ajft

I'm pretty fond of the offline files and folders feature in Windows, can't say I'm terribly impressed how Microsoft makes such a feature only available in “Professional” versions, when such a huge proportion of home machines are laptops where people have a NAS or external drive that ideally they should be using to hold their precious files.

Both at home and at work I've configured SAMBA on a linux desktop machine to export my home directory; at home our Windows 7 laptop has Pictures and Documents libraries on the server in $HOME/Pictures and $HOME/Documents, at work the clapped out Windows XP laptop does the same to the linux box there. The Linux boxes run unison to synchronise files, so the copies are consistent between the two.

An added degree of complexity is that the pictures and documents folders are really $HOME/media/pics and $HOME/docs respectively, the Pictures and Documents folders are symbolic links to the real locations. This all came about because my folder structure in my home directory is old, terse and unixy and I'm happy with it.

All well and good... so far. Windows 7 doesn't seem to have any problems, although sometimes its a little slow to synchronise, especially if I've worked on the files from the Linux side of the universe, and periodically I get a couple of hundred of the particularly useless Microsoft error message that:

The process cannot access the file because it is being accessed by another process

Of course there's no bloody indication or identifiying features of either process!

The real weirdness is the Windows XP system. Sometimes, and I cannot narrow it down to when or why, other than it has happened both on hibernation and on power-down, when the XP system shuts off it will delete the symbolic link $HOME/Pictures from the server. Of course the next time it powers on it tries to re-establish the SMB share to \\blah\Pictures and can't until I've realised and remade the link!

None of the software on either Windows system seems to have any problems with the offline folders, except Google Picasa, unfortunately, which is my image manager of choice. The developers seem to be stuck in a pre-Vista "My Documents" mindset and it didn't seem to like Vista's naming of folders or Windows 7's concepts of Libraries. Some days I just cannot convince it to refresh its view of the folders and let me see photos that every other application on the machine can see.

2009 wasn't a very impressive showing, nor was 2008. Here's to 2010:

2010-Feb-12 Tombstone (DVD)
2010-Mar-30 Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End (DVD)

OK, OK, so picking on the little paper is like shooting fish in a barrel... but surely sometime, somewhere, somehow, they could employ a high-school graduate or even a monkey from the zoo to proof-read these stories before they publish them:

...It lasted another 5km until the alleged driver and her teenage passengers finally abandoned the car when the tyre came completely away from the rim and made a run for it.

Don't you just hate it when the tyre comes off the rim and makes a run for it?

Or maybe:

A MAN dressed in camouflage used an archery-style bow to fire a steel-tipped hunting arrow...

Wow, amazing, just think he used a bow to fire an arrow! Extra points if you can think of absolutely anything else that the Herald Sun think you can fire an arrow from... perhaps a kazoo, or a mickey-mouse watch.

Went to turn on the IXUS 700 this evening to take a picture of Cam running around building towers in the kitchen and there was that horrible grinding noise from the plastic gears in the lens, three or four high pitched beeps and the dreaded message on the screen “E18”.

Bugger.

That'd be the error that seems to plague the IXUS cameras. The error that Canon refuses to acknowledge. The error the the Australian staff “had never heard of”. The error that my first IXUS700 thankfully got while under warranty and was replaced. The error that almost seems to inspire thoughts of products “not of merchantable quality” and “defective design.”

I guess I've had a reasonable run out of the camera, but I see no reason why I should have to spend big money because the bloody thing broke due to a fault that Canon built into them.

A bit of hunting around shows that the first one lasted from 2005-Jun-09 to 2006-Jan-03 — just on six months — then expired. The replacement took over two months to turn up, but I've been using it from 2006-Mar-06 up until last weekend — somewhere just over 4000 photos, it claims to be up to 4318, but has done some odd jumps when I've moved the memory card from a video camera back to the IXUS700.

Tomorrow I find out how much they want to repair an almost perfectly good camera that for four years has done almost everything I want. Sure, I'd prefer better macros and a better zoom, but anything else and I'd be giving up the convenience factor and the pocketability of the IXUS.

Refs:

• http://www.e18error.com/

Updates

2010-Apr-07: Only three calendar weeks and I've got my camera back — a big improvement on my previous experience of Canon service. Newly repaired and hopefully good for another four years' use!

Tomatoes, tomatoes, tomatoes.

What happens when you combine stupid people with cars? Here's a local genius who may have spent too much time watching Hollywood movies and lost track of reality just a wee touch.

Man in hospital with head injuries after jumping from car at 90km/h

A 21-YEAR-OLD man who jumped out of a moving car while he was driving it at nearly 90km/h is in hospital with serious head injuries.

Police Constable Nikki Drever said the man was driving on the Surf Coast Hwy in the right-hand lane when he opened his door and jumped out of the vehicle about 1.25am Saturday, the Geelong Advertiser reports.

"Apparently he said, 'Wouldn't it be funny if I jumped out of the car while it was going' and then the next thing he jumped," she said.

:

Definite Darwin awards material, and we all have to share the roads with them.

In the usual roundabout fashion; from reading my RSS feeds through to a Norman Walsh post to a page by Tom Morris to a mention of OPML and then of FireEagle. All stuff I'm interested in, but all by people who are much better at using it, writing about it and hacking it, than I am.

• ~/pkg/OPML — OPML editor, Windows version that puts an ugly ^M at the end of every line.
• http://fireeagle.yahoo.net — login with my yahoo account and then update my location

After being away from Melbourne for three days we were more than a little apprehensive at what we'd find after the thunderstorms, the TV footage of metre deep floods in the CBD and hailstones the size of¹ golf-balls, tennis balls, lemons, etc all looked pretty frightening. How, exactly, would the wobbly old house hold up? According to the newspaper this morning, the centre of the swath of destruction had passed less than a suburb to the north, so it wasn't too promising.

Tip-toeing in the door and looking around showed us the suprising news that we had no broken windows, no soaked ceilings, none of the roof was missing and that the leaning gum tree in the backyard was still standing. There are shredded leaves everywhere along the side of the house and in the back garden from the neighbour's apricot and the bushes, the magnolia tree lost most of its leaves, and the jade plant took a pruning — but nothing much else seems to be a problem.

No sign of hail sitting around so it must have all melted by now, although some parts of the garden look partly plowed where it landed. A massive 68mm of rain in the rain-gauge, I can't remember when we last had that much rain in a month, let alone in a single weekend!

So how long to the next “One in a hundred year” storms?

Footnote:

1. Where would we be if people were forced to simply say “Five centimetre hailstones” rather than what seems to be a news-media inspired fishermen stories of ever increasing sizes?

Trundling home on the mountain bike towing the trailer, today I decided to go the slightly longer way via Huntingdale station and the full length of the bottle-strewn bike path to Oakleigh. Making my way carefully through the Huntingdale station car-park in case of idiots I had to suddenly slam on the brakes and stop to avoid an idiot reversing at speed out of a parking space without looking.

Surprise, surprise, surprise; same idiot as last week, same car as last week — old blue Ford Falcon rego. ODS-520 — same place as last week and pretty much the same behaviour as last week. Bogan boy come tearing backwards out of the space without looking — or maybe he looked but didn't care. Same sunnies, same fag hanging out the corner of his mouth.

I stop with the front wheel almost up against the driver's door.

“Thanks for watching where you're going,” in response he glares at me and sneers. “Yep, fine, have a nice day.” at this he muttered something and gave me the finger, planted his foot and tore off showering us with gravel and rubbish.

At least this time he didn't drive the wrong way out the one-way entrance.

I wonder if I'll meet him again next week?

So trivial, and so commonplace — aggressive idiot tries to flatten someone on a bike — if it hadn't been the exact same guy two weeks in a row I wouldn't have bothered mentioning it.