Oh thank Christ! Aside from the fact that having “mob” in your company name sounds more like you’re going to put a horse head in my bed or break my knees than simply annoy me with advertising on my mobile phone, I hate AdMob. I clearly understand that stuff costs money, and that if I’m getting it for free, and it is not a crippled “lite” version, a demo or FOSS, I really should expect there to be a catch, like having to view ads, but I just couldn’t stand it any longer. Every time I’d look for something interesting in Cydia, I’d try to scroll down for a screenshot, or “More Information” or whatever, but just as my finger touched the screen, the goddamned huge ad would finally load and I’d end up accidentally clicking it. No, I am not going to wait for the whole thing to load, only to try to find a tiny spot where I can touch outside an ad that spans essentially the entire width and nearly the whole length of the screen, without clicking the link I didn’t want, and no, I am not going to learn juuuuust the right way to touch so I can touch the ad, but scroll rather than click. If they’re that much in my way, then I’m sorry–I don’t care whether you need ads to keep your business running…yer out. If they were smaller banners instead of big boxes, I’d tolerate them, and if they were little text links like Google’s, I wouldn’t be bothered much at all, but I’m never, ever going to intentionally click on any ad–never–so it just wastes my time, screen real estate, and bandwidth, and tries my patience. Aside from AdMob in Cydia, there’s also the fact that the web is goddamned near unusable without blocking advertising, and if I’m stuck browsing on Edge (as I am often), it’s so goddamned slow that by the time the page content and the advertising have all loaded, I forgot what I wanted in the first place.

So I don’t lose it, here is the original hosts file that was on the phone, and here is the one on there now. It doesn’t block all of the ads in Cydia, but it blocks the huge AdMob ones that were pissing me off (blocks them in Cycorder, too, but it still works), and so far, the small banners don’t bother me enough that I’m inspired to find out where they point and edit the hosts. I just want enough space that I’m not accidentally clicking shit that is of absolutely no interest to me. The hosts goes in the root of /etc, just like Linux, and when I forget to change the default in gFTP, it needs to be SSH2, 22.

So, yay, and goodbye to huge ads. I think there’s some app in Cydia that doesn’t work if you block AdMob, but if that’s the case, then whatever it is, I don’t need it that badly. 🙂

Now…can I post this from here, then add a screenshot to it from WP on the phone? Yep, I can…here’s more bearable Cydia. I was just picking something at random to take a screenshot, but the little cartoon SMS birds were cute, so I installed them.

I guessed it probably had a name, but I’d still never heard of semantic saturation. I’d heard it called “jamais vu,” but that seemed like some sort of made-up response to déjà vu. It happens to me mostly with words, but if I say my name enough times, it begins to sound strange. Not only does it not sound like my name, it doesn’t sound like it’s anyone’s name; just like a bit of nonsense. It doesn’t work with other people’s names because I’ll always think of the person with whom I associate the name, but it works with my own. Works with words, of course, and they needn’t be weird words like poxy or lambaste. Anyway, cool to know that it has a name…semantic saturation. I wonder whether anyone’s ever done studies in other languages? I’m sure it must be a characteristic common to humans, but the only information I’ve seen was from English-speaking universities. Is someone, somewhere in Québec or France looking right now at the word “jamais” and thinking that it doesn’t look real, or that it might be written in another language? Is jamais vu a real term, or just something made up because it means the opposite of déjà vu?

Apparently, Windows 7 has some new functionality that had historically required additional software (apparently, something called Unlocker would do it, and there were others mentioned as well). Instead of just refusing to rename or move or delete (or whatever) a file and leaving you to click “Ok”, it’s actually going to tell you what application is using the file and therefore preventing your doing what you want to do. First of all, it’s about fucking time, but for MS, anything that makes file management any easier is a plus. Annoys the hell out of me when I go to move a photo or something, but can’t because I forgot it’s still open in Irfanview. Just move the goddamned thing like I told you! It doesn’t, though, and that’s a pain, especially when I can’t tell right away what’s got a lock on it, so this is a step in the right direction. (Not my image–I “liberated” it.) Apparently, this functionality “sort of” exists in Vista, but almost no one uses it, and attempting to move a file will invoke UAC, just to tell you…it can’t move the file because (whatever application) has locked it. If that’s the case, I can’t say I’m surprised no one uses it.

Like just about everything useful “under the hood”, MS is late to the party and is treating something as new when Linux (maybe BSD and MacOS as well…dunno) has had that functionality for years. I forgot last night that an episode of The Big Bang Theory (sniffle…I hope it wasn’t the final episode of the season!) was open in VLC, but it didn’t matter. I had already copied it to my external drive, so I didn’t need the copy on my desktop anymore. I chucked it in the Trash, and forgot entirely about VLC until I shut down hours later. Linux doesn’t care whether some application is using the file; it just does what you tell it to do. I had always half-wondered how, and now, I know. Thank you, Henry! I don’t know who you are, and I don’t really care, but I had always been a little curious as to why I can rename photos when they’re open, or move them, and why I can delete a video even if VLC is still running. Interesting!

It’s because a “file” and a “file name” are two completely and fundamentally different concepts. Unix allows the same file to have as many file names as you wish. The file simply keeps a reference counter to see how often it is referenced (by file names and by applications) and ceases to exist once this reference counter reaches zero.

Therefore, once an application has opened a file through one of its file names, it has a connection to the file (reference counter increases) and doesn’t care at all what happens to the file name after that. You can move/rename or delete any of the file names of an open file at will since the application doesn’t need the name anymore once the file is open.

I’ve heard that this is in principle the same under Windows, at least on a kernel level, but that this functionality has been intentionally crippled under the guise of backwards compatibility. E.g. in FAT a file does have exactly one file name and deleting the file is done by changing the file name to start with a special character.

P.S. Looking forward to ext4 in Jaunty…is it April yet? 😀

When I heard the sound for a new text last night, I glanced at the clock and wondered who’d be sending me a message so late. Curious, I picked up the phone to look, and I was immediately pissed off.

One. I pay for wireless service, not ad-supported wireless service, and I pay a lot for it. Two. It’s irrelevant that the text was free and did not apply to my limit. It’s okay for AT&T to send messages to verify changes to my account or something, but it’s not okay to annoy me with advertising. Three. Of all things, they sent an advert for…American Idol? I think that might be what pissed me off the most of all because it’s an idiotic program, and I’d rather have Billy Mays spend an hour trying to sell me a Sham-Wow than watch even one episode of American Idiot (and I think that both Billy Mays and the headset-wearing dumbass who actually hawks the Sham-Wow should DIAF).

Even worse, I had to opt-out of something to which I’d never opted-in (it’s a word…now) in the first place! Would anyone really be stupid enough to not opt-out? Seriously…who wants to be texted with marketing?!

I love my iPhone. That said, like most cameraphones, it performs rather poorly in dim light. I already knew the 2.0mpx camera was only so-so, but didn’t care because the point of a cameraphone is that you’ve always got it with you; it’s not supposed to perform like a Nikon D90. If I want to shoot good photos, I’ll take my Canon. Besides, this thing is made of so much other awesome that I’d probably still have wanted one even if the camera was utter crap. I got it for Christmas, and unless I’m in the shower, it’s never been more than a couple of metres away from me since; even then just because it was charging. If it’s not charging, it’s probably within reach. At night, it’s right beside the bed, though set on vibrate. I (heart) my iPhone.

Probably a week and a half ago, I had taken a photo of P’s cat when he’d just awakened because…well, because he was there, and is actually pretty cute when he first wakes up and looks like he needs a good, strong cup of coffee. For the hell of it, and because I know P. adores that damned cat, and because I like sending mail on my phone, I sent it to him at work. Of course, he loved it, so the next day, I did it again; this time, taking a photo of the cat in his Battle Station (AKA a cat veranda “cage” thing that fits in the kitchen window). This time, I made the subject “The Daily Kitteh”. Not surprisingly, he loved the idea, so since then, I’ve taken a photo of the cat each day and sent The Daily Kitteh to him at work. There’s actually a legitimate psychological reason for my doing it, too. He’s stressed out every day at work, and I know that, so a photo of his beloved cat serves as a reminder that home is not stressful, and the workday doesn’t last forever. A little “recess” to temporarily distract him from the South Americans who never have their shit together, and the Jamaicans who want everything yesterday, please, and yet don’t even really know what they want, and the French Canadians who drive him batshit because they’re world-famous for being rude bastards (and I’ve met few who weren’t). They’re not all incompetent (he generally gets along well with his Greeks, and loves Irma and Sture, his Swedes, because they’re always prepared, efficient and polite), but enough of them are that he often runs up against a Customs wall that he can’t get over on schedule, and through no fault of his own, so yeah, stressful.

Unfortunately for the fixed-lens, no image stabilisation iPhone camera, it lives with me in a house that was apparently built by Morlocks. There are windows, but other than the picture window in what’s supposed to be the dining room, they’re nothing special, and the lighting itself in the house is a joke; mostly crappy single-bulb fixtures that won’t take more than a 60w incandescent (though I use CF bulbs). The wiring in here might well be older than I am, so I don’t push its limits. Also, my subject for The Daily Kitteh is…a cat. Sometimes, cats stay still, but even P. would get tired of “here is your cat, sleeping….again”, so I try to take a variety of photos. Some of the cat’s favourite spots in the house, though, are some of the most poorly lit. The iPhone does not perform well in poor light, and the cat isn’t exactly the most co-operative of models (he’s improving–at least he doesn’t run from the camera anymore), so I’d end up with fourteen shots of blurry, grey, vaguely cat-shaped blob, and one that I could actually send to P.. I was poking about the App Store yesterday, and happened to notice something called Night Camera, which looked interesting, and was only 99 cents.

At first, I thought, “How much use could it be if it’s priced at only 99 cents?” so I read the reviews. Some were very good, and others were shit like, “Terrible. Doesn’t work, don’t waste your money.” I rarely pay much attention to the reviews on either end of the spectrum because the “OMG, this app changed my life!!!” reviews may be written by the dev’s mother, for all I know, and the, “Crap. Doesn’t work at all” reviews are most often written by the technically challenged, who can’t figure out how to make it work, then blame the software for their own inadequacies. Night Camera cannot turn a 2.0 mpx cameraphone into a DSLR, and it can’t do anything about the fixed lens, and it can’t create a flash where none exists (though one negative reviewer actually said, “I expected it to make a flash”…Jesus wept), and it can’t even add image stabilisation. What it can and does do, though, is use the phone’s accelerometer (sp.? too lazy to look) to determine that the camera is still, and at that moment, open the shutter. When I read how it worked, I thought, “Ahhhh…okay. That might actually be useful,” so I bought it. I tested it with the cat on the “dim” side of the bedroom, away from the window (there’s a furnace vent there, so that’s where he often naps), and got decent results. Last night, I decided to give it a different task; one at which my Canon doesn’t even perform all that well. Photographing my (so-so lit) 55g mbuna tank at night. I turned off the TV and all of the lights except for that tank, and I must say, I was fairly impressed with the results. No, it’s not “cover of Aquarium Hobbyist magazine” quality, but neither is the tank, and for a cameraphone with automatic white balance and ISO in a dark room, it’s not too damned bad. I cleaned up a little of the noise on the wall and the stand in GIMP (not too much, though–I’m not that proficient with GIMP), scaled it down to 1024×768, and the result wasn’t bad at all. I’d call it 99 cents well-spent. 🙂

Would be nice if that floating silk plant wasn’t in there, and that I hadn’t had to place tall plants in the middle, but Leo and Dr. Teeth decided that yesterday was a good day for Fish Wars, so I had to break sight lines and give the Doc a place to hide near the surface, since Leo was being an arsehole, and I only just got Doc out of the fishpital after the last time Leo beat the shit out of him. That’s actually why it looks like there aren’t any fish in there…Leo had them all too scared to come out from the rocks. Mbuna stay pretty close to the rocks anyway–mbuna means “rock fish” in Swahili–but last night, they were all hiding. If he doesn’t smarten up and be nice, he’s going to Fish Jail even if he is one of my favourites. Anyway, it’s not like I have fancy show tanks, or that I can have nice live plants in this one because the little bastards dig them up (or just plain eat them), so it’s no big deal. The fish live there, I don’t, so my main goal is to give them a home in which they are comfortable and safe, and my secondary goal is easy maintenance, since I live in what is essentially a giant fishroom and there are but 24h in a day. If the end product happens to look “not terrible”, then great. 🙂

I didn’t really want to read the article. Mostly because I think Cheney is a weeping pustule upon the leprous, unwashed taint of America, and I also know that nothing’s going to happen to the fucker, even if he should rot in jail for the rest of his life, preferably whilst having his arse traded amongst the other inmates for cigarettes and pudding cups (why yes, I am that vindictive!) Still, even the Grammar Nazi is vulnerable to Car Accident Syndrome and had to look. The Grammar Nazi cares nothing for world events, or politics, or news. The Grammar Nazi cares only for the grammar, and here is part of Satan’s…uh…I mean Cheney’s quote:

…The New York Times broke the story I think in December of ‘05, won the Pulitzer for it, which always aggravated me.

As I understand it, the old fucker has had a heart attack or two (unfortunately, he survived), but he still qualifies as something externally resembling a human, so no, no, no and a thousand times, no. It did not “aggravate” Cheney or anyone else that the NYT won a Pulitzer, or any other kind of award. That is an impossible statement because no human being (or humanoid lizard-demon, in the case of Cheney) was, is or can ever be “aggravated”. A human being can be annoyed, irritated, irked, vexed, bothered, miffed and just plain pissed off. Aggravation is the exclusive domain of a condition, especially a medical condition.

It annoyed me that George wasn’t here yesterday because moving that baby grand piano by myself aggravated my sciatica and I can hardly walk today!

The unnamed person in the sentence was not aggravated, George was not aggravated, and the baby grand piano was not aggravated because none of the aforementioned are conditions. In this sentence, only the sciatica–a medical condition–can be aggravated.

Christ. I don’t care about “relaxed standards” or that stupid kids’ game (which is probably a good part of the reason so many don’t know the correct usage) and “people understand what you mean”. English, motherfucker…do you speak it?

There was a topic on Reddit this morning that said, “Write this joke: Ben & Jerry create ‘Yes, Pecan!’ ice cream flavour for Obama. For George W., they created ______.”

If what I read is true, then Ben & Jerry’s really did rename their Butter Pecan ice cream to “Yes Pecan!” for Obama, which is rather clever even if I pronounce it “peh-KHAN”, not “pee-CAN” and it doesn’t really make sense, but not half so clever as some of the names suggested for a flavour to commemorate the Shrub. I couldn’t choose a favourite.

Cluster Fudge
Iraqi Road
Impeach Cobbler
Nut’n Accomplished
Chock ‘n Awe
WireTapioca
Heck of a Job, Brownie
Grape Depression
Neocon Politan
imPeachmint
Constitution Crumble
Iraqi Roadside Bomb
Guantana Mo’ Chocolate
Marshmallow Misunderestimation
George Bush Doesn’t Care About Dark Chocolate
WMDelicious
Guantanmallow
Caramel Preemptive Stripe
Yellow Cake Bombe
Rumsfeld & Razin’
Is Our Chocolate Learning?
Abu-Grape

Someone else suggested:

How about just a half tub of chocolate ice cream with the label:

“Mission Accomplished?”

Overall, if I did have a favourite, it would be this one. I think the guy (most likely, though there are women on Reddit) who wrote this might be slightly bitter. 😆

Good Riddance You Lousy Motherfucker… Swirl

Lighting a fire under the molasses-running-uphill-in-January Gnome menu…

sudo gtk-update-icon-cache -f /usr/share/icons/NAME_OF_THEME

echo gtk-menu-popup-delay = 100 >> ~/.gtkrc-2.0

(100 works for me so far, but can be adjusted by editing .gtkrc-2.0; lower numbers faster, higher numbers slower)

When I fsck up VLC again and get it stuck on a skin….

vlc –reset-config

It’s a small world after all…celebrating a (three days late) Mexican El día de Reyes (complete with Baby Jesus baked into sweet bread, courtesy of Adalberto) with an American and a Canadian, plus copious amounts of Swedish vodka and German beer, Romanian pop and Bulgarian chalga. Christ…now I’m gonna have that goddamned Disney song stuck in my head all day.

Is it spring yet?

Switched my iPhone’s text plan to international, too. P. put one on when he got the phone for me, but he didn’t think to ask whether it applied to only US, or the rest of the world. When I checked my usage, I realised it was US-only, so every time V. or M. sent me a message, it applied to my limit, but every time I sent one outside the US (which was every time), the fuckers were arse-raping me for 25 cents per message. It pisses me off because the cost to the carrier for texting is so near zero that it may as well be, but instead of charging a small fee, just to keep idiots from using it for “direct marketing”, they charge 20 cents for US messages, and 25 for international, and you pay not only for sending, but for receiving, too (well, unless you have a text plan). Millions of text messages are sent every day, so they’re making a killing off a service that they have to operate anyway, and which costs them nearly nothing. Fuckers ought to EABOD.

What I want more than anything right now is to lie in bed in the very early morning, windows open and the air just a little bit cool, looking at a bright blue sky and listening to the birds twittering and singing outside. The holidays are over now, so I’m ready for spring. 🙂