It’s a pie chart, and while some people find that using distinct colors is a distraction in this case the colors are so similar that you are hard pressed to determine which ones apply to what.
shame really, but this is one of the primary reasons for coloring the graph versus shading it – you would at least have the chance to read the bloody thing when the colors are correct
boinc keeps the house warm
I think it’s a great and noble task that the BOINC project is performing. I just don’t feel like using it at home; and here’s the reason – I only have speed switching processors. When the CPU is kicking away at this work all the fans run full tilt and things get very noisy. I like the quiet; in fact most of the time I use a nifty tool called SpeedSwitch XP, which allows me to customize the frequency scaling policy of my laptop. When not doing anything CPU intensive I leave it locked on Max Battery, which restricts the speed to the minimum, and thus keeps the fans off most of the time.
damn you paravirtualization; damn you to hell!
Playing with the latest 2.6.20 kernel, I tried to enable paravirtualization on the kernel and it broke vmware. It looks like the XEN changes that went in should be disabled for the time being until there is a more recent release of vmware – prefereably one that can play well with others.
Drug test the TDs please!
Drug test our children! Please, drug test the members of the Dail to see what kind of drugs they must be on to suggest such a really frelling 1984-esque item.
Whiney applications…
If there’s one thing I can’t really stand, it’s applications that whinge about everything that goes wrong with an array of practically useless dialogs. One of my biggest gripes at the moment is of all things Thunderbird. It has to be one of the most whiney applications. When things go wrong it pops up a dialog which generally has only one option ‘ok’.
The most regular complaint dialog I get is because it’s incapable of connecting to the mail server. Outlook has solved this years ago with the connection status bar at the bottom of the screen. When things go well, the notification goes away once the communication has completed. When things go wrong you get a ‘send/receive errors’ item in the status bar. It expands to a dialog which gives you the status of each of the activities it was performing at the time.
Thunderbird…. every failed connection is a modal dialog box with ‘connection to foo failed’. I gather my email from many disparate sources and this is no end of an annoyance to me as normally when one fails they all fail.
Is is that there isn’t a graceful way of bringing up failure notifications to users?
VAT me baby (play)
Apparently play.com are being naughty with the VAT situation. Pick a price in pounds. If it exceeds a certain value (£18) it is subject to vat in the UK. Make sure this is the case.
Translate the price to euro using something like XE’s universal currency converter. Then click on the ‘price in euros’ button on play. They’re pretty similar.
Read the fine print in the terms and conditions… item 26 states you will be charged tax where appropriate … item 32 states only if you’re in jersey. Apparently play are paying tax to addresses delivered in the UK, but not to addresses in other european countries (like Ireland).
So the long and short of it is that they’re pocketing the tax difference and then when customs screw you on delivery of your item and add a €5 handling fee you have every right to be angry with them. Suddenly those DVDs aren’t cheap anymore.
Mind you there’s a getout clause. If the value of the item does not exceed €22 then you should not be charged VAT on it. This information is outlined in the Customs Duty and VAT at Importation leaflet.
the fact that they’re on holiday is an advantage
being at work again raises a few interesting issues. One of them involves the period over Christmas. It seems like there’s nobody in the office (I am one of three/four). I have 0.6 days holiday left and I am troubled. Damn my work related guilt.
My Frelling Documents
The old new thing has a short article about the use of the My Documents, which links to a short entry about the use of the Documents folder on the Mac.
Let’s see how many folders I have on my little box that are not of my creation
05/05/2006 13:39 <DIR> ACT Projects 05/05/2006 13:40 <DIR> AdobeStockPhotos 24/11/2006 19:30 <DIR> Bluetooth Exchange Folder 04/12/2006 22:29 <DIR> Borland Studio Projects 23/08/2006 17:15 <DIR> History 04/05/2006 14:02 <DIR> InterVideo 06/12/2006 22:01 <DIR> Java Development 12/10/2006 13:07 <DIR> My Albums 05/05/2006 13:49 <DIR> My Data Sources 01/11/2006 15:29 <DIR> My Digital Editions 29/12/2006 03:06 <DIR> My Downloads 05/08/2006 16:19 <DIR> My DVDs 08/08/2006 18:26 <DIR> My Games 05/05/2006 13:53 <DIR> My MMS 25/12/2006 21:04 <DIR> My Music 28/12/2006 11:42 <DIR> My Pictures 11/05/2006 10:19 <DIR> My Received Files 05/05/2006 13:53 <DIR> My Shapes 05/05/2006 13:53 <DIR> My Skype Content 11/05/2006 10:19 <DIR> My Skype Pictures 27/12/2006 22:10 <DIR> My Videos 07/12/2006 14:43 <DIR> My Virtual Machines 21/12/2006 09:34 <DIR> My Widgets 12/12/2006 10:11 <DIR> Nero Recode 05/05/2006 13:53 <DIR> NeroVision 27/11/2006 14:40 <DIR> PSP Games 27/11/2006 14:56 <DIR> PSP Sync 06/10/2006 17:18 <DIR> Rogue Trooper 05/05/2006 18:23 <DIR> SimCity 4 15/10/2006 23:57 <DIR> Source Insight 05/10/2006 20:16 <DIR> Tomb Raider - Legend 05/05/2006 13:59 <DIR> TT Installer Logs 14/11/2006 12:14 <DIR> Updater 05/05/2006 13:37 <DIR> Visual FoxPro Projects 17/11/2006 22:39 <DIR> Visual Studio 2005 25/09/2006 18:02 <DIR> Visual Studio Projects
I mean, what the frel is TT Installer logs? For the most part, all code goes into a version controlled sub directory, which is not under my documents (that would be silly). Bleugh… the save game location being under My Games is fine, but not in my documents; maybe under Application Data/Local Settings/Games would make more sense. You can’t load them except from the game so why have them there.
Samsung… what kind of crap is that UI?
My sister bought my Aunt a mobile phone. Dear god but it is such an unusable piece of crap. It reminds me of the worst things about the phone I first bought, but thought were really cool at the time. For example finding someone in the phonebook. Using a Nokia, Sony Ericsson all you do is tap the down arrow and you’re browsing the phone book. No, apparently that is initially bound to ‘voice memo’. Oops, you think, I’d better get out of that… it forces you to navigate back from where you are to the main menu. Time to look up a number using the non-intuitive ‘phonebook’. Click. I’m looking at a menu asking me if I want to Search, Add an entry…. For crying out loud, the most common use of the phonebook is to look for numbers, so make that the default phonebook action.
Well, I may as well change the down shortcut to browse the phonebook. No such luck, there’s no option to allow you to do that. The menus are a mess, there’s no other way to get to the phone book except through the front end. The center button is bound to make an internet connection (which given fat fingers will become really expensive).
Non intuitive, poorly designed piece of dreck. I won’t even mention the model number. It makes my heart hurt that this was a gift for a 70+ year old who has a hard enough time using her phone in the first place.
Anyone else seen this happen to their laptop?
Isn’t youtube great. It’s a Dell XPS laptop, the display does this wierd tearing thing like it can’t determine the refresh rate of the display. It happens occasionally on Windows, normally in a game when switching display modes. It happens with annoying regularity on Linux under XGL/Compiz, which leads me to the belief that it’s a driver problem.