Life’s but a walking shadow…

In Tokyo for the W3C Japanese Layout Taskforce meeting, I went to the first day of the Sumo basho with a friend. Firstly, I was amazed by the number of foreigners in the audience (as opposed to the number of foreigners competing), and secondly I was flabbergasted when one North American told his friends just as the top division was getting started that he was going to leave because his camera battery was going flat.

Whatever happened to experiencing something for its own sake? Is the experience only real if you can take photos of it? Is it only real if you can put photos of it on your social networking site? What about just staying with your friends while you all watch something unique to the country you are visiting and that you may never see again?

In Montréal for Extreme Markup 2007, I went to Marché Atwater to buy some maple syrup. When I wanted to know the weight of a pack of 8 cans of syrup, the syrup seller took me and the 8-pack next door to the fishmongers, and the fishmonger put the cans on her scale. She even set the price to $2.20/kg so I could see the weight in pounds if I’d wanted.

Since it was at that point I agreed to make the purchase, I’d say I did buy the maple syrup in the fishmongers.

After quite a few years with Hostway, I’ve changed over to WebFaction.

The good news is that the menteith.com website is now a Trac so I can host the tdtd code in public for the first time (and possibly also host the xslide code here), plus I expect better spam filtering and the blog software is more fully featured.

The bad news is that URLs to existing pages have had to change because I’m using a Trac and that I couldn’t properly export my blog entries from the previous benighted blog software, so blog entry URLs also changed and I lost the few non-spam comments that the entries had received.

The slides for my XTech 2007 talk, My Stylesheet runs, but.., are now available from http://2007.xtech.org/public/schedule/detail/217.

Currently only an older version of my paper is available at that URL unfortunately.

While reading Steve McConnell’s Software Estimation: Demystifying the Black Art (ISBN 0-7356-0535-1, and excellent, BTW), I found a reference to the magnificently named “Goldratt’s ‘Student Syndrome’”, characterised in the book as:

If developers are given too much time, they’ll procrastinate until late in the project, at which point they’ll rush to complete their work, and they probably won’t finish the work on time.

It’s almost worth not finding out more about it just so I can invent my own inaccuracies. You can imagine the cooperative response of a teacher the first time the following note is received:

Please do not penalise Johnny for late submission of his assignment. He was unable to finish on time as he suffers from Goldratt’s Syndrome.

It might almost work, once. It obviously wouldn’t work if the rest of the class who also evince the syndrome tried their luck the same way.

(And if you do want to find out more, there’s Wikipedia and Google.)

I spent far more time last week making two monitors not work than I did making them work, so here’s I few things I have learnt:

1. Don’t use the “nv” driver. I couldn’t get it to drive two screens at once, much as I would have liked it to.
2. Don’t use ‘Option “ConnectedMonitor” “dfp”‘ with the “nvidia” driver. I did RTFM rather too well and put that in as a hint to the driver. While ever it was in the xorg.conf file, only one screen at a time would work.

The eventual solution was, surprise, surprise, to download the latest version of the Nvidia driver — which was released partway through this epic battle — and follow its instructions to the letter — including removing existing Ubuntu packages as directed. I don’t know whether the driver had improved or my technique had improved by the time I tried that third version, but it worked for me.

Of course, the first thing I did when both screens worked was see how many 80-column Emacs frames would fill the screens: over 600 lines of Emacs visible at once, now that makes it all worthwhile!

I started out using the two monitors as separate X screens but I’m now using Twinview so it’s easy to Alt-Tab amongst the Emacs frames. The X startup log shows that X thinks the combined screen is too wide to be allowed, so it starts at a lower resolution, but once I’ve logged in, I can jigger the “NVIDIA X Server Settings” tool to get it back to it’s highest resolution.

In keeping with the long tradition of filling the Internet with example configuration files that are all purported to work but are all somehow puzzlingly different, here’s the xorg.conf file that’s working for me:

# nvidia-settings: X configuration file generated by nvidia-settings
# nvidia-settings: version 1.0 (buildmeister@builder26) Mon Feb 26 23:38:28 PST 2007

Section “ServerLayout”
Identifier “Layout0″
Screen 0 “Screen0″ 0 0
InputDevice “Keyboard0″ “CoreKeyboard”
InputDevice “Mouse0″ “CorePointer”
EndSection

Section “Files”
RgbPath “/usr/lib/X11/rgb”
EndSection

Section “Module”
Load “dbe”
Load “extmod”
Load “type1″
Load “freetype”
Load “glx”
EndSection

Section “ServerFlags”
Option “Xinerama” “0″
EndSection

Section “InputDevice”
# generated from default
Identifier “Mouse0″
Driver “mouse”
Option “Protocol” “auto”
Option “Device” “/dev/psaux”
Option “Emulate3Buttons” “no”
Option “ZAxisMapping” “4 5″
EndSection

Section “InputDevice”
# generated from default
Identifier “Keyboard0″
Driver “kbd”
EndSection

Section “Monitor”
# HorizSync source: edid, VertRefresh source: edid
Identifier “Monitor0″
VendorName “Unknown”
ModelName “Apple Cinema HD”
HorizSync 49.3 - 98.5
VertRefresh 60.0
Option “DPMS”
EndSection

Section “Device”
Identifier “Videocard0″
Driver “nvidia”
VendorName “NVIDIA Corporation”
BoardName “Quadro FX 1500″
EndSection

Section “Screen”
Identifier “Screen0″
Device “Videocard0″
Monitor “Monitor0″
DefaultDepth 24
Option “TwinView” “1″
Option “metamodes” “DFP-0: 2560×1600 +2560+0, DFP-1: 2560×1600 +0+0; DFP-0: 1280×800 +1280+0, DFP-1: 1280×800 +0+0″
SubSection “Display”
Depth 24
Modes “1600×1200″ “1280×1024″ “1024×768″ “800×600″ “640×480″
EndSubSection
EndSection

I now have the static build working after battering my head against this for a couple of days. The most cogent advice that I found was post #6 in http://forum.skype.com/index.php?showtopic=76815, which was to use “dpkg -x” and copy the extracted libraries to /usr/lib32.

My proposal for a talk “My stylesheet runs, but…” has been accepted for XTech 2007 (http://xtech.expectnation.com/event/1) in Paris in May.

Information on Mortgage Interest Relief (officially, Mortgage Interest Tax Relief at Source) is at http://www.revenue.ie/trs/mortgage/. I found out about the scheme just a couple of months ago when it became necessary for me to learn more about the tax system after being made redundant.

I found the page by searching for ‘mortgage interest’ on http://www.revenue.ie.

For future relief, I applied online at https://www.revenue.ie/trs/details.jsp. Future relief will reduce what’s paid rather than show up as money being returned.

For previous years, the FAQ at http://www.revenue.ie/faqs/trs_relief.htm#12 has a link to a form at http://www.revenue.ie/forms/trsp.pdf. You need to fill out the form and send it and copies of your mortgage interest statements to the address shown on the form. Past relief gets credited to your bank account. Getting back lump sums for 20% of the mortgage interest paid over nearly the last five years came in very handy right now.

You can only claim for the previous four years, so if you bought your house in 2002, you’d better act quickly.

When you finish watching television, walk the three steps over to the TV, turn it completely off, then walk the three steps back.