2016 — 23 March: Wednesday
My apologies if anything breaks with 'molehole' in the next few days.1 99.9% or so of the files on the site now once again end in "html" rather than "shtml". It's quite strange, stepping back to pure, static HTML. Still, the only thing I've spotted so far is a minor-league code page glitch that's clobbered the £ symbols on a listing of my films out of the Kodi SQLIte DB. As exuded (as it were) by a piece of Python code.
The fun may not get going...
... until my first "for real" run-in with the AWS method(s) of web hosting and data synchronisation, of course. Still, I've obeyed the first rule of intelligent tinkering: save all the bits. So I can, if need be, revert to using SSIs.
I was sufficiently busy sorting out web files I had no time to mention a few acquisitions, erm, acquired during my trip to Soton. Indeed, I've just spent 40 minutes or so watching one of them. But now, at 01:01 or so, it's getting a bit late. The data will keep. And a chap needs his beauty sleep.
Typical!
Big Bro in NZ gets the prize for being the first 'molehole' reader to send me my first customer complaint of the day.
Despite my almost immediately sending him the one-line one-character fix... he went on rather rudely to respond in two further emails. Since it's Big Bro, and I love him dearly, I shall reproduce them2 here for purely didactic purposes:
He: (06:47) Ah!!!!! Your server has disappeared into the cloud! J
Me: (06:53) Not really! Try changing the shtml bit at the end of
the web address so it is just html instead and reload...
He: (07:08) So where do I find shtml in order to do that? Your site
has existed in my favourites for years and now you
expect me to change the address? You are making things
difficult for your cult followers!
He: (07:24) So having gone to Mr google and found you and made it a
favourite then it all works again. Is you middle name
Jobsworth? Fail to see why any change was necessary. J
Notice this peerless demonstration of the art of not reading my clear guidance! <Sigh> But in all honesty the customer is always right, of course. And in Bro's case I wouldn't dream (for more than a moment or two) of telling him how to build and fly an aircaft, would I?
Though, actually, I could! :-)
Meanwhile...
... back in the more mundane world of Day #1 of my new early morning "power on and setup régime" I have to say I stumbled a little, though some good may yet come of it. Step #1 was easy enough: switch on all the things I need to switch on before turning any attention to the NUC. Kuro plasma screen? On. Rotel pre-amp? On. Select Video input #6? Done. (This being all done in readiness to display the NUC's login screen and trick it into providing me with the Full HD resolution screen I prefer for use in a NoMachine window on the 34" Dell for the rest of the day.)
But then Step #2 glitched: I had to unplug and replug the NUC's power before I could persuade it to show any willingness at all to put its morning boots on. Luckily, while I'd been waiting for that to happen, I was standing close enough to the Kuro plasma screen to see a faint 'ghost' image on it. This was an extremely unwanted residue from the Oppo's home menu — a high-contrast display — on the otherwise completely pristine blank screen.
Irritating, but not yet alarming, as I have a crafty trick up my video sleeve for just such a horror show.
Having first let the NUC finish waking up, and displaying a perfect Mint login screen, I wandered back over to BlackBeast Mk III, fired it up, logged in, fired up NoMachine in turn, exiled that out of the way on the "furthest" Workspace, used it to connect to the NUC, logged in, established a pleasant stream of music from the NAS and, via the NUC and the Rotel Input #6, to the waiting ears, and only then delved into the Kuro's own menu system to find, and initiate, its "Pattern".
While I sup my own "wake up" cuppa, this "Pattern" will be spending the next hour generating and scrolling a full white column slowly across a full black screen3 in a (successful so far) attempt to exorcise such unwanted ghost images before they turn into untreatable third-degree burns.
Sudden...
... nasty thought: Big Bro will (of course!) almost certainly have been bitten by Google's current set of cached 'molehole' links without ever realising. And then fooled by seeing only what he expected to see.
Please use www.molehole.org/~david/index.html for any future 'molehole' starting point.
Technology Towers houses...
... an idiot who thought removing an SSD mounted as /backup from his new Skylark PC (to lend to Len in a Good Cause) would work without first editing the /etc/fstab file table to render it safely unknown to the Linux system. Needless to say, it didn't. In fact, it stopped the entire boot process dead in the water, before it had loaded enough "brains" to permit an easy work-around. So Skylark sat there, unblithe spirit, with its pinion in its cloaca and its mind in neutral until the idiot held down the Big Red Switch for long enough for the bird brain to notice.
Of course, when my — I mean, of course, the idiot's — next boot attempt yielded a Grub menu from which it was possible to select a recovery mode, the entire file system was now loaded in read-only mode, rendering it harder to do the editing. But the idiot learned his next spell:
mount -oremount,rw /
I gather the translation from the Elvish is something like "stick it back as read-write, you blistering Balrog!" (Or maybe it was "Speak 'Friend' and enter!")
Does anything change?
Check the date:
I find myself ineluctably forming the conclusion (once again) that the Windows Media Centre facilities in Vista are no more ready for my living room than XP Pro Media Centre 2005 Edition was, and still no match for dedicated separate A/V units.