simonb.com: a 35mm comedic short about a man

Bar Rouge, The Bund, Shanghai

Last night the termites that have been living in our door frame graduated to flying bugs, mated and died. There was millions of them. An inch deep on the floor. They got everywhere - in books, in keyboards, under adhesive tape. Took us four hours to clean up. Here’s a few pics

You would think that when sticking your company name onto your company building you would ask someone to check the English. Think again. Also note the stange Nava/Napa Valley duality. Spooky.

Is this the dumbest dialog box in the world? Its been with us for so long and apparently is still in the Tiger.

Heard on Shanghai TV News at Ten. “Qualifying toilets will be downsized.” In a story about saving water.

The trials of washing machine repair.

So we’ve got an Electrolux washing machine. Works fine for a year and a day. Until, like every other piece of consumer electronics, as soon as the warranty expires the equipment does too. “E20” says the display. “Drainage error” says the manual. So we call Electrolux - explain we’ve got the drainage error. Two blokes arrive. No tools. No spare parts. Can’t do anything. Go away. Next day. Same thing. Different blokes. By this time the wife is simmering. In the evening another bloke appears cap in hand - he doesn’t get past the front gate.

Skip forward a few days. After much telephoning and insisting they send a man who can. A young chap arrives. With parts. Yipee. We’ve got a drainage error we tell him. Right he says - no you haven’t - I’ll just replace all these parts. Which he does. It doesn’t work. He turns to us and says “You’ve got a drainage error” It’ll take three days to get the parts…

This maybe specific to Gentoo. Anyhoo, to get mount_nfs to work on a Mac when mounting Linux NFS server exports we have to use the -P option.

More info here

In which we learn the joys of easy admin that is the Mac. Not.

CUPS standards for Common Unix Printing System. The Mac comes with a nice graphical tool for printer management which has never really worked. So we manage from the command line. In this example we have a Linux machine with printers attached which is acting as a server.

In which we discover the delights of # placement.

If you’ve written code for more than one platform you’ve probably come across something that looks like this:

#if defined(_WIN32)
#elif defined(LINUX)
#endif

A lot of us indent to make things more readable so you might end up with this:

#if defined(_WIN32)
  #include <io.h>
#elif defined(LINUX)
  #include <ioctl.h>
#endif

According to K&R that’s valid. But some tools don’t do what you think. Take makedepend for example. I just discovered that if the line does not start with # then makedepend ignores it. So that file you think makedepend was picking up as an include is silently ignored. If you’re relying on makedepend you really should write the statements like this:

#if defined(_WIN32)
#  include <io.h>
#elif defined(LINUX)
#  include <ioctl.h>
#endif

I know compilers (e.g. gcc) can output dependency statements but I’ve found makedepend to be much faster. So I guess, until I fix makedepend, I’ll be paying more attention to where I put my hash from now on.

We’re lucky in this issue to have captured rare footage of the soontobesushi. 

The soontobesushi hails from Japan where it is occasionally found in the secluded areas of certain bespoke eating establishments. The fish is now seen all around the world but always in restaurants. The soontobesushi likes to make its home surrounded by a moving train of random objects. The reasons for this are unclear. As are the methods by which the fish builds the conveyor belt. Though at heart an outgoing type of personality the soontobesushi can be prone to prolonged depressions which the fish expresses by means of positioning its body in a variety of poses. These poses include swimming backwards, lying upside down, playing dead in deep water and (a personal favourite) the nose butt.

As this footage shows the soontobesushi, though normally a passive fish, is prone to outbursts of massive activity lasting several seconds. This can lead to the fish travelling literally feet in a matter of minutes. How lucky we are to have the privilege of witnessing this rare event.

As a pet the soontobesushi rebufs all shows of affection. Training can be attempted but will always fail. As will any attempts to get the fish to fetch or sit. They are, however, perfectly safe to leave with the children. One word of warning only: never leave a soontobesushi alone with a tuna as this can lead to terrible displays of jealousy by both breeds.

Happy New Year. This is the first post to the simonb.com weblog. Relax it gets better. It is raining in Shanghai.