Tim Child

Saw this on a blog the other day, with no description and it was from a Apple Mac Expo.

I really want to see Google PowerMeter adopted in Sweden, I guess it will be a long time coming, but an overview of power usage would be excellent.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/02/power-to-people.html

For that matter I would like to see Mint.com adopted by Swedish banks though I am sure they will argue that they have to do it themselves with some stupid software developed by a kid out of University that knows nothing about UI, and banks that complicate everything as much as possible.

Been trying to use mplayer from the shell on Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy) and LIRC was giving my problems, but I couldn’t find any help with the following mplayer error:

Well all you need to do to is to disable LIRC support by doing the following:

Edit

And put in the line:

And that should sort it out.

Been trying to get a linksys wireless card working on my server with Ubuntu 8.04. Its not the easiest thing.

My output of lspci shows:

And my lshw -C network:

And my output of iwconfig:

So the hardware apparently is a little tricky but I have downloaded the firmware and drivers that should support it with the correct wrapper.

Except its really not working yet.

Windows 2008 Server is probably the most robust operating system to come out from Microsoft whilst still supporting most of the modern features users demand. The robustness and speed of it is just two of the advantages it has over Vista.

To install on a MacBook Pro its probably easiest to use Windows 2008 Server x86 CD 32bit. 64Bit and bootcamp is not recommended at the moment!

First steps of the installation:

1. Step one is to start up the bootcamp assistant whilst you are running OS X.
2. It will take you through the procedure
3. Put in the DVD when prompted
4. Follow through the questions asked for the install
5. When prompted to enter a password make sure to use one of these three: numbers, symbols, capital letters, lower case letters. Password policy is setup on Windows 2008!
6. It will continue to install and any reboot needed will take you back to the installation

After this is done the OS is installed, but as a workstation OS its a bit of pain to use.

Next steps straight after installation

1. Start by downloading a webbrowser that you can actually use. IE is quite restricted so to even download something you must go into options and change the privacy options
2. Insert your Leopard disk and install the drivers that you need, then reboot
3. From here you can change the resolution of the desktop to the native display resolution

All the steps after this are optional, but are probably good to know:

Enable themes

1. Open up “Server Manager”
2. Click “Action”, “Add Features”
3. Choose “Desktop Experience”
4. Go into the Service panel
5. Enable the themes service (its probably disabled, so you need to double click it and enable it
6. Select a theme by right clicking on the desktop and selecting personalised
7. Aero theme can be found at:
   C:\Windows\Resources\Themes

Enable wireless networking

1. Open up “Server Manager”
2. Click “Action”, “Add Features”
3. Choose “Wireless LAN Service”
4. Let it install

Enable hibernation

1. Open up a command prompt and type
2. powercfg.exe /hibernate on

For more information on turning Windows 2008 into a workstation check out:

http://www.win2008workstation.com/wordpress/

And for a program that easily enables the features of a workstation on Windows 2008 server:

http://www.win2008workstation.com/wordpress/2008/07/17/windows-server-2008-workstation-converter/

As promised I have updated this site to the latest version of WordPress – 2.7

Its actually really impressive, and really shows why I updated to an off-the-shelf blogging tool instead of sticking with my own home grown set up several years ago.

I also cleared up many of the problems with images being aligned on the site, and finally have decent code previews thanks to the CodeColorer plugin by Dmytro.

There is probably some work to be done on making sure the feeds are 100% and then on to the design – the grid is totally messed up, but at least I feel confident in the software backing this up now.

It seems that my move of feeds from feedburner to the google feedburner service has messed up my RSS feeds quite a bit. Not sure what has happened or why the links on my site got messed up, but its probably something to do with the plugin that I had installed.

All in all it highlights the need for me to update this site from its current version of WordPress to the latest version.

I will be doing that shortly. Hopefully then the RSS feeds will resume properly.