Windows XP like you never heard it before
Check out this creative use of Windows sounds (the file inside the ZIP should play under WinAmp without the need for extra plugins. Ditto XMMS

[Listening to: Astrix - Eye To Eye ]

A Brief History of the Yak
An excellent history of Llamasoft, as told by the man himself, Jeff Minter. Part one and part two done so far

Cheap books
Good news is, I can get 50% of a book I want (cos we publish it )

Bad news is, they don't take Solo cards - doh!

Bluejacking
Had my first Bluejack on the train this morning. That'll teach them to leave their Bluetooth switched on hehe.

[Listening to: Instant remedy - Commando ]

Mobile Java Stuff
Found a cool website full of cool Java programs for Java-enabled mobile phones. Its got apps as well as the usual games, but the thing I spotted that I really want is the little Telnet client. Would be better if it was SSH, but hey, better than nothing....

[Listening to: psychaos - electronic uncertainty ]

New Linux PDA
Ok, so further to my earlier post about wanting a Yopy PDA, I gave in and bought one from eBay. Hopefully it should arrive before I go to Alabama. :-)

[Listening to: Cube / Aggression - Amok]

Phones are now toys
When I was a little kid, I had a toy phone. These days, my new Sony Ericsson T630 phone is a pretty cool toy, with its gorgeous colour screen, built-in camera and Java games. I also picked up a Bluetooth headset for it, and I'll let you know how that works out in a future blog entry.....

Bonus Time
Got a letter confirming my annual bonus today! Its in the next paycheck! Which is tomorrow! Woo!

[Listening to: Ghidorah - Toilet Story II - ]

Terror suspect delays my journey
Train home last night was delayed on the way home, due a suspected terrorist being found wandering around the tracks near one of the tunnels. You can find out more here

Hello? Is that Chris Rock?
Great story here about a girl in New York whose new cellphone used to belong to comedian Chris Rock. She still gets phonecalls for him on that number...

[Listening to: Hallucinogen - Mi-Loony-Um! ]

Happy St. Patrick's Day

What kinda apps you running anyway?
Spotted on my task bar at work was the following program SQL Query Anal. I know my SQL knowledge is a little rusty, but calling my query anal is a bit harsh....

[Listening to: Ronny - Diese Augenblick Werden Nie Vergehen ]

Error - too much mail!
Today I managed to break a server at work, cos I had too many unread system messages. About 150,000 of them in fact. Took us ages to figure out why the server was straining under the load (ie, clocking up about 97% CPU time on the one process alone). Doh!

Tiny science is lost on UK public...
...claims the BBC in this article.

I can't help thinking that if they weren't so tiny, maybe the UK public wouldn't have lost them......

[Listening to: Miss Shiva - Dreams (sunbeam mix) ]

Linux to the rescue
Got a colleague here at work that deals with our e-Commerce side of things. He's been charged with the task of checking the site works in Lynx, but couldn;t get the Win32 ports of it to work properly, and came to me advice. I handed him a Knoppix Linux LiveCD, which he booted from, brought up a console window, and had lynx running in less than 2 minutes. No installation, no fuss, no problems. Linux saves the day once again.

[Listening to: Sesto Sento & Intergalaktic - Sarcastic Bee ]

Linux in your pocket
Oh my, I so very much want one of these Linux handhelds [Hint, Birthday is July 10th!]

[Listening to: Cncd - CNCD CD 07 Mariko ]

Ultimate geek gadget?
New toy for the geeks amongst us - the USB Swiss Army Knife - basically a regular one with a USB memory storage thingy on it too. Nice.

[Listening to: Sound Palace - Dreamscape (original mix) ]

Wireless LAN help
This link is more as a reminder for myself, but anyone else interested in trying to set up a wireless LAN under Linux may find it useful too.

[Listening to: Maktone - Fluke 01 ]

Linux tool of the week
To begin an irregular and ad-hoc series of posts on my blog, I'd like to introduce handy little Linux utilities that I've recently discovered and now find indispensable. The first of these is screen, which allows me to have little virtual terminal windows in one actual window. One of the big advantages I have with screen too, is that I can detach from a screen and reattach to it later, even from different machines. In practical terms, this means I can start a job running via an SSH connection at work, detach from the screen, and reattach to the same screen again when I get home. You can find a very good introduction to using screen here

The bleeding edge
The bleeding edge seems to be bleeding too fast! Yesterday I bumped my Linux kernel version from 2.6.2 to 2.6.3 and got it running. Now I just heard on OSNews that 2.6.4 has been released. Damnit Linus, work slower will ya?

[Listening to: Psylent Buddhi - Moksha]

Un-doh!
Ok, contrary to my earlier post, it turns out that my newly built kernel did work and bring the machine back up (now with NTFS support, woo!), but almost simultaneously, the internet connection went down. I successfully got into my box for a whole 5 mins just now, but looks like the net is down again...

Euro DMCA approved (with restrictions)
Well, its a sad thing that the Euro Parliament has voted in favour of the new EU Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive by 330 votes to 151. Fortunately, a late amendment limited them to organised counterfeiters and not people downloading music at home

I think the most abominable fact about this directive is that it was put on the fast-track approval route by Euro MEP Janelly Fourtou, wife of Jean-Rene Fourtou who is boss of media giant Vivendi Universal, which probably represents the bulk of record companies. That fact alone makes a mockery of the entire democratic process, since I have seldom seen such a clear case of corporate interest in policy making.

Furthermore, she is a major player in seeking approval for Software Patents, the most evil concept ever devised. Somebody, please, stop this woman today!

[Listening to: Psylent Buddhi - Convergent Images]
(And yes, that track is copyrighted, but freely available at no charge by permission of the author!)

Doh!
Rebuilt a kernel for my box to compile in some security patches and NTFS support. Annoyingly, Genkernel replaced my kernel and initrd that I already had on my boot partition (I wanted both available to me in LILO). Added it to LILO anyway, rebooted, and the box didn't come back up. The most annoying part is that this was all done over a remote connection, so now I can't get back in to fix it. Doh doh doh doh!

[Listening to: Nissimyani - Fuck Out ]

Tweak to your heart's content (yes, another geek blog entry)
Now that I have the basics of my new linux box working, I've been having some fun tweaking and customizing it. I'm adding some themes, I've installed GKrellM, and I'm putting together a Mono development environment. That last one is proving a little difficult though, since MonoDevelop depends on GTK# 0.17 and the latest Gentoo package is only 0.16, so I might uninstall the Gentoo version and rebuild from the source tarball....

[Listening to: Beek - Substitutionology ]

Penguin powered once more
Well the machine is up and running with the new kernel, and most things seem to running smoothly. OSS is now deprecated, partly cos its now commercial, and partly cos most people are probably using ALSA now anyway. This means I don't have any sound on the box now, cos I've not compiled ALSA support into the kernel and/or modules. Doh! I hope that Gentoo have packaged the latest build (1.03), cos it fixes a lot of compilation issues with 2.6 series kernels.

[Listening to: BLT - Bizzare (Floor Mix)]

New Linux build
Rebuilding my desktop machine as a Gentoo Linux box again, using the new release Gentoo 2004, with Kernel 2.6.3. Gonna put it through its paces and see how well it works.

Winamp 5.0 Streaming Titles
I listen to a lot of streaming audio on WinAmp, but after upgrading to the latest version, I noticed that song titles were no longer appearing in the display. I just found out why.

Winamp 5.0 defaults to using the MP3Pro plugin instead of the normal MP3 plugin, and it doesn't seem to support the streaming titles. Switching off the Pro plugin, so that it uses the regular MP3 plugin seems to fix the problem. Another example of progress taking a step backwards....

[Listening to: Psylent Buddhi - Spaceforms Sponged Out]

Origins of the species
Someone had enough time on his hands to research the origins of the original Penguin Baseball game and its variants. Interesting stuff - didn;t realise there were so many versions out there!

Another advance in snack technology
Ok, so not really technology as such, but Pot Noodle have just brought out a fajita flavoured variety, called Seedy Sanchez. Its bloody marvellous - it might even replace Bombay Bad Boy as my favourite one...

SCO sues first Linux customer
SCO group sued its first Linux end-user, AutoZone today for use of Linux, which they allege contains their intellectual property.

Slashdot and Groklaw are covering this one to death, but this whole "hey, you stole my code!" furore does seem eerily reminiscent of a similar claim by a certain Mr Bill Gates, as far back as 1976, in his "Open Letter to Hobbyists". Let's just hope that SCO doesn't grow to the same monolithic size as Microsoft did...

George Bush's expensive new hobby
Some people collect stamps. Others collect coins, baseball cards, beanie babies, whatever. Seems like President Bush is starting a new collection - dictators. So far he's added Saddam Hussein and Jean-Bertrand Aristide to his list. Let's just hope he picks up a highly-collectable Robert Mugabe next....

[Listening to: Jeroen Tel - TinTin on the Moon]

Not very safe sex
A 27 year old woman with a bad cough and a fever visits the doctor. Doctor removes condom that she accidentally inhaled during fellatio. Medical notes here

Atomic!
I've added an Atom newsfeed to my website for all you news aggregators out there. Its not quite RSS, but more and more news aggregation tools are beginning to support it, and Blogger provide Atom feeds for free. If all else fails, you could do a lot worse than use the web-based BlogLines to manage your RSS/Atom feeds. Oh, and the link to the feed is on the left hand menu on this page.

[Listening to: Alien Project vs. Raja Ram - Live at Heineken Sundance Eilat Israel 04-18-2003]

Great Balls of Fire
Cool little game involving fireballs here. Found via Fark

[Listening to: Dma Sc - Odd stuff]

Ouch!
Well, it was a good weekend right up to the point where Alison and I were walking home. We got accosted by a group of about 8 drunk teenagers who decided they wanted trouble. I managed to shield Alison from harm, but got punched in the head for my troubles.

The trouble is that these days, there is no point in retaliating, because kids these days carry weapons, and when you are in their home streets, can very easily go and fetch older brothers. Equally, reporting things to the police is futile, since nothing will happen to the offenders because they are teenagers.

This bloody country is going down the tubes....