20 May 2006
I think my desktop-of-three-years is about to give up on me. The DVD drive appears to have stopped working, and the other day my 40GB volume unexpectedly powered down and the computer soft-reset, with the drive not working until I rebooted properly.
Then my computer apparently turned itself off a day or two later, and I was slightly concerned. Being a well-trained tech-monkey, the first thing I did was check power. I’d kicked it out… just.
It was actually still in the power socket, and looking loose enough that it’d probably been moved out over a period of several days. So it occured to me that maybe it was actually so close I could have nudged it that day my hard-drive failed and caused a brown out… which isn’t actually that implausible, if a tad improbable.
Perhaps it’s not just about to die. Perhaps that’s what actually happened… perhaps.
Meanwhile, the computer is still perfectly fast (and would be faster if I gutted and reinstalled Ubuntu) if a little shy on storage space. 40GB is becoming increasingly cramped (even with an additional 10GB drive dedicated to OS + applications), and hard drives are SO CHEAP these days. I’ll probably save up for a bit to get a 250GB drive and a DVD burner, and a new graphics card whilst I’m doing the computer shopping thing (there’s a computer fair at UNSW in two weeks but it was pretty meagre last time I went…).
The graphics card thing is mostly just so I’ve got video-out and a DVI connection. I’m sick of my LCD’s picture flickering/distorting because of the cheap VGA cable I’m using! Ah well. Sometime… I can never be bothered buying computer stuff anymore (unless it’s on eBay ;-)).
19 May 2006
What the hell are they thinking? 450 messages since I switched off at about 12.30 last night until 8 when I checked again this morning. I actually bothered to weed through them all and check there weren’t any legit ones in there. When will you guys realise YOU ARE NEVER GOING TO GET YOUR SPAM TO APPEAR ON THIS BLOG?! The only thing you will possibly achieve is the disabling of Trackbacks, which doesn’t really concern me because Pingbacks are infinitely superior/more secure, etc.
I really hope I never meet any of the people doing this…
18 May 2006
As per the last post highlighting the location of 3-phase power, tonight occasioned a trip (er, perhaps “drive” would be more appropriate when speaking of power) to Sydney Uni, to test a dimmer under the cover of darkness. All is good! And, so far as covert theft-of-wattage goes, it was a great deal of fun ;-) No photos of the occasion, unfortunately.
Everything went well until we tried to unplug the 3-phase from the socket, and the stupid thing ripped out of the sandstone. It wasn’t properly mounted to start with, but there was still a bit of an “oh crap” moment. Especially seeing as the thing was LOCKED in “On” position… yeah, probably not the safest of operations, but everything worked and it’s not like we needed to rely on it staying in place for a show or anything (obviously didn’t bother screwing it into place). Yay for ridiculous amounts of lighting powah.
18 May 2006
Flickr’s new Organizr is a huge step backwards. It takes an incredibly usable Flash application, reworks it into a much-slower JavaScript version (that’s still just as inaccessible, and who really cares about screen readers seeing as we’re dealing with vast numbers of photos? *flamebait*), and in the process removes useful graphic (as in, having the quality of graphs, not graphical) elements, replacing them with numeric date selectors, etc.
Oh, yeah, and they’re browser-sniffing and rejecting anyone aside from Firefox, Safari, and IE. Which is ridiculous because Opera is so much easier to get to work with stuff than Safari is… in fact, it’s one of the better behaved browsers. Meanwhile, Flash would work on anything and so many people have Flash it’s hardly a great problem. To choose between a great, usable app and a less-usable, quasi-standards-embracing, still-just-as-inaccessible app seems like it should have an obvious outcome. Sigh. Why couldn’t they just focus on making the Flash thing work better? Multi-select dragging in the Flash UI was the last thing I really desired from Organizr: beyond that, I’d be pretty much content with existing features. But no… they had to go tear it apart. Grrr. Just because programmers like numbers, doesn’t mean the rest of us do. Bring back the drag-and-drop!
p.s. Yes, I know you can get to the old version still. It’s not that so much as the new version seems like a massive regression with absolutely zero advantages, and development on the Flash version is going to be in permanent hiatus (at least until they realise I am infallible and surrender in their folly, etc., etc.)
17 May 2006
I was trying to describe to someone what a 3 phase 32A 415V socket looked like (at least in Australia) the other day and discovered nothing of assistance in Google at all.
So here are two photos.
Note the easter-egg in this image. If you go to Sydney and need to show someone what one looks like, there are about four on the front lawns.
Feel free to steal these images, etc./link to this page. Deep link images and die a horrible death. I’ve refrained from doing BadThings to a couple of MySpace users thus far, but if anyone with slightly more brains tries it then the images will probably turn into things you’d rather they didn’t. Here ends the warning that also applies to every image published here.