2016 — 21 February: Sunday
How does such a short month manage to last such a long time?1 Shortly after yesterday's over-confident...
- Kodification ticks gently along.
... I made the — possibly unwise — choice (I hesitate to label it a "decision" and I gave it no real thought at the time) to allow my installed version of Kodi to be refreshed from the Mint repository. I had the wit to realise it was probably a smart move to shut it down first, of course (though I've been assured that's rarely actually necessary as Linux has no objection to in-flight applications being refreshed on disk regardless of what they are doing in-memory). All seemed fine, so I resumed Kodification.
("Kodification" is shorthand for the process of updating each data stub2 to contain [as part of the film's filename] a year in the form of "_(year)" to help disambiguate films that happen to have the same title from one another. Further disambiguation is then only needed if two films of the same title are released in the same year. Perfect example: two versions of "Emma" came out in 1996. In this case, you need an extra ".nfo" file which contains enough data to differentiate between the two [or more] identical titles. Our choice has been to use each .nfo file to point to the appropriate IMDB entry to help Kodi tell them apart.)
Then came the next cuppa, and time to re-run a piece of Brian's Python. This code reads Kodi's SQLite DB and uses the data to re-generate the SHTML content of my web page list (to reflect updates). Or it did.
A detailed bug report...
... has winged across the village. I await, with some trepidation, the latest comments on, and necessary changes to, my working practices. Meanwhile, I need a new hobby. Perhaps as a trainer of performing elephants?
The "Gish gallop" was...
... a new term for me. Beautifully called out here over 20 years ago. I wonder what the current term is for this mode of unenlightened "debate"? Anyway, that led me here, from where it's but a hop, a skip, and a jump down random rabbit holes such as this one (in Idaho). My own (imperfect) recall of Bible studies had clearly missed its applicability to any of history, law, philosophy, ethics, astronomy, biology, geology, world geography, archaeology, music, sociology... for starters.
Comforting though I guess it must be to have, and to hold so dear, a sacred text with all the answers in it I don't see the evidence of much success in that approach.
Kodi...
... turns out to have renamed their SQLite DB "under the covers" (or, at any rate, "hidden" in the .kodi folder with all the other user data). So my Python code was reading the 'old' DB while my updates were being applied to the 'new' DB. Still, at least I'm not going mad!
Yet.
In other news...
... I've just turned off all compositing on BlackBeast Mk III's Xfce desktop. Doing so on the NUC cured a window redraw problem, so I thought I'd head that off at the pass on BB Mk III. The desktop responsiveness has improved in both cases. It wouldn't surprise me if the on-chip Intel graphics on the Skylake NUC is quite far ahead of the Radeon fanless graphics card I'm using in BB — and have to use, as its DisplayPort output is the only way I can get full 3440x1440 resolution on my 34" Dell widescreen display. I already know a 5th generation i5 NUC has no trouble driving the Dell.
Later today I shall hook up the NUC to the Dell and set about bringing BB and NUC more closely into alignment (partly to see how their performance differs on the small range of tasks I carry out).
While I suppose...
... I probably agree, in the case of paranoia,3 with the remarks here about a continuum, I resent the mild implication that one should always occupy the, erm, middle ground!
... keep in mind that paranoia occupies the extreme end of a continuum. We can perhaps call the continuum in question suspiciousness. In that sense it reflects a normal and healthy human psychological experience, much like anger, love, happiness, and so on. At the low end of the continuum is naïveté, while paranoia sits at the other end. Each end is abnormal/pathological. In the middle are varying degrees of healthy trust or suspiciousness. So by definition paranoia and paranoid disorders are pathological states. They repÂresent an extreme of a normal, adaptive emotion.
But just you try telling that to a paranoid; just because you're paranoid doesn't (as my hippie-era badge proclaimed) mean they're not out to get you! Not that I'm in need of Captain Queeg's stainless steel balls, either. (The first time in my reading that I encountered such full-blown paranoia, albeit fictionally-depicted. It was a useful early lesson in some of the personality types needed to achieve "success". Deservedly or otherwise. And a good demonstration of the Peter Principle, too.)
Given BoJo's decision...
... to campaign for the UK to "leave" Europe — and thus pit himself against the boy Dave (who clearly has the job BoJo wants) — I shall ponder anew the interesting chapter on Europe in Tim Marshall's fascinating "Prisoners of Geography" to try to see what BoJo sees that completely escapes me. (Of course, he could just be a stupidly insular oaf.)
My own pro-European sympathies were formed in the mid-1960s and (obviously!) were further increased by marrying Christa. We both thought BoJo should confine himself to guest appearances on HIGNFY. (See above, re Peter Principle.)
Linux Mint...
... was hacked yesterday, apparently by some miscreants in Bulgaria. The download site was nobbled to point to a compromised Cinnamon ISO with a backdoor in it. I gather a nasty piece of malware in a bit of Wordpress PHP allowed the breach. B******s!
Ouch!
The feeling you get when your jaw drops to the ground as you realise just how blisteringly fast your tiny little i5 Skylake NUC is. I've treated it to a USB3 powered hub to hook up the keyboard, mouse, and another delicious little 4TB Western Digital (aka "My Book Studio") external hard drive of the sort I've been using for the last few months with BB Mk III.
Nor is there anything wrong with the quality of the analogue stereo audio from the NUC's own mini-socket. Which is just as well, as I couldn't persuade a decent volume from the Xonar external USB soundcard analogue output and, as before, there's no trace of digital audio output until I repeat the hack that I was told was no longer needed...