Ok, thinking about buying one of the new Ipods (Yes, the capitalisation is InTeNtIoNaL). Daire is going to hate me for mentioning that I have been considering getting a Macbook Pro. So I did the math. The Euro:Dollar exchange rate is about 1.3:1, so it saves me a bit more than €500 to get the machine. Soooo…. it’s cheaper to fly to New York for a long weekend and buy all my Apple desires in the US than it is to buy it in the store in Euro. So, I’ll probably be visiting the sister relatively soon then 🙂
Class act Creative…
Evidently Creative believe that we’re running some form of toy operating system that can be limited to running only one application at a time. Come on guys, get a grip here. There are facilities for installing in-use files under Windows. In fact, if you used the installation system properly you could tell us who is using the files you’re planning on replacing, but no, we get this crummy dialog that says, essentially ‘leave me alone while I screw with your system‘. It’s a little bit silly, really.
Great music sale
Hey, it looks like itunes is having a huge blow-out singer-songwriter sale – all albums are an amazing 7 cent!!!!!!! This is what you get from using a symbol (€) in the wrong position for the locale that you’re presenting, and also having a symbol that coincidentally looks horribly like another language’s cent symbol (¢). Just another morning complaint.
Oi, apple stop installing the ‘update service’
For some reason even though I explicitly un-check the ‘apple software update’ option when installing either itunes or the bonjour service I am unsurprised to find that it has been installed.
Along with the quicktime icon in the notification area. Please respect my wishes to keep my notification area clear. It’s already cluttered with the detritus of outlook, pidgin, vmware, creative X-fi, hotsync, sync manager, bluetooth, quickset, virtual daemon manager, the power status, network status, volume and the sidebar. At least I can switch off clock, volume, network and power if I so choose, and they respect my authoritay.
Simpsonize me
As part of a shameless plug for the simpsons movie there is a Simpsonize me website that allows you to turn a picture of yourself into a simpsons style character. This is my end product.
vmnetnat.conf musings
I wonder does the ‘allowAnyOUI = 1’ option that’s commented out allows me to pick an oui from a previously created virtual machine that’s part of the pre-allocated set.
Vista, unidentified networks and vmware
The network interfaces that get configured by vmware always fall into the ‘unidentified realm’. The reason seems to be tied to the lack of a router or default gateway entry for the address.
So we cheat, and add in a router entry for the networks that is the same as the IP address of the connection and bingo, you get the option to put it into another network and give it a label! So I put both the VMware network interfaces and the Microsoft loopback interface into a group called ‘local only’, and providing I don’t use any grotty windows virtual machines, it should service me well. Of course, this is all purely academic for those who don’t use vista
three (3) no PPTP cookie for you
Waulgh. Trying to debug a VPN configuration using my 3 data modem was proving fruitless. It turns out that they are knobbling the GRE packets somewhere along the way which is killing the ability to establish a PPTP connection to the remote service.
Alternative solutions are to use OpenVPN, but let’s be honest about this, it was simply to connect to an already configured Windows vpn environment.
Having talked to the support bloke on the phone he told me that ‘three currently does not support VPN connectivity, but it is in the pipeline’, when asked about the schedule/timescale on that he could not comment – dadblastit!
Old School
I just uncovered the photographic evidence of my debs (prom) – a sleeve of photographs from the night. I cringe and then remember that some of the people in the pictures are no longer here.
I’m no real friend of Sony, but…
It strikes me as a little odd that a company got a patent in 1991 covering parallel processing of a form that seems to look suspiciously like the Inmos Transputer hardware from the 80’s. They are now suing Sony for their cell architecture (hey, try suing IBM instead; they designed the damned thing). The patent in question is 5,056,000, Synchronized parallel processing with shared memory.