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unixronin: Galen the technomage, from Babylon 5: Crusade (Default)
Unixronin

December 2012

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February 27th, 2006

unixronin: Pissed-off avatar (Pissed off)
Monday, February 27th, 2006 06:52 am

I found an envelope big enough to mail my naturalization application in.  I sorted the two stacks of papers on my desk to get the papers together and dig out stuff that I realized this morning had slipped my mind.  And during the simple course of this sorting, which took perhaps ten minutes, I managed to hide the envelope so thoroughly I can no longer find it.

My brain has fallen and it can't get up.


Edit:  Two minutes later, of course, I find it in almost plain sight.  Has anyone seen my mind lately?  I think I'm losing it.

unixronin: Galen the technomage, from Babylon 5: Crusade (Default)
Monday, February 27th, 2006 07:49 am

I'd be safer riding with Ted Kennedy
than sharing the road with Bill Janklow.

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unixronin: The kanji for "chugo" (Duty/loyalty)
Monday, February 27th, 2006 08:15 am

Q:  Do you support the Constitution and form of government of the United States?

Reaction every time I see this question: "Yes, but it's a shame the government doesn't."

unixronin: The caduceus (Medical/Health)
Monday, February 27th, 2006 04:38 pm

Turns out the reason my therapy session last week was cancelled on short notice is my therapist injured her knee and couldn't bend it enough to get into her car.

In other news, this week she recommended that I consult a neurologist regarding memory and cognitive issues, after I just sort of ... stalled in the middle of signing the check for the copay, and it took me three or four seconds to figure out how to get started again.  I've long suspected the medical malpractice incident in 1993 did permanent damage, and it's well known that long-term chronic pain causes organic changes in the brain.

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unixronin: A somewhat Borg-ish high-tech avatar (Techno/geekdom)
Monday, February 27th, 2006 05:09 pm

Suppose you're writing an applet using PerlTk, and you want to specify the initial size of your window (not, really, an unreasonable request).  You hunt through the PerlTk documentation and the O'Reilly Tk book, and you eventually find out that according to these resources, the correct way to do this is as follows (non-essential code snipped for brevity):

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use Tk;
...
main();
...
MainLoop();
quit();

sub main
{
    $app = MainWindow->new(-height => 600,
                                               -width   => 800);
    $app -> formGrid(40,30);

There's just one problem with this:  It turns out not to work.  I've dug into the issue several times since writing this code, and never found a reason why it didn't work, when according to all the documentation it should have been working.

Today, it occurred to me to ask my fellow Perl monks and see whether one of them knew the answer to this conundrum.  It turned out someone did, and in fact, commented:

"Oh, that doesn't work.  It's never worked."

It turns out that what you actually have to do is this:

sub main
{
    $app = MainWindow->new();
    $app->geometry("800x600");
    $app -> formGrid(40,30);

And then it'll work.

So now you know.  The moral of the story?  Know when to Ignore, rather than Read, the ... uh ... Fine Manual.

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