Visitations and cereal 2006 July 6 23:05
Posted by diamond in : Random , add a commentI got a phonecall from my dad today. It seems my parents are going to come down to limerick for a night over the weekend to see me, seeing as i wasn’t able to make it home last weekend and they haven’t seen me in ages. And, they’re going to swing by roscrea and collect my car if possible. They rock. -)
I’ve always been a fan of cereal. Over the last year i’ve moved from just eating weetabix to eating weetabix + frosties (i’ve always found frosties on their own to be too sickeningly sweet, but mixed with weetabix.. *nyom*). I recently purchased a box of nestle fitness as an experiment. It’s like chewing gravel. However, i couldn’t just throw it out, that would be a waste. Happily, this has lead to a most serendipitous finding: weetabix + frosties + fitness. Delicious. The sweetness from the frosties and crunch from the fitness counterbalance the weetabix beautifully. That said, it’s probably not worth the effort to repeat this once the box of fitness runs out, but i thought i should document my findings here like the good scientist i’m theoretically claiming to be.
It’s the simplest things
Posted by diamond in : Work , 1 comment so farSo, we had a problem. Nichola’s flash piece would work on her machine and my laptop. It would not run the target machine. The target machine and my laptop were running ubuntu dapper. The flash piece had a number of buttons on it, two of which worked everywhere, and the rest, well, didn’t. We were baffled.
We spent 5 hours trying various things to try and track down the issue. We tried changing input devices, reconfiguring X, changing machines, replicating the install onto a fresh machine. We went through umpteen test flash pieces with various things tweaked/simplified/removed to see what would work and what wouldn’t. No change. No progress.
I started comparing the versions of firefox and it’s dependancies on all the machines involved, they didn’t match, updated to the same version, no change. I checked the version numbers of the flash plugins, did md5sum’s of them, all checked out. Removed firefox extensions, installed firefox extensions, brought in outside help. I can’t even remember most of the things we tried. Nothing.
Eventually i decided to do a package list on a machine that worked and a machine that didn’t. Started looking through the differences. Many many differences, but nothing looked relevant. Then i spotted one called ‘gsfonts-x11′ on the machine that worked, and missing from the others. Hum. Had a look at the package description. It claimed to make certain fonts available under ‘the official “adobe” names’. Suspicious, i installed the package onto one of the non-working machines. Bingo. It just so happens that all the debugging stuff we’d tried printed text onto the flash animation, and flash was looking for a particular font, failing to find it, and then failing to do anything useful about it such as giving an error.
I’m reminded of a joke that goes along the lines of:
Q: What’s the best thing about banging your head off a brick wall?
A: You get great relief when you stop.