voidynullness

It seems to happen in threes. All of a sudden my digital TV reception has gone to hell. Being without TV I might consider a minor annoyance, in a world of online streaming of TV shows (and *cough* BitTorrent *cough*). But my ADSL is constantly dropping out too. And my central heating just broke down. So I am without both TV and internet. And I’m cold. Needless to say I’m fucking grumpy.

The ADSL I’ve been having …

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One moment I’m thinking JasperReports is great, it’s exactly what I need, it’s making things so easy and my job/life/world is all the better for it. The next moment I find I’ve overlooked/forgotten/misunderstood some arcane aspect of it and everything degenerates into a horrible, broken, useless mess, and I’m thinking why am I bothering with all this when it just seems to be an exercise in endless frustration and misery? Kind …

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To set up ssh to allow logins without having to type a password, first generate keys on the local machine:

ssh-keygen -t rsa

Copy (securely) the freshly generated public key (id_rsa.pub) to the remote machine.

Append the contents of id_rsa.pub to the ~/.ssh/authorized_keys file in the home directory on the remote machine.

Finally, if necessary:

chmod 600 ~/.ssh/authorized_keys

The above procedure will also stop SVN from constantly pestering for a password when checking out a repository …

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I think I might have enjoying my recent foray into the weird world of web services and SOAP had it not felt so much like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. Reverse engineering a communication protocol that has its roots in RS-232 serial coms was bad enough. But then to work out how to send that data over a web service interface defined by a third part…while maintaining backwards compatibility…in C…let’s …

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I’ll give Unity a go one day, but for now I’m persisting with Gnome 2 on my work PC, because I have it set up with the GUI staying out of my way as much as possible, so for now it is the path of least annoyance.

At least now that I have worked out how to fix one of Ubuntu’s annoying allusions to OS X of having Gnome position the minimize, maximize and close buttons on …

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I can’t believe I’ve never had to do this before: replace a string of one or more characters in a buffer with a single newline. But how to tell Emacs the replace text is a literal newline? The obvious escape characters like \n don’t work. After googling, turns out the answer is deceptively simple:

      C-q C-j

Not exactly intuitive, but kinda sorta makes sesnse in an Emacsian way. Weird how I’ve never had to do this …

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