Later in the process, I was about to insert the CD drive into one of the outward facing slots. It didn’t quite fit, and I noticed the metal framework of the CD drive was bent out of shape a little. I assumed it was a cosmetic problem and just pushed the dent back in, so that the drive slid snugly into the case. I didn’t get to use it that evening because I didn’t have a cable to connect it. Tonight I was able to try it out though. It gave out such a heart-wrenching noise when I fed it a CD that I jumped out of my seat. It was worse than nails on a chalkboard. Needless to say, it didn’t read the CD. There must have been some mechanical damage to it after all.

Back to my story: instead of installing the OS from a CD, I had to find a way to install it from a spare external hard drive I had. I figured out how to do that. It wasn’t too hard. The trick is that it has to be a FAT32 file system because the BIOS wouldn’t read anything else, and in order to get a FAT32 file system you need the volume to have a pretty small size. I don’t know exactly how large, but certainly not the whole 250 GB my hard drive had. That didn’t work. I created a partition only large enough to fit the install files: around 5 GB.

Anyway, I got to use my new machine on Wednesday night and I was beside myself with joy. It was working like a charm. The next morning, I started transferring about 100 GB from my old computer. The machine froze partway through the process and wouldn’t respond to any input. A hard reboot later, the BIOS told me that the hard drive has failed according to S.M.A.R.T. and it needed to be replaced. So much for my happiness. Newegg’s return process is as long as it can possibly be so that they can avoid any possibility of being swindled. I have to send in the hard drive first, then they’ll look at it, and only then will they send me a new one. They assure me each of these steps will take some number of days, and their sum seems to be about 2 weeks. Great. I have this wonderful machine next to my desk, and it’s worthless to me for another 2 weeks.

Now, It’s not really too hard for me to wait a little longer, but there is a catch. Newegg’s return policy states that I must return everything within 30 days of the invoice date. Funny how these days are measured in actual days whereas all of Newegg’s days are measured in business days. Whatever. The kicker is that now that I have sent in my hard drive, I have to wait two weeks. Meanwhile, I can’t really put the other parts to use to make sure they’re all in perfect working order until I can get a hard drive! These 30 days will not be extended on account of the failed hard drive, so basically by the time this new hard drive arrives, this trial period will have expired. What’s more, by my reading of the terms, if the replacement hard drive were to fail in a similar way to the last one, I will have no recourse but to buy a new one because the 30 days are up.

I am pretty upset about all this and I don’t think I’ll be using Newegg again. It might not be their fault that UPS banged up the shipment well enough to destroy the only two devices in it that have moving parts, but Newegg’s return process is not robust enough to deal with that possibility. It’s too much of a risk to take. I’m not planning on asking for a replacement CD drive because that only cost $20 and I don’t feel like dealing with the return process anymore. They ask that I return it in the original packaging “with all accessories”. Well, the CD drive came with no accessories and it was just bubble-wrapped and thrown in a much bigger box with other things. I’m not going to go look for packing material and boxes. I’m done. I’ll find a CD drive elsewhere. It’s next to worthless as a part in today’s computer world anyway.

Enough ranting.

Snarl usually requires an app to register itself with Snarl, which I didn’t do. As such, you had no control over how long notifications should stay on your screen because Winamp didn’t show in the Apps tab from within Snarl’s preferences. Well now it does. I tested it, and it works. You can set the notifications to stay for 10 seconds. The default remains 3. These settings can be found within Snarl, not in Winamp’s plugin settings dialog.

Another very nice addition I’ve made is that I now use Snarl’s ability to update notifications that are already visible, so that if you find yourself skipping multiple songs, you won’t flood your screen with Winamp notifications. The same one will keep getting updated. This was the motivation for resurrecting the source code.

One additional thing: if installing the new version of gen_snarl causes your Winamp to crash, then you have to download and install the Visual Studio 2010 C++ Redistributable package. There is a chance you already have it installed, especially if you’re running Windows 7 (I believe). Installing it won’t hurt any other piece of software on your computer, I promise!

Thu Jun 09 00:06:02 +0000 2011

In order to parse this tweet using the Boost Date Time library, we can use the following code.

#define BOOST_ALL_DYN_LINK
#include <iostream>
#include <boost/date_time/posix_time/posix_time.hpp>
#include <boost/date_time/posix_time/posix_time_duration.hpp>
#include <boost/date_time/c_local_time_adjustor.hpp>

int main()
{
    using namespace boost::posix_time;
    std::string format = "%a %b %d %H:%M:%S +0000 %Y";
    std::string tweetTimeString = "Thu Jun 08 00:06:02 +0000 2011";
    ptime tweetTime;

    time_input_facet facet(format, 1);

    std::stringstream ss(tweetTimeString); 
    ss.imbue(std::locale(ss.getloc(), &facet));
    ss >> tweetTime;

    std::cout << "Time: " << tweetTime << std::endl; 
    
    typedef boost::date_time::c_local_adjustor<ptime> local_adj;
    ptime adjusted = local_adj::utc_to_local(tweetTime);
    std::cout << "Adjusted for time zone: " << adjusted << std::endl;

    ptime now(second_clock::local_time());
    time_duration elapsed = now - adjusted;
    std::stringstream elapsedString;
    if (elapsed.hours() < 1)
        elapsedString << elapsed.minutes() << " minutes";
    else
        elapsedString << elapsed.hours() << " hours";
    std::cout << "Time elapsed since then: " << elapsedString.str() << std::endl;
}

Time: 2011-Jun-09 00:06:02
Adjusted for time zone: 2011-Jun-08 20:06:02
Time elapsed since then: 55 minutes
Press any key to continue . . .

Pretty neat, isn’t it? The code is pretty readable, too. The adjustment I’m talking about is a translation from UTC to my local timezone which is EDT. I have not found a good way to deal with the UTC offset, but from what I can tell, Twitter will always give me UTC timestamps, which is why I just hardcoded +0000 into the format string. I might have to fix this later though.

I attempted to do that last night, but I ran into an error that I couldn’t diagnose, let alone fix, so now I’m opting for an extra bit of adventure. I’m going to attempt to build the cross compiler on a GNU/Linux machine, so that the build system has access to a complete and conformant UNIX shell. In order to do that, I will use a cross-compiler from GNU/Linux to Windows. Tomorrow I’ll tell you how it went.

Let the fun begin!

This is by far the most disturbing thing I have seen on the Internet – a private company that can supply you with information, which even when in the hands of the government sends a slight chill down my spine.

When I attempted to use https, some settings wouldn’t take effect when I saved them, and I couldn’t use the Insert -> SharePoint control -> Custom List Form.

I wanted to see if the CPU issue would present itself in another music player, and seeing as how Windows comes with Windows Media Player, I tried that. It didn’t have the problem, so I kept listening to music with it. Then I noticed that, of course, it doesn’t work with Snarl, and I was surprised to find that no plugin with that functionality exists. I set out to see what it would take to write such a plugin, and boy is it hairy! There are a lot of ins and outs to it, and I spent approximately 5 hours Googling, reading and piecing together information just so I can set up a build environment with which I can write the plugin. I think I am basically done at this point, but I have no idea if I’ll figure out how to listen to the right events and forward them to Snarl. More to come.

Truthfully, while WMP is not a very full-featured player, and its international text support for tags is not compatible with any other player (though it does support writing non-Latin characters), it looks awesome in Vista with Aero enabled. It also has a very nice view of albums. I don’t think I’ll be able to handle it for long, but I’ll keep it around for a while. Let’s try the full Vista experience, I say.

Here's what I meant when I said I liked the album view.

So here’s where my idea comes in. What if a single contiguous file representing a virtual hard disk volume could be encrypted in such a way as to allow two passwords to decrypt it? One password would reveal the true data, and the other would reveal harmless or, better yet, misleading information. If this were possible, the spy would feel free to reveal the dummy password somewhere into the 24^th hour of torture (so that he or she doesn’t arouse suspicion). I don’t know if this makes good tactical sense, but it is certainly a clever way to get off the hook and buy yourself some time.

When I came up with this, I had no idea if it was technically possible. It is crucial that such double encryption be undetectable and that the knowledge of the dummy password is not enough to give you access to the true data. Well, it turns out that not only is this scheme possible, but it has already been implemented. I just found out about it. You can get your very own kit for buying time under torture by downloading, installing and setting up TrueCrypt — open-source encryption software. It can encrypt whole partitions, even the ones where your OS resides, and it works on Windows.

By the way, I’m not playing with TrueCrpyt because I’m afraid I’ll find myself at the receiving end of torture. I just think cryptography is really cool.

It was written using Mono C# and was, for the most part, gracefully ported over to Windows. However, the UI toolkit it uses is GTK+, which I have found to be very subtly broken on Windows, with bugs that are difficult to reproduce. I’ll just give one example. Tomboy has a tray icon which you can click on, and a menu pops up with a list of your recent notes. If you decide against opening any notes, you might want to click elsewhere on the screen to make the menu go away. You’ll be out of luck though. It won’t go away. This bug was reported to the GTK+ team in November 2006, and it’s still not fixed.

Thankfully, a knowledgeable figure by the name of Raphaël Godart found a way to work around this bug. I tested his patch yesterday, debugged a couple of issues with it, and turned it back in to the Tomboy team. Hopefully it will be included in the next stable release. I, however, can take advantage of the patch straight away, which is awesome.

One last cool thing about Tomboy.

What you see here is a note where I have typed a bit of math. You input it by writing LaTeX code surrounded by \[  \], and when you move away from the code, Tomboy automagically turns the code into a picture. Placing the cursor over the picture turns it back into code for you to modify. It took a bit of effort on my part to get this addin to work on Windows. I hope to finish it up and send my work back to the author, so others can use this.

I used to take notes in math class using LaTeX. At the end of one semester of class, I had 39 pages of notes in a pdf file. Having the notes in Tomboy would have been much cooler though. And more organized.