August 19th, 2008 Mark
I have just stumbled across LOLCODE - an esoteric programming language inspired by the pidgin English expressed in examples of the LOLCAT Internet meme.
It is hilarious to read, all the while making perfect sense!
HAI
CAN HAS STDIO?
VISIBLE “HAI WORLD!”
KTHXBYE
HAI
CAN HAS STDIO?
PLZ OPEN FILE “LOLCATS.TXT”?
AWSUM THX
VISIBLE FILE
O NOES
INVISIBLE “ERROR!”
KTHXBYE
HAI
CAN HAS STDIO?
I HAS A VAR
IM IN YR LOOP
UP VAR!!1
IZ VAR BIGGER THAN 10? KTHX
VISIBLE VAR
IM OUTTA YR LOOP
KTHXBYE
HAI
CAN HAS STDIO?
IM IN YR LOOP UPPIN YR VAR TIL BOTHSAEM VAR AN 10
VISIBLE SUM OF VAR AN 1
IM OUTTA YR LOOP
KTHXBYE
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOLCODE
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July 31st, 2008 Mark
I’ve had the iPhone for a couple of days now and thought I would start listing features that I have found to be missing, or improvements I would like. I will add to this over time, then I can tick each one off if/when Apple decide to implement the changes
- You can’t forward SMS messages
- Unable to mark all emails as ‘read’
- Deleting multiple contacts
I’m sure I will come accross a few other things in the next few days. Having said that, I am totally loving my new toy!!
Posted in Tech | 2 Comments »
July 8th, 2008 Mark
Saturday morning, and my girlfriend heads to work. I get up at the same time for some breakfast and realise we have no milk. So I head out to the local supermarket to pick some up. Whilst there I had a “quick-look” down the XBox 360 isle.
Guitar Hero III was reduced from £60 to £45.
Now, I have fancied purchasing this game for a while now, but thought I may not enjoy it, because I am really not into that type of music, how wrong could I have been.
I gave in to temptation, and made the purchase becuase of the offer.
I promptly made my way home, skipped breakfast, and loaded up the game. At first it was pretty hard, but now I am pretty good at it and I totally love this game, so much so, I think I am addicted!
This point was proven again this morning, and yesterday morning whilst getting ready for work. You see, I normally have a shower, get my shirt and tie on, then have breakfast whilst watching the news.
This morning, I got as for as opening the cereal box, and I thought to myself, what do I want more, this food, or a quick blast on GHIII? Food or GHIII? Food or GHIII? Food or GHIII? Food or GHIII?
5 minutes later and I’m in the middle of the living room floor, on my knees blasting out Paranoid by Black Sabbath.
Posted in Random Stuff, Tech | 2 Comments »
July 8th, 2008 Mark
So, yesterday, the iPhone 3G was available for pre-order on the O2 website. I promptly loaded up the website and added a 16gig version to my basket. I went through to the checkout. With my mouse hovering over the complete button, I suddenly had a change of heart and closed the window. Yes, why indeed? Well, you see, about 9 months ago, I made a schoolboy error (no, nothing to do with contraception), I signed a new 18-month contract with a different mobile network. So, I now have 9 months remaining. I kinda had in my head I was just going to get the new iPhone, and just pay off the remainder of my current contract, but it seems like such a waste of money (9 x £18).
I know I will give in eventually and go into an O2 store in the next couple of weeks and get a new iPhone, but I will be safe in the knowledge that I had the willpower to close that browser window.
Posted in Tech | 1 Comment »
June 6th, 2008 Mark
3 more days until the 3G iPhone anouncement and the suspense is killing me. They had better be available to buy immeadiately otherwise I think I will explode!
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May 12th, 2008 Mark
Copy file from one domain to another in the absence of wget
curl http://www.domain.co.uk/file.tar -o file.tar
Dump DB to file
mysqldump -u [username] -p [db_name] > db.sql
Import DB dump into new database
mysql -u [username] -p [dbname] < db.sql
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April 14th, 2008 Mark
I have no idea why, but as soon as a camera is put in front of my face i do one of three things:
1) Point at the camera in some kind of catalogue pose.
2) Stick my tongue out or pull some kind of funny face.
3) …or this new thing I keep doing with my fingers (see image, me on the left)
I have no idea why I started doing this. It has only started to occur in recent months.
And, each time we hit the town, I think, I must look good in front of the camera, then immeadiately after a few beers, I forget, and the 2 fingered salute reappears!
Posted in Random Stuff | 3 Comments »
April 14th, 2008 Mark
Recently, I accidently unpluged my iMac at the power socket on the wall. Not shutting down a computer in the correct way is not recommended, but, it is not normally an issue.
This time however, I powered up the iMac, after a few seconds of a blank grey screen, the hard drive starts making a ‘clunking’ noise. Three ‘clunks’, then a pause, repeated about 5 times, then I was presented with the “unable to find OS partition” icon on the screen. After a few power downs and restarts, I decided to launch Disk Utility from the OS DVD.
This is where my worst fears were confirmed, the hard drive wasn’t recognised, it didn’t show up at all.
Now, I don’t have a lot of important stuff on my iMac that I couldn’t cope with losing, but the one major thing was 5 years worth of photos. How could I have not backed these up? I know why, it’s becuase i’m lazy. Some of them I could get back from friends, and some I had uploaded to Facebook, but there were numerous others that would be lost forever.
I went to bed that night pretty dejected.
I woke up the next morning, and got ready for work. As I went downstairs to make my toast, I thought “what the hell, I will give the iMac a quick power up to see if the Apple repair fairies had paid a visit”. I couldn’t believe it, the iMac booted!!!
First thing I did was copy my iPhoto library across to a network drive and an external USB drive.
Over the next couple of weeks, I found that the iMac hadn’t fixed itself, the ‘clunk’ noise and no OS icon kept appearing whenever I restarted the iMac, but if I left it off for 20-30 minutes, it worked! I have no idea why.
This was getting rather annoying, so I bought a new hard drive. I have Time Machine running on my iMac, so I was just going to install the new hard drive, and restore the drive from the Time Machine backup.
The hard drive arrived last Friday, and I got home and shutdown the iMac (properly). When shutting down it installed some Apple OS updates that had been downloaded. I thought it would be best if a rebooted the iMac and ran Time Machine one final time to catch the updates that had just been installed. But, as I previously stated, the iMac need a 20-30 mintues before rebooting. I thought I would just try it straight away, I might be lucky.
The iMac booted first time. I restarted again, the iMac booted first time. I have restarted a few times this weekend and not once has the problem reoccured.
It’s a miracle!
P.S. I now regularly backup my iPhotos library, i have Time Machine creating a backup every hour, I periodically copy the iPhoto library to a network drive and attached USB drive, and I also upload everything to my newly purchased flickr account.
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April 13th, 2008 Mark
As you may or may not know, I have been playing golf for the last year. Now, I am by no means good, but me and my buddy get by and have loads of fun in the process.
The odd birdie by me hasn’t been unheard of, and they are always a pleasure to g
et, making you feel that you are progressing with your game, only to shoot a 7 on the next par 3.
Anyway, yesterday morning on our weekly golf outing we were having a pretty average round. Up comes hole 6, a par 4 dog leg left, with trees blocking a view of the green. Now, there are two options here, play safe and hit it straight to the corner of the dog leg, or shoot straight over the trees. Obviously, we go the over-the-tree route (it looks better).
I tee’d up my shot with a 6-iron and took my swing. I got loads of height on it and it looked the right direction. I was quiety confident it had landed on the green.
So, we headed off down the fairway, to the make-or-break view you get when the trees clear. I couldn’t believe it, I was about 6-7 yards away from the hole. A great shot by my standards. Immediately the thoughts of an Eagle came to mind…my first ever!!
I walked up to ball with my putter, very nervous at this point. I steadied my self, took a couple of practice swings, then went for it. I hit it, it looked on target, was this going to be the Eagle? No. The ball reached hole, and with too much pace, jumped up and skipped over the hole.
Damn.
Still managed a Birdie though, so it wasn’t all bad.
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April 11th, 2008 Mark
I currently have an NSLU2 with a Terrabyte attached to it at the moment. It is a little sluggish, but i can put up with it as it just stores my movies and tv series collections. Its a bit of a drag copying stuff to it, but onces it is there, it streams around the house to any of the 4 XMBC machines great.
After a very recent episode with my iMac, where i was very close to having lost 5 years worth of family photos, i’ve started taking data security seriously at home, which is weird, because i take it seriously at work.
I am definately looking at going down the RAID 5 route, but as always, there is a budget that comes in to play.
I have toyed with the idea of getting an cheap machine, or build one from old parts i have and make this into a RAID server, but when you start totalling it all up, something like the N4100+ comes in at around the same total cost, comes in a nicer looking box and uses FAR less power (which is good when it is going to be runing 24/7).
I have toyed with idea of the cheap HP Proliant Server, but for the reasons i just mentioned, i decided against it.
At work, we have a Netgear ReadyNAS NV+ with 3 x 500gig drives in it setup as RAID 5 giving us 1 terabytes of storage. Had it about a year now and have had no problems with it. Great little machine, but as you are probably aware, these are a little expensive. Around £500 diskless.
After reading many reviews and comments, i seem to have settled on the Thecus N4100+. The performance of this may not be entirely a lot better than my NSLU2, but i wasn’t unhappy with it in the first place. I just want something that will allow me to expand my storage capacity and keep my data secure.
With the N4100+ coming in at about £250, i would initially install 3 x 750gig. This would be an initial outlay of about £500 which would give me 1.5tb of space. Idealy i would like to stick 1 TB drives in there, but as i need at least 3 for a RAID 5 setup, this could get very expensive very quickly. I would probably look to maxing out the system to 4TB down the line.
The Thecus 5200 looks very tasty, with its better performance, and 5 drive bays for future expandability, but again you are looking at £500 without any disks.
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