2016 — 7 October: Friday
A momentary lapse of reason has just necessitated a wholesale, recursive, change of access permissions and ownership to all my webfiles on the NAS before I could create today's ¬blog entry. Probably better if you don't ask. Let's just say I'm holding lighttpd entirely responsible. I was just trying to set it running on Skylark (which worked) and then point it correctly to all my files (which didn't). And it won't happen again.
So much for following my own instructions.1 I never thought I'd say this... but, thank goodness for the command line! Right; it's way past time for bed. G'nite.
Idle hands
It's 08:21 or so, and "the Bowl of Night" definitely contains "the Stone that puts the Stars to Flight". I was too tired to sort out lighttpd on Skylark a few hours ago. It was quite bad enough having to repair all the broken permissions (caused by one of the steps of my failed lighttpd installation on Skylark). So why not just let the perfectly-behaved lighttpd on BlackBeast carry on doing its local web-serving thing2 for me?
I haven't even logged on to BB, which is — I presume! — still happily displaying its login screen to the empty air of the Dell's mini-DisplayPort connection. BB doesn't suffer from the DP disconnection Sleep of Death but its DP connection to the Dell will give NoMachine all the screen parameters to construct a full-resolution display on Skylark should I actually ever need to logon and retrieve any BB files.
Donald Trump...
... is one of this year's nominations for the Nobel Peace Prize. Nurse! My meds! Quickly!!
Oh joy! Nice to know that some of the share and currency-trading algorithms "feed off news headlines and even social media". GIGO, anyone?
Beyond satire
I'm daily reminded why I have never voted for the political party that currently kids itself it's "in power":
Rudd, a socially liberal ex-journalist, meanwhile suggested companies be forced to publish data about how many foreign staff they employ... In the current climate, she was accused of being one step away from handing out yellow stars.
And yes, it's scary stuff. But it also falls apart surprisingly quickly when prodded, and therein lies the ray of hope: this isn't a cabinet of racists. It's a cabinet peppered with people terrified of being exposed as closet liberal elitists, clumsily second-guessing what
people they'd once have regarded as racists think...
Apparently...
... some chap who thinks he's in charge of Brenda's "Loyal Opposition" has produced a "Digital Democracy Manifesto" that includes a perfectly sensible recommendation to the effect that maybe our guvmint could/should use more Open Source software. A nasty little tabloid rag (briefly famous for an infamous "Gotcha!" headline at the time of the ill-advised Falklands War) is of the opinion that this would "let foreign spooks rob UK" or some such ignorant nonsense.
I was irritated by the segment faults...
... with the YAGF front end (to the tesseract OCR engine) on Mint 18. So I enlarged a ¬blog page and scraped an image of a bit of text from the web browser with the "Take Screenshot" tool to try an experiment. Converted the .png screenshot file to a TIFF file in the GIMP. Fed that to tesseract via a simple terminal command. Then opened the output text file in Leafpad:
Input:
Process:
Output:
It's not perfect, but it's fine as a starting point. And takes longer to describe than to do.