2016 — 8 October: Saturday
Either there's a family of computing elves living hereabouts or I was so tired last night that I simply didn't switch off all my PCs. My second cuppa is completing the morning waking-up process. It's rather a grey morning, and the heating evidently came on during the night.
Never mind. Soon be Xmas.
As part of its secret policy...
... of keeping me on my toes, the makers of the excellent UltraEdit text editor have subtly changed its behaviour in their latest build of the Linux version. In the release I bought shortly after lurching into the world of Linux, when you did a "Save as..." to make a new file1 identical, initially, to your current one, your edit session was immediately "placed" in the new file. In the upgrade I've just treated myself to — I encourage software houses to produce Linux variants of their products by buying the things — you are instead "left" in the old file. This remarkably subtle change makes it very easy for idiots like me to kick off their next burst of editing in the "wrong" file.
And when that happens (as it just did) you have to go through a slightly tedious, and definitely irritating, renaming dance with a temporary copy of one of the "wrong" files.
I actually have no preference, but just wish that the behaviour hadn't changed from one release to the next. Mind you, worse things happen at sea.
An interesting trio of essays...
... has kept me from my breakfast:
- The rise of English as the language of science (plus a gorgeous colourised photo of an amazing array of physicists attending the 1927 Solvay conference) — Link.
- Musings on issues of existential angst — Link.
- Cutting corners in China — Link.
And now I have something called OCRFeeder to investigate.
Oops! The package on the Mint 18 repository installs, but refuses to launch. Tesseract command line it is, therefore. Not a deal breaker.
Jeeves! Where's that bubbly?
My new best friends in Brenda's State Pension department have just told me exactly how much will be coming my way, in arrears, every four weeks. I'm astonished and delighted to learn from their letter that I have actually inherited some of Christa's state pension. That means I didn't lie to her after all! Which is oddly a huge relief...
A couple of days before the end, She said to me "When I woke up this morning I suddenly thought 'I've still got this cancer in me, haven't I?' And I'd been thinking I could go on like this forever." I said, yes, She did. She then said "But if I go 'pop' you'll still get my pension, won't you?" I said, yes, of course, don't worry.
Ev'ry little helps :-)
I was re-reading...
... some thoughts by Marcus J Ranum on daft ideas (written in 2005) in computer security, particularly those on Enumerating Badness. He was talking in the context of Windows XP at the time and, as he said:
For every harmless, legitimate, application, there are dozens or hundreds of pieces of malware, worm tests, exploits, or viral code. Examine a typical antivirus package and you'll see it knows about 75,000+ viruses that might infect your machine. Compare that to the legitimate 30 or so apps that I've installed on my machine, and you can see it's rather dumb to try to track 75,000 pieces of Badness when even a simpleton could track 30 pieces of Goodness.
It occurs to me that there are already more apps installed by default in the Mint 18 distro than I ever run, and tens of thousands more in the package repositories. This is my current main "working set" of 16 day-to-day desktop apps...
... and of these, only six are currently running — and that's counting NoMachine which doesn't park itself on my apps panel, and can't be moved there, either.
My multi-hand copy...
... of the complete Antrobus finally turned up all the way from Toledo, Ohio:
No doubt I will now find my original 1990 copy quite soon!
I hate wasps!
One that had been making itself comfy in my fleece jacket just stung me on the back of my neck as I was putting the jacket on. My burst of exercise (as I dashed downstairs — cursing loudly — for my trusty little tube of "Anthisan" cream) has now warmed me up at least as much as the jacket would have done... Some 20 minutes later, I'm just irritated — I'm not as allergic as poor Christa was.