I find it hard to imagine how Microsoft managed to make the installer for Visual Studio 2005 SP1 take even longer than it takes to install Visual Studio in the first place, but hats off to their team for managing this task so successfully.
I’ve been looking at the progress bars of various dialogue boxes now for neigh-on three hours, and it’s still crawling slowly, eating 100% CPU, not even a third of the way through the ‘gathering required information’ phase.
Of course I should really be thanking them as otherwise I may have been forced to do some actual work on the first day back for two weeks, instead I can achieve zen-like states of mind waiting for the next green blob to appear on the progress bar.
I should take some valium, then this would just fly by.
Post Category: Uncategorized
January 2nd, 2007 at 01:59pmOs
I reckon being ill as one of the great pleasures of life – Samuel Butler
I don’t often get colds, my immune system seems to be quite good at fighting them off most of the time. Even when it fails to do so everything’s usually over with within 24 hours and I’m back to full strength.
However, whatever dread plague I picked up before Christmas has been determined to lay me low for the entire holiday.
The general feelings of crappiness and overabundance of phlegm are mostly over, however I’m suffering from a side-effect that’s both bothersome and strange.
My right Eustachian tube is blocked, and nothing I do will clear it. The one major attempt to clear it by holding my nose and blowing hard resulted in the sound like a rifle going off and the room spinning like the barn in The Wizard of Oz for a few minutes. Subsequent attempts merely make noises like a blocked drain – my hearing is still somewhat impaired but I do get to hear myself breathing, which is reassuring I suppose.
So, on a slightly lop-sided note, happy new year 2007, may your various tubes remain un-gunged.
Post Category: Personal
January 1st, 2007 at 07:24pmOs
It’s true, I really don’t recycle. It isn’t because I want the Earth to be turned into a wasteland for future generations, it is simply because it’s not economically viable.
Think about it for a second, it if really made economic sense to recycle, people would be paid to do so and big industry would be falling over themselves to do it without being forced to by governments.
This is already true for aluminium, which is significantly cheaper to recycle than digging out bauxite and producing from ore, it’s twenty times more efficient in fact. Which is why there has been an aluminium recycling system for decades.
Paper, on the other hand, is certainly less efficient. The waste paper has to be pulped, treated with chemicals to remove the ink (producing waste), not to mention being transported to the recycling plant in the first place. So what about saving trees? The majority of paper is produced from trees grown specifically for paper production, in sustainable forests, and the demand for paper increases the amount of trees planted in the first place. So by recycling paper you’re actually discouraging forests.
Add to this the requirements for more man-power to collect and sift through the waste (you don’t really think that they believe what people put in the specific recycling bins do you? Of course not, it all ends up being largely sorted by hand) plus the additional collections and it soon starts to look less and less compelling as a means to save the Earth.
Naturally, if I was a gardener I’d be composting organic waste for the garden, but again, the benefits of this have been widely known for decades so it’s hardly a new thing.
I view the current recycling fad being forced onto people by governments as a means of making people feel good about ‘helping the environment’, while in actuality it’s the large subsidies being offered for recycling schemes that’s pushing it. Ultimately, we’re all paying for this, either directly through our taxes or indirectly by giving our time to go through the efforts to put waste into the designated containers in the first place.
The green lobby will no-doubt excoriate me for my opinion, but, frankly, they should be concentrating their energies on areas that make more sense economically, as they will, in the long term, improve our lot much more.
Technorati tags:
recycling,
recyclePost Category: Personal,Politics,Science
December 9th, 2006 at 04:47pmOs
On the whole, I don’t get a large amount of telephone-spam – people cold calling trying to sell me things – apart from some persistent company trying to get me to buy a new kitchen.
But I got a call recently that went through to my voice mail with the following message “This is James from your collection service, please called 0871 2089407”, the caller-display was 0871 2409000.
For anyone not familiar with UK area codes, anything beginning with 08 is a non-geographic number, not currently classified as a premium-rate number. As such the regulations appear to be somewhat lax.
Calls to 0871 numbers are, however, charged at approx. 10 pence a minute. I have no doubt that calling this number would entail a long wait going through some automated switchboard, turning a tidy sum to the crooks who run this scam.
I’m not the only person to get calls like this, so I bet someone’s making a lot of money off this.
Ofcom (the UK telephone regulator) appears to be in the process of reclassifying 0871 numbers as premium-rate (see FAQ 10), so hopefully the happy muppets behind this scam will be out of business soon, but in my experience they’ll be off onto something else soon enough to fleece money from people.
Post Category: Uncategorized
November 23rd, 2006 at 12:53pmOs
A year ago today I had LASIK surgery correcting myopia (short sightedness) of around -3.8 in the left eye, and -3.5 in the right, as well as a mild astigmatism. One year down the line my vision is still clear, my right eye slightly sharper than the left, but I don’t need glasses for anything anymore – even such focus-critical tasks like photography.
Before the treatment I had several visits to the clinic to determine my suitability, which including having eye drops to dilate the eye, and having my corneal thickness measured with a probe (a very strange sensation indeed).
The procedure itself is unpleasant rather than painful, and over within 20 minutes or so. I decided against taking a mild sedative, and although it was at times hard work – trying to focus on a red dot when it was so out of focus it was the size of a beachball – the ophthalmic surgeon performing the treatment was very professional and I was kept informed during every step. One word of warning – if you can’t handle the smell of burning hair, this isn’t for you.
I was driven home by a good friend and driven back the following day by another for the post-op review, looking a bit worse for wear with swollen eyes and a minor corneal scratch that didn’t bother me in the slightest. One all-clear later I was driven home as I still wasn’t able to pilot a car.
I suffered about a week of mild discomfort, with bright lights being a problem, as well has having to use eye drops regularly. Even so, I was legal to drive within two days, and one week later my vision seemed to be pretty much normal.
My pupils were on the border-line for being too large when fully dilated, which means I suffer from halos around bright lights at night, including street and car lights, but it have lessoned over the year and doesn’t pose a problem any more, or I’ve just learned not to notice it any more.
The one problem I suffered from the longest was dry eyes, for at least six months I carried around eye drops (meant for users of contact lenses) to moisten my eyes. Certain environments – smokey or air-conditioned for example – still cause my eyes to dry fairly rapidly, but I always keep some drops in my jacket in case I need them.
All in all, I view it as being a complete success – having worn glasses for 27 years before the surgery, I won’t say my life has transformed, but I will say that things like being able to wake up seeing clearly, sleep without having to remember to take off my specs and have a wide choice of sunglasses available have had nothing but a positive effect on my life.
If you’re thinking of getting LASIK treatment, I would give it a hearty recommendation, but go to a reputable clinic and get a second opinion from another, your eyes are precious and it’s a fairly major intrusion upon them.
Technorati tags:
lasik,
myopiaPost Category: Personal
November 15th, 2006 at 01:31pmOs
The Oracle
33% Extroversion, 100% Intuition, 27% Emotiveness, 57% Perceptiveness |
| Heuristic, detached, and analytical to a fault, you are most like The Oracle. You are able to tackle any subject with a fine toothed comb, and you possess an ability to pinpoint nuances and shades of meaning that other people do not have and cannot understand. Accomplishment and realization of ideas are, for you, secondary to the rigorous exploration of ideas and questions — you are, first and foremost, a theorist. You hate authority, convention, tradition, and under no circumstances do you accept a leadership role (although, you will gladly advise leadership when they’re going astray, whether they want you to or not). Abstraction and generalities are your interests, details and particulars are usually inconsequential and uninteresting. You excel at language, mathematics and philosophy.
You are typically easy-going and non-confrontational until someone violates one of the very few principles that you deem sacred, at which point you can fly into a rage. Although you possess a much greater understanding of process and systems than the people around you, you are always conscious of the possibility that you’ve missed something or made a mistake. You don’t tend to become attached to particular theories, and will immediately discard mistaken notions once they’re revealed to be incorrect (but you don’t tolerate iconoclasts who try to discredit validated theories through the use of fallacies and bad data). Despite being outwardly humble, you probably think of yourself as being smarter than most other people. That’s because you are. In fact, in your dealings with people your understanding of their motives is so expansive that you know what they’re going to say before they say it, and in world affairs, you usually know what is going to take place before it actually does. This ability would make you unbeatable in debates if only you were a little less pensive about your own conclusions, and a little more outgoing.
Famous people like you: Albert Einstein, Charles Darwin, Adam Smith, Thomas Jefferson, John McWhorter, Ramanujan, Marie Curie, Kurt Godel
Stay clear of: Apollo, Icarus, Hermes, Aphrodite
Seek out: Atlas, Prometheus, Daedalus |
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My test tracked 4 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender:
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You scored higher than 99% on Extroversion |
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You scored higher than 99% on Intuition |
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You scored higher than 99% on Emotiveness |
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You scored higher than 99% on Perceptiveness |
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I don’t know if I’m particularly oracular, but I like to be avuncular.
Post Category: Uncategorized
November 3rd, 2006 at 11:50amOs
I blogged earlier about blocking some ip ranges to prevent comment spam, but the Russian-owned, Italian-spam-spewing range expanded to get past the two ranges I had originally blocked.
So, Netcathost, your whole range is now a welcome and permanent fixture to my firewall deny table, all packets from 195.225.176.0/22 are forever banished into the ether.
Up yours spammer.
Post Category: Blogging,Rants,Technical
October 31st, 2006 at 12:32pmOs
When IE7 was launched, I dutifully installed it, since it had a few features that I was interested in and it was reportedly more secure than IE6. All in all, slightly underwhelming, but a big improvement on IE 6, but then that isn’t really hard.
For day-to-day surfing I use FireFox, so I dutifully downloaded Firefox 2.0 when it became visible on the Mozilla ftp site. So far I’m impressed: it feels faster; the majority of my extensions worked a treat; I like the improvements to the tabs and so far no crashes.
But, by far the biggest change to my system was brought about by IE7, and that is my switching to using Cleartype instead of the normal XP anti-aliasing for fonts. I had always assumed that Cleartype was only for LCD displays, which I don’t use on my desktop, but IE forces Cleartype for it’s font rendering and I liked how it rendered. So I switched over to Cleartype in Windows and, frankly, I think it looks a whole lot better.
So, thank you IE7 team; I may still need some convincing that your browser isn’t a monolithic security hole that I only use on sites that absolutely, positively refuse to work with Firefox, but you have indirectly made Windows look new and fresh for me, and I’m grateful for that.
Technorati tags:
IE 7,
Firefox,
CleartypePost Category: Uncategorized
October 25th, 2006 at 12:13amOs
In an admission that will greatly surprise the seven people in Arkansas that think the war in Iraq is going well, Alberto Fernandez, a member of the US State Department has admitted:
I think there is great room for strong criticism, because without doubt, there was arrogance and stupidity by the United States in Iraq
He also said that the US is willing to “talk to any insurgent group, except Al Queda” in an effort to reduce the bloodshed. This in no way constitutes a change from the stance of “no negotiating with terrorists”, since they’re not terrorists, they’re ‘insurgents’.
Mission accomplished, eh?
One day later, under no pressure from his bosses at all, he retracted his statement.
In further news, the war isn’t being won and the US will not be able to stay for the long term.
So, with certain estimates putting the number of dead in Iraq attributable to the war as over 650,000 (warning, PDF link), civil war being almost inevitable and the most likely outcome would result in the country splitting into three ethnically divided regions, each probably trying to blow up the other two.
But, on the other hand, Iraq has some lovely oil reserves!
I’m not saying that Saddam Hussain was a lovely man who hugged puppies and enjoyed long romantic walks in the rain, but do people really think that post-Saddam Iraq is a better place? More importantly, do you think you’re safer from terrorism now than you were before the invasion?
I don’t.
Still, there is all that lovely oil…
Post Category: Politics
October 23rd, 2006 at 04:30pmOs
I’m a big fan of nVidia graphics cards, unlike my past experience of ATI, nVidia cards have never given me problems.
Recently, my PC would have issues with processes consuming 100% CPU and making Windows grind to a halt. I have a dual CPU machine so the process would only get 100% of one of them, but the process that would suffer the most was explorer. Now when explorer being over-demanding the rest of Windows tends to go with it – programs continue to run but actually interacting with them is a bit of a hit and miss affair. Manually killing explorer would move the problem to another process, and eventually a slow spiral of death from a thousand cuts occurred, in most cases hitting the big red switch was the only solution as shutting down turned into an avalanche of hitting ‘this process has stopped responding’ dialogues.
I was quite prepared to believe that it was just XP suffering from a bad case of bit rot and is in dire need of a re-install, however I don’t like to let things be when they’re bothering me on my own PC so I broke out the heavy tools and started debugging.
The heavy tool of choice in this case was the terrific Process Explorer from SysInternals, it allowed me to dump the stack of the locked up explorer process and at the bottom, sucking all the CPU was the nVidia nView dll, which is part of the nVidia drivers.
I had enabled nView months ago for something and completely forgotten about it, until my debugging session.
One quick trip to control panel and nView was disabled, and I’ve not experienced any process lockups since. If I was a betting man I’d think it was a race condition exacerbated by having dual processors, but in these days of dual-core CPU’s this problem could become more prevalent.
Post Category: Technical
October 23rd, 2006 at 01:27amOs
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