The Wyrdest Geek

Copy error messages to clipboard

2012-01-25T13:18:00.005-06:00

I wouldn't believe it if I hadn't just tested it. In the (should be) immortal words of the poster "From Windows 2k onwards you have been able to copy the text in error messages to the Windows Clipboard by pressing Ctrl + C, but Microsoft forgot to tell anyone."

Yes, it's true. I tested with an error message from my own code:

When that popup has focus, if you Ctrl+C, then Ctrl+V into a text window, you get:

---------------------------
AutoKeys.au3: HlprMkREWinActive
---------------------------
Unable to set The Raiser's Edge as active.
---------------------------
OK
---------------------------

I haven't checked to see if it works with all MsgBox( ) type things, but it probably does.

Oh--also it turns out Windows NTFS since maybe NT 3.0 does support something like the Unix symlink. (Symlinks are different than .lnk files because, for most purposes, they are treated as a real file or folder. It allows for one file or folder to appear to exist in multiple names and/or locations within the filesystem without crufty wasteful copying.) In NTFS, they're called Junctions, and they only work for folders. (Apparently, in Vista, MS added some new feature that finally allows for full symlinks.) Google for 'sysinternals junction.exe'. Be very careful with them though--since they're transparent to most all the programs on the OS (i.e. treated as actual folders), it's easy for a lot of accidental damage to happen.

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Furry cows moo and decompress.

It's that time of year

2011-12-21T16:30:00.001-06:00

VLC tells us it's that time of year again...

It's kinda cool. And kinda weird. It changes its icon from the standard to this with the Santa hat on sometime around the start of December and it'll stay this way for, I think, the whole month.

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Furry cows moo and decompress.

Household with Children Complexity Calculation Formula

2009-09-17T16:10:00.004-05:00

I just came up with a way to calculate the complexity of your household based on the number of children in it.

First, take the average of all of your children's IndividualComplexityValues (see below) in years of all of the children in your care, including those that are only there part time. This will form the base. (Note if the result comes out to a value less than or equal to 1, then add 1 to it, then multiply it by itself, and use that as the base.

Now, raise that number by powers based on the IndividualComplexityValues of all of the children in the household.

IndividualComplexityValues are calculated like this: For children aged 1 to 10: it's just their age. For very tiny children/babies aged less than one: it's 13 minus the number of months old they are. For children age 11 and above, it's one tenth their age.

For example, let's suppose you have three children in your household of the following ages:
11 months, 4, 16. Then the average would be:

(0.9166, + 4, + 1.6) / 3 is approx = 2.1722.

So, to figure the Children Complexity Value we would perform:

2.1722 ^ ( ( 13 - 11 ) ^ ( 4 ^ 1.6 ) ) .

So that would mean that your over-all household complexity is just about... 5.212 times 10^196. And of course, in my case, the Complexity calculation comes out to something far beyond perl's ability to calculate so it just answers with "inf" for infiity. Seems pretty accurate to me.

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Furry cows moo and decompress.

Mary Anning lyrics, Artichokes, Skeptic Mix Tape

2009-07-10T08:59:00.007-05:00

There's a Skeptic Mix Tape in existence now at Skeptics.com. As you might guess it has skeptically themed songs from a variety of artists. This one song, Mary Anning seems particularly furry to me right now because of it's, for lack of a better term, Beatles-esque sound. I checked out the artist's site, and initially couldn't find any lyrics there. (Later, I did find them, but that was after I'd already taken the time to write them all down. And mine are more complete than theirs.) So:

"Mary Anning" by Artichoke

Do you know Mary Anning?
Born on a southren shore.
Her father, Richard, was a cab-i-net ma-ker.
And Richard died too early.
And left the Anning's poor.
But lucky Mary Anning found an ich-thy-o-saur!

By circa 1820,
She ran a fossil store.
She put the bones together
For the col-lect-ors.
And science was the province
Of men of noble birth.
But I'd take Mary Anning
Over those stuffed white shirts!

// Ancient life that sleeps as fossils... //

She was walkin' the cliffs
On her own by the sea.
She was wonderin' if
There were shapes underneath.
There were men with their cash
But that's not what it took.
She could read every line
On the ground like a book.
She assembled the bones
Of the past
In cement.
And she sold them in town
For a couple a pence.
And she showed all the men
How the bones could connect.
Though at first some would scoff
They would grow to respect...

Do you know Mary Anning?
Born on a southren shore.
Her father, Richard, was a cab-i-net ma-ker.
And Richard died too early.
And left the Anning's poor.
But lucky Mary Anning found an ich-thy-o-saur!

"How did you get in here!?
Show me what you've found, Dear.
Hello, isn't that queer?
Do you have any more?"
"How did you get in here!?
Show me what you've found, Dear.
Hello, isn't that queer?
Do you have any more?"
?reeuq taht t'nsi ,olleH
?erom yna evah uoy oD
"How did you get in here!?
Show me what you've found, Dear"

About the reversed lines: I used Audacity to un-reverse the reversed/back-masked part towards the end of the song. :-)

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Furry cows moo and decompress.

Who Moved My Cheese (review)

2009-04-06T13:04:00.001-05:00

I've been hearing people mention this book for quite some time now. I finally read Who Moved My Cheese yesterday. I skipped the intro and the afterward, but the meat (or cheese) of the book was pretty good.

(SPOILERS, sort of)
It's really an allegory about how once we have things easy in life (in business, personal, or just all-around), we ought not get too complacent and comfortable, lest we miss the signs that the "cheese" (the thing(s) that makes life worth living for you) is getting used up and will be gone soon.

In the story, Hem and Haw are shocked to discover one morning that the cheese they had worked so long and hard to attain is suddenly gone after it had been right there where they had found it for years and years. Of course the mice, Scriffy and Scurry, they were well aware of what was happening, and they've already gone racing off to find a new supply because, really, what else is there to do? But the humans, they're not so quick on the uptake because they have all these complex belief systems in their heads that get in the way. They get to thinking like, "Who moved my cheese!?" "Wait and it will come back," "We deserve cheese," etc.

The venerable Professor J. R. R. Tolkien said something to the effect that he detested allegory in all its forms. I guess I am not like him. I feel I understand what he is driving at: that allegory is icky insofar as it's someone else's rather blatant attempt to tell you what to think. Mr. Tolkien is correct--that's bad. However, allegory isn't always like that. Sometimes it can be a (admittedly heavy handed) way to explain something, or a way to remind you of something that you already knew or ought to know in a memorable way.

Now, I will be remembering the mice and littlepeople with their running shoes and track outfits zipping through the maze of life in pursuit of The Cheese for a long time. And hopefully it will remind me to not be complacent, to not get too comfortable with my cheese, and to know when to read the Handwriting on the Wall.

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Furry cows moo and decompress.

Puppy Linux / Firefox font

2009-03-27T22:59:00.000-05:00

I'm waiting in the hospital right now with a family member. Seems like a great time to work on the laptop!

I'm still running Puppy linux. I've been thinking about switching to Ubuntu, but then there is this whole if-it-aint-broke thing. If I use this much more, I really need to figure out how to set up sudo rather than running as root all the time. Still, I always (improperly) run windows in a similarly powerful way, so I'm not too worried.

I've switched from a usb flash drive to an IDE hard drive that's connected via a USB drive caddy. Yeah, I know, but it's what I've got to work with right now. The laptop takes SATA and I don't have that right now.

I'm writing mostly to remind myself this: I found out the easy fix to the font problem in Firefox. X comes with almost no tolerable fonts, but it does come with Helvetica. So just go to Edit -> Preferences -> Content and set the default font to Helvetica. All of a sudden the awful Times will be replaced with the slightly less bad Helvetica.

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Furry cows moo and decompress.

Install Hell

2009-03-19T19:25:00.000-05:00

It seems these days that on those rare occasions where I have to install an OS come along, it always turns into a long, protracted, excruciatingly painful experience. It's sort of like trying to pass medium sized kidney stones.

The hard drive died on my wife's computer. This probably has a lot to do with the amount of abuse this computer suffers on a daily basis.

So I really wanted to obtain an XP SP3 because trying to reinstall the Vista that it came with feels like a step backwards rather than forwards. Procuring the disk was difficult and, it turns out, ultimately futile as the computer failed to read all of the files. Nothing's more fun than staring at the blue windows install screen and watching it fail to copy multiple files, all of which have varying degrees of importance. On the low end, there's the files which I know I don't really need like "arial.ttf". On the high end, there's the files which I'm sure I really do need like "driver.cab". That one's so important it wasn't even compressed on the source cd.

So what did I do? Well, I wound up trading back and forth between the SP2 cd I had procured and the SP1 cd I already had. Wanna guess how well that worked? I wound up with a system that boots fine, everything comes up, yay. Only when you try to actually do something, like choose Start -> shutdown, explorer.exe crashes and restarts itself.

Currently, I have this same computer running using the very, very cool Puppy Linux. Why is Puppy so cool? Well, because it's really, really tiny and you can get to a vaguely-usable desktop in just a few minutes. I mean--this system that I'm on right now has no useable OS other than Puppy, and yet just with that I'm able to browse online and make this blog entry. I call that cool.

Now, back to the install... "Once more into the breach, dear friends..."

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Furry cows moo and decompress.

Daily Words of Wisdom (or Whatever) #1

2009-03-18T06:26:00.000-05:00

fortune(1) tells us:

Cynical? Well, maybe. However, it does turn out to be true rather frequently.

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Furry cows moo and decompress.

First Post

2009-03-13T23:09:00.000-05:00

First post!

perl -e ' print "\n\nHello, World.\n\n"; '

Welcome to the blog of The Wyrdest Geek. The exits are at the front of the theater, Non-Sequitor is a good comic strip, and one day I will change my last name to Wyrd.
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Furry cows moo and decompress.