It's been two months since I started transitioning from firefox to chromium. It
still isn't done, and I'm beginning to think that it never will be. Yes, firefox has
bugs that chromium doesn't, but the converse is also true. Earlier in the month I had a case where chromium refused to perform a function
because of perceived security issues. Dammit, I want a browser, not a
minder. chromium also refuses to log in to the State Library of Victoria: any attempt fails
silently.
You have been blocked from The New York Times because we suspect that you're a robot.
Why am I seeing this? There are a few possibilities:
You are browsing and clicking much faster than is typical of a human being
Something is preventing Javascript from working on your computer
There is a bot with the same IP address as you
None of that applied, of course: it's clearly a bug in the Times' software. But it even
occurred when I logged in as a different user. But it didn't with firefox! They
later fixed it without telling me, but one way or another it's another reason to
avoid chromium.
I don't use Instagram except
to look at photos that people post. Today was such a day. Log in, please. Sorry, wrong
password.
That's another site that keeps forgetting my password (which was, in fact, something
like WhyD1Dyouforgetit?). OK, reset again. “We will send you a code to your
cell phone”. They didn't. Once again I'm out of contact with Instagram. Do I care? Only
because of the nuisance value.
As we get older, our daily walking the dogs is shorter and shorter. A few years ago we
would go 1 or 2 km, sometimes even 3. Lately it has been as short as 600 m.
But today the weather was nice, and Yvonne had energy. Round
the loop Progress Road → Rozenstein Road → Bliss Road and back, a distance of about 3.3 km.
It was interesting: there seem to be more houses there than I recall, particularly in
Progress Road, though none has been obviously newly constructed.
But it wasn't until we were on Bliss Road that it occurred to us how many properties had
“Keep out” signs or similar:
Part of writing up this diary is to compare the contents of the monthly diary with the previous contents. And oh horror, the
entry for 8 September 2026 was missing!
Quick check: yes, it was still in the previous checked-in version, so I was able to restore
it. But that's one of my horror scenarios. 25 years ago I lost the entries for 11 and 12 June 2001, and it still keeps me up at night. I have
PHP code to catch this kind of
problem. Why didn't it? The code is:
if (($yesterday != ($day - 1))
&& (($day != 1) || ($isdiary < 2)) /* don't complain on diary wraparound */
&& ($diary_complete != 0)) )
$missing_days .= "Incorrect sequence: $yesterday followed by $day\n\";
That looks OK. So why didn't it catch it? Spent much time searching through the code
before I discovered this in the header of this month's diary:
$diary_complete = 0; /* No gaps */
Oh. That should be 1, not 0. And it seems that there were many such entries.
Fix them all? Or kludge the test? For the time being, the kludge is the way:
It has been nearly 3 years since I bought hydra.lemis.com, my new main machine with
ridiculous quantities of memory. And I still haven't completely migrated to it:
I had hoped to migrate my X configuration
from eureka, which also had 4 displays. But the window manager (fvwm 2) no longer works reliably. And the
“drop-in” replacement fvwm3 has lots of compatibility issues.
The 3840×2160 monitors require a surprising amount of software configuration to display
text in a legible size.
The intention to run all my other “machines” as virtual machines (and thus the 192 GB of
main memory) hasn't come to fruition. There are too many bugs, in particular the
networking code in conjunction with Microsoft. So I'm still running ThinkCentres like distress.
Countless newer versions of existing software no longer work the way I want them to,
notably Emacs and
Hugin. I've fixed some of
them, but there are so many changes needed. It's a pain, and there's a quick
workaround: use the version installed on eureka, now nearly 11 years old.
The last point raised its ugly head again today. When checking my daily diary, I display
a diff in an Emacs buffer. Then I commit the version, still in Emacs.
Only things have changed: previously, the commit would work even if the diff was
selected. Now it silently fails. I really need to position in the diary buffer. This was
the background for my lost day's entry. Nothing for it: use Emacs version 24.5.1 of 1 October 2016 rather than the halfway modern version on hydra.
Fondue de fromage for dinner this evening, as
frequently before. One of the issues is quantities. We need about 225 g of cheese and
about ⅔ of that quantity of bread. This evening I weighed the ingredients: 222 g cheese,
159 g of bread. We had 27 g of bread left over, giving us a ratio of quite close to 0.6:1.
It can never be that accurate, of course: the 159 g of bread represented 3½ slices of bread.
But at least it's something to aim for.
How long do you cook noodles? I have a page about that, 40 pages long. And I'm constantly changing it: I'm currently at
revision 1.118. Today I ate the Jack Hua rice noodles, which I have been cooking for 5
minutes regardless of width. But today's were the thin 1 mm cut. Do they need as long? My
guess was no. Cooked them for 4 minutes, and they were fine.
I've now finished watching the acdsee Photo Studio videos. A total of 11 of them, including a 10 part introduction for beginners, of which
only 3 were of much use. How to use their database facilities. How to attach an image to
an email (excruciatingly complicated, even before their bizarre requirement of “Microsoft Outlook”). How to back
up your photos. I didn't even bother looking at that one, though maybe I should.
The other three were interesting for reasons that I hadn't expected. I get the impression
that the product derives from two separate products: “Develop” (“non-destructive”) and
“Edit” (“destructive”). In fact, they do very similar things, and neither is “destructive”.
The big difference seems to be that “Edit” uses layers and “Artificial intelligence",
while “Develop” doesn't.
So: at least I have an idea of how to navigate the application now. What I need to find is
more about noise reduction.
This page contains (roughly) yesterday's and today's entries. I have
a horror of reverse chronological documents, so
all my diary entries are chronological. This page normally contains the last two days,
but if I fall behind it may contain more. You can find older entries in
the archive. Note that I often update a diary entry
a day or two after I write it.
Do you have a comment about something I have written? This is a diary, not a
“blog”, and there is
deliberately no provision for directly adding comments. It's also not a vehicle
for third-party content. But I welcome feedback and try to
reply to all messages I receive. See the diary overview for more details. If you do
send me a message relating to something I have written, please indicate
whether you'd prefer me not to mention your name. Otherwise
I'll assume that it's OK to do so.
