Beachball weg! … Icanhascheezburger … Squawk, squawk, squawk 18th of April, 2007 ANTE·MERIDIEM 12:25

I wonder sometimes if I'm the only person in the world with so much trouble seating RAM. At least five separate boots this time, to check if the OS would recognise both new sticks. But, yay, it does, and let me say that OS X 10.4 is a hell of a lot happier in my usage patterns with 2 GB as opposed to 512 MB.

Sonst gibt es wenig Neues. Ich müsste mal einen neuen spanischen Sprachtandempartner finden, herausfinden warum die Lautsprecher von der Kiste nicht funktionieren, meine Hausaufgabe tun, arbeiten, mich amüsieren – was für ein hartes Leben.

One of the cooler internet phenomena lately has been icanhascheezburger.com, with photos of kittens, cats, dogs, walruses together with hoygan-style captions, as one imagines the animals would type had they the digits for it. Weirdly cheering. And really weirdly, they’re pulling in more traffic than cars.com. I suppose the low barrier to appreciation plus the consistency of the posts, with the un-filled niche explains it.

Word of the day: der Truthahn is German for the turkey (fowl, not secular Islamic country).

Character set chaos, as so often … GTK2 & Option, X11.app … Keyboard nerdiness. 7th of April, 2007 POST·MERIDIEM 03:14

A couple of things from moving from my overheating NetBSD laptop to a Mac Mini (with a 20” BenQ monitor and cheapo keyboard and mouse from MediaMarkt, which are nonetheless fine, may your diety of choice preserve falling prices in consumer electronics). Firstly, I transferred a lot of my music using an external hard disk formatted using FAT 32, since NetBSD wouldn’t recognise UFS as formatted by Mac OS X, despite it theoretically being able to. I used UTF-8 for file names on NetBSD, and on the Mac Mini, as Mac OS X forces you to, but unfortunately FAT 32 doesn’t really have a standard way of specifying “UTF-8 is the file name and directory encoding for this disk, thanks.” So I generated MD5 hash → file name maps for both machines, once the files had been copied, and the renamed them using this information. Here’s the Emacs Lisp:

;; -*- coding: utf-8 -*- 

;; In a traditional Lisp data-is-code approach, for this programlet I
;; generated two lists of MD5 hashes to file name mappings with a shell
;; script:
;
; find . | while read; do echo ""$(openssl md5 < $REPLY)" "$REPLY""; done
; 
;; And then pasted the resulting data between the parentheses in the "data (
;; )" sections below. No explicit file parsing needed. 

(let ((old-file-info #s(hash-table test equal data ( ) ))
      (existing-file-info #s(hash-table test equal data ( ) ))
      new-file-name existing-file-name)
  (maphash
   (lambda (key value)
     (setq existing-file-name value
           new-file-name (gethash key old-file-info))
     (if (not new-file-name)
         (message "no information on file %s" key)
       (unless (file-exists-p new-file-name)
         (unless (file-directory-p (file-name-directory new-file-name))
           (make-directory (file-name-directory new-file-name) t)
         (rename-file existing-file-name new-file-name)))))
   existing-file-info))

Also, Adium doesn’t use Gaim’s log format, so I’ve stuck with the latter as my chat client. Something that surprised me with that was that Option+letter for various atypical letters didn’t work, despite their working fine with XEmacs under X; it turned out I needed to call this:

xmodmap -e 'clear mod1'
xmodmap -e 'add mod5 = Mode_switch'

I’ve also made a version of the X11 XKB ie layout for OS X available here; despite the layout being based on the Irish Mac layout, there remain some differences, the most notable being the generic Mac weirdness of placement of the @, the § and €. Copy the file to /Library/Keyboard layouts and log in again to make it available; feedback and complaints welcome.

Word of the day: der Knüller is German for ‘sensation[al success], a sensational offer;’ often to be had in marketing-speak.