Pigsflew.com

I wrote a script tonight to quickly and intelligently mount ISO images, so that I can treat them as cd’s without having burned them to physical discs.

Something like that already exists, in the form of Nautilus scripts. Some creative Googling found the ones from here, which is actually fairly basic. So I started with that and made it way better. Here’s how mine works:

- It uses a single mount point, /media/isoimage.
- If you run the script and something is already mounted there, it will ask if you want to unmount.
- If the directory already exists, it’ll ask you if you’d like to delete it–which it will fail to do if there are items in it.
- If there’s nothing mounted, it’ll attempt to mount whatever is passed in to it.
- If it succeeds, it offers the option to open it.

TODO: Make sure what was passed in is an iso file
TODO: Support other types of disk images

You can get my script here.

To set it up (the preferred way):

Open a terminal, navigate to the directory you downloaded my script to, and type the following:

adrian@Kashra ~$ chmod +x ./isomount && sudo mv ./isomount /usr/bin/isomount

Enter your password, then it should be set up.

Find an ‘iso’ you want to mount, and right click it, go to “Select program”, and in the text box, type in “isomount”. Then the next time you want to mount/unmount an iso image, just right click and select my script!

To set it up as a Nautilus Script:
Disadvantages: Does not show up for all users, and shows up on all files (not just isos).

Open the terminal, navigate to the directory you downloaded the script too, and enter the following:

adrian@Kashra: ~$ chmod +x ./isomount && mv ./isomount ~/.gnome2/nautilus-scripts/isomount

And you’re done. Note that you will still need administrative privileges to mount the iso itself.

Find an ‘iso’ you want to mount, right click it, select nautilus-scripts, and click on isomount!

Us.

Television Viewers.

Now in reality, I watch exactly two television shows that have not been cancelled, and two television shows besides. The two that aren’t over yet are Heroes (NBC) and Battlestar: Galactica (Sci-Fi). The two that are were Firefly (FOX) and Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip (NBC). Given this fact I really don’t consider myself a television viewer.

Therefore, let me explain why I’m mad at you people:

It’s because of Studio 60. Aaron Sorkin’s amazing talent for blindingly crisp dialog aside, this was an amazing show with a fantastic cast, and a solid concept. I could get mad that the show was taken off the air, but it was taken off the air when it just… failed to draw audiences.

Now, Firefly failed to draw audiences, but to be frank, it was never given an honest shot, what with multiple changes in its time slot, last minute reordering of episodes, and frankly poor advertising.

Studio 60 was given more than an honest shot.

Actually, it was given the slot before prime time, right there with Heroes, a dumb but extremely entertaining show I expect to stay on the air for quite a while. Studio 60 had a decent opening audience which faltered immediately, and continued to flounder, even when NBC tried to get people back into the show by having Masi Oka (plays Hiro on Heroes) make a cameo. It eventually sputtered and they pulled it.

The problem was the show was smart. It was based on the premise that the fictional broadcasting company NBS was banking on American audiences not being “too dumb” for good television. The real thing was that NBC itself was banking on the same proposition, and we as audiences let them down. We showed them that we are indeed too dumb for good television.

So there you are, everyone who tuned in at 10 to watch that first season of Heroes but missed the good stuff that was on at 9pm, I’m mad at you tonight.

(oh, I’m extremely glad I own the Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip Complete Series.)

I want to walk you through something I read a while ago and have been stewing on since. From October 18th in Wired Magazine, a robotic cannon killed nine people and wounded fourteen others.

They wrote that these machines are supposed to select and aim at a target, and “[wait] only for a human to pull the trigger.” Except that sometimes, “these machines start firing mysteriously on their own.”

They call it a software glitch. A malfunction. The problem I have with these terms is that, similar to the term “accident” in a traffic collision, they tend to imply no one is to blame.

I submit that somewhere, some programmer is to blame. If you write code, no matter how trivial, your job is to ensure the efficiency, consistency, and most of all the accuracy of your code. To fail in this regard can be tantamount to negligent homicide.

Coding errors can cause great cost; in the simplest of projects, this cost may only be in time, but soon that cost becomes money. In greater projects, it might be personal possessions, or public relations, or in still greater projects, lives.

This is not the first time something like this has happened. I am reminded of the infamous Therac-25, which between 1985 and 1987 was involved in at least five deaths due to poor interface design and failure to sanitize inputs. The Northeast Blackout of 2003, caused by a race condition in power monitoring software. The MIM-104 Patriot whose failure resulted in the deaths of 28 soldiers in Saudi Arabia in 1991 due to an error in time synchronization.

These are our responsibilities, laid upon us by virtue of our interest in the technologies which run our world today and those that will tomorrow: To provide value through technology by relieving stresses in tasks, or by relieving those tasks altogether, and to protect ourselves and our fellow man from those very technologies we create, and to the best of our abilities, from himself.

~Pigsflew