You probably think there’s just no possible way your computer’s BIOS could fail to recognize your new ginormous EIDE hard disk—that problem just sounds so DOS-era, doesn’t it?—but, yes, this can happen to you. My PowerMac G4 thinks my new 400GB drive is… 128GB. And the best part is: no returns! Who’s the tech expert in this house? I am!
April 14, 2007
April 12, 2007
Oh, Ubuntu…
It just wouldn’t be a system update if it didn’t break Suspend.
If, for whatever reason, you have been moved to install the latest version of the Nvidia drivers—eschewing the always classy, always out of date nvidia-glx package—you must must must re-install after a kernel upgrade. The reason being that the driver compiles a custom kernel interface that is, in all likelihood, now broken.
Bonus tip: How do you shut down the server so that you can install the driver?
sudo /etc/init.d/gdm stop
(Or,
sudo /etc/init.d/kdm stop
for you Kubuntu people. (What’s wrong with you?)) (Hat tip: TheOS)
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April 5, 2007
Moving to a new Gmail account
Interestingly, it can be done without losing your email, although it is not officially supported. Here’s how it’s done (with a hat tip to these guys over here):
- In your old account, go to “Settings -> Forwarding and POP” and select “Enable POP for all mail”.
- In your new account, go to “Settings -> Accounts” and select “Add another account”
- Enter your old email address and click “Next.”
- Enter the username and password for your old account. From the “POP Server” drop-down list choose “Other…” and type in “pop.googlemail.com”.* Unselect “Leave a copy of retrieved message on the server.”** You may also want to tag or archive the retrieved messages, but you can change these settings later.
- Click “Add Account.” If something goes wrong, fix it.
- Now wait. The emails will come slowly and out of order, but they will come. They’ll even have all the right timestamps and such. It took about 8 hours for approximately 800 messages to be loaded from my old Inbox. (Presumably, Google throttles the message transfer so that you don’t interfere with everybody else’s everyday Gmailing.)
- When all of the emails have transferred, you can go back, turn off POP, and enable regular forwarding. This will be much faster, in general.
Transferring your contacts is easy. The Export/Import links are in the upper right corner of the Contacts page. There doesn’t seem to be any way to get somebody into your Quick Contacts box without sending them an email.
Note: Changing your Gmail account will screw up all your other Google Account stuff. Like your Blogger account. D’oh. [UPDATE: No really, this is probably the worst “feature” of Google Accounts. If I log into Blogger, I log out of Gmail and vice versa. I can probably somehow get around this by inviting the new me to join this blog…] [UPDATE 2: As you may notice in the Contributers bar to the right, there are now two of me contributing to this iblog. This is annoying.] [UPDATE 3: This was a known bug with “New Blogger” that has since been fixed.]
* This is part of the trick. The pre-fab list of gmail.com servers won’t let you suck in all of your mail, but this undocumented googlemail.com server will.
** This sounds frightening, so some clarification: Gmail won’t let you leave this selected; they’ve got the POP server set up to complain if you do. However—and this is weird—your mail won’t actually be deleted from your old account. This setting doesn’t mean what it says, somehow.
March 18, 2007
Buffer-local Dictionaries
If you write technical documents—especially technical computer science documents with code snippets and the like—you’re likely to come across a spell-checking dilemma like the following:
Unrecognized word: pBuffer
Replace with: (0) buffer (1) puffer (2) puffier (3) pouffe …
Space: Accept word this time
a: Accept word this session
i: Insert into personal dictionary
“pBuffer” is not a real word that should go in your personal dictionary, so you accept the word for this session. Say you’re going to write 5,000 more drafts of this document. All of those weird little technical words could get pretty annoying after a while.
In Emacs, you can type ‘A’ instead of ‘a’ to insert the word in a “buffer-local dictionary.” You can also presumably add a Local Words comment somewhere in your file by hand, like
% Local Words: pBuffer
Why is it always so hard to figure this stuff out?
Hat tip to the Linux Documentation Project.
Bonus tip: You want an em dash in your blog post? Try —. You would think I couldn’t be so em dash-happy and not know this already, but I am and I didn’t.
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March 17, 2007
\tag{eqname}
So you want to give an equation a name in LaTeX, instead of the number it gets automatically… For some reason, Google will resist telling you how. You may be tempted to use the eqname package. No need! No need at all! Use the \tag command. Why isn’t this easier to figure out?
UPDATE: I apologize to the writers of the amsmath documentation, who mention this pretty much immediately after they introduce the concept of equation numbering. I always assume that Google can find these things for me.
March 16, 2007
Lazy Scholarship
Fill in the blanks: You are ___% more likely to get cited if you include BibTeX and/or EndNote entries for your publications on your web page. You are ___% less likely to get cited if the PDF of your paper doesn’t support cut-and-paste.
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March 4, 2007
Newlines in Regexps
This tip rocks: to search for a newline in Emacs type C-q C-j.
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February 20, 2007
Comments in BibTeX
Be warned: there is a @Comment directive in BibTeX, but it doesn’t appear to do anything.
UPDATE: @Comment works as expected so long as you use it outside any other directive. E.g., the following will not work,
@InProceedings{ key,
title = {\BibTeX comments considered harmful},
author = {Christopher L. Conway},
booktitle = {Procrastiblog Symposium on \LaTeX Arcana},
year = 2007,
@Comment{ This never actually happened. }
}
whereas the following is fine,
@InProceedings{ key,
title = {\BibTeX comments considered harmful},
author = {Christopher L. Conway},
booktitle = {Procrastiblog Symposium on \LaTeX Arcana},
year = 2007,
}
@Comment{ The above never actually happened. }
February 13, 2007
Developers Can Be Dicks (It’s True!)
Take, for example, this bug that I mentioned a few days ago: the Mac OS version of the Thunderbird mail client doesn’t integrate with the Mac Address Book. Many people find this annoying and a good many cite it as the One Single Reason They Don’t Use Thunderbird On Their Mac.
In a past life, when my Mac was my main computer and Mail.app was getting on my nerves, I voted for this bug in Bugzilla. As a consequence, I am CC’d on any changes to the bug, which I find fairly annoying. Apparently, the maintainer find it un-bjørne-ably annoying:
Peter Van der Beken 2007-02-13 13:37:12 PST
is someone working on this with the intent of AddressBook integration happening sometime ‘soon’ (hint: not another 4 years, please …)?
Yeah, I was. But comments like yours have finally made me decide that I’d rather not read more bugmail from this bug.
And, with that, he took his name off the bug and marked it UNASSIGNED.
A little history… This bug was first reported in April 2003. The first patch was committed in June 2003. Since then, there have been about 80 comments attached—a rate of less than 2 per month—and the patch has been modified more than a dozen times to fix bugs or keep it up-to-date with the trunk code. Over 400 people have voted this an important bug, making it the #5 most voted for open bug in the entire Mozilla project database. Despite all of that, there has been never an inkling that the bug fix will be incorporated into a release.
What gives, Mozilla? Has all maintainence been outsourced to unhinged maniacs?
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A Series of… Pipes?
Yahoo Pipes is pretty cool, though not, I suspect, as easy-to-use as advertised. The idea is that you can take RSS feeds and other “Web 2.0” content, process them in non-trivial ways, and end up with your own filtered, re-mixed, or mashed-up data stream. Things like: personalized Ebay price watches or Flickr photos inspired by New York Times headlines.
I’ve concocted my own, decidedly less ambitious Pipes: Overheard in New York w/o the Wednesday One-Liners (there’s too many!) and Tapped blog posts by Mark Schmitt or Ezra Klein (all those other earnest liberals get boring). Here’s another one, just for kicks: Grace’s posts on design*sponge and BizBox in one feed.
If anybody can figure out how to make a Pipe that attaches headlines to headline-less RSS feeds, that would be sweet.
P.S.: I should probably give a “via” credit to TWiT—as if they need it—since I was inspired by their idle yapping to check this out.
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Procrastiblog 