Spidah's Web

Laura Robson

noreply@blogger.com (Spidah) — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 19:04:00 +0000

Congratulations to Laura Robson on her Girls Singles Wimbledon Final win. The only time I actually watched a full match of hers was the final, so I didn't actually really know what to expect from her (I'd only seen a few highlights when she had been playing at the same time as another big match).

I was quite surprised, about both of the players (Noppawan Lertcheewakarn was the other player), as they had power to match the professional players. Quite looking forward to seeing more of her in the future, hopefully winning more finals!

Why I Use Opera

noreply@blogger.com (Spidah) — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 17:30:00 +0000

For about the last eight or nine years I've been using the Opera web browser instead of Internet Explorer or Firefox. I've been throughly satisfied with it since then and highly doubt I've ever switch to another browser for my day-to-day usage. There are some sites that just don't work in Opera, however, so I still use Internet Explorer every now and then (mainly just for a game site).

There are many reasons why I've stuck with Opera over the years. The main reason is that it's pretty fast and snappy and I can happily leave it running in the background. I tried Firefox several times but it was always so sluggish and slowed down progressively over time. I haven't actually tried Firefox 3, but I seriously don't see any need for it.

The newly released version of Opera (9.5) is even better. I had been following it with their "weekly" previews, but due to some changes breaking some pages for a while I ended up just using the 9.2 releases until they'd fixed the problems (ie. released 9.5). When it was finally released I made sure to install into a new directory (always had the weeklies seperate, so it was no different from that) just incase there were any problems and I could easily just continue using 9.27. I had to make a few changes to the default install, mainly as I don't really care for the new default skin (or any of the default skins actually), so I installed the skin I like (Operatic Orbit), plus also made some changes to the keyboard layout as the new defaults are more to cater for people coming from other browsers (like Firefox) and I'm used to the old Opera keyboard shortcuts.

It seems much snappier now. Opera 9.27 took roughly 8-10 seconds to start up from cold, whereas 9.5 takes about 3-4 seconds. Opening links from other programs (like a rss feed reader) used to take about 6 seconds on 9.27, but now are near instant on 9.5. I've never really noticed any of the claims that Opera is leaner on memory, as whenever I check the memory usage in the task manager it's usually in the 80-90 MB range (I know it's not a conclusive test, but it's the only test I can do quickly and easily). Opera 9.5 is still the same, with a current usage of 98MB and the browser having been open for 12 hours, three tabs open, one (gmail) for the whole 12 hours, and lots more tabs having been opened and closed during the day. However, it doesn't really appear to make any difference to my system, unlike other programs which use the same amount of memory in the task manager but make my system really slow. Also, 9.5 seems to close quicker too, with the process freeing it's memory and exiting before 9.27 would be even halfway done.

All in all I must say that I'm quite happy with Opera 9.5. The new speed increases on startup and opening tabs is very welcome, as it stops other programs from locking for too long while it waits for the browser/tab to open.

08/05/2008 - Thursday

noreply@blogger.com (Spidah) — Thu, 08 May 2008 11:18:00 +0000

A couple of weeks ago my parents computer picked up another bit of spyware. The symptoms were the desktop picture had gone and was replaced by a failed Active Desktop page (white background, big yellow exclamation mark, and text saying that it had failed), and the desktop kept crashing out shortly after loading, only to attept to reload again, but fail, and continue doing this for some while (some times it didn't try to reload, other times it'd keep doing it).

I attempted to see what was running on the computer through the task manager, but that was "disabled by the administrator". I don't know whether this was done by whatever was causing the desktop crashes or if it was something else on there, but it was a problem. So I booted into safe mode, and the desktop was still crashing out. I tried to open the task manager again so that I can start a command shell, but it was disabled here as well.

I knew I had Spyboy Search & Destroy installed on the computer, so I rebooted into safe mode with command prompt, started Spybot via the command prompt, and let it do a scan. I wasn't sure how old the definitions were, but it might have been able to find something. It found a fair few things (unrelated to the main problem, but problems themselves), as well as the task manager being disabled. I didn't actually know it could be controlled by a value in the registry. I "fixed" those problems, then rebooted back into safe mode to see if I could access the task manager again. I could, great!.

I rebooted into safe mode with network access, quickly rigged up two network cables and a switch to give the computer network access (it was using wireless at the time, which doesn't appear to work in safe mode; which isn't surprising really) due to the distance from the router, and started Spybot again. I then updated the defintions and let it run another scan. I kept running the scan until it didn't find anything wrong (hah!), then rebooted into normal Windows to see if it had done the trick. It hadn't as the active desktop was still failing and the desktop still crashing out. I tried to change the active desktop back to a normal picture, but that didn't hold after a reboot.

I rebooted back into safe mode and did some scans with other spyware products (Sunbelt Counterspy, and Lavasoft's Ad-Aware). Both of them found different things, but neither of them actually fixed anything. The next time I was in normal Windows I opened up Internet Explorer and took a look at what add-ons (BHOs - Browser Helper Objects) were installed and running (I can't remember now why I looked there, but it helped). I noticed two odd ones that shouldn't have been there. The first was called 'xxyyvstr.dll' and the second was 'ssdOHqXP.dll' (or something like that; I didn't note the names down until after I had got rid of them, and I could only really remember the first one correctly). I attempted to disable them, but they didn't stay disabled. This made me think that one or both of these were the problem.

So I downloaded the BHO remover from Novell (http://www.novell.com/coolsolutions/tools/18177.html), ran that and deleted the two BHO's. When I deleted the second BHO I noticed that the first one had come back again. So I deleted that again and noticed that the second one had come back again. Bah, something is running that's restoring the BHO's.

I did a quick file scan to see where the files lived and both were in the C:\WINDOWS\system32 folder. I attempted to delete them but they were in use and couldn't be deleted. I rebooted into safe mode again and tried to delete them from there, but they were in use there too. I use a bit of software called Unlocker (http://ccollomb.free.fr/unlocker/) which lets you unlock lock files so that they can be deleted or moved (ie. video files that are locked by Explorer because it's building up a thumbnail preview). So I ran Unlocker on the xxyyvstr.dll file and it said it was locked by winlogon.exe (a core piece of the Windows OS). I attempted to unlock the file so I could delete it, but all I managed to do was mess the winlogon.exe file up and it started a forced reboot.

After it rebooted I started Unlocker again and told it to delete the file on the next reboot instead. Rebooted the computer again, but the file was still there and locked by winlogin.exe. Obviously the files are being loaded and locked before any delete events are executed. I was now stumped for a while. I couldn't do a system restore as the system restore feature had been turned off (a good kicker for me to leave it enabled in future!). I was considering doing a recovery from the Windows install cd, and if that failed then I'd backup the files and reinstall Windows. It was then that I remembered the recovery console available on the Windows install cd. I quickly put the cd in, rebooted, entered the recovery console, changed into the system32 folder (cd system32) as it starts off in the WINDOWS folder of the system drive, and deleted the two files (del xxyyvstr.dll and del ssdOHqXP.dll).

I ejected the cd, rebooted the machine again (just type exit and hit enter from the recovery console to do it automatically), and crossed my fingers. Windows loaded up, the desktop appeared, the failed active desktop appeared too, but then the desktop stayed on and everything else loaded. Woohoo! I changed the desktop back to a normal picture then ran the BHO Remover again and deleted the two BHO's. This time they didn't come back again.

Since then, I did a scan through the registry (using regedit.exe) for any traces of the two files, but I could only find one. This was located at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\Notify\xxyyvstr. I deleted it as I don't want any traces of it still left on the computer.

So, if anyone else has anything like this and those two files are on your computer, just follow these instructions:

Get your Windows install cd (I've been using Windows XP, but I guess there's something similar on a Vista install cd, or a Windows 2000 one. For other versions I don't know - sorry!), put it into the cd drive, reboot and boot from the cd.
Enter the recovery console, select the Windows drive (usually option 1), and enter the admin password if you've entered one.
Run these commands:
cd system32
del xxyyvstr.dll
del ssdOHqXP.dll
Eject the cd and then type exit.
When it's rebooted, run the BHO Remover program and delete the entries for the two files.
If you want to get rid of the registry key, open regedit.exe (Start - Run), navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\Notify\xxyyvstr or just search for xxyyvstr. Right-click on the found key on the left and delete.
All done!

If you don't have access to a Windows install cd to use the recovery console then I'm afraid I have nothing to help you. I couldn't find a way to remove the files without it.

01/03/2008 - Saturday

noreply@blogger.com (Spidah) — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 21:59:00 +0000

So the UK picked their Eurovision entry for this year, and somehow managed to pick the wrong one. The only interesting and good one was Michelle Gayle's song, yet the Andy bloke got picked. No matter, the UK aren't going to get many points anyway.

24/02/2008 - Sunday

noreply@blogger.com (Spidah) — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 21:28:00 +0000

Wow, I hate computers sometimes

Last weekend I had some stupid weird problem with my computer. I rebooted it (as I do every Sunday morning), started up the programs I usually have running (winamp, utorrent, etc.), then fired up the defragger to clean up the C: drive (another thing I do every Sunday morning). This is where the problems started. Everything ground to a halt and the music went sporadic, like there was a ton of disk access. I left it for a couple of minutes to see if it would clear itself, seeing as I wasn't running anything that would cause all the disk access (I hadn't actually started the defragger at the time, so it wasn't that causing it). I got bored of waiting, so I decided to just restart it and try again. So I hit the reset button, watched the BIOS flash past, then it stayed at a black screen with the hard drive light on constant. So I tried it again. Same thing. Tried it a third time, and this time it flashed up that there was a disk read error. My mood suddenly dropped as there was some stuff that I hadn't backed up yet and I didn't really want to have lost it due to a dead drive.

Invisible hard drives

I have two drives in my computer (a 300 GB and an 80 GB) and I wasn't sure which was causing the problem, although I was guessing it was the 300 GB one as that's the drive that has Windows on the C: partition (it has four other partitions on it). I restarted the computer again and entered the BIOS to see if it's not seeing one of the drives. It surprised me as neither of the drives were visible (in hindsight I should have tried replacing the IDE cable, but I didn't think of that at the time). This was kind of confusing as I was expecting at least one to be there (if not both).

Getting my hands dirty

I decided to dive into the guts, unplug one of the drives, and see if the other one then becomes visible. I did the 300 GB drive out first as it was the easiest to get to. Turned the computer on and entered the BIOS and the disk was visible. Rebooted again and let the BIOS continue and it came up with the message about it being an invalid system disk, which was good. I plugged the 300 GB drive back in and unplugged the 80 GB drive, turned it back on, entered the BIOS, and, surprisingly, the 300 GB drive was also visible! Rebooted, let it continue, and Windows booted perfectly fine. Strange.

Kinky drives

I rebooted again and entered the BIOS yet again and took a look at where the drive was placed on the primary cable. Turns out it was the slave device. This got me a bit confused as the 80 GB drive was also the slave device when it was plugged in (different plugs on the cable too). The 300 GB has always been the master device as I hard set it with a jumper, and the 80 GB has been the slave (no jumper = slave for the drive). Why was it suddenly showing them both as the slave device? Maybe this was the problem? If both the drives are attempting to be the slave device then it was obviously confusing the BIOS and it thought that there were no drives at all.

Cable select

I decided to put both drives into cable select mode and let the BIOS and the cable work out which drive should be the master and which should be the slave. Changed the jumper on the 300 GB drive and put one on the 80 GB drive (luckily I have spare ones), plugged them both back in, turned it on, entered the BIOS, and only the 80 GB drive was showing as the slave device (no master device at all). I was getting annoyed by now (it had been about three hours since the problem started, due to going for a shower, stopping for lunch, etc.) so I switched the plugs over to see if that made any difference. Turned the computer on once more, entered the BIOS, looked at the drives, and both of them were visible with the 300 GB as the master and the 80 GB as the slave. Hurrah! Rebooted, let it continue, Windows booted and everything is visible on both drives. Hurrah again!

One week on

It has been a week now and the computer has been restarted a couple of times (had to fiddle with the network card settings to get a better network speed) and there was a very brief power cut at the beginning of the week (brief being less than a second, but long enough to interrupt the power), and everything is still working fine. I rebooted it again this morning before running the defrag and everything is still working fine. I have absoutely no idea what caused the drives to play up, nor why switching the plugs over managed to fix it. Maybe the cable is slightly faulty, but it's working for the time being. If it happens again then I'll swap the cable over with the secondary cable and see if that works (at least it's cheaper to buy an IDE cable than it is to get another drive).

23/12/2007 - Sunday

noreply@blogger.com (Spidah) — Sun, 23 Dec 2007 22:09:00 +0000

It has been just over a month since my last post. I've been saving up a fair bit to say, so this will probably be a longer post than my usual ones. Then again, I might find that I have less to talk about than I thought!

Merry Christmas

Well, I should start off by wishing everyone a merry Christmas, even if you don't celebrate it. I think it's pretty stupid that our government is allowing places to drop the idea of it being Christmas and just call it a holiday. This country is a christian country and thus we celebrate Christmas. If you're a foreign person living in this country then you don't have to celebrate it, but don't get your knickers in a twist just because they country you're living in wants to celebrate it.

Spam

My email address surprisingly hasn't found its way into many spam databases, so I was usually getting around 20 spam emails a day. However, twice in the last week I've been hit by a lot more spam than usual. At the beginning of the week I managed to get 50 new spam emails, but they're the same four spam emails repeated. Today, however, I hit a new record. So far today I have 105 spam emails, again with the same four emails plus some more. The emails are for winning an iPod, winning an iPhone, a £150 voucher for Tesco, Gala bingo, getting cash in 24 hours, and a GHD christmas box (whatever that may be). Oops, I've now got 106 spam emails! I don't mind getting spam, as Gmail does a wonderful job of sticking it in the spam folder. I've had a few spam emails slip through to my inbox, but they're just a case of clicking the "report spam" button and never seeing them again. I've also noticed that Gmail has got a bit smarter when dealing with spam received through a public mailing list which uses a single email address which Gmail liked to mark as spam if I reported one bit of mail as spam. Now it seems to let the real emails through but still bins the proper spam emails.
UPDATE: At midnight I had a grand total of 128 spam emails! Slightly higher than the normal 20 odd. I wonder if it'll continue?

Monarchy

I've been watching the recent five part series into the private lives of the monarchy. I know that I'm not really a huge fan of the monarchy, mainly because I couldn't really be bothered about them rather than thinking they shouldn't exist or anything, but it was a great series to watch. You got to see a different side to what they get up to instead of just hearing about the various things in the papers. Some of the things that have been printed in the papers have been different from how I saw the events happening in the program. I'm quite happy that I took the time in the evening to watch it instead of just turning my tv off like usual.

Other Stuff

I'm sure there was a lot more that I wanted to talk about, but I really can't think of what they were now! So I think I'll leave it at that for now. If I remember anything else then I'll make sure to edit the post!

22/11/2007 - Thursday

noreply@blogger.com (Spidah) — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 10:12:00 +0000

I fail to see why the England Football manager, Steve McClaren, has been sacked following the defeat last night against Croatia and the subsequent failure to qualify for Euro 2008. Understandably the manager should be able to control the team and to orchestrate a victory, but there's only so much a manager can do with a rubbish football team like the one that England has.

I would like to see most of the current players dropped and new, fresh, talent brought in as replacements. This might allow the team to play together better instead of only trying to only get the ball to one injured player. Sure, that injured player was able to pass the ball once which resulted in the equalising goal, but they still lost.

I won't deny that I am happy to see England dumped out of Euro 2008. They play like a bunch of sissies. Croatia played a much better game and were excellent from the beginning. England should watch how they play and take some tips on how to be a team.

16/11/2007 - Friday

noreply@blogger.com (Spidah) — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 20:07:00 +0000

It's Children In Need tonight, and in typical usual fashion, the Spice Girls have to mime their boring song which somehow got to be the official song. Why the hell can't they just sing live?! We all know that they suck at singing live, but it's CIN and they should do it anyway. I'm still not sure how they got to do the official song. The song is damn boring and makes me want to turn the tv/radio off whenever I hear it.

The best part so far has been the girls from Holby City. Lola (Sharon D Clarke) sang lead vocals for Respect and she has a lovely and very strong voice. I wonder if she has a singing background. The backing singers were Maddy (Nadine Lewington), Kyla (Rakie Ayola) and Maria (Phoebe Thomas). I love Maria's character (and the actress herself) so it was nice to see her scantily clad ;)

24/10/2007 - Wednesday

noreply@blogger.com (Spidah) — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 11:09:00 +0000

I switched broadband packages yesterday. I now have an upload speed of 1Mbit (up from 768kbps). It's not that much faster, but it has actually made a difference. The max download speed is actually less than what I had on the previous package, but it's still faster than what my telephone line can actually handle (due to the distance from the local telephone exchange).

It didn't go without problems though, but then I was kind of expecting something to go wrong as there were problems when I switched last January. Instead of the line speeds being changed to the new speeds they actually got changed to the slowest speed (512kbps down, 256kbps up). When I phoned the technical support to tell them they told me that it wasn't actually due to be switched over until the next day. This was fine and I wasn't too annoyed as I still had an internet connection, but it was just annoying that I had received an email telling me that the switch had been completed but it wasn't actually going to happen until the next day. I decided to email the support people and let them know that their system was sending out false positive emails. A little while later the dsl dropped out then came back on, and when I checked the router status page the line speeds were back to what they were before the switch. Then the dsl dropped out again and failed to come back three times then managed to come back. I checked the router status page again to see that the line speeds were now what they were supposed to be on the new package (14.5mbit down, 1mbit up). I then got a reply email from the support people saying that they're sorry for the problems and that he had reconfigured the line for me to be the speeds that it should be at.

So it seems like it was supposed to be switched over yesterday but something just went wrong. I'm happy now anyway as I have a stable connection and it was all sorted out pretty quickly. Thumbs down for the flaky switching process, but thumbs up for the quick and helpful support people.

20/10/2007 - Saturday

noreply@blogger.com (Spidah) — Sat, 20 Oct 2007 15:55:00 +0000

It has been nearly a month since I posted something. I've actually been pretty busy working on my Healtheriser website. It's getting pretty close to its first public release, but there is still quite a bit to get done before that can happen. Hopefully I'll have it done in a week or two, then I can start to work on the other features that will make up the real release. Fingers crossed!

The main reason for doing a new blog post is to wish on England for this weekend. Tonight England take on South Africa in the Rugby World Cup. I'm kinda expecting South Africa to win, but I hope that England can put up a good fight and maybe even win. They started out a bit sloppy in the group stage, but after getting through to the quarter finals they've been playing a lot better. The scores have been low, but there has been a lot of good play.

Also, Lewis Hamilton is in with a chance of winning the Formula 1 Championship in his rookie season tomorrow. All he has to do is finish and finish ahead of Alonso and Räikkönen. Hopefully he'll be able to win the race and then the championship, but I'll be happy with him just getting the championship.

So come on England and Lewis!

24/09/2007 - Monday

noreply@blogger.com (Spidah) — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 22:58:00 +0000

I've just finished watching the full series of Taken which has been showing on the Sci-Fi channel for the past 10 weeks. The series started off a little slowly as it advanced from the 1940's up to 2003 (I think), but once it hit the more modern times it picked up speed and got a bit more interesting. I thought it was a good series and would recommend it to anyone who enjoys sci-fi shows, although I can see that not everyone would be able to get into the series (my mother for example).

23/09/2007 - Sunday

noreply@blogger.com (Spidah) — Sun, 23 Sep 2007 16:58:00 +0000

Today I took part in the Hovis London Freewheel cycling event. I found a small advert for it on the tfl website at the beginning of the month and it looked like it would be fun, so I told my family and got them to register as well. My mother, sister, and her boyfriend joined me on the 14km car-free route that took us from London Bridge to St James Park (and back again) along The Thames.

The ride itself was enjoyable as we were surrounded by the other 38,000 people that registered. Even though there were a lot of people there, we still managed to travel at a decent speed and did half of the route in roughly an hour, and around the same time coming back.

There was a festival going on at St James Park which involved music and entertainment which consisted of people juggling, bmx stunt shows, and childrens bicycle rides. Hovis also kindly offered free sandwiches at the festival, so at least we didn't have to pay outrageous prices for food like you usually have to do in Central London!

We took a few photo of the event, but it was generally harder to take photos of the actual route as we were riding along with the crowd and never really felt like stopping to take pictures. However, we did manage to take some at the beginning and at the half way point. I've uploaded all of the photos that were taken and you can see them on my Zooomr page.

12/09/2007 - Wednesday

noreply@blogger.com (Spidah) — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 20:42:00 +0000

I know that I'm not a great fan of the English football team (I generally cheer for the opposing team when they're playing) but I'll have to admit that they're playing pretty well at the moment. The team currently playing (Robinson, Richards, Ferdinand, Terry, A Cole, Wright-Philips, Barry, Gerrard, J Cole, Heskey and Owen), which I think is the same team that played Israel on Saturday, have bonded quite well and worked together. There have been times when they've looked pretty sloppy and let chances get through, failed to take advantage of their own chances, and missed plenty of shots on goal, but they've managed to score 3 goals in each game to win 3-0. This should really be the team that continues to play together, rather than bumping them off to bring on the rubbish "big name" players. I say it like that because when those players are on (ie. Beckham and Rooney) England lose. England don't need them and do far better WITHOUT them playing. Get rid of those two rubbish players and England will likely continue to play well and win more games.

09/09/2007 - Sunday

noreply@blogger.com (Spidah) — Sun, 09 Sep 2007 20:29:00 +0000

TV

Not Going Out and After You've Gone were excellent. I'm glad that they returned. Casualty has also returned for a new series after only being away for a few weeks. It's now on for another (roughly) 48 weeks and they're introducing some new characters as well as getting rid of some.

Healtheriser

I'm still working on the measurements tests although I think I'm nearly done with them. I need to clean up some other code as well as write a few more tests for something else (which isn't fully tested properly).

I also managed to fix a problem which had been plaguing me for a little while now. When I ran my tests using my standard way (autotest) they all completed perfectly fine, but when I ran them the standard Rails way (rake test) the integration tests would complain about accessing the fixtures data and the functional tests (controllers) gave a failure of "SQLite3::SQLException: SQL logic error or missing database".

I tried searching for anything that would help but I couldn't find anything that made the slighest difference. The changes that were suggested seemed like they weren't even taking effect. I even tried creating a new website project and adding a blank controller and test and noticed that the failure occured even then.

This had me stumped for a while until I stumbled across the cause. In tracking down why the fixtures were still being instantiated I realised that I had installed a plugin called PreloadFixtures which preloaded all of the fixture files before the tests are run in an effort to speed up the tests (they're preloaded and kept for each of the tests instead of each test loading and then destroying them). This was causing all of the fixtures to be instantiated, which is one of the problems that I was seeing. I moved the PreloadFixtures directory out of the plugins directory and ran the tests again to see if it helped in any way, and I was shocked to find that ALL of the tests now ran perfectly fine and completed!

So if anyone else has a problem with your functional tests throwing an error of "SQLite3::SQLException: SQL logic error or missing database" and you can't find any other way to fix it, please take a look in your plugins directory and see if you have the PreloadFixtures plugin and consider disabling it to see if it helps.

02/09/2007 - Sunday

noreply@blogger.com (Spidah) — Sun, 02 Sep 2007 23:00:00 +0000

Wakoopa

It has been 14 hours since I did the weekly restart and the highest process id is now 3404 and has been that all day. Before the Wakoopa update it would have been around 60,000 by now (the 30k number before was because I did the update a while after restarting). I'm happy that I managed to find what was causing the high numbers!

TV

Not Going Out returns for a second series this Friday. Kate is no longer in the show, but has been replaced with Tim's sister. Hopefully it'll be just as funny as the first series, if not more funnier! After You've Gone also returns for a second series this friday (it's on before Not Going Out). I haven't read much about the new series, so I don't know if anyone new features. I used to turn my TV off pretty early on Friday evenings but not any longer!

Exercise

At Christmas I was bought an exercise set which contained a step machine. This was fine for eight months (with around one month of nearly every day use) until it decided to break. The plastic wheel that holds the cable in place and allows the step arms to move had bent which also caused a metal bracket to twist:

I emailed the customer support people and they sent out replacement parts for me to install. I was expecting to just get a new bracket and wheel, but they also sent a new cable and the main bracket that holds the wheel (the thicker one that the wheel is inside). I was expecting to receive them on Monday (it was sent Thursday evening) but they arrived on Saturday (hence why I know what they sent). I installed them (after finding another spanner to turn both nuts) and gave it a little try to see how it felt and it seemed fine. I haven't given it a proper try yet as I do different exercise on the weekends, so the first try will be tomorrow morning. Hopefully it'll all be fine and nothing else will go wrong with it!

29/08/2007 - Wednesday

noreply@blogger.com (Spidah) — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 23:24:00 +0000

100th Post

This is my 100th post on this blog so far. I created this one on the 2nd October 2006, so 100 posts in just under 11 months isn't too bad. I know I should post more, and I do try, but most of the posts I could do would just be the same all the time (about website updates and things like that). I prefer my posts to have a specific subject and usually be more than a paragraph long.

To celebrate this milestone I'm going to add averts onto the bottom of the posts (or at least three of them on the main page). It's a new feature of Blogger that I thought I would try out. I already have two advert blocks and I had actually thought about putting some at the end of the posts but my trial attempts didn't work out. Now they're doing it for me so I just had to turn the feature on and it should all work.

Computer Problem

For a while now I've been experiencing rising process id numbers which would hit 450k-480k after 7 days (my computer is restarted every sunday after a defrag). I had recently installed and updated a few pieces of software but wasn't able to track down which one was causing it. I just left it as I didn't really see any adverse effects. On Sunday, after restarting, a popup window informed me that there was a new version of a piece software that I had installed when this all started, so I decided to take a look at what had changed. One of the changes was about fixing a handle leak which would be a cause of the high pid's. After installing the new version of the software the highest pid so far is 38716, which is the pid of the software itself. So it definitely was the cause of the problem. If anyone uses Wakoopa (social website for software) and have experienced the pid problem then you should make sure to install the newer version of the software.

20/08/2007 - Monday

noreply@blogger.com (Spidah) — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 21:10:00 +0000

Your Brain is Yellow

Of all the brain types, yours is the most intellectual.
You crave mental stimulation, and your thoughts tend to very complex.
Your thoughts tend to be innovative and cutting edge, though many people don't understand them.

You tend to spend a lot of time thinking about science, architecture, and communication.

What Color Is Your Brain?

18/08/2007 - Saturday

noreply@blogger.com (Spidah) — Sat, 18 Aug 2007 23:48:00 +0000

I've finished off quite a few tests for the Healtheriser recently. I've also started on a few more that I should actually have (the tests are also performed by other tests, but it doesn't hurt to make sure that it's throughly tested!). In a short while I should be ready to move on to implementing the measurements part of the website. It's pretty similar to the weights, so most of it is simple copying. After the measurements are done I think I'll make it available for public testing. I'll then see how it stands to being abused by people (if anyone uses it that is!). I have a lot more planned for it, so I'm not going to be stopping there (I have two planned already, with at least one more as a possible).

I also watched High School Musical 2 tonight. I honestly couldn't wait for it to end. The storyline is pretty boring, the acting not much better, the characters worse than the first movie (which I actually liked), and the songs just plain rubbish. The actors have also seemed to forget how to mime to the songs they're apparently singing. Not one of them was able to keep in time with the song. Zac Efron's head was also pretty funny. In both this and the first movie, his hair and eyebrows look totally plastic, like they're not even real. I can't remember one bit where a peice of his hair moved, and his eyebrows look like slugs. He's also not good at making a face that is capable of singing the words that the dubbed songs contain. When the song has full voiced words Zac has a mouth open like a fish. I want my 105 minutes back!

16/08/2007 - Thursday

noreply@blogger.com (Spidah) — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 23:37:00 +0000

It was my birthday today. A whopping 25 years old now. Doesn't feel that long though! For presents I got a pair of roller blades (more about these later), a "Horror Duck" (which I have to keep in the box as apparently they'll become collectables sometime!), an entry in The Great British Duck Race, and tickets to the cinema on Sunday to see The Bourne Ultimatum.

Unfortunately I wasn't able to use the roller blades right away as the blade on the left boot is angled slightly inwards which prevents me from putting my weight down on it and coming out with an ankle intact. The right blade is perfectly fine, but the left one just can't hold any weight (as soon as you put any weight on it the centre of balance is shifted and the boot tries to go over to the left, resulting in your ankle nearly getting snapped). The stitching on the velcro strap also came apart. The roller blades are being taken back tomorrow and hopefully the replacements will be fine!

13/08/2007 - Monday

noreply@blogger.com (Spidah) — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 20:48:00 +0000

I've finally finished watching Space: Above And Beyond. I first watched it when it was on TV some 11 years ago, but I didn't get much further than halfway through the series before I got busy with school and missed the rest of the episodes. A few months back I managed to get hold of two DVD's containing the episodes as recorded from TV (I don't actually know if there are official DVD's out there) and have been slowly watching them when I get the chance. Turns out that I only got up to episode 12, which was actually halfway through (23 episodes in total).

It was a pleasure to watch the remaining episodes as it was like being back in 1996 and watching them for real on TV. In the last episode I already knew that quite a few of the main characters would be injured or killed, but it was still sad to see it happen. I always felt like I had grown up with the characters as their personalities evolved with each episode (unlike other sci-fi shows where the characters hardly change between episodes).

I'm glad that I finished the series off, although I'm sad to see it end. At least I have it on DVD now so I can watch it again in the years to come!

07/08/2007 - Tuesday

noreply@blogger.com (Spidah) — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 00:48:00 +0000

I was a little hasty the other day when moaning about Sky Anytime and the BBC's iPlayer. On Sunday I was doing my weekly defrag and noticed that I had forgotten to delete Aquamarine from Sky Anytime. I started Sky Anytime to do it, and when I got in My Library to delete it I saw that the percentage was 14%. All I can assume is that because both Sky Anytime and the BBC iPlayer use the same downloading software, when I had the BBC iPlayer open trying to download in that instead of downloading the BBC's tv show it was actually downloading the one from Sky. I left Sky Anytime open after the defrag had finished and Aquamarine finished in roughly two hours.

After the success with Sky Anytime I decided to give the BBC iPlayer another go. Luckily there was a tv show that I had missed watching on Saturday and it was listed for download, so I clicked on it and waited to see if anything would download. After a few minutes the downloaded amount changed to 1 MB, and a few more minutes later it changed to 2 MB and 1%. I left it running for the rest of the day and it took roughly 14 hours to complete the 35 minute episode (which was about a quarter the size of Aquamarine). It worked fine and the quality of the episode was good, but it just took far too long. If it had the same speeds as from Sky Anytime then it would be great. Maybe I just have to wait until the BBC iPlayer comes out of beta and they'll obviously add more capacity for all the people that (might) use it.

UPDATE: Earlier this evening I went onto the BBC iPlayer website to see if they had Grownups for download as I forgot that it was on Sunday and I had seen an advert earlier today. Luckily it was on the "featured" page so I didn't have to browse through Sunday's shows. I started downloading it and saw that it quickly went to 1 MB. I then closed the program down so that I wouldn't keep looking at it all the time and got on with other things on my computer. Around two hours later the status window appeared informing me that the show had finished downloading. This was much better than the previous 14 hour wait! I'll have to make a note of other things that show on BBC 3 and 4 that I don't get chance to watching (due to watching BBC 1/2 or some other channel) and see how quickly they download.

04/08/2007 - Saturday

noreply@blogger.com (Spidah) — Sat, 04 Aug 2007 09:30:00 +0000

Recently I've been trying out the Sky Anytime on-demand program as well as the new BBC iPlayer on-demand program. Unfortunately, my conclusion is that they are both pathetically disappointing. The Sky Anytime program starts a large Flash 9 player window in which it loads its stuff, but it's really slow to load it, takes the cpu for a long spin at 100% usage, and is really sluggish. That's when it's running at its best. The rest of the time you get too many errors and messages saying that there was a problem with Sky Anytime. Attempting to change to your library while its failing to load a movie listing results in the program locking up for a few minutes, and then it has forgotten both of the things it was doing and sometimes just logs me out instead. The one movie that I tried to download and watch (Aquamarine) wouldn't even start downloading, so I just gave up. I hadn't found a lot that I wanted to download as it only had a small handful of the movies that Sky was showing on their movie channels.

The BBC iPlayer is slightly better than Sky Anytime in that the bulk of the usage is done through a web browser (which has to be Internet Explorer unfortunately). You're able to go back through the past seven days worth of TV shows, but it doesn't actually list all of them (again it only lists a small handful, and lists repeats of repeats while ignoring something new). I attempted to download an episode of Mock of the Week, which I hadn't actually watched before. I left it "downloading" for 30 minutes and it was still at 0%, so I promptly stopped the download and closed the program.

Maybe I'll try both of them again at some point in the future, but hopefully by that time they will have sorted all the stupid problems out so that they're actually useable.

29/07/2007 - Sunday

noreply@blogger.com (Spidah) — Sun, 29 Jul 2007 21:56:00 +0000

Fan

Last Saturday (the 21st) I bought a new fan for the processor in my computer. I had to buy a new one as the existing one was playing up, slowing to half speed most of the time and sometimes going slow enough that I could read the label as it spun round. It was also running slower than usual when it was being "normal" resulting in more noise (it got real noisy the slower it spun) and a higher processor temperature.

Before the fan started playing up I was seeing typical idle temperatures of 40-43c for the processor and 38-40c for the motherboard, and full load temperatures of 55-60c for the processor and 42c for the motherboard. Once the fan started playing up the idle processor temperature went up to 45c minimum, with the temperature rising the slower the fan spun, and a full load temperature of 60-65c.

With the new fan the temperatures are much lower. Idle temperatures give 35-38c for the processor and 30-32c for the motherboard, and full load temperatures of 50-53c for the processor and 30-32c for the motherboard (I sometimes forget to check the motherboard as I've been monitoring the processor more as that's where the fan is).

The new fan is also slightly louder than the old fan, with a rating of 28dB (decibels). I'm not entirely sure what the rating of the old fan is as I haven't been able to find specs for the exact model I had (I could only find slightly similar), but I would guess that it was around 20dB (as that's what the similar one is). It also has a much higher airflow with 21 CFM (cubic feet per minute) compared to 5 CFM for the old one (similar model again). I think it's also spinning around 600 RPM faster (4600 RPM), although I can't remember what the old one was spinning at, especially as during its last few weeks it had stopped reporting the speed it was going at correctly (sometimes it would show a speed, othertimes it would just be 0). It's also a thicker fan, just less than double the old fans depth.

All in all I'm very happy with the new fan as it's making my computer run quite a bit cooler, plus I've got used to the slightly louder noise.

Healtheriser

In other news, I'm still working on the Healtheriser. I had the idea to change the way that logins are handled before I get stuck in with the rest of the code, considering that I'm currently the only person using the website. The change is to allow multiple OpenID logins to use the same user account. When you login for the very first time you'll be given the option of creating a new user account or linking your OpenID login to an existing OpenID login. If you create a new user account then you'll be able to login like normal and use the website. If you decide to link to another OpenID login then you will be able to login to that user account without actually using that OpenID login that was used to create it (if that makes sense). It's useful if you have multiple OpenID logins and don't want to always remember which one you used when creating your user account (I know that OpenID is all about a single login, but you can get OpenID logins from using AIM or having a livejournal blog, plus you can aggregate your OpenID login from a different website).

It has taken a few days to get most of it done as I changed the main login code to handle linked accounts but I forgot to change my mocked (faked) login code in the tests, so I was expecting the results from the real login code, but the mocked login code was giving different results as it hadn't been changed. It took me a little while to realise that that was the problem and I was able to fix it pretty soon afterwards. I've also been doing it using TDD (Test Driven Development) for the first time, where I write a failing test with the results that I expect, make sure that it fails, then write the real code to produce the correct results. Doing it this way has actually made me write a few bits better than I would have done if I was just writing the main code straight away.

I highly doubt that I'm doing the TDD the correct way though, but it's working fine for me at the moment. I've been doing it all from the integration tests (test stories) so that I know all the things work from the users point of view. I haven't done many other tests though, like testing the model and testing that each action works correctly. Once I finish the changes to the login I'll read up on the other testing again as I can't remember the flow of it now (tut tut, but I'll get there eventually), and hopefully I'll have some solid tests in place. My current code to test ratio is 1:0.9, so I do have a lot more testing to do!

26/07/2007 - Thursday

noreply@blogger.com (Spidah) — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 01:30:00 +0000

In my last post I said that I hadn't laughed as hard in a while as I did while watching The 40 Year Old Virgin. Well tonight I laughed even harder while watching Wild Hogs. When you bring together four great and funny actors as the main characters, along with Ray Liotta and other known actors as the remaining characters, you just know you're going to have an excellent movie. I laughed pretty much all the way through.

23/07/2007 - Monday

noreply@blogger.com (Spidah) — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 08:54:00 +0000

I've watched a few movies recently that I've been meaning to write about, so I might as well do that now. I'll start with Harry Potter And The Order Of The Phoenix. This was OK for a movie, but once you try to compare it to the books it goes downhill pretty quickly and you pick the movie totally apart. It felt far too rushed for me, like I was being pushed through the movie rather than walking along with it. Quite a lot of the good bits were cut out of the movie, and several parts were changed probably to make it more "dramatic". It was good to watch, but just try not to think too much of the books.

The next movie is 28 Weeks Later. I thought this was pretty good, although quite a lot of the lines between the main characters are whispered, which makes them a bit hard to hear, then followed by action, which leaves you deafened after straining to hear the whispers. I didn't think that it was as bloody as the first one (28 Days Later), but the characters are better in this one. The ending of it is great though.

Finally, there's The 40 Year Old Virgin. I thought that this was a hilarious comedy that kept me laughing from the beginning all the way to the end. I haven't laughed at a movie this hard for a while, so it was refreshing. I thought that the jokes were well planned out, and the various scenes that he ended up in were great. I'm glad that I watched it.