My 10GB disk on my VirtualPC was nearly full to overflowing so I went looking on how to resize the virtual disk. There’s a free product that does this for you, but to quote an old song “I waved that thing all over the place, my boomrang won’t come back”. In fact I was using the app correctly but not understanding what the app actually did. This guide showed me the way.
It’s been a while since I posted, so what has been keeping me busy?
Work, it’s getting easier – I think I am getting into the VB6 mindset, but I still hate VBA with a passion. When is the nice .NET extension becoming available? Is it already, and could Reporting Services save our souls (not to mention our sanity)?
Space is coming along very slowly. Any time I sit down to work on it I have to spend about an hour refreshing my mind on what I have done – and I only have about 40 mins to do it in.
Had my birthday: One of my presents was an iPod from Mrs Bear – which gave me a lovely opportunity to hate iTunes all over again. This time I accidently deleted my play list, there is no undelete and then it synced it – wiping it. I’ve installed iTunes 9 but I don’t hold out any hope for them fixing all the problems with it. Another present is an ant farm – so along with my Sea Monkeys you could say I have Surf’n'Turf.
Another side effect of my birthday was my the choice of venues for a meal. Since I’ve always wanted to eat there I picked Kaminaki and had some of the nicest fish I have ever eaten, and definately the nicest pitta bread ever. All this and despite the grumblings of some of my friends.
My employer of nearly 3 months is slowly moving to VB.NET. However a lot of their ‘legacy’ apps still need to be maintained and extended to support new methods, etc.
This involves VB6 and VBA. I was always in the position that VB6 was a mickey-mouse program for throwaway apps but not really suitable for real dev work – I was an elitist C++ programmer basically.
My view has shifted – you can really write large enterprise class apps in VB6. But one thing I can’t seem to shake off is the contempt the people who wrote VB6 IDE had for their users. Having used VC6 for a number of years you get used to certain things: Like if you start editing a file that isn’t checked out it will ask you if you want to start editing and then when checked out your caret is where you want it to be.
Not in VB6. You are informed that the file is locked. So you then have to right click on the file and manually check it out. But now the file closes itself and reopens with you looking at the top of the file.
Should I mention the 255 control limit? Who picked that as a number? (As an aside why is Excel 2003 limited to 1026 rows? Why 1026 and not 1024? Is that a typo?)
“Out of memory error”. I have 4gb in my machine. Why am I out of memory and why does that stop you from saving my last 15 minutes of careful debugging work? Why must you lose my break points?
And the mouse wheel doesn’t work.
This isn’t to say VC6 was all roses – far from it – but it makes you wonder if the VB6 team actually a) used it for anything b) gave a damn.
Life continues.
Slowly getting used to the way my new employer does things. It’s a little more strict than previous places but this is the largest organisation that I’ve worked for under one roof. Using VB after a break of 5 years is a real pain but apparently it is only going to be for a short time. There are plans to rewrite (why do I cringe when I hear that word?) the apps in VB.NET. Oh joy of joys. Between now and then I can try and wheedle my way into getting C# used. Meanwhile I am learning to swim again by being thrown in at the deep end. As a plus I don’t have to get up/leave so early and I get home an hour earlier too.
While this is going on I am still working on Space. Or rather trying to get Space to work on a local VM. There is little point in pushing forward with changes when the changes are so hard to implement, and the only way to test is on a live system. That’s just folly: If something breaks then we start to lose real money. Better to make a VM and play safely in there.
That means learning Linux. Which I have now installed a dozen times. Even the book on the subject doesn’t work the way it is supposed to. Fortunately I am savvy enough to figure out my way around where the book misses out one of the hyphens in –dport.
With learning comes confidence so I went and reinstalled selecting server as the install option and doing everything manually. However with Virtual PC as my VM I kept getting the ‘i8253 too high – resetting’ all the time which made working in Vim a nightmare. So I decided to give VirtualBox a try.
Oh my God! How fast is it compared to Virtual PC!?. It just rips along. The boot is a blur, the install of the OS is twice as quick and UI is feels more responsive. As a plus I haven’t seen the i8253 bug yet.
Just finished my first week back in work and though it wasn’t a full week, does give one some confidence once again.
However, the job isn’t my ideal one – working with mess that is classic VB (could be worse might be PHP) – but it is a job all the same.
Being off for a week I’ve experienced the dubious pleasure of watching Golden Balls, the second worst game show on Earth – the worst being Deal or No Deal.
The premise for Golden Balls is similar to Deal or No Deal in so far as much as you don’t have much say in the proceedings.
There’s a large amount of balls, all of which are golden, in a large rotating drum. These have a monetary value attached to them from £10 to £2,5000. They have a Clamshell/catch affair so you can open them and read the value, but they won’t open at by accident. 12 of these balls are released and roll down into another spinning drum into which a lovely assistant puts 4 ‘killer’ balls. These random balls are then released down chutes to each player. They then position them how they choose on a 2-tiered rack and then open the front tiered balls for the world to see. Only they can see what they have.
So no player interaction so far. Now the contestants get to ‘play’. The idea for the players to discuss what balls they have and bluff about what they have. After the bluffing they decide which person to drop. This bluffing is pointless. You have no way of telling whether they are lying or telling the truth. The only logically way is to total up the values on show and make your choice based on that. Obviously killers override all other values and must be removed.
So now you have 3 players. The remaining balls are returned to the spinning drum. An additional 2 value balls are added as well as a killer ball. So they now each have 5 balls instead of 4. Again they display the front 2 balls and try to bluff about what they have on the back shelf. You have a little more information than before – you know what balls were there before. However you don’t know who has them. The best you can do is save the player with the most and drop the player with the least.
Now you have the head-to-head. This is where the true intelligence of the players shines through. The remaining balls are closed and placed at random on a field. The contestants pick one ball to bin and one ball to win. The balls are opened to reveal what the contestants would of won – like that makes a difference. If you get a killer, the value is divided by 10. So if you have 10,000 on the board and get a killer your prize fund is now 1,000. Another killer would reduce it to 100. So killers at the start doesn’t make much difference.
But where does the player intelligence (or lack thereof) come into this? The players were going with their feelings whether a ball felt right or not. Eh? It’s a featureless golden ball – it looks like every other ball on the table. How can it feel of anything?
Okay. Now fast forward to the they end game. You have a prize fund. It can be of any amount. You have to decide whether to split (S) or steal (K). Your opponent has the same choice. There are 4 possible patterns SS, SK, KS, KK. What are the outcomes (with you first):
Recognise this? It’s a bastardized version of the prisoners dilemma. However, this version of game theory it rewards for stealing.
The correct way of doing this is to tell the opponent you are going to steal and offer them a fixed value of less than 50%. Point out that they have no chance of winning any money unless they accept your offer. Tell them what they can buy with the money. If they point out you’d be getting more, point out that my winning is irrelevant. They will be getting zero or the amount you have offered. Always make it about them. And steal.
Nice guys finish last.
Okay first it is a 65.5mb download and requires 200mb of space. For a piece of software that plays music and video. Even this day and age of bloat, that is a tad excessive.
I have a large music collection on a different machine – it is a slow connection (see previous post) and I told iTunes where it was – now my machine is unusable while it indexed the 2000 tracks in that folder – and I have another two folders to go. You can’t minimize iTunes while this is going on due to the modal dialog, you can’t inform it of other locations that you want indexing. But it doesn’t stop there, once the modal dialog box finally buggers off and you tell it of the next folder you want indexing it has started on a “gapless playback” and now your machine really crawls as it tries to do two things at once. My fault for having a slow network? Maybe that is part of it, but I can set the folders up in Winamp and have it index at the same time and Winamp is a fraction of the size and I would hazard that Apple can afford to hire better programmers.
When you first index your music iTunes claims it is getting album art automatically. Cool – that’s neat. However I have this other folder to index, you can get the art later. So you index the album, let the gapless playback work out its stuff and then select all and then tell it to ‘Get Album art’. No can do – you need to be signed in. What? You didn’t need that a few minutes ago why now?
Now comes the really insiduous part of it. Okay lets’ create an account, and this is what I really don’t agree with. Why does Apple need to know my house address, what I do for a living, and my telephone number? And I am never going to buy stuff at the Apple Store so I don’t want to give you my credit card details but I can’t sign in without handing over my details. So I did a google search for a way and now I definitely don’t want to hand over my credit card details.
Fortunately I found a tutorial on YouTube that details how to get an account without handing over those details.
Update: I’ve now got my account by the above method. Something I didn’t mention was that I indexed my collection with a wired connection, but the wired couldn’t stay as it was laying directly across the living room, so I am back to my slow-ass wireless. Whether this is what is affecting the album art updating and causes it to crash out about the 1200th cover (which happens to be where my compilation albums exist). Perhaps crash was a bad word, how about hang, or just stop. Whatever. The point is it hasn’t finished the albums and there doesn’t seem to be a way of kickstarting it.
Not only that the only way of getting it restarted is to shut down iTunes. This brings up a dialog box telling you that you are get the album art and whether you are sure you want to stop this. Naturally you click yes and as iTunes shuts down a dialog flashes up for the briefest of seconds – looks like one of those ‘Do not show this dialog again’ boxes. But does it get all my albums? No. And the albums it get are pretty varied. Missed The Chemical Brothers, but did get Blutengel.
Final thing: The iPod has an update available a 57.8mb download. What?! It’s a software update!
People bleat on and on about how much better Linux is than Windows. Here’s some news: I’m fairly bright, and I like challenges, but even I am getting frustrated at Linux. I’m using RedHat 9, which might make some of you mutter “Why isn’t he using Ubuntu?”. Well I’ve joined a group of like minded individuals, and we’ve inherited a server and it happens to be RedHat 9. So it stays.
So I get VirtualBox, download the 3 CD’s that RedHat is provided on and start installing. The installation was painless. However getting the needed stuff installed is where things collapsed. Every website and forum that goes into installing redhat files has a slightly different way of doing things. But they don’t tell you where to get the files from: “Type the following to extract the apr-1.2.5-41b+8.tar.gz”. That’s fine, but please tell me where to get that file first. Also installing from source isn’t the greatest it’s cracked up to be. Various software components organically evolve – functions come, go and get renamed or deprecated and dropped. So trying to compile several things from releases that you try and glean from the net isn’t the productive, especially when you have to wait 10 minutes to find they aren’t compatible. So there goes rpmfind.net.
And that brings me to my next point: The point of the tools is to make me more productive, not the tools themselves. Spending an afternoon trying to install software (Subversion of all things) isn’t productive. Windows takes about 30 seconds: Download the msi, double click the msi, accept the default config, done. I can now start using Subversion. Can I use it on RedHat? No. Because I still haven’t got it installed.
So why don’t I use the install I have on my Windows box? Because I am trying to get the steps figured out so we can use it on the server without me borking the entire server.
This is the reason why Linux will never break the strangle hold of Windows. You may say that if I used Ubuntu then I wouldn’t have this problem, but RedHat was released in 2003. I can still double click MSI installers created in 2003 and be confident that they will work as advertised.
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]
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:-(