Going solo I'm re-declaring my independence again. I'm going back to contracting, with a healthy dose of working directly for clients as well. Already I've got the potential for a couple of systems that people want lined up, but contracting would probably be my main income.  ¶ 11:44 AM 0 Comments Links to this post

  Email - wonderfully useful I don't have spam.

I do, however, have a cupboard full of herbal remedies for erectile disfunction that some nice chaps from the Interwebs sold me, a timeshare in Spain, a mate in Nigeria that owes me $67,000,000 (any day now!),
some Rolex watches I got at a fantastic price and some rather interesting cinematic productions from a Ms. Hilton.

I love how many useful things come to me by email :-D  ¶ 11:42 AM 0 Comments Links to this post

  Broad-but-not-quite-as-broad-as-it-should-be-band My Broadband connection is getting slower, especially since I'm paying extra for their top-end unlimited service. They always churn out the old "may vary depending from your distance to the exchange" excuse. The exchange is 400 metres away, I can see it from my bedroom window. When I first got it, I was getting around 6mb (they say up to 8mb, but it invariably never is). Latest speed test shown below :-



I shall continue to monitor this one and if it doesn't improve, I'm gonna complain.

[UPDATE 5:40am]
Looks like they're throttling the connection at peak times. Here's my off-peak score :-

  ¶ 8:54 PM 0 Comments Links to this post

  UK Government To Terminate File Sharers' Net Access "An anonymous reader writes 'New plans published by the UK Govt show that they hope to terminate internet access for people suspected of breaching copyright by file sharing. Under the proposed new laws ISPs who fail to enforce the policy will face prosecution in the courts. Users falling foul of the new law will be subject to a three strike policy: First suspected instance of illegal file sharing they would receive a warning, at the second — a suspension, and at the third they will have their Internet connection terminated. It isn't clear whether users will be prevented from ever using the internet again, or whether simply subscribing to a new ISP will reset the process.'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

(Via Slashdot.)

  ¶ 3:21 PM 0 Comments Links to this post

  Got the coding bug again Continuing my permanent cycle of coding like mad then being lazy for a couple of months then coding again.... I've finally got around to starting to address some of the bug fixes and enhancements for my GNFOViewer, as requested by Ubuntu Forums people here.

The nicer exception handling was an easy quick win, but the saving of preferences is proving a bigger challenge. I added support for GConf to store settings and certainly the preserving of the text colours inversion is working fine, as is the window sizing, but the window position preservation is still buggy. Why they decided not to implement suitable events on Gtk.Window is beyond me - this business of Widget.ConfigureEvent seems a horrendously convoluted ay of doing things.  ¶ 3:23 PM 0 Comments Links to this post

  Speed boost Upgraded the graphics card in my PC this weekend to give it a much needed performance boost. My old onboard nVidia 6150LE got replaced with a PCI Express nVidia GeForce 7300 GT. I ran 3DMark 06 before and after the upgrade to compare performance :-

nVidia 6150 LE (Onboard) - 236 3DMarks
nVidia 7300 Gt (PCIe) - 1873 3DMarks

Nice improvement!  ¶ 10:38 AM 0 Comments Links to this post