Somehow, my bank card was at least partially cloned recently, and used to transfer money to:
- GENESREUNITES (whatever that is - note the ‘S’ at the end),
- O2 - a telecoms company I don’t currently havea contract with, and
- VICTORIA COX (I don’t know anyone with, nor have I shopped at, a store with that name).
The replacement of the card obviously buggers up my genuine subscriptions - to Safari, for instance - and also means that for the moment, I’m reduced to withdrawing cash in person at a branch. So 20th century and disempowering. Modern life is great when it works, but when people break it, it becomes rubbish ever so quickly.
In other news, my beloved Dahon Piccolo appears to have developed a pair of small cracks, one on each of the leaves of the seatstay’s quick release section. This is serious, and might mean I need to have the frame replaced. Also, the rubber rim tape on the rear wheel has given up the ghost, which I discovered after a pair of flats that occurred while the bike was stationary. No cycling for me, then, until these problems have been taken care of. Bike hire is pricey.
I just tried the Automatic Upgrade plug-in for Wordpress, and it seemed to work flawlessly - touch wood.
Like most people, I am affected by earworms. In fact, there’s rarely a period when I don’t have one. Perhaps more atypically:
- Mine are usually percussive only.
- I have begun recording them.
Here are my two most common ones:
The first doesn’t always come with a hi-hat introduction; both loop indefinitely. I have curtailed them to four repeats.
Quite often, I’m only peripherally conscious of the earworms themselves, and instead a new prime earworm - in the form of a second percussion soundset that performs a syncopated, continuously varying solo over the accompaniment of the first earworm. Or sometimes - presumably the times when I only have the spare brain capacity to support one earworm - the first earworm just varies itself. When I have even fewer free mental processor cycles, I just get the basic repeat, as in the recordings above.
Now, have a listen, and tell me if they get stuck in your head.
I installed the Windows Search 4.0 update for Vista Home Premium today, and unfortunately it has failed to fix the most fundamental flaw in Vista’s search capabilities: false negatives in results. I’ll give an example of just how appallingly rubbish Vista’s search is.
Here’s the situation: I have a folder called C:\Program Files\1060-NKSEDK-3.3.1 containing a large number of files spread throughout various subfolders. I want to get a list of all the files, in that folder or its subfolders, containing the term “HTTPBridgeConfig”. In Windows XP or 2000, this was easy to do and reliable. Using Windows Explorer, you navigated to the directory you wanted to search within (in this case, C:\Program Files\1060-NKSEDK-3.3.1), pressed Ctrl+F, entered the phrase you wanted to search for, selected the “Search in subfolders” and “Search within files” check boxes, hit enter, and soon you’d have a list of all the files you were interested in.
In Vista, it’s apparently supposed to be possible to do the same thing, but actually it isn’t, because Vista is just… broken. In Vista, trying to find those files goes as follows.
As with XP and 2000, you navigate to the folder you’re interested in. Here, however, the experience diverges for the worse. You enter your search term in the search box at the top right of the window and press return. You might get some results, but they’re not the ones you’re interested in because you haven’t yet been presented with an opportunity to specify that you wish to search within files (yes, you actually have to perform a search before you get the option to specify what kind of search you want to perform - how dumb is that? Totally ass-backwards, that’s how dumb). At the bottom of the unwanted results, Vista prints a little message: “Didn’t find what you were searching for? Advanced Search”. Clicking on Advance Search expands an extremely poorly designed advanced search pane that, it eventually becomes apparent, relates to the search box in the top right corner that you used originally, but which (unlike the advanced search options panes XP and 2000) fails to provide any visual feedback to alert you to this fact. Sadly, in the advanced search pane, there is still no option to specify that you wish to search within files. However, there is an option to “Include non-indexed, hidden and system files (might be slow)”. Exasperated, you select this in the vain hope that perhaps file contents are “non-indexed” or something, and that therefore this will let you search within files, and you click the “Search” button. At this juncture in the hellish process, something vaguely - but not entirely - promising happens. Although this search (note: the second you’ve performed so far) still fails to identify the files you are interested in, it includes below its results a slightly modified (blink and you’d miss it) version of the pessimistic message that appeared below the previous search: “Didn’t find what you were searching for? Search in Files Contents. Advanced Search”. Aha! You may have had to jump through some preposterous hoops to reach it, but finally you have a chance to do what you wanted to do right at the beginning: request a search of files’ contents (NOT just files’ names). You click the link expectantly, hoping for a comprehensive list of all the files within the folder you selected, that contain the text you searched for. However, XP and 2000 would have given this to you, but… Vista won’t.
Here are the results of performing the above searches on my PC.
The results of the first and second searches in Vista, which just looks at filenames (i.e. not what is wanted):
C:\Program Files\1060-NKSEDK-3.3.1\modules\mod-fulcrum-backend\etc\HTTPBridgeConfig.xml
C:\Program Files\1060-NKSEDK-3.3.1\modules\tutorial\etc\HTTPBridgeConfig.xml
The results of the third search in Vista, which ostensibly looks at file contents as well as filenames:
C:\Program Files\1060-NKSEDK-3.3.1\modules\mod-fulcrum-backend\etc\HTTPBridgeConfig.xml
C:\Program Files\1060-NKSEDK-3.3.1\modules\tutorial\etc\HTTPBridgeConfig.xml
C:\Program Files\1060-NKSEDK-3.3.1\log\netkernel0.log
C:\Program Files\1060-NKSEDK-3.3.1\log\netkernel1.log
As you can see, this finds a couple more files. If I didn’t know better, I’d be forced to assume that Vista had indeed found all the files under C:\Program Files\1060-NKSEDK-3.3.1\ that contain the text I’m interested in: “HTTPBridgeConfig”. However, a double-check using grep via cygwin (configured to give the same sort of results as Windows XP or Windows 2000) reveals the truth.
The results of running grep -irl ‘HTTPBridgeConfig’ . in the same directory (i.e. the same results as W2K or XP would give):
C:\Program Files\1060-NKSEDK-3.3.1\log\netkernel0.log
C:\Program Files\1060-NKSEDK-3.3.1\log\netkernel1.log
C:\Program Files\1060-NKSEDK-3.3.1\modules\forum-web-1.1.6.jar
C:\Program Files\1060-NKSEDK-3.3.1\modules\mod-fulcrum-backend\etc/HTTPBridgeConfig.xml
C:\Program Files\1060-NKSEDK-3.3.1\modules\mod-fulcrum-backend\module.xml
C:\Program Files\1060-NKSEDK-3.3.1\modules\mod-fulcrum-frontend\etc\DefaultHTTPBridgeConfig.xml
C:\Program Files\1060-NKSEDK-3.3.1\modules\mod-fulcrum-frontend\module.xml
C:\Program Files\1060-NKSEDK-3.3.1\modules\mod-fulcrum-servlet\module.xml
C:\Program Files\1060-NKSEDK-3.3.1\modules\tpt-http-2.2.2.jar
C:\Program Files\1060-NKSEDK-3.3.1\modules\tpt-servlet-2.2.2.jar
C:\Program Files\1060-NKSEDK-3.3.1\modules\tutorial\etc\HTTPBridgeConfig.xml
C:\Program Files\1060-NKSEDK-3.3.1\modules\tutorial\module.xml
C:\Program Files\1060-NKSEDK-3.3.1\scratch\modules_ext_introspect_1_3_1\org\ten60\netkernel\introspect\module-summary.xml
C:\Program Files\1060-NKSEDK-3.3.1\scratch\modules_mod_lucene_1_1_10\org\ten60\netkernel\ext_entrypoint\master\_1j6.cfs
So you see, there weren’t only four files containing “HTTPBridgeConfig”: there were actually fourteen. Vista’s search is totally untrustworthy, having missed 70% of the relevant files!
And that, dear readers, is how broken Vista’s search is.