jmtd → log → 2006 → 02 → 12

I promised afterglow that I would write fewer geek posts—so here I go.

I managed to lose my last pair of glasses on friday night. I'm currently using an older pair which had a broken arm, with a spare arm stuck on the side as a temporary measure.

I’ve put an order in for a new pair via specsdirectuk.com. This is one of a crop of no-frills, low-overheads on-line glasses retailers.

The site had pretty poor pictures of the glasses frames, but I thought I’d try it anyway as the cheaper ones were only 13.45 GBP (vs. about 80 from specsavers or similar). I had a recent prescription from an Opticians to feed into the site—although I had to measure my “pupillary distance” myself.

Straying back into geek territory for a moment:

I couldn’t actually complete the order without a bit of messing around. The “Checkout” link was not a conventional HTML link but a javascript onclick event, calling the submit() function. This function wasn’t actually defined—a quick look through the page source shows that a submitEvent() function was, however. IE must treat submit() as guess the correct form element for the page and submit it.

I managed to progress by pasting javascript:submitEvent() into the address bar.

My laptop sound hasn't worked with my home-rolled kernels for a while. I found the solution in this article about the IBM X31 laptop under Debian Intel 3.0, kernel 2.6:

amixer set 'Line Jack Sense' off
amixer set 'Headphone Jack Sense' off
alsactl store

I can't find a bug report or whatever explaining why this has happened, but apparently it effects 2.6.x where x > 10 and x < 12.2. This is quite a popular chipset, so hopefully re-iterating the solution here will help someone.