It's cold and miserable at the moment, and in addition Yvonne had a cold and spent all day in bed. I don't usually get colds, but somehow the general
misery of the situation washed off on me too.
Sλmsung seem to have a desire to perform their
recall action outside normal working hours. Last week they wanted to send somebody by
after dinner on the Queen of England's birthday, and today Peter wanted to come at 8:00, a
time when I normally am just thinking of getting up. Managed to put him off until 9:20. He
arrived, took the cover off some of the electrical distribution, and pointed out the
problem:
It seems that the area can get very moist, and this connector can then start to burn,
setting fire to the machine. Looking at it, it's amazing how many things are wrong: apart
from the fact that it's not moisture protected, it's apparently a connector to the motor, as
evidenced by the thick wires going out. But the input wires are an order of magnitude
thinner. That looks very dubious to me. In addition, it suggests that the connectors are
made of a potentially flammable material—most of the surroundings are metal. And I wonder
if the moisture in the affected machines is due to condensation or leakage. As the “after”
images shows, this thing is right next to the cold water input:
It's been nearly two years since I
started my current panoramic views of the garden, and in that time lots of things have
changed. In particular, at the time I was using
out-of-camera JPEGs, and now I process my
images with DxO Optics
“Pro”. The difference in appearance may be at least partially due to that. Here the
verandah two years ago and now:
Spent quite some time reprocessing the images with DxO Optics “Pro”, but the
difference wasn't that pronounced. Here a comparison, first the original from two years ago
and then today's processing. Move the mouse over each image
to change it to two others:
The difference isn't nearly as pronounced as I expected. Quite possibly part of the issue
is that at the time I exposed all the images in the same way, like the instructions say, and
I thus lost a couple of EVs of dynamic range.
Phone call from somebody at a company Wordsworth. He wanted access to the domain fbbg.org.au. I told him there
was a web site, but no, it seems Wordsworth (or whatever) is the company doing the
transition to a “professional” web site, and what he really wanted was information on how to
update the DNS information. He had the registry key, but didn't know what to do with it.
Asked him to send me a mail message, which came from Adel, with whom I had spoken earlier
this year, with an email domain address from a different domain. Sent her the information,
and the DNS records were quickly updated. Off to look at the site. Nothing. Literally nothing: the web server
delivered an empty document. Sent her a message to that effect; it seems that they still
hadn't loaded the content. Later I found this page, which stayed there all day long.
Why? It looks as if they first bent the DNS and then started to install the web site. Why
couldn't they have done it before switching the DNS? And why did it take so long?
While playing around with my photos a few days ago, I came across a strange problem: in my
diary for 16 April 2011, my
normal photo resizing stopped working correctly. Spent some considerable time investigating
it, finally reducing it to a simple example. Normally I have five potential display sizes for an image: hide
(size 0), “thumbnail” (67,500 pixels, size 1), “small” (270,000 pixels, size 2), and two
“big”, both the native size of the image. Size 3 scales this image to the width of the
window, while size 4 shows it in full resolution.
In this case, though, size 3 was smaller than size 2. Everything else worked. My image
display functions are large and have evolved along with my understanding of PHP. All in all they're 2,500 lines long, and I dreaded
debugging them. Was this maybe a result of the “lazy loading” of images that I implemented
a year ago? In the meantime I've
found some other reasons to want to disable it, so I added a request parameter lazy
which defaults to 1, but when set to 0 disables the lazy load. That's particularly useful
for printing things out, since printing doesn't enable the loading. And in this case it
gave me the opportunity to confirm that it wasn't the problem with my web page.
What was it? Hacked around in the image and finally discovered that a
<p/> tag was causing it. If I replaced it with a
<p></p> pair, the problem didn't occur.
Why? It seems that <p/> is not allowed in all dialects of
HTML, and browsers all interpret it in such a way that the implied CSS remains in effect
after the tag. But it is in XHTML, which
is what I'm using here.
That could change, but at the time of writing it's correct.
And no test tools complain about the usage. However, it seems that I'm sending out headers
from the web server indicating that this is text/html. Not deliberately.
And then I hear a claim that the P tag is deprecated in HTML5. According to the W3 schools reference that's not the case,
but who knows what might happen? In any case, these things differ from one dialect to
another. Why didn't they introduce a completely different markup instead of trying to make
a silk purse out of a sow's ear?
In other news, Jürgen Lock pointed me at this report. After only 10 years, a complete lack of evidence, and a bankruptcy,
SCO (now spelt “XINUOS”) is still not giving up with their law suit
against IBM. Why?
Went back looking and discovered that it was ten years ago
today that SCO announced that they had terminated IBM's UNIX license. It's also the
tenth anniversary of the publication of a Byte interview with Chris Sontag, unfortunately also no longer accessible. Went looking and
found that most of the documents to which I had referred in my documentation of the case have since ceased to exist. Spent some time tidying up my
own documents, which are sorely in need of it, notably my rebuttal of the Sontag interview. What a mess it all is, and how few of the web
links there are still active!
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. I try to leave the pages here for two days;
you'll find them all in the archive, so if I fall
behind a day or two, you may find more here. 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
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