Monthly Archive for September, 2003

First Day In Cambridge

Published on September 29, 2003 10:53 PM - Closed

Well today was our first day operating out of our new offices in Cambridge, wasn’t to bad I had managed to sort out a majority of problems on Saturday when I was setting stuff up. The journey into Cambridge is still slowed odwn a little due to rail safety board’s speed restrictions on the lines, however I think the travelling towards King X is probably more problematic since it take about 15-20 minutes more than it should. Hopefully this will get better in the coming weeks. I’m currently taking the 08:15 fast train, and coming back on the 17:45 train. Meaning that I don’t get home till around 20:00, which is not bad but it means that my eveings are pretty much over by the time I get home.

As for the actuall office they are not to bad, only a 10 minute walk from the train station located about on the south side of Cambridge. We are on Clifton Road just off Cherry Hinton Lane. The M11 is not to far away either meaning that access is okay, and we miss all of the nasty traffic in the northern side of Cambridge. Things are still a little messy around the office but that is because people have not finished unpacking yet. We even have a couple of arcafe machines, more precisely a pinball machine and a Chase HQ cabinet. The general feeling around the office is a little hard to guage at the moment, but I hope things work out. I’m only commuting twice a week, working from home 2 days a week, and spending 1 day in the London satellite office.

Last Day in Euston

Published on September 25, 2003 10:19 PM - Closed

That day has finally arrived, our last day in the Euston office. Come monday I will have to commute to Cambridge twice a week until I sort myself out. I look foward to having to work from home as well, but having to deal with distance for getting work done is going to be fun, and I wonder how collectively we will all manage. One thing is for sure, APRSmartlogik is going through another major change and the move marks the end of a era. I just hope that we don’t come out too badly on the other end.

So this afternoon was spent packing our stuff into packing crates and dismantling furniture so it could be thrown away. Destroying desks was probably the toughest thing we had to deal with today, if only I had sledge hammer, something about the whole thing reminded me of Office Space, the scene when after being made redundant they smash their laser printer.

We only managed to do so much in the evening, we where told to call it a day, and leave the rest for tomorrow. However I was going to be in Cambridge ready to receive the movers and get our kit out properly and hooked up as soon as possible so I missed out on the rest of the destruction. James our system administrator has been busy preparing the new site for a couple of week so he already has the important infracture pieces replicated and moved to the new office.

I said I would be happy to help complete the set up of the Cambridge office over the next couple of days, these sort of things always end up being more fun than you think, and I’m happy to do my bit. I think my main objective is going to be to get the development infrastructure back up and running.

1100 G5 Cluster

Published on September 21, 2003 6:27 PM - Closed

Pictures of the first G5 cluster at Virginia Tech are posted got the link from this slashdot thread. Can’t reallly justify shelling out for a G5 at the moment, though I will definately be getting a new 15 Powerbook in the next 6 weeks or so. Hopefully in the next year we will see G5 improvements that will finally see IBM take on Intel properly.

Underworld

Published on September 21, 2003 3:50 PM - Closed

Blade fans will love this film, and I did as well to a point. Most of the plot is quite well thought out however there are flaws. If you overlook these (as you probably should do) Underworld provides great entertainment for a couple of hours. The premise of the movie is basically that a war between Vampires and Werewolves has been taking place for nearly a thousand years. A human doctor holds the key to something the werewolves have been working on for centuries, with him they believe they will be able to defeat the vampires.

Now the acting is not great though Kate Beckinsale comes out rather well. The action is not terribly original or amazing either, but there is something definately there. The cinematography is purposefully dark, and some definte Matrix’isms and Crouching Tiger’isms are present in the film, as well as a few John Woo style gun battles. All in all making Underworld a worthy trip to the pictures.

Updated Just looked at Becksale’s IMDB entry and noted that she is in Van Helsing which also stars Hugh Jackman. Which reminds me that I must order X-Men 2.

Lets take a new 15′ Powerbook Apart

Published on September 20, 2003 7:20 PM - Closed

A Japanese Apple User Group site has already got their hands on a new 15′ Powerbook and then took it apart. kodawarisan.com

Going to be seeing Underworld tonight looks ok, looks like it going for the same audience as Blade, will let you know what I thought later.

Plain Salling

Published on September 18, 2003 4:33 PM - Closed

Jonas Salling has done it again, another cool Bluetooth application for Mac OS X that lets a user control his desktop from a Palm handheld. I’ll check this out at some point this weekend however, I’m quite happy with the original Clicker which I use to control with iTunes.

Yes……

Published on September 16, 2003 3:19 PM - Closed

New Powerbooks today from Apple. At last, now I just need to wait a couple of months and I will get the 15″ Powerbook. The 12″ now is a 1GHz G4 as well. I want a semi-desktop replacement so the 15 Inch is going to be the one to go for. The 17″ has been pumped up to 1.33GHz and the top end model of the 15″ variety is 1.25GHz. The 15″ and 17″ now have Radeon 9600 Mobile’s as their graphics core.

Another new bit of kit from Apple today was the Bluetooth Keyboard and Mouse that have been on the rumour sites for a while. However I think Apple have made a mistake by not still adopting a 3-buttoned wheel mouse. I understand to a point that they don’t want to be seen doing what other do since in honesty there is not much more room for innovation as far as a mouse is concerned. A while back there where some rumours of an iPod like control mechanism however such a device has failed to appear. Who knows maybe next year.

Nooooooooo….

Published on September 16, 2003 3:06 PM - Closed

The new X-Box update that went out over the last couple of days has fixed the buffer underun vulnerbility in the X-Box Dash Board, looks like that plan has been sucker punched. Looks like I will have to get a modchip and switch combination.

Slashdot has a thread. It would seem that even non-subcribers of the X-Box Live service are having the patch applied to the machine automagically, hmmm that does not seem right though I guess for the large number of users it’s probably right since they are not going to want to know how to patch their X-Box.

So much for flat hunting in Cambridge

Published on September 13, 2003 2:54 PM - Closed

Had set yesterday aside to deal with Estate Agents and the like in Cambridge however it would seem the odds where against me. Had a few things to do at the bank in the morning but the queues where hurendous, spent practically an hour and a half in my local barclays. I then had some other stuff to do and ran a little late and did not get to Kings Cross till around 2:40pm by which time I was already 10 minutes late for my appointment in Cambridge. So I rang up the agent and changed my appointment to today.

Guess what it’s now 2:50 pm and I’m still in London, looks like that plan has gone down the drain. Maybe I’ll manage to see some places on Tuesday, since I’m up in Cambridge for a company meething anyway. I’ll just have to take the afternoon off or something.

Linux on SPARC

Published on September 10, 2003 2:39 PM - Closed

Finally took the Ultra 10 I got from work home. Now I just need to get Linux on to this box, I think the SCSI drive in the unit is a bit noisey may have to swap it out, but I don’t have any spare SCSI disks will have to find one from some where.

Would seem like Debian is going to be the distro to go for, I have tried Gentoo in the past (not on SPARC tho) and I do like it I just don’t fancy waiting 3 days for all of the packages to compile. Going to see if there is a Debian network install disk.

I want to put a PCI IDE Controller (ala PC Style Promise Controller) into the Ultra 10 so I can put a set of disks into a RAID-1 set, however I can’t seem to locate anything about putting a Promise controller into a SPARC. I don’t think it’s possible since the cards are PC BIOS centric, haven’t seen anything that confirms my suspicions either. May need to find a Sun specific controller card.

Star Wars Kid

Published on September 7, 2003 10:38 PM - 1 Comment

Saw this thread on slashdot about the Star Wars Kid, I’m guessing by now most people have heard about the Light Sabre Meister. Some of the edits are cool.

Thoughts about the N-Gage

Published on September 6, 2003 10:13 PM - Closed

Having seen the N-Gage at the ECTS last week I have been considering getting it since it phone upgrade time. I just happened to be surfing around Oreillynet and I came across Nathan Torkington blog entry which is about the N-Gage, it references an article on Wired.

I personally have been sceptical off Nokia’s entry into the gaming arena, they make perfectly good phones, I just think the odds are stacked against them as far as the games industry is concerned. Without proper third party support and decent titles it is a little hard to pull off. However to their advantage no one else has tried to do this. Perhaps Nokia might stimulate the whole sector and start something new, so on this point I hope Nokia is successful.

If people really want to play games on mobile devices then I think Nintendo should partner up with Nokia and develop some killer mobile games. I’m sure Nintendo’s R&D department have some exciting ideas, however because of their current position of being seen as third, it is going to become harder for them to role out hardware. I would love to see Nintendo become a software only company, in the same vein as Sega today. (Speaking of Sega they are supporting the N-Gage.)

One possible scenario would be for Nokia and Nintendo combine their efforts to fend of Sony, who have already shown they can enter a new market sector and make it theirs. Sony are going to introduce the PSP next year, which will be like a portable Playstation with media playback and wireless capabilities. On paper it would seem that Sony are going to own this percieved market as well, I guess we will just have to wait and see what happens.

As far as phones are concerned it looks like the firm favourite at the moment is the T610, purely because iSync supports it. As for the N-Gage I haven’t seen anything on any of the service providers sites about the launch of the handset or specialist services.

So much for finding a repair center

Published on September 4, 2003 8:13 PM - Closed

I looked at the Apple Repair Service on the Apple Support site, I put it through as an out off warranty repair, even though the system told me it was in warranty, which it is not. The quote came back as �235, which is �15 less than a brand new 10GB iPod.

So I posted a thread on iPodLounge wanting a response as to how to fix the firewire port myself unfortunately, I did not get much of response, so I think I will just open the iPod and see if I can manage to do anything.

R.I.P iPod

Published on September 3, 2003 11:09 AM - Closed

My iPod’s Firewire port has come loose

Basically I can’t transfer songs to or from the iPod. Charging is also a bit of a problem, I have to tilt the unit in a funny way so that there is a little pressure on the connector so that it interfaces properly.

Dad’s operation is tomorrow

Published on September 1, 2003 2:06 PM - Closed

Found out yesterday that my dad’s operation has been moved forward to tomorrow, originally it was meant to happen early to mid next month and he had been given a preliminary date of 2nd October. Going to be away for a few days to help take care of family stuff, need to start worrying about the move to Cambridge as well have been working on getting stuff ready at work. However I have still not decided on what I’m going to do, time is running out.

Charles Bronson

Published on September 1, 2003 11:53 AM - Closed

Whilst doing my first thing in the morning browse for news at work I noted on Google News a story informing that Charles Bronson had passed away on Saturday. Now I’m was not the greatest Charles Bronson fan however I did appreciate some of his earlier roles, mainly his roles in The Magnificent Seven and The Dirty Dozen and of course the Death Wish series which is probably what he is most known for. A found a good article on the Telegraph .

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Monthly Archive for September, 2003

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