Dr. Memnus Lagbane Soultooth the Mad

- Site backup utilities that are removed in later versions
- Site backup utilities that may never have worked in the first place
- Site backup utilities that give you files without telling you they're encrypted
- Encrypted files that don't tell you that the filename is the key, instead of just a unique identifier

Heads would roll. Anyone know anything to do with encrypted .sql files?

But in other news, SoultoothIII is reborn as Lagbane-mini, and I get to decide what to do with a web server.

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Who else is on Twitter? I am. Let me know if I should be stalking you there too. I hope I don't get too addicted to it that I start texting it too often.

I decided to go with the Thinkpad. The only downside is that it'll take three weeks to ship.

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So I have two separate music problems, both stemming from inferior CD ripping software.

First is as exhibited in this file: A scratch on the CD causes the file to not play properly on an iPod Nano. It plays correctly in iTunes, but the iPod gets a few seconds in, goes silent for a bit, then skips to the next song. All files with this problem are in .mp3 format.

Second is as exhibited in this file: The file metadata read by every player I've tried lists the track length as about twice as long as it actually is. All files with this problem are in .m4a format.

So I'm looking for a music repair utility - something that can open the file, smooth it out so it reads and plays correctly, then save it back with the same filename. This should be something automatable, so I can script it through either Cygwin or Python to run overnight on every song on the computer.

Anyone know of something?

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"Manhat o'clock" has got to be the best CAPCHA phrase I have ever seen.

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( Useless crap )

The only part of that I think you should care about is that I'm now on Skype, as truememnus. No idea who took memnus; whoever it is has no profile information at all.

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I have hardly any attention span right now - I'm waiting for campaign to start, have laundry in the dryer, two different Google searches up, and the .tex of my geo paper open - and I imagine this entry will reflect that.

Dear DangKid,

You're in CS 2, and your girlfriend is in CS 1 - it's really sweet that you help her with her homework. Really, it is. However, we spend a LOT of time on the differences between arrays and linked lists. While that is new material in CS 1, you should probably know it by now, rather than coming to ask me about it.

No skin of my back,
Your TA


Dear NewEgg,

I realize not all of your stock is in the same place. Even still, did you really need a box that big for just my keyboard and mouse? Seriously, I could hold an entire family of cats in there.

Actually, that'd be pretty cute.

Still no access to recycling,
Brian


( Computer questions for discussion )

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Getting more serious about building my own computer. It'll be a similar setup to my current box, a dual-boot Windows/Linux system with media on a shared partition. I don't habitually store movies, and at current rates will never be interested in high-definition or protected Content. I rip CDs, but I don't have a problem with 128kbps MP3. I want DirectX 10 and OpenGL 2.0 support, and sometime during the lifespan of this computer I'll have the free time to take advantage of them. I would like to maximize the length of time before products start coming out that will be simply unsupported.

[Poll #956551]

Defend your answer in comments. Particularly, I'd like some alternate opinions on this scathing condemnation of Vista design decisions.

Does anyone know how to clear the DNS/IP cache in Linux (Fedora Core 5, specifically)? My computer is inexplicably convinced that mail.google.com is 212.58.240.135, which is actually newsrss.bbc.co.uk...

Sometimes running a whois fixes this, but not often.

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I've been waking up with sore throats and stuff, and now my lymph nodes are swollen and painful to touch. Thank gods this waited for after the semester. Skiing today was very much out; getting dressed may also be for that matter.

Something seems to have broken my OpenRPG game tree. This is very strange, and the only way I can think of to fix it is by digging down into unparsed XML to see where it went astray. Even more worrisome is that this could have happened in the first place. After a bit of digging, it turns out that the problem is that the Mudd CS filesystem is down. Get that - a few images it wants to load are stored there, and rather than gracefully failing to load them, it gets into a loop of error dialogs. Hoping that's back by tomorrow. (EDIT: It's back.)

Today is also the day when I need to get rid of all my perishables in anticipation of them perishing while I'm gone. The count is: Two one cups of yogurt, three apples, a small amount of Montery Jack cheese, one egg, three fajita-sized tortillas, a fair amount of deli turkey, and a cup or two of milk. There's also about half a head of garlic, several sticks of butter, and eight unopened ounces of cheddar, but those I'm not as worried about. There's also the usual assortment of non-perishables to help make the above tolerable. I am now accepting suggestions as to what to do with my food, before dinnertime comes around and I do something I regret.

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Ok, so maybe not fully happy. A bit slow on the startup, both of X itself and of any given program.

As a viable alternative to getting a whole new computer (which is what I'd have to do), this card looks like a pretty nice deal. A GeForce 7-series, in AGP, for under a hundred dollars? I discovered just now that the GeForce 2 doesn't even have a stencil buffer. This makes my graphics homework pretty damn difficult to do from home, when just about all the cool algorithms use either the stencil buffer or full shaders.

I think I also need a memory expansion, but that'd require knowing how many pins this board takes.

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