A New Chance and Stickfight

Category None
As the development I'm doing gets more and more serious, I find myself missing the hideous nature of my old Alienware laptop, its dedicated RAID card was a real boon to multiple vmware images running at once, when the memory ran thin.

However with my latest machine (a badly butchered Compal FL92 which I'm normally very very happy with), there is no dedicated RAID card and the internal space and voltage won't stand the double/triple height of the raptor 2.5 inch drive, sooo, i have to keep it away from the drive (the processor is fine), but I'm at 4Gb already, surely the little devil will take the latest 8Gb cards, a trip round the forums comes up with a guy with proof that the FL92 will take the Crucial 8Gb set, it's £258 which is about what I was expecting. Clutching a credit card in my sweaty hands, I make my rash purchase.

Now that I'm committed (Crucial had it delivered to my hand by 9am on Saturday, when I ordered it Friday afternoon and I picked the slow, free postage), time to make it work with the old software EEEEK!, Linux Generic can't cope with more than 3Gb, and 64 bit is not to be considered, as there is no flash player and lots of other software won't work ***Update*** Vaughan Rivett's has since corrected me that the 64bit version is just fine and not missing any of the good stuff, so ignore my drivelling ***End Update***, hmmmm, but Linux servers have been running more than 4Gb for ages on 32bit, and indeed they can, using something called Physical Address Extension so I just have to swap out my kernel and it will be OK.

In Linux this is easy - just do the following in the nearest terminal:


$sudo apt-get install linux-restricted-modules-server

$sudo apt-get install linux-headers-server

$sudo apt-get install linux-image-server linux-server


I then had to go into "/boot/grub/menu.lst

and add

title Ubuntu 8.04.2, kernel 2.6.24-24-server
root (hd0,0)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.24-24-server root=UUID=24bcaa1c-2860-4171-b760-e1129947958e ro quiet splash acpi_os_name="Windows 2001 SP2"
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.24-24-server

at the top of the "## ## End Default Options ##" section (I just copied the 4 lines that were previously at the top of that section and changed the "initrd.img-2.6.24-24-server" and "vmlinuz-2.6.24-24-server" values so that they matched the latest changed files in the "/boot/" folder
then restarted.

and LOOK!!!

But would that new memory be passed on to the applications?

Well I'm happy!! (Where's me copy of WAS??)

Posted by Mark At 17:01:35 Location | Permalink | Comments (7)

Category More Adobe stuff Alchemy
At first sight this is just 3 cool games that run in flash silvergames games doom triple pack, for the young uns out there, the three games it lets you play "DOOM, Hexen and Heretic" were once top flight games (in the land of the 386/486), but now the are free bees that compress into a 10meg swf file (just download the page, then run the doom-triple-pack.swf on the stand alone flash player if you want to play off line), all very nice but after a few mins playing you start to think, "how the hell did one bloke do this as a hobby project" the answer lies with Adobe Alchemy a beta adobe project "that allows users to compile C and C++ code that is targeted to run on the open source ActionScript Virtual Machine (AVM2)." ie reuse lots and lots of existing C and C++ code, HOW COOL IS THAT!!!!

Posted by Mark At 23:34:16 Location | Permalink | Comments (1)

Category None
A top book to read/listen to is "the Graveyard book" by Neal Gaimen, recommended by me by my far better half, not only is Mr Gaimen his usual inventivate self but as normal his books manage to be exciting and interesting without being socially stressful, to top this Mr Gaimen does is own narration on audio books, this sets him apart from a lot of modern authors ( Douglas Adams and Spike Milligan both did there own narration) it also helps that he is very very good at it.

Posted by Mark At 23:32:19 Location | Permalink | Comments (0)

Category travel
There seems to be the chance that i might be a'traveling to the fair US for one of my clients (a most exciting prospect), but how to act like a native in any given city: NY, Chicago or Detroit, anyone got any tips?

In return i offer 9 beginner tips for the joy that is London town.

1) Please stand on the right on escalators, the left is the fast lane (it is very defiantly not the “I have huge luggage and like to block peoples way” lane)
2) Public transport is the norm, both buses and trains/tube are used by 'suits', there's no shame in it.
3) Its impossible to walk round anywhere without being given at least 3 free newspapers, they are mostly drivel.
4) You WILL get badly drunk (its the countries fav pastime), and it WILL cost you a fortune
5) Teenagers are the most dangerous thing in London (and that would include velociraptors if they had a colony in Trafalgar square) ***I'm not joking***
6) All late nights will end up at a curry house (its a strange gravitation effect)
7) The only cabs to trust are the oddly shaped black ones.
8) Any inclement weather of any description with bring the city to a standstill for example “the wrong sort of sunshine”
9) If you get your self injured in our fair city, don't worry, you don't need any money or insurance, we got it covered as a freebie :)

Posted by Mark At 09:08:40 Location | Permalink | Comments (3)

Category None
Just a quick note to the people out there taking advantage of the one click update from Ubuntu 8.10 to 9.04, make sure you don't have "auto logon" enabled, if you do, you stand a huge chance of happily screwing up your install (you will get lots of permission denied errors against /dev/null when you launch a xsession, even if your ctrl-Alt-F1 in and reset the security to "666" from "600" the darn thing resets on reboot (and anyway you just get a blank screen even if you get it (ie by ctrl-Alt-f7) to get back to xsession login,


....so carful carful party people

.. P.S. to the Mac boys out there laughing, i rebuilt in 14 mins (after backup), and i did not have to go to a "genius bar" to fix my problem...so RASSSSSSP!!

Posted by Mark At 09:16:10 Location | Permalink | Comments (6)

Category Domino flex
We all know that Domino should been good at calendar apps but sucks balls in reality, so i quietly poo'ed my self when a manger says "could we have something a bit like google calendar", however flex comes to my rescue, now i cant claim any of this is mine its just gluing other people work together so first take Quietly Scheming's Calendar ***UPDATE: the app is much newer than the blog posting would indicate, as it keeps being updated*** sexy isent it?, now this takes an ical format as its data source, which in case anyone was wondering is just a vcalander file with some extra bits stuffed in (which we wont need), so to get to that data source, enter Jake Howlett's excellent series of articles, in particular Flex with Domino Quick start, go pinch his example database for the 'simple view' stuff, you will want to butcher that to output your data as a ical text file (the download for Quietly Schemings flex apps has examples of what they should look like in the "data" directory of the zip file.),

One snag here is that the Adobe parser for icals is REALLY picky, there must be no extra white space in your file, and every line must finish with a proper Carriage return and a proper line feed (i ended up with computed text of "@Char(13)" at the end of every line in the view template and "@Char(13)+ @Char(10)" after every field in the view, so be careful, but other than that it works like a charm!!, and my manager thinks im a coding god (well he doesn't because he knows me, but never mind)

there you go, if this dosent make sense just put a comment and i will explain more

Posted by Mark At 22:46:43 Location | Permalink | Comments (4)

Category None
Its been over a month since i last blogged, but I have a good reason, I have been given an amazing opportunity (given the current financial climate), and my working skill set has taken a amazing leap, I am now working on FLEX 3, Proper Java (with Spring, Hibernate and very serious web services) in addition to Domino, and all with those tight times that make a project fun, its been disturbing my sleep but i wake keen to be at work (always the best way to be), but time to get some useful blog entries out.

Posted by Mark At 22:31:41 Location Home | Permalink | Comments (0)

Category Disney Zazzle UPS
You hear from everybody these days that the art of customer service is dead, this is apparently not so with www.zazzle.com and Disney, in an effort to get a T-shirt done in time for lotus Sphere, i ordered it and had it emergency ups'ed to the hotel in Florida, alas it did not arrive in time (to be fair i only gave them a couple of days), i gave a mental shrug and counted it as a lost gamble, a couple of weeks later i get a email from zazzle customer service saying that they had had the T-shirt returned, and that i had been given a full refund including postage, a complete surprise (if one that makes me feel slightly guilty)

Posted by Mark At 10:28:53 Location | Permalink | Comments (0)

Category Xpages flex Domino Eclipse
Been watching all the "sticking with notes"/"moving on" talk on all the blogs, and only just realised that i was one of the offenders, the reason why i only just realised is not simply because im dumber than a sack of bricks, its because i have taken the domino 8.5 splash screen to heart, it says "built on eclipse", just as the flex splash screen says "built on eclipse", and the myeclipse screen (well duh!)

When you realise that, the reason for conflict just seems to melt away, your an eclipse developer, Domino is suddenly a back end and a UI interface, just as flex is, and hibernate, etc etc, you may have a STRONG preference for one toolset, but your core is eclipse (providing you are on a modern version of notes), so we can just write amazing apps, why make life complex (shrug).

Posted by Mark At 10:28:10 Location | Permalink | Comments (0)

Category None
So, first proper fight night over (by proper i mean at a competitive club rather than at a social club), and my blisters have all burst and i am hobbling like an old man, i have reached the "messy" stage of fencing training, in which your body has to make certain changes to let you continue (such as growing hard skin and proper muscles), and at the moment the mass of body parts are voting for nothing more stressful than xbox

I would appear i have remembered how to "fight" but not how to "fence", which just makes me a thugist embarrassment, but we will persevere

Mini Haverstock Thursday Review:

I've been away from Haverstock for a while and in the mean time they have started doing proper targeted training on Thursday, and i can completely recommend it, Soooo it does not let you do exactly what you want (shrug), but it does make you a better fencer and in the end that's what competitive clubs are supposed to do, you realise how bad your basic fencing is and Alex (who does the advanced version), guides you thought without rancour and in a way that make you determined to succeed, a good move on haverstocks behalf (dont know if other clubs are doing it, but they should)

Posted by Mark At 10:27:36 Location | Permalink | Comments (2)