Hunter555

Ok Guys, Who Sent Patriot Missiles to China? (Updated)

2011-12-23T15:31:00.000+11:00

Ok Guys, Who Sent Patriot Missiles to China? (Updated): So, Finnish Authorities yesterday found 69 Patriot air-defense missiles and another 160 tons of explosives on a ship bound for China. What!? The British-flagged merchant ship Thor Liberty apparently left Emden, Germany with the missiles and stopped in Finland to pick up anchor chains when Finnish customs inspectors found the weapons — in crates marked as fireworks [...]

Eve online is torturing me - send help

2011-08-22T11:54:00.000+10:00

I've played a few trials of eve online since 2007 on and off with the same character. Sometimes for a week, sometimes for two months. I just started a month to see what the new changes are like and I'm still unsure what all the appeal is. I'm still undecided as to whether I continue or not. Sure, it's entertaining sometimes but it seems monotonous and I wouldn't be surprised if the player base is in fact suffering from Stockholm Syndrome.

Water Damaged Galaxy S

2011-07-18T10:46:00.000+10:00

So my Galaxy S went for a bit of a swim on the weekend...

I ripped the battery out once it was recovered and left it to dry for a couple of days but I found that it would boot up automatically as soon as the battery was inserted and constantly reboot or get stuck in a reboot loop of the boot loader. I did a fair bit of googling and found this to be a common problem with people not knowing how to fix it.

I pulled mine apart, by unscrewing all the screws in the back and levering off the back plate with my fingernails and then found that if I unsoldered the little micro switch board for the power and bridged the terminals it would work fine. Then I soldered two wires onto the terminals, popped the power button out of the backing plastic and threaded the wires through the hole where it was. Put it all back together and now I have a ghetto spec galaxy s with two wires sticking out the side. Connecting the wires acts as the power button.

My guess is that the sealed micro switch has water inside it. I'm going to let it dry out and try testing if it still works and if not I might try levering it apart on one side to let it dry.

Remember remember, the 5th of November

2011-07-12T15:52:00.000+10:00

When I grew up, every year on the queens birthday weekend, the children constructed a Guy Fawkes effigy out of old clothes and straw to burn on the bonfire.

It seems strange now that I have a graphic novel glorifying his identity and legacy sitting on my desk.

How a single app made my entire android OS unusable!

2010-08-19T12:14:00.000+10:00

One thing I've really liked about my new Samsung Galaxy S is the speed of the thing. Apps open almost instantly and you can navigate around the place very fast. It is certainly a refreshing change from my old iPhone 3G. This week however, things had been slowing to a crawl and it got to the point where the OS was popping up with messages like "Facebook is no longer responding would you like to force close it".

I was losing my mind, I checked running tasks and killed everything but still to no avail. (Trying to diagnose these issues on a phone that takes over 30 seconds to open settings was frustrating to say the least). In the end I traced it to a running service (found under settings -> applications -> running services) for an app I installed this week. Services don't show up under running tasks and despite the device still having free ram at a guess I'd say the service was maxing out the cpu. The app was called Aura, a monitoring tool for eve online characters. You can use it to check on your skill queue, market orders, inventory and ships/fitouts. It's quite a good app except for the service. Even with the setting for updating in the background disabled the service still started itself up every now and then. I have since uninstalled the app and my phone is back in a usable state.

It left me wondering how many less tech savy people will find themselves in this situation and consider the phone or any other android phone for that matter to be a pile of crap just due to some poor programming in a 3rd party app. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance after all.

An adventure in android!

2010-08-17T14:53:00.001+10:00

I have replaced my iphone with a samsung galaxy s and so far I love it. I will keep you posted on how I like it down the track.

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Namebench results

2009-12-08T14:01:00.000+11:00

I never thought I'd see TPG fastest at anything...

In this test, TPGI-2 AU is

153% Faster

than your current primary DNS server

Mean Response Duration

In other news Ultra DNS sucks for not america?

Muscle March - more weird

2009-06-10T01:38:00.002+10:00

All I can say is WTF: http://www.destructoid.com/muscle-march-the-greatest-videogame-trailer-ever-created-132269.phtml

SCO is dead!

2007-09-15T12:02:00.001+10:00

Wheeeee!

http://www.linux-watch.com/news/NS8426942136.html

AMD to open Radeon GPUs for all

2007-09-09T17:43:00.000+10:00

This is an interesting move. Could opening up the Radeons and releasing information and development packages change the usual choice of Nvidia for Linux users? I never thought I'd see the day. Find more info here: http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS6484054324.html

Daft Punk coming to Australia

2007-09-07T12:07:00.000+10:00

In case you have been living under a rock Daft Punk is coming to Australia for the first time ever. I'm going how about you?

Street Magics!

2007-08-17T17:22:00.000+10:00

This is a pretty good parody of the street magic videos that various magicians do. The second part is particularly good.

Part 1:

Part 2:

If the embedded objects don't work links are below:
Part 1
Part 2

Buscat!

2007-04-12T16:14:00.000+10:00

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=447527&in_page_id=1770

Sitting on the seat that cat seems to have a look like "What the hell are you staring at!? You've never seen someone riding a bus before?"

Gaming Similes to Describe your Relationship Failures

2007-04-12T16:07:00.000+10:00

http://www.mathewkumar.com/2007/04/10/320/

With gems such as:

Lemmings. I’m trying to save it, but I really just want to hit the nuke button.
Ultima VII. You think I’m a symbol of perfection, but really I’m a sociopathic, thieving bastard.

It was always so much fun pocketing everything in sight as Iolo exclaims "Is that virtuous!?" and Dupre starts attacking you.

Subaru releases pictures of the 2008 WRX

2007-04-03T10:29:00.000+10:00

Is it just me or does this thing look like a Toyota Camry? (The Camry is shown below.) I don't know who they hired to design this thing after they fired the designer of their last model.

Desktop Tower Defense

2007-04-03T10:25:00.000+10:00

I found this fun little flash game the other day and I noticed they updated it last night with a few new features. A fun little time filler if you are waiting for something.

Surprise, Conflict of interests - Windows most secure OS evar!

2007-03-23T11:49:00.000+11:00

http://www.internetnews.com/security/article.php/3667201

So I'm not calling them a liar but it is suspicious coming from a company whose livelyhood depends on people using windows and not switching to OSX or Linux...

SVN Integration for Visual Studio

2007-03-20T11:58:00.000+11:00

Yes! It is possible! It works quite nicely too. Even has little icons to indicate your changes in the solution explorer.

You can get the plugin from here: http://ankhsvn.tigris.org/

I find it also useful to configure the plugin to use kdiff3 - my favorite diff/merge tool.

Deposit deposited, teh Rei lives!

2007-03-13T14:52:00.000+11:00

Yesterday I put a deposit on a car I've been looking for on and off for the last two years...

A Mazda RX7 type RZ

Hopefully I can pick her up in the next week or so. Her name will probably be Rei. Unless you guys can think of a better suited girls name that starts with R. Leave a comment with your suggestion if you do.

Whacky Japanese Inventions

2007-03-05T14:53:00.000+11:00

http://uebanet.ueba.com.br/hosted_pages/Top-12-Weird-Japanese-Inventions-20060511

I don't know what's going on with half of these.

Flow

2007-02-27T18:25:00.000+11:00

You may have heard of fl0w coming out for the PS3 - An evolutionary style game with seamless game play. I found the original concept for fl0w on the web as a flash game. You can try it out here:

http://intihuatani.usc.edu/cloud/flowing/

Installer error code 2869 - MSI and UAC on Vista

2007-02-26T16:19:00.006+11:00

I ran into this problem today and couldn't find too much information on it. It happens when you try to run your installer that contains a custom action from the msi file only. When you run from the exe file everything works fine. This is to do with how the custom action interacts with (or fails to interact with) the windows user access control (UAC) in Vista. Your custom action requires elevated priveledges but it has not been given them.

First of all lets run the installer with a log:

msiexec.exe /i setup.msi /L*v log.txt

In the rather large log file we see:

MSI (s) (C8:6C) [16:20:10:162]: Invoking remote custom action. DLL: C:\Windows\Installer\MSIE4FD.tmp, Entrypoint: ManagedInstall
MSI (s) (C8!EC) [16:20:13:747]: Note: 1: 2262 2: Error 3: -2147287038
MSI (c) (44:CC) [16:20:13:757]: Note: 1: 2262 2: Error 3: -2147287038
DEBUG: Error 2869: The dialog ErrorDialog has the error style bit set, but is not an error dialog
MSI (c) (44:CC) [16:20:13:803]: Font created. Charset: Req=0, Ret=0, Font: Req=MS Shell Dlg, Ret=MS Shell Dlg

The installer has encountered an unexpected error installing this package. This may indicate a problem with this package. The error code is 2869. The arguments are: ErrorDialog, ,
MSI (c) (44:CC) [16:25:00:976]: Note: 1: 2262 2: Error 3: -2147287038

The error is slightly misleading. It is to do with a lack of administrator priveldges for the custom action. To fix this we need to set the NoImpersonate bit on the custom action. Unfortunatly vs2005 does not let you do this easily. To resolve this take the following steps:

Add the following code to a new file called NoImpersonate.js:

// NoImpersonate.js
// Performs a post-build fixup of an msi to change all deferred custom actions to NoImpersonate

// Constant values from Windows Installer
var msiOpenDatabaseModeTransact = 1;

var msiViewModifyInsert = 1
var msiViewModifyUpdate = 2
var msiViewModifyAssign = 3
var msiViewModifyReplace = 4
var msiViewModifyDelete = 6

var msidbCustomActionTypeInScript = 0x00000400;
var msidbCustomActionTypeNoImpersonate = 0x00000800

if (WScript.Arguments.Length != 1)
{
WScript.StdErr.WriteLine(WScript.ScriptName + " file");
WScript.Quit(1);
}

var filespec = WScript.Arguments(0);
var installer = WScript.CreateObject("WindowsInstaller.Installer");
var database = installer.OpenDatabase(filespec, msiOpenDatabaseModeTransact);

var sql
var view
var record

try
{
sql = "SELECT `Action`, `Type`, `Source`, `Target` FROM `CustomAction`";
view = database.OpenView(sql);
view.Execute();
record = view.Fetch();
while (record)
{
if (record.IntegerData(2) & msidbCustomActionTypeInScript)
{
record.IntegerData(2) = record.IntegerData(2) | msidbCustomActionTypeNoImpersonate;
view.Modify(msiViewModifyReplace, record);
}
record = view.Fetch();
}

view.Close();
database.Commit();
}
catch(e)
{
WScript.StdErr.WriteLine(e);
WScript.Quit(1);
}

Add the file as an existing file to your setup project.
Find the PostBuildEvent in the properties for your setup project.
Set the PostBuildEvent to the following:

cscript.exe "$(ProjectDir)NoImpersonate.js" "$(BuiltOuputPath)"

Rebuild. You're done!

Edit number 2: I had thought that there was a typo with the build output path shortcut. I thought the typo is a missing t, however you may want to double check this when adding it to your post build events. Originally it was copied from msdn (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms165452.aspx) and if you use the macros button in the post-build event dialog in vs you still get $(BuiltOuputPath).

Jesus' Family Tomb Discovered? Sensationalism GO!

2007-02-26T11:48:00.000+11:00

The discovery channel seem to think so. http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2007/02/25/tomb_arc.html?category=archaeology&guid=20070225073000&dcitc=w19-502-ak-0000

But why now if this was uncovered in 1980? And produced by James Cameron? Shouldn't all this be rather big news? It all seems very suspicious but seems like a nice way to make a few bucks I guess.

What Is Intelligence, Anyway?

2007-02-15T17:42:00.000+11:00

A good point...

http://www.haverford.edu/writingprogram/Asimov.html

Terror has a new face...

2007-02-09T14:09:00.000+11:00

Destructo rabbid has chewed through 3 cables relating to my PS2 steering wheel...