26/02/2007 - Monday

The weekend was pretty much uneventful. I did manage to flesh out the data needed for the health website, so at least now I can think about how the site itself will work with the data. I also saw an article today on some OpenID stuff that was quite helpful. It also linked to an OpenID server that I can run locally so I can use that for testing instead of using a real OpenID server. It will also be useful if my internet connection goes down!

I don't usually pay attention to adverts but I saw one tonight that I absolutely loved. It was a new Budweiser advert. Some dude has installed a rubber floor so that they never break a bottle of bud again, and it shows them doing tricks with the bottles bouncing them to each other. At the end his girlfriend is at the door holding a pizza and a dog that was on the sofa jumps down to go greet the woman, and ends up bouncing high above her and straight out of the door. When I saw that I nearly choked for laughing as it was something that I wasn't expecting at all.

I was just logging into my webserver machine through ssh when I decided to check the uptime as I couldn't remember how long it had been on (10 days, 15 hours, 24 minutes if you're curious). I saw that the load average was "0.00, 0.00, 0.00"! Getting it down to 0.00 was due to getting rid of Apache 2.0.55 and getting Apache 2.2.3 working with Subversion. Before switching I was seeing load averages of around 0.18 when the machine was doing nothing at all. I'm happy that it's now actually doing nothing at all!

24/02/2007 - Saturday

I wonder if it's possible to get addicted to nicotine by using the nicotine patches that you get for weening yourself off of smoking. I know it's possible to get addicted to the substitute drugs they give you to get off of cocaine and heroin, but what if you're not addicted to nicotine to start with? I suppose it's highly possible as the patches are designed to give you the same amount of nicotine so you don't actually smoke (at least the strong patches do - there are different strengths so you eventually cut down and then stop using them), so you could get addicted to it. It was just something I was wondering while I was sitting on the toilet this morning.

Apparently I'm red-green colour blind! I was just taking some online tests where you're shown the circles with different coloured blobs in them and you're supposed to see a number that's hidden in it. I could only see the ones that I was supposed to see and not the ones I wasn't supposed to see. No wonder my webpages always have crappy looking colour schemes ;)

Unlocker is a piece of software for Windows that lets you unlock locked files and folders. Don't you just hate it when you're trying to delete a file or folder (or move or rename it) but Windows thinks that it is in use and it doesn't let you do anything to it? I know I used to, but then I found Unlocker around two years ago. I hadn't needed to use it for a while but I just had to as Windows thought something was using a folder I was trying to delete (I had just burnt the folders contents to a DVD disk and I wanted to get rid of it). With Unlocker you just need to right-click the folder/file in question, click on the Unlocker menu item, then click unlock in the box that appears (listing all of the locked files and folders). Bingo! The file or folder is now unlocked and you can continue using it like normal. It even tells you which program has it locked, but usually this is explorer.exe so you couldn't touch it otherwise unless you restarted Windows. I thought I would write about this bit of free software as it tole me that there was a newer version available, otherwise I probably would have just used it and forgot about it!

RocketDock is an application launcher that sits somewhere on your screen and lets you launch various applications quickly and easily. You can add any shortcuts you like as well as a few other things (like a clock, recycle bin, seperators) and you can even get it to notify you of what applications are running. There is also an option for minimising windows to the dock, but I don't actually find that useful. There are plenty of dock launcher programs out there but this one is actually fast and responsive, even after it hasn't been used for a while.

23/02/2007 - Friday

I'm curious. Someone (I know who you are actually) always visits this blog my going onto google and searching for "spidah blogspot". What I'm curious about is why do you keep searching for it and why not just create a bookmark instead? It would be a hell of a lot easier!

In other news, the past few days I've had really slow browsing speeds but only the download speed has been affected. I contacted my isp's email support yesterday telling them of the problem and eventually they figured out that there was a problem in the telephone exchange that affected browsing speeds. They didn't have an ETA for it yesterday but it seems to be fixed now. At least I hope it's fixed and not just a temporary speed burst! Now I can visit a few sites at decent speeds (400 KB/s+) instead of the sub-dialup speeds I've been having recently (0.4 KB/s anyone?)!

I forgot to mention a "celebrity" in my post the other day. She's a small and rubbish singer called Britney Spears. Apparently she hasn't been in the news much recently so she decided to shave off her hair as she knew it would guarantee her front page space. She has also been in and out of rehab for some reason. Why was she even in rehab to start with? Do all "celebrities" go into rehab when they have no singing career?

21/02/2007 - Wednesday

Heroes has started on the Sci-Fi channel in the UK. It's pretty weird watching the first two episodes again when I've already watched up to episode 16. It has been around half a year since I saw the pilot episode and it was fun to watch it again as there were a few things that I had forgotten.

Stargate SG-1 is gearing up to the end of the last season and it looks to be a pretty interesting end. Hopefully the last episode will contain some past characters and I really hope that the series gets closed off and not left dangling in any way.

There have been a lot of z-list celebrities (meaning they're not actually celebrities) in the news recently. Things like Victoria Beckham ate a pea in Hollywood (shock horror! She'll ruin her "diet"!), David Beckham going to an American soccer club (can't call it football as they can't play football to save their lives) saying that he's not going for the money but everyone knows he's going for the money, Kylie Minogue talking more about her faked cancer (so she could get more publicity) and how she is "worn out" now and can't continue her concerts (poor diddums), Coleen whatshername (Wayne Rooneys' slut of a girlfriend) saying how she's so popular and isn't with Wayne for his money (which she is as she was nothing before meeting him, and she's nothing now as well), and finally, Jade Goody in all the papers and magazines selling her story of how depressed she is and having to go into Rehab (she had to get back into the papers and get people back on her side after the stupid Celebrity Big Brother show). Most of these "stories" I skip entirely as they're not news at all. About the only things I read in the papers these days are the jokes!

That's it for the moment. Stay tuned for more in a few days probably.

16/02/2007 - Friday

In an effort to blog more I'm going to attempt to blog daily. I doubt I'll have much to blog about each day but I'm sure I'll be able to find something. I think I'll also start doing some more technical posts about various things (like websites, programming, etc.), so not all of you will be able to follow fully, but nothing lost if you can't follow along!

I had a scare last night and this morning. I was attempting to compile Apache 2.2.4 and Subversion 1.4.3 so that I could run both my websites and my svn repository using a single Apache install. I couldn't get Subversion 1.4.2 to work with Apache 2.2.3 so I had to use Apache 2.0.53 for the svn repository and Apache 2.2.3 for the websites (so I could use mod_proxy_balancer). This was fine except I noticed that the Apache 2.0.53 process was using a lot of cpu time when it was pretty much sitting idle 99% of the time. I couldn't work out why so I did a google search to see if anyone else had had this problem. I ended up coming across a page detailing how to compile Apache 2.2.4 and Subversion 1.4.2. I spent the day grabbing the sources, extracting them, getting the right configure lines, compiling, trying, going back to configuring and repeating from there. I switched the subversion source for 1.4.3 instead of 1.4.2 and I skipped out the "optional" steps that I couldn't even get to work right anyway.

Eventually I had Apache 2.2.4, Neon (can't remember the version) and Subversion 1.4.3 built in my home directory and working just fine (doing both websites and svn). I removed both of the old Apache installs from starting at boot time and added the new one to start instead. I then had to restart to check that the new Apache started and worked properly when the machine started up. There was a kernel update waiting to be installed so I decided to install that as well instead of leaving it in the updates (it had been in there for about a week and it was getting annoying). This eventually downloaded and installed (was a slow download) so I restarted the computer. It restarted, went to the initial Ubuntu boot screen with the progress bar, moved ever so slightly, then went to a black screen with a flashing cursor top left and the hard drive was making a weird noise. I left it for about a minute thinking that the hard drive was messed up (it happened to another hard drive I had that came with the bunch of three computers I got just before Christmas), tried to ctrl+alt+del out, then powered it off manually. I tried it again, same thing. I got annoyed then and just pulled all the plugs out and ignored it.

I thought I would give it another try this morning to see if any error messages came up and then see if I could salvage anything from the hard drive and install a spare hard drive in there instead. So I turned it on, it went to the black screen with the flashing cursor again, but this time I left it for longer. After about two minutes it started doing a disk check. I thought, "Ok, it'll find something wrong with the disk and then it'll tell me". Alas, it didn't and it then booted up into the graphical part (GNOME) and logged me straight in! Obviously the kernel update had to do something during boot time and it was that that caused the black screen and flashing cursor. I just assumed it was dead when I just had to leave it longer. At least I don't have to go hunting for a spare hard disk and then spend time installing everything again then trying to get my website and programming data from the original hard drive!

I think there was something else that I was going to write about but I can't think what it was now. I guess it obviously wasn't that important!

Uninteresting update

I was going to write a list of what has changd in the Your Goals website since I posted about it last, but when I checked who had signed up for it all I saw was myself. So I really couldn't be bothered to write about something that no one uses. I'm thinking of taking it offline and removing these posts about it.

Big Kahuna Reef 2 revisted

I just went through the main pack for Big Kahuna Reef 2 again. I've been doing the other packs for a while but decided to try that one again. This time I managed to get 3,418,963 points with a time of 04:46:27, which makes it 1 hour, 50 minutes, 51 seconds quicker than my previous attempt, and 634,422 points more (2,784,541 and 06:37:18). I'm pretty happy with that, seeing as the first attempt was the first time of playing the new version. I've gone through hundreds of levels since then in the other packs and know how to handle the "powerups" properly now :)