ICT related

On shitty days

Kaijuu — Sun, 04 Jul 2010 13:29:00 GMT

Of which Friday was one.
It started out with an early rise: because of the heat left from Thursday, I got up at around six and managed to get in the office around seven.
Both my colleagues had the day off, but if all went well, I could get an early weekend by leaving at around 16:30, but a shocking rise in temperature in the server room nullified that resolution.

When I almost made it home at around 19:00, the gearbox of my car went haywire, blinky lights on the dash ensued and I had to drive very slow and carefully to get the last few kilometres behind me.
I have to call the shop tomorrow to have my car picked up for repairs, which will be costly without a doubt.

I had dinner and a few pleasant hours with a friend of mine, but when I drove to Schiphol to pick up my mom, the motorway was largely closed, and limited to 70kph. When I finally arrived at Schiphol at 23:25, I just missed mom (flight arrived ten minutes earlier, luggage came quick) and waited in vain for well over an hour until I got hold of her on her house phone.

So I went back, but tried to get a drink from a vending machine first, which swallowed my euro, but refused my 50 cents. Hitting the refund-button didn't work either, so I kicked the machine and headed for the car (not mine).

After spitting out some additional profanities and being forced to take another exit (the card reader refused to read my card), I finally got on my way and eventually arrived in Utrecht at 1:40.

Next day, it turned out that the air conditioners at work kind of kicked the bucket, so yesterday was largely spent monitoring the servers and calling my co-workers so that they could try and do something to lower the temperature, while the maintenance crew worked on reviving the airco's.

Pfff...

Currently, everything's running cool again, and I got to spend yesterday evening babysitting my niece. She was an absolute angel, which kind of balances things a little. :)
However, this was a weekend to remember.

Cheers, K.

Movie: Up (in 3D)

Kaijuu — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 21:21:00 GMT

I went to an IPv6 seminar in a movie theatre today, where they explained the how and why of the latest version of the internet protocol (that is, IPv6 has been around for more than a decade already) and stressed that in a couple of years, things will have to be v6-ed or we'll be in a heap of trouble, since IPv4 (the version we're using now) is at its end.
Seeing that IPv4 was concocted almost forty years ago, this doesn't really surprise me.

After the lectures and a small pause, we went back into the theatre to watch Up; Pixar's latest animated flick. To heighten the experience, we got to see it in 3D, by using special goggles.

An old balloon salesman, Carl Fredericksen, uses a lot of balloons to fly his house to the Venezuelan jungle. By accident, he takes an eight-year old Wilderness Explorer scout named Russell with him, who was hoping to earn his "Helping the Elderly" merit badge.
They meet an old hero of Carl along the way, but not all is what it seems.

It was a good one. Not a movie particularly for kids (like Cars was) and therefore blissfully without an ominous message hanging over it, despite Pixar being part of Disney now, which says something about Pixar in general and this movie in particular. :)
It's pretty out of whack sometimes and even handles topics which aren't usually in Western animations, so points go there as well, but do not step into the few plot holes present in the film.

The Pixar short "Party Cloudy" which was shown before Up was quite a funny one, at least up there with "For The Birds" and "Lifted". Granted, the stork-approach for delivering newborns is a bit dated (and prude), but it fits.

As said, Up was shown to us in Digital 3D, which had its merits; some things really get towards you, and appear to be hanging over the heads of the people in front.
However, the effect is gone as soon as the object hits one of the sides of the screen, and you can clearly see that it's just an effect. The only time this does not happen is when the object is as dark as the walls surrounding the screen.
Despite that, it's a neat trick and adds to the movie.

I reckon that Up will make it into my collection some day.

Cheers, K.

Thank the stars for forgotten backups

Kaijuu — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 20:19:00 GMT

When I went to Japan for the first time, back in 2004, I purchased a new digital camera on the first day and shot to my heart's content for three weeks on end, which resulted in over 2000 pictures of whatever interesting I came across.
When I arrived home, I backed the pictures up to an external hard drive, connected through FireWire.

A year later, something horrible happened; the drive seemed to begin to fail (despite the excellent track record of that particular brand at the time) and I needed to copy the contents to a different disk.
Unfortunately, the chipset of the drivecase wasn't too good, and I ended up with corrupted data. Most of that data was already copied elsewhere, but a lot of the pictures of the first Japan trip got corrupted beyond retrieval, which saddened me greatly.

However, I made a great discovery today; apparently, I burned them away to cdr at one point but forgot about those backups, until I ran into them today while cleaning out some junk, along with some other data I thought I lost long ago.

It looks like the discs survived, so I have my pictures back. :)
Happy happy, joy joy! :)

Cheers, K.

I can has Seven

Kaijuu — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 23:58:00 GMT

Today, my copies of Windows 7 Home Premium came in the mail; first time I bought a retail version of an operating system since Windows 98. :)
As said, I'm going to sit on them for a while until I have time to refit my kit upstairs. Since I will be quite busy until well into December, I recon that will be a job for the holidays.

Cheers, K.

Windows 7 is here

Kaijuu — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 22:00:00 GMT

The final version of Windows 7 will be available for everyone tomorrow, and many will undoubtedly try to be the first to have a copy.
Not me, though; I already ordered my copy over a month ago through Amazon UK, when it was still cheap. ;)
Got the shipment notice just now, so it'll be at my doorstep within a few days.

I'm not really in a hurry to install it, though; I have to get a new motherboard to match the processor I picked up a while ago for my box upstairs first before I can retire my current bit of kit into a server running Windows 2008. My home theatre rig downstairs is already running the test version of Win 7 Ultimate, and that's still good until July next year, so the extra license I bought will sit around for a while before I'll use it.

Why buy it now, then? I hear you ask. Well, I already know I want to keep on running this operating system, and I got my copies of Home Premium Full at €80 a pop, a price which will never be matched again, unless I go OEM (different licensing issues) or wait for Windows 12 to arrive. :) (after all, you can pick up a legit copy of Windows 95 on a computer fair these days, but who'd want 95 anymore?).

The girl in this post is the Windows 7 OS-tan, called Nanami Madobe, which roughly translates to 7 by the Window. Picture courtesy of Akiba PC.
Madobe-san is included with the first 7777 Japanese copies of Windows 7 Ultimate DSP in the form of a set of wallpapers and a soundset. It's the first commercially-made OS-tan character.

Cheers, K.