Tyler moves
Tyler has been moved into the ICT server room EN314. It will now enjoy proper aircon, UPS power and high tech networking (10Gig ethernet backbone)
Add comment May 15th, 2007
Posts filed under 'Uncategorized'
Talk about busy
Well I must have been busy for the past 86 days since my last post. I was looking for a tool I wrote and I came across this
Exploring-filesystems-with-Explore2fs which was a bit of a surprise.
If/when I get some time I will write a real entry, perhaps about how crap the FAT filesystem is and why I have been writing a driver for it.
Add comment December 1st, 2006
Freakin Windows
I have a simple problem. I want to view japanese characters under Windows. I am implementing unicode support in a new program I am working on and I need to test it with japanese. I managed to get it working under linux ‘yum groupinstall “japanese support”‘ which I though was tricky to figure out. Well imagine the trouble in windows. I fool heartedly went to the MS web site. It seems that people only use japanese in Office XP. That was news to be but none of the MS downloads work. I eventually found a web site which had instructions, but the only way I can install the 230 meg of required crap is from the windows install CD. I have the CD, but I don’t have a CD-ROM in the computer. I hate windows.
1 comment August 15th, 2006
Spam
I have started getting spam comments on my blog. I just marked 37 comments as spam. The default settings seem to be working in keeping the messages for moderation. When I get a chance I’ll investigate the spam filtering options in wordpress but for now I have set all comments to be moderated.
Add comment August 7th, 2006
Dead pixel compensation
We have it already for font smoothing, LCD subpixel rendering. Because LCDs are made up of rows of pixels RGBRGBRGB etc, rather than turning on one plixel, you can turn one blue and the next one red & green and you still get a white pixel, inbetween 2 pixels.
When a pixel dies in an LCD, there are still plenty around it which could take on the roll of the dead pixel, particularly if it is only one subpixel which is not working. The result would not be perfect but if a 2, 3 or 9 pixel combination was on average correct, the final result would be more correct than if the dead pixel was ignored.
This is a feature which could be implemented fully in software, in video hardware or directly in the LCD device. Perhaps if I ever get some spare time I’ll investigate.
Add comment February 2nd, 2006
<rant>
To my supprise, I was able to register 2 bpay bills with the same biller ID. I then went to pay multiple bills, but it turns out that you can only schedule bills with that (why is it not called 'schedule multiple bills?). So I had to do them one by one. First one went OK but the second was denied. I rang up NetBank and after 5 mins of hold and recorded messages, I spoke to someone who looked up the error code FE5_270 which means 'Handball to the credit card people'. So I went back on hold and got the same recorded messages about how crap their customer service is any why everyone wants to complain about it. The next person I spoke to wanted to fob me off to some bill paying department but I told the sotry like it was, and then he looked up my card. The story is that because both bills were for the same amount, the second transaction was denied. The good news was that because I had spend so long on hold, if I try again then it should work this time.
Add comment November 28th, 2005
New gateway
The disks are mirrored using CentOS-4 software RAID. This will be my families main file storage.
I have set up my firewall and transperant squid proxy. I also migrated my samba NT4 domain. I have not yet set up my VPN but I know it works on CentOS-4. I am still deciding thought wether I should try OpenVPN.
I bought an Ozito 'high speed rotary tool' (think Dremal) so I can clean up the opening for the fan. I'll try and post a photo when it is done 
Add comment October 10th, 2005
Good news everyone…
And it other news… Red Hat fix a bug! I was quite suprised to see that a bug I filed only last month has been fixed already https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=165782]]>
Add comment September 27th, 2005