Write more…
I really need to write more. I have a lot of ideas. Unfortunately these happen mainly at work or when I am in bed. By the time I am able to blog about these I’ve forgotten what I was going to write about and it goes unsaid:-(
I hate mailing-lists
I hate mailing lists. At low level of traffic they can be okay, but you still have to visit a website if you want to search the past questions. At high level of traffic the signal to noise ratio far outweighs any use you might gain from the large number of users. Sifting through the results can be traumatic – Thunderbird is okay, but GMail is not mailing list friendly. A forum is a lot better method of getting answers and results in my opinion.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Life
July 1st, 2008 :: graham.reeds
Categories: Life
Categories: 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!