books and desk

Dates a bit approximate.

Books recently read.
20/8/2009

ByRoyalCommand
author:CharlieHigson
More of Daire's books. Good fun. :) James Bond just getting back from a last adventure (I should maybe have started at the first book!?) to join his friends ski-ing. It's before WWII. Good action story.
http://www.mi6.co.uk/sections/literary/index_higson.php3




1/8/2009

Ilium
author:DanSimmons
Excellent!
Gods and humans acting out the Illiad, while AI space and explorer bots go on a quest and other humans left over on future earth (maybe?) are dependant now on tech they don't understand. I was a bit dubious - the cover quotes and blurb don't help the book I think. But wow! I liked it after a few pages. It was not explained for a long time what the hell was happening (as it was for the characters) but in the end you knew where in time & space you were and how things were working. Nice book :)
http://www.dansimmons.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Simmons



17/8/2009

StarOfTheSea
author:JosephOConnor
Again the excited gushing quotes on cover are off-putting! Excellently told. The history and people and politics and knowledge of the time felt very true. Good characters again.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_O%27Connor
http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/o/joseph-oconnor/



20/6/2009

TheSeaAndTheSummer
author:GeorgeTurner
mmmh I really like the awkwardness of oldish sci-fi. The future people looking back on how the world was really doesn't work. The main story does though. Global warming and world over-population has kicked in in earnest. It's getting hotter, the sea is rising and food production and resources in general are getting really tight. Society in Australia has been split between swill and sweet. The status-quo (sometimes involving criminality and corruption, but without evil or even badness) is maintained by everyone.
Is what is missing from the characters some evilness. Everyone is actually too well behaved.



My desk in Sun.
21/8/2009


Nearly a christmas tree ornament!
Another flash moment.
Missing 0 from length in a command in manual and blindly cut&pasting. tut.
My suggestion of hot-popping in flash in working board and reprogramming came in as a suggested fix from Intel as well :-) Heh heh! And it worked. whew!

misleading error syntax error: word unexpected (expecting ")"

This error ("line 1: syntax error: word unexpected (expecting ")")") is misleading.
It leads one initially to suspect a scripting error.
It is because of trying to run an incompatible (maybe elf64) binary on an elf32 platform (x86/i386).

 /sbin/udevd: line 1: syntax error: word unexpected (expecting ")")

It is quite like the misleading error you get in solaris 32bit or 64bit "Invalid argument" if trying to run an incompatible binary.

The error on x86_64 is good "cannot execute binary file" leads you to the problem directly.

$ ./hello32sparc 
bash: ./hello32sparc: cannot execute binary file
$ ./hello64sparc 
bash: ./hello64sparc: cannot execute binary file
$ ./hexdump_arm 
bash: ./hexdump_arm: cannot execute binary file
$ uname -s -r -m -p -i -o
Linux 2.6.27.29-170.2.79.fc10.x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

$ ./hexdump
-bash: ./hexdump: Invalid argument
$ ./hexdump_arm 
-bash: ./hexdump_arm: Invalid argument
$ ./hexdump
hexdump        hexdump_arm    hexdumpx86_32  hexdumpx86_64  
$ ./hexdumpx86_32 
-bash: ./hexdumpx86_32: Invalid argument
$ ./hexdumpx86_64 
-bash: ./hexdumpx86_64: Invalid argument
$ uname -s -r -m -p -i
SunOS 5.10 sun4u sparc SUNW,Sun-Fire-V245

Use objdump to check what platform your binaries are for.

objdump -h hello32sparc 
elfdump -e hello32sparc 

unzip 'unsupported compression method 99' error use p7zip 7za

Problem:
$ unzip -l muh.zip
$ unzip -Ppassword muh.zip
Archive: muh.zip
   skipping: muh unsupported compression method 99

Solution: On linux p7zip will unzip the zip with the password, for fedora:
$ sudo yum install p7zip
$ 7za x -Ppassword muh.zip

This will hopefully save me 2 minutes of fumbling next time (BY lodging this info into my brain as well as on the internet).

$ rpm -qa |grep p7zip
p7zip-4.61-1.fc10.x86_64
$ rpm -q p7zip-4.61-1.fc10.x86_64 -l
/usr/bin/7za

7-Zip (A) 4.61 beta  Copyright (c) 1999-2008 Igor Pavlov  2008-11-23