Firelog

Yeah, that’s right, stop doing CPR, I’m not dead. I’ve just been busy with school (well, parties too) the last few weeks. I just started at LTH, a school that in English terms would be equivalent to college (I think). I’m having a great time, since this education has been my goal since 1998, when my sister started there. If everything goes as it should, I’ll be a civil engineer in information and communication technology (more info here). ‘nuf said about school.

Some days ago, I heard about Red vs. Blue, which is kind of a sitcom made in Halo and Halo 2. I have to say that it’s as funny as it sounds, or rather, much funnier than it sounds. The guys making it have just the right humor… The series is filled with stuff like doing CPR for a bullet wound in the head and quotes like “It’s not pink, it’s like… a lightish red!”. Just watch it, it’s dead funny. I fount a torrent with all episodes of season 1-4, so downloading was no problem. It doesn’t take up much space either, since the episodes aren’t that long… I started watching them today and I’m already at ep. 61 (of 77). And yes, I have a life, I mowed the lawn too.

I’ll probably write something again within 6 months, but for now it’s back to HaloWorld (®?) and then some SchoolWork®.

//Firetech

P.S. Because this post is highly ranked on Google, it causes a lot of spamming in the comments here. Since it’s old and I get almost no serious comments at all, I’ve disabled commenting for this post. Sorry spambots. (No spam gets through anyway. ALL unknown comments that get through my blacklist and the Akismet plugin are sent to me for moderation…)

Ok, I haven’t posted anything for two months and two days, but I’ve had my reasons.

Slightly after my last post (about silly bugs in IE), I had umpteen projects to finish (the website the post was about was one of them) and umpteen tests to study for. (The last week of school, I had four tests…) I wasted a lot of time doing nothing, but it all turned out well… Then I had a lot of free time before I graduated on June 13. I used that free time to work a bit on Amarok, learning more Qt on the way.

I got a lot of presents for my graduation, including a lot of money. I only had those money for two days before buying myself a laptop on June 15. An Acer TravelMate 4202WLMi. It’s got everything you could ask for, except TV-out, but it works flawlessly in Kubuntu (Linux). The speed of its Core Duo CPU amazes me, it compiles about 3-5 times faster than my desktop computer.

It has taken me until now to set it up correctly, but now I’m totally happy with the results. The reason why it took so long is because I had to look up a lot of info, but in the end, the fixes I applied were only trivial. I’m sitting in our garden right now, posting this via WLAN (802.11g)

The laptop, called “Barbacola” currently dual boots Windows® XP Professional and Kubuntu Dapper, and that won’t change in the near future, it’s just perfect as it is right now.

//Firetech

Update(July 1 2006):
Ok, I measured the times taken to compile Amarok from a cleaned source tree. The results are… well… Shocking!
Barbaque (my desktop) compiled Amarok in just about 16 minutes.
Barbacola (the laptop) compiled Amarok in exactly 4 minutes, when running single threaded (I.E. only one core used). That’s four times faster, but later I found the -j option to unsermake (well, make too…) and recompiled with -j 2. When the new time appeared, I was stunned. 2 minutes and 41 seconds. I even ran it one more time to check, and then I got 2:40… Exactly 6 times faster. That laptop is QUICK!
You can guess which computer I do my hacking on…

I love Internet Explorer, I really DON’T. I just spent 2 hours trying to find some kind of hack to fix the most bizarre bug I’ve found in it, and the hack that finally fixed it, was almost as bizarre as the bug itself.
Here goes: I have a page with a table (Yes, I know I shouldn’t use tables for design, but it’s a lot easier in this case.), and three iframes beside eachother inside that table. The table has its height and width set to 100%, and the iframes have their height set to 98% (100% also works) of their table cell. That’s all I have to tell you to reproduce this. The thing that happens is that the third line in each iframe becomes invisible. Only the third line, only the text of it, and it doesn’t matter if the third lines have the same distance from the top. These pictures show the result:

This is what it looks like in IE.

This is what it should look like.

It works as it should in all browsers except IE (just like everything else…), and it works as it should if I remove the height property of the table. Quite bizarre bug, don’t you think?
Anyway, the fix is, as I said, quite bizarre too. Put a div tag around the iframes. the bad thing with that is that it doesn’t work in other browsers, because then the div tag doesn’t fill the entire height of the table cell. I tried setting the height of the div tag, but then the bug reappeared in IE, so I added some comment hacks:

<!--[if lt IE 7]>
<div>
<![endif]–>
  [iframe(s) here]
<!–[if lt IE 7]>
</div>
<![endif]–>


I just love these bizarre bugs that keep appearing in IE for no reason. Maybe I should boycott IE and leave that bug in the web site. Then we’ll see what happens, because making all these hacks is getting quite tedious.

EDIT: Forgot to say it, but this result was in IE 6 (the comments hack’s “lt” means Less Than, so they shouldn’t trigger on IE 7, which I haven’t tested yet though…

//Firetech

P.S. While I’m on the subject of Microsoft: I found this article quite interesting…

First of all, I’d like to make clear that “blip-blop” in my opinion is an unfair (but funny) nickname for what I’m gonna talk about… (Read this if you don’t understand why.)

A friend of mine (not to mention any names, you know who you are…) has been constantly nagging on me and trying to get me to listen to SLAY Radio since late last year or something. Until about two weeks ago, when I gave in and actually tried it. I became a bit disappointed, for not trying it earlier that is… ;)

The special thing about SLAY is that they only play music that’s somehow related to Commodore64. Both “raw” SID tunes and remixes/covers based on such tunes (more common). I can’t deny the fact that I love that kind of music, and the fact that their jingles and live shows are quite fun just makes it better. :) The fact that I’ve never done anything on a C64 (actually, I’ve never even seen one IRL, probably because I were more into outside activities when I was younger) doesn’t matter very much, I enjoy the music anyway. (Lots of facts there, but that makes me more trustworthy. ;))

I’ve also downloaded the High Voltage Sid collection (HVSC) so I can listen to some of the lovely songs a little longer. :D

So tune in and listen to some blip-blop you too! I command you.

//Firetech

Update (May 12 2006):
Some days ago, I found remix.kwed.org, which hosts a lot of the tunes you can hear on SLAY, and also a “C64 TakeAway” Podcast. :)
I crammed my ancient 64 MB MP3 player full with 32 of my favourite remixes, and now I almost have a portable SLAY radio. Even though the podcast would be better to server that purpose, it’s not as long lived as 32 VBR (q9, I’m thankfully no audiophile) encoded MP3s that make the player’s counter go nuts…

They talk about global warming, but this winter, there has been exceptionally much snow here down in southern Sweden. Normally, what we get is a week or two with 1-5 cm of snow per year. This year, there has been snow somewhere since the beginning of January. Ok, some weeks at a time, the snow has only been in small piles beside the road, but it has been there. Right now, it’s snowing quite much outside, and adding to the layer that has been coming since the middle of the week. It’s just slightly below 10 cm deep… I wouldn’t call this global warming…
The thing is that the snow has been there since I went skiing the first time in January, just making fun of the fact that there’s no slopes to go skiing in down here. :( I like snow, I really do, but when I can’t do anything with it (I.E. go skiing), I just get fed up… I think I should move to an area with more slopes. ;)

My inside activities the last few days have been dominated by Unreal Tournament (the original from 1999). I’m only playing against bots, but the InstaGib mutator (everyone gets supercharged shocking guns (and all other weapons are removed) which kills everyone with one direct hit) makes it quite fun :) Just a bit suckish that I can’t get it to run in Linux… Seems like the installer can’t patch some windows specific game files… :( Playing it on my mother’s laptop isn’t a problem, though. ;)

Oh, And I also got fed up with the KDE OS X thing, so my KDE is back to normal, except the wallpaper and the desktop fonts :P

//Firetech