Cranial Trauma

Arguments over ‘whether you should have to pay anything at all to Micro$oft to use its on-line service` aside, I found myself needing to buy and xBoX360 Live Gold membership (for the bf).
I decided there is no point getting 3 months for half the price of 12, and I didn’t fancy walking down to the BlockBuster’s Video to pay over the odds.
I didn’t want to wait for delivery either, its a pain in the ass and I don’t trust the post. I don’t want to have to pay more for the sake of a piece of cardboard.
So after a little googling I payed £29.99 for a 12+1 Gold subscription to be “instantly emailed to me” via InstantLiveCodes.com.

Read more…

It was my attempt to track down some of the more amusing kernel source code comments I’d heard, that led me to thinking I’d broken the advanced tagline plugin (tho it wasn’t).

It was also this quest, that led me across this most fantastic graph, showing Linux Kernel Revision against #of swear words contained.

Many thanks to Mr. Holden of vidarholen.net for posting this (and amusingly he’s currently using the same theme we are )

A couple of years ago, I got paid for some programming with a  CiBOX C1905 19″ Monitor.

When  I first got it, I thought it was the dogs-danglies, however after using it for a little while, two inconsolable problems came to light.

Personally I dislike wide-screen monitors. I spend a lot of time typing and whether it be paragraphs of text or lines of code / config files; all of which (especially if you hope it to be printable) have a habit of being in portrait; eg: Scrolling Down!

Read more…

Lemmings written completely in DHTML, so thats static HTML and JavaScript. No flash here. -very excellent

In fact, I first came across this a good few years ago… I wonder ifit can be calssed as pre-2.0 Web2.0

Personally I recommend polaying it with firebug running, so you can watch the source change

http://www.elizium.nu/scripts/lemmings/

I’ve recently come across PTCs Pro Desktop 3D CAD software when reinstalling a laptop for a friend.
As I understand it, Pro/Desktop is the younger brother to Pro/ENGINEER, “a parametric, integrated 3D CAD¹/CAM²/CAE³ solution” produced and distributed by PTC⁴.

And after playing with it, to try and make a vivarium, I decided I needed it to run on linux.

Read more…

1. Computer Aided Design ↩
2. Computer Aided Manufacturing ↩
3. Computer Aided Engineering (& Analasys) ↩
4. Parametric Technology Corporation ↩

It turns out one of my (many) firefox plugins is causing wordpress to break in strange ways, namely when trying to edit a post, it reloads the main page inside of one of the iframes and then fails.
More info as it comes.

Thu Jan 15 18:25:35 GMT 2009:

I tried to be clever. I re-installed WordPress, Disabled all the plugns on the website and all to no avail.

Then I used my brain and tested it in another browser (seamonkey) and found it all working perfectly -fantastic, not a server issue then, but FireFox.

After switching to a different FF profile¹ for a little while, I prove it was due to the plugins I was using.

Having finally switched back to my orogional profile, I’ve found everything working fine again. Which is a PITA.

1. `firefox –profilemanager` ↩

So I got asked a couple of days ago how to stop the xbox auto signing in to MSN Messenger.
Whilst its a handy feature (-I talk to a couple of people over MSN who don’t have a computer, just Live,) it’s also a great PITA¹ to constantly get signed off from the computer and to have people trying to chat when you’re busy killing Horde or trying to complete a Rally.

So, very simpily: Read more…

1. Pain In The Ass ↩

In the past, recovering data from laptops (or rather from 2.5″ IDE hard drives) has been a Pain in the Ass.

Due to their tiny size there is no chance in hell of connecting a standard IDE cable never mind a standard Molex power connector, so you’ve always had to use an adaptor cable (standard IDE & power on one end, laptop connector on the other), which is peachy-fine, except for when its lost, lent out or just damn hard to get hold of in the first place.

Later this evening I’m expecting a 2.5″ laptop SATA hard drive dropping off as it needs swapping out in a Sony Vaio -and I started worrying. What if I need special adapters/cables if I want to hook the old drive up to my PC to do some data recovery?

Not a problem. Turns out that the new Laptop Drives (probably because they’re also now used in enterprise RAID Arrays) all have standard SATA Power and Data connectors on them, which is fantastically handy
Read more…

Vmware’s Workstation (version 6.5.0.118166) is proving impossible to get running on my Gentoo-AMD64 box.

It seems to get installed without any bother, the kernel modules load fine, but then when I run workstation or player, it tells me it “Cannot initiate the installer DB” when trying to run it.

Currently going round in circles trying to get somewhere. -and I thought updating would be a good idea. 6.0 was really sweet.

——-

Edit:

Turns out, its actually quite simple. And it seems other gentoo users have been having problems((see gentoo bug ID 248813 and maybe this gentoo forums post))

The trick to getting it working, is very simple. Even if it did take me about a week of going round in circles to get anywhere. Delete (or atleast move) /etc/vmware. Then reinstall and you’re done.

However -Rather than downloading an illigal copy of vmware-workstation, or even worse paying for it, why not try VirtualBox as a direct replacement to workstation?

Its free, open source, and frankly, is preferable to vmware. Try it for a week, once you get past the fact its different, it becomes really quite sweet

You¹ might have noticed the downtime with the server over the last couple of days.

We have been migrating to a new server over the last couple of days, and although it was supposed to be seamless, I fucked up royally.

Read more…

1. I say you, and I mean You. There’s got to be like 2 people in the entire world reading this, and I doubt both of them noticed. ↩