Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in Jonathan Ohcamac's LiveJournal:

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Wednesday, July 7th, 2004
8:39 pm	Cool From Jim Kerr: Steering columns are designed to retract during an impact by shearing some plastic pins and allowing the outer column tube to slide down the inner tube. This often happens when the driver impacts the steering wheel. To further reduce the possibility of injury, Volvo's S40 uses a pyrotechnic charge to pull the steering column away from the driver. With 140 millimetres of travel, the steering wheel can be moved away before the driver hits it, reducing upper body injuries. Sensors in the driver's seat monitor seat position in relationship to the steering wheel and sophisticated software activates the charge to retract the steering column only when necessary. Every collision and every driver is unique. The system is designed to react differently for each situation. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, June 1st, 2004
2:20 am	ouch - VLC on win98 After getting annoyed with windows 98 for not supporting submenus in vlc, I noticed that nearly everything that can be done with submenus can also be done by right clicking on the video, gimp style, which does work on win98. Ouch. Current Mood: annoyed Current Music: 102.5, wcrb (Comment on this)
Monday, May 31st, 2004
6:09 pm	Another tiny perl script ===prefix=== #!/usr/bin/perl -w if ($#ARGV < 0){ print STDERR "Usage: | $0 \n"; exit(1); } while(){ print "@ARGV$_"; } I used it for background 'tail -f bochsout.txt | prefix "bochsout: "' (Comment on this)
Monday, May 24th, 2004
2:57 am	*sumdir There are a couple of ways to find out how large a directory is, but there's always room for three more. ( jsumdir ) ( psumdir ) ( psumlist )Update 2004/06/01: new and improved psumlist. Another example: rpm -ql <some-package> | psumlist <some-package> (1 Comment |Comment on this)
2:46 am	background.pl I wrote this after having an application quit when I closed the terminal window that it was launched from. #!/usr/bin/perl -w $P=fork(); if ( $P == 0){ exec "@ARGV"; } syntax highlighted by Code2HTML, v. 0.9.1 (Comment on this)
Tuesday, May 11th, 2004
11:28 am	27 screws need to be removed to get the base off my laptop. 6 of these have funny hollow hex heads. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, May 4th, 2004
11:28 am	More on dvds I upgraded my laptop to a Samsung SN-324FEN and the first two Lain dvds play nearly perfectly on VLC. VLC has the nifty feature that it's possible to hear the english dubbing and watch the english subtitles at the same time. Try that with windows media player. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, April 28th, 2004
10:45 pm	Don't run this perl -e 'while (1){local $foo = 5; fork();}' (Comment on this)
Thursday, April 1st, 2004
8:31 pm	Project looking glass@sun Watch this movie. (Comment on this)
Sunday, March 28th, 2004
1:07 am	Wacky cable A 4.5 inch, red-black-black-yellow 4-strand cable came with a copy of Corel Wordperfect 11; around it was a sticker stating: This piece of hardware is included to complete the OEM licensing agreement (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Saturday, March 20th, 2004
12:32 pm	Detroit I'm leaving for detroit, michigan to meet dad's parents and won't be able to update this till Wednesday night. Livejournal users mark356 and opal581 will also be going. (Comment on this)
Thursday, March 18th, 2004
4:39 pm	Update to last post Upgraded gdm through vnc; ssh -l jonathan 192.168.1.106 su shutdown -r now (Connection closed) Repeat as needed. The exact error message thrown by red-carpet is :(red-carpet:1940): Gtk-WARNING **: Unable to locate theme engine in module_path: "bluecurve", Error: Couldn't import gtk. The exact error message thrown by vlc is: VideoLAN Client 0.7.0 Bond [00000198] main input: playlist item `dvd:///dev/dvd@0:1' libdvdread: Using libdvdcss version 1.2.8 for DVD access libdvdread: Attempting to retrieve all CSS keys libdvdread: This can take a _long_ time, please be patient libdvdread: Get key for /VIDEO_TS/VIDEO_TS.VOB at 0x00000155 libdvdread: Elapsed time 0 libdvdread: Get key for /VIDEO_TS/VTS_01_0.VOB at 0x000003a8 libdvdread: Error cracking CSS key for /VIDEO_TS/VTS_01_0.VOB (0x000003a8) libdvdread: Elapsed time 1 ( more of the same ) The mplayer error message is : Playing dvd://1. Reading disc structure, please wait... There are 22 titles on this DVD. There are 19 chapters in this DVD title. There are 1 angles in this DVD title. DVD successfully opened. Cache fill: 19.14% (1605632 bytes) LMLM4 Stream Format not found MPEG-PS file format detected. VIDEO: MPEG2 720x480 (aspect 3) 29.970 fps 8080.0 kbps (1010.0 kbyte/s) ========================================================================== Opening audio decoder: [liba52] AC3 decoding with liba52 Using SSE optimized IMDCT transform AC3: 5.1 (3f+2r+lfe) 48000 Hz 448.0 kbit/s Using MMX optimized resampler AUDIO: 48000 Hz, 2 ch, 16 bit (0x10), ratio: 56000->192000 (448.0 kbit) Selected audio codec: [a52] afm:liba52 (AC3-liba52) ========================================================================== ========================================================================== Opening video decoder: [mpegpes] MPEG 1/2 Video passthrough VDec: vo config request - 720 x 480 (preferred csp: Mpeg PES) Could not find matching colorspace - retrying with -vf scale... Opening video filter: [scale] The selected video_out device is incompatible with this codec. VDecoder init failed :( Opening video decoder: [libmpeg2] MPEG 1/2 Video decoder libmpeg2-v0.3.1 Selected video codec: [mpeg12] vfm:libmpeg2 (MPEG 1 or 2 (libmpeg2)) ========================================================================== Checking audio filter chain for 48000Hz/2ch/16bit -> 48000Hz/2ch/16bit... AF_pre: af format: 2 bps, 2 ch, 48000 hz, little endian signed int AF_pre: 48000Hz 2ch Signed 16-bit (Little-Endian) AO: [oss] 48000Hz 2ch Signed 16-bit (Little-Endian) (2 bps) Building audio filter chain for 48000Hz/2ch/16bit -> 48000Hz/2ch/16bit... Starting playback... a52: CRC check failed! a52: error at resampling a52: CRC check failed! a52: error at resampling VDec: vo config request - 720 x 480 (preferred csp: Planar YV12) VDec: using Planar YV12 as output csp (no 0) Movie-Aspect is 1.78:1 - prescaling to correct movie aspect. VO: [xv] 720x480 => 854x480 Planar YV12 a52: CRC check failed! 2.175 ct: 0.000 1/ 1 0% 0% 0.0% 0 0 1% a52: error at resampling a52: CRC check failed! a52: error at resampling a52: CRC check failed! a52: error at resampling a52: CRC check failed! a52: error at resampling repeat the last two lines as needed. ( Xine's error message ) (1 Comment |Comment on this)
1:16 pm	Help! I now have a somewhat borked fedora system. Here is a list of events that happened before it, in no useful order. Got the Equilibrium dvd out of the library; I have it for one week now. Tried installing VLC; my windows laptop doesn't have a dvd drive, and this was the first time I've tried playing a dvd on fedora. The first time I ran vlc, I selected the wrong mode and the it froze the whole computer. Not even the ssh client that I had connected was responding. Reboot with the power button. Finish installing Open-carpet. When starting, it beeps some **GTK WARNING** and refuses to start. Try vlc again, this time selecting a different format. Gets as far as showing a black window before yelling "Alsa error: no soundcard configured" or something of the sort. Boot up into Knoppix to see if it detects the sound correctly. It does, and I play far too much Frozen Bubble. Knoppix + phoenix bios hangs on shutdown (Knoppix thinks the box is off, but it doesn't turn off), so I turn it off by yanking the power cable. Try to boot up, and find that I get an error message instead of a normal graphical login prompt. The error is "There already appears to be an X server running on display :0. Should I try another display number? If you answer no, I will attempt to start the server on :0 again. (You can change consoles by pressing Ctrl-Alt plus a function key, such as Ctrl-Alt-F7 to go to console 7. X servers usually run on consoles 7 and higher.)", selecting no makes the same message appear, selecting yes makes it reappear with a :1 instead of :0. A google search suggests that this is related to gdm, the gnome display manager. One of the nice things about having multiple computers is that I can still SSH and VNC into it normally, even though I can't login! Side note: GNOME has not been that stable for me since upgrading to Fedora Core 2, test 1 (release 1.90). When nautilus runs on display :1, none of the normal file icons show up; just the same generic white icon, and the logs are flooded with stuff like "** (nautilus:1649): WARNING **: No description found for mime type "text/x-log" (file is "hs_err_pid26159.log"), please tell the gnome-vfs mailing list. ** (nautilus:1649): WARNING **: No description found for mime type "text/x-log" (file is "hs_err_pid11572.log"), please tell the gnome-vfs mailing list. ** (nautilus:1649): WARNING **: No description found for mime type "text/x-log" (file is "hs_err_pid11572.log"), please tell the gnome-vfs mailing list." Other side note: I was running the up2date applet during this time, upgrading about 3 or so packages at once, and it complained about a few a the packages not having valid signatures. I just clicked ok; not sure if that has anything to do with this mess. The Ars OpenForum would probably be a better place to post this. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Tuesday, March 16th, 2004
1:26 pm	Painful image of the day Anyone what to celebrate Ashoura this year? Whacky sig Slashdot user pizza_milkshake has perl -e'$_=q#: 13_2: 12/o{>: 8_4) (_4: 6/2^-2; 3;-2^\2: 5/7\_/\7: 12m m::#;y#:#\n#;s#(\D)(\d+)#$1x$2#ge;print'; when run that evaluates to __ /o{> ____) (____ //^--; ;--^\\ ///////\_/\\\\\\\ m m Nifty! Mild car accident I've been learning to drive and last sunday while I was backing out of our driveway in my dad's 1988 blue manual transmission accord, I hit a red saturn. Not how I would have liked to start a week. Canonical vs. absolute paths in Java When I tried running my filesystem scan utility on my redhat box, it got stuck in an infinite loop because /home/jonathan/.openoffice/user/work/ pointed to /home/jonathan/, so it quickly gets stuck repeatedly scanning paths that begin with /home/jonathan/.openoffice/user/work/.openoffice/user/work/.openoffice/user/work/.openoffice etc. However, requesting the canonical path instead of the absolute path renormals it. Hosting? I'd like to post links to files that I write in here; anyone have any recommendations? (Comment on this)
Thursday, February 12th, 2004
11:42 pm	My latest DROD.net/forum addiction side effect . . . . . . Was the creation of a piece of software that can read a *.demo file, and display statistics on time taken and types of moves made in a tree format, mirrored in a text pane for easy pasting. Get it here(zipped exe) or here(jarred java source). ( Sample output ) Note: since free geocities accounts are have so many limitations, you might have to paste the address into a new window to download it. When enough people read my journal, I'll buy a better site. (Comment on this)
11:07 pm	Cool news of the day Mentioned at trnmag, nature materials, and Philips Philips has built a 64 x 64 monochrome flexible organic transistor display that's 1/3 of a millimeter thick. They've managed to integrate some of the control circuits into the plastic as well, starting with shift registers. It's been bent back and forth 100 times without noticeable degradation. It has a white reflectivity of about 35% and a contrast ratio of 9, being based off of E-ink More detail here and here. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, January 21st, 2004
1:43 pm	CSS syntax highlighting in Jext The default edition of Jext doesn't come with a highlighting mode for CSS so I tried to add one. Step one: seeing where the syntax highlighting definitions are stored. Cd'ing to my Jext installation directory didn't turn up any filenames that sounded likely, so I ran 'jar -tf jext.jar|less'; that command turned up gold with filenames such as "org/gjt/sp/jedit/syntax/PikeTokenMarker.class". Step two: grabbing the source (jext.jar contained only the compiled .class files and no source files) available for free with CVS off their SourceForge project. Using Eclipse to grab a cvs snapshot, I moved jext.jar to jext.jar.bak and tried building from the source, using the included Ant build file. Result: a bunch of error messages. After editing the build.xml file slightly, I now built Jext from the source without any errors. I now created a new file, "CSSTokenMarker.java", running off "JavaTokenMarker.java" as a guide. Since jEdit was in the path, I opened up a small .css file in jEdit to see if the jEdit maintainers had added a CSS highlighting mode since Jext had copyed one of their components. Answer: Yes. Not only that, but they had refactored the codebase dramatically, so that syntax highlighting definitions were now being stored in .xml files instead of .java files. Step three: doing it. With the jEdit css.xml file in one tab and JavaTokenMarker.java in another, and many thanks to find/replace all, I put all the keywords listed in the css.xml file into CSSTokenMarker.java and added 'assert', 'BigInteger', and 'BigDecimal' as keywords in the Java file. Rebuilding Jext with Ant showed that the changes in JavaTokenMarker.java had taken affect and creating CSSTokenMarker.java had done nothing. A full text search for some of the highlighting modes in the Jext source turned up jext-defs.props.xml, editing this slightly and rebuilding gave me . . . a version of Jext with a CSS syntax highlighting mode! (Comment on this)
Thursday, January 15th, 2004
2:25 pm	CGI To handle multiple tabs in Mozilla having only one title at a time, I wrote a simple script to dynamically create any requested title. ( The script ) (Comment on this)
Tuesday, January 13th, 2004
1:29 pm	Html recursion While glancing at the html specifications trying to get my last post to work, I noticed that the Object and Inline Frames could be used to create a self referencing html page. Here's what I came up with: ( One html page ) and: ( a companion page ) Opening the first file in Mozilla displayed about three layers deep, and stopped. Opening it in IE displayed one layer deep, and pressing stop gave a persistent hourglass icon; a glance at a task manager showed that it was using over 40 percent of the cpu and slowing sucking up memory at the rate of a megabyte every few seconds. I hav'nt tested it in any other browser, and would appreciate hearing of the results. (Comment on this)
Monday, January 12th, 2004
6:33 pm	Comics After noticing the dilbert_feed, in my friendsfriends page, I thought it would by a simple to create a dynamic page that displays the current comics inline, instead of just providing a link. Here's what I came up with, in a short time: ( The python source ) Edit the comics [] as you like, place in /cgi-bin under some useful name such as "comics.py" and see if it runs. It works for me with apache2 with Python 2.2.2 on Redhat 9, and has been viewed successfully in Mozilla on both windows xp and Redhat, although IE spits it out. See if it renders in Opera / Safari / any other browser and post your results Unfortunately, since I'm behind a router, you can't run it from me. Enjoy. (Comment on this)