posts tagged with: bugs

Via claytoncubitt:

Nick Knight, Alexander McQueen, ‘Angel’ 2000, music by Bjork

“The concept is quintessential Knight/McQueen. Create the face of an angel and place it, pride of place, in a church in the southern French town of Avignon. Nothing much new about that, you might think, except that instead of using stained glass or any other such obvious and/or widely deemed appropriate materials, the pair constructed the piece entirely out of dyed maggots - 80 gallons of dyed maggots, to be precise. It’s a frankly horrifying thought, which is, of course, the point. The designer and photographer have by now collaborated on more than one idea that subverts our preconceptions of what is and isn’t beautiful. Ideas that, on the face of it, may rile the more politically correct among us and appear to be no more than sensational, once executed seem rather more tender, lovely - moving even - than had been expected.” -Of Maggots and Madonnas, Susannah Frankel

Showstudio project page with text and behind the scenes

Keepin’ calm and carryin’ on.

Vanity

Around campus

Around town

I got my new SD reader today, so I can finally get pictures I’ve taken in the past few weeks off my camera. Here are a few I’ve liked:

Summer

Around campus

And here are a few that I took with my cellphone:

My second time toying around with my wacom, and I think I’m getting the hang of it!

Via VideoSift

I found this bug over at Neatorama, and it warrants spreading.

Curiously, as far as I can tell this company isn’t really selling much of anything. Not much of anything I can see on their website, anyway, and certainly nothing that appears to be worth buying. It seems to have something to do with buying “premium booklets” at a head shop. Certainly not the stuff of infinite nightmares that their advertisement would imply, anyway. Unless of course lung cancer is the stuff that fuels your nightmares.

Ha! xfce4 did it, AGAIN. This time though, I had previously taken my own suggestion from LAST time, and just grabbed last night’s cron backup of my menu file, and hence prevented further heartache.

Take that, you steaming pile!

Interestingly, this time I have absolutely no idea what prompted the menu overwrite, which is somewhat disconcerting. If it’s still not a bug, then it’s also disheartening.

I use Xfce4, and I hate it. I used to use Fluxbox, which I liked quite a bit, but then I found out that Xfce was purportedly just as fast, nearly as stable, and full of much more eye-candy.

Being the superficial Teri that I am, I was intrigued.

So, several months ago, I started playing with Xfce. Problems abounded, including:

• Every few days my computer does a massive processor and disk intensive backup process. Every time this process completes, Xfce becomes retarded: no items in the menu will illicit any reaction at all, save for the ‘Quit’ item, which pops up a “file not found; memory not allocated” error. Running the file it claims to have not found from the command line (‘xfce4-session-logout’) works just fine.
• The compositor, while beautiful, has made my framerate in WoW terrible. I used to have all the graphical settings maxed out with a completely reasonable framerate; now I have all the graphical settings minned out with a mostly reasonable framerate. But as I do other stuff on my computer more often than I play WoW (yes, truly!), the eye candy has still generated a surplus of happiness, so I keep it (though I do like to complain).
• On a similar note, I used to be able to switch virtual desktops without fear in and out of WoW when I used Fluxbox. Now, however, checking Thottbot or surfing the web while rebuilding my Auctioneer database is always a risk. Periodically I try to switch back to WoW only to have the game refuse to show anything other than a black screen, or to have 3D acceleration seem to completely disappear, causing my entire computer to freak out until I manage to kill WoW and restart X.

Today, Xfce managed to piss me off more than usual. I updated Crossover Linux (which I use at work to test pages in IE on my Linux box) with the provided .deb and it decided it was a wonderful idea to replace my user menu with the new system default menu.

For those of you that don’t know, editing the xfce menu is a major ordeal. The interface to do so, while not difficult, is slow and tedious, and while it is theoretically possible to edit the menu.xml file by hand, it seems rather fragile and even more tedious than the terrible interface they have. (As an aside, the fluxbox menu file format is wonderful. I don’t know why people insist on using XML for everything when a normal text file will often suffice.)

During my googling into this terrible (for me, in my melodramatic computer-centric world) event, I found that the Xfce developers, in their infinite wisdom, decided that this wasn’t even a bug, or at least, that it wasn’t a bug that they will fix. Even that would have been fine, assuming that the offending update-menus command will run rarely and only with user prompting. But as that clearly isn’t always going to be the case, the very least they could have done is to have it do a cp menu.xml menu.xml.old before commencing to overwrite menu.xml. In that case, a user would have to run update-menus twice before losing data (which, while still possible to unknowingly do, is much less likely).

So, what have I learned from all this? Whenever I have to use some terrible interface in a painstaking process I do not wish to repeat, save the end results someplace safe. A cron job to cp menu.xml menu.xml.old once a week would have been a good thing to have last week.

Luckily, neops1 has a mostly similar menu file, so I won’t have to recreate everything, just the work and syncing menu items specific to this computer.

Unluckily, that computer is still behind the terrible network connection that until earlier this week my website was also behind. Hence, that file may as well not exist, for all the good it does me at this moment.