graham.reeds/

Flamingo Land

Yesterday, Mr & Mrs Bear with some non-bear friends went to Flamingo Land and had a thoroughly good time and a picnic.

It was slightly marred by the thoroughly lack lustre approach by most of the staff.

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Greatest Show On Earth…

…and I missed it because I was at work.

Never mind, in this age of TV-On-Demand I should be able to watch it at my leisure when I get home.

So I watched the “highlight” which showed the drumming, the globe, the lighting of the torch and a lot of fireworks. All with a really, really bad commentary by “professional” commentators who came across like a boring person given the disco.

This hasn’t satisfied me so I decided to look at the TOD features. Unfortunately we still use the list of lists design. So would the Olympics be in News, Sport, or Entertainment? Also in there would it be under O for Olympics or B for Beijing? Considering every click took about 4 seconds it was painful.

In the end we watched Black Books on Demand.

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Stack Overflow

Stack Overflow, the website that bears the same name as the podcast, has opened for private beta testing. I am honoured to be one of those beta testers. Unfortunately I haven’t been able to ask or answer a question as I don’t currently have any to ask, and everyone has already replied what I would replied to the topics that caught my eye.

[yes - this counts as a post just to let people know that I haven't forgotten about you all]

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Mounts & Muppet

Yesterday I was transferring a lot of files from one nearly full drive to a completely empty one. However it started to go pair shaped when I accidently tried deleting two mounted drives that had started to be copied - it was moaning of lack of space, etc. I tried to delete the mounts - they are only folders right - but alas, windows is stupider than that - it started to remove the files off the drive and I had use shift-delete too. I hit cancel as fast as my brain could take me but I had lost 108gb of files in approximately 2 seconds (or 348 files).

Now back in the day of DOS 6.2 you had a handy utility called undelete. Now you can get undelete tools, but they are abysmally slow. Also unreliable. Between me deleting the files and me undeleting them, nothing had touched the drive, all the pieces of the file should be there, right? Appears not. I used Undelete Plus first but that sat there and did nothing for about 15 minutes after I clicked ‘Start Undelete’ until I got bored and then tried RCI Undelete. This seemingly actually found all the files but only restored a large fraction (308) of them which is annoying to say the least. Also it’s time estimation is borked - it reckoned, right up to the moment it had finished, that there was over 7 million minutes left.

Why did it try to delete everything in the mount? Why couldn’t it find all the files? Why I am still pissed off at myself 18 hours later?

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Eclipse

I hate installing eclipse.

I’ve got a problem and none of the online solutions seem to work. I can’t install any modules. Or rather the tool that allows me to install them won’t display. So I am left with the reinstallation of eclipse.

Eclipse is one of those wonderful open-source IDE’s that has broken the shackles of singular development environment and now does anything you can imagine - pretty much like NetBeans and the IDE that comes out of Redmond.

However the Eclipse developers can take a lesson from the Redmond developers. First make a tiny installer that is about 2mb in size. Then have that display a wizard that asks question such as: Check the boxes of the languages you would like to develop in (I’d tick Java, Python and HTML). Please check the boxes of the databases you like to connect to (I’d tick MySQL and SQL Server). Please select your Source Control (I’d select Subversion).

What so difficult about that. Any time I try to upgrade anything in Eclipse I always get the “This needs org.tools.eclipse.acronyms.128.2586.20945.20070923″.  Where is that located?  If it was so bloody important ask me if I want to add that to the download!!!

NetBeans doesn’t have these problems and it looks nicer, but isn’t (or rather wasn’t - it’s been a couple of years) as quick.

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Amazon madness

I’ve noticed something strange. I have two wishlists. One is my UK account which has lots of items in it that I picked. The other is my list of items that other people link to and recommend - my American account.  Now it knows I am Graham Reeds - otherwise how does it know to whom to add the book to a wishlist - but why would I want it from America? I have a list, in the UK, which you obviously know about, why not add it to that one?!

Also there isn’t a way of moving it! 10 items that will probably remain unpurchased because I can’t be bothered to go through and look for that particular book in the .co.uk pages.

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More Power!!

No - that’s not right! We need less power.

Did some more testing before going to bed last night. First was my HTPC while off. That draw’s 3.4 - 6.7 watts. While off. Not in S3 Standby mode, but off. A little bit of thinking and I remembered that there are other things running, like Wake-On-Lan etc, which I could probably turn off in the bios and save me leccy.

The other thing was the socket that has the wireless router and cable modem attached. This I expected to be low. Nope this is running at 13.2 idle and peaks at 13.9 while downloading a 150mb file at 230kb/s and running uTorrent.

The only things I really want to test is my main rig, my new monitor, my old monitor and big TV.

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Life

It’s been a few weeks since I’ve posted properly. Does that mean I’ve been doing nothing? Not at all!

First I had a week off with Mrs Bear: Spent a weekend in Londinium visiting the Tutankhamun exhibition at the Millennium Dome, a day shopping in Edinburgh and a night out clubbing in Leeds.

With my lovely new monitor I’ve been playing the original HalfLife. Fantastic game. It is suprising that after all these years since I last played it I still remember all the little tricks that Valve put in.

But it’s not all fun, fun, fun. Been listening to the Stack Overflow podcasts which while have been running for a few weeks I’ve only just got around to listening to. Well worth it to see how a project grows. Certainly put me back in the mood to work on Galaxy a bit more, and to revisit OpenID again.

Loosely on the subject of Stack Overflow, Jeff Atwood - he of Coding Horror fame - blogged about building an efficient HTPC. My HTPC is loosely made up of bits that I had lying around. Eventually I decided to get rid of my PII-450 and get something a bit beefier. I plumped for a KX-333R with a AMD TBird 1.5 (which means it runs at 1.4GHz. It has 1gig of RAM, 5 HDD’s (one of which is a paltry 10gb), 1 DVD.  Jeff’s is dual core, all integrated jobby runs at a paltry 43watts. Using my EcoHamster (similar to Jeff’s Kill A Watt) I get a surprising 140 watts at idle, and during boot it ran to a massive 190.5. So if you need an excuse to upgrade this is it: Your old PC is killing the environment - upgrade and save leccy at the same time!

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Skanked!

A while ago I purchased a 320gb hdd for my media center. When it arrived Windows recognised it as being 298gb in size. I didn’t quibble - I wish I did now.

Recently I replaced it with a 500gb drive by the same company - Western Digital - but Windows recognises it as being only 465.76gb in size.  Where’s my other 35gb?

I’ve been caught by one of those 500gb = 500,000,000,000 bytes (500×1000x1000×1000).  If you do the maths properly, you get 500,000,000,000/1024/1024/1024 = 465.66gb.

In other words, if you are in the market for a new drive, steer clear of Western Digital. I used to like Maxtor drives, but I switched because Maxtor were more expensive than the competition, but now I wish I’d stuck with them. It seems Maxtor were charging more because they were giving you the actual drive size - not an imaginary number.

Update: Even my Maxtor drives are doing it now: I have 2 40gb maxtors in this machine of varying ages and they both report differing amount of available space.  One is 39.6gb in size and the other is 38.1gb. Neither quite 40gb but both above the 40,000,000,000 mark:-(

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I can see again!

Finally upgraded my monitor from my ageing 17″ CRT to a 22″ WS TFT. It’s an Acer X222W and was bought from Amazon. I set the screen to white and black and no dead pixels!

Currently trying out different things. Games playing is a bit weird - not all games support widescreen (notably the older ones).

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