When I sign up to commercial services I create a specific account for receiving email for that account. When email arrives for that address from a third party I know that the account has been compromised in some way. Today’s offender is audible. I’m not linking them as they don’t deserve it.
Disabling that PC speaker beep once and for all
For some reason the ^G character is not performing a ‘default system sound’ when it happens. No idea why, probably a misconfiguration on my behalf. It makes using a console very annoying – for example every exception on vmware produces an annoying beep when anything wrong happens.
The solution is in, of all places, the MSDN reference for Beep(), which states in small print to type: net stop beep followed by sc config beep start= disabled
Reenabling it involves typing: sc config beep start= system followed by net start beep
I hope you found this as useful as I did.
World Cup arrives…
While the rest of the planet goes crazy I’m painting 🙂
Ubiquitous Networking?
I was at Shannon Airport to collect the sister this morning. Sign up says ‘free internet access’. You just need to register. Two problems with this – registration was be email and I could not connect to my mail server securely until I had registered. Secure web browsing seemed to be unusable – possibly because I was using self-signed certs from my home server (at $200 p/a for a cert when it’s just for me is plain silly).
The other complaint was of course the everyone must use web 2.0. I cough politely, and remind people that not everyone has broadband access from everywhere. Considering that I use the laptop for most of my work, when I need to connect it’s over GPRS, and that’s just expensive from the get-go. You may complain about a 10cent text message (plus VAT) for 160 usable characters (which works out at 0.0625cent a byte), but the phone companies are charging 2cent for 1k of data. Not that I could ever get this working correctly. All those round-robin trips to the server could end up costing a fortune to the on-the-go user.
Well, rant, rant. It’s such a lovely day I think I’ll be outside.
What is wrong with me?
I recognised Ian Wright on the TV. I don’t care one jot about football. It’s official, I should be down t’pub to watch footie games.
Freakshow Didn’t make it…
Oh well, Springheeled Jack won. Dangnabbit.
Depressed? You have no idea
Things are often left unsaid. I regularly don’t say what’s on my mind where my emotions are concerned. This has been a disaster as far as relations are concerned. I had one more chance to say what was on my mind, but no, I chickened out. Now I’m depressed. How much longer will it take to say things?
Waiting for Vista
It’s my own limited homage to Samuel Beckett. 🙂
Direct3D 10 (AKA DirectX 10) is a Vista only item. Considering the driver model changes for Vista I can see how you would have a problem shoehorning the API back into XP. The problem is that they keep delaying the release for various reasons meaning that the games keep being delayed. The longer you delay the OS the later it will be adopted. I’m not planning on an upgrade until I’ve heard a reasonable amount of feedback as I can’t afford to waste time troubleshooting problems. Considering that everything native I’m developing has to be backwards compatible with Windows 2000, my upgrade path has been restricted somewhat.
The new toy has the dreaded ‘Windows Vista Capable‘, which is a tad suspicious.
Hippies, you’re all a bunch of hippies
Naah, I just thought I’d put in a title like that to grab a few eyeballs. The brother is going to the Munster Biarritz game this weekend in Cardiff. He got flights to London and is travelling up with the Brother in law for the game. Outrageous price to go to Manchester for the weekend – something in the range of €300, so the mammy has delayed her trip to visit the uncle until early june, where it’s a much more reasonable €140. I’m not going to the game, as there aren’t any spare tickets. If I’d known that Liz was in the US this week, I could have connived to get the ticked to Brian in New Zealand who promised to come all the way to see the game if he was guaranteed a ticket. That would have been silly.
I’m about half way through the evening course I’ve bene taking. It’s interesting. Some things I knew, some things I didn’t, but overall educational to have everything you need lined out in front of you. When I couple it with the Maths grinds for the niece, I’m busy in the evenings, and more than a bit tired. It will be a matter of time before I’m too tired to watch my favourite ‘Boston Legal’ on the telly. Maybe I should stop watching it pre-emptively; or even record it.
Mark, sorry for not getting in touch sooner. I’ve been distracted and just haven’t gotten back to you.
Never had a hibernate problem with 1GB ram
Christ, but it was annoying – I close the laptop case and shove it in the bag. I pull it out a while later and there’s a dialog saying: ‘Insufficient system resources exist to complete the API. And my hibernate tab is missing. A bit of googling led me to and entry in Bryce Yehl’s weblog. I followed the guide, contacted Microsoft, got the hotfix and now hibernate seems to be working just fine. I’m running Delphi, SQL server Visual Studio have a few mounted CD images and things seem to be just fine – everything hibernates just dandily. All this because I have more than a gig of RAM? That’s annoying to say the least.