Honestly, you meet the most appalling sort of people....

Giles ,'Chosen'


Buffistechnology 3: "Press Some Buttons, See What Happens."

Got a question about technology? Ask it here. Discussion of hardware, software, TiVos, multi-region DVDs, Windows, Macs, LINUX, hand-helds, iPods, anything tech related. Better than any helpdesk!


§ ita § - Apr 06, 2007 6:59:17 am PDT #1164 of 25496
Well not canonically, no, but this is transformative fiction.

In situations where c&p works, I breathe a sigh and pretend it never happened. Word is weird, but I've never had that particular problem.

Hokay. I solved my PostgreSQL "what's the row_id of the last insert?" question two ways--first by issuing a "SELECT currval()" query right afterwards, but have now replaced that with the PostgreSQL extension to INSERT that means you can say:

INSERT INTO table (row_id, row_field1) VALUES (DEFAULT, "This is how we roll") RETURNING row_id

and the insert query returns a row I can grab stuff from. Neat, and I've yet to consider the full ramifications.

Because I can never get enough, I'm now missing a MySQL extension, REPLACE. The difference between

INSERT INTO table (primary_key, rowvalue) VALUES (17, "For Nilly);
and
REPLACE INTO table (primary_key, rowvalue) VALUES (17, "For Nilly);

is that the latter will overwrite a preceding row with the same unique key. Saves me writing a sequence of commands.

Anyone know a 'standard' PostgreSQL way to do that?


Sean K - Apr 06, 2007 6:59:52 am PDT #1165 of 25496
You can't leave me to my own devices; my devices are Nap and Eat. -Zenkitty

XP, this is my work computer.

Hmmm. Okay. I was wondering if your office was still on NT 4.0 or something (as many offices still are).

Under NT 4.0, you could set printer settings for the document, but also globally from the control panel (and one other place, I think). This made for much craziness when you thought your printer settings were correct, but you'd forgotten to change them in the two other places you could change them.

But that is not your problem.


§ ita § - Apr 06, 2007 7:05:47 am PDT #1166 of 25496
Well not canonically, no, but this is transformative fiction.

Oh, never mind. I've decided to just always delete the row in question before peforming an insert, and to send the two commands in one transaction. Should be safe.


Jon B. - Apr 06, 2007 8:05:03 am PDT #1167 of 25496
A turkey in every toilet -- only in America!

I'm posting from my MacMini in the living room. I've just discovered that t cntrl - t mouse scrollwheel magnifies the entire screen centered at wherever my mouse is. Wacky!

I keep forgetting to post about my Harmony remote. I love it, but I have a few quibbles:

  • The default softkeys for my devices were not at all intuitive to me. I needed to redo them all. One example -- The TiVo "thumbs up" and "thumbs down" were on different screens. That makes no sense.
  • The emulation of the Mac FrontRow remote should default to have the arrow and OK keys do the same things as the five buttons on the original Mac remote. I had to manually program that.
  • The "device" menu should allow for some cross control of the TV. If I select the device menu and then choose the DVD player, or even the TiVo, I lose my volume and mute controls. I needed to manually program those keys for each device by pointing the other remotes at the back of the Harmony.

These really are quibbles. Since there was a way to fix all of my problems, I was (and remain!) ultimately satisfied. Another toaster for Sean!


§ ita § - Apr 06, 2007 8:09:42 am PDT #1168 of 25496
Well not canonically, no, but this is transformative fiction.

If I select the device menu and then choose the DVD player, or even the TiVo, I lose my volume and mute controls

I only end up in the device menu if something went weird. In fact, I kinda go there to lose the other controls. I just want it to pretend to be a solo one.

I've had mine a while, and tweaked the TiVo and DVD menu to look how I needed, but I only recently went in and clicked on every link in the setup website. As a result, my remote control has wallpaper! Stupid wallpaper, mind you, since it was the only thing lying around, but how cool (uh, and un-needed) is that?


-t - Apr 06, 2007 8:11:49 am PDT #1169 of 25496
I am a woman of various inclinations and only some of the time are they to burn everything down in frustration

I've just discovered that - magnifies the entire screen centered at wherever my mouse is.

Hey, cool, that just made my TV-as-monitor setup a lot more practical!


Jon B. - Apr 06, 2007 8:29:31 am PDT #1170 of 25496
A turkey in every toilet -- only in America!

I kinda go there to lose the other controls. I just want it to pretend to be a solo one.

Yeah, but you always need volume controls. I also only end up there if I accidentally push the wrong thing, but it's still annoying.

how cool (uh, and un-needed) is that?

I know! You can set up a slideshow, too! I did something really sappy and put on these photobooth photos of me and FAQWife.


§ ita § - Apr 06, 2007 9:22:52 am PDT #1171 of 25496
Well not canonically, no, but this is transformative fiction.

you always need volume controls

Me, NSM. I don't control volume from my DVD remote, so I've never thought of needing it under Devices. I just head in and get right back to Activities ASAP.


flea - Apr 06, 2007 10:06:40 am PDT #1172 of 25496
information libertarian

Question: I crash Firefox a fair amount. Just did it now trying to get into Cute Overload. It happens more frequently at work, where I run NT on a old and memory-impaired Dell, but it happens a decent amount at home on a 5 year old Mac G3 running 10.4, too. Is it me (in both places?), or is this a known Firefox thing?


Jessica - Apr 06, 2007 10:42:06 am PDT #1173 of 25496
And then Ortus came and said "It's Ortin' time" and they all Orted off into the sunset

DVD drive update -- the fix suggested in Kevin's link has partially fixed the problem. The Mac can now play all DVDs...except the ones it creates. (Doesn't seem to matter if we create a DVD with iDVD, DVD Studio Pro, or just by dragging QT files and hitting "burn" from the finder -- once they're done, they're all read as "Untitled CD" and completely unplayable.)

I am stumped.