Pffft (Or the sound of the iPad launch)

Ξ January 28th, 2010 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Life, Review, iPod |

My oh my, I wish I could have been at the post-launch party of the iPad. It must have been like attending a wedding reception where the bride has been jilted at the altar; “You look absolutely lovely darling. So where are you going on your hon ……. ah …… ummmm …… errrr ….. more tea vicar?”

In fact, Stevo’s speech must have been just as good. I imagine it to have been a little like the opening scene of The Party – with Peter Sellers.

After all the hype and speculation, Apple have launched ……….. a big iPod Touch. Absolutely inspired! No multi-tasking, no video-conferencing, no 3G (unless you pay extra), no physical keyboard (unless you pay extra). All that, and a hefty price-tag for a staggering 16Gig of storage. It’s got a ten-inch screen – which doesn’t fold. So, if you’d like to try the experience of an iPad and only spend twenty quid doing it, visit your local home store, buy a twelve-inch mirror, chuck it in your back-pack and see how long it lasts.

Even the normally vociferous fan-bois are strangely mute – and that must be saying something.

Maybe I was being naive, but I was looking forward to a true road-warrior piece of kit. All I can do on my Touch, with web-cam chatting, multi-tasking, 3G/Wifi – always connected and proper MS Office integration. I could have lived without the keyboard, and I would have gladly paid the Apple premium for the product.  I mean, how hard can it be?

We’ve had the Nokia N97 (close, but no cigar), the Nokia N900 (a “computer” with some phone functionality), Sony Ericsson’s latest attempts (piss-poor OS and battery life). Someone, somewhere out there must be able to produce this “Netbook killer”.

We got our youngest a Netbook for Christmas; OK, it’s got Windows XP home on it at the moment, but it multi-tasks, runs flash in the browser (and any other plugin you’d like), has Office 2007, integrated web-cam, key board that even my lumbering fingers can use, folds in half to protect it when not in use, has a five-hour battery life and only cost two-hundred quid.

There’s a football (soccer to you Americans) chant, the second line of which is “and you know you are”, and this – sadly – applies to Stevo here. Yes, I know that Apple have a reputation of launching a hobbled product and then “upgrading” it a year later to what it should have been in the first place (iPhone. I’m looking at you), but even the most die-hard fan-boi would struggle to justify this one. With previous products, when whipped out in public we derided them but secretly yearned for one. With this baby though, it will just be “Oh. You’re one of the dicks who lobbed out for a big iPod Touch”.

This could go on – and is all over the internet – but I have to go. I’ve got some fan-bois to bait.

Thank-you Henley Standard

Ξ December 21st, 2009 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Henley, Life |

I was a little dismayed to receive this email from the Henley Standard – together with this accompanying Solicitor’s letter – regarding their award-winning website. Seems as though their “webmaster” has been a little lax. Strangely enough though, this hasn’t made it into the newspaper itself.

Naturally, I’ve asked them ;

• How the data was obtained.
• Where in the wild the data has been spotted.
• Why it has taken nearly a month to report the breach – bearing in mind that, in this period of time, any security measures from us punters would be stable-doors and horses.

The reply, was less than useful.

I’ve posted this to Slashdot, in the hope that someone there can advise what they would do in these circumstances.

Alwyn and Stuart’s Wedding

Ξ November 17th, 2009 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Henley, Life |

Great day, lovely people, wonderful occasion. You can find the photos here (http://www.flickr.com/photos/atomicvindaloo/sets/72157622697595769/).

This is a first pass at the photos I preferred (not blurred, eyes closed, daft expressions etc).

Abbey National

Ξ November 5th, 2009 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Life |

Sorry – that should be Santander shouldn’t it.

Has anyone else found that their automated fraud detection is a tad over-zealous?

Cannot copy/paste in Virtualbox

Ξ October 13th, 2009 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Ubuntu |

One of the better things in Virtualbox over VMware Player is it’s ability out of the box to have host integrated two-way copy/paste.

What do I mean by that? Well, you fire up your guest OS – in my case XP – and you can copy/paste test from an application in XP to one in Ubuntu (or whatever else your host OS is) – and vice versa. Really useful if, as for most of us, you’re only putting up with a bloody awful guest OS because of a couple of critical applications – iTunes and Sharepoint Designer for me.

All well and good, but this exposed a horrible little bug in my latest iPod recovery (see previous post) as I was copying the  Apple Computer software from the Guest OS to my spare XP box. A little bug exposing itself in the simple fact that I couldn’t copy/paste files or folders from within the guest OS!

This took a lot of digging around – together with no small amount of swearing – until I happened upon closing down the guest OS and looking at it’s settings; It kind of figured that you wouldn’t be able to use the host/guest bi-directional copy/paste to shift files back and forth, so I disabled this from the “Advanced” tab in the General settings, fired up the guest OS and – voila – all well and good and you can now copy/paste files and folders from within your guest OS to destinations relevant to it.

iPod Touch stuck in recovery mode – error 1604

Ξ October 13th, 2009 | → 0 Comments | ∇ iPod |

Well, this is something that I get every time I apply an update to the firmware on the iPod Touch and, first time it happened – a mere half a day after I got the thing – I was more than a little gutted. I’d been playing with the little baby for a couple of hours, had fallen in love and was now faced with an apparently bricked piece of hardware.

First off,  the error itself. As an Ubuntu user, I was running iTunes in an XP VM – which was working fine and dandy – under VMWare Player. This, in fact, was the only thing that didn’t work and – for what it’s worth – you’ll get exactly the same error under Virtualbox. It seems to be a timeout in the USB layer – I’m guessing that the firmware update is a little more rigorous than the day-to-day iTunes type stuff that goes on.

As luck would have it, I’ve got an old box with XP on it lying around. You’ll need to get all your odds and sods onto this box so take these following steps ;

1. Install the latest version of iTunes on your old standalone (or a friend’s) XP box. (Assuming that you’ve got the latest version on your non-functioning copy)
2. Pop into \Documents and Settings\<your name>\Application Data (This is a hidden directory) on the broken box and copy the “Apple Computer” folder and then paste it over the same one on your recovery box.
3. Fire up iTunes on the recovery box and plug in your iPod.
4. iTunes will detect an iPod in recovery mode and ask you if you  want to fix it.
5. As part of copying all that gubbins over, the firmware update will be there too – this will be applied when the iPod is restored.
6. Once everything is up and running on the recovery box (this may take some time), unplug the iPod from the recovery box.
7. Fire up iTunes on the original box and plug in the iPod. The backup that you took just before the update will now be restored to the iPod and all will be well again.

Rinse and repeat every time you have to update the firmware.

Serving Microsoft Office 2007 Documents From Apache

Ξ September 11th, 2009 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Ubuntu |

This raised it’s ugly head as I was trying to link to an existing .xlsx file from an Apache site hosted on Ubuntu Server that I had set up for someone.

All worked fine and dandy from Firefox 3 under Jaunty, but and Windows clients were trying to open the file with their default .zip client – despite seeing the file as a .xlsx.

As it happens, this is the correct default behaviour – as a .xlsx file is meant to be an archived XML file anyway. Despite the correctness of the situation though, it wasn’t too handy for all the Windows user in the office.

The simplest answer lay in updating the Mime types in Apache;

You could update the /conf/mime.types in the Apache installation – however, this would be overwritten should you later update Apache. The answer then, is to update your httpd.conf or, if you’re doing this on a per-directory basis, using the .htaccess file.

The entry that you’ll need for .xlsx is ;

AddType application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.spreadsheetml.sheet xlsx

If you want the full set of Mime types for Office 2007, then here you go ;

AddType application/onenote onetoc onetoc2 onetmp onepkg

AddType application/vnd.ms-excel.addin.macroEnabled.12 xlam

AddType application/vnd.ms-excel.sheet.binary.macroEnabled.12 xlsb

AddType application/vnd.ms-excel.sheet.macroEnabled.12 xlsm

AddType application/vnd.ms-excel.template.macroEnabled.12 xltm

AddType application/vnd.ms-powerpoint.addin.macroEnabled.12 ppam

AddType application/vnd.ms-powerpoint.presentation.macroEnabled.12 pptm

AddType application/vnd.ms-powerpoint.slide.macroEnabled.12 sldm

AddType application/vnd.ms-powerpoint.slideshow.macroEnabled.12 ppsm

AddType application/vnd.ms-powerpoint.template.macroEnabled.12 potm

AddType application/vnd.ms-word.document.macroEnabled.12 docm

AddType application/vnd.ms-word.template.macroEnabled.12 dotm

AddType application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.presentationml.presentation pptx

AddType application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.presentationml.slide sldx

AddType application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.presentationml.slideshow ppsx

AddType application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.presentationml.template potx

AddType application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.spreadsheetml.sheet xlsx

AddType application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.spreadsheetml.template xltx

AddType application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.document docx

AddType application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.template dotx

86.150.103.112

Ξ August 19th, 2009 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Site |

Ivybridge, Devon – BT Central Plus.

You’re right – you got reported to abuse@btbroadband.com – feel clever now?

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.