Oh, bloody heck. My laptop just bricked up hard.

I was just typing along when suddenly the whole machine froze. Then, when I tried to reboot, I got a CRC error from the current kernel. I shut the machine down, picked a lower level kernel, and it made it about three minutes before it froze up again.

Now, it won't even post to BIOS.

I hope the harddrive's okay. I've been naughty about backup (and I even have a backup brick!) and it's been two months, maybe three, since my last.

I have an old laptop in the basement. I'll put the hard drive in there, put in a rescue disk, and write the contents out to the backup brick.

I so do not need this

Put Down That Vibrator And Come Out With Your Hands Up!

Dan Ireland, executive director of the Alabama Citizens' Action Program, a Baptist group, said it would oppose any effort to overturn the law.

"Laws are made to protect the public," he said. "Sometimes you have to protect the public against themselves." Ireland said the ban is a "good law" that has bolstered public safety.

"Sexual matters are not to become a nuisance to people and the community," he said. "We have enough problems with sexual-oriented crimes without enticing or promoting it."

Because, y'know, people might hurt themselves with a blow-up doll or something. And we can't begin to count the number of times a dildo has been used in a robbery or assault. (On the other hands, the number of airports evacuated because of a vibrator in the luggage has skyrocketed recently. Maybe Mr. Ireland is just trying to save the TSA any further embarrassment.)

Read it all here.

WATIR is my new toy

FireWatir is a utility that runs on your client platform, invokes your browser and operates it via remote control. Using a very simple domain language describing the DOM tree, one can drive a web application. It's unbelievably trivial to use:

 $page.text_field(:id, 'field_username').set("user")
 $page.text_field(:id, 'field_password').set("badpassword")
 $page.button(:id, 'button_submit').click
 assert(($page.title =~ /Login/) != nil,
      "You went somewhere other than the Login page-- that's bad.")
 $page.text_field(:id, 'field_username').set("user")
 $page.text_field(:id, 'field_password').set("goodpassword")
 $page.button(:id, 'button_submit').click
 assert(($page.title =~ /Your Page/) != nil,
      "You went somewhere other than the Your Page page-- that's bad.")
 

Holy frack. How the hell did I ever live before? A scripted driver just to take me to the page where the interaction goes sour takes so much of the boring routine crap of my daily life and automates it. I just sit back and watch the machine do the work.

It totally makes my life easy.

Really, really down in the slowzone

Well, I put the hard drive from Kusanagi (the P3/1GHz/1GB box) into Lain (P2/266/128MB), and the difference is, well, hellish. I'd forgotten just how slow this machine was. And to think that it used to be one heck of an improvement over Brick, which was a P1! I can run Thunderbird, but only if I choose to run absolutely nothing else. I've dropped down into console mode, and am using Emacs the old-fashioned way: no mouse, no windows, no widgets, no gadgets, no menus. Just me and the keyboard.

I'm currently backing up the hard drive onto a USB enclosure drive so that when my new computer comes in (and yes, I've already bought one, a T60/1.83GHz I2C/3GB) I'll be able to restore my accounts from backup onto its bigger drive.

This... isn't that horrible, actually. It's annoying, and I can't watch movies, and the battery's so old it barely works as a UPS, but I can do the essentials. I can even read LJ, albeit uncomfortably through lynx.

That's depressing...

It's been three hours since I started the backup routine. I just saw the notice. "Now backing up file #22527 of 440794." This is gonna take forever.