort of like visual basic; but missing a few important (eg: "mesgbox") functions. I've also tried my hand at using ProjectBuilder and Gorm from the GNUStep guys; both are pretty impressive for those who know what they are doing.

That would not happen to be me, however. I like to 'talk the talk', but in all honesty I have no clue what the fuck I'm doing.

On another front, I'm slowly succumbing to the siren song of gvim. To me, there's (usually) no reason to use vi except for those rare times when you're using a rescue floppy and it's all there is, period. It's saving grace is that it's small and fast - which means that tacking GTK2 and a slew of functions (syntax highlighting, multiple windows, etc) onto it rather defeats the point, in my mind. But today I actually was curious (having seen so many people advocate for it as an IDE here on /.) so I pulled up gvim to enter and run that snippet of code up there and it wasn't bad.

To me, however, it and emacs both fail in terms of being an IDE because neither one (to the best of my knowelge) provide any mechanisms for handling projects or even automatically creating your own makefiles.

On the other hand, though, for small one or two file projects, gvim might not be so bad. I do like the automatic syntax highlighting and how easy it is to make (^Wn) and delete(^Wc) new windows.

I want try out python, and gvim may end up being ideal for that.

Links for today:
Non-programmers tutorial for Python

flat assembler which has a great list of OS Development-related links in their forum.

That's about it for today.

I am finally running Linux 2.6(.12). I may have been wrong about what the culprit was all along, too.

As I mentioned in this thread I am very disgruntled with Linux 2.6, and have been since I tried it in slackware (I want to say in slackware 9; but I'm not sure). I've tried it on three computers and finally I have it working on my new one.

The problem was twofold. One, Linux keeps choking on apic, so I had to add these two entries into the boot parameters:

noapic nolapi

The 'nolapic' is the signifigant one, I hadn't tried that previously. The following the boot parameters I'm using to get ubuntu 5.1 to boot:

noinotify noapic nolapic pci=noacpi noagp noagpgart

The other half of the problem surprised me, to be honest: it was hotplug. After I hammered out the above boot line I noticed that Linux mysteriously hung (with no errors) after loading hotplug. So I booted an old knoppix cd, mounted the linux install and made the /etc/init.d/hotplug* files non-executable.

I'd like to say it's worked like a charm, but this being Linux life is not so simple. Networking mysteriously failed to work, so I had to add a dhclient command to /etc/init.d/networking.

Also X failed to configure itself on my ubuntu install so after trying different things (including finding out that the x-window-system package is broken on ubuntu) I found a guide on ubuntuguide.org how to set up the NVidia graphics driver.

All of that and I'm still not done. Because of licensing issues (which, ironically, don't seem to bother other software distributions) Ubuntu doesn't ship support for playing mp3s, so I have to fuck around with reading preachy guides and trying to puzzle out where to grab codecs from. Bleah, BSD is, imho, far simply (pkg_add -v xmms beats reading guides and going on a mad scavenger hunt).

Been up since 4am I'm going to try to make sense of the guide and if the words dance too much I'll fuck with it later.

[Update 9/27/12:31mst]
I added ac_97=yes to the boot parameters (I suspect it's superfluous, though) and after fucking around with searching I -on a whim- did a 'MAKEDEV audio' in /dev and now I have sound.

Bleah bleah bleah.

Opera 8.50 was just released, with the most noticeable change being it'll be 100% free (still only as in beer though). This change in marketing and lack of ads is permanent.

Users having purchased licenses the past 30 days is eligible for a refund if they wish. If not, they'll get premium support services, like any users that keep paying will get.

Check out the browser with fewer known open security holes than Firefox here:
Opera.com

It's more likely than I had thought!

I thought I had been rtbl'd for one thing or another since it's been four years since I have had them. I've spent three out of five of my points on this thread, where eno2001 has single-handedly brought back the venerable tradition of Troll Tuesday.

If there's a list of classic threads, that should be on it. I'd encourage everyone to mod it up (remember, under-rated cannot be m2'd).

Myself? I'm ip banned (have been for a while now) because of flaming about bittorrent. Of course, that makes my recieveing mod points a bit on the odd and ironic side; but oh well.

Anyways; bye for now, journal; see ya next year!

I'm thinking of getting a Twiddler2: the one-handed chording keyboard.

Before I do, I'd like to hear opinions of the Twiddler2 from anyone who has used one.

Anyone?

I'm playing around with the idea of getting a laptop and (geek warning) some sort of VR glasses instead of a screen.

Optimally, I'd like something with the form factor of a Sharp Zaurus, but with a hard drive and standard ports.

Basically, I want a "real computer" that I can put in my pocket. To use the VR glasses, I'd need standard USB ports and the ability to use a standard video card.

Is this too bleeding edge? What are my options for a really small laptop, possibly without a screen?

This is slashdot, so I know you guys have some good ideas, and a good sense of what's possible.

Yet another Slashdot.org topic, but they've done unusually many noticeable changes lately, and this time it's something I found annoying. Hopefully it's just a glitch...

Talking about:

Slashdot requires you to wait 2 minutes between each successful posting of a comment to allow everyone a fair chance at posting a comment.

It's been 7 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment

Whaa... And I was sometimes annoyed by the 2 minutes thing already. And no, I don't use to spam replies without thought behind them, just type quickly. :-p

Using Google Fusion and adding the Slashdot RSS feed soon enough sent me to a page telling me I had been banned for "absolutely ridiculous amount of abuse". Apparently, one shouldn't keep the Slashdot feed there if you use it on a site you frequent, at least if you do it more than once every 30 minutes.

I'm not going to bother them with any unban procedures and will just restort to visiting them and loading the 10 KB web site with images even if they don't happen to have any news (I won't know). They seem to send the message that generates far less traffic than grabbing a KB sized feed more than once every 30 minutes.

... and it was as if a thousand trolls cried out in rage, and then went silent.

Finally one can actually browse at 0, or even -1, without wading through GNAA posts?

Unbelievable.

The same researchers have previously mentioned other ways to get around Mendel. See abstract #34.

Almost as interestingly, this discovery could undercut the deleterious mutation hypothesis theory of why sexual reproduction is useful, useful despite what John Maynard Smith termed its "two-fold cost", and explain the eighty-million years of asexual reproduction without extinction in bdelloid rotifers.

Also, brought to you by the letter... 3FB? DNA gets a fake fifth letter.

(This was submitted to Slashdot and rejected, so you get to see it exclusively in my journal, or over on MetaFilter.)