To the eternal pit of technological damnation with iPad!!

Let me sum it up for you short-attention span bipeds. This thing is a good piece of technology, doomed to the rubbish heap of history by the shortsightedness of bureaucratic lock-in.

I don't like visiting the god of sociology. I don't like hearing him talk; I don't even like how he dresses. I hate that guy. But that balding bastard has a point. This thing is a dead end.

OK, I see some confused people in the back. Doubtless ignorant of the happenings in even their miserably short life span. Which platform won the electronic computing wars? The PC. Why? Because it was better? No! It was inferior in almost every important way. Ah, but it was open. Not is some kind of feel-good way, but in a very practical way, that allowed other entities to tinker with, improve and extend the steaming piece of electro-crap until it was something much better.

I'm surprised at Jobs. He always seemed canny the few times I'd met him. Oh, those eyes. Those beady eyes. Maybe he's planning on opening it later. Can't the fool see that the time to strike is now? Oh well. The thoughts of mortals are closed to gods.

Enjoy your short-lived shiny new straight jacket.

Keep Ubuntu kernel version

sudo aptitude hold linux-image-2.6.27-11-generic

Check it:
sudo aptitude show linux-image


I found the package name for the hold command by doing:
uname -a
Say your kernel version is 2.6.27-11
apt-cache search kernel |grep 2.6.27-11

svn failing on cygwin with return code 53

Problem: subversion client fails under cygwin with no output

Solution: run setup.exe. Choose a different download mirror. Click the "Base" package until it says "Reinstall". Continue with the installation, and make sure it finishes cleanly.


Story:
svn was jacked. Running svn with any arguments caused it to exit with error code 53:

$ svn
$ echo $?
53

A coworker suggested rebaseall.

That turned up this tidbit:

ash$ /bin/rebaseall
/usr/bin/cygfreetype-6.dll: skipped because nonexistent
/usr/bin/cygz.dll: skipped because nonexistent

Hmm. cygz.dll. That seems pretty important.

Running svn.exe from ash poped up a dialog that read:

This application has failed to start because cygz.dll was not found. Re-installing the application may fix theis problem.

Heh. Already tried that.

Something about running cygwin apps under the usual bash shell suppresses this (very useful) error message.

I tried reinstalling the "Base" package with no success. Changing mirrors, and doing it again worked. Maybe a tcp connection got reset during the previous upgrade? Who knows.

Happy ending:

$ svn
Type 'svn help' for usage.