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| Greg's diary |
| April 2024 |
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| Monday, 1 April 2024 | Dereel | Images for 1 April 2024 |
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distress: disaster?
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Topic: technology, photography, opinion | Link here |
Into the office first thing this morning and wanted to continue with yesterday's photo processing. That involves waking distress.lemis.com, the ThinkCentre running Microsoft, which is usually hibernated. That goes via rdesktop, so I first hear the sound of the DVD drive seeking.
But then nothing. More problems with this bloody Microsoft? No, the machine wasn't running at all. Even the power light was off.
More searching, and ultimately came to the conclusion that the box had some hardware failure. Not to worry, I have a number of these boxen. Took out the disk and put it in another one, same model. And it came up happily with no repairs needed: after all, it had been hibernated. Success!
Well, not so fast. When I started up DxO PhotoLab, it wanted me to enter the license key. Why? It's identically the same system that I have been using all along:
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Huh? I have licensed the thing already. OK, dig out the license key and painstakingly type it in, something that I have hated for decades. And it worked, so clearly I didn't mistype.
But things still weren't right. My first task was to straighten this image:
Yes, it's on its side, but it takes a single keystroke (c-l) to fix that. The real issue, a little slower, is to get it exactly rectangular. That's straightforward. Select one of the almost descriptive symbols at the top of the window. But they were gone!
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They should look like this:
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Why? Something in the back of my head said “ViewPoint”. Right, that could be it. Back to my list of keys, searched the DxO menus, and luckily found a Help item “DxO ViewPoint → Activate DxO ViewPoint”. And yes, that did it. But what a pain!
Still, “Perfectly Clear“ didn't want to be outdone. It, too, decided that I wasn't registered.
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But unlike DxO, it didn't give me the option to register! How do I register? It didn't offer the possibility. After some searching on the web, found a way: select the barely visible “About” towards the right at the bottom of the main window, which brings up this window:
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OK, click on Activate. Yes, it comes up with another window that already knows the license key and email address:
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But the “ACTIVATE” button was greyed out, and nothing that I could do persuaded it to let me submit the data! Off searching for answers, and finally found a way to send a message to their sales team (support has ended). “Please prove that you are human and fill out this CAPTCHA”! And yes, EyeQ, that's the correct information. See if I care. Clearly nobody can steal it.
Damn you, EyeQ, and all those who insult people like that. I won't fill out a CAPTCHA, ever again. Sent off a rather stiff email to support@eyeq.photos and sales@eyeq.photos, asking what to do and telling them what I thought of their attempts to insult their customers. And support@eyeq.photos bounced. Yes, my product has reached end of life (but should work for ever), but surely they have other customers.
And that was only half of the pain. What about Yvonne? She has always had issues; clearly Microsoft likes her no more than she likes Microsoft. But in fact things went relatively smoothly, once we persuaded the bloody thing to react at all. Trying from my system and a shell, I got
=== grog@hydra (/dev/pts/26) ~/Mail 79 -> rdesktop -u yvonne distress
ATTENTION! Found a certificate stored for host 'distress', but it does not match the certificate
received from server.
Review the following certificate info before you trust it to be added as an exception.
If you do not trust the certificate the connection atempt will be aborted:
Subject: CN=distress
Issuer: CN=distress
Valid From: Sat Mar 30 13:06:41 2024
To: Sun Sep 29 12:06:41 2024
Certificate fingerprints:
sha1: e5821dd31e6a4e640b95ee93a1ec815430fa7304
sha256: edb83be75b8c33cb86e31fe2d40b1ce8fa95842e1f0e90216b024f5073407ebc
Do you trust this certificate (yes/no)? yes
Connection established using SSL.
disconnect: Logout initiated by user.=== grog@hydra (/dev/pts/26) ~/Mail 80 -> rdesktop -u yvonne distress
Core(warning): Certificate received from server is NOT trusted by this system, an exception has been added by the user to trust this specific certificate.
Connection established using SSL.
Clipboard(error): xclip_handle_SelectionNotify(), unable to find a textual target to satisfy RDP clipboard text request
Protocol(warning): process_pdu_logon(), Unhandled login infotype 1
That must have something to do with the change in something, and by comparison it's acceptable. After a bit of playing around, things worked, but only when I wasn't already logged in. Previously it would produce a popup asking “shall I disconnect grog?”, but now it just silently fails. And it seems that it no longer goes to sleep, so I have to explicitly put it to sleep (which, I discover, works with just a handful of mouse gestures).
So: things are almost working again, when there should have been no problems whatsoever. But this is Microsoft. And why did the programs want revalidation now? It wasn't the disk; it came up out of hibernation as if nothing had happened. And it's barely the hardware. The new machine has a PCI graphics card in addition to the on-board graphics (it was once teevee.lemis.com), and it has only 16 GB of memory, and of course the Ethernet interface has a different MAC address, requiring updates to /etc/ethers:
--- ethers 2023/02/18 00:33:55 1.10
+++ ethers 2024/04/02 01:36:41
@@ -5,4 +5,4 @@
6c:f0:49:09:7a:4d teevee
00:21:86:21:ab:7e despair
00:21:cc:d0:9e:0e euroa
-44:39:c4:90:52:20 distress
+6c:0b:84:04:0a:5c distress
But clearly there's something about the hardware environment that triggers the license check. What is it? And why? It would make more sense to store the activation information on the disk. As it is, there's clearly a loophole: change the hardware once a month and you can use DxO for free.
One thing's clear: I really need to migrate distress to a virtual machine, as I had planned when I built hydra. That way I'd save power, probably have more processing power, and I could work around this kind of pain.
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Bibi castrated!
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Topic: politics, general, fiction | Link here |
The news of the day: Bibi has been castrated! It seems that it was just completing the job started 11 years ago. As the punchline of an unrelated joke goes, would you eat that pig all at once?
Oh, and admire the delicacy of the reports. They've changed “castration” to “hernia operation”.
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Whan that Aprille with his shoures sote
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Topic: general, history, gardening, opinion | Link here |
Sixty years ago I was preparing for the GCE 'O' Level exams. One of the set works for English Literature was the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, and in a fit of misunderstanding I thought I could pass the exam by memorizing the entire prologue (I failed).
But the weather today reminded me of the first two lines:
Whan that Aprille with his shoures soteThe droghte of Marche hath perced to the rote,
In modern English: when April with its sweet showers has pierced the drought of March to the root.
And somehow that seemed to fit. Here a photo taken this morning:
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According to the Bureau of Meteorology, 0.8 mm of rain over the whole month at Ballarat Aerodrome, the closest measuring station to us. By contrast, the average rainfall in March is 42 mm, and in April 51.2 mm.
But now it's April, and as if to honour Geoffrey Chaucer, it rained heavily. The Bureau measured 46.8 mm, 58 times as much in the whole of March, or 1,755 times the March daily average.
That's their view, of course, and they told me so:
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But despite their claims, that's the rainfall for Ballarat, not Dereel. We measured only 28 mm, still a welcome change and a refill for our water tanks. On the other hand, I measured 5 mm of rain last month.
| Tuesday, 2 April 2024 | Dereel | Images for 2 April 2024 |
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| previous day |
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Another disaster
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Topic: technology, photography, opinion | Link here |
Response from not one, but two people at EyeQ today, saying that the license details were correct, but because the product is no longer supported, they can't do anything about it. They did offer me a discounted upgrade to Radiant, the new replacement, but that would still cost money.
OK, one thing's for sure: changing hardware messes up licenses. So let's do what I had been planning all along and set up a virtual machine on hydra. What shall I call it? Yvonne was for discard or dismiss. She would have liked disgust too, but we've already had that one. But by the time I asked her, I had already started with the name disaster.lemis.com, so one of the next ones will be Yvonne's choice.
First step, of course: make a copy of distress' disk. Put it in dereel, which I haven't used for months, and do a dd, which went at the reassuring speed of about 103 MB/s, effectively wire speed.
Then create a new VirtualBox VM. Last time I tried this, I ran into confusion between hydra and eureka. But once I started the right version of VirtualBox (on hydra), and also discovered how to include a native disk image (it must have a name ending in .hdd), things went relatively smoothly, and soon I had it up and running. Microsoft didn't like the change of IP address, but it didn't know why, just “Windows can't find the problem”. People, “Windows” is the problem. And everything I tried Just Worked—quite a success story. Doubtless the devil is in the detail, and I'll find other issues.
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50 years of microprocessors
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Topic: history, technology, opinion | Link here |
It has been well over 50 years since Intel introduced its first microprocessor, but for me the first one was the 8008. Spent a while comparing it with my most recent processor:
| Feature | I8008 | Ryzen 7950X | factor | |||
| Introduction | April 1982 | September 2022 | ||||
| Transistors | 3,500 | 13,140,000 | 3750 | |||
| CPUs | 1 | 32 | 32 | |||
| Clock speed | 0.0005 GHz | 4.5 GHz | 9000 | |||
| MIPS | 0.03 | 220,000 | 7333333 | |||
| Process size | 10 μm | 5 nm | 2000 | |||
| Die size | 16 mm² | 264 mm² | 16.5 |
At first I was confused by the process size. 10 and 5? Oh, different units. The entire I8008 processor could be
And in the course of my investigations, came across this detailed description of the chip layout, which looks very interesting. I should read it some time.
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