Ravings

Empty Or Not?

From the Department of Insane Hacks

On Halloween, Windows played a dirty Trick on me, so I gave myself a great Treat: I blew Windwoes to hell and installed Debian. Life has been wonderful ever since — but that’s not what this story is about.

Because I like playing World of Tanks, I ended up installing Windows again, but only as a slave chained in a dark little dungeon that I could access when I damn well felt like it. One day, when I had booted into my little slave Windows to play, I wanted to do something Internettish. I opened the portable version of Firefox that was in a shared NTFS partition. Windows blue-screened out.

Something in that portable ffx was deadly. It may have come from an attempt to run it in Wine, or from an update done through ‘nix. At ay rate, it was thoroughly poisoned. I couldn’t run it, couldn’t delete the cache, couldn’t poke my nose into it at all without crashing Windoze. After three bluescreens, I stopped trying. It didn’t knock the virtual Windows over, so I tried to get rid of it from that.

Using Free Commander’s wipe function, I erased — oops, not quite all of it. The “Some files could not be deleted” dialog popped up. I looked. All that was left was a nested directory with NO FILES IN IT. OK, I step away from Windows and take a look with Nautilus. Yep, empty. But I still can’t delete it because it is “not empty.” Bash, what do you see? Nada. No files. It’s EMPTY. No command shows anything, deletes anything, does anything. It is empty, but it is “not empty.” I can even rename the top dir (from “Firefox” to “poison”), but I can’t delete anything!

I get mad. OK, you little SOB, you’re not empty — let’s see what happens if I put a real, visible file in you. Copy, paste. Ha.

Then I up-dir to the root of this odd family of not-emptines and…DELETE the whole shebang. No complaints. It’s gone.

I suspect a wee fukup in the Master File Table. Wottever, it’s just another one of those crazy hax where doing *something* shakes something loose and whothehell cares, it works.

The late perp:
/media/(UUID)/progs/poison/Data/profile/safebrowsing

Dance of Life (poem)

apophysis-101117-13n-c

 

 

 

 

 

Winging down
in around
the zoosphere
we find
a single
being,
intertwined
invisibly
in fleeting forms
shadow-dancing
with itself
in separate mind
seeking
sometimes
fearfully
to know
what lies behind
its seeing.

This is probably around 30 years old. I ran accross it for the umpteenth time while looking for some particular song lyrics that I needed to digitize. It’s in weak pencil on poor quality colored paper, and wouldn’t be a good bet for long survival. But I can still remember the pleasure of writing it, and therefore thought that it deserved something better than a recycling bin.

I also found the sought-after lyrics, and got them on my hard drive with somewhat improved punctuation.

 

The image accompanying this piece is a product of Apophysys and The GIMP.

 

Ididdit

Published. On Smashwords.Yes, I did.

A Drum Is Empty is finally available to readers who have already waited too long. I also uploaded two short stories as freebies. You might say I celebrated Mother’s Day by giving birth to a litter of literature.

It was a day’s work. First, I had to make sure the manuscripts were formatted correctly. I was a good girl, I read the Smashwords style book. Then I slapped Word around for a while. Did Drum more than once from scratch to ensure clean formatting. Then there was the cover art.

I had taken some time previously developing the Drum cover. It only needed a couple of minor tweaks to be ready to go. The other two were hastily cobbled on the spur of the moment. I had to get up and take a photo of my hand for Grandmothers. By the time I got around to Tiwa’s tale, I was running out of steam. Obviously. Thank goodness for The GIMP in all cases.

Anyhoo, the “Meatgrinder” had no trouble digesting my perfect docs. I uploaded the short stories first, to get the hang of it. Then the Big One. It was fun to watch the process, the page refreshing over and over. Nothing like chocolate or sex, but a bit of a thrill for that first time. Yeehah, I had ebooks.

ADIE-cover

grandmothers

Kewarratiwa's Story

I had never intended to publish Kewarratiwa’s Story when I wrote it, but on looking it over one more time after a long hibernation period, I decided that it hung together well enough. I needed to read it again anyway. Tiwa is still a problem character, but I am coming to understand her better.

So…why Smashwords? Because I like how they do things. Because I loathe DRM. Because I could. I did it, and it feels good.

One thing that surprised me was how many times the short stories were downloaded in the first 24 hours. Not too many nibbles on the novel yet (and no sales), but I think I dropped my line into good fishing waters.

At least I finally got my bait good and wet 😉

The hack that wasn’t

I thought I got hacked yesterday. This line of text appeared — with no apparent cause — in a text file that was open but out of sight:

Cracked and cul De SAC and all will have some fun and this one th at a picnic

After finding no clues in any obvious way, I slept on it; modem and router unplugged, of course. Lying under my quilt this morning for some post-pee horizontal thinking, I went over my memories of events in the time between opening the text and being asked if I wanted to save it when I started to close it. The video player behaving oddly while the speech recognition software was still running…. I got up and performed some experiments. Uh-huh. The only hacker was in the movie.

I couldn’t reproduce the exact results, too many environmental variables, but oh teh lulz. That such a near classic neener line could result from a random series of coincidences. Must soak head more often.

The Tao of Budget

My mother once told me I should have a budget. Many years later, I aquired a parakeet, and named him Budget. Unfortunately, I couldn’t keep him….

What is the Tao of Budget?

To take an oversimplified view of the subject, let us say there are two basic types of budgeting: Big-Thingian and Little-Thingian.

Tom Chance is a Little-Thingian. He has some old debts and a few recurring bills. Today, he has a fistful of dollars (insert short snatch of movie theme). It isn’t enough to make a real dent in an old debt, nor is it enough to pay off an impending bill.

But Tom likes to think he’s a positive thinker. Wow, his glass is half full! So he drinks it. Literally.

When all the beer is gone, he still has debts and bills. And no beer.

Ben Buckmaster, a Big-Thingian, also has a fistful of dollars (insert short snatch of movie theme). He has old debts and recurring bills too, and not enough to pay off anything yet. Oh well. He leaves his half-empty glass under the tap. It will gradually fill if the faucet drips, and, if nothing else, it will still be there if he’s thirsty tomorrow. Ben has seen a lot of thirsty tomorrows.

Some days later, both Tom and Ben have found odd jobs that leave them with (insert short snatch of movie theme). Ben now has enough to pay his most pressing bill. He does so, and promises himself that if there’s a bit left over from the next paycheck, he’ll treat himself to a beer.

Tom, however, is in the same place he was before. Enough for beer and pizza, but not enough for child support.

Guess what Tom does. Again.

So…Ben is a negative thinker, right? A pessimist, a Scrooge, a tightwad, no fun. He won’t party because he can’t “loosen up” and forget his problems. Big-Thingians are No. Fun.

Tom is a great guy to hang around with. Too bad he’s in jail right now.

To sum up:

A Little-Thingian budgeter is in constant motion; he spends whatever he has. If it isn’t enough for the Big Things, he spends it all on Little Things.

A Big-Thingian budgeter rests in the Tao. His money grows through his inaction and his bills are paid.

A great Master once said, “It’s the priorities, stupid!”

i can haz program

File Memo header
I went into a programming frenzy yesterday. Couldn’t do what I wanted with what I had, so I downloaded  AutoHotkey. Found the commands I needed, and after a few near misses I had a wee proggy that worked, either by sendto/drag-n-drop, or through the context menu after a bit of registry diddling.

Then came the hard part. I wanted an idjit-proof installer so I could share this handy widget. Some easy-peasy install builders are pretty dumb about adding stuff to the registry — not deep enough for my baby. I didn’t feel like learning another scripting language before midnight either.

The one I finally decided to stick it out with was SSE Setup. Again, I found the registry part a mite sticky. Trial and error took care of that after never mind how many (un-)installs. But the worst thing was that SSE hates Vista! I had to do the compiling in a virtual machine. The completed installer is pretty slick. So far it’s been tested in Vista, XP, and 7. It is not for older winderz, though maybe I could adapt a version.

What the fluff is it, you ask. It’s called FileMemo. It plops down an empty text file with the name of whatever file you right-clicked to make it so. And what good is that, you ask. Well, have you ever downloaded something and forgot why and/or what it does, or wanted to find the site you got it from again? Or lay down a shipload of details about a photo without having to dig inside it or use some damnable “album” crudware? How about a file memo? A simple, system-independent plain-text file with a bit of info. Not bad, for what ended up being nearly two days work and enough frustration to stick my head through a wall.

It’s here if you want to try it out:

Download FileMemo

🙂

Note: Requires admin privileges, installs in C:\FileMemo with no options ’cause I wanted to keep it simple.

Buried Treasures

Amazing what one runs across when cleaning out surplus stuff. Also amazing what one never notices until…when one notices it. I rescued this old label some time ago from a box that had been used for storage since whenever. Then it knocked around here and there and was buried, until I dug it up yesterday and scanned it.

Today, I took a close look at the scan image while touching up the color. There it was. The street address of my grandfather’s gas station. Yes, the old postcard that I spoke of here does show it.

I don’t know why the package was sent there instead of to my grandparents’ residence, but it makes a remarkable contribution to my growing collection of digitized memorabilia. In all the stuff I have gone through over the years in this house, it is the only thing I can recall that has that address on it.

Old shipping label
Old shipping label

I’m sure that I will discover more occurrences of the address as the “house arcaeology” progresses — and plenty of other interesting things long shoved aside. I also dread finding them after they have been destroyed by mice, silverfish, and leaky roof. 🙁

A Bed of Roses

Minding one’s own business doesn’t pay very well.

I’m pretty quiet. I don’t have loud parties, don’t play a radio outside, don’t have a constantly barking dog.

Many of my neighbors do.

I don’t throw trash in my neighbors’ yards — although I may sometimes “return” something that I know is not mine.

My neighbors habitually toss cans, broken things, and sometimes tree limbs into my yard.

I do not vandalize my neighbors’ property.

My neighbors trample my fence, and one has cut my roses to the ground.

What a nice place to live is Sturgeon Bay.

It can’t be envy; I live so far below poverty level that I will never see over the edge. So what is it? Do they hate me because I’m not young and live alone? Is it because I’m not healthy and wealthy?

Is it just because I don’t make a lot of trouble?

Why I Won’t Read Your Fanfic

Variations on an old rant.

You have no idea how to construct a decent sentence and really don’t care.

You can not or will not use sensible formatting, and stick your readers with a mass of run-together text and/or other discourteous and inhospitable barriers to comfortable reading.

You misspell characters’ names. Really, this stuff is in print, it’s in a book, you can look it up. This is supposed to be fanfic, for cryin’ out loud, it’s all about the characters.

You don’t have a story, just an “idea”, and it’s never going anywhere. You will either peter out after a dozen posts or natter on into infinite boredom.

You believe what your readers say about your great story and your great writing…and because of that, you will never get any better.

Most of this could be recycled under the title: Why I Won’t Beta Read Your (Unfinished) Novel.

Whodunit, IrfanView or the Windwoes Gremlin?

This is not a problem with IrfanView, but it is involved with it.

Something strange happened while I was browsing a folder of old images with some new work being added. There is one TGA file among the JPGs, PNGs, and BMPs. I noticed the image in the thumb viewer and made a mental note to go back to it. When I looked for it again, it didn’t seem to be there. Then I saw that its thumbspace was blank.

In a file manager window it showed the wrong icon, and when opened in IrfanView it was blank. It had been normal only minutes before.

A little investigation showed that the file type designation in the Windows Registry had switched from “IrfanView TGA” to “IrfanView SGI”. (I don’t even have SGI files associated with IV; I don’t have any.)

This must have happened while I was fooling around with the other files, because IrfanView was not blind to the file when I started.

The other odd thing is that after I fixed a few things in the Registry, IV sill did not display the file.

I rebooted to make sure the registry changes would be effective, and something else went weird. The window of a program that runs at startup was not showing. It had to be brought back on screen with a window hacking proggie.

I suspect Windwoes is having me on a bit. That is not a good sign. Is SilentBob getting delusional? Am I going to have to *gasp* kick some file and drive ass? Lordy, I’ve got a lot of gigabytes invested in this Vista monster. 🙁

11-05-21 update — still farked.