Dave Holland's home page

Gnome and floatbg, feeling dirty
5:19pm, Thursday 26 February 2009

I don't know what the best way is to get floatbg to play nicely with Gnome. But I have a feeling that this:

sprintf(cmd,"gconftool --type string --set
  /desktop/gnome/background/primary_color \"#%04x%04x%04x\"",
  red, green, blue);
system(cmd);

which I uploaded yesterday can only be described as "suboptimal"...

Killer iPhone app
1:19pm, Thursday 12 February 2009

Use your iPhone as a rotary-dial telephone. Neat. Completely impractical, but amusing.

I still have a rotary 'phone, and even use it occasionally.

Quote of the day
11:07am, Thursday 5 February 2009

I see no motivation not to view the world as a vast ocean of Unicode codepoints and then go sailing those Seven Seas.

-- Jay Carlson, in the Risks Digest

I find that particularly (un)amusing given the general lack of support for Unicode/UTF-8 in ABC software.

Filename comedy
3:04pm, Friday 5 December 2008

...or, why you shouldn't put a database on an NFS filesystem:

somesrv1b:/nfs/somedb/[...]/data/base/1# ls -l 2669    
-rw-------  1 foo bar 40960 Oct 11  2007 2669
somesrv1b:/nfs/somedb/[...]/data/base/1# ls -l 2669*
-rw-------  1 foo bar 40960 Oct 11  2007 2669
-rw-------  1 foo bar 40960 Oct 11  2007 2669

This is, understandably, causing said database some confusion...

Detritus
4:59pm, Tuesday 18 November 2008

Bleh, look what I found...

somehost:~# mailq
1935d  1.5K 19jALB-0000Co-00 <> *** frozen ***
          root@somehost

somehost:~# exim -Mvl 19jALB-0000Co-00
2003-08-03 05:19:29 directing failed for root@somehost: unknown local-part "root" in domain "somehost"
*** Frozen (delivery error message)

Think I might leave it there and see if it fossilizes...