rant
Oh this gets my goat….
Feb 8th
Catching up on what’s farciacally described as “news” these days, I noticed in a BBC Report this little ‘gem’ (yes, dear reader, that’s sarcasm):
A spokeswoman for Ms Smith said: “The home secretary has always abided fully with Parliament’s clear rules on expenses and has long-standing written approval from the Parliamentary Fees Office for any agreed expenses.
Now, correct me if I’m wrong but the article relates to Jacqui Smith as a CONSTITUENCY MP, not a frikking Cabinet Minister. I find it quite wrong for the spokeswoman to refer to her office, when it’s a matter of legislature, not executive.
Please, please, please, can people get SEPARATION OF POWERS, into their heads. It’s really not that difficult to understand.
Can’t upload images to a Wordpress blog?
Oct 15th
If, like the guys in the ORG HQ, you find yourself unable to upload images in a Wordpress Blog, and are befuddled by the reams of posts &c on the web, well, here’s another idea that might sort you out:
Remove the crap from old installs, in your ~/.mozilla directory. And by crap, well, I mean:
- appreg
- mozver.dat
- pluginreg.dat
- plugins/
cd .mozilla
rm -rf plugins/
rm appreg
rm mozver.dat
cd firefox/
rm -rf pluginreg.dat
Astonishingly, by removing a couple of bits of pelt, the uploads worked for the guys.
Seeing as this is my blog, and people expect me to be miserable, here’s my whine: why the fuck don’t people SEARCH THE FUCKING ARCHIVES on forums before posting a new question? I gave up, and went back to old-fashioned testing.
Oh, and I should probably plug a fairly new site I recently discovered: stackoverflow — about all I can whine about with that is that is uses OpenID…
OS Updates
Jul 30th
Dontcha just hate doing them?
Particularly when there’s the whole big fun of package updates, and it taking about six iterations of the various tools to get things up and running properly again?
Ach well. Mainly done now. Urfgh.
Shame about freebsd-update(8) not wanting to play ball: my guess is that the SINGLE SERVER was over-loaded.
4oD, VMWare, Grrrrrrrrrr.
Mar 27th
Ok, let’s start off with saying I’ve not used “Windows” properly for about 4years, now, having ditched it in favor of umbungo, on my home machines.
The exception to this is that I use VMWare for when I need to use Windows, e.g., to do stuff in Visio, or sort out something like Page Breaks & Tables for a Word Document: two features *really* lacking in OpenOffice…
But now, I want to watch a news report off ITN. I should have just found a Torrent. It would have been a lot quicker. And saved the web of *another* rant-blog posting…
You’d have thought it would be fairly easy. Oh no. 4oD don’t work on *nix:
Who can use 4oD?
4oD is available online on your PC and through our digital television partners, BT Vision, Tiscali TV or Virgin Media. You’ll need to be a resident in the UK or the Republic of Ireland to watch 4oD.
On your PC
To be able to get 4oD on your PC, you will need:* A PC with Windows XP or Windows Vista
* Internet Explorer 5.5 or above
* A broadband internet connectionRead about our minimum system requirements to find out more
Please note that Mac, Linux and non-XP users will currently not be able to use this service.
http://www.channel4.com/4od/help.html
So, over to the VM…
‘cept that didn’t have: A recent enough Media Player, DotNet, a bazillion patches (post SP2) …
And installing all of those updates means that my 6GB partition weren’t big enough to actually carry on (bearing in mind this is just XP, Office 2003, a printer driver, Acrobat Reader…). Great. Should be easy enough to sort that out, he thinks.
Nope.
Step One: try to work outhow to delete the snapshot made accidentally…
Step Two: oh, that crashes VMWare. So let’s rebuild VMWare…
Step Three: oh, it seems as though that might’ve worked…
Step Four: let’s try and resize the partition: yum. And yay
Step Five: see if Windows wants to play ball.
Fuck. Nope, it now recognizes there’s two disks, not the one partition… so, erm, over to the live CD and thence GPartEd…
(at this point, I thought, “fuck it”, I’m gonna blog)
Step Six: ignore the gparted warnings, and see if that’s sorted it…
Step Seven: let’s reboot into Windows. Oh look, it wants another reboot. Fuckwittery.
Step Seven(b): well, guess what, it’s not worked. But I have had a brainfart. Despite saying “I don’t want a paging file, but you’re gonna give me one, anyhow”, let’s resize that to get some space on this VM Disk….
So, erm, yeah. Maybe I’ll fix this a bit proper, but right now, i’ve had enough… I though *nix was meant to be the more difficult to use OS…
