Everything, Everything

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February 2006
Bad Smell
Tuesday 28th February, 2006 13:27
I dropped a floppy drive inside a PC and now there's a strange electrical burning smell from somewhere. It might be the PSU, I\'ll try a spare one later. Still waiting for my UPS to arrive today.
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ER
Monday 27th February, 2006 01:25
Lots of cool guest stars in it this season, will let you know all the names of them sometime, just as soon as I\'ve caught up on all the aired episodes. Also noticed that ITV2 is showing American Idol on Sunday evening. I still think Katharine McPhee will win, she's amazing and adorable and a shade crazy.
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However
Monday 27th February, 2006 01:07
You have to uninstall it afterwards, othewise Australians will find DST happening on that date every year. Oh dear, silly Microsoft.
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Australian Daylight Savings
Monday 27th February, 2006 00:32
The Commonwealth Games are scheduled to be held during March 2006 in Melbourne Australia. Several Australian states including New South Wales, Victoria, Australian Capital Territory, South Australia and Tasmania, have changed the Daylight Savings transition end dates to the first Sunday of Apr 2006. But don\'t worry, Microsoft are quick to patch this!
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Also
Saturday 25th February, 2006 21:09
What I should have mentioned was I was watching the 6th episode of The IT Crowd off the Channel 4 website, the intro credits had just finished, with the whole computer crashing type ending. Thankfully I saw about 10 seconds of footage before the PCs died, otherwise I would have been very scared.
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Argh
Saturday 25th February, 2006 20:37
Stupid flatmate killed the power to the flat again to sort out the extractor fan. Firstly she did it from outside instead of using the fusebox inside the flat. Secondly she didn\'t even tell me as I watched TV in my room. Which means my fileserver machine died instead of being shut down properly. The RAID array seems ok, but I\'m definitely going to look up UPS prices.
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Sessions
Saturday 25th February, 2006 15:26
The site - all 2 pages of it, although there are a number of legacy pages that I\'ve left alone - now uses PHP sessions to help me manage some things, and I might add some extra features at some point that will make it even more useful.
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The IT Crowd
Saturday 18th February, 2006 23:38
I\'m still not entirely sure I like this show, it reminds me a lot of Father Ted (unsurprising, as it's by the same person), but I might be biased as I know what IT support is really like. I\'ve been watching the episodes online, they\'re available a week in advance on the Channel 4 website, but I initially had trouble playing them. It looks like I had issues with the DRM, and although I wasn\'t getting the same error message listed here, I suspect that would have solved the problem. But I went for the simple solution of downloading and reinstalling Windows Media Player 10 from the website, as it's only (only?!?) 11MB, which doesn\'t take long for me on broadband. The Channel 4 servers are also quite good, I grabbed the 5th episode in about a minute, as I was downloading it at 1.17MB/Sec according to the file transfer window. Nice.
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Mozilla
Saturday 18th February, 2006 18:11
It looks like Firefox doesn\'t display the page properly unless the doctype (HTML 4 or XHTML 1.1, for example) is present, which screws up my plan. I think I\'ll just go with XHTML 1.1 and ignore the IE7 quirks for now, and hope they get fixed later. I might still do the CSS hacks as conditional comments, but both are just as nasty as each other. I can see why developers like Firefox (current memory leaks aside), although I suspect Opera does just as well too.
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IE7 Quirk
Saturday 18th February, 2006 17:41
The only time my test layout works online is if I don\'t use a doctype, but then the fonts are a size larger that I\'m after, so I\'d probably have to use IE specific conditional comments to adjust the font size back down, as well as the IE7 one I\'ve used to sort out the margins (previous versions of IE use the CSS hack, but if I put a conditional comment for all IE browsers first I could probably remove the hacks). At least they\'re more like filters than hacks, but it's not something that people should have to do. No wonder most sites still use tables.
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IE7 Is Odd
Saturday 18th February, 2006 17:25
Very odd. With the doctype <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD html 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3c.org/TR/1999/REC-html401-19991224/loose.dtd"> I get the page to work fine locally (aside from text going outside the box), but acts differently online (it ignores the new margin in the IE7 specific import).

Index page with doctype, viewed locally
Index page with doctype, viewed online

When I remove the doctype, it no longer looks okay locally (navbeta ignores the background, but navalpha works fine even though it uses exactly the same background css), but it looks pretty good online!

Index page without doctype, viewed locally
Index page without doctype, viewed online

I\'m about to try the XHTML 1.1 doctype, but I still don\'t know why it looks/acts differently online and locally! Stupid IE7.
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The Dilbert Blog
Thursday 16th February, 2006 14:17
Scott Adams makes me laugh, he recently posted this on his blog:

Here\'s one little face reading tip that you can use right away. When people look at something or someone they like, their pupils widen. It doesn\'t matter if they\'re looking at puppies and rainbows or porn. If they like it, their eyes try to get some more. It\'s even true of your pet. When your dog or cat looks at you, or at some favorite toy, check out the eyes.

[Note: If your dog\'s eyes don\'t widen when he looks at you, he\'s planning to kill you in your sleep.]

Hehe. Maybe that\'s why I wouldn\'t want to own a dog. Cats are great.
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Sessions
Sunday 12th February, 2006 03:24
I think I\'ll switch some of the current code I have in the site to use PHP's sessions. I doubt it\'d take long to do, it's probably just a couple lines of code at the top of diary.php, and then I can tidy up some of the other stuff.
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Ooh, shiny
Friday 10th February, 2006 16:41
I want one (actually, I want two).
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Hot
Thursday 9th February, 2006 20:59
Kelly Sotherton looked really nice on A Question of Sport tonight. Talking of pretty, I didn\'t think many of the girls were attractive on the UK version of Beauty And The Geek, only one I really liked was Sam as she's pretty and cute looking.
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Why
Thursday 9th February, 2006 04:52
Why on earth do I crave a jacket potato with cheese at this ridiculous time in the morning?
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Don\'t Cha
Wednesday 8th February, 2006 03:05
Lyrics from the Pussycat Dolls single:

Dont cha wish your girlfriend was hot like me
Dont cha wish your girlfriend was a freak like me
Dont cha, dont cha
Dont cha wish your girlfriend was raw like me
Dont cha wish your girlfriend was fun like me
Dont cha, dont cha

I wish they'd use "were" instead of "was". No wonder teenagers today are incapable of stringing a sentence together. I think I'll stick with a girl that knows her grammar, and possibly doesn't dress like a slut (most of the time hehe).
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Bitesize
Tuesday 7th February, 2006 02:36
I quite liked this article, it shows just how outdated, incorrect and irrelevant GCSE IT... sorry ICT... is.

The author of the article missed one thing to rant over. The BBC site claims "You should always act to remove a virus and let other people know if their computer is infected, but remember that lending your anti-virus software to someone else is breaking copyright laws" - perhaps they should look up copyright laws, as I think it should depend on the licence agreement (a good example would be Clam AntiVirus: open source software for Windows &Mac &Linux, released under the GPL).

I am not a lawyer, but this is how I understand the situation. Popular free (typically free for non-commercial use) ones do have restrictions. AVG has an assignment restriction in the licence, saying: "This license is provided personally to you and for that reason it does not allow you to make any duplicate (copy) to be sold, borrowed, assigned, leased or transferred in any manner whatsoever to another person." but making the installer available is not the same as making the program you have installed available. Just take a look at how many freeware sites have the installer available to download (e.g. Major Geeks, SoftPile, ZDNet UK, Top Shareware.com).

The BitDefender licence agreement says "You may also store or install a copy of the BitDefender on a storage device, such as a network server, used only to install or run the BitDefender on your other computers over an internal network; however, you must purchase and dedicate a separate license for each separate computer terminal on which the BitDefender is installed or run from the storage device. A license for the BitDefender may not be shared or used concurrently on different computers or computer terminals. You should purchase a license pack if you require multiple licenses for use on multiple computers or computer terminals." This presumably means that you're allowed to make the installation file available, but the end user (your friend, from the BBC example question) needs a separate licence. However, the Linux version is fine: "BitDefender Linux Edition is a freeware product, which doesn't require a license to be used." This means it should be possible to lend the Linux version to other Linux users without any trouble at all.

I know we have to keep things simple for kids to understand, but some of the information given is just wrong. I did laugh when the article mentions the BBC's description of a main frame (sic).
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Alias
Thursday 2nd February, 2006 23:58
ABC's spy series Alias, which was supposed to return for its final run of episodes in the spring, was not on the network's midseason schedule announced this week, and an ABC representative couldn't be reached to discuss where the show might land for the rest of its final season, Zap2It reported.

I didn't think ratings were that bad, what the hell are they planning? Will it air over the summer instead?
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Note To Self
Wednesday 1st February, 2006 16:23
Official IE7 Beta 2 is now out.
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