briancarper.net (λ) (Tag: Addiction)

Hello again, world

Sun, 04 May 2008 20:04:07 -0700

Computers are a love/hate thing for me. I love all things digital, but I desperately need to get away from it sometimes too. So I had a nice vacation away from my computer last week. I couldn't keep myself from reading some mailing lists and hitting Slashdot once a day, but I didn't write a single line of code and didn't give my websites or work projects or anything much thought.

But now my vacation is over, and it's so easy to fall back into old habits, endlessly looking at webcomics and reading articles about Common Lisp unit testing suites and cringing at the latest drama amongst Gentoo devs and minding my message board like a crusty old beat cop making his rounds. It's the life I've chosen, and I do like it, but I do like getting away sometimes too.

I fulfilled one of my dreams last week when I finally caved and ordered a solid glass mousepad. They're pretty cheap on newegg.com, depending on the color you want. I happened to want green, and it happened to be the cheapest, so all is well. It looks very nice, and it's big and hopefully the surface won't degrade over time; I tend to eat through mousepads via a slow yet inexorable process of erosion.

Unfortunately my laser mouse doesn't work on it. However, I have learned that if I upgrade my mouse's firmware, it will magically be able to work on a solid glass mousepad. Who would've thought my mouse had updateable firmware, let alone that updating the firmware would allow it to work on new surfaces? Not I.

The bad thing is that I need freaking Windows XP to upgrade the firmware on my mouse. I don't have any computer that has XP on it and I'm afraid to try anything in a virtual machine that involves something as dangerous as fiddling with the innards of connected peripherals. So I tried to install XP on my laptop, desperate times calling for desperate measures. But of course the install failed because my XP install CD is so old (pre-SP1, received free from my college 7 years ago) that it didn't recognize most of my hardware. In fact, the XP install CD blue-screened, which set a new record for how low Windows could sink in my opinion.

So I tried slipstreaming SP2 into my install CD. But it failed because, get this, the filenames of some drivers on the CD, namely usbehci.sys, ended up in lower case rather than uppercase and the CD's install program couldn't locate them. I kid you not. Since when is anything in Windows case-sensitive? Is it running Linux? I had to burn another CD after renaming all the files into uppercase. Then the CD worked, but it couldn't find my hard drive, probably due to missing SATA drivers. At that point I gave up, and plan to take my mouse to work tomorrow to upgrade the firmware on a work machine that has XP on it.

And so the score up to this point in my life is Windows: 947, Brian: 0. Windows remains undefeated.

Thanks go out to Logitech for not letting me use Vista (or, say, LINUX) to upgrade my mouse's firmware, and of course to Microsoft, for yet another gloriously broken and frustrating computing experience.

Pack rat

Sat, 02 Feb 2008 18:07:19 -0800

Cheap data storage is a curse. I have so many files on my computer it's not even funny.

I have every homework assignment I ever did in college 8 years ago. I have pictures I can't even recognize any more, and many pictures of stupid crap like the kitchen of the apartment I moved into in 2005. I have snapshots of websites from 7 years ago. I probably have backups of config files from Gentoo in 2003. I have enough wallpapers to open an art gallery of my own. And I don't even want to think about the status of my email. I haven't deleted an email since 2004 other than spam.

I have a folder buried in one of my many backup folders called simply "CRAP". I can't remember making it. Looking in there, I find SQL dumps from databases whose use I can't remember, a couple of ISO images, a list of Latin proverbs, savegames from Baldur's Gate, a couple full maildir trees full of emails, receipts from Christmas presents I bought online in 2003, and chat logs of people I haven't talked to in 5 years, among many other things.

Behold:

find CRAP | wc -l
273308

If I can look at 10 files every minute to figure out what they are, it would take me approximately 19 days of non-stop work just to identify all of these files, let alone do something useful with them. And that's JUST THIS FOLDER. I have oh so many others. And that isn't considering that many files in this folder are archives containing other files.

The problem is when it comes time to do something with a file, I think to myself, why delete it? What if I need some of this stuff someday? I can keep all my files until my HD fills up, then spend a mere $100 and have space for another million files. But if I DID need something, there's no way I'd locate it in this mountain of stuff. And I will never need 99% of this crap. I haven't needed it in the past decade, and the chances of my needing it are only decreasing over time.

But I can't bring myself to delete it. Today I burned everything to DVDs and rm -rf'ed the lot of it as a compromise. The files still exist, but at least I can hide them in a drawer. And why do I feel like I'm just making room for a new scrap heap to begin?

Computerless

Tue, 18 Dec 2007 02:26:47 -0800

The end of this week marks the beginning of one of my fairly regular two-week trips to Canada. That means two weeks away from my computer.

It's sad that I really miss my computer when I'm away from it. At the same time it's almost essential to unplug every once in a while. The bad(?) thing about Linux is that I have to lie to myself and pretend that I can't SSH home any time I want. Actually now that I think about it, my upload speed at this location is probably fast enough to let me run VNC pretty effectively for once.

...I don't have a tag suitable for this post. Let's go with "Addiction".