Cat discovers GNOME desktop bug It's a tip of the open source hat today to a cat belonging to one Christoph Reiter, which recently discovered a bug in Linux desktop GNOME. Christoph was running GS 3.18.1 in Debian sid when, for reasons likely related to the familiar "uninvited feline on keyboard" scenario, the following catastrophic sequence was initiated …
At 14 months old, she discovered a keyboard short-cut that deletes all of FireFoxes bookmarks.
I lost 6 months of work (yeah, I should have remembered to back up more often).
She also managed to delete 3 of the 5 "Home" screen pages on my Asus tablet, delete ALL the Apps on them, but not touch a single one of the games I had installed for her.
She then went on to figure out how to unlock mummies iPhone (yeah, I know), and make international calls with it. We dont know ANYONE who lives in Canada, but there are a number of Canadians who wont answer if they see mummies number displayed.
"Your daughter sounds smarter than you, if you let her loose on your computer logged in as you. I gave both my sons their own logins so they could happily wreak havoc without affecting anyone else."
She was sat on my lap watching funny cat videos, reached forwards with both hands and BAM all my bookmarks were gone; I still dont know which keys she pressed.
She now has her own (ancient P4) PC and an old Lenovo smartphone to play with,neither is connected to the internet, and the phone is SIMless so she hasnt started playing Global Thermonuclear War with the Whomper yet.
Your daughter sounds smarter than you, if you let her loose on your computer logged in as you. I gave both my sons their own logins so they could happily wreak havoc without affecting anyone else.
That sounds like hubris. Most kids are able to pick up their parents login details very quickly: their young brains are wired to copy behaviour exactly.
Most kids are able to pick up their parents['] login details very quickly: their young brains are wired to copy behaviour exactly.
My granddaughter is a bright one, but I defy her, or pretty much anyone else, to memorize my 43-character passphrase by watching me touch-type it.1
Not that she ever has the chance to see me type it anyway. When she's around, we have better things to do. Where's jake when I need some curmudgeoning support, damn it?
1Even someone using mnemonic tricks would have difficulty associating mnemonic devices with the sequence of keypresses that quickly, even if they could accurately observe all my finger movements. It'd be more plausible with repeated viewings - most readily achieved with a video recording, if a suitable angle could be found - but from seeing me type it a few times? Highly doubtful. Eidetic memory doesn't work the way Hollywood would have it, so that's out too.
Not to get all "Science vs Religion" on this statement, but I would urge you to watch
the film Cats & Dogs. On the face of it, it is just a film. But it's so much more, it's proof if ever were needed that Cats are evil and hell bent on propaganda to turn people like you into gibbering wrecks that mindlessly bow down to the feline fascists.
We have been warned.
P.S: Dear Reg, please supply a tin foil hat icon. Thanks.
Not so much. The Internet as a whole has debunked the myth of monkeys reproducing Shakespeare long ago. In fact, where Shakespeare added words to the language, our fellow online denizens have created emoji, downplaying the need for literacy. Sure, people make poetry with them, but there is really no comparison.
I can see how having to slide a screen up would be a useful intent in a touch screen or whatever but it's a really dumb metaphor in other scenarios. When I lock a Windows 10 machine all I have to do is push any key and start typing my password. In GNOME I get a misleading "slide to unlock" message and it's only if I'm psychic and know the keyboard shortcut that I can bypass it.
It should die, or at least be smart enough to only enable "slide to unlock" when the person actually has a touch device, and sets it as their primary input (e.g. toggling into a tablet mode).
There are a number of other annoyances around GDM, screen lock, flickering etc. I hope that as X is shown the door and more control comes under KMS and Wayland that some of these will go but it is a little jarring that they exist at all.
I have always found that explaining the operation of my non-working code to one of the cats allows me to quickly find where I have cocked it up. This process is referred to as the "CAT scan".
The technique also works with dogs (the "Lab report") and random strangers ("user testing").
So a cat discovered a bug? Pah.
RISC OS users who inhabited a particular usenet group many, many years ago (almost certainly none from that particular group on this forum) would remember that my pet tarantula was responsible for developing most of my software.
Spidz has long since passed away, which may or may not explain why I don't get anywhere near as much programming done these days.
Friend of my SO brings over older PC. "always shutting down on its own" and "makes so much noise".
Dell box. One of those disasters where the CPU fan is on the outside face of the chassis with a plastic "cone of static death" back to the cooler block on the cpu.
We found the three missing cats in there. Amazing what airflow does for cooling.
Thus; cats purpose to computers is to engineer early thermal death.
> Thus; cats purpose to computers is to engineer early thermal death.
My old Dell 2950 has survived about 8 years in a house with 6 cats. Mind you, I remove the front and hoover out several hamsters-worth of cat hair every 6 months or so. And make sure that the cat tray isn't in the same room..
Today,
http://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/1/2015/11/12/microsofts_1st_major_win_10_update/#c_2696270
The associated miscreant creeps up behind me whilst I am doing some mechanical drawing in LibreCad,
Leaps up on the desk and smears his Fat Fluffy Body all over the keyboard. Again before I get to hit CTRL|ALT|L so that's an hour of, complex for me, work gone. Yes, blah blah blah.. I did try to recover it but for shit.
Now it's sleeping in one of it's multiple sleeping places presumably prior to vomiting a fur ball all over it, along with associated stomach contents, or somewhere else so I get to clean the crap up.. and preening its arse and penis.
The shit will probably ask to go out to shit in someone else's garden after I have gone to bed and will be tapping on the window to come back in three hours later.
BASTARD!
It's like having 'A Boss' who is a deliberate fuckhole and should know better so you toss the job but FluffyBum is truly clueless/unaware and you have been adopted.
It's all just designed to show it loves you.
Or, or correctly, designed to show that it owns you, body, soul and bank-balance. And before you know it, that one, lonesome, friendly male cat has turned into six friendly cats-of-both-genders-but-thankfully-neutered-otherwise-we-would-be-knee-deep-in-kittens.
Not that I know from experience. The nym is purely a coincidence.
What an absolute Broken Piece of Fucking Shite...
http://forum.librecad.org/Copying-from-one-document-to-another-one-td5550173.html
http://sourceforge.net/p/librecad/feature-requests/94/
The above relates in particular to LibreCad and generally to all of the previous Software and Hardware Shite that PersonKind has managed to bollocks up since its inception that has anything to do with computahs.
You are all soooooo clever with your broken SHITE.
Go kill yourselves along with your legacy.
Open Source CAD tools are definitely a pain point which many would benefit from being fixed.
No its not QT. It seems as if some of the Adobe people write for the GNOME's. GNOME has gone to pot since version 2.x . All flash with plenty of crash. BTW i've had GDM fail with an error message of 'Oop's something failed!! Cannot start.' talk about you're lack of information, almost seems like MS.
The problem is not which tool kit to use, but using a complex tool kit at all. That's why, traditionally, such screen savers and screen locks didn't use a tool kit at all, they were written with raw X11.
Once you have some graphics tool kit you will always have features you want to have in a normal application, but not in a screen saver. Thinks like accessibility functions or spell checkers.
The big problem however is that screen savers used to be secure before the Freedesktop tried their hand on it.
I have it on good authority that rats make good coders but bad PDAs.
The cats around here are pretty well behaved. One is sleeping on the desk, another on the floor the other side of the desk and the third is not in her usual chair. They don't wake me up at stupid o'clock for food (I leave dry food down at all times and feed them tinned food once a day when I get in from work) and the one that likes to sleep on the bed seems to manage to remain there comatose from before I go to sleep until after I wake up. I will gloss over the furballs, mainly because if I'm not quick enough, the dog cleans those up.
I do lock the keyboard when away from the PC though, I don't trust them that far, and they don't appear to have cracked the password yet.
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