cookieandscream

A woman unknowingly hired a pair of former porn stars to re-paint her apartment. After much "hot coffee", the apartment still wasn't painted. Which just goes to show that two long blacks don't make a flat white.

/groan

February Album Writing Month

The FAWM challenge is simple: 14 songs in 28 days. Why? Because...

"You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club." — Jack London

If you want to chase after inspiration, then FAWM is your club. Each February this website forges a collaborative community where thousands of musicians of all walks and skill levels attempt to write an album's worth of new music during the shortest month of the year. We "fawmers" are a motley mix of music professionals, students, homemakers, and folks who work dayjobs but rock nightclubs. Got questions? Check out the FAQ.

I'm giving this a shot this year; it should be fun. I'm third time lucy.

Also started a music blog, where I'm posting/hosting my tracks: thirdtimelucy.info. (I think the RSS feed works as a podcast too, if you're into that sorta thing.)

This post is for those of you who've been completely unable to get the battery out of your shiny new Nokia 6700 Classic, and have searched or asked on the internet only to find unhelpful answers like "check the manual" or just utter silence.

See the thing is, the manual doesn't say how to get the battery out; it only explains how to put it in. And some of the batteries in these things fit so tightly that you'd think it's clipped in somehow. I'm talking bang it on the desk, battery stays put. Wedge a screwdriver in where your fingernails normally go, screwdriver slips and cuts your hand up, battery stays put. You've already tried and broken all ten fingernails.

Maybe, like me, you've even taken it into your phone dealer and the staff there have been completely unable to budge it either, so you've arranged to return it as defective (which might be a 4-6 week turnaround process, depending on your dealer/provider/starsign/etc).

There may be hope yet!

My completely unscientific experimentation, tipped off by a comment from a colleague at work about batteries possibly expanding when warm, led me to try turning the phone off and leaving it somewhere cool for several hours to chill out (in my case just on the coffee table). I then tried the old bang it on the desk method (this time protecting the phone from damage using a mousemat rather than the sock thing it comes with, though I don't think this change contributed to the result), and managed to get it to jump right out. Hurrah!

Just to be sure, I pulled out the sim, and then tried replacing and removing the battery a few times over. It worked!

Now that I've put the battery in and out a few times, it comes out fairly easily. This leads me to conclude that these phones are manufactured with pretty tight tolerances, and the battery takes a bit of wearing in before it achieves a comfortable fit, kind of like those comfy old boots that ripped your feet to shreds the first week you wore them -- and in some cases the tight fit combined with a bit of thermal expansion (either of the battery or the compartment in the phone) can lead to the thing jamming in completely.

But it might also just be that I'd completely given up on ever getting the damn thing out, and was ringing customer service to find out where the fuck my courier was to come collect the defective unit (since it had been seven business days since I'd called to arrange the return), and figured I'd give it one last try while I was navigating their phone menu system...

So this morning I found myself wanting to debug some macro expansions. Those of you with some unix-fu will immediately think (like I did) that something along the lines of

cpp foo.c | indent | view -

should show you what code is actually being generated, in a nice readable way, so you can get down to working out what's wrong. And like me, you might be a bit startled by the results.

Consulting the manpage, it turns out BSD indent needs the -st option in order to function sanely in a pipeline.

Then, GNU cpp wants the -P option to suppress linemarkers in its output (which indent otherwise chokes on).

Third, for some reason cpp doesn't actually resolve tokens concatenated using ## -- it leaves the ## and the surrounding whitespace in the output, presumably expecting the next piece in the usual toolchain to know what to do. Nor does it appear to have an option to force it to do it. Hmm. We'll need some perl here.

Fourth, it also doesn't resolve macro stringification (where #foo in a macro taking an argument foo results in "foo"). Nor does it appear to have an option to force it to. More perl.

Finally, indent doesn't appear to know or care about C99, meaning it chokes on // comments, which I tend to use liberally as they're more editor-friendly than /* */ comments. More perl.

So an hour of banging your head against docs later, and finally giving up and doing half of the job yourself in perl, what you eventually end up with is something more like:

cpp -P foo.c | perl -00 -pe 's/\/\/.*?\n/\n/msg; s/\n\n+/\n\n/g; s/\s*##\s*//msg; s/#([A-Za-z0-9_]+)/"\1"/msg' | indent -st | view -

Lessons learned:

• BSD indent is a kettle of arse


• GNU cpp doesn't seem to actually pp much c

Finally got my Ubuntu VM that I've been ranting about IRL for the last few days back on the network again, thanks to this blog post I googled up somehow

Turns out it wasn't Ubuntu that ate itself, it was VMware, and it needed a kicking via sudo /Library/Application\ Support/VMware\ Fusion/boot.sh --restart

Saw an episode of Top Gear a couple of days ago (s12e04), but missed most of the Star in a Reasonably Priced Car interview cause I kept getting distracted by this blue-haired cutie in the studio audience.


That is the interviewee's shoulder in the bottom right corner of the screenshot. Every time they cut to him, she'd be there peering blurrily over it.

So I signed up for facebook.

Not really sure how I feel about that, to be honest.

In large part I signed up cause lately pretty much all my friends are already on it, which meant when someone was organising something they had to go to a lot of trouble to invite me specifically. Now I'm nice and low maintenance again.

I'm a bit worried that it's going to make things weird at work, in large part because I have no intention of adding most of the people I work with to my friends list or whatever facebook calls it. I like to keep a clear separation between my work and personal lives, which unfortunately facebook doesn't seem equipped for doing -- I suspect that because I've added the couple of people from work that I do see socially, the friends-of-friends business is going to announce my existence to everyone else. (My privacy settings are as locked down as possible, but I'm not really sure exactly how locked down that is.)

Oh well. If there's too much drama I'll just delete it.

Also, merry etc!

So the Australian government wants to filter the internet under the guise of protecting children from child pornography or something.

Nevermind the obvious freedom/choice/etc issues; let's stop and think briefly, in convenient dot-point form, about how exactly this is supposed to protect children.

• Child pornography is already illegal pretty much everywhere, with harsh penalties in most places
• Despite this there's a market for it which clearly cares little for legalities
• Underground markets are usually pretty lucrative for those willing to accept the risks and supply illicit resources (such as, say, child pornography)
• If the filters are successful they will, assuming they work at all, further restrict access to child pornography
• ... artificially increasing its scarcity, and thus also increasing its market value for those still willing to accept the risk
• ... making supply of child pornography into Australia suddenly a very attractive venture, particularly for people outside the reach of Australian law
• If the filters are a success at recognising and blocking known existing content, the obvious way around this for someone looking to tap into this market is to simply create new content
• ... therefore by filtering existing child pornography, you are directly contributing to the further exploitation of children in order to produce more of the stuff

Or how about:

• An internet filter is not going to eliminate pedophilia
• Every pedophile at home masturbating to kiddie porn on the couch is a pedophile who's not sitting in his car outside your child's school
• Any pedophile without the technical skill or underground connections to work around the filter is still going to need to get their fix somewhere
• By further restricting pedophiles access to porn you're increasing the risk they'll actually be out and about taking advantage of real kids

Yeah great idea guys, that'll totally protect the kids

you heard it here first