If I were designing a house which had quite a narrow front hall, I wouldn’t put the telephone master socket right by the front door, where nobody in their right mind would want to have a telephone, thus rendering it COMPLETELY USELESS.
Am very tired, and lots of bits of me ache. But I’m in the new house and have unpacked most of the lounge. Hurrah.
Off we flew to Glasgow for the lovely Kirsten’s birthday. Or rather, off we flew to Glasgow Prestwick, which is to Glasgow as London Luton is to London.
Anyway. After a special Ryanair queueing adventure, where I was sent back and forth from the checkin to the ticket desk twice, we boarded. I settled down to try to snooze, as is my wont, and Anthony switched his phone to flight mode and started watching a video on it. The flight attendant approaches.
“Excuse me, sir, is that a mobile phone?”
“Yeah, but it’s in flight mode.”
Then, the moment of chilling clarity. The realisation of that which had only been previously suspected. All those nagging fears confirmed in a single sentence.
“Sorry, sir, but you’ll have to switch it off. Ryanair doesn’t support flight mode.“
The Quicktime plugin keeps crashing Firefox so I finally install that iTunes update I’ve been putting off for ages (largely because Apple’s update software for Windows doesn’t work). There are pending Windows updates, so while I have all the windows closed anyway I reboot to do them.
On reboot, nTune hangs the machine until it is killed. The Windows update goes through. iTunes gives an error about not being installed correctly. I reboot again. The POST hangs at “detecting IDE devices”. I reset a couple of times trying to sort it, and finally yank the cable from my iPod because I’m convinced it is the cause of the delay. USB support disappears from my machine altogether and the POST hangs with a “keyboard not present” error. This problem persists through several power-cycles. The air is rent with cursing.
I find a PS/2 keyboard and get my machine to boot again. Once Windows loads, USB support magically returns and all my USB devices light up, including the keyboard. nTune hangs the machine until it is killed. I reinstall iTunes. It gives the same error. Another Windows update arrives. I search for the error in the Apple software forums. Apparently iTunes doesn’t install the correct drivers under x64 Windows. Why the fuck not, thinks I. I reboot again. nTune hangs the machine until it is killed. I uninstall nTune. I find, download and install the supposedly correct drivers for iTunes. It has no noticeable effect, as iTunes still gives the same error. As the error doesn’t actually stop iTunes from playing music or syncing my iPod, I decide to go to bed.
Apple annoyed me the most today, largely because they seem to throw their Windows software together without a great deal of care. Their automatic update software has never worked for me, and while iTunes has drivers for ripping CDs under XP x64 (I know this because my iTunes used to be able to do it) they don’t seem to bother making sure the installer does the right thing.
I know they can do software right. My Macs are evidence of this. Why don’t they do it for all of their software?
I get that you want to protect your business from burglars. I get that. I really do.
But if you allow your alarm to wail unattended for OVER AN HOUR when people are trying to sleep, then you should be shot.
Bane of restfulness!
Slayer of sleepytime!
Truly, thou art a cruel and capricious mistress.
Change working directory of java code to location of batch file before code is launched, call rt.exec("batchfile.bat"), batch file runs.
Leave working directory alone, call
File dir = new File("C:\\path\\to\\batch\\file");
rt.exec("batchfile.bat", null, dir);
Batch file does not run, giving a file not found error.
Change second line to rt.exec("cmd /c batchfile.bat", null, dir); - batch file runs.
I’m not sure why this is, but I thought the information might be useful to someone.
In this particular case, about an hour and a half.
I’m sure there’s a moral in there somewhere, but other than “you apparently need to know more about how the APIs work internally than should be necessary” I can’t seem to find it.
Hey ho. Ever forward.
Every so often I get a small surge of creativity which enables me to dismantle someone else’s work and twist it to my own nefarious purpose. In the latest of this irregular series, I present: the Bioshock gamercard sig.
Uses my gamercard parser thing to dynamically update the score, and stuff. Nothing particularly special, perhaps, but I like it.
There are no good space-based real time strategy games around these days. And, well, it’s a fairly niche genre, so I suppose it’s understandable. But last week I suddenly had the urge to dig out and re-play Homeworld: Cataclysm, so after much digging through boxes of stuff, I did so. And it was just as good as the last time I played, and even prettier on my current PC than the 650MHz Celeron laptop I originally played it on.
So, if you haven’t played it, and you see it in a bargain bin, snap it up. It really is a bargain.