Robotic Tendencies
The personal blog of Robert McQueen

October 19, 2005

Tweaks

Does anyone know of a Thunderbird extension to check for words like “attach” and remind you if you failed to make any attachments?

Does anyone know of a way to stop Firefox interpreting Ctrl+W as “throw this window away including the wiki post/bugzilla comment/blog entry you were writing”? It doesn’t need to be mapped to delete word, I just don’t want it to close the entire thing. It’s most upsetting.

posted by ramcq @ 1:44 pm
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October 19, 2005

Comments

Just a quick post to reply to the comments I’ve had on some previous posts.

On Missing entropy on my server box, I received lots of comments on how to feed random other stuff into the entropy pool or make it bigger or other hacks, but Alexander Reelsen pointed me to the real cause — a kernel bug in older 2.4 kernels which causes the entropy pool to deadlock on SMP systems, and never get refilled. There is a patch from RedHat which backports the fix from 2.6, and is included in recent 2.4 kernels.

On the topic of kernels, now I’ve upgraded from 2.4.29-rc1 to 2.4.32-rc1 I get lots of errors like hw tcp v4 csum failed in my syslog. I’m using the e100 driver which as far as I can see hasn’t changed between versions, but there have been some changes to TCP checksumming code which I havn’t quite been able to grok. Google finds mailing list posts with other people asking what the cause is, but nobody answering. Anyone know what’s going on there?

On Windows accessibility, many people seem to not listened to the first couple of minutes of the tasteless song I linked to, and hence taken my comment completely seriously. Thanks to everyone who told me about sticky keys etc in comments, but I did already know about the existence of Windows accessibility support (warning: mjg59 in furious anger mode). 😀

On the topic of blog comments, how do I cut down on the comment spam I have to moderate without requiring people to go through a completely unaccessible captcha image thing, or the annoyance of registering and acknowledging an e-mail? Would prohibiting comments and URIs containing words like ‘mortgage’, ‘casino’ and ‘ringtone’ ever cause false positives?

posted by ramcq @ 12:55 pm
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October 15, 2005

Windows accessibility

While pondering the delightfully tasteless Snippets song from Amateur Transplants (authors of the London Underground song), I realised that until the requirement to press Ctrl+Alt+Delete is removed, Windows will always remain unaccessible to certain users.

posted by ramcq @ 5:03 pm
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