Eric Covener’s Journal

i miraculously was able to fix my jammed (all the way pushed up to the steering wheel, of course) electric drivers-side seat with my own two little hands. Electrical snafu aside, The honoroable engineers at toyota made each of the 4 14mm nuts in it’s own uniquely challenging orientation.

I felt like a combination of Andy Duphresne and a triumphant contestant on Ninja Warrior when I hoisted the seat out of the car, only to flop it over and stare at the electrical guts.

I was very surprised that neither FAQ for this failure was actually the problem, but there was a blatant disconnected line that did the trick.

You don’t have to do this yourself with LD_PRELOAD, although it doesn’t really save you much!

--wrap=symbol
Use a wrapper function for symbol. Any undefined reference to symbol will be resolved to "__wrap_symbol". Any undefined
reference to "__real_symbol" will be resolved to symbol.

This can be used to provide a wrapper for a system function. The wrapper function should be called "__wrap_symbol". If it
wishes to call the system function, it should call "__real_symbol".

Here is a trivial example:

void *
__wrap_malloc (size_t c)
{
printf ("malloc called with %zu\n", c);
return __real_malloc (c);
}

If you link other code with this file using --wrap malloc, then all calls to "malloc" will call the function "__wrap_malloc"
instead. The call to "__real_malloc" in "__wrap_malloc" will call the real "malloc" function.

You may wish to provide a "__real_malloc" function as well, so that links without the --wrap option will succeed. If you do
this, you should not put the definition of "__real_malloc" in the same file as "__wrap_malloc"; if you do, the assembler may
resolve the call before the linker has a chance to wrap it to "malloc".

at com.ibm.lex.lap.lapimport.LAPConstants.(LAPConstants.java:53)

.. means install libXp before using IBM JRE 1.4.2

http://www.collegian.psu.edu/archive/2010/01/20/president_ranks_within_top_10.aspx

Penn State President Graham Spanier is one of the highest paid public university presidents, according to a recent report — but rankings can be deceiving, officials said.

The ranking, published by The Chronicle of Higher Educa-tion, lists Spanier as receiving the sixth-highest base salary at $620,000 for the 2008-09 academic year. Ohio State University President E. Gordon Gee was ranked first, with a base salary of $802,125.

But Spanier’s name did not appear on the list of the top 10 public university presidents in terms of total compensation, as he does not receive many of the benefits included in extra incentive packages offered at other universities, Penn State spokeswoman Annemarie Mountz said.

..

“Look at all of the perks and incentives included in other peoples’ salaries,” Mountz said. “None of that is applicable to President Spanier. He has his salary, and then beyond that, he lives in a university house. He doesn’t get a housing allowance, and he drives a university-owned car.”

My DNS had been pretty laggy lately, on the order of seconds, and playing on he command line with /usr/bin/host it would always hang between grabbing the A record and all the MX info.

I told my router to ignore the DNS servers in the DHCP response, and instead uses googles 8.8.8.8, 8.8.4.4 servers. Zippy once again!

For some reason even my local dnsmasq didn’t get in the way of debugging, which it should have!

Move to chrome is looking more and more likely to succeed.

• My most important greasemonkey script runs natively in chrome (chrome downloads and installs them as if they were compiled into their own extension already)
• Chrome supports the same syntax for quick searches, although it doesn’t let you add them from right-click on a form
• whatever native totem embedding extension I use is working for e.g. xmradio online
• native flash plugin works
• adblock port

My only remaining problems are no forward-slash-to-search and some frustrating slow DNS inside of chrome. I eagerly await a hung chrome tab that doesn’t take down 10 others!

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/01/07/rsa_768_broken/

The team managed to factor the 232-digit number that RSA held out as a representative 768-bit modulus from a now-obsolete challenge. They spent half a year using 80 processors on polynomial selection. Sieving took almost two years and was done on “many hundreds of machines”. Using a single-core 2.2GHz AMD Opteron with 2GB RAM, sieving would have taken about 1,500 years, they estimated.

http://www.nypost.com/p/entertainment/tv/backstage_error_scraps_quiz_show_sJe8oL2jywmh8tnstE0RVO”

FOX is pulling “Our Little Genius” off the air — and will reshoot the entire series to avoid the appearance that the young contestants may have had help with the answers.

“I recently discovered that there was an issue with how some information was relayed to contestants during pre-production of ‘Our Little Genius,’ ” the show’s producer, Mark Burnett, said in a statement.

Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/entertainment/tv/backstage_error_scraps_quiz_show_sJe8oL2jywmh8tnstE0RVO#ixzz0c2WIi8Ln

They insist the children didn’t get answers, which probably means they only got the questions ahead of time!

Man threatening to `kill all the Jews’ taken off Miami flight, arrested

An Ohio man who became loud and disruptive aboard a flight from Miami to Detroit — at one point shouting “kill all the Jews” — was removed from the airplane and taken into custody by Miami-Dade poli

Although if you really were about to go on a anti-jew rampage, why would you be flying out of Miami and into Detroit? This guy needs a refresher of his Jewish stereotype handbook.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34436730/ns/us_news-life/

MILWAUKEE – Cities around the country that have installed energy-efficient traffic lights are discovering a hazardous downside: The bulbs don’t burn hot enough to melt snow and can become crusted over in a storm — a problem blamed for dozens of accidents and at least one death.