This has got to be the greatest FireFox addon ever. True, it will soon get on your nerves, but for a short time its quite amusing.
STOP! Hammer Time!
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Category Archives: Tech
Paranoia
So a few months ago I bought 50 blank DVD-R’s, they seemed to work OK, burning without error and as far as I was aware producing a perfect copy every time. So having ran out of disks I bought a further 200 of these disks so that I can do some serious backing up over the festive period. An unforeseen problem has occurred. Even though they write OK, when I come to read them they keep having errors on them. After trying different CD burning software software, simulating before burning and verifying the data after its been written I was still having problems.
The final option was to try a firmware upgrade, it turns out that I was still using firmware version A301 rather than then newest version A306, support for the RITEK disks I’m using was added in version A302. The upgrade does allow me to write at 8x speed rather than the previous 4x speed, although the actual final disk is yet to be produced so I’m yet to discover if my problem is solved or if I need to look for a new home for the remaining 190 disks.
My major worry now is for the data quality on my previous 50 disks, have I deleted data from my PC to free up disk space thinking its securely backed up when in fact its actually just stored on a load of old coasters, I guess only time will tell.
Don't delay update today
Its time to update your browser because yesterday Firefox version 2.0 was release, so now the best web browser has just got better. I’m not going to go on about the new features because there not that exciting. All you need to know it that its got built in spell checking so from now on when I can actually be bothered to post then it should be spelling free!
Too true
I must appologise to Phil, he posted this on his site, and it was too true not to steal.
1. When you call us to have your computer moved, be sure to leave it buried under half a ton of postcards, baby pictures, stuffed animals, dried flowers, bowling trophies and children’s art. We don’t have a life, and we find it deeply moving to catch a fleeting glimpse of yours.
2. Don’t write anything down. Ever. We can play back the error messages from here.
3. When an I.T. person says he’s coming right over, go for coffee. That way you won’t be there when we need your password. It’s nothing for us to remember 700 screen saver passwords.
4. When you call the help desk, state what you want, not what’s keeping you from getting it. We don’t need to know that you can’t get into your mail because your computer won’t power on at all.
5. When I.T. support sends you an E-Mail with high importance, delete it at once. We’re just testing.
Narrow escape
After some recent problems my web host has decided to retire the server on which this site was hosted. I therefore received an e-mail this morning informing me of the changes, I logged into my account and check all my sites and everything seemed fine. That was until tonight where I realised that my blog had been returned to the state it was on Friday. This was no good because I’d written a rather large entry yesterday and had had a comment on it.
No problem I thought I have backups made every night so I’d just use one of those, so I tried running the sql file in phpMyAdmin, this didn’t work though since the database already existed. There was only one thing for it, I’d have to delete the current live database and run the backup sql file. I came across a bit of a problem, having deleted the database the backup sql wouldn’t run because it was unable to create the database from within phpMyAdmin, and then when I created the database on cPanel it couldn’t run since the database already existed. This was not a good position to be in. Luckily I’d done a full home directory backup today so was able to use the sql backup file which this generated.
So what is the point of this post, well its basically a reminder to myself to actually look into finding out a fool proof way to restore my backups, its all very well taking periodic backups, but with no means of restoring them their not much good.
Summer time projects
Its summer now, which means more spare time on my hands, last summer I started writing my own Content Management System but got side tracked and so it got pushed to one side. I think I’m going to try and get it finished off (although the chances are that I’ll actually start again from scratch and again never get round to finishing it). So if you have any specific CMS needs, now would be a good time to mention them. The aims of the project include (although are not limited to, and lets face it, if it begins to become too difficult then I’ll soon drop the hard stuff):
- a simple templating system
- built-in calendar functions (so you can publish/share your diary)
- blogging features (including comments)
- simple page creation
- simple category/sub-category structure
- standards compliant
- …and maybe more although can’t think of much at the moment.
Steam Power
This is genius, a steam powered internet machine!
History
While sorting through some stuff I’ve found the receipt for my very first PC and it makes interesting reading. It was bought from Performance Computers in Darlington in Feb 1996. The machine was a Performance Pentium and it cost £1749. That’s a serious amount of money, but wait for the spec, its amazing:
- P120 Processor
- 8MB EDO Ram and 1GB HDD
- 1MB Diamond Stealth PCI Video card
- Quad CD Drive, SoundBlaster 16 and speakers
- 14″ SVGA monitor
- MS Win95, Works V4 and Encarta 96 CDs.
That really is a stupid amount of money to pay for such a rubbish machine (although it was amazing at the time). But I still wasn’t happy because in October the same year I got a memory upgrade, I can’t remember how much it cost, but the memory upgrade options in the price list for Jan 1996 are as follows:
- extra 4mb ram – £109
- extra 8mb ram – £219
- extra 16mb ram £409.
Finally in December I replaced my aging Citizen ABC colour dot matrix printer for a HP 690C colour inkjet for the very reasonable price of £259.99. That is shocking, I think I’m going to throw these receipts away and try and forget about them.
Aren’t computers amazing, you spend a fortune on the one which is surely going to last for years and then a few months down the line its a piece of rubbish and you wish you’d bought something else. Luckily I get to make the same mistake again, when hopefully a new Power Mac will shortly be announced.
Downtime
If you’ve visited one of my sites over the weekend, you may have noticed that its not been accessible. This is because the server on which this site is hosted was suffering from a DDoS attack. This problem has since been resolved and the server rebuilt, the data centre is also having some new hardware installed tonight which should prevent these issues from occurring again. Hurrah.
Its a matter of style
So I’m discontinuing the use of my feedburner service. It was good for the few days it was in use as some of the stats it gives you are quite nice, but it did introduce a delay into the issuing of my feeds and since it didn’t do anything that I couldn’t do myself figured that I’d just have to get on and write some XSL.
So that’s what I did, when I say that I wrote my own it may be a slight exaggeration, it was more a case of customising some files that I borrowed form elsewhere to suit my needs. But the results are the same, no longer are you greeted with plain XML data, for now it has been styled into a nice human readable format by my custom built template. I may make some changes to the overall style at some point, but for the time being it will suffice.