katie writes stuff

About 20 minutes ago, I get a phonecall off my manager, asking me to reset the boss' password, text it to him and ask him to please not forget his password when the main administrator is on a train without Internet access.

So, I booted up my Windows laptop, started VMware, went to the required server... and realised my own password is long and complicated enough to be nicely secure, but also flipping annoying to type in manually. Go to webmail, change my own password, log in to the server and reset the boss' password. Send the new password to the boss, and return to my other laptop at my desk.

And then I thought, "what did I just change my password to?"

Fortunately, I didn't log out of the Windows laptop when I was done, so I was able to return to VMware to reset my own password again. I am feeling a bit daft now, anyway.

I don't like it when hard drives make noises they're not supposed to. Especially hard drives that have only been used three times in just under six months.

I do like warranties.

Tonight I introduced maznu to my mum as "the man who keeps me in hard drives". (This is the third time in 2 years.)

You know when you're fighting computers to do what you want?

You're staring at the admin interface of your website in your browser, trying to work out why what you're putting into your terminal window isn't having any effect at all.

And then you look at your terminal window again, and realise that the path isn't what you're expecting, and it turns out you've spent half an hour editing one website, whilst expecting the changes to appear on a different one.

And you know that feeling of complete, utter stupidity that comes right after that moment of realisation?

Yeah, that.

The way in which I found myself sitting with naxxfish.eu at St Pancras International train station whilst he dismantled my laptop to replace the hard drive tonight is long and complicated.

Fortunately, our only commentator was a woman who said to me "I've never seen anyone do that in a coffee shop before. You can't take them anywhere, can you?" and looked thoroughly surprised when I said it was my laptop.

Foursquare is my latest fun timewaster: it's a game which purports to be about finding new ways to explore your city but is really just a pointless exercise in wasting your iPhone battery checking into the places you visit and collecting badges for things like going to three places with photobooths or spending a lot of time at the gym. If you check into a place more than anybody else, you become the mayor and get a little crown next to your name when you visit.

On the web interface, you can add tags to different places which help you get badges, and to "let people know what they can expect to find". Some choice tags from the page for London Bridge train station: delays, despair, insanity, pain, stare into the abyss and suffering.

You can also add "things to do" at various places; a few of the more hilarious ones include:

• "Resist the urge to madly punch other passengers during the morning commute."
• "Abandon hope all ye who enter here."
• During peak hours, wear a pair of Heelys or a jet pack to enhance & hasten your commute.

Whoever said Londoners don't have a sense of humour? :-)

Someone submitted a support request, basically saying "the site interface menu above my profile isn't displaying and I don't know why!" The user suspected it was related to the content of her bio, as it was only a problem on her profile and nobody else's.

zarhooie came into #dw and the following conversation ensued:

04:04:06 <MissKat> Anyone here really really good with HTML?
04:04:10 <MissKat> Specifically, tables and stuff?
04:04:12 <tajasel> MissKat: I can have a go
04:04:18 <MissKat> thanks taj
04:04:18 <exor674> oh god TABLES
04:04:21 <tajasel> for my sins, I can do tables
04:04:22 <exor674> TABLES ARE THE DEVIL
04:04:26 <tajasel> I don't do tables, but I can.
04:04:31 <tajasel> and I will try, for you! <3
04:05:23 <MissKat> I am loved.

She sent me a private message with a link to the support request, and I sat here and examined the HTML in the user's profile to try and figure out what was wrong with it. A good while later, I'd had no luck working it out, so I gave up, and rewrote all the HTML that she'd put in, tested it on my profile, and found that the problem had disappeared. So, I hosted the fixed HTML on my shell and replied to the support request saying "I fixed it! Replace your profile with this and your problem should be solved!" (in a slightly more formal manner, of course) and linked her to the page with the code that she needed.

It was a few more minutes before I realised how completely bonkers I must be for putting that much effort into such a simple support request.

I wish I knew what had broken the profile in the first place...

I love summertime. I like having daylight at 4pm, and even as late 8pm in the height of summer. It's lovely being able to sit out in the garden on a warm evening to watch the sun going down.

Battling irssi to display the correct time when the clocks go forward, however, is not.

I have successfully permanently set my timezone as being Europe/London using tzselect inside my shell and I always thought irssi just inherited the time from the shell. It would make sense, wouldn't it? But no.

So, I had a quick search of the FAQs on irssi.org and discovered the command I was looking for:

/script exec $ENV{'TZ'}='BST';

I pasted it into irssi, and hit return. The clock remained resolutely at 02:45. I thought okay, fair enough, maybe it doesn't know what British Summertime is. I changed the command:

/script exec $ENV{'TZ'}='UTC+1';

The clock changed! Hurrah! Oh, but wait. It should read 03:45; instead it has changed to 01:45.

irssi has either developed superpowers and can now bend the space-time continuum, or it doesn't know which direction to go in when you append a + or a - to a timezone. I'm afraid that I'm rather sceptical about the whole superpower thing, though, so I'm going to assume it just has a very hilariously wonky error.

Sigh.