The Woman of Interest mentioned to me how some sellers manage to maintain acceptable or better feedback scores, and the initial negative feedback that they receive might not itself be particularly damning, yet one can discern from their replies that negative feedback that these are very problematic people. So I drew her attention to ohiopal (located in New Philadelphia):

• negative feedback given to ohiopal
• negative feedback left by ohiopal

I suppose that a few sloppy readers might actually be fooled by his recurring trick of signing a reply with the buyer's account, as it it were a follow-up. I've seen some of the photos that he claimed were inadvertantly misleading because of poor quality — they were clear photos, but of a different item than was delivered. And take special note to the entries on each page for lot 2164122076.

He's better behaved at GunBroker.com. [Edit (2008:11/17): Except in-so-far as he persuades buyers there to buy from him more directly, in which case they may get junk.]

(I've not myself ever done business with this account, nor to my knowledge otherwise with its holder. I just stumbled upon his record when I was investigating another seller.)

Surely many of you are familiar with TinyURL, which provides the service of turning long URLs into short URLs (useful, for example, if one wants to pass a link with a GET request by using an e.mail handler or chat app which chops-up lines of that length).

Now, by way of Ricky Catto, I am exposed to

As previously mentioned, one of my Corsair Voyager 8GB USB flash drives has failed.

Christophe Grenier's TestDisk was unable to locate a partition table. But his PhotoRec is racing through the drive recovering various sorts of files. I am quite pleased and impressed.

Unfortunately, the program has no way of identifying the file names! So the files are all being given new, opaque names.

Addendum (2008:12/17): A recent entry by oddharmonic reminded me to note here that PhotoRec reässembled video files like Frankenstein Flub-a-Dubs. Mind you that there was really no practical way for the program to know what bits belonged together, and the resultant files could be fixed by using a decent video editor to re·splice them.

One of the Corsair 8GB Voyager USB flash drives that I bought seems to have completely failed, before I even received the mail-in rebate for it. Grand.

I'd like to be able to connect my note-book computer to a better antenna than those built into it.

I could drill a hole in the case, and mount an RP SMA jack there, connected to the internal Wi-Fi card. The patch cord that I would use fot this would cost me $20.50.

An alternative would be to get a new USB or PCMCIA[1] Wi-Fi adapter with a built-in external antenna connector. Setting aside units that I fear would be even cheaper than they are inexpensive, it appears that an adapter with an antenna jack or jacks would cost at least $40, and then not support the forthcoming 802.11n standard.

Thus, basically, if I bought one of these Wi-Fi adapters, then I'd be paying $20 or more to avoid drilling a hole in the case of my computer, and for the convenience of not having to open-up the case whenever I wanted to switch to-or-from the internal antenna that would be disconnected to enable the RP SMA jack. (A patch cord with bulkhead U.FL-R connector instead of an RP SMA jack would spare me that latter awkwardness, but I've not found such a cord.)
 

[1]I don't much like the idea of surrendering the PCMCIA slot, as I only have one; but I have six USB slots, and have never used more than five at one time.

The Swansea Council has apparently failed to learn from the mistakes of others:

LiveJournal has been failing in its attempts to fetch various feeds, including that for this 'blog. When I first saw that the feed to my 'blog was not being fetched, I examined the profile pages for various syndication journals on LJ; quite a few were reporting a parsing error, and next check times were passing without those next checks.

So far, there is no report at LiveJournal Status, at LJ Support, or at LiveJournal Maintenance indicating an awareness of the problem.

Up-Date: Well, the previously unretrieved entries have now been fetched, and now they appear one immediately after another on Friends pages.

Up-Date (2008:10/29 02:23 PDT): The fetching is failing again.

Oog.

I notice that a number of people have found their ways to this 'blog because they've installed OpenOffice under RHEL, but OpenOffice doesn't seem to launch.

This is probably an SELinux issue. If so, then it should be resolved either if one goes to the directory containing libvclplug_gen680li.so.1.1 and (as root) runs

chcon -t textrel_shlib_t libvclplug_gen680li.so.1.1

If you're actually trying to install another version of OpenOffice, then click on the OpenOffice tag, as there may be an entry on that other version.

Here's my suggested procedure for installing OpenOffice 3.0.x under RHEL 5.x:

1. If you don't have a JRE installed, then install one. OpenOffice 3.0.0 is being distributed with JRE 1.6.0 update 7; Sun is already at update 10. (I suggest that one use jdk-6u10-linux-xxx-rpm.bin, rather than jre-6u10-linux-xxx.bin.) The remainder of these instructions assume that one has a JRE installed.

2. Remove any earlier installation of OpenOffice. As root, enter these two commands:
   

   rpm -qa | grep openoffice | xargs rpm -e --nodeps
rpm -qa | grep ooobasis | xargs rpm -e --nodeps

3. Unpack OOo_3.0.0_LinuxIntel_install_wJRE_en-US.tar.gz (or the version appropriate to a devil-language, if you use one of those) to your filespace.

4. Go into resulting OOO300_m9_native_packed-1_en-US.xxxx/RPMS/ (or to the OOO300_m9_native_packed-1_xx-xx.xxxx/RPMS/ corresponding to your devil-tongue).

5. As root, run

   find . -maxdepth 1 -name "o*.rpm" | xargs rpm -U

6. As root, run

   rpm -U desktop-integration/openoffice.org*-redhat-menus-*.noarch.rpm

   (NB: You will need to log-out and back-in for the Applications menu to be up-dated and list the OpenOffice components.)

7. As root, run

   rpm -U userland/*.rpm

8. Tell OpenOffice which JRE to use:

   • Launch OpenOffice:

     /usr/bin/openoffice.org3

     (It will not be listed on the applications menu unless you have logged-out and back-in.)
   • Select

     Tools | Options… | OpenOffice.org | Java | Use a Java runtime environment

   • Choose one of the environments that is then listed.
   • Click the OK button.
   • Shut-down OpenOffice. (The change will be in effect upon next launch.)

There do not appear to be any issues with SELinux this time. I didn't have to use chcon on anything to get OpenOffice working.

NB: This post was edited on 2009:09/13, to improve the procedure, though most readers should not be installing version 3.0.x, as version 3.1.1 is available.