LITTLE TIP FOR YOU NEW WII OWNERS....
If your remote doesn’t appear to work after a system update, turn the Wii off for 1 minute then on again at the wall socket. This should get your Wii working again :)
JAVA GAMES
I’m one of those people who’ve been using Java long enough to have written it off as not being able to present a good graphical front end, that was until I saw this post at Java Lobby (The video in the post is available directly from YouTube, be aware, it has a techno soundtrack). None of these cut it against the current generation of PC games, and I’ve looked into a few of these games, and some of them semi-cheat by using JNI to call through to native APIs such as OpenGL, so portability is questionable, but the achievements of a working AI, physics, and game processing models at speeds which don’t impact gameplay is pretty impressive, particularly as they are not produced by large multi-million dollar games development houses.
PLUG TIME....
Some of you may be wondering what I do for a day job. For those that are interested, and for those who are looking for a centralised password storage solution :), I’m a director of Enterprise Data Safe Limited who sell the Enterprise Password Safe. My specific areas of responsibility cover development, sales, and support. So now you know you can read my posts knowing where my interests lie.
FINALLY I CAN DITCH ACROBAT READER
Adobes Acrobat reader is, in my opinion, an over-hyped bloated piece of resource hungry software. I’ve had countless IE hangs that appeared to be because of it, and finally I can get rid of it to read PDFs. How am I going to read PDFs without it, simple, use Foxit Reader. It’s small, fast, and in two months of using 2.0 and previous version has yet to hang on me. My advice… Make the switch as soon as possible.
VISTA... KILLER OF YOUR CURRENT DISK UTILITIES?
I’ve been trying out Microsoft Windows Vista Beta 2 (like many IT people who’ve joined the free beta), and found a couple of interesting things about it’s partition management and it’s effect on some of the disk utilities I’ve trusted to help me with Windows XP problems in the past. I initially installed Vista on my test box, which went well (apart from D-Link telling me “We have no information on when drivers for Windows Vista will be made available for any D-Link product.
THE QUALITY ISSUE WITH OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE
There is no doubt that open source software saves people money. There is also no doubt that there are a large number of talented people working for free on open source software. But there is a large amount of debate over the quality of the open source “product” . A lot of open source authors dismiss the statement that “open source software has a lower quality level” as being just F.
SPIKESOURCE - WHAT VALUE DO THEY ADD?
SpikeSource popped up on my radar after seeing an article on The Register. After looking a bit at what they do I still seem to be unable to see what value they add. My main problem is one of their claims that… Now I know there certainly weren’t 2,965 new stable releases of Apache in 2005, so my guess is their talking about changes to the development version of the code, which, as pretty much anyone in IT support will tell you, you should definitely not be using in a environment with real users.
WHY ANTI-SPAM BLACK LISTS ARE BAD.
I want to make it clear that I’m not a spammer, I hate spam, and would like to find a way to banish it from the net for everyone, but black lists are just not going to make it happen, and here’s why…. I’ve recently been looking into Email and the inevitable spam problem, and have found that IP address based anti-spam real time black lists (or RBLs) are probably doing more damage than good.
SKY+ SERVICE MENU
There is a hidden service menu on Sky+ units which gives you access to engineer functions. If you have been having problems recording using Sky+ and the screen has been reporting there is a fault it may be worth doing using the system reset option from this menu. Please Note: this WILL lose all of your previous recorded programs and your recording schedule. Once you have performed a full reset, you should wait 5 minutes before trying to use the Sky+ system.
SONYERICSSON T610 SERVICE MENU
There is a hidden service menu on the T610 which gives you access to the firmware version numbers for the components of the system. To access it use the following key combination from the “normal” screen (i.e. where you dial a number from) Move the joystick right Release the joystick (it should return to the center) Press * Move the joystick left Release the joystick (it should return to the center) Move the joystick left again Release the joystick (it should return to the center) Press * Move the joystick left Release the joystick (it should return to the center) Press * You should then see a menu with the following options;