Welcome to MekTrix 4.0

A message:

I'm still getting emails telling me how many points I have and how I
can spend them; but my card says it expires 02/06, and the website
won't let me log in :-/

    -- Signed: [my full name], Card No. [number]

And a reply:

Dear Cardholder

Thank you for your e-mail.  

Please could you reply with your full name and Connexions card number,
keeping this e-mail attached, so that we can look into your query further
for you?
 
Kind Regards
Connexions Card Team

…

It kills the knees >_<

The intro lesson was two hours long, and all we did was the greeting and bowing process — bow, walk forward, squat & draw sword, stand, yell, squat, put sword away, stand, walk back; over and over…

The atmosphere of self-discipline and respect was very apparent though; I could feel my posture improving just by hanging out there ._. They do the first couple of lessons for free, so I’ll be going to those, and maybe more…

8p noodles \o/

And 13p for a tin of peas which last several meals~

Then £5 for pizza…

Coming up to 2am; I note that the quietest, most polite girl in my hall has a way of making friends with the most obnoxious noisy drunkards, and she keeps inviting them to her room in the early hours of the morning.

Argh.

Fresher’s Week has been packed, such that I’ve been either going out or sleeping since I got here. Food is nice when I can remember to get it in time, with breakfast being free and enough food to make me hurt for about £5.

Fresher’s fair had lots of interesting societies; I’ve signed up to more mailing lists than I can remember. There’ve been lots of comp sci specific meetings too, the one I’ve just got back from had a guy from Sun showing off robots and LEDs, and we got free tshirts /o/

My hallmates are great so far, although there’s a returning second year set to come today or tomorrow; A couple of us went to the on-campus club on wednesday to a disco, with Jenny Frost (who seems too famous for me to know) DJ-ing, and several other evenings have been spent having random philosophical conversations (everyone else in the hall is doing humanities subjects)~

Blogging of my first days at uni has been delayed by problems connecting to the network… And the resulting conversation with tech support:

From: shish
To: tech support

Your SBS signup form for linux users [1] has typos[2] that make it
impossible to submit; the resulting page is a back trace of a
nullpointerexception[3]. I guessed the URL of the windows version of the
form and filled that one in instead, and it works fine (it even sent me
the correct download, CSA.sh). The fix is to go through the form and
give the elements their proper names (eg, change "username0" to
"username")

[1] http://reg-kent.org:8080/registration/register-linux.html

[2] It looks like someone copy & pasted the form in a WYSIWYG editor --
all the relevant elements had zeroes after them, which is a standard
way of keeping unique element IDs after copy & pasting...

[3] I would guess somebody did something like form["username"].value,
without first making sure that the "username" element was POSTed :-/

A rather simple problem, and I even took the time to work out why things were broken, and explain how to fix them in easy to understand terms. The result?

From: Tech support
To: Shish

Thanks for your e-mail.

You need to have Java turned on in order to see the page correctly and submit it.

Gah, a boilerplate response, and an incorrect one at that, on a variety of levels — there is no java on the page, so enabling it won’t make any difference. I would assume he meant javascript (something totally different, the name is coincidence), but that is inappropriate too, since the problem is nothing to do with the script (which works fine in my already javascript enabled browser).

So I reply again, in even simpler terms, and explain why the previous response was wrong:

No I don't; there is no java on that page. There is javascript (which
is a different thing altogether), and I do have that enabled. I know my
browser works fine since I can use the version of the page designed for
windows users.

To repeat: The problem is that the linux version of the page has errors
in its code that cause the values entered to be given the wrong names.
For example, the linux username box is called "username0", and doesn't
work, whereas the windows and mac pages have called the box "username"
and they work fine. If I download the registration page and change the
name of the box myself, that works too.

It's a very simple problem with a very simple solution; you could
probably fix it in less time than it would take to send another
useless boilerplate message :P

A response?

Thanks for your e-mail.

You need to have Java turned on in order to see the page correctly and submit it.

Argh.

* Shish gets parts out of a freshly delivered box
<Mother> What’s this? (picking up hard drive)
<Shish> A hard drive
<Mother> And this? (pointing at motherboard)
<Shish> A motherboard
<Mother> What’s the difference? They both look exactly the same ._.
* Shish cries