blog.arithm

Well, what was supposed to be a quick weekend project back in March is finally on it’s way to the iPhone App Store; and for the second time no less.

“Kanji Fuda” is a simple Japanese kanji learning game reminiscent of ComCul’s excellent Kanji for Fun. Between work and baby management, I’ve been cobbling it together in fits and starts over the last couple of months. Even have the fancy shmancy website that seems to be prerequisite for releasing any kind of mobile app.

Now that the basic version is done and “released” — assuming that I am able to get it by the App Store gate keepers — I’m working on an advanced version specifically to help study for the year-end Japanese Language Proficiency Test (JLPT). I’ve always wanted to go after Level One, but given how little I actually use my Japanese these days, it’s going to be a stretch… hence Kanji Fuda.

I found this buried in a drawer over the holidays.  It appears to be from a 1976 edition of the Readers Digest.

Happy Father’s Day!

The following essay, which had evidently been written by a young schoolgirl as a Father’s Day assignment, was found blowing around in the front yard the other day:

The best thing about my father is that he doesn’t use  words like groovy or gross or try to talk like a kid.  When he drives me and some of my friends to a show, he doesn’t tell any jokes.  He just groans a lot and sometimes mutters to himself.  All the kids think it’s funny the way he groans.  Many of them have fathers who tell jokes, which are boring.

When he taught me to throw a baseball like a boy, he didn’t say it was becasue girls throw baseball funny.  All he said was that if I would learn to throw a baseball the way he showed me, he wouldn’t get sick to his stomache watching.

My father says that women can be anything they want these days, judges or scientists or even President.  But he says in all these jobs it’s important to keep your room cleaned and brush your teeth after every meal.  He says it is bad to cheat at games, and points out that when he is playing with us kids, the only times he cheats are when he would lose otherwise.  My father has worked very hard for every dime he has, a fact which he mentions from time to time.

My father has this weird thing about telephones.  He says that were intended to convey a message in two minutes or less, not to giggle over for 45 minutes.  Alther he doesn’ think people should talk on the telephone, he talks to people on the television all the time.  We tell him the people can’t hear him, and he says that’s just a lot of propaanda the TV people put out to stifle dissent.

He always says that he doesn’t want anybody to give him anything expensive for Father’s Day, and he claims that’s the only thing he ever says that anybody around the house pays any attention to.

- Bill Vaughan, NANA

Run # python-updater. Some of the old Python packages don’t play so nice with the new snake.

If you get an emerge: there are no ebuilds to satisfy "=dev-libs/libxslt-1.1.20" error or similar, try running the updater with the --ignore-versions switch.

Because the default Portage behavior has changed.

Old: $ emerge world
New: $ emerge -u world

New Portage thinks that a simple “emerge world” means you want to reinstall everything.

Shame on you for not zealously reading and memorizing everything that Portage has to tell you. Bad Admin. Bad.

There’s lots of recommendations floating around the net for this, but try the following first:

Make sure that the user and group permissions for the account and the home directory match. For example, if you are logging in as:

account:x:521:500::/some/directory:/sbin/nologin

then make sure that the home directory defined for “account” is at least readable and executable by user 521 and group 500.

Here.  There’s a lot of these things.

Of lesser utility, but clearly the best:

Zombies will attack whomever uses your ZombieURL link.  For eggshample.

http://storyofman.tumblr.com/

My recent favorites:

• Man Twitters and is attacked by tree
• Man Rescued From Hole That Opened in Seattle Sidewalk
• Man Uses Horse Tranquilizer to Sleep
• Man Robs Convenience Store With Beer Box on Head
• Man finds snake head in his broccoli; restaurant ‘regrets’ the error
• Man shoves would-be suicide jumper off bridge for holding up traffic (includes video!)
• Man, 62, Sues for $125G Saying Ohio Police Made Him Walk Home in Polar Bear Pajamas

Okay, so I’m working on project in Visual Basic.NET.  Using Visual Studio 2003.  And it’s really, really bad code.

You there, stop snickering!

Anyway, the point of this post is that, if you see the above error, it probably has to do with a bad path in your .sln file pulled down via SVN or other.  Open it in Notepad and change:

Project("{F184B08F-C81C-45F6-A57F-5ABD9991F28F}") = "IPTV", "http://localhost/somepath/IPTV.vbproj“, “{AD96074E-13E6-47B2-8B61-14FCE9EE9377}”
ProjectSection(ProjectDependencies) = postProject
EndProjectSection
EndProject

to resemble how you configured IIS.

This has been driving me crazy forever. As soon as IMAP became available for Gmail some time back, I immediately went about hooking it up to Outlook so that I could access Gmail along with my other five plus other email accounts from one central interface.

And there was much rejoicing.

Except for the fact that all of my outgoing messages seemed to get saved twice into my Sent folder. This is a pretty annoying, but not a show stopper. Like any good geek, I ignored the problem. For well over a year.

Finally today it dawned on me that both Outlook and Gmail could be saving copies into my Sent folder. Turning this off in Outlook (Tools -> Options -> E-mail Options… -> un-check “Save copies of messages in Sent Items folder”) reveals that, indeed, my lightning quick powers of deduction are sharper than ever. Problem solved.

Now perhaps in six months I will deduce a way to remove ten gigabytes of duplicate messages.

Apparently Apple really really wants us to be building for only OS3. Xcode in the iPhone 3.0 beta 5 SDK goes to the trouble of actually hiding older Active SDK settings as soon as you do a build for 3.0.

To get the older settings back, hold down the Option key while choosing Project -> Set Active SDK. The original list magically reappears.