Looking back over some old photos, I kind of miss my fisheye lens (sold last year) . I wish I used it more. According to Lightroom I only took 119 shots with it, most of which were throw away tests. When I’ve decided wether to move to full frame or not I might invest in another one.

In September last year my Father and I went up to Duxford to the late summer airshow, I’ve only just got round to processing the pictures. Looking through them it seems like more of my ground shots are nicer than the inflight ones, something I’ll have to address in future airshows!

Always forget this:

(parted) mklabel gpt
(parted) mkpart primary 0 100%
(parted) set 1 lvm on

That is all.

Whats this I see? Have Apple finally changed their default Gamma from 1.8 to the more widely used 2.2. Hooray!

So I want a toner cartridge, I go to dabs and search for it. Their search works well and I find it easily. I note it is priced at £70.00 which is a fair price and free delivery is available, so in the basket it goes.

Once clicking on checkout I’m given the options of dabs.com checkout or paypal checkout. I’ve not got a credit card to hand so I choose paypal checkout.

Next I’m asked to login to my dabs.com account, which I do.

Whereupon without warning I’m redirected to BT Business Direct, woah! WTF, I was about to spend some money with Dabs direct, no mention of BT prior to this and I specifically clicked PayPal Checkout. And to add further insult to injury the free postage is now 2.98 and the price has risen from 60.87 ex vat to 67.89. No word of why either of these things happened is given.

I check around and this is still a fair price so I click checkout, but then instead of being asked for my paypal details I’m asked for a credit card number. Which I note they dont accept my business card of preference which is American Express.

There you go dabs, there was too many fails in that checkout process for me to have any confidence continuing. I’m off to spend 15 quid more on the same item in a real shop because you incompetence has scared me off.

This evening I received a phone call from a client:

Client: We are not receiving any emails from your site since lunchtime.

Me: Ok, no problem. I can look into that, quick question though. Have you been receiving any emails at all?

Client: Oh yes. Tons.

So off I pop to investigate. The Java application which generates these mails has nothing in the logs which look like errors. So I peer at our central outbound mail relay. Sure enough there are a bunch of mails in the retry queue waiting to be delivered to this client. Next up I look at the log, yep the mail server is complaining, first about connection refused then about no MX records. A quick dig for the MX records and sure enough there is nothing listed. Bravo!

So I ring back the client:

Me: I think its your problem, are you SURE you are receiving any other email.

Client: No, we havn’t received anything from anybody since mail from your site stopped around lunch time.

/me looks STUNNED

It is at times like this I would like to be able to send this image to said client…

Can’t cure stoopid

Just recently I upgraded a Centos 4 machine which broke OMSA, this post helped me fix it.

Double clicking a Word document embedded in a Word document, whilst in Microsoft Word results in Word coming to the conclusion that Word isn’t installed. Amazingly helpful error message, thanks Microsoft.

Dumb error from Microsoft Word

Just recently I wanted to be able to lock a single process to a specific CPU for testing purposes. A bit of googling lead me to thisnice explanation of how it works.

Essentially you use the taskset command to run a new proc locked to a specific CPU:

% taskset -c 1 sleep 10

Will run ‘sleep 10’ locked to CPU #0.

% taskset -c -p 1<br /> pid 1's current affinity list: 0,1

Shows you what PID 1 has its affinity set to.

Every time I need to use this modem on a new mac I end up fighting with it and often giving up. I’ve made it work this time, so I intend to document the process here so I dont spend hours googling next time.

These instructions worked on my iMac and my MacBook Pro both of which were running 10.5.7.

Before you start, make sure the modem is not connected.

First off download the drivers, the ones buried in the three.co.uk support site lack a actual installer even though the documentation suggests you just need to run the installer. WTF am I supposed to do with a bunch of .kext files three? Have you heard of a nice user experience? Clearly not. Click [this link]({{ “/uploads/2009/05/huaweidatacarddriver26-intelpkg1.zip” | prepend: site.baseurl }}) and download the zip file from here, inside is a standard OSX installer package. run that.

After that has installed, you dont need to reboot. Plug in the modem and wait a few minutes. The little LED started flashing blue occasionally for me which I think means I’ve got 3G coverage.

Once its calmed down open up network preferences where you should see a few new devices down the left hand side:

The device you are interested in is the HUAWEI Mobile, select that. Then in the ‘Telephone Number’ field enter *99#:

After you have done that click the ‘Advanced’ button. On the resulting pane, select ‘Generic’ from the Vendor drop down. Then select ‘GPRS (GSM/3G)’ from the Model field. If you are in the UK, enter ’three.co.uk’ into the APN field and leave the CID as 1:

Click ok, and then click Apply on the main Network Preferences pane. After you’ve done this try clicking connect and you should see the following connection confirmation:

A nice little utility to monitor your connection is CheetahWatch which you can get from here.