well, the micra it appears has the ability to make fuel disappear even when it's standing still, making my cobra's 14mpg city and 22mpg highway economy, if that is an appropriate word, look _really attractive_.
it's gone from 1/8 tank last week to empty and 1/4 tank yesterday to empty, overnight. this morning, it is indicating 1/2 full and it's not starting.
bastard.
geek strikes back
orange has no access control on their staff being able to enable and disable services. this means that incompetent and ill-informed staff may not only mis-inform customers as to pricing and features but also disable the default setting of data service availability (9600baud) without a) warning the customer that enabling high-speed (28800 wow!) will take 24 hours b) informing the customer that there are _three_ speeds available, at standard rates off&peak for 9600, slightly higher than that for 14400, but that 28800 is 25p/min _flat_ rate c) actually switching _on_ the data service...
the guy i called back was very annoyed, told me of a company called softgsm.com that is trying to get their USB-nokia data cable approved by nokia (good luck guys) it would save me a _hell_ of a long cable+adaptor which is about 6 inches of plastic all joined together :)
i added an extra option -t 6 to the chatscripts, i now only wait 6 seconds for the phone to be told by "chat" to reset & wake up.
samba
i have no idea how it happened. one minute i was minding my own business, unsubscribed from virtually every mailing list in sight, receiving 4-5 emails per day and very happy about it, and suddenly _whammo_ it's a full-blown 150 email warfare scenario the likes of which make me homesick for the times when i was in OZ. _not_.
actually, that's not true: i really enjoyed the social life in canberra. it was the other bits that got to me.
well, after the technical discussion attempts moved on into the usual slagging off introductions, followed by attempts to actually move into further technical discussions and justifications for directions to take, and everyone getting far too much information, wasting time, some very surprising comments, a deliberately sensationalist article, i think that, deep down, the guys on the samba team are beginning to realise that they have a maintenance problem on their hands, which i've been telling them for at least two years, now.
the people whose names do not begin with andrew tridgell and jeremy allison do actually realise that samba needs to become similar to apache's architecture: libraries, modules and services. one or two of those people are actually prepared to sort out the mess.
hopefully this will result in people not wasting any _more_ awfully large amount of time on an experimental codebase i developed in 1997 for exploratory purposes, using very time-consuming [but information-rich, which was the whole point] network-reverse-engineering techniques.
zak and the importance of waking up
i've often received messages that, despite their shocking nature, were very useful "early morning" messages.
in a similar vein to "never post 3am letters", most people need to be aware that starting work later in the morning _after having been up_ for at least two to three hours results in a much more productive day...