So this morning, I arrived at work some 90 minutes late. Considering I’m often 15 minutes or more early, that’s almost two hours later than usual. The reason? An accident. This accident, in fact. I’m not complaining about the accident at all. It looks especially nasty, by all accounts, and I hope everyone involved is OK. I’m also not really complaining they closed the road. After all, what else could they do? No, my issue is the way in which …
This comes up all the time at work, and I always struggle to find the page and never remember to bookmark it. So now I don’t need to! Who’d have thought you could use a blog as a bookmarking tool? Oh yeah, StumbleUpon realised. Anyway. The reason I needed it this time was because numbers in an Excel spreadsheet were being rounded up, or down, or converted from (say) “75.0” to “74.99999999999999” for seemingly no reason when mail merged in …
The first of our EeePCs arrived at work today, and what a lovely bit of kit it is. As is traditional, there was an Unpacking Ceremony, and here are a few pictures of the box and the unit in action. Apologies for poor quality camera scans. It really is a lovely unit though. A bit thicker than I expected (and probably thicker than it needs to be really – especially at the back), and it runs slightly warm (but only …
I have spent much of today banging my head against my monitor trying to get Moodle (v1.8) installed at work on our 1&1-hosted webspace. It just refuses to work. The problem, is that it hangs part way through the install, when it’s doing something with MySQL tables. The page tells you to click Continue, but there is no Continue to click. The same error occurs sometimes for v1.6/7 to v1.8 upgrades, but I’m doing a fresh install. Anyway, after much …
After yesterday’s Macbook uptime report I had to reboot as expected. Today, I installed a new keyboard on my PC (sadly, last week’s cleaning killed my other one a bit) and had to reboot that. Here’s the uptime before I hit the switch. Pathetic!
Well, it isn’t that massive, but compared to the usual peak of 40 days (ish) on my desktop PCs, 123 days on my Macbook is quite impressive. Even more so because it’s a laptop, I think. Anyway, I took this photo as my Mac has stopped recognising external drives (my fault – I was backing it up last night and pulled the external drive too early) so I think I may have to reboot soon. Shame!
Which may come as a bit of a shock to some of my readers, as I’ve been vocal in the past about how much I don’t wish to be a part of Facebook, MySpace, Bebo et al. It wasn’t as much of a shock as it was to me, though – I didn’t have a say in it! I got an email today saying I’d been added as a friend by someone I know who works for the LEA (Local …
Apparently, I am a software pirate. You see, I’m looking for a vector version of the Chinese characters for “Welcome” for work. I know what they look like, but only have them as a tiny gif and need it blown up to hugebig proportions for a sign. So I searched the internet for something to do this, and typed “chinese symbol finder” as a Google search term. In the results, I see a link for “Chinese Symbol Studio”, so follow …
This is perhaps the most geeky blog post I’ve done yet. Basically, I ran into a problem this morning. A couple of weeks ago I installed Ubuntu on a virtual server to replace the aging physical server running SuSE 7.3 that powers the intranet pages at work. Everything was fine, until today… I also use the install of PHP on that server to create thumbnail images as part of a photo gallery creation system I have for work’s website. As …
This is me using gparted to clone and expand the partitions on my old work machine boot drive to my new one. I also upgraded by data drive too, and kept the old drives as backups. So now, I have a staggering 1.5 terabytes of storage on that PC. I remember just ten short years ago when I bought a “cavernous” 4.3 GB hard drive, ad thought that would last me forever.
And I don’t mean how long it took to come to market, either. Today, I took delivery of an Acer Aspire 5051AWXMi (yes, all them letters), that comes with Vista Home Basic. It’s a cheap (¬¨¬£255) and cheerful laptop, but it’s only for internet and office use and replaces an older, heavier, less powerful laptop that had an accident involving a flight of concrete steps. I didn’t actually want Vista, but they don’t have any other OS option, so I …
It isn’t all fun and dongles, you know. Sometimes error messages happen and they need to be decyphered before you can even make a start on fixing the problem. Take this Acer desktop I have in for repair. It says “Stop: C0000221” on boot. Then there’s some stuff about “image kernel32.dll is possibly corrupt” and “header checksum does not match”. Thankfully, I found a solution. Kernel32.dll resides (on this XP Home machine at least) in c:\Windows\System32. And, having booted into …
Remember dongles? They’re devices that often came with (usually expensive) software. You plugged them into a port on your computer, and the software wouldn’t run without them. It was a stone age anti-piracy device, basically. Well, lookee what arrived this morning: That’s right. It’s a dongle! A USB dongle, in fact. Ah, the memories. The hideous memories. Memories of software not recognising you have a dongle plugged in and calling you a pirate. Memories of losing the dongle and being …
Why does formatting a new (super-fast SATA) hard drive take FOREVER? So far, it’s been going for about an hour. I wiped and reinstalled Tiger on an old G4 Mac mini last week in less time than this is taking just to format, and the mini has a slooooow 4200rpm laptop IDE drive in it. Yeah, I could do a quick format, but since this drive arrived in the smashed up box from yesterday’s post, I thought I’d best do …