Mon, 22 Aug 2005

[01:20] Zooming 'round the streets of London
Date: 8/22/05 at 9:20AM

Well, I made it. London very nicely turned on the rain for my first ride in - a fact I didn't notice until AFTER I'd gotten dressed so I had to go and get changed into my boardies and a t-shirt and waterproof my bag. Luckily my bag always has it's little waterproof jacket inside it or it would probably be back at home (Australia) where my waterproof pants are.

I managed to get as far as the bottom of the lift before I nearly stacked :) Luckily I recovered and from then I kept a sharp eye out for the many little slippery pitfalls that pepper the roads of London:

• Steel Manhole Covers
  
• Rows of VERY well polished bricks randomly embedded across roads
  
• The stuff they use to write on the road with. Back home it's paint - over here it's a plasticy substance that is significantly raised from the surrounding road surface (a good 5-10mm) and is slick as hell
  
• Motorcycles - one of 'em nearly got me this morning
  
• My Bike! Yes, that's right. I broke the bastard on my first real ride in. Somehow the (plastic) chainguard managed to break off and, in a desperate bid for freedom, it attempted to leave the bicycle and take it's close friend the chain with it. This sucked for a number of reasons. Chief among them the fact that I was in the middle of an intersection with no method for providing forward propulsion and a large garbage truck bearing down upon me. I did the first thing that came to mind which was the "Secret Signal" I learned whilst watching Team America: World Police. Surprisingly this didn't work. I rapidly shifted to Plan B and shuffled the hell off the road. I shall be talking to my fine friends at Decathlon later today about that. I don't THINK it's actually a functional piece of the bike. I think it's just meant to keep trousers from being eaten by the chain but it was displaying a remarkable penchant for flinging the chain off whilst in 1st gear - I stuck to second for the rest of the ride in.
  

Sun, 21 Aug 2005

[02:14] What, and it's going downess
Date: 8/21/05 at 10:14AM

OK, it's been one of those exciting weekends, and there's still more to come. But first, a rant:

In a display of personal munificence I bought some speaks last weekend. To be precise a Logitech X-230. This was cool because now we have sound coming out of our (borrowed) computer. Unfortunately, said computer is running Windows 2something and as I didn't build it it has the default sounds turned on (which I turn off in my winnt.sif and never have to worry about normally). So anyway, there I was this morning eating my breakfast and checking out what music I wanted to put on my MP3 player, I open up explorer and click on C: ... *click* ... OtherDirectory ... *click* .... *MP3* ... click, at which point I started screaming at it, then I turned the default (aka crap) sound scheme off. Now my question is - who is so stupid that they would click on a directory and, in the time it takes to render the contents, completely forget what they were doing and require an audible prompt???? Let me present the scenario:

Characters:
- elBoxen: A default install W2x machine
- The Androgynous One : A Human Bean

Scene: A computer on a desk (elBoxen). A person (The Androgynous One) sits in front of the computer, mouse in hand...

Act 1: It Begins
The Androgynous One: I think I'll see what is in the "My Documents" folder, first I shall click on the folder
*clicks on folder*
The Androgynous One: Now we wait
nanoseconds later
The Androgynous Ones Brain: Oh SHIT, what were we doing....are we skydiving?!? SHIT!
elBoxen:CLICK
The Androgynous Ones Brain: Oh YEAH - waiting for a folder to load...let's click on another one...
nanoseconds later
The Androgynous Ones Brain: Oh SHIT....
*fade out*

Not likely really is it? Now I know I'm being a little melodramatic here (yes, just a little thank you). I know that the stupid clicky sound is actually the "Complete Navigation" event firing off. I can see there is possibly some leeway here in that a webpage might take longer to load than your directory full of files but it still pisses me off!


Right, onto more exciting news. I bought a bicycle yesterday. It was THE cheapest one I could find in the city that was still a legal purchase. I didn't want to get something bright and shiny because bicycle theft in this city is abundant. I also bought the plethora of locking devices on requires to cycle in modern-day London. A D-lock for securing the bike to something, a cable lock for securing the wheels/seat to the D-lock, another D-Lock to secure the first D-lock to something else in case the first thing gets cut/bent/removed and a small trailer to carry it all in.

I bought the thing because my Oyster card runs out on Monday and I'm not particularly keen on shelling out another 80 quid for the questionable privilege of ramming myself into a stinking, sweaty, overpopulated tube for "high-speed" transportation to somewhere close to where I want to be! I cycled in this morning in 14 minutes and 09 seconds - the Tube journey from Waterloo to Bank takes that long alone (including walking time form my house to Waterloo), it's another 5-7 minute walk from Bank up to where I'm working so so far most of me is happy - my tender buttocks are not so happy but they'll toughen up :)

Tonight we're off to see She Talks In Maths, a show by a lass named Eliza Lumley. She's a broadway singer and the show is launching her new album (of the same name). The album is "a re-working of songs by Radiohead". It sounds interesting and that's all we know about it. I'll let y'all know if she's any good!

One last thing, for those of you on the edge of your seats wondering where I left Bodies (the book, not the objects) - I haven't yet. It was pissing down on Friday and yesterday wasn't much better - not good weather for abandoning books to their fate in (even if they do have rain jackets - water resistant is NOT waterproof). Maybe when we go out tonight....

Sat, 20 Aug 2005

[06:10] bash.org
Date: 8/20/05 at 2:10PM

More than likely everyone knows about bash but I haven't looked at it for months. While waiting for some installs to finish at work today I dropped by to have a look - now everyone thinks I'm (more) mental 'cause I've been cackling at my monitor:

#5775 +(8910)- [X]
* ab is away - gone, if anyone talks in the next 25 minutes as me it's bm
being an asshole -
HAHAHA DISREGARD THAT, I SUCK COCKS

#368808 +(4766)- [X]
<@David> Yay I get laid today! Been a month.... needing it by now
<@Sony> ...........
<@Sony> TMI TMI TMI
<@David> Only a few hundred pounds but its better than nothing
Thanks for the info
<@David> eh?
<@David> damn i meant PAID
<@David> I get PAID today
<@David> dammit

#329292 +(4645)- [X]
Euch, rap is just missing one letter. c.
rapc?
...
Crap you idiot. you put the c on the other end
oic
Though you could also say it's missing an e
wtf is erap?
* Batty bangs his head repeatedly against a wall

#240849 +(4539)- [X]
what does your robot do, sam
it collects data about the surrounding environment, then discards it and drives into walls

UPDATE: Sorry, I couldn't resist one more (I read the Top 200 last night as well :)

#168859 +(2896)- [X]
The most secure computer in the world is one not connected to the internet.
Thats why I recommend Telstra ADSL.

PS: Sorry about the tragic use of cite/pre - I've fixed that up now with <'s

Fri, 19 Aug 2005

[06:13] The Cleverst Little Printer In The World
Date: 8/19/05 at 2:13PM

I've just moved offices (wheee) and I am now situated directly opposite the printer. The printer in question is a venerable HP Laserjet 5 (OK, I just checked and they were only manufactured in 2003). Anyway, The printer has a little problem, every now and then the little grippy wheels that help suck the printed paper out seem to lose their grip and the paper doesn't fully exit the machine. The next piece of paper to be printed then pushes it out.

Whoop-de-doo I hear you say, care factor nil. Haha - think again! There is a slight point of interest or element of cool, as I like to call it, here:

When the first piece of paper is pushed out by the second piece it tumbles off the printer and drops to it's doom....NOT! The printer has been carefully aligned (by the great printer gods I can only assume) so that as the paper falls and flips (due to the curvature imposed upon it on its trip around the drum) the top edge of the paper slips in between the bottom of the printer and the desk upon which it resides and hangs there, as does the next, and the next! It is SO cool!!!! I've been watching it for ages.

Possibly I need to get out more.

I'm going to hunt down a device capable of capturing video so that I can share the full excitement of the moment with you all. Stay tuned....

Thu, 18 Aug 2005

[12:24] Bodies by Jed Mercurio - *** (3/5)
Date: 8/18/05 at 8:24PM

Bodies is a book with the medical profession at its core. It follows the life of a young and naive freshly graduated doctor, from his first experiences as a casualty doctor onwards. It's brutally open in its coverage of his everyday life (if you're one of the whining killjoys who pipes up "Howcome they never go to the toilet in the movies" then you'll enjoy this book). Every nuance of his life from pimple popping to murderous thoughts and actions are illustrated which makes the book startlingly candid and immersive. You live vicariously through the main character and it really is most difficult to put down - on the other hand I found the sordid and grimy details of his life oft bordering on revulsion. There are some things I just don't want to know. I'm a nice clean neat kinda guy and there's a reason I'm not a doctor.

One of the reasons I was interested in this book is that my sister recently became a paramedic (no way I could do that) and this alternate window into her world was interesting, but horribly worrying, to peer through.

You grow up as a child assuming the adults know what to do. As I get older and wiser (for want of a better word) I see that no-one really knows what to do. We're all just muddling through life doing the best we can - it's just a worrying when you think that the guy up to his elbow in your guts with a very sharp knife is just doing his best...

I'm going off on a tangent here so go read the book if you want.....it is a good book. It would have had another half a star if I had a half-asterisk key on my keyboard, instead I knocked a star off because it was too horribly real for me, bring back the rose-tinted glasses!

Tue, 16 Aug 2005

[16:13] WoW Comedy
Date: 8/17/05 at 12:13PM

I'm sure this has been linked to hell and gone by now but I have to post it....WoW Forum pwnage

The posts in question are 3 and 5, I've excerpted them below but head over to the forums for the ribbing:

3. Re: Alterac Valley for Tuesday 08-16-05 | 8/16/2005 3:29:01 AM PDT
Quote this post Reply to this post
ok i have a proposition for the horde, let us kill Korrak while you sit and watch. and well let you get all the honor youll ever want=}. no? ok well it shall be a great battle then, hope to see everyone there!

4...

5. Re: Alterac Valley for Tuesday 08-16-05 | 8/16/2005 8:44:27 AM PDT
Quote this post Reply to this post

Q u o t e:
ok i have a proposition for the horde, let us kill Korrak while you sit and watch. and well let you get all the honor youll ever want=}. no? ok well it shall be a great battle then, hope to see everyone there!

((OOC))

Pardon me for hijacking the thread, here..

But, Brion - if you don't want your mother to know you were up and on the computer at 3:29 in the morning - DON'T post on a forum that she reads.

Busted.
Grounded.


Ahahahahahaha :D

I've been thinking about (and I've even semi-written) an essay/article (for want of a better word) on the interaction of technology, specifically virtual communities, and the real world - this just fits in perfectly! Anyways, you don't need to know that - go forth and do whatever it is that you do!

Sun, 14 Aug 2005

[06:22] Data taste good, Windows EAT DATA
Date: 8/14/05 at 2:22PM

OK, so that's not strictly true - but I thought it sounded funny. Here's the lowdown.

Shona bought a BlueEye portable HDD enclosure before she left Oz so that she could easily transport all her Mail/Recipes/Patters/personal data/etc. She then stuck an 80Gb drive in it and - for maximum portability - formatted it with FAT32. Now, as everyone knows, Microsoft have been making it harder and harder to format things as FAT32 in recent years, especially things bigger than 32Gb. To be fair to Microsoft, they do it because it is insanely wasteful to try and use FAT32 on such a large partition but this is the beauty of choice. If I WANT to stick the loaded gun in my crotch and pull the trigger, I can! But I digress, where was I, blah blah BlueEye blah, ah yes.

So with the aid of Linux and the mkdosfs utility the disk was formatted (NOTE: It has come to my attention that someone has ported mkdosfs to Windows - I haven't tried it yet but I've downloaded it for later) and the world was a beautiful place...she took it home, plugged it in moved all her data onto it and took it out.

A week later, it was plugged back in and Windows asked, most politely, "The disk in drive F is not formatted. Do you want to format it now?". Obviously this is not the kind of question you'd like to be asked about the disk on which you have the only copy of your mail and other personal data (no, really). She moved it to another XP machine and it worked, back on her machine, "How bout I format your disk? Lemme format it, go on!", weird. There was no time for diagnosis so it just came over here and I had a look at it this morning.

I plugged it in and it appeared as a non-formatted "Healthy" device. I checked it out with Disk Investigator and it looked like there was data there. I pondered for a minute. Because it's a USB drive most of the traditional MS tools aren't going to work because you can't get access to the USB device from a DOS botodisk. I had a look on the ole internet and came across a delighful little utility called TestDisk. With the aid of the online documentation I had the problem sorted in five minutes. Hoorah for Open Source! Basically it took a backup copy of the FAT32 boot sector and overwrote a corrupted one however it's abilities seem to stretch a lot further than that - hopefully I'll never need them but I now have a copy of that snuggled into my USB toolkit (which is getting obscenely large now, weighing in at 281Mb). For more information on how you could fix the problem if you actually UNDERSTOOD the 1s and 0s on the platter, read here: How a Corrupted USB Drive Was Saved by GNU/Linux

Thu, 11 Aug 2005

[00:31] A chance encounter with a book
Date: 8/11/05 at 8:31AM

On the way in to work yesterday morning I met a book. This book to be exact. It was sitting on a ledge outside of Bank and as the area is usually littered with free magazines, papers, flyers and pamphlets I nearly ignored it - but I like books and the fact that a book was sitting there, with a curious little sticker in the corner piqued my curiosity - I turned back and rescued it...the sticker read:

Mon, 08 Aug 2005

[09:21] VB6 IDE and the Mousewheel
Date: 8/8/05 at 5:21PM

A long time ago I used to work with the VB6 Integrated Development Environment a lot. My biggest irk with the environmetn was that, for some reason it did not support the mousewheel events. You can't scroll the page up or down. This was back in the days when mouse wheels were still new fandagldness and in the end I ended up using a cool little application called FlyWheel by a mob named Plannet Crafters. They've disappeared now but FlyWheel is still out there.

I came back to the VB6 IDE recently as it is packaged with Microsoft Office (up until Office XP anyway) and it is what you get to write your fancy macros in Excel and Word in. I was violently surprised to find that the mouswheel STILL doesn't work. "Surely this cannot be" I thunk. Microsoft, in their infinite wisdom, have chosen to fix the problem but not to include what I would have thought would be a required usability fix. Anyway, you can download the required executable, vb6mousewheel.exe or go and check out the page from the Knowledgebase, Article 837910 - Mouse wheel events do not work in the Visual Basic 6.0 IDE. It's a pretty easy install and is described on the page but basically all you need to do is:

1. Download the file (it's a self-extracting archive) and run it. Say Yes to the "Can Microsoft own all your propertity in perpituity" box and extract it somewhere easy. I chucked it in c:\wutemp\c.
   
2. Go to c:\wutemp\c and copy the file VB6IDEMouseWheelAddin.dll to C:\Windows\System32 or C:\WINNT\System32 or whatever magical DLL directory you've got in your %PATH% that you care to use. I will call this directory Magical_Directory from now on to avoid confusion.
   
3. Close the IDE and anything that runs it (ie Word or Excel, not sure if Access has its own IDE these days)
   
4. Pop open a cmd window (Start > Run > cmd)
   
5. Type regsvr32 Magical_Directory\VB6IDEMouseWheelAddin.dll. You should get a little window pop up saying "DLLRegisterServer in Magical_Directory\VB6IDEMouseWheelAddin.dll succeeded.". Hit the OK button.
   
6. Start Excel or Word or whatever and open the IDE (in Excel it's Tools > Macros > Visual Basic Editor).
   
7. Click on Add-Ins in the menubar and then click Add-in Manager.
   
8. You'll be given a little list of possible add-ins. Click on MouseWheel Fix so it's selected.
   
9. Click to select the Loaded/Unloaded check box, and then click to select the Load on Startup check box.
   
10. Click OK and you're done. Woohoo - welcome to the late ninties!!!
    

Fri, 05 Aug 2005

[05:10] Bugg....ooorah!
Date: 8/5/05 at 1:10PM

Attention Denizens London: If you see a lost looking SonyEricsson T610 could you kindly return it to me. Thanks so much.

Hehe, that's unlikely to work really isn't it. The bugger part of the post is that I've lost the mobile. I've canned the SIM via the network but I don't know my IMEI number (aka International Mobile Equipment Identity) so I can't disable the handset unfortunately. I've reported it lost on the tube but my provider tells me that someone made a call that used up all the pre-pay so I think it's unlikely that it's going to get handed in really, oh well.

Do yourselves a favour people - find the IMEI on your phone and stick it somewhere handy (I have mine at home...in Australia). Luckily I've been offered another handset by a friend and my provider is sending me a new SIM (that stands for Subscriber Identity Module - I never knew that :) with the old number so all is well. All the data is backed up so I haven't lost anything really.

On to the Hooorah part of the post. When we got home last night the connection light on the router wasn't blinking......the Internet is connected to my house!!!

Wed, 03 Aug 2005

[16:18] Damn Hickorydacks
Date: 8/4/05 at 12:18PM

Well, maybe it isn't my wooden underwear so much as my inability to read - the installaton is this FRIDAY....here is an interim post:

• My Make magazine rocked up today - YAY! This quarters issue includes such scintilating topics as : VCR Cat Feeder, Stunning Spud Gun and Mr Jaloppy Teaches Welding. I look forward to getting into this tonight!
  
• My National Insurance card turned up today! I can now officially be taxed (rather than unofficially on the "Emergency Tax Rate" of 50%).
  
• I bring up the next topic as it appeared in the Metro this morning:
  The Space Elevator! The idea is simple, string a cable between the moon (or some other orbiting object) and tie it to the Earth. All travel problems solved as all you need to do is climb up the "rope". Now, I don't intend to take credit for this idea but I did think of it all by myself some years ago. I then discussed the idea with a reasonably knowledgable friend who pointed out to me that if, for some reason, the cable were to become dissacociated with the base station then you would have a cable dangling over the earth attached to an object moving at a relative speed of 1 kilometer per second (0.6 miles per scond). Since we're talking about a "cable" that would be some considerable diameter you're talking about a VERY destructive object (watch the start of Ghost Ship for a brief introduction to the destructive magic of high speed cables). He also pointed out a phenomenon I like to call the "wacky smacky string effect". I'm sure you're all passingly familliar with the Tennis ball on a string on a stick game (I forget the trade name) whereby you hit the tennis ball and it goes up the spiral piece of metal whilst your partner attempts to push it to the bottom by hitting in the opposite direction. Once someone wins and the string reaches either the top or bottom of the coil it can no longer rotate around the stick, at this point the cable begins to wrap around the stick until it runs out at which point the ball thumps into the pole. With the whole MoonEarth setup I see a possibility (I'm not sure how exactly you'd kick of such an event) of a similar but intensely more catastrophic outcome.
  I'm assuming these guys have thought of all of this but I wll do some reading and make sure :)
  
• My efforts to bring Bug 252 to the attention of someone at ModBlog are not faring well :(
  
  
  OK, I've used up all my free time this morning.....time to get to work.
  

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  Tue, 02 Aug 2005

  [06:15] The Updates Of Meaninglessnessness
  Date: 8/2/05 at 2:15PM
  
  Hello folks! Happy days are here - I should have ADSL at HOME tomorrow if all goes well. As I type my spanky new modemy/routery toy is en-route and the ADSL connection is scheduled for tomorrow - my fingers are crossed and I've crafted a cunning set of underwear from hickory so as to be always touching wood.
  
  This is good news for YOU (see the pointy fingers up the top, this means YOU - or YOUS in the vernacular for those back home) as I will now be able to post on some kind of regular schedule (instead of sneaking in posts in my lunch minute) and I have SOOOO much stuff stored up that I want to post that you could find useful, informative, helpful or, alternatively, blithering crap.
  
  I want to tell you what I found out about the mysterious bumpy black paint, I want to wax lyrical on my last two weekend outings, I quiver in anticipation of inviting you into realm of the CyberDog, I have many and varied exciting Windowsy tips I've picked up and, of course, there's all the naked photos.
  
  Muhahahah, bring on the interjobie!
  

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