Technology

Jul 9 2008

Server change

Perhaps WordPress has become slower in recent releases, perhaps I’ve broken something by running a non-prelinked system – but in any case, running this blog from my trustworthy SGI O2 was just getting too slow.

By Stuart • Internet, Technology, Thoughts 0

Jul 7 2008

Basic English: O₂ Fail

So this morning at about 7:30am, O₂ sent out an email to what is probably millions of punters (judging by the fact that their pre-orders site has crashed and burned) with the headline:

iPhone 3G is here and its free*

Anyone spot the problem with this?

Let’s see what Wikipedia has to say about this:

ITS, it’s or its can mean:

“its”, the possessive adjective and possessive pronoun form of the personal pronoun it

“it’s”, a contraction of “it is” or “it has”

The “It’s” man, a man with torn clothes and unkempt beard who appeared at the beginning of episodes of Monty Python’s Flying Circus

It comes to something when a corporation the size of O₂ can’t even be bothered (or doesn’t have the knowledge – a more worrying conclusion) to get basic grammar and punctuation correct on what is unquestionably its biggest launch of the year.

By Stuart • Mobile, Thoughts 0

Jun 28 2008

Nude

… and now that I’ve got your attention, may I present “Nude/Big Ideas (Don’t Get Any)” by Radiohead in all its 8-bit(!) glory.

By Stuart • Music, Technology, Video 0

Jun 27 2008

Nintendo Star Points – expressly designed to annoy?

Time was, you bought a new Nintendo game and got a code with it, which you entered into a Nintendo website and got points in return. Never mind that anything worth buying with these points sold out immediately (the used to give away Gameboy Players for the GameCube, and certain NDS games) – people were generally happy. Or, at least, not gnashing their teeth in frustration.

By Stuart • Computer Games, Rants 0

May 14 2008

Backwards-compatibility or forwards-compatibility: choose either one

(or “Why you should never change your hardware platform”)

As reported at play, GTA IV was tested as being 100% compatible with the current model of PS3, but unfortunately not with any of the older (60Gb) versions which retained PS2 compatibility via hardware custom chips.

By Stuart • Computer Games, Technology 1

Apr 30 2008

Vodafone illegally intercepting 3G-users’ email?

Some of the guys at work have been reporting for several days that they haven’t been able to send email when working off-site and connecting to the internet by their Vodafone 3G dongles.

Specifically, Thunderbird was saying that it received an invalid server response of “421 too many connections”.

By Stuart • Internet, Technology, Work 2

Apr 29 2008

‘scponly’ an oxymoron :(

After spending an hour or so today trying to work out why scponly logins to upload files to one of our servers were no longer working, I found the answer:

scponly no longer supports scp.

Read that again. I kid ye not.

By Stuart • UNIX 0

Feb 16 2008

Fantastic piece of advertising!

Just wait…

hema.nl

By Stuart • Internet 0

Feb 11 2008

Hopes and fears for a new MacBook Pro

With the rumoured (hopefully) imminent launch of new MacBook Pro models, I thought I’m commit to blog a collection of thoughts I have about how Apple could improve it, how much I’d like to see them make the suggested change, and how likely I think it is that they’ll do so…

By Stuart • Technology, Thoughts 1

Feb 1 2008

Nintendo Europe: Not evil, just irredeemably stupid?

There are several things which annoy me about Nintendo right now… amongst them the shameless price-gouging for Virtual Console games, the DRM which prevents you from backing up your saved games from your console to your SD card (what was the thinking behind this one??), the hopelessly slow SD write-speed when you do actually find something that you can copy, the inability to run copied data from the SD card, the lack of any form of online mass-storage support – I could go on.

However, right now, it is Nintendo Europe who are in my cross-hairs – and I’m left wondering exactly what they think they’re playing at.