Mathrick no PATANKO PRESS!

Here.

My calendar says it’s Dec, 21st today, which means it’s been one day since my article got published. Yay!

Introducing CCharset!
If you were ever annoyed by XChat’s perpetual inability to follow per-channel encoding settings, then be no more! CCharset allows you to override encoding on a per-channel basis, so now you can use iso-2022-jp in the ever stubborn #nihongo and utf-8 everywhere else. Isn’t that cool? It does exactly this one thing, manages your encodings, nothing else, particularly won’t spew stupid messages on all channels you’re on and fuck with your colours, unlike certain other plugins (coughfreecharcough). Also supports saving your settings, so you don’t have to ever enter that info more than once.

Of course, the usual disclaimer applies, so if this plugin runs over your cat, then sorry for the cat, but you have only yourself to blame.

Update: It has come to my attention that the plugin messes with non-ASCII topic setting badly. So there. You have been warned. I’ll probably (attempt to) fix it someday, but right now, it’s not a top priority.

Today, kids, I have so fucking maddening that I want to stab people in the eyes with a toothpick an amusing story about computers.

Dramatis personae:

• Me
• Windows Remote Desktop
• Firefox
• Putty
• Mysterious Stranger

So, I was working on a friends machine via remote dekstop (which, by the way, is pretty sweet, with sound forwarding and stuff), and in the course of matters, I upgraded the copy of Firefox instaled there to 1.5. Then it stopped connecting to the net. IE works. Ping works. FF does not. Hmmm…

Okay, so I did what I needed with IE (bleh), and moved on to the part which required SSH access to the Uni server. Downloaded Putty, installed, ran, it dies with timeout. HMMM. Some thinking later, I figured it’s probably a firewall. Opened firewall settings, it’s OFF. WTF?. So I fiddled with it harder, and some 15 minutes later, I was able to determine that Windows’ firewall was indeed off, but Sygate Personal Firewall was ON. Okay, I thought, strange I haven’t noticed any indication of this fact, but ran Start->Applications->Sygate Personal Firewall. And then (enter Mysterious Stranger), it’s shown me this.
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WHAT. THE. FUCK!?
Just how incredibly, unbelievably cretinous shithead you have to be to invent something like that? Because it was blocking stuff, just not showing any indication of this fact. Of course, when I went to this machine, sat by the console, logged out, logged in again, and then connected via RDesktop, Sygate was magically able to show its UI! Person responsible for this should have all teeth removed without anaesthetics, and all programmers involved in creation of this abolition their fingers broken, just to make sure they won’t commit similar crime ever again.

(As an aside, I’m not sure that it showing its UI is a significant improvement over lack of UI, as then it regularly, every couple of minutes shows little info popup WHICH STEALS FOCUS OF YOUR CURRENT WINDOW, and also has “don’t show this again” checkbox which doesn’t work, so next time it’ll popup it again, with the same non-working checkbox again, and then, when my friend came back, and we tried to transfer some files via FTP, so he installed FileZilla or something, but it wasn’t working, despite us trying for some 20 minutes, and then I discovered that fucking Sygate was showing blocking question popups, but it was doing that on my account, which was fast-switched to his, fuck, where’s my toothpick, I’m gonna stab them to death, ARGH)