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.
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.
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!
vmware, vista and losing network traffic
I’m replaying network traffic at 1000 packets per second into a vmware client that’s hosted on a vista machine. It’s losing quite a few packets. the Vista OS does not appear to be losing the packets, they are simple missing on the guest operating system. This is a lot like crap, really.
No unicode file names in cygwin
Not always a problem. Except when I’ve got international characters in my filenames. Which seems to be quite common with the import albums I’m downloading.
Dang. There is a patcharound, but it’s unsupported. Honestly, this backwards compatibility is a pain in the ass.
The next issue is cygwin/X. It’s hanging on Vista. Seems to be related to dwm and the pretty aero effects and the occasional toggle to non-aero mode caused by some applications (not java 1.6, though).
Groan, back in rainy Ireland
Ah, well, it was a great holiday.
still tired
my i nternet access has improved massively – I purchased a year long subscription to three. €20 per month. It’s cheaper than actually purchasing broadband.
Spiderman 3… just don’t
Sorry kids, I know what was being attempted. Unfortunately it just killed. The pacing was all over the place. There were too many bad guys. The character development was surreal.
Assassination is probably too nice a word
Here I am trying to maintain a system that was originally ‘designed’ by an idiot. Dates are stored using unix timestamps. When there is even the slightest kerfuffle involving the timezone everything gets horked as all the code referencing the dates uses the local time to determine when things happen. Blargh!
While I don’t appreciate the deliberate heart string pulling
Forrest Gump is a good movie. I hate movies that make me cringe, this one doesn’t. It is a carefully crafted collection of ups and downs designed at the end to make me feel more happy than sad. I do wish there could be more movies that end on the proper inflection. Sad is more likely than happy, and reality is a drug best served on it’s own.
Grumpy? not really, just watching another of those convincing movies…