'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe

boggyb: Wtfteams
boggyb: I'm looking at a teams chat where messages I sent are out of order
boggyb: Also, wtfskype
pleaseremove: also wtf skype, i didn't get your notification last night
boggyb: Skype on my phone didn't update this chat history until I went back to the main screen
boggyb: Can I have MSN Messenger back please?

For added lols, I got the other person in the Teams chat to send me a screenshot. They saw my messages in yet another order!

Once upon a time, sending files via instant messenger actually worked. Reliably. But nooo, we can't have nice things anymore. As this recent Skype chat shows...

pleaseremove: this is the most frustrating thing to enter a password on... and also, the most evil...
* pleaseremove sends video (judging by the thumbnail, it's an IoT widget with typically terrible UI)
boggyb: that looks like it could be awkward
boggyb: on a related note, I have discovered yet another Skype fail...
* boggyb sends screenshot (of me trying to play the video)


pleaseremove: lololol

So the not-a-window in my flat turns out to actually be a window, as the windy weather decided to make clear today. And in doing so it blew everything off the windowsill and a nice piece of stained glass I picked up back in St Mawes ended up shattered on the ground outside. Sigh.

It's a bizarre feature - two of the windows in the flat are theoretically openable, except there's no handle fitted and they're secured shut. Or at least I thought they were - I've noticed that one shifts in the wind but never enough to actually open before.

Anyway, I went spelunking through the bag o' tools and found a suction cup to use to pull the window shut, pried a blanking plate off to reveal the slot that the handle would turn if there was one, and improvised my own handle with a screwdriver. That window is now definitely shut, and I can glue the blanking plate back on later.

You would have thought putting together an audio CD complete with labels and tray inserts would be an easy job, no?


Pitfalls so far:

The CD labels from Staples have the wrong dimensions on the guide sheet. And for added laughs, the sheet is ever so slightly not symmetric (the labels are offset 16mm from one end but 15.5mm from the other).

Nero CoverDesigner doesn't have any native support for printing CD booklets/inlay inserts with double-sided printing. That's annoying but can be worked around with carefully crafted paper stock definitions (and whatever other failings it has, it allows very precise positioning of the separate elements). Except...

Some interaction between Nero and Canon's printer driver is screwing with the co-ordinates when printing. It appears to have applied a rotation to the co-ordinates, but not to the images on the actual page, so a template intended to print in the top-left corner as [P1|P2] actually prints in the bottom-right corner as [P2|P1]. I'm fairly sure this is Canon's fault as using a PDF "printer" doesn't show this problem - though it may also be because I've crafted a paper stock with landscape-orientated but portrait-fed A4 to get the correct layout for a 4-page booklet. Still, that can be worked around with increasingly insane paper stock templates.

Oh, and Nero sometimes doesn't quite get the concept of print bleed area right and seems to not bother with any bleed area for the CD booklet. Instead it looks like it scales the label which is not helpful. It also prints circle crop marks on the CD labels which is pointless as those are printed on precut label paper.

And that's all before I try to actually add the images to the labels, and discover such fun things as whoever put the artwork together has added random amounts of padding on the images (especially annoying for CD labels as that means I can't just centre the image on the template), used the wrong aspect ratio for booklet and inlay inserts, and created two-page spreads that need to be carefully carved up into a front and a back image (after removing padding, cropping to the correct size, and adjusting for the now asymmetric bleed offset).

Then comes the fun of burning the CD. There's surprisingly little in the way of CD-burning software that still works in Windows 7 - Nero used to be the CD-burning package, but the version I've got merely implodes half-way through setting up the project. PlexTools fares a bit better but is full of annoyances, like drag'n'drop not working, and inserting tracks in reverse order when selecting multiple files. And then when it comes to actually burning the disc it just spat the blank back out and sat there at 5% forever (apparently because when it claims to support FLAC files what it really means is it only supports 16-bit sample depth. Because of course ejecting the CD means "File format not supported", nevermind that it does show a sensible error when faced with a 24-bit WAV file...).


I swear, this all used to be easier to do even back in the terrible Windows 95 days of ASPI layers and EasyCD.


Then again I suppose we have made some progress - these days, when PlexTools finally decides that yes, it will deign to burn a disc, it can do so at 20x while decompressing a FLAC source on-the-fly and without having to worry about buffer underruns. That's something you couldn't do in the Windows 95 days.

Red 1468! It's a roll of Kodak Gold 200-6, and another of the Brighton films. This one consists almost entirely of photos from Ditchling Beacon... but before that, have a slice of fail from the Brighton House.

( Fail! )

( Photos! )

Today's maths fail comes courtesy of the local Tesco's - can you spot it?




Using the drained weight (dr.wt) of 165g, the correct values are:

65p ÷ 165g = 0.394p/g = £3.94/kg

£1.25 ÷ (2 × 165g) = 125p ÷ 330g = 0.379p/g = £3.79/kg

So I was chatting with pleaseremove as he was on his way home, and the call dropped. This is not unexpected - his route goes through an area of patchy signal that regularly eats phone calls (Devon is a bit like that).

What was unexpected is that when he called me back, he commented that at the same time as the call dropped his phone received an email. So mobile operators have solved the non-problem of being able to send/receive emails from anywhere, but have in the process broken phone calls. Isn't the future wonderful?

The hilarity is in the past I've worked on phone networks, and so I have some idea of why everything is so broken. The short answer is 4G is awesome for data... and terrible for everything else. And the hilarious answer is there's no need for it to be terrible - voice over 4G should be a straightforward SIP call except that appears to be too much like hard work and so until I think late last year a 4G phone would fallback to 2G/3G to make a phone call. While SMS over 4G is just terrible by design (I should know, I once wrote a IP-SM-GW gateway to deal with it) - there was a wonderful opportunity to remove the 160-character length limit and the crazy 7-bit-packed encoding, and instead the solution is to take the radio-level packets from a 2G phone and tunnel them over SIP.


xkcd #1760


Anyway, after that pleaseremove had the bright idea of trying Skype instead since data seemed bizarrely more reliable than voice calls. Let's see how well that worked...

*** Call from pleaseremove ***
*** Call dropped, duration 01:39 ***
pleaseremove: I give up
pleaseremove: Speak to you whenever

We're not sure what happened. Our best guess is that as he got home his phone picked up his wifi signal, tried to switch to using wifi for data, and ate the call. Because migrating a Skype call from one internet connection to another is Hard... except funnily enough I'm currently working with VoIP tech, and modern VoIP protocols can do this. Theoretically. If whatever WebRTC stack you're using has actually bothered to support it.

Apparently the Boots in Fareham can't count. It's eight sprocket holes per 35mm photo, and so 32 per strip of four photos. Not 33, and certainly not 34. Not unless you're cutting the film in the middle of a photo.

Fortunately I think they just missed the edge of the moon with their scissors, so it's not irrecoverable, but merely a right pain to scan given that I now have to convince my film scanner there's 4-and-a-quarter photos on this strip of film.

It looks like they were similarly sloppy on the other roll of film, and clipped the edge of some photos with their scissors. Next time I'll just ask them to not cut the film and give me the whole roll back... which, come to think of it, is what the Boots in Brighton did when I got them to develop some night exposures many years back.

Today's discovery is that if the "mv" command can't simply rename a directory due to permissions, then it'll copy the directory structure. Then attempt to delete the old directory structure, fail because of the aforementioned permissions, and spew umpteen bajillion lines of error messages on the console.

Now, a sensible program would have just said that the file permissions didn't permit renaming and stopped there.

Sigh. Now to unpick the mess and check if it did actually copy everything or not.

So if you've just updated Firefox to version 34, have the Flashblock addon installed, and are wondering why videos no longer work at all... it's because the Firefox devs changed part of the plugin API such that Flashblock is now broken (they freely admit that "this has the potential to break addons"!). The only fix is to disable Flashblock, which may or may not happen automatically (on my system it was enabled, but marked to be disabled when Firefox was restarted).

Unfortunately all the workarounds range from "buggy" to "horrible". The obvious patch to Flashblock (apparently just setting a "yes, this plugin really is allowed to rewrite HTML" flag) doesn't work on some sites, Flashstopper only deals with flash videos and not flash in general, and Firefox's native click-to-play is clunky and too coarse-grained (no I don't want to enable all flash applets on a site just to watch a video).

Now in theory there would have been some warning when updating Firefox that the addon was incompatible, as each addon is supposed to declare which versions it works with. Except Firefox has followed Google Chrome's lead in continually releasing new major versions (presumably to be able to say "my version number is bigger than yours!"), with the result that the version number has no semantic meaning and version N+1 is equally likely to be fully compatible as it is to break everything. This means there's no point in specifying a maximum version that your addon is compatible with unless you want to have to release a new one every 6 weeks.


For added annoyance, the update appears to have reset the configured search engine back to Google (which is odd as Mozilla has just ended their partnership with Google). It also appears to be rather unstable - it's crashed a good half-dozen times already. I wonder if I'm better off just reverting back to version 33, or possibly going back further to version 31 (which at least will continue to get security updates, unlike version 33 which is now considered end-of-life despite having only been released for less than two months).