taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

• The Trifecta of FAIL : ah, the hazards of monkey-patching core classes illustrated perfectly; a Ruby point-release upgrade broke Rails (via chromatic)
  (tags: ruby rails monkeypatching ouch programming coding oo subclassing apis)

• best intranet form ever : ‘The software my employer uses for booking holidays has recently been “upgraded” and we now need to specify an absence reason.’ there are several hundred reasons, including ‘Abortion’, ‘Stroke’, ‘Warts’, ‘Dementia’, ‘Rectal Problems’, ‘Manic Depression’ and, um, ‘Wax’. best of all, this is for booking time off in advance…
  (tags: intranet funny inept hr wtf daily-wtf bureaucracy pto holidays)

• Sup : ‘a console-based email client for people with a lot of email [..] The goal of Sup is to become the email client of choice for nerds everywhere.’ Looks like they’ve nicked a few ideas from GMail, too (via Luis)
  (tags: via:tieguy console linux unix sup mail mail-readers ui apps)

Tags: apis, apps, bureaucracy, coding, console, daily-wtf, funny, holidays, hr, inept, intranet, linux, mail, mail-readers, monkeypatching, oo, ouch, programming, pto, rails, ruby, subclassing, sup, ui, unix, via:tieguy, wtf

I’ve just spent a rather frustrating morning attempting to debug major performance problems with my home wireless network; one of my machines couldn’t associate with the AP at all anymore, and the laptop (which was upstairs in the home office, for a change) was getting horrific, sub-dialup speeds.

I did lots of moving of Linksys APs and tweaking of “txpower” settings, without much in the way of results. Cue tearing hair out etc.

Eventually, I logged into the OpenWRT AP over SSH, ran iftop to see what clients were using the wifi, and saw that right at the top, chewing up all the available bandwidth, was a multicast group called 224.0.0.56. The culprit! There was nothing wrong with the wifi setup after all — the problem was massive bandwidth consumption, crowding out all other traffic.

You see, “pulseaudio”, the new Linux sound server, has a very nifty feature — streaming of music to any number of listeners, over RTP. This is great. What’s not so great is that this seems to have magically turned itself on, and was broadcasting UDP traffic over multicast on my wifi network, which didn’t have enough bandwidth to host it.

Here’s how to turn this off without killing “pulseaudio”. Start “paman”, the PulseAudio Manager, and open the “Devices” tab:

(click on the image to view separately, if it’s partly obscured.)

Select the “RTP Monitor Stream” in the “Sources” list, and open “Properties”:

Hit the “Kill” button, and your network is back to normal. Phew.

Another (quicker) way to do this, is using the command-line “pacmd” tool:

echo kill-source-output 0 | pacmd

It’s a mystery where this is coming from, btw. Here’s what “paman” says it came from:

But I don’t seem to have an active ‘module-rtp-send’ line in my configuration:

: jm 98...; grep module-rtp-send /etc/pulse/* /home/jm/.pulse*
/etc/pulse/default.pa:#load-module module-rtp-send source=rtp.monitor

Curious. And irritating.

Tags: multicast, pulseaudio, rtp, wifi, wtf

A good deal came up on a mailing list I’m on: SAMSUNG 245BW Black High Glossy 24″ 5ms DVI Widescreen LCD Monitor for $459.99, or $409.99 after rebate, via Newegg.

A follow-up from a German poster: he’d just picked up a Dell 2407WFP-HC ‘for the low, low price of 659 EUR’.

We marvelled at the price difference — then I looked up Dell.ie forcomparison. I thought 659 EUR was bad, but Dell.ie is asking for 1,117.74 Euros inc VAT for the same product — insane!!

What possible excuse could there be for that? EUR 458.74 worth of shipping maybe? Do they encase it in platinum? That’s nearly three times the price of the Newegg monitor.

Update: Duh. I’m an idiot. That’s a 2707WFP, not a 2407WFP; it’s 3″ bigger and quite a bit fancier. It appears Dell.ie is no longer selling the 2407WFP.

Tags: dell, dell.ie, ireland, markup, newegg, prices, ripoff, shopping, wtf

This should be in the running for “least informative dialog ever”.

(The information in question was that Firefox had been upgraded by the Ubuntu Gutsy Update Manager app, if you’re curious…)

Tags: crap, informed, ui, wtf

After a short period where things were looking up, Screenclick have once again reverted to type, by ditching the lovely simple Netflix-style queue they seemed to be using, and instead instituting some new kind of bizarre homebrew wierdness.

It looks like a queue, with a line-by-line listing of movies — but then beside each title, there are 3 radio buttons: “High”, “Medium”, and “Low”.

The instructions run as follows:

All titles are sorted in alphabetical order within their priority group

• - High: Please deliver these titles as soon as possible
• - Medium: Please deliver these titles as they become available
• - Low: I don’t mind when you send these titles

So what — does this mean that if I put a title in as “High”, I’m going to receive it next, or not, or what? and what’s with the alphabetical order? WTF is going on? argh.

Anyway, I just got out “Amores Perros”, presumably due to this alphabetical ordering thing. not what I wanted at all. What a mess.

Tags: dvds, ireland, netflix, screenclick, tv, usability, wtf

Myself and Tom were in a taxi last night, stopped at a stop light, when I noticed something odd.

A girl, about 20 or so, walking along the path stopped beside a bag of recycled rubbish, and bent over as if she was tying her shoelace. Instead of fixing her lace, though, she quickly ripped a hole in the (transparent) plastic bag, grabbed a crumpled Fanta can, and walked off.

WTF? anyone got any theories?

Tags: cans, dublin, odd, recycling, rubbish, wtf

wtf? From the Red Hat 9 at(1) manual page:

At allows fairly complex time specifications, extending the POSIX.2 standard. … You may also specify midnight, noon, or teatime (4pm).

Tags: hat, midnight, noon, page, posix, red, teatime, time, wtf