Misc

In which I review my old phone

My phone has been annoying me for some time, as it’s been slow and buggy. I’ve therefore decided to do a review. To start with I need some tools: Safety is of course paramount, so I’ll also need: Reviewing can be dangerous. Kids, never review something without adult supervision. Before review: Here we see that in the event of attack by chisel the phone easily separates into two components, after which it ceases to function. Further we can see...

posted @ Saturday, September 19, 2009 12:29 PM | Feedback (4)

If how many times you scream at the screen in anger is the metric…

…then The Howard Years is a much better documentary than Liberal Rule.

posted @ Saturday, August 15, 2009 6:49 PM | Feedback (0)

Installing Windows 7 on a HP Mini 2140

As the 2140 does not contain a DVD drive it’s necessary to do the install off a USB key. The interblag contains a number of articles describing how to accomplish this (for instance here) however to install I found a small modification to be necessary. The USB key I was using is 4Gb which the BIOS turns out to be unable to read. During the partition of the USB key specifying SIZE=3072 enables the BIOS to read it and is sufficient to contain the Windows 7 install files.

posted @ Saturday, June 27, 2009 4:27 PM | Feedback (4)

Daylight Savings

There's a referendum on Daylight Savings coming up in Western Australia. So far I'm entirely unconvinced by both sides of the debate. It doesn't really affect me either way so I'd like to make a choice based on what can be demonstrated to be the best overall outcome. Unfortunately neither side makes a compelling case. And at this point I'd settle for a slightly compelling case. I am therefore probably going to vote against whichever side has the dumbest argument in support of their position. This means I'm likely to vote for daylight savings because the arguments by people...

posted @ Wednesday, February 04, 2009 1:35 PM | Feedback (4)

To the loneliest VanderHeyden

Apparently Simon is already pining for home and is worried that I'm yet to mention his new blog A Gamer's Odyssey. I have these things to say: You haven't taken any kind of gaming system with you. I challenge your gaming credentials. A single post on an alleged game for the iPhone does not a gaming blog make. You should be referring to yourself as Oddity if you're on an Odyssey. You haven't even left Australia yet. Get a move on. ...

posted @ Friday, January 30, 2009 5:45 PM | Feedback (2)

Apparently comments are not broken

I just needed to find where to moderate them from. I suspect my geek card is now probationary.

posted @ Tuesday, December 16, 2008 9:08 PM | Feedback (0)

In case you were wondering

Yes, I am aware that I have a tendency to raise new points in the summary section of my posts. This works for me.

posted @ Sunday, November 30, 2008 6:47 PM | Feedback (0)

Why xkcd is the world's greatest webcomic

Because it produces things like this. With stick figures. It's genius in (mostly) monochrome.

posted @ Monday, November 17, 2008 8:03 PM | Feedback (0)

I have an exclusive new card to demonstrate my superiority

OK, all it does is demonstrate my ability to pay for a MSDN subscription. I'm trying to work out why they're giving them out. It has my subscriber ID and subscription expiry date, but I have them elsewhere. It also has my name and email address but I'm not immediately in danger of forgetting those. So my question is: what does this piece of plastic get me? And how can I use it to lord over those I consider beneath me? If you have any suggestions post them as a comment. Comments on this blog are currently broken (one...

posted @ Saturday, November 08, 2008 4:00 PM | Feedback (0)

Today in corporate fail

My bank has decided to start making decisions for me. They've sent me a cheerful letter telling me that they're going to swap my credit card of type X with one of type Y with a brand new number. For my benefit, honest. This will all happen unless I call them and get the marketing spiel on why this is the greatest change ever to happen to me. Er... No. I have a number of things set up to do automatic billing from my credit card. If I'm going to have to change all those, I'm going to...

posted @ Wednesday, October 01, 2008 7:29 PM | Feedback (0)

Pushing the boundaries of Science

I'm a big fan of science. I'm under no delusion that I personally am a scientist, but I applaud those of you who are. That said... this is cool. But is it science? Surely not until it can manage whales.

posted @ Thursday, September 11, 2008 8:21 PM | Feedback (0)

Well that was pointless

I just tried to upgrade to the latest Subtext version but ran into issues. As this version apparently has problems with medium trust environments anyway I'm not going to keep pushing. Apologies to all none of you who would have noticed the downtime. I am however strongly resisting the urge to write my own blog engine (again) as an excuse to learn ASP.NET MVC. And by strongly resisting I mean I've downloaded the ASP.NET MVC Preview 4 release.

posted @ Wednesday, August 20, 2008 9:40 PM | Feedback (0)

Archery? Over Top Gear? Really? Bad SBS

Apparently this evening SBS will be broadcasting Olympic archery in the slot that should be occupied by Top Gear. This is wrong on so many levels. Not least of which is use of medieval weapons being considered an Olympic sport. If you really want to get me to watch, combine medieval weapons and cars. Bring back jousting. With cars. Until then can we please stop pretending that any of the Olympic events are interesting to any but the terminally dull? Hopefully one day as a species we'll get over the idiotic nationalism that drives this overly expensive stupidity. I'm...

posted @ Monday, August 11, 2008 2:14 PM | Feedback (0)

How to determine that you may be excessively geeky #1

You get depressed that reality doesn't support rollback because you want a do over. What kind of unreliable system doesn't have transactional support?

posted @ Monday, July 28, 2008 6:03 PM | Feedback (0)

Today in Technical Difficulties

My blog is currently experiencing some technical difficulties. This may be a combination of code, configuration or hosting. I'll be looking at it this weekend. Until then all 3 of my readers will just need to bear with me. In further failure news Telstra have managed to deliver the replacement handset to the wrong address, so I won't have it until tomorrow. This is after I specifically gave them the correct address. Brilliant. The delivery company (who just deliver where they're told) are the only consistently competent people I've dealt with so far. So kudos to Startrack Express and...

posted @ Thursday, June 26, 2008 9:53 AM | Feedback (0)

New Adventures in Telecommunications

I recently got an i-mate Ultimate 9502 which I'm on the whole reasonably happy with. Its got a large form factor but that works for me. The screen is excellent, although the video performance isn't brilliant. It doesn't have the same one handed usability my SP5 did but that's to be expected given the additional capabilities and the compromises to phone functionality that entails. Unfortunately its developed a problem. I used the included headset and now it won't work without it. It'll still ring but no other sounds will come from the inbuilt speakers. Kind of a problem. I've...

posted @ Sunday, June 22, 2008 6:18 PM | Feedback (2)

How to organise a DDOS on yourself

Step 1: Produce a new version of Firefox Step 2: Try and break a world record for number of downloads in 24 hours Congratulations to Mozilla who appear to have organised to have themselves nuked off the Interblag by millions of geeks wanting the latest shiny thing. I'd mock, but I'm one of them. Mmmm.... Shiny....

posted @ Wednesday, June 18, 2008 1:10 AM | Feedback (0)

Switched to SubText

After getting some reports of issues with dasBlog I've moved across to SubText which so far seems nifty. The binary version didn't work for me so I built it from source but had an otherwise trouble free install. This tool exported all the content from dasBlog except the images (which I solved by just leaving the images where they were). I also found this post from Ayende helpful in getting the post ordering sorted. In theory I've tweaked things so that the URLs should be the same for older posts. The RSS link has changed but Feedburner should mean...

posted @ Sunday, June 15, 2008 5:29 PM | Feedback (0)

Every developer should have a whiteboard

I got myself a whiteboard over the weekend. Due to a lack of available wallspace it's now "installed" by resting it on a wooden frame I happened to have lying about and using Scotch tape to fix it to a cabinet. I'm not good with physical objects... Nevertheless there are some design problems that are best solved by scribbling transient crap on a whiteboard. They exist as a tribute to all the weird and improbably ideas you can have while searching for a solution that works. Recommended. Just get one with a stand if you can...

posted @ Tuesday, June 10, 2008 2:31 PM | Feedback (0)

Ordered a new phone

I appear to have accidentally ordered an i-mate Ultimate 9502 from Telstra. My current phone (an i-mate SP5) has lasted over 2.5 years (which is quite good for me given my tendency to put phones through the wash) but it's starting to wear out. I shall of course attempt to demonstrate to my father why an integrated phone/PDA is superior to having separate devices, especially given that his old HP PDA runs Windows Mobile 2003 and therefore loses all its data when the battery dies. I probably won't have much luck with that.

posted @ Monday, June 09, 2008 7:27 AM | Feedback (0)

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