It was good to meet up with Mike Ramchand and Phil Harman last week at the Oracle User Group where Phil was presenting a talk entitled “Virtualisation Fever”. The conversation turned to personal web sites. Mike advised me to get off Snipsnap because its resource implications are too costly. It should be noted that there are a number of additional weaknesses due to its age. It is written in Java and while it has an extensibility framework, using it requires Java and possibly Groovy, and I code in neither. …
Upgrading Well Red
I have created a fully hosted version of the blog here at davelevy.info and copied the articles from the original ‘canned’ wordpress blog. At the moment the old blog is still occupying the obvious URL of http://blog.davelevy.info. …
Using Mail on a Nokia-Orange Phone
Nokia have turned off my e-mail client on my mobile phone without my permission. I have been using a Nokia 5800 Xpress as my personal mobile phone since leaving Sun Microsystems. I got it because it runs S3 and could be used to host Joikuspot which turns the phone into a wifi internet gateway. Over the 21 months I have been using it, my use has varied, to the extent that I also used an HTC Hero for two weeks. …
DE HQ Reunion Barge Trip
The Reunion barge trip is over, we travelled on the Stourport Ring, to and from Tardebigge, via Worcester, Stourport, Wolverhampton and Birmingham. I made a video recently!
I have started to upload and convert the images and videos. I used a Nokia phone, and a Sony camera and Handycam so there’ll be some mucking about to make a video/slide show for youtube, laptops and the ipodtouch. The rest of the pictures are on flickr in a set called Barge Trip 2011. …
My snipsnap is back online.
My bliki, snipsnap, is now back on line, hosted by Amazon. …
Selecting from an excel array using two or more criteria
In some of the more complex spreadsheets I have built recently I have wanted to select data from a table based on two conditions. This can be done using the functions COUNTIFS() and SUMIFS(). Once again using range names helps. These functions offer one the the equivilent of boolean AND, and they can be made to implement OR as well. …
Adventures in Faerun with an Apple Mac
I finally got Neverwinternights running on my Mac using WINE. It is clear from the old Bioware forums that to get it working on recent i.e. Intel based Macs needs virtualisation technology. There are choices here, but I chose WINE since it seems to leave the game’s code ‘closer to the metal’ than alternatives. I also wanted it to be legally free.
There have been some rat holes in this project, but I started at http://winehq.org. This has lots of great resources including some “How To…” pages and a forum. The best advice at the time I started was to install from source, so I got introduced to git. I came to the conclusion, after being advised, that macports was a better way of installing and maintaining WINE on the MAC. (I also downloaded Porticus which is a GUI front end for macport and I had to upgrade my version of the Xcode developer package.) This conclusion was aided by the fact the game now works.
An article at arstecnica, called “Neverwinter Nights WINE Tutorial” states that the installer won’t work under WINE and my early experiments had found this to be true. The article suggests copying a good windows installation which I did via a DVD. The compressed folders are between 3.4 & 3.7 Gb, depending on how many saved games and add-on modules are in the folders. The ars article also recommends copying some of the Microsoft DLLs, but they used a W98 build as their source, I am using XP. I have not copied any of the DLLs onto my Mac.
It seems to be working OK.
In summary its a three step process,
- Install macports and porticus
- Install WINE
- Copy the NWN folder from a Windows Machine
The first comment is by me, and discusses how I got doh123’s Wineskin to work. DFL 22 April 2011. …
My first Blackberry, bit late I know
It seems that my announcement that I have adopted a Blackberry and in doing so abandoned my Android based HTC aroused some interest. On the one hand you have an open source based operating system, java based apps, produced by an agile company that does no evil, on the other hand you have the epitome of the corporate suit’s pocket billiard cue rest. (Although I am informed that it’s IM app is the chat carrier of choice for today’s yoof!). …
Pivoting with medians and filtering frequency distributions in Excel
This was originally written as a note on how to build tables with complex values i.e. values other than those supported in pivot tables.It focused on using range names and countif[s]/sumif[s]. One of the side effects was to document the use of range arrays and functional filtering. i.e. specifying an array within a cell and filtering the values down to one. This later piece of functionality has caused me to return to this page more frequently than the table construction. I have amended the tags and inserted this paragraph as finding it proved harder than I wanted. …
Why did Facebook eclipse Yahoo?
Yahoo had a web site, e-mail and photo sharing. It didn’t have micro-blogging, nor was it able to leverage the market- and mind-share of Facebook’s initial applications publishers.
It was self-obssessed and under takeover threat, but it had great brand value, and most people would accept that it is run be people that will take customer privacy more seriously; their business model treats their users as customers, not commodity (eyeballs).
Yahoo is not a secret garden either, which should make it more attractive, you can use it to share with non-yahooers. Is it just that the deal, “Your privacy in exchange for e-mail and micro-blogging”, is worth it? Admittedly, it’s initial growth was driven by teenager adoption, but why take up with Facebook and not Yahoo?
Yahoo was almost there. Interesting how close you can be and miss! …