Adventures As Me

Attracting the Spam

Five years ago, I wrote a post entitled “Combating Comment Spam” It amuses me that this post attracts the most comment spam than any other post on this site. The spam ratio is easily 100:1

Unlocking the OS X screen saver from the command line

My OS X Desktop system has a problem. When the screensaver activates, there is a small window, one or two seconds in length, wherein if I depress a keyboard key or move the mouse, the screensaver does not fully activate. However, it does not de-activate, leaving me with an unusable desktop.

The system does not respond to the keyboard. The mouse functions but does activate the desktop.

To resolve this, without reboot the system, the following may work if you can login to the system via SSH:

1. Login via SSH as your normal user account

2. Execute the following:

	ps ax | grep -i screensaver | grep -v grep

3. The above returns the entire process as it appears in the process table. The first column contains the Process ID (PID). With the PID known, issue the following command:

	kill -HUP pid

Substitute the actual PID for the word pid above.

Once the above is done, the login box should appear ( or you will be returned to the desktop if you don’t have a password protected screen saver ).

directx is not backward compatible

Directx, the most common API on Windows for game development, is not backward compatible. Why?

When you upgrade to a new version of Windows ( e.g. from Windows XP to Windows Vista ) you need to install older versions of directx in order to use your older games. For Windows Vista, this means installing directx 9. What is the purpose of API and DLL versioning if you don’t make use of it?

Twittergation needed

Twitter went from being “why would I use this?” to “hmmm, look how many of my friends are using it” to “why doesn’t this integrate easily with anything I use?”

The closest is via SMS, but that can be costly for how often updates happen. What I would like to see:

1. Better integration with current IM clients, especially the open source ones I use: kopete and adium
2. Better integration with email clients – send an update via email for example

What I primarily want:

1. Updates sent to what I am using ( e.g. my IM client when I’m logged in )
2. Ease of sending a twitter update from what I am using ( see email example above )

All this of course means I’ll need to examine the Twitter API to see what I can do about resolving this.

openSUSE More

After three months, openSUSE is here to stay. On my home desktop that is. It has totally replaced Kubuntu for my preference. The quality documentation is one shining point for me. Yes, I actually read documentation. The tight integration between applications is another. Kubuntu may eventually reach this level, in a about 6 – 10 years.