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Personal thingies....
by Montmorency 02 Apr '10

02 Apr '10

Thanks for all the positive responses, both on the list and by email. A fair number of people claim to be unsurprised. Which I guess shows how generally crappy I am about being closeted. Also, as somebody commented, April 1st, was possibly a VERY BAD day on which to post such a thing, but I guess I didn't think. Anyway, thanks again. katsmeat. montmorency(a)ukfsn.org bellphegore(a)nerdshack.com

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Personal Announcement
by Bellphegore 01 Apr '10

01 Apr '10

People don't seem to do much in the way of personal announcements on this list. But I though what the hell as a handful of ALUG people already know about me, as do almost all of my non-ALUG friends. I thought there'd be no harm in throwing it out there, with the vague hope that nobody will actually give a damn. So yeah.... I'm actually one of those funny transexual people. Which really amounts to finding the whole maleness thing a complete annoyance and wishing it would go away. Actually, when I say annoyance, I mean gut-churning feeling of fundamental wrongness that's there 24/7. The next point is what am I doing about it? Well, early days and all that. I've been seeing a therapist, and living part-time as a woman. Sort-of a try-before-you-buy deal, trying to seeing if being a woman actually works for me. It actually does, though at the moment, nothing is certain. The whole process of physical transformation, which is lengthy, expensive and complicated, seems to be a possibility right now, rather than a probability. I'm simply engaging in a process of exploration to see if it'd be right for me. The third point is how does this affect you? Well, if you don't show up to the Norwich pub meets then you've just wasted 30 seconds of your life reading something that's completely irrelevant to you. If you do come to the pub meet, then you may see me come in female role. That's about it. I get the impression this isn't amazingly uncommon in the tech field. A surprising number of geeky women became geeks before they became women, it's not unlikely you know, or know of, some already. Anyway, please view this as my small, personal contribution to redressing the gender imbalance in tech. Katsmeat bellphegore(a)nerdshack.com montmorency(a)ukfsn.org

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Firebug, how to use it to investigate CSS?
by Chris G 01 Apr '10

01 Apr '10

I'm trying to work out another CSS conundrum and, as per Brett's advice, I am trying to use Firebug to do it. However, at the moment, I really can't see how Firebug can be used to help me find what CSS is applied to a specific bit of HTML. I can follow the HTML facilities of Firebug OK, how it highlights the sections of a page as you click on different bits of HTML in the Firebug window. However I'm not at all sure how to then try and work out what particular bit of CSS is affecting something. Can anyone (Brett?) elucidate a little for me. -- Chris Green

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Graphics package to produce neat, aligned protocol table (TCP header) pictures?
by Srdjan Todorovic 31 Mar '10

31 Mar '10

Hi, Lets say I'm documenting a low-level protocol or file format and want to produce a picture such as the TCP header (etc) table (http://izecksohn.com/pedro/pub/tcp_header.jpg) what's the best program to use for that? Another example: http://www.wtcs.org/snmp4tpc/images/TCP-Header.jpg I have tried Openoffice drawing tool in Writer, and it does not align well. Inkscape might be good as I can snap to grid. I could use a spreadsheet and then export to picture. Is there a special purpose application for this that anyone has used and would reccommend? I need to be able to insert text into the cells or perhaps refer to the cells in some markup way - also the cells should be fixed width as each cell would represent one byte. Any suggestions please? How would, for example, a graphics designer go about doing this? Thanks all, Srdjan

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Replacing popped-off key onlaptop
by Ted.Harding＠manchester.ac.uk 30 Mar '10

30 Mar '10

Hi Folks, Appealing to the hardware-savvy anongst you! I have an Advent 8117 laptop (nice machine, by the way), and one of the keys has popped off (the down-arrow key near the bottom right). For the life of me I can;t suss out how to put the key back on again. The details are probably not specific to this particular machine -- they may well be identical on other makes and models, so if you recognise the description below and know how to put a key back on, I'll be pleased to hear! The key itself has a kind of "trestle-like" hinged frame underneath it, whose function seems to be to keep the key-top level as it goes up and down. This is very tiny. It is presumably also intended to attach itself to something on the keyboard (see below). The bed of the keyboard has a little rubber/plastic nipple which is pushed down by the key (and, lacking the key-top, I can operate it by pressing on the nipple). Above and below this nipple are two lttle metal mountings, each with two little metal flanges projecting upwards. The two flanges on the top mounting have each a little notch near the keyboard bed, as if something is supposed to go in there. The two flanges on the bottom mounting also have a little notch each, in this case being directed somewhat upwards. I guess that the "trestle" structure on the key-top is meant to somehow engage with the notches in the flanges as described above. However, no matter how I try to manipulate things, I can NOT get the key-top to re-attach! I hope that's enough to describe the situation to Those Who Know. Looking forward to very simple and easy-to-execute instructions on how to put things together again! With thanks, Ted. -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding(a)manchester.ac.uk> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 29-Mar-10 Time: 20:42:24 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------

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Version control choices for web development
by Mark Rogers 27 Mar '10

27 Mar '10

I've experimented a little with version control over the years (cvs, svn) but never used it in anger even though I know I should. The thing that's always stopped me is that I've never found one that I've liked for web development. What I have is a server in my office that everything gets developed on. When I am happy, I use unison to synchronise the changes to the live site. What this gives me, is no ability to roll back changes if something goes wrong. What I want is for the version on the live site to just be a checked out version from a version control system, with the changes on the dev server being checked in to the version control as we develop. However, to me the logical location for the version control system is therefore my dev server in the office (which has plenty of disk space), but I don't want to open up ports to allow live servers to "pull" a version from the system. I want to be able to "push" a version to the server from the dev server, and that's where I get stuck. The best solution I've ever come up with is to check out a separate local copy which I then unison to the live site, but this is two steps instead of one and (more importantly) means duplicating the site locally for no real benefit - which is a pain if a site has several hundred MB of images, for example. The other part that I've never found a good solution for is handling databases; ideally there should be a way to perform diffs against different MySQL database schemas and apply them but I'm not aware of a way to do this either. On the other hand, what I want to do seems like a fairly "standard" thing so I'm sure either there must be a way or that other people in similar situations have found a better way to do it than I am suggesting? -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0844 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) @ 13 Clarke Rd, Milton Keynes, MK1 1LG

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Re-ordering columns in an sqlite database
by Chris G 26 Mar '10

26 Mar '10

I know it isn't really necessary as it doesn't actually affect anything (except my sensibilities) but I'd like the ability to re-order columns in some sqlite databases. Well, it *does* have some advantages, it would mean I can do things like "SELECT * FROM database" and get the columns displayed in the order I want rather than the order resulting from database creation followed by adding extra columns as I found I needed them. So, is there any way to re-order columns other than by creating a new table with the required column order, copying all the data across, deleting the old table and renaming the new one? I can't find any neat utilities out there to do this for me. -- Chris Green

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iTunes on EEE
by Mark Rogers 26 Mar '10

26 Mar '10

I've done a bit of Googling but as a non-iTunes user I'd like some real user experience if possible. A customer of mine has ended up with a "ASUS little shitty netbook thing" (his words!) for his daughter, and with the requirement that "all she wants to do on it is surf the internet & manage her itunes on it". They don't like the noddy interface (presumably Xandros?) and I could replace that for him. But iTunes I know nothing about. I gather that Songbird is a suitable replacement, but I have no idea how similar it is to iTunes and whether it'll allow her to manage her music files. Surfing the internet is easy, and they can already do it. What they'd like, of-course, is the XP model. But installing XP is expensive and I'd like to show them that they don't need XP to do what they want. Assuming that they can.... -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0844 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) @ 13 Clarke Rd, Milton Keynes, MK1 1LG

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Re: [ALUG] Re-ordering columns in an sqlite database
by Govind Chandra 26 Mar '10

26 Mar '10

Brett Parker wrote: > In case one wasn't aware, all fields in sqlite are text. Nothing else. > It doesn't do type checking. It is not really so simple. Please have a look at http://www.sqlite.org/datatype3.html For reordering the columns of a table one could resort to a temporary table. create temporary table temptab as select column4, column3, column2, column1 from sometable; select * from temptab; I think that this is more flexible than reordering the columns of the main table. Remember that "temptab" is temporary and lasts only the current session, something I consider a feature. Govind Chandra

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Hi, Geeks!
by Ted.Harding＠manchester.ac.uk 22 Mar '10

22 Mar '10

It's been a nice sunny day, and all that; and I've been out enjoying it; and got back to find myself wondering where the word "geek" comes from (dunno why). So on to Wikipedia. Excerpt: "Formerly, the term referred to a carnival performer often billed as a wild man whose act usually includes biting the head off a live chicken, bat, snake or bugs." Well, yeah, "bugs" connects. But I hadn't been aware that my very first OS, CP/M, might stand for "Chicken Post/Mortem". Just a thought. And it's still nice and sunny out there, chicks. Ted. -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding(a)manchester.ac.uk> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 21-Mar-10 Time: 17:23:52 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------

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