Philip Norton

I saw this great site the other day called Proud To Be Apple Free. Naturally it is all about annoying Mac users are. Actually that should be iUser as they seem to have this fixation about putting the letter i in front of every product they produce.  Which is intensely irritating!

Personally I wouldn’t buy a Mac, not unless I won the lottery and wanted something pretty to play with. I have used a Mac at work and as a development platform it I can’t imagine a system that is more annoying to use than a Mac. Most of what you need to do with anything is hidden behind several layers of crap, the idea being that most people don’t want to use it. Well I do want to use it, but after messing about with the very strange file manager for a couple of hours I found out I had to use the command line to get more access to the system, but even then everything is hidden!

It just works huh? Only if you want to paint pictures all day long. I want to write code!

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I got my computer back today. I got a Asus EAX-1050 graphics card from a local shop in Congelton. It is quite low powered, but should do me for a few months. I can’t afford a brilliant card at the moment, but I was contemplating getting a good laptop to replace the desktop in a few months. I don’t trust the desktop as it has a habit of crashing and blowing up components.

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My old faithful graphics card has finally given up. I started playing X3 today and it just crashed. When I tried to restart I was met with a screen full of ASCII characters. Looks like a quick trip to a local shop might be in order. Pity as the XFX 6600 GT I was running was a good card.

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I was just thinking the other day that my computer was running fine, and I hadn’t needed to re-install it for at least 6 months. However, I think I might have thought too soon as when I got home on Thursday it was acting very odd. For some reason it wouldn’t allow me to paste text into Word and it kept spontaneously logging me off of the internet chat program I use (Pidgin). So I do what I normally do in that situation and restarted the machine to see if it would be okay.

The answer was a big no. The thing wouldn’t start again. It would get to a file called “mup.sys” and just utterly fail. No amount of fiddling would stop this file crashing the machine. Looking into mup.sys it seems to be a resource controller file, so I can only assume that whatever it was controlling was corrupt. It has taken me 2 days to get the thing back into working order as I had to make sure I have backed up all of my files. It’s still a pain in the posterior.

I like Microsoft, I think they do a pretty good job, and their usability is quite good as well. But why can’t they make an operating system that doesn’t need a full reinstall ever 6 months? It’s getting a bit annoying really. I have tried to move over to Linux (I have SUSE 10 installed on my other hard drive) but I just don’t know where everything is, and anything even slightly complicated involves editing system files and using the command prompt.

Still, everything is sorted now so I should be aright for another 6 months.

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I have finally got the computer up an running. I had to get a 160 gig hard disc from ebuyer.co.uk, but it now works as good as new. What is a pain is that I haven´t managed to save all of my files. My FreeNAS server is doing well and keeping backups of all of my important stuff, but I lost all of my videos and every save game I have ever made.

As we are quite strapped for cash at the moment (broke really) I could only afford a 160 gig disc. I suppose when we have more money I can get another drive of the same capacity and install SuSE onto it.

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I was sitting in front of my computer today when it died. It has been acting funny for a few days but tonight I was watching an online video when the hard disc failed. The computer turned itself off, and when I tried to start it again all it could manage was a "critical disc error - can´t boot from system disc!". I can´t get it to do anything. It was a lucky thing that I did a backup the other day otherwise I could have lost the lot. I did manage to get SuSE linux to boot from the DVD which is how I am able to write this. I have managed to install WindowsXP into a small disc, which is sat outside the machine on a smaller pile of books. I needed to use WindowsXP as there is this really cool disc recovery software that I have used before, but is only available on XP. I will do some data recovery activities over the next few days but it looks like I will have to order a new hard drive from Ebuyer.

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I should mention, or I couldn’t call myself an I.T. professional, that Microsoft released their Vista Operating system to everyone today. Previously it has been only available to developers and businesses, just so that they could run their applications on it before the system came out to the rest of the world. It also seems to have the most complicated pricing structure I have ever seen of any microsoft product, and each type is called something odd that doesn’t really describe the difference between one version and another.

Pricing options aside, the question you are probably wondering( or if anyone actually read this they might be wondering) is this. Will I be buying it?

Probably not. I tend to wait until the first service pack comes out before I commit myself. So if there are any major security flaws they will be fixed before I get hold of it. Also I don’t see why I should pay out a lot of money (over £100) to get a brand new Operating System when I have a nice working copy of WindowsXP. I would be buying it for the Aero graphics system alone. I think in about 6 - 8 months I will probably have a more serious look but for now it´s a luxuary I can´t afford.

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I have been trying to get a CCTV system running using only components that I have at the house, and not buying any software. These are

• Second hand 1MHz Pentium 3 with intel motherboard
• 20Gig hard drive
• 100MB SDRAM
• USB Webcam (MSI StarCam 370i)
• SuSE Linux/Windows98

So where to start? I didn’t want to use my good computer because it uses way too much power for a simple thing like this. Also, I eventually wanted to position the unit around the house in different posisions, and that just wouldn’t be feasable. The other computer I had Windows98 installed allready so I started out trying software for that. The software the comes with the StarCam wouldn’t work on this system so that was a dead end. I found something written in Java called grabMotion, which seemed to work, almost. However, I just couldn’t get my camera recognised by the software.

After must installing and uninstalling on Windows I decided to try and use something I found that runs on Linux. The program is called ZoneMinder and has a very professinal feel to it. So I installed SuSE Linux 9.1 with Apache, Mysql, PHP and Perl already installed using the very lovely YAST that help you install stuff with SuSE. After some (well a few hours) of fiddling I eventually managed to get the software working, along with all of the JPEG and PNG libraries needed to create images. However, the down side is that I couldn’t get my web camera working with it. I’m sure that if I knew the first thing about installing USB Web cameras on Linux it would have worked. ZoneMinder tells me to point to a file, which presumably should be in /dev/usb, but no picture is ever found.

So does anyone know how I can install a USB camera into Linux? Any help would be great!

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I had a great support call today. I have this Access database at work which is my responsibility to keep functioning. So when problems occur I have to backtrack through data and code for hours on end trying to find out what went wrong. What makes this really frustrating is the guy who wrote this (a professional contractor) didn’t label any of the text boxes on any of the forms or in his code. So every time I look at code it all says stuff like "x = Text25". This is a complete nightmare to work with and makes the task of fixing the database more complicated than it needs to be.

Anyway, this guy came in saying that it was messing up the dates, which is a new problem as far as the database was concerned. Every time he entered the date 31/06/06 it said that it was 06/06/1931. So I said leave it with me and I set about stating to do what he was doing. Those of you who are observant will have noticed this already. He was entering a date that didn’t exist, and it took me about 3 minutes of entering dates into the system to notice this. There are only 30 days in June so Access was doing it’s best to convert the string into a date. I went over to his office and said "How many days are there in June?", so which he said "…oh…". Ah, the life of a database adminstrator.

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