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| Wednesday, 17 March 2010 | Dereel | Images for 17 March 2010 |
Another power failure! This one lasted over 3 hours, and kept me busy getting the machine back up and running. And again found a new problem with the Apple software. My old machine loses the date when it loses power, and I have to set it manually. The canonical way to set the date on Apple is the tag “Open Date & Time”, which require much clicking. Why bother when you have a simple program to do just that, date?
Admittedly, date has a relatively painful interface. You specify a single string of digits with minimal punctuation, representing, as the FreeBSD man page says, [[[[[cc]yy]mm]dd]HH]MM[.ss (centuries, years, months, days, hours, minutes and seconds. The [] represent optional groups. I've already established that Apple changed the format to mmddhhmm[[cc]yy]: they put the year and century at the end, not the beginning. And each time I forget it. Today I entered it almost correctly, but accidentally hit an additional key at the end, and got an error message:
=== root@boskoop (/dev/ttyp3) /Users/grog 10 -> date 031709042010f
But that's the original form, as from the FreeBSD man page. Tried it anyway. It doesn't work:
=== root@boskoop (/dev/ttyp3) /Users/grog 11 -> date 201003170904
So this is just another untidy area where they've gone and half changed something, and forgotten to finish the change.
Later got a call from Toll Priority: they wanted to deliver the replacement monitor. No complaints from me, of course, but it makes me wonder why they called to ascertain that I would be there tomorrow.
The monitor arrived and worked. I'm considerably less irritated with Samsung than I was, though their web site is yet another indication of how web sites seem to be out of tune with the rest of a company's operations. In addition, I've now also got rid of the scratches that the old one had. Took the opportunity to try to tune my X installation. What a pain! To start with, the Samsung monitor came up with a virtual resolution of 1920x1200, though it's a “modern” 1920x1080 panel. That proved to be due to the specs of the replacement monitor I had put in: there was a mode line
Modes "1920x1080" "1600x1200" "1280x720" "960x540"I had added the 1600x1200 for the CRT monitor, but that increased the virtual height to 1200. Isn't it sad that old monitors have higher vertical resolution than modern ones? 10 years ago I had a monitor with 2048x1536.
The other issue I have isn't really an X problem: the left-most monitor is still a CRT, and for some reason it frequently comes up out of sync on a cold boot, such as I had today. It made more sense to put the system console on the second panel, which is as simple as swapping the plugs. But that meant I had to reconfigure X to change the sequence. That's easy enough: the configuration file defines Screens (what you see in front of you), Monitors (the physical hardware) and Devices (the display cards). Individual sections describe each instance of each of these and how they relate to each other. So for my first two screens I have:
Section "Screen"So really all you need to do is to swap the Device entries, and it should work. But it didn't. It seems that something in the drivers attaches the monitors in the sequence it wants, and not in the sequence I specify.
There's also a section at the top which says how they relate to each other:
Screen 0 "Screen0" 0 0Theoretically I could just change the middle two lines to:
Screen 1 "Screen1" LeftOf "Screen0"Tried that, and it worked, but it's not invisible: the display numbers derive from the screen number, so this meant that I had, in sequence from left, :0.1, :0.0, :0.2 and :0.3. More head-scratching needed. Maybe I'll swap the two halves and put the console on :0.2 (screen 3), which would be more convenient anyway.
My /home file system is getting ever fuller, and after the catastrophe I had setting up the replacement, I had postponed things. But it's finally time to do something. I could just run newfs on the disk and start again from scratch, but maybe there's something on the new disk that got lost from the old disk, so started coalescing the files in preparation for comparing them. That took all day: there was the best part of a terabyte on the disk, about 400 GB of which disappeared by evening.
The delivery driver brought me another tidbit: a horse fly landed on his shoulder, so I smacked it and collected it. It wasn't dead—a German horse fly would have been—so I was able to take some photos of it, as planned yesterday. The strange position of the right wing appears to be the only harm the insect had experienced when I caught it.
We have a visitor again: Jill, from Childers in Queensland. She'll be with us for a few days while she makes up her mind which horse to buy.
| Thursday, 18 March 2010 | Dereel | Images for 18 March 2010 |
Continued moving data across to the new /home file system today. What a time it takes. I now have nearly 7 million files on the file system, many of which are copies and old versions.
Filesystem 1048576-blocks Used Avail Capacity iused ifree %iused Mounted onIt'll be a while before I work my way through that.
A year ago I lent Aligi Voltan my 1826 Savary jeune bassoon, the last remaining Savary that I had. I was dubious about whether he would be able to use it, and with good reason: it seems that it had been shortened to raise the pitch, and repair was quite involved. Strangely, though, he liked it and offered to swap it with a old Heckel instrument, serial number 3620, built in 1892. I'm a little sad about losing my last Savary—I was sad about losing the first—but an old Heckel is certainly interesting too, and considering that I don't perform on them, it seems a shame to keep them from people who do.
So we agreed to the swap, and Aligi sent the instrument on 2 March 2010. I followed its progress via the tracking site (tracking numer ZA001603147IT) as it worked its way from Padova to Milano (2 days), then via Germany to Australia (another 2 days), and it was cleared by customs on 7 March 2010:
The next day was a public holiday, so I expected it on 9 March 2010. But nothing arrived. Two days later, Yvonne checked at the post office—still nothing. I called Australia Post, but they couldn't do anything with the tracking number, and suggested I get it traced from the other end. Finally, on 12 March 2010, I asked Aligi to trace it, and today I finally got the results: it wasn't Australia Post at all who had to deliver it; it was UPS. They had given it the tracking number 1Z11WR410473735162. Went to the tracking page and was amazed:
They had been sitting on it for 11 days with the claim that I had requested them to do so. Clearly the next step was to ring them up; but we don't have a phone book at the moment, and getting contact details from web sites is usually painful, so went to the White Pages web site. What they presented me was amazing:
That's the phone number of a competitor of UPS. Yes, the page is long, but there's not a single reference to UPS (not even the string) in the entire response. I'm left wondering if this is deliberate; certainly UPS must be able to claim damages.
Finally found the number (131 877, or, as they obfuscate it, 131 UPS) on the web site after all. Rang up and spoke to Kristina and asked her to get it delivered today. She asked about my address, which was correct. She told me that they didn't have my post code (3352) in their computer. What kind of system is that? I offered to pick it up at Ballarat railway station, like I have had to do before (two years ago today, in fact). And like last time, she talked about deliveries to the post office with Australian Air Express. I told her that I had always had to pick up the parcels at the railway station, but she didn't listen. When I insisted, she said she had listened, but clearly she didn't understand, or maybe the concepts were just too difficult for her.
She did collect all the delivery details, though, although they were all correct, and finally (on the second attempt) connected me to her supervisor Jennifer, who sounded a lot more human. She said she had never seen anything like that before, that they weren't allowed to hold on to parcels for more than 5 days, that she would follow up with the delivery people, and that I should hear from them within half an hour.
That was round 10:00, and sure enough, round 10:20 Nina called me and said she would arrange delivery and call back. That she did at 10:35, promising delivery between 14:00 and 15:00.
The courier arrived at about 15:20. He had been sent out just for this delivery, and was armed with nothing better than a Melway, which doesn't cover this area. So finally I have my new bassoon:
But what a lot of stress! And every time I think that UPS may be getting better, they come along and do something like this. I suppose it's par for the course that they had lost my customer login altogether. I was able to re-register with the same user name, mail ID and password. But what should I think of a parcel service that loses things?
We've been pretty lucky with smaller pests in the garden. Possums and kangaroos yes, but few sucking insects. But today I found some aphids on one of the roses on the verandah:
How did they get there? There are none on the other roses. Looks like I'll have to keep my eyes open, and to combat the ants better too.
The Crassula falcata is blooming now:
Time to replace the completely inappropriate image on the Wikipedia page:
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.
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