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[15:30] Windows Tip o' The Day
At work today I accidentally pressed Windows Key+B. The Start Bar popped up, as it is wont to do when the Winkey is pressed, but I noticed that one of the system tray icons was highlighted. Further investigation shows that Windows Key+B will actually make the system tray active! You can move the highlight from icon to icon with the arrow keys and hitting enter will kick off the default action for that icon. I don't know if this is Windows XP only - it hasn't worked on the one Windows 2000 machine I've tested it on - but I'm excited anyway; I love not having to use the mouse for stuff!
As ususal, Wikipedia was there first with a somewhat indefinite article on the Windows key. Maybe I'll update that a little once I've done a bit more research.
[05:41] The New Rammstein Album Is Out
Rammstein have released their latest album, Rosenrot. I'm a little bit late with the "news" as it was released just over a month ago but Hurrah anyway!
I've only listened to it once so far (goddamnit I left it at home today too) and that listen made me think Wagnerian opera! It is still a very Rammsteinian (if that's a word) album, the first track, Benzin, is all about setting things on fire :)
If you'd like more info Herzeleid, the biggest fansite out there, has LOTS of information for you.
[10:06] *Pop* What was th...*pop*...at
That was BOTH of my tires being puntured on the way to work this morning.
I'm feeling crappy at the moment as I'm recovering from a cold (caused by my house auditioning for a role as an aquarium - more on that tomorrow) and didn't want to sit outside in the cold fog sodding about with tubes and looking for punctures. With this in mind I called the local bike shop and asked 'em how much to fix it for me. I was advised not to bother and do it myself or purchase a new bike, the prices would be approximately the same :)
I've managed to rack up three punctures now in the space of two weeks. The first was very exciting - I had a slow leak which meant I had to pump up the tire every time I rode home at night until I managed to purchase a puncture repair kit.
Amusingly, after I repaired the puncture I managed to rip the valve off the tire whilst pumping it back up so I had to go and obtain a new tube the next morning.
Lessons learned? Always carry a pump and puncture repair kit and pump s.l.o.w.l.y!
[07:19] Good Luck Andrew!
Andrew has skipped the country - or is that Andrew has skipped the country? Either way, welcome to the expat club! A much more controlled departure than mine and for a lot more exciting reasons - all the best!
[09:25] Firefox 1.5 and Online Banking
One of my banks is preventing the 1.5 version of firefox that I'm using from hitting the online banking site. Being the progressive bank they are (their debit cards have PINs now!!!) they used to let firefox 1.0 in. I'm assuming they haven't blocked 1.5 because of any specific security issues as they've listed none on their "Why you can't log on" page. I figure they just haven't updated their list of allowed User Agent strings. With this in mind I have loaded the User Agent Switcher Extension and added my own custom User Agent string to pretend I'm the old version I was running. The specific string looks like this:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.12) Gecko/20050915 Firefox/1.0.7
Now I can get in again :)
[09:15] Weekend Technical Frickery
I added the pollxn "Discussion Engine" blosxom plugin to the site this weekend to see if I can have some commenting without getting spammed to, well, wherever it is that you get sent to by comment spam. Based on teh assumption that the spambots search for links marked as "comment" I've called it something else.
I've also edited blogTools so that it's working again after my abortive attempts two weeks ago to add some JavaScript sanity checking stuff and (once again) locked myself out for a while. I now have new blog posting and editing functionality but not WITH categorisation. Still on the ToDo list (in priority order) are:
[14:53] The Sony DRM Debacle and why I like Sysinternals
This post is partly in relation to the current Sony DRM debacle but before you all groan and change channels I must absolve myself of the crime of "posting old news". As I've whined previously I just don't have time to keep up with the real world right now. Even my lunch hour is spent reading the manuals for the software we are inflictinginstalling at work (because no-one else seems to have).
So anyway, I only stumbled upon the whole Sony DRM thing on Monday (the 7th, a full week late) whilst on a completely different mission:
I had to verify that a lot of machines were up to the task of running the software we are installing - things like CPU being beefy enough, enough RAM and free disk, certain versions of Windows/IE etc. I knew that the psinfo utility from Sysinternals could give me that information but due to the volume of machines I needed the output in tabular format rather than human readable format. No probs I thought, the -c option will dump the output in CSV format. Hurrah! Then I found that the Kernel Version and possibly the Processor Type fields might have a comma in them. Obviously this might wreak havoc with a comma seperated file. I noticed that the -t option allowed you to specify your own delimiter. I wanted tabs and I tried all sorts of ways to get the -t option to accept a tab character but it refused. I dealt with it by getting upset because I couldn't use the delimiter I wanted. In the end I e-mailed the author, one Mark Russinovich, a quick note saying that there was an error in the documentation on the webpage, that the downloadable version didn't seem to match the documentation version and I slipped in a request "Can I please have an update to psinfo.exe to allow TABs to be passed to -t", hoping that my other information, like a sacrifice to the gods, would provide me with some kind of credit/karma. Imagine my surprise when he e-mailed me back today:
Thanks for the correction.with a swanky new version of psinfo attached to the email! VERY big thank-yous to Mark for making my life just that little bit easier :)
I've attached an update that supports a tab delimiter. The current posted version is 1.71, this version is 1.72.
-Mark
[16:19] Halo Audio Outtakes
My sister sent me one of the audio outakes from the Aussie marine in Halo (the XBox game), whose name I've just learned was Private Chips Dubbo! It's a Steve Irwin, Crocodile Hunter rip-off and I found it most amusing. There are more at the Bungie Audio Outakes page if you're interested. On the subject of audio outakes from games, a few years ago now my friend Donovan "Blogs suck like nothing else has sucked before" Ryan also pointed me at the outakes from the Duke Nukem 3D Outtakes. I just listened to them all again and they're still funny - possibly because I remember them from the game but if you played Duke then you might want to go check them out.
UPDATE:Oh my god, I can't stop, I started this post nearly an hour ago. I got hooked on reminiscing and started to track down the swear track from the 1999 hit "Kingpin: Life Of Crime". Not only did I find what I was looking for, I found that Kingpin is alive and well today and is still being actively played on the net! I also found the Kingpin vs Half-Life WAV that someone put together - hehe.
OK, I hear Big Ben tolling midnight - bedtime methinks!
[07:55] Guy Fawkes Night
Last night was Guy Fawkes night and was the cue for everyone in London who hadn't been letting fireworks off every night for the last month to do so. We went out to my original London base (my friend Sams' house in Stockwell) for dinner and watching of fireworks from the comfort of the sofa. The apartment is on the 7th floor so we had a pretty good view of pretty much 180 degrees of the south-west of London from the lounge room and about 45 degrees of the north east from the kitchen. It was all very pretty, when an entire city the size of London decides to start letting of fireworks simultaneously for four or five hours you're in for a fairly spectacular show. The other advantage of watching from an apartment is that you are at eye level for the ones being set off at the bottom of the building. I was watching from the kitchen when one shot up and exploded right in front of me - I was pretty excited as I've never had the opportunity to examine an exploding firework at such close range before (the magic of double-glazing).
As a side note, I find it more than a little amusing that in this current climate of fear and "Terror Alerts" that the entire country is celebrating an event that, were it to occur today, would be decried as a most heinous terrorist attack!
[11:23] If god were a condiment....
I'm "Home Alone" this evening - at least for now - and having to prepare my own dinner. Since I really couldn't be assed to do much I have created a very quick and very special recipe that all you bachelor boys can write down and use. It is based upon leftovers which are MAGICALLY transformed merly by adding the liquidy love that is WASABI.
Ingredients
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1 x Carrot
1 x Sausage (cooked/cold)
1/4 Onion (cooked/cold)
Wasabi - The God Of Condiments
Recipe
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