I'm in the future. Like hundreds of years in the future. I've been dead for centuries.
Oh, lovely, you're a cheery one aren't you?

Dammit

I forgot Pixy's First Rule of PC Hardware Upgrades:

Don't.

Three hours into a 10-minute upgrade, you'd be happy if you could even get back to where you started.  Which I have, more or less.  Don't think any permanent damage was done...

I may have a DVI-eating nanovirus, though.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:41 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Dear Vista Slideshow Team

Die in a fire.

Because maybe, once you're dead, you'll leave my fucking display resolution alone, huh?*

And not take two minutes to start a simple slideshow.  On a 2.6GHz dual-core computer.

Oh, and Vista audio team?  You can join them.  You manage to do a worse job than Windows Me, despite having approximately 15 times the memory and processing power to hand.

* In the usual spectacularly retarded Microsoft fashion, there's a fix to stop Windows doing something it should never bloody well do in the first place.  The fix is: Edit a secret value in the registry.  Yes, the thing that Microsoft tells you never ever ever to touch.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:16 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Green Ring Of Death

After my Compaq Presario notebook coughed and died just weeks out of warranty, I went out and got a shiny new HP Pavilion notebook to replace it.  Which is basically the same thing, except shinier and newer.

One of the shiny new features was that it has a proper dedicated Nvidia 8400 graphics controller, instead of the embedded ATI graphics on the Presario.

It seemed like a good idea at the time.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:28 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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The Only Thing More Screwed Up

Than Windows XP's networking is Windows Vista's networking, which at this point I deeply desire to punch in the face.

It's the usual Microsoft problem, of course: A dumbed-down user interface over what is actually a fairly powerful system, such that when you need to do something unusual, or something has gone wrong, you can't, because while the system is perfectly capable of doing what you need, the user interface designers didn't think of that.

So I somehow got myself into a situation where I couldn't disconnect from a VPN because my computer insisted that said VPN didn't exist - at the same time that it showed that I was connected to that VPN.

Disabling all network interfaces solved that problem.  Of course, if you do that, it forgets what your network is called.  I mean, no-one would ever want their computer to actually remember something trivial like that, right?

Also, once you've disabled the interface, that only half-registers in the user interface, so you can't enable it again.  You can disable it again, if you wish, though I hardly see the point.  You can also ask the system to diagnose your network problems, at which point it will highlight to you the fact that your network interface is disabled, and offer to enable it for you...  Secure in the comfortable knowledge that you can't punch a piece of software.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:16 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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You Can't Get There From Here

Unusually, I have a little money in my pocket at the moment, so I wanted to finally upgrade my monitor, which is currently a 19" model a few years old.  It is a very nice 19" monitor, but it's still a 19" monitor.  And I blew up the DVI input for Christmas, so it's currently VGA only.

In shopping around, I discovered the new Samsung T series monitors.  The T240HD and T260HD in particular have exactly the features I want.  If I could buy two, today, I would.

I can't.  They aren't available in Australia at all.  None of the T series are.

The other thing I'd like is a good way to run some virtual servers.  VMWare Server was just that.  However, you can't run version 1 on Vista 64 - Vista 64 demands signed drivers, and VMWare Server doesn't have signed drivers - and while I could run it just fine on Linux, I couldn't access the remote console because you can't run it on Vista 64 and I can't connect my Linux box to my monitor because the DVI port is dead so I only have the one input and I can't get a new monitor because the one I actually want isn't available and if I buy one I don't want then the next day the one I want will show up and I'll be out four hundred bucks.

VMWare Server 2 beta runs on Vista 64.  VMWare Server 2 beta is a bloated piece of crap.  They replaced the very functional remote console with a hideous browser-based bit of crapware that requires you to install Apache and Tomcat just to administer your virtual machines.  Leading to a situation where the VMWare Server download is 25 times the size of the comparable VirtualBox installer.

On the other hand, VirtualBox crashes horribly when you try to run Centos 5.2 as a guest.

If I could get virtual servers running nicely on my Linux box, I'd quite like to upgrade it to 12GB of memory using the new 4GB DIMMs that are available, for instance, from Kingston.  They're a little pricey, but they allow me to put up to 16GB of memory on a $100 motherboard instead of needing a $700 motherboard.

You can't get them in Australia.  Not even from Kingston's Australian office.  Who aren't answering my emails.

I'd quite like to upgrade the mu.nu server to 12GB of memory as well.  I can't get that either.  I'd have to do a server swap, which takes about 48 hours even if I spend two weeks planning it in advance.

And then there's semi-automated online stores.  Yes, I know it's the 3rd of July over there, but when I place an order for a downloadable software product, I don't expect the date or time to matter.  I expect instant fulfillment.  I can't rant about Digital Anarchy, though, because even though their ordering system requires human intervention, a human actually intervened and got my order shipped in a few minutes at 8pm their time.  So, um, good for them.

Where was I?  Oh yeah, my order for something - presumably either  Adobe Design Premium CS 3.3 or my new quad-core CPU - decided to arrive the moment I'm out of the office for four days.  Though I could pop into the city tomorrow if I really wanted to.  And I have the trial version of Photoshop to tide me over.

And OCZ have just announced the database-administrator-on-a-budget's wet dream: A 2.5" SATA flash-based SSD, boasting 120MB/s reads, 80MB/s writes, 0.3ms access times, MTBF of 1.5 million hours, and a price between $4 and $5 per GB.  32GB model is $169; 64GB model is $259; 128GB model is $479.  Again, if I could buy two of the 32GB models right this second, I would, but they aren't available in Australia.  Though again in this instance I can't complain too much, because they're apparently not going to be officially launched until next Monday.

Meh.  I think I'll go to lunch.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:19 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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These Are Some Of My Least Favourite Things

PHP.  Script kiddies.  Any combination thereof.

Perl.  Perl DBI.  Perl DBI apps that merrily eat 2.8GB of memory per frigging instance.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:20 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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All Blogging APIs Suck!

The only thing worse than any given blogging API is any of the other blogging APIs.  Somehow, they all manage to be worse than all of the others.  You'd think that would be impossible, but not so.

For a start, the Blogger and MetaWeblog APIs are based on XML-RPC, which sucks.  The Atom API doesn't use XML-RPC, because it sucks, but does use XML, which sucks, and Atom itself, which sucks.

Why isn't there a JSON blogging API?  Whatever the reason, there soon will be.

But I'll support MetaWeblog anyway.  Even though it sucks, it sucks in a way that is easy to implement in Python.  As long as nothing goes wrong, anyway.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:18 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Shoulda Known

That was the season finale of House.  (Part 1 last week, part 2 today.)

But while the second half of the finale of House had some problems, it was better than Bones, which just spontaneously retroactively self-destructed through force of sheer boneheaded idiocy.

Bones doesn't so much jump the shark as skin the shark alive, boil the flesh from its cartilage, grind the cartilage into powder, make soup from the powder, feed the soup to hungry beetles, blend the beetles into porridge, and shoot the porridge into the Sun.

Can we have the writers' strike back, please?

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:08 AM | Comments (6) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Firefox 3

I thought they'd almost fixed the awful bar in beta 5; with RC1, it's back in all its craptastic glory.  It's the most completely worthless "enhancement" I've seen since Vista's "A program wants to do something!!!" nag screens.

In Firefox 2, if I want to go to Chizumatic, I type a c in the url bar.  That brings up Chizumatic (http://chizumatic.mee.nu), Cute Overload (http://cuteoverload.com) and other sites whose urls start with c.  I hit down arrow once or twice, and enter, and there I am.

In Firefox 3, the way it works is, well, it wipes all your history and doesn't do anything at all.  But after that, the way it works is, it brings up sites at random where the url or the title of the page or the name of the sites in your history or bookmarks or elsewhere in its tiny, confused mind, has a c in it somewhere.  Anywhere at all.  And displays two lines of text per site, so it wastes space and is much harder to read.

It's a complete pile of crap, and you can't set it back to the old way that actually worked.

Zero out of ten for style, and minus several million for good thinking.  Wonder if Innova Editor works in Opera yet...

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:28 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Aigh! Bastiges!

Really good episode of House this week.  Right up until it stops.

Darn two-parters.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:52 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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