Fiery Fred

This just made me laugh…

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/03/28/t5_reconstruction/

Enough said.

http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2007/12/14/wireless_usb_missile_launcher/

Mr. Ben said that I hadn’t posted anything for a while. So here is a post!

I was around at Mr. Ben’s house last night to watch Liverpool beat Marseille and we had to watch it on the internet. It is the first time that I have actually seen  live tv over the internet and I was impressed by the quality. I mean it wasn’t up to broadcast standard but it was still pretty good considering it was coming over the wire. However, I’m not sure what it would be like if everybody in the area was watching at the same time and I’m not convinced that using the internet is the best way to deliver real time tv programs.

I had a phone message from one of my workmates at a previous employer about the software that I helped to write whilst I was there. Apparently the current custodians have broken some bits of it and they may as me to help fix it. Which should be interesting if it happens. The code is in C++ which I haven’t done anything serious with in the last 2 years. The bigger issue is going to be looking at the old code and thinking ‘OMG! What was I doing when I wrote this!’

I’d like to think I’m a wiser and better coder than I was when I last contributed to that software which was over 3 years ago. We’ll just have to see.

I’ve setup a copy of this site on one of the PCs at home so that I could play with WordPress without totally trashing the live version. Last night I thought I would have a bit of a play with altering the site on the PC and tried to login….only I couldn’t because I’ve forgotten the username and password and because it is a local version of the site I haven’t set up an email address. No problem I thought, I’ll just access the MySQL database and hack the relevant table..except I can’t remember the password for that either. I’m sure I wrote it down somewhere……

…is trying to remember that you have one and that it should really be updated! I can’t believe it has been so long since I last posted but ten nothing really noteworthy has happened. Java song is still in the ideas stage, though I did get to use OpenSong in anger on Sunday. Hopefully I will be able to write some prototype code later on tonight…once the hedge has been cut and the bushes have been trimmed.

Well I finally took the plunge and installed Ubuntu 7.04 server onto the family computer (A Shuttle XPC SG41) and it went suprisingly well. I only had a couple of issues.

1. The server edition doesn’t come with the Gnome desktop but a quick search on Google produced some clear instructions on how to install it.

2. The bigger problem was that Grub didn’t get installed with an entry for the existing Windows XP installation. However I had previously set up 7.04 desktop on a laptop and I was able to copy the relevant bits into the Grub menu list and it worked a treat.