Random Geekage

The London Metropolitan police have made a poster to help fight “The War On Terror?” which seems to suggest everyone is a terrorist. Lets see…

• Camera…check, part of my phone
• Car…check
• Vague travel details…check, sometimes intentionally, sometimes not
• Phone…check, a very nice phone at that
• Computers…check, several of them

Yup, they got me. Allah Ackbar and all that jazz. Seriously, WTF guys? I’m more scared of getting run over by a bus than being a victim of an attack and bus accidents are far more likely. Hell, I think winning the lottery is more likely.

Weblog poster, stupidity

VirtualBox is awesome. It is open source virtualising software which lets me run one operating system in another. Here I am running Windows XP inside Ubuntu, making use of what is called “Seamless Mode” where the application windows appear on my native desktop. This leads to the amusing situation where newbies have no idea what OS I am running. It does mean that I can run Windows apps that will not run in Wine alongside my usual applications without swapping machines or even bringing up the virtual machine window.

I’m gonna try out Os X in this, see if I can effectivly triple boot.

Weblog geek, VirtualBox, virtualisation

…My new laptop has arrived in one peice. No problems at all. The carrier at the end of the day was UkMail, thankfully not a shady white van.

Laptop is bigger than I expected but thats probably due to my crap estimation of size. Everything just works, webcam, wifi, sound, even the media buttons that are at the top of the keyboard. The Ubuntu folk have done a great job with this.

Copying over my documents and settings was a breeze, just select all the files and folders I want (remembering the hidden files), copy and paste then reboot once all the patching was done. Easy as pie.

This was definatly a good choice of laptop.

Weblog Dell, geek, laptop, Ubuntu

Wooo!

Weblog

A public beta of IE8 has just been released. Of note is a feature called InPrivate Browsing which is something that Firefox does not have (yet). It is designed to hide your browsing history from prying eyes but has been found that law enforcement can access your history (3rd paragraph). It also means that advertisers cannot data mine your computer for targeted advertising. Not sure where I stand on that. Less advertising is good but having law enforcement come snooping through data that you can’t see is not good.

Think I’ll stick with Firefox.

Weblog browsers, firefox, ie8

I decided to kill my twitter account earlier this morning and attempted to go through with it just now. When I clicked the delete account link, An alert popped up saying that due to twitter stressing out, that feature has been disabled. Um, what? The ability to delete an account is pretty vital in my eyes, I do not want to be trapped in a service that I have no use for. How difficult is it to run a DELETE query in SQL?

I can delete my mobile phone info and my picture yet I cannot remove my account completely. This is not cool.

Weblog delete, twitter

Laptop is still not here. The tracking is somewhat cryptic and I have no idea where it is.

I’m slightly worried about one of the entries. Apparently the delivery date has been set but they were supposed to call me to ask when it is convenient. Also, what does “plan committed” mean? What plan?

There are also some bad experiences with the courier that Dell use to ship stuff in the UK. Aparrently Walsh Western subcontract the deliveries to other couriers so I have no idea what van to look out for.

Call me paranoid but when you have spent a fair bit of money you want to know where your purchace is and negative reviews aren’t comforting.

Weblog delivery, Dell, laptop, Walsh Western

*Squees like a crazed fangirl*

Weblog laptop, squeee

Did a bit of organising the Afternow files I have on my mirror. A lot of folk have made their own Afternow stuff and I thought it would be best to have a directory for all of them.

If you haven’t checked out the stuff, do it.

Weblog mirror, Tales from the Afternow

I made a game! Well, copied from a magazine (Linux Format 110) but it still counts. It is a stripped down version of space invaders which is coded in python. Needs the pygame software installed to work as well as an install of python (duh).

No idea what the liscence is with the code, I’m assuming some version of the GPL. I’m putting it up anyway. It is pretty hard, goes quite fast. Have fun!

Weblog game, geek, pygame, python, space invaders