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 bliki, snipsnap, is now back on line, hosted by Amazon. …
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. …
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,
The first comment is by me, and discusses how I got doh123’s Wineskin to work. DFL 22 April 2011. …
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!). …
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. …
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! …
While at Sun, while developing the CEC Messaging Platform, one of my colleagues put part of the platform on Linux, because “It just works on Linux”. I was reminded of this today while repairing one of my desktop computers, which had suffered an HDD failure. The system runs Windows XP and after the hardware repair, Windows was hanging every time the Drive was referenced. This was despite mounting the disk on the e:\ mount point.
I rang Dell who support the UK today from Germany and was advised to create a Linux Live CD and see if that could mount the file system.
It could.
Also it browsed the networks, found the file server, mounted a folder and I am now busy copying the files to a remote disk.
The Dell and Alienware people who have helped me over the last two months have been both helpful and knowledgeable. There was some reticence from the Alienware people since my system is pre-merger and they classify it as “legacy”. They diagnosed the original disk failure and guided my through replacing the disk and rebuilding the OS. They stated that fixing windows explorer was a software problem and beyond them, so they passed me over to Dell software support. Again great advice and it looks like I have recovered the data. Now to see what happens if I format the disk.
Thanks to Linux, Dell and Alienware.
NB. Both these services were chargeable, so having to pay for two incidents was a bit poor, but I got to talk to people who know what they’re doing. Alienware gave me reason to believe that it was going to be OK, and Dell reminded me that Linux just works. …
I started some notes on userstyles.org. This was first written in 2010, and may have been originally posted to the snipsnap bliki; when I rescued it I copied it to this blog but have since decided it’s better on the wiki, and you can now find it here …. However, at least one of the links is now supported by the wayback machine, and it refers to the NWN Vault, which has now gone. …
I used an Excell 2007 Pie of Pie chart the other day for the first time. It may be that these are not very sound statistically but they can be powerful graphics. It wasn’t exactly intuitive at the first glance. Here’s how I did it. …