Author: alex

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Blog News

Summertime = no more snot

I am really, REALLY looking forward to the summer.

Sam and Tom have been keeping us busy these last few weeks, and on-and-off during the last few months draining snot from nostrils. I’m going to enjoy the spring / summer more knowing that during that period we don’t have to clean runny noses anymore.

Sam is not letting this keep him down however. He only wants to stand now, and this weekend, at 9.5 months old, we bought him his first pair of shoes. He is now very proudly bumbling around the living room, with his parents holding him up of cours (which is hell for the lower back !).
We’ve booked our summer vacation – Bulgaria, it is !

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Blog News Pocketpc

SD Card problems

We’ve been on holiday the last week to Centerparcs and it has been a blast. Except for the return, when the last hamburger I ate there (I only ate two) didn’t agree with me and I had the runs for two days.

Not fun, that.

Anyway, when we were going over there, I used TomTom to navigate to the place. At one stage TT (installed on my pocket pc’s main memory) could not find the card that was installed on the sd card.

A reboot helped, and going back home it kept on working until I again did a reset (the normal one, not the hard reset). And suddenly all my programs installed on my sd card are gone ! I still have my documents, but that’s about it.

Damn. When I loaded the card up on my mac, it showed me the folder names, but as 0 bytes executable files… Guess I’m screwed. I’ll do a reformat of the card tomorrow and reinstall my stuff on there. I just hope this was a once-off happening.

Just about the only thing I wasn’t doing a backup on was my sd card… I now regularly, after installing new programs, make a copy of my sd card to my pc.
Update : I removed all the affected dirs and reinstalled my applications. Now doing a backup…

Update 2 : It seems that I have to be very carefull when rebooting my pocket pc. The best way to do it is to turn off the pocket pc, wait a while, then do a reboot or reseat the sd card. If I press the reboot willy-nilly it usually manages to loose whatever files where associated with the program I was currently running.

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Pocketpc Windows

Active Sync 4.1 (read: Active Stink)

I recently upgraded my Ipaq hx2410 pocketpc to Windows Mobile 5.

I didn’t want to have the same problem a collegue of mine had, which was that he had waited so long to upgrade his Pocket Loox from Windows 2002 to 2003se that he no longer could find the appropriate upgrade software.
The upgrade went well, but since then I’ve been unable to get Active Sync 4.1 running on my Windows XP (Service Pack 2) box at home and reinstall my pocketpc applications.

The only way so far to install them is to download them as .cab files from the internet and install them locally on the handheld. But of course, most apps aren’t available as .cab files.

Apparently, if you can get Active Sync to work on another machine, you can extract the .cab files from a temporary folder that AS puts them into when you install them. However, I don’t want to do this on another machine that is not my own, I want my applications to be on my box !

I’ve tried everything, going as far as uninstalling Microsoft Active Sync, uninstalling Zone Alarm, cleaning out the /Program Files/Microsoft Active Sync directory, cleaning out the registry and reinstalling Active Sync. Nothing, nada, zilch, nikske.
Nothing so far has worked, even though the pc seems to see the handheld – as when I put the handheld in the cradle, Active Sync activates its self and starts ‘Connecting’… forever. And I am not the only one looking for a solution.
It seems to be a networking issue.

[Update]

I finally, finally got it working, after two weeks of puttering about. The solution, of course, was really simple (in hindsight). Simply uninstalling my Cisco VPN client (which had refused to work anyway) resolved the problem and after a reboot my PDA was recognised toot-sweete ! Any vpn client installed looks at your network traffic and in this case seems to be the source of corruption.
Installing my apps at last !

Categories
Blog News TechScience Future

Real 3D images made from light

Real 3D light points

This is sooooooo cool !!!

I hope to see some more -practical- applications of this in the future to come…

Original link to article

Categories
Blog News PSP

Tales of Eternia

Woot !

Today I purchased Tales of Eternia for the PSP. It’s supposed to come out tomorrow, but the shop owners had already put it in the store. And since I have a few days off, this is a very nice way to while some time away.

Provided I get the time to while away, of course. 🙂

It’s about time the PSP got some new games, there has been absolutely nothing released since the Christmas season last year. Almost 2 months without a new game appearing on the shelves.
Apparently in March we should see some more titles.

Meanwhile, my first impressions on Tales of Eternia : smooth, 2D, old-style RPG. Don’t expect the latest visual trickery or new-style interface. This is RPG like I played them when I was young and childless !

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Blog News Links Websites Caught !

Grumpy Gamer

Grumpy Gamer has a nice article about copy protection, as well as a solution to the problem 😉

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Blog News

Anti-telemarketing

I can confirm that the anti-telemarketing script works, even if you just use part of it. You can feel the hesitation entering the conversation when you start deviating from their script !

This first time, I kept it short. Started asking questions, and when ‘Elizabeth’ told me that she just got my name from a computer I asked her to delete it from there. She even said ‘Thank you and Good day’ before she hung up.

Very funny. When she first introduced her she said her full name. When I asked her her name again, she gave me the company name. I asked her again for her name. This time I only got her first name.

I’m definitely going to try this again next time I get a telemarketing call.

Categories
Blog News Programming

Python and cx_Oracle

Recently I have taken over the maintenance of an application at work that was written very quickly and, to be honest, rather badly. A department needed the app badly.

I hasten to add that it is bad because it was done so quickly. Plus the person who wrote it is not used to writing EndUser applications.

It uses an ODBC connection to an Oracle db, plus an Access db to connect, plus Excel to show the final info in. Inside the MSAccess db are 4 different queries all building on each other, each one paring information away from the previous query using left joins. To refresh the data the user must do a manual refresh and each time input the password.

Adding a component to monitor to it involves updating the Access db (easy) and then recreating at least two pivot tables as well as adding the component to other excel tabs and fields, easely 15 minutes of work. And the problem is that this is probably only going to get more critical…

So I’ve started to investigate if I could do something about this, like rewriting it in Python and then compiling it in an end-user application using py2exe. I’ve rescued all the sql queries and table connections from MS Access.
One thing is very clear : SQL queries made from Access suck ! They are like the html docs that MS Word makes – full of useless cruft everywhere

I am now trying to remake the program using Python 2.4.2, cx_Oracle for the Oracle connectivity and PySQLite. So far I’ve managed to connect to the database and execute the first query.

Note to self :

  • when debugging an SQL query, cx_Oracle or even Oracle itself, who knows, does the query evaluation backwards. It will start evaluating your SQL expression from the back. Usefull to know when you get an error, you need to look from back to front !
  • also, you don’t need a ; at the end of your SQL query for cx_Oracle. In SQLite you do. In Oracle you do not. Two days, mate, two days before I found this.

Next up : trying to get the Left Join to work as well a Tkinter window setup to show the user something. Luckely I’ve got a knowledgeable sql guy not far from me… and I am not even sure that is the way to go, just emulating what has been done before…

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Blog News

WordPress upgrade from 1.5 to 2.0

I just made the upgrade to WordPress 2.0 – so far so good. I have lost my default header, will have to fix that (update : fixed) and see what else is new. So far lots of changes in the admin interface.

Things I’ve noticed that are still not ‘there’ :
– an addition to the menu to let you determine the width of the screen space your blog uses on screen; I would like my blog to be a bit bigger on screen, I find those empty bars on the side a waste of screen. Not completely, mind you, but still, a bit less empty
– still no menu bar when you write a post on a mac using Safari. In windows you have all these buttons, on a mac you need to do it all by typing html. UPDATE : this seems to be Safari not following closely enough. Firefox 2.0 does give you the menu bar !!
– a way to specify your header image for the default theme from the admin menu. It’s only the most changed thing in the universe of wordpress blogs… UPDATE It seems that since 2.0 theme designers now can create an optional functions.php file in their theme that will let you do custom configuration of that theme. See also what’s new in WordPress 2.0 for an overview.

All in all, those 3 things I’ve noticed are actually already solved in 2.0, if you use the right software/theme !

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Blog News Websites Caught !

Laurent au pays des Sushis

The title says it all : a good buddy of mine is on a trip to check out Japan and New-Zealand, with the option of staying in NZ.