Month: October 2006

Linux

At the weekend I replaced the broken power connector on our old Toshiba SA30. I tidied it up, defragged it all and then applied the latest set of Microsoft patches.

Thats where it all went wrong – system just hung on reboot. Booting in safe mode it showed windows crapping out on mup.sys

Now as the Tosh comes with only a “product recovery” CD there is no access to the recovery console so its blat the disk and start again

So I go and dig out the “product recovery” CD.

Hmm, Toshiba obviously have a different interpretation of “recovery” than me because its a complete pigs breakfast. Stuff doesn’t work properly and its a complete pain.. two steps forward and three steps back.

I could I guess, get an OEM XP disk from work and key in the product code on the bottom of the laptop.

Or I could just wipe the whole damned thing and shove something like Ubuntu ( www.ubuntu.com ) or SLED ( www.novell.com/products/desktop/ )

Thats the problem Microsoft and the manufacturer lackeys – they make things so complicated when things go wrong that you just can’t be arsed trying to conform to their neo-fascistic ideas that you just say “sod it all” and ignore them.

Trackbacks

I’ve been reading up on Trackbacks and how they are supposed to work. I think I now understand it – but I did find an article by Shai Coggins that puts it in a nice easy to understand way.

Shai’s posting on the subject can be found at http://weblogs.about.com/od/weblogs101/f/usetrackback.htm

Kitchen DIY

I have to admit that the kitchen renovations had stalled in a pretty major way. This was mostly down to the fact that house was obviously built by people who knew very little about plastering which led to a major problem with all the plaster falling off round the window (see http://www.tty.org.uk/album/thumbnails.php?album=8 for some pictures).

Anyway today Nick came round and armed with his rather large drill we drilled into the concrete cills and screwed some wood into place. Then we fixed on more of the MDF boarding that is in the rest of the kitchen.

All that remains now is to box in round the boiler and fix up a couple more pieces of MDF.

So I’m off to the pub 😀 via a friends house – he bought a home cinema system but something isn’t working right so guess who’s been asked to help out 8)

Forum Revamp

In the background I’ve been working on a complete overhaul of the Camsigh Forums.

I put the site up in January 2004 and I’ve bolted a few things on since then, but it was all getting very messy and tired so I’ve been building up a new version in my spare time.

Hopefully over the weekend I’ll get round to cutting the data over (not as easy as it sounds as there is some crud lying round in the existing database), and then users will have a nice new looking forum with some new features (like being able to post pictures directly into posts)