I’m back again!

Ξ June 26th, 2009 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Site |

SAVE ME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Ξ May 15th, 2009 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Henley, Life |

It rained last night. Yes, rained. There wasn’t a hurricane, monsoon, tempest or tornado – but rain, and a little drizzle this morning.

And because it rained, only one thing can happen in Henley, and I’ll give you a clue as to hat that one thing is …… my normal journey to work to three times as long and I ended up having to drive twice the distance.

“Why so RagingAardvark?” You ask.

“Simple.” I reply ………..

“That’s a bit rich.” You might comment.

“Rich, my arse.” I’ll reply again.

I watched some dappy bint load her kid into the back of a Touareg or similar seven-seater at the top of Greys Hill, drive him to school, block the entire road for ten minutes whilst she faffed around, then round the block back to home – where she spent another ten minutes trying to parallel park the said tractor. She finally gave up and left it blocking the road.

“So?” You say. “She wanted to make sure her snowflake got to school in one piece.”

That may be so. However, the distance from her house to the school is exactly fifty-two paces – I know, I measured it myself.

Social stuff ….

Ξ May 6th, 2009 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Life, Me, N95, Site |

As you can see, I’ve amended the geo-location icon on the right to use Google Latitude (as that’s the one that is generally live) – add me if you want …….. the domain name of this site at gmail.com.

I’ve also added Ovi to the N95 8Gb – have a dig around for Ragingaardvark and, again, add me as a contact if you want.

Who knows, I may even jump into bed with the devil one day and get a Twitter account too.

Evolution working with Exchange 2007!

Ξ April 24th, 2009 | → 1 Comments | ∇ Ubuntu |

(Sort of – anyway)

One of the biggest PITAs of the last few months was SAS upgrading to Exchange 2007. Whilst the Microsoft fan-boys reveled in the increased emasculation of their UI, us Ubuntu users had to revert to OWA – as the Exchange connector in Evolution only supported up to 2003.

With the release of Jaunty Jackalope 9.04 and the associated 2.26.01 of Evolution, there was hope in the air.

The first thing that you’ll need to do is to install the MAPI connector. (If your Exchangebox isn’t running MAPI, then you’re buggered);

sudo apt-get install evolution-mapi

Next, you’ll need to either edit your old Evolution profile or create a new one. On the drop-down list of sources, you’ll see the new Evolution MAPI connector listed.

The first bug that you’ll encounter is that using the FQDN in the server entry will generally cause Evolution to bomb when you click the “Authenticate” button. To remedy this, use the IP address – open a terminal window and ping the FQDN of you don’t know what it is.

The authentication should work now and you will enter Evolution and wait whilst it builds your mailbox for the first time.

This is where the second, and in my case show-stopping, bug appears. The process of building the mailbox for the first time uses a vast amount of memory. My laptop has 2gig of RAM, and that is eaten up and a page-fault (80000405) occurs before the mailbox is built – with Evolution then crashing.

Assuming that your Exchange 2007 install isn’t as big as ours and/or you have more installed RAM than I do, you should get through this point and be up and running.

As a side note, I used swappiness to try and force the OS to page rather than chew up the RAM by typing

sudo sysctl vm.swappiness=100

in a terminal window. This had no effect atall, so I’m guessing that someone, somewhere has been a little short sighted in the way that they have implemented this aspect of the Evolution set up.

Your mileage may vary! So please let me know how you get on.

Spring time

Ξ April 24th, 2009 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Henley, Life |

Wow, the Bluebells are good this year; For reasons known only to themselves, they’re thick and heady with a beautiful perfume. Walking Shelby in the woods each morning, I can smell the flowers from a hundred yards away.

Perhaps it’s something to do with the cold nights and hot, sunny days that we’re having at the moment – the dew starts to rise just before six in the morning, the sky is clear and the fragrance fills the air.

This time of the year, the Chilterns are a magical place. Despite the fact that it’s forecast to hiss down this weekend, I’m going to take Shelby on a mission on Saturday – whilst Jules battles the plebs in Tesco and Jenny goes to a birthday party. I’ll take the camera with me (if it’s not too tropical)

SAS WWIT09 – Cary

Ξ April 22nd, 2009 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Life, Me, Work |

One of the reasons I’ve been busy, was preparing for and attending the SAS World Wide IT conference in Cary this April. I went out early to spend a few days with Dad – who drove down from Canada. The flight out was pretty uneventful, apart from being seated with a bunch of rugby players attending a tournament at Duke the following weekend, and I’m happy to say that we all stayed at the Embassy Suites this time – rather than the much flashier Umstead.

Sunday was golf at Prestonwood and, this time, we played the Fairways course. Apparently, this is meant to be easier than the Highlands course we played last year but, for someone of my technical ability (read, none whatsoever) the course proved to be rather challenging. The “no more than ten shots counted per hole” rule was called into play a few times, I lost six balls (found two), nearly caused an RTA with a wayward golf-ball and managed to hit someone’s house.  One the bright side, I wasn’t overly troubled by the numerous bunkers – beacause I either didn’t manage to reach them or avoided the fairway all together.

Monday was a wander round the Umstead State Park. How on earth I have managed to avoid this all these years I really don’t know. It’s an absolutely beautiful place – pretty deserted, great trails and wonderful scenery. Including the walk to and from the park, we managed to clock up just under twenty miles – which is, apparently, Dad’s total walking for three years.

Shopping next – to keep the folks at home happy and then into the conference.

Flight back on Friday was a bit of an event. Take off was about six-ish in the evening and due to land about the same time in the morning at Heathrow. All well and good you may say.  However, about forty or so minutes into the flight I detected a definite decrease in aircraft noise. The captain came on the tannoy with;

“Ladies and gentlemen. Please don’t panic, but I have an important announcement to make.” (Cue screaming and wailing from some folks.)

“We have lost power to one of our engines and, because of this, are unable to attempt to cross the Atlantic.” (More hysteria)

“We are currently carrying too much fuel to attempt an emergency landing, so will circle on full flaps until we have burnt enough fuel to do so.” (Sobbing and tearing of hair)

After an hour and a half, we had lost sufficient weight to make the emergency landing at Boston airport – along with a cavalcade of fire trucks alongside and behind us. Everything in the airport was closed, so we were penned into the departure lounge until 01:30, when they managed to find a plane with two functioning engines so that we could resume our journey.

We eventually arrived in Heathrow (with the captain announcing “Thank you for flying American Airlines. The airline that gets you there.”) At just before one in the afternoon. Great trip!

Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope

Ξ April 22nd, 2009 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Ubuntu |

I’m typing this into Firefox on Ubuntu 9.04 – codenamed Jaunty Jackalope.

“How so?” You may ask. “It’s not released until tomorrow.”

Well, to be truthful, I’m typing this into Firefox on Ubuntu 9.04 RC (release candidate). The beauty of Ubuntu over Windows (one of the beauties) is that, in Windows, the release candidate is usually as flaky as hell and your mileage may well and truly vary. With Ubuntu, the opposite is generally true and bearing in mind that the servers will be overloaded tomorrow with folks downloading the production version, I’ve done my usual trick of installing the RC.

For those that don’t know how, simply take the following steps ;

1. System -> Administration -> Software Source -> Third Party Software
2. Uncheck all entries here
3. ALT-F2
4. update-manager -d
5. Check
6. Install update

and that’s it.

So far, so good. On this laptop (Dell XPX M1330) I needed to enable the Pulse audio server to get the sound working.

On the PC at home (Sony VAIO) everything went fine and dandy.

The boot time is absolutely blistering – bearing in mind Ubuntu p***es all over Windows boot times anyway, and I’m just wading through the various features now.

The only thing I haven’t done yet is to enable ext4 – as there are still a couple of bugs to iron out before tomorrow, and I don’t want to hose my file system.

Yes. I know, I know …

Ξ April 22nd, 2009 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Life, Site |

… it’s been a long time again hasn’t it. Sorry – I’ve been totally snowed under at home and work, so not had a chance to put fingers to keyboard.

As a bonus for you, here are a bunch of posts in one day …….

A long time again …

Ξ March 11th, 2009 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Canada, Family, Life, Me |

I know, I know. I’ve been ill I’m afraid, but am back up and at ‘em now. So, what’s been happening?

Well, the recent news on the web is how those half-wits the PRS have forced Google to pull all music content for UK IP addresses. If this is impacting you, then don’t panic. If you’re using IE, then Hotspot Shield will get around the problem. If you’re a Linux user, then Firefox has a couple of extensions that will block or spoof your IP address. If the worst comes to the worst, then there are plenty of anonymising proxies out there that you can re-direct through to hide your IP address. All in all then, a totally pointless move by the PRS which will only serve to harm the people that they are allegedly representing.

Other than that, I’ve been runing a comparison of getting Joomla, Drupal or Wordpress up and going for a quick TTL site here. Probably going to plump for Joomla – purely because I know it, and the learning curve for Drupal is too much for my schedule right now.

The flights to Denman have been booked and Kit and Robin are talking about spending a few days treking and camping up in the Beaufort Range, so I’ve bought myself and Austrian four-piece rucksack and am loading myself up when walking Shelby. It’s an amazing piece of kit; The main rucksack is attached by a full yoke (two pieces), then a but-pack is attached to a webbing belt (two more pieces) and clipped to the yoke. Very, very comfortable. Very roomy and breaks down into a day-sack too.

Amazon came up trumps and replace the Guitar Heroes game that we got the kids (ahem) for Christmas.

Not only but also, I’m meeting up with Dad again for our now “Official” yearly meet-up in Cary this Easter. Charlie has promised to give me a few golf lessons in the meantime. Gina’s still loved-up. Jenny’s still crackers and Jules is still gorgeous.

Old Skool on the N95 8gb

Ξ February 25th, 2009 | → 0 Comments | ∇ N95 |

First off, I know it’s been a while – but it’s been half term and Jules and I have been “relaxing”(tm) by re-decorating the kitchen. I’ve also been busy adding more spam sites to the block list on the server.

Anyway, today’s little pearl comes from a combination of a nice Polish chap, the Nokia n95 8gb and a load of hard work in getting things up and sorted. Sounds interesting?

How about running Windows 3.1 on your N95

First off, you’ll need to install the port of DOS box for Arm. You can download the file from the site here.

You’ll need to extract the file to your memory card (second drive) and then take the following steps ;

1. Use your file explorer to install every file within the Install directory
2. Now try to install the DosBox_Full.sisx
3. If that fails due to insufficient memory, then install the DosBox_Slim.sisx

Next, you’ll need to install the OS package. You can download it from the site here.

Unrar the package so that the Data directory is in the root of your memory card. You’ll see a dosbox.conf file that has been lovingly edited to support the N95 8gb.

Now you should be able to open DOSBox from the applications menu which will then fire off Windows for you.

Notes:

• To switch between keyboard and mouse, use the call key.
• Use the # key as right-click.
• To end the session quickly, you can use the disconnect call key.
• To increase the font-size, press # when in mouse-mode, select the last option, third option and change the number from 14 to 22.