I’ve been invited alongside two fellow phpBB developers to attend Microsoft’s Jump In! Developers’ Campnext month in Switzerland to learn about interoperability between Microsoft’s software stacks and PHP applications. For more information on how to attend this event read on or visit, www.jumpincamp.com.
Archive for the ‘Life’ Category
Jump In! Camp
Saturday, March 13th, 2010One enormous footer
Sunday, January 31st, 2010Lloyds TSB Bank plc. Registered Office: 25 Gresham Street, London EC2V 7HN. Registered in England and Wales, number 2065. Telephone: 020 7626 1500.
Bank of Scotland plc. Registered Office: The Mound, Edinburgh EH1 1YZ. Registered in Scotland, number 327000. Telephone: 0870 600 5000
Lloyds TSB Scotland plc. Registered Office: Henry Duncan House, 120 George Street, Edinburgh EH2 4LH. Registered in Scotland, number 95237. Telephone: 0131 225 4555.
Cheltenham & Gloucester plc. Registered Office: Barnett Way, Gloucester GL4 3RL. Registered in England and Wales, number 2299428. Telephone: 01452 372372.Lloyds TSB Bank plc, Lloyds TSB Scotland plc, Bank of Scotland plc and Cheltenham & Gloucester plc are authorised and regulated by the Financial Services Authority.
Halifax is a division of Bank of Scotland plc. Cheltenham & Gloucester Savings is a division of Lloyds TSB Bank plc.
HBOS plc. Registered Office: The Mound, Edinburgh EH1 1YZ. Registered in Scotland, number 218813. Telephone: 0870 600 5000Lloyds Banking Group plc. Registered Office: The Mound, Edinburgh EH1 1YZ. Registered in Scotland, number 95000. Telephone: 0131 225 4555
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Telephone calls may be monitored or recorded.
I removed the double line spacing as well!
Why do I bother?
Sunday, January 31st, 2010Updated my desktop from Ubuntu ‘Jaunty’ 9.04 to Ubuntu ‘Karmic’ 9.10, the upgrade process worked flawlessly. Sadly the number of regressions has kind of taken the shine of the various improvements to the distribution.
The big kicker for me is the breaking of VLC and/or Gnome Screensaver, now VLC fails to suppress the screensaver in full screen which is kind of useless when you want to watching anything over 5 minutes long. To workaround this I use gnome-screensaver-command --inhibit to prevent the screensaver from activating, and set a command to kill that after 2 hours. The next problem I’ve observed is that even when the suppression and the film have both ended, the screensaver still doesn’t want to activate for ages; leaving my desktop burning the image into the screen until I lock the screen myself. Not a problem but I often hit the hay with a film on and usually fall asleep midway through, got up yesterday morning to find my desktop sat there still being projected from my display. LP #428884.
My second gripe is Flash player under a x86-64 installation using nspluginwrapper and the x86 Flash player provided in the repositories works, what’s so bad about that? Well you can’t actually click on any controls on the Flash object, which kind of rules out embedded YouTube, BBC iPlayer, etc. roll on <video> with Ogg Theora. I resolved this by purging the packaged Flash and nspluginwrapper, and then installing the native 64 bit alpha version from Adobe.
Finally Firebug 1.5 doesn’t support 64 bit builds of Firefox, which to be fair Mozilla don’t support so I don’t really have a problem with this. You need to get an older release from the 1.4 branch, I’ve heard that the 1.6 alphas work again.
Good grumbling done for the morning!
How customer service should be
Monday, December 14th, 2009Awesome and entertaining customer service from IWOOT!
I’m sorry to hear about this, but thank you for letting us know.
I’ve just sent a request for a new one to be sent out to you, so you should receive it soon.
There’s no need to return the broken one, we wouldn’t want the posties to be carrying around broken pottery in their bags – they have enough to complain about! Just take care and dispose of it safely.
I hope this helps a wee bit?
New Year Server Crash
Thursday, January 1st, 2009My server for some reason unknown to me crashed last night, in the middle of new year festivities. Extracts from my logs show the, hopefully, coincidental timing of it.
Dec 31 23:56:15 sandman rsnapshot[11655]: /usr/bin/rsnapshot -c /etc/rsnapshot.d/mail.cs278.org hourly: completed successfully
Jan 1 01:15:30 sandman syslogd 1.5.0#5: restart.
Happy New Year to all! 
Three Years Old
Sunday, December 7th, 2008I know I started this blog in December 2005 but I wasn’t quite sure when, so I took a nose and it turns out it was December 7th which means this blog is three years old today. In three years I have written 316 entries (including this one) which is an average of 8 a month which is pretty good, and I’ve never missed a month. 
First Lines
Saturday, December 6th, 2008BAM Vulnerabilities
Thursday, December 4th, 2008BAM is a company that provides services to Students Unions around the country primarily dealing with union websites. My Students’ Guild signed up with them last year to provide our website, from the off I was quite opposed to the move anticipating it would turn into a complete joke which, naturally, it has. BAM uses their own proprietary in house developed content management system, from the outside it looks bloody awful and I am reliably informed that the administration side of things is worse. Last month a meeting was held to discuss the Guild website and what was wrong with it, the general consensus was — everything. Pushed on by this I decided to take a poke around and see if I could find any vulnerabilities, I didn’t have to look hard, it only took me 10 minutes to find the first. I found two more before I decided I would stop in case I scared myself senseless.
Back to Exeter
Monday, September 29th, 2008The time has come once more for me to return to Exeter, for my final year of my undergraduate Computer Science degree. I’m looking forward to moving in with new people so much, to be honest I have been wanting to go back for quite a while now. Fairly exhausted from all the travelling and work I’ve been doing lately, need to catch up on some sleep. This is all for now, new desktop wallpaper soon I hope, and a backdated post about the visit to Hethel.
