Froosh. Stuff.

It’s actually a support article: The system time runs too fast on a Linux-based virtual machine that is hosted in Virtual Server 2005 R2

I’ve always* used both Windows and Linux in my personal and professional lives, so have basically ignored most of the Microsoft vs. Linux (and GNU/OSS/etc) rhetoric out there. Hypocritically though I was suprised by the article – it was straight-forward, accurate, and there was no taint of “it’s all the fault of the open-source-hippies”. In fact it was the opposite, with an educational piece about the nature of Linux timekeeping systems at the end. Huh. Who’da thunk it? Learning something about Linux from Microsoft.

Wow. I really am very inconsistent. I claim to ignore the religious war, but just read that comment above… May I be tortured by dumbass users for eternity!

*always since Linux became available to me in late 1992 sometime.

Update: oops, forgot the credits! Thanks to the Virtual PC Guy’s WebLog!

Ok, so Conquest was on over the Easter weekend and it was fantastic as usual. Of course I’ve actually only been twice now…

For me, it was four intense days of gaming and helping out and even two days later I’m feeling exhausted but happy about it. I may have a problem though: I’ve bought some miniatures and become addicted to a 9 book series.

The miniatures: Urban War – a reasonably new 1-inch base miniature game. The Junkers (Gladiators) are my chosen faction. I bought mine from Olympian Games who are the only Australian distributors for the Urban War kit at present. It’s been so long since I’ve painted miniatures or played a miniatures game … I’m quite excited!

The book: Second Pass by Ken Ludden. This is where it gets really bad. It’s a 9 book series. Only 1 book has been released! We were lucky to have the author as special guest at Conquest along with the designer of the SIL RPG, Andy Toy. I got to play one of the RPG playtests, and spend more time with both Ken and Andy – as a result, I’ve become addicted.

I’ve also been drafted into the organisation team for Conquest and associated conventions – could be fun, definitely a lot of hard work, and if I’m really lucky maybe some free stuff

And to top it off, I feel the need to attend more conventions now – Retrocon in particular. Current plans include playing a very retro Dungeons and Dragons module: The Keep on the Borderlands! (If you’re confused, Basic D&D was released in the early ’70s and evolved several times after that)

Note: I’m playing with the Amazom Associates program more as an experiment and professional training than the desire to scam you all for profit. If you do happen to buy something though my links, I will make a very small amount. Any links I do make are made solely because of my personal interests and own choices and I will/would post them without the Associates program anyway.

Update: I appear to have been insanely lucky and missed the con-fluenza this time around. w00t!

Well, it does if you live in Melbourne that is!

That’s because it’s time for Conquest again. w00t!

We haven’t signed up for the same “Get Wrecked” plan that we did last year with Andrew – but we’ll being helping out at the rego desk amid the rest of the con-fusion.

Oops, it didn’t occur to me that I would score this high…

[via Xbox Live's TriXie]

I had left comments set to require you to be registered and logged in to comment – not that good for encouraging feedback!
I turned it on when I installed the OpenID plugin for authenticating comments and forgot to turn it off.  Why did I install the OpenID plugin?  So I could comment on Mur’s LiveJournal of course!

Bloody hell! Why do so many things needlessly require administrator privileges???

The latest culprit: Apple iTunes on Windows

Ok, so I bought Kim an iPod Nano for her birthday – she’s only been begging for one for about 3 years…

• I installed iTunes on our PC using a dedicated Administrator account then logged back in with a Limited User account (Actually we are all Guests and depend on the default Windows XP inclusion of AUTHENTICATED and INTERACTIVE in the Users group).
• As a Limited User we could rip music off CDs we own (Apparently illegal in Australia).
• We could sync those songs onto the iPod with no problems
• We could play the songs with no problems
• We bought some tracks from the iTunes Music Store and downloaded them
• The played perfectly on the PC
• We synced them to the iPod
• They would not play!

The symptom: Whenever we tried to play the purchased songs on the iPod, it would simply skip them all very quickly

Apple’s iPod Support pages were of no assistance – I went through “the five Rs” and had absolutely no change in function, and authorised/deauthorised the PC many times.

It was only after 6+ hours of incredibly frustrating, tedious, tiresome diagnosis that it occurred to me that it could be permissions related – it was a last ditch effort and I thought it was a long shot given that we had not received a single access exception.

Yep. Bloody hell! You need to be a local Administrator for purchased music to work when synced to an iPod. Unprotected AAC’s work perfectly without Administrator access. Protected AAC’s work perfectly on the PC without Administrator access. Only if you want to play your purchased tunes on your iPod do you need to be a local Administrator. Pfff, who would want to do that?!

And now with the line that I seem to use far too many times: I can’t be the only person who has experienced this!*

Why is it not in the Apple Support pages? Why do I have to buy AppleCare to log a fault with them? For crying out loud, I’ve diagnosed the bloody problem for them already – I just want to make sure a ticket gets logged in their fault tracking system and will get resolved in the next point(less) release!

[breath] [breath] [breath]

Ok, so I’m calming down now. Everything’s fine, the iPod works – even if we have to add Administrator access to our accounts when syncing the iPod – and Kim is very happy with the new music she purchased.

* Google was NOT my friend

Update: Fixed links and typos.

Update 2: How odd – TinyMCE in WordPress had popped a strange piece of HTML in that messed up some of the links displaying (<a  xhref=”http://www.apple.com.au/itunes/” />)

I have been listening to podcasts for a while now and one of the very first podcasts I started listening to was Mur Lafferty’s Geek Fu Action Grip. I’m hooked and can’t get enough Mur goodness

1. Geek Fu Action Grip
2. I Should Be Writing (Very relevant to anyone writing anything, not just fiction. e.g. Software Developement)
3. Lessons From A Geek Fu Master
4. Voices: New Media Fiction

And of course, Mur appears as a feature on The Dragon Page every so often.

Mur: Thanks, and keep it up!

http://www.dice.com/beingit/

The Pizza Launcher was my fave.

There are a large and growing number of Instant Messaging systems out there and just as many ways to ask someone to contact you. Given that I normally only have 1 or 2 methods in common with a particular individual, it’s redundant to ask them to Skype/MSN/GoogleTalk/Jabber/Gizmo/Yahoo/ICQ/etc me. And so, I’m throwing my vote to Tristan‘s proposed usage of the word bing:

Bing!

Synonymous with “instant message”.

verb: “Bing me!”
noun: “I got a bing from Dennis…”

I find the onomatopoeia of it elegant, and genericly non-technical for all those poor stiffs who can’t even open milk cartons (Honestly, is “Open other side” that confusing?!).

In conclusion: If you see me online, bing me!

It’s an odd choice … but my first post after a long hiatus is this:

Try this out – it’s fun in a disturbing way.

More posts to follow, probably with better content – but I’m not promising anything…

Oh, and thanks to Anthony for the link!

Oh poo, I was enjoying being totally ignorant about work stuff whilst I was on holiday – until this found it’s way to my personal inbox: Zero Day Holiday

Whew – it’s been ages.

This is just a quickie to turn off the piratey theme and post a link to my X-Box Live Gamertag. Feel free to add me to your friends list – preferably with an audio note mentioning who you are and how you know me.

I’m really only playing Halo 2 and Doom 3 at the moment, but I’m willing to entertain other games – once I buy them…

I’ve been holding off watching any of Kevin Rose’s Systm – mainly because he’s a dork

However … I was pleasantly surprised! I watched their MythTV episode, and while their hands were hyperactive, it was totally watchable.

The coolest thing about their show, that will probably bring me back every time, has to be their main logo – a stylised Commodore PET.

My 1st computer was a Commodore PET 4032. I learned to program in BASIC and 6502 assembly on that. I learned by digital electronics with it, hacked extra devices into it’s memory space, and created my own custom OS (and OS extensions). It’s interesting how certain memories can trigger strong emotional responses. I loved that machine.

As impracticle as it would be, I wish for it back at times. There was not a single component of it that I did not fully comprehend; hardware or software. If only that were possible today … actually, I wouldn’t have a job in IT Systems Support

I still get a kick out of programming (“I’m an amateur programmer”), and hacking around with hardware, electronics, and creating extension devices and applications for my computers.

To this day, I am still the only person I know or have known who had a PET. Does that make me weird?

Apparently I didn’t shut up about pod-catching…

Tejas, I’ve dumped all my podcast feeds into a Podcast category list in my sidebar.

For general IT related feeds, IT Conversations has to be my favourite, with the Chris Pirillo Show in a close second. These are usually not podcasts in the ‘traditional’ sense – they’re more often recordings of various IT forums and conferences and offer the chance to hear some amazing speakers that I would never normally have a chance to hear.

One thing I’ve just noticed is that WordPress‘ support for OPML is a bit skinny … Importing links from OPML required a bit of massaging afterwards, and I can’t seem to find a way to publish my link categories as an OPML feed (or even export them to an OPML file to manually upload). Might have to work on that when I have some spare time. (ha!)

It was an interesting night. I enjoyed it, and most others appeared to as well – I’ll be waiting for the next one.

For better or worse, there are photos (Thanks, Matt! You make us all look great! ).

I used to go to geek dinners. Back in the day. When BBS’s were the blogs of the time.

I’ve never thought of them (BBS’s) like that before… It probably doesn’t fit too well now, but when blogs were kicking off, there were some similarities to BBS’s – built by geeks, used primarily for geek-to-geek communication, and Real Life meet-ups were curious events that meant you got to put faces to FidoNet nodes.

Yes, I ran my own BBS for a while. It was known my me, and by about the same number of people subscribed to my blog now (3) as “Destinations Unknown” (FidoNet Node 3:54/459). I was inordinatly proud of it; primarily because I wrote my own DOS serial driver (crap, I can’t recall what they were called … F-something?) in assembly to correctly provide the “ring-back” functionality I needed because I only had one phone line that had to be shared between BBS and voice. “Ring-Back” was where you rang the BBS number, let it ring once or twice, hung up and dialled again. The BBS would then answer, and you could keep the line until your time limit expired or you voluntarily left.

My details for the system have been archived in the nodelists/nodediffs at FOTI (hosted by TextFiles.com). I’m in the 1994.364 nodelist at least, but it’s not worth the bandwidth to completely delineate my BBS hosting days. It’s just occurred to me that I still have my archives on DDS2 tape somewhere. But I have no DDS2 drive anymore.

But I dissemble.

There’s a geek meet-up happening in Melbourne this Friday, courtesy of Tejas Patel. If you’re interested in podcasting, Cameron Reilly may be there – bring brick-bats or bouquets as is your wont.

[via Jake]

Co-incidentally, my birthday is on the 18th and you can pre-order it starting on the 18th. It’s fate. So, who wants to buy me a shiny noo birthday present? At nearly AU$570, there is no way I can even pretend to justify the purchase.

Maybe in another lifetime.

I’m trying to get my head around OPML right now, and it’s not going so well. I can see it’s worth for passing lists of non-time-based data (as opposed to RSS/Atom which is great for time-linear data lists). I’m just not sure what “Outlining” is right now … perhaps it’s just a little too late, too much working on a Sunday, and far too much NASAtv and following the Return to Flight.

“That’s the second biggest one of those I’ve ever seen.”

I got a little bored of the default Kubrick theme from WordPress, and so went hunting a new favourite via the WordPress Theme Browser and settled on Russell Tanton’s “Yaaarr, tis me blog!”. It’s camp and piratey, and I like it! It probably wont last a long time, but enjoy it while it lasts… (Agregator-only readers will need to visit the site to see the theme in action)

Additionally, feeds are now being provided via the FeedBurner republishing and tracking service. After listening to Chris Pirillo interview Rick from FeedBurner, I was sold. And it really was that easy. The hardest part was inserting the 4 lines into my .htaccess file to redirect y’all to the FeedBurner feed seamlessly:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} FeedBurner
RewriteRule ^feed/?([_0-9a-z-]+)?/?$ /index.php?feed=$1 [QSA]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !FeedBurner
RewriteRule ^feed/?([_0-9a-z-]+)?/?$ http://feeds.feedburner.com/insert.your.feed.name.here [R,L]

Once I’ve looked at the stats for a bit, I’ll start showing them – yes, even if they’re pitifully low

How to make a desktop trebuchet from popsicle sticks

Gotta MAKE me one of these!

Skype. It’s closed. It’s proprietary. Yet it still manages to be cool…

I only use Skype occasionally and haven’t yet paid for any additional Skype services – I’m just not sure I’d make much use for it. Not to worry though, Skype have recently revealed that they will be releasing packets of free SkypeOut time to users. The only catch is that you have to check your Skype account page regularly to find the parcel of free time when it appears (on selected days, yet to be announced). From the details, it appears you may collect 10 minutes of free time on each “Free Skype Day”.

I’ll give it a go, and try out the Skype-to-landline service – if nothing else, to talk to my Brother in London. If it’s satisfactory I will consider getting a London based SkypeIn number to make it easier and cheaper for him to call me.

I’d be interested to hear (literally if you like ) about other people’s experiences with SkypeOut, or SkypeIn.

Update: Today is the first Free SkypeOut Day – Go to your Accounts page to get 10 minutes of free SkypeOut time