Your leaking thatched hut during the restoration of a pre-Enlightenment state.

 

Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



links

decay & ruin
Biosphere II
Chernobyl
dead malls
Detroit
Irving housing

got that wrong
Paleofuture.com

appropriate tech
Arduino μcontrollers
Backwoods Home
Fractal antenna

fun social media stuff


Like asecular.com
(nobody does!)

Like my brownhouse:
   destined for a platform as valueless
Thursday, February 19 2015
It was yet another cold and windy day, with lows down around zero and highs at around 20 degrees Fahrenheit, about 20 degrees colder than what is normal for this time of year.
My Lightroom/webapp client came by today and dropped off another minimal four-figure check, saying he didn't have any more money beyond that and that now was the time for it to start making him money. I guess he really thinks it's almost done now, though he keeps deluging me with bug reports, most of which are coming from the woman with OCD he has hired to do quality control. I guess if the money is drying up for me, it will also be drying up for her, so there is that.
I ended up spending a fair amount of time this afternoon debugging the few lingering issues with his app. I also built some additional logging features to help me get to the bottom of anomalous empty users and images that occasionally get created. My solution was to add columns to the user and image tables that are populated with strings containing the file and line number of the PHP that is inserting or updating those two SQL tables.
I also continued work on the laptop that Gretchen has ordered for her former prisoner-student. As I've been working on it, I've come to realize why there isn't much of a market for old computers. The effort to install an OS on old hardware now exceeds the cost of a cheap brand-new notebook computer, one that will run many times faster than, say, an old Vaio laptop from the early 2000s. Perhaps I was just having an especially hard time with my particular Vaio, a PCG-GRS700. Apparently its internals don't match the published internals of a PCG-GRS700, because I can't get any of its internal devices to work with drivers downloaded from Sony's website (then again, perhaps the files I was downloading were actually Trojans full of North Korean payloads). I cannot get the Vaio's sound and ethernet to work at all, and the video, while working well enough to display a full-resolution picture on the screen, is the slow generic VGA driver. I could spend hours tracking down the drivers, but my time is too valuable for such nonsense, especially when it is so tedious and destined for a platform as valueless as a laptop from 2003.
I should also mention that the takeover of ATI by AMD appears to have made a lot of old ATI drivers either disappear down the memory hole (or else become much harder to find). These drivers might still be findable on those many spammy websites that purport to offer drivers, but is it really worth having an unscrupulous website install a Bulgarian rootkit on your computer just for the chance (and it will only be a chance) that they'll also deliver the correct driver?


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?150219

feedback
previous | next