Archive for the ‘Geekiness’ Category.
I’m having permalink problems. I had to switch to the default (/?p=xxxx) to get categories and single articles to work. My pages, however, don’t. I’m working on figuring this out, but if anybody has an idea what’s going on, feel free to give me a holler. I get “input not specified” when I try to access one of my pages.
I now really, really, really detest Firefox. I want to either downgrade to 1.5.x, or move to another browser, one that’s supposed to be what Firefox used to be: Fast and stable, not a CPU hog, and with no intrusive “Your files have all downloaded!” popups or automatic updates.
So far today, Firefox has frozen seven times — you know, when there’s supposedly a “script” running on the page. On one of those pages, there was nothing but text. On another, there was no damned script. I know, because I authored that page.
I have had to close and rerun Firefox three times today because it was eating up 100% of my CPU.
And don’t point me to any of those lame about:config hacks. I shouldn’t have to edit a damned thing to make the application stable. Firefox has become Netscape, with feature creep. It’s big and bloated and unstable, and I hate it.
Can I downgrade? If not, what else is out there?
I’m really missing Lynx right about now.
Since we’re going to see Underdog here in about an hour, I decided to shut the desktop down, unplug it (and everything else, except the wireless router), and let it stay unplugged until we get back, just to see if letting it stay unplugged for a few hours will bring both hubs back to life. I know that’s like hoping waving a crystal around over the machine will fix it, but I might as well try.
This started about a week ago when suddenly, my desktop decided my external hard drive needed to be formatted. I tried running chkdsk, but chkdsk crashed. I tried again. Chkdsk crashed again.
I hooked the drive up to my notebook, pulled up a command line, and tried to run chkdsk. It crashed, just like it did on my desktop.
So I took it upstairs to the old 486 running Win2K. And again, chkdsk crashed.
When I hooked it up to the newest notebook running Vista, chkdsk ran just fine. So other than getting a new drive to back up the data and then retiring the drive, I thought that was that.
Uh, no.
I got the new drive, and started backing up data. When I got up yesterday, I saw that after copying about a tenth of the directories and files, chkdsk had started returning “path not found” errors. So I decided to check the drive, and that’s where things started to get really strange.
When I right-clicked on the drive in My Computer and pulled up the properties screen, it reported that 26% of the drive space was free, so obviously, XP knew there were data on the disk. And the directories showed up in the foldier view sidebar on the left. But if I tried to change to one of those directories in the same My Computer window, I got “0 files.” I pulled up a command line and tried dir. Same thing. 0 files.
Then I got the bright idea of trying it on the other machines. Well, this turned out to be a bad idea. Every one gave me a “USB device has malfunctioned” message — which I also got on the desktop when I tried to plug it back in.
And of course you know this is the drive that has all my really important stuff on it, right? If it had nothing but crap on it, it would be running just fine.
That was yesterday. When I got up today, my desktop had one of those obnoxious yellow balloons saying “USB device has malfunctioned,” and note that the buggy drive had not been plugged in. No, this time, the USB device was one of my two USB hubs, so the computer didn’t see any of the connected peripherals. Note that this was a brand new hub I bought and hooked up yesterday. Brand. New. Hub.
I unplugged it, then plugged it back in. Same thing. I rebooted, and this time, my machine returned the same error for BOTH of my hubs. I googled, and found somebody who’d had the same problem and claimed that shutting down, then unplugging the machine for a half hour, and rebooting solved the problem. I decided to try that.
It worked for the old hub, but not the brand new one. I’d had a similar problem before, when one of my peripherals was buggy, so I shut down again, unplugged all of the peripherals from the hub, rebooted, then plugged in the hub with nothing attached, and again, got “USB device has malfunctioned.”
Granted, my desktop has had weird USB issues for a while. If I cold boot with the hubs plugged in, the boot hangs, so I have to unplug them until the XP screen pops up, then plug them in. And my desktop refuses to recognize my flash drive, though my notebook has no trouble with it.
So I have two problems: My hard drive (and data), and that damned USB hub problem. It seems that the only solution to the first problem is to take the drive (and the new one) to Best Buy and have them transfer the files, which will cost $159 (plus tax, of course), and right at the moment, I really don’t have $159 to spend. However, at least there’s a possible solution. I have no idea how to tackle the USB hub problem, or what to do about it, other than spending yet more money on another hub, just to see if it works. I suppose I could take the computer AND the drives to Best Buy, but only God knows how much that would cost.
And as if that weren’t enough, early this morning I decided to start the laser disc to DVD backup. Huh-uh. The DVDR doesn’t “see” the input from the laser disc, even though there’s no reason it shouldn’t. I looked in the manuals. Everything was set up fine, and I did everything I was supposed to.
I was too damned frustrated after the hard drive and USB hub trouble to fight with it.
Below the fold (you’ve been warned).
I got my ELS data from NCES. I put the DVD in my drive and ran the installation program, and it set up a little query application. Fine so far. You run the application and get a list of data columns that mostly make sense (level of parental education). You go through the list, select the ones you want, then export the data.
The query application is fine. It’s when you open the exported file that everything gets bizarre.
In the query application, the column names make sense. But in the exported data, well, SCHID is okay for “School ID,” but EX3_4XN_6R just does not, in any way, map onto “math score.” Nor would any reasonable human being look at M4C_9X_3-2 and think, “reading score.” Sure, you can change them in Access or Excel or SPSS or SAS, but if you’re exporting, say, 15 columns of data, you’re in a world of hurt if you forget to write them down from the query application window before you export the data.
Where do they find these idiots who decide to represent “math score” with EX3_4XN_6R? My guess is that lousy database managers who got fired for incompetence in the private sector go to work for the Department of Education.
Is that cynical?
There are lots more problems, but if I get started, I’ll never stop . . .
What is it with technology that is deliberately annoying? Why do OS developers believe that I want the computer to do things on its own–without my telling it to? And even things that should operate on their own in the background, like anti-virus software, why does mine make me go through a little NEXT, NEXT, NEXT, FINISH game every day after it downloads an update and runs? Why does it have to ask me if I want it to clean or delete infected email? Why wouldn’t I? And if I didn’t want to, why would I be running anti-virus software at all? And somebody please explain why computers by default need to play stupid little ditties every time you open or close a window, or boot the machine, or do nearly anything at all. What the hell makes these software developers think I want to hear their stupid little tunes?
Why does the computer feel it necessary to ask me if I’m sure I want to do something every time I tell it to do something? If I weren’t sure, I wouldn’t have told the computer to delete the damned file.
I despise the user-friendly tech culture–and that is fundamentally why I despise Apple and the Mac idiot box. That’s where all this “point and click” “let me do everything for you!” BS started.
But it’s not just computers. Do they make telephones that don’t beep obnoxiously when there’s a message? Yes, I know there’s a message. I don’t particularly want to listen to it now because I’m busy, but if I don’t that damned beeping will drive me off the deep end.
This “user-friendly” crap drives me nuts.
Thanks to (who else?) Jonah Goldberg, I found this list of rules for robots, inspired by the Japanese rules for robots. A few of my favorites:
Rule #10 - Any robot who begins to behave illogically shall be immediately employed by the government.
Rule #85 - Robots are not allowed to appear on American Idol as contestants, because their ability to modulate their audio processors to sound like Bono gives them an unfair advantage.
Rule #89 - Robots may at no time play the bagpipes.
Rule #111 - Robots who become evil due to conflicted programming, ultra high doses of radiation, or warped artificial intelligence are considered automatically qualified to head programming at one of the major television networks in the U.S. or Britain.
HDW, while reporting the latest Microsoft screw-up with Outlook, says:
If you’re using the MS suite, and you’re thinking of upgrading… I have a word for you. Thunderbird. Download it, use it. A very good e-mail solution.
Before you download Thunderbird, read what I have to say about it. I refuse to use Outlook for reasons I needn’t go into here and when I bought my latest laptop, I downloaded and installed Thunderbird. All I can say is that if migrating email and filters weren’t such a buggy pain in the *ss, I would have stopped using Thunderbird a long time ago.
When I boot my laptop in the mornings, the first thing I want to do is read my email. So I fire up Thunderbird and download my email. So far, so good. I have filters to move certain messages to certain folders, and delete others (you know, like spam), and the next thing I do is click Tools, Run filters on folder.
That’s where the nightmare begins. Daily nightmare, not once in a while nightmare.
Typically, I’ve downloaded 250+ messages, and I can see the messages being moved. I may get to 200 messages, and then it just stops. Every day. I then have to exit Thunderbird, and rerun it so I can again run the filters on my inbox. The second time, I may get to 150 before it just stops, and I go through the whole exit, rerun, tools, run filters on folder process again.
On a good day, I have to exit and reload Thunderbird only four times before it will finally run all the filters on my inbox. But no, Thunderbird isn’t done screwing up yet.
Once all the filters have run, I can’t read my email because Thunderbird won’t delete messages (and much of what’s left in my inbox is spam). I have to again exit Thunderbird, then reload it just to delete spam.
Granted, once I’m to that point, Thunderbird behaves — until the next day, when I boot my laptop.
Then there are other things I hate about Thunderbird. It uses one SMTP server for all accounts. If you have two or three accounts, you have to choose one of the SMTP servers to send your mail. So if you send email to a computer-aware person who’s particularly nosy, he’ll see that your email from “jones@myisp.com” was sent from “myotherisp.com.”
That’s just plain stupid.
Another thing I really hate about Thunderbird is that it wants to sit and think when you get to one of those messages not in unicode — most of which are in Japanese, Chinese, or Korean, and are spam. So I look at the little “loading message …” message until it decides to show me the Korean spam and I can delete it. Worse, and this is mouthbreathingly stupid, I can’t create a filter to delete any messages in alternate character sets. Thunderbird wants you to get spam. Thunderbird loves spam.
Thunderbird has spam filters, but they’re useless. Completely useless.
Of all the applications I use, I despise Thunderbird the most. It’s written by incompetent fools. I hate it so much I’d almost be willing to go with Outlook. Almost.
I followed Rory’s suggestion and installed Google Desktop. As Jules Crittenden says, I’m lovin it!
Plus, I really hate iPods, Steve Jobs, the cult of cutesy aesthetics, and the fetishization of trivial status-symbol whatsits.
On the other hand, if someone wants to send me a really powerful desktop or kickass HDTV, well. Those are actually useful, aren’t they?
Eat Me, Steve Jobs: Jagoff.
Surprise, surprise! John McCain — who calls himself a conservative, for some inexplicable reason known only to him — has proposed yet more restrictive legislation! McCain thinks bloggers should report kiddie porn spam on their blogs or face stiff fines.
Now, before you say, “That sounds reasonable,” let’s look at this a bit more closely. Redstate says:
As a pander to what the Senator endearingly terms “the far-right base” it’s probably good politics — or at least someone in his office thought so. But, as legislation, it’s very poorly crafted and shows a certain cluelessness when it comes to the medium he has repeatedly tried to regulate to death. It also dashes the hope expressed by some that McCain would represent a revival of the Goldwater-Gingrich “leave us alone” coalition that could drive a stake through the heart of Big Government Conservatism. As with CFR, as with Kyoto, as with the gun-show loophole, McCain’s answer is always to regulate first, and ask questions later — the essence of Big Government “conservatism.”
[ . . . ]
In case you hadn’t seen the two white boxes up top, RedState is a site “you’d have to join up or become a member of to use,” at least to its fullest extent. Hundreds of thousands if not millions of independently hosted blogs have a membership requirement to post comments. And each of said blogs have been targeted with hundreds of spam comments and trackbacks, often left without the knowledge of the author. If one of those comments happens to contain kiddie porn, are they now liable?
But it’s actually worse than that. I get lots of spam comments and trackbacks, many of them porn, with links to porn sites. I do a pretty good job of keeping them off the blog though it’s inevitable that from time to time, a few will get through, but I do not click on the links to see where they go — for reasons that should be obvious to anyone with a computer. So if a comment gets through and the link leads to a kiddie porn site, I’ll get fined? Am I supposed to start clicking on every link in every spam comment I get and risk getting trojans, viruses and spyware just to make sure they aren’t kiddie porn now?
Come on. That’s crap. And I have yet one more reason not to vote for McCain. Need another? From that same Redstate story:
And it doesn’t stop there. Get this. Senators McCain and Schumer have introduced a separate bill to create an “e-mail sex offender registry.” Sex offenders would need to submit their e-mail address and IM handles like they do their physical address — as if it wouldn’t take them right about 15 seconds to create a new one without any trace of it.
There you go.
This theme (most, actually) uses HTML lists in the sidebar. The indentation is handled by the list code. So why, when I specify a text-align of right, do the lists not indent, but appear all flush right? Since the list code creates the indentation, shouldn’t the lists indent from the right?
From Hog on Ice:
Today a reader sent me a link to a video I am sure George will enjoy. Take a look at Why Macs Suck.
I had no idea Macs had such a range of exasperating problems. But the nature of the problems is not surprising. They all revolve around the Operating System as God and the User as Insignificant Annoyance. Which reflects the Mac’s liberal origins. An operating system is like a government. Windows is like a Republican government. It gives you a tremendous amount of power and lets you run your own life, even if it screws up a lot. And if you screw up, it allows you to fix the problem yourself. The Mac OS is like a liberal government. It gives you very little power and tells you what’s good for you, and when something goes wrong, you have to run to an anointed Mac official to get it fixed.
And the Mac OS takes more of your money, because you’re not qualified to decide what to do with it. You may not realize it, because you’re just a potato-eating, truck-pull-watching User, but this is what’s best for you.
That pretty much sums up why I abhor Macs. And click on the link above to watch the video. It’s hilarious.
You understand how technorati works, right? You put a list of technorati tags in your post, then you ping technorati. Technorati then indexes your post by the technorati tags you used (click on the technorati tags at the bottom of a post, and it takes you to a list of blog posts that used that tag).
But something very strange is going on.
In my post on the Tennessee Guerilla Women and their deception, I have the following list of technorati tags:
abortion, sjr 127, liberals, leftists, progressives, moonbats, NOW, idiotarians
Click on the abortion tag, and technorati shows the post on my site. Click on the liberals tag, and technorati shows the post on my site. But click the sjr 127 tag, and the only thing that shows up is a list of leftist postings, all by egelia (that’s what Queen Tennessee Guerilla Woman Wackjob calls herself). I’ve repinged. Still, only the moonbat’s posting show up when you click that tag (the title of the bill).
So how does that work? Does technorati allow you to buy a tag, so that it will only show your posts?
So I got a response to my request to liveblog Coulter next week — a courteous, but odd, response.
He said he was looking into “internet access” in the auditorium.
Those of you who aren’t from Bloomington — that would be most of you — don’t understand why this is odd, of course, so I’ll tell you. Every inch of campus has wireless access. In fact, you can sit down with your laptop anywhere in Bloomington (not just campus) and connect to the internet, thanks to the university and the area’s number one service provider, who worked together to make every inch of Bloomington WIFI hot.
(Just an aside: This is not the case here, which I found really bizarre and hard to live with when we first moved.)
Back to the point. My battery life may be a potential issue, but not internet access. So I’m confused, and I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.
Polls and surveys are pop statistics for a variety of reasons, all of which have to do with the trustworthiness of the poll or survey, and the results.
Polls are likely to reflect skewed samples. A poll conducted, say, by the New York Times usually polls local residents — which skews the poll significantly toward the left. I give newspaper polls very little weight (no pun intended).
Related to the above, polls also often reflect ridiculously small samples. In statistics, it is difficult, if at all possible, to extrapolate from a small sample to the population. A poll with 300 respondents is statistically useless.
In order for a sample to reflect a population, it must be randomly selected and it must be relatively large. Pollsters often use selective sampling — that is, they want their poll to accurately reflect population demographics, so they ask x% of this group and y% of that group. The problem with this, at least as far as politics and elections go, is that people do not vote in demographic proportion (if lesbian Siamese twins of color are z% of the population, that does not mean that lesbian Siamese twins will be z% of the voters).
Polls are also prone to bias, due to the way questions are worded. “Do you believe the President should have the power to tap the phones of American citizens?” and “Do you believe the President should have the power to tap the phones of American citizens if they are calling terrorists?” will predictably get very different responses.
Don’t give undue weight to polls (like I should have to say that after the 2004 exit poll debacle). Certainly, never decide it’s not worth voting based on the results of polls.
I love technorati. Not only does using technorati tages get me traffic, but I find all kinds of great stuff besides. Remember this read more or read more right here thing?
may I offer a word of advice to all my colleagues who use blogspot.com, which again today, has been down most of the time?
Go to Hosting Matters (yes, they host me, as well as The Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler and Little Green Footballs, and only God knows how many other conservative blogs), plunk down the $15 for a domain name, and sign up for one of their packages. The packages are cheap, and these people are great. Since I’ve had this account, it’s been down exactly once, and for less than thirty minutes.
Seriously. And you can run wordpress.
Well, I think it is. Okay, so I’m a math geek. Sue me.
A Game Theoretic Approach to the Toilet Seat Problem. Hat tip: Ex-Donkey Blog.
In my experience, at least, the most frustrating part of teaching is when you don’t understand why they don’t understand. If you understand the problem they’re having, you can address it; if you can’t fathom why they’re not getting it, though, what can you do?
The problem is that I want my students to succeed. I want them to get it. It would be nice if just one semester, every one of my students earned a B or better (like that’s ever going to happen). But when you run up against the “why aren’t you getting this?” hump, you feel ineffective and useless.
I’ve started reading a lot of blogs written by secondary school teachers, just because it’s so obvious how very different today’s undergraduates’ high school education is from mine (cough, cough, get me my walker, please). But it’s also obvious that some problems never get resolved: When I was in high school, most students had trouble with so-called story problems, and they still do.
At one point, when I was less cynical, I believed that this problem could be solved easily. Just show them how to extract the information, and set it up. But that’s when I thought story problems themselves were the problem, and I no longer think so.
Google won’t give the US user data (and they shouldn’t), but they’ll censor results for China?
Uhm, moral compass, anyone?
The WordPress support forums are worthless. I have yet to get one useful piece of information from them — and the “search” is the worst part. If you have a wordpress issue, use google. So far, every problem I’ve had (except for the one I’m currently wrestling with, which I won’t go into here, and the problem I’m discussing in this article) has been solved, either directly or indirectly, by googling for an answer.
I use plugins, but I’m more a hack-the-code type than an install-a-plugin type (my favorite plugin is RunPHP, which allows me to run PHP code directly from my articles). Anyway, now that StarWomb is posting here from time to time, I wanted to turn the author name (beneath every article) into a link, so when you clicked on it, you’d get a list of all articles by that author, just like the category (in the same line).