November 2004 Archives

I've been able to play one MP4 video on the PC per boot of windows. Every subsequent time it crashed. It turns out that the intervideo mp4 video decoder was at fault. It was preventing me from enjoying the stalker trailer that gleb pointed me to.
The Solution? unregister the intervideo mp4 decoder.
How do I do that? pop up a command prompt using the run dialog, on the drive that you installed the intervideo software cd to \Program Files\InterVideo\Common\Bin. At the prompt type: regsvr32 /u MP4VDEC.ax, and it all works job oxo.

Well I'm glad that I've got to the end of half-life 2. maybe now I won't be hearing the troubled breathing of combine troops any time it gets quiet.

DHTML Lemmings Another fine waster of time.

SmokeSkins Design your own covers for your cigarette packets. It's an interesting idea.

One of these days I'll actually pay attention to stuff like this by default - it turns out that you can run unsigned .NET code from the internet by default. under medium security settings in IE. I need to test this out as it makes for interesting possibilities.

They should put a nice warning when you log into a solaris box that killall on linux and solaris are entirely different commands.
Laame, if it was meant to be the same, then they would have used the same operating system.

Well it's early in the morning and I feel I've made some progress in half life 2, so I may as well get some sleep. Nothing too taxing in the difficulty so far - a few traps a nasty helicopter. I like the way the starting animation for the game is dependent in where you've progressed to during the game - if it was static then it wouldn't be as good.

It's fun. I can't believe that one of the mad scientists has a headcrab as a pet Talking about silly. They've really taken out all the stops in this one. And in case you're wondering; No I was not up until 4am playing the damned game.

Half life 2 and it won't install. It turns out that if you don't want to install Counterstrike:Source you can't install half life 2 AAAAAARGH!

We Represent The Lollipop Guild...
Half Life 2 is out tomorrow. I think I'm going to be ill tomorrow :)

I originally saw this on Dabe Barry's blog, but never bookmarked them. Milkshake tapestry
qveer eye for the medieval mann
and if you're skilled you can always DIY

Charlie & The Chocolate Factory Poster - MovieWeb

Ok, ok I realize that this is more of a bloody rant than an actual programming thing, but what's the problem with dealing with input fields properly? Take for example inputting credit card numbers. Type it into a text field, but the program complains that it's wrong. What's the problem? you used a space! An effing space! why the hell doesn't it just strip the bloody space out of the input before processing it? but noooooooooo that would involve another one fucking line of code to fix such a complicated input condition as that.
Then let's not talk about phone numbers! for fucking christ sake what is it with people and their insistence that you use the 'proper' format - XXX-XXXX noone in their right mind uses this format.
If the number is preceeded with a plus (+) it's a fucking country code prefix ... like every other goddamn country on the planet ... but of course this does not work in the fucking U S of A, oh no, when I visit I have to fix all the numbers I call because some dumb fucking stupid motherfucking telephone engineer can't deal with a proper mutherfucking phone number.
Other than that get rid of every other fucking non-numeric entity in the phone number. How hard is that? I mean really! Lazy fucking programmers! I'm a programmer myself and I hate it when I encounter UI disasters like that. It's not difficult to write something that makes people more likely to use your system.

Imagine a school with children that can read or write, but with teachers who cannot, and you have a metaphor of the Information Age in which we live.

QDB: Top 100 Quotes
I'm not saying there should be a capital punishment for stupidity, but why don't we just take the safety labels off of everything and let the problem solve itself?

Ode to joy, I got to attempt to install windows 98 onto a PC that my next door neighbor salvaged from a dump (he works in the waste management industry - no he is not a trash man). Having spent about 40 minutes copying the content of the windows 98 cd onto the hard drive and starting the installation process - we wnet for some food, then came back to the installation process to find that some of the hard disk was corrupt. Either the drive had been damaged in the discard process or it was damaged in the first place. It's been left scandisking with the surface scan for the remainder of the night. Another installation attempt tomorrow, I have an old hard drive which can be used for the installation if needs be. I mean it's an ATA33 machine!
Scary old hardware you are evil!

Why do I keep getting these ninja stealth nosebleeds? I was coming home on the train and my nose started leaking red liquid (that's blood for you freaks). This seems to be an occasional thing for me. Maybe I should talk to a doctor about this?

A hint for all you windows users out there who can't connect to the internet... don't forget that the number they ask you to dial in the dialer box is not your own phone number of your house, but instead is the service providers telephone number. I just spent 20 minutes on the phone trying to tech-support my sister through the dialup effort. She was repeatedly getting number in use errors. It turns out that she put her own number in the dnumber to connect button. At least she wasn't using call waiting, otherwise it would have kept disconnecting here every time she rang.
The fix is as always to use the real phone number of your ISP. I spent 10 minutes trying to get her to the eircom.net phone number, but accidentally gave her a pay-use number. The eircom number is 1892150150. It takes any username ans password, which makes it really easy to use.
Well she's sorted and I'm off home now.

Google is your friend. All the smart people use google. Just Fucking Google It For people who are too stupid to check Google before asking a question...

Oh my god! Pink Hello Kitty Laptop Just the thing for people like Fi :)

Links without Comment:

• Wired 12.11: The Decline of Brands
• Microsoft commits to XML docs for long term | CNET News.com
• 79bmedia GmbH Hacks on PalmOS 5
• Sorry Everybody

The first time I saw this movie it was about 3am and I had come home from the pub. Normally when I get home from the pub I fall asleep on the sofa (sad but true! what do you do?) but when this was on I could not fall asleep until I had seen y way through to th end. I've been telling people about it but noone else I know claims to have seen it.
So what do I do? I buy a copy of the DVD of course so I can inflict it on everyone I know. All I have to say is... you took my stapler and I want it back.
But for heaven's sake don't think that this corresponds to where I work. We don't have cubicles, we don't have to fill in arbitrary TPS reports and normally we only have to report to two bosses.
On the plus side we're only expected to work from home at weekends, and that's when we've got deadlines looming. Every morning I get into the office. There are about 120 emails in my inbox, another 120 mixed and matched amongst my other mailboxes. Trust me when I say I do not read all the email I get. I have been known to just tag whole reams of email as deleted if I'm not in the mood. This can cause problems - people damn me with faint praise and I miss it! I will say, for the record, that project related email gets the highest priority in the morning, followed by email that's in my inbox that is either (a) from someone who I recognize or (b) contains a useful subject line. An example of a useless subject line is not having one, or please help - dear god people do you have any idea how mush utter shite I have to wade through every day?
Well that turned into an unintentional rant.

Ever wonder what it would be like to roll around and collect everything you touched in one massive heap? Well that's exactly the premise of Namco's strange action game Katamari Damacy. In it, players assume the role of the Prince of the Cosmos as he undertakes a quest to right the wrongs of his father who accidentally knocked the stars out of the sky. The only way to fix it is to roll around the world and collect as many items as possible in one gigantic clump. Both a single player story mode and two-player battle feature are included for the romp, and gamers will be able to accumulate hundreds of different items of various shapes and sizes.
And for those of you who don't have PS2's we've got the utterly addictive TUMIKI Fighters

I got an emergency call from my housemate this afternoon - his computer had hanged and was not rebooting. it kept bluescreening. He is of course using windows.
The problem lies in his hard drive. He's only had the pc for a few months but the hard disk has started failing. It took several hours of trying chkdsks and running the maxtor drive utility before it was accepted that the drive was on the way out.
The only problem is of course that he has all of his vital email on it. And he does not have a recent backup of any of it; it's all on the one .pst file on the hard drive. Thank you lords of outlook.
I'm a bit paranoid about my data. I have about 3 copies of everything important, one on the laptop I wander around with, one on a remote server and another on the PC I have at home. Then I've an almost complete duplicate of everyting on an external USB hard drive. I think I'm about 80% insulated from failure. I know if I lose one of the devices I may lose a few days work, but at least I have a chance of recovering most of it.