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Mystery solved 2006 April 29 21:28

Posted by diamond in : Random,Work , add a comment

On thursday night, i went to bed at about 01:10, and after 6 hours of being unable to get to sleep, got up again. Friday wasn’t as bad as it could have been, though i was in no state to get any work done. About 19:00 that evening i was about ready to crash. Went to bed, slept through till about 08:30. Oh man was that needed. I also solved the mystery of the missing sleep (very enid blyton eh?). I had forgotten to take the medication to help me sleep on thursday, though i could have sworn i had. Doh.

Henchcoat 2006 April 28 11:20

Posted by diamond in : Random , 1 comment so far

To whom it may (or may not) concern,

I, the undersigned, hereby give my express and explicit permission for ____EOGHAN CAFFNEY_____ to compile (note: _not_ install) his own version of the linux kernel, for use on a HEAnet Server.

Sincerely,
Stephen Shirley
Chief HEAnet User

*Update*
Failing the presence of such an employee, any other employee at your discretion.

How not to allow users to restore their pcs to working order 2006 April 26 11:46

Posted by diamond in : Random , 1 comment so far

(can you see a pattern here?)

A case study:

  1. Ship a pc without any system media to use for restoration. Bad
  2. Provide a hidden restore partition on the hard drive with the restoration s/w in it. Not great
  3. Provide a utility to create restore media. Ok
  4. Have said utility burn a system restore disc, and delete itself upon completion. Moronic
  5. Have said utility not check to see if the disc burnt was even valid or readable. Unbelievably moronic

The above was the case with my dell inspiron 9100 laptop. Disc burnt wasn’t readable. I was soo glad i’d taken an image of the entire system before trusting dell to be competent. And if you thought that was bad, the dell dimension 9150 i received yesterday only has points 1 & 2 above. So, if you corrupt, say, your partition table, you’re up a well known creek with no means of propulsion. Well done dell. Have a cookie.

*Update*
I should note that i’ve not been bitten by this because my previous experiences have taught me to be extremely cautious about this stuff, so the first thing i did upon receiving the 9150 is to image the diagnostics and restoration partitions. Long live sysresccd + partimage.

I used to have a cubicle 2006 April 25 14:10

Posted by diamond in : Work , add a comment

cubicle2

I guess i’ll just have to console myself with a new dell desktop. Shouldn’t be too difficult -)

How not to write a compiler 2006 April 24 15:26

Posted by diamond in : Work , 1 comment so far

A case study:

The top of my code:
#define WIN_VERSION //needed for ext.h
#include "ext.h"

Code i inserted into the top of ext.h, a header file from an sdk i’m using, to try and debug stuff:
#ifndef WIN_VERSION
#error WIN_VERSION is not defined. why?
#endif

So, guess what happens when i try compile the project?
...\ext.h(2) : fatal error C1189: #error : WIN_VERSION is not defined. why?

If i put the #define in ext.h, it works. If i tell the compiler to define WIN_VERSION at compile time, it works. So why oh why is Visual C++ 6 unsetting WIN_VERSION between my code and the sdk? Why? Gah.