LeeNukes

Is it just me, or if 10 years ago Blockbuster, HMV etc had used their names online to create a digital version of themselves, then they might have held on.

GAME will likely go next, despite attempts to save it, then who knows. Soon the highstreet will just be clothes shops and empty premises.

Electronics Boutique (which became GAME in the UK), when I used to work there had a great tie up with Barrys World (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BarrysWorld http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/1192857.stm) where if you worked for EB you got a certain size server that you could host games on etc. It was great, but I seemed to be the only person asking about it at the time.

I think this was back in 2003. Back then places like UK2 were popular, hosting your own server, public or private for Clan matches and just fun on games like Counter Strike. I don’t seem to hear of that much often anymore, if the price was right, I’d play on a GAME server or a Blockbuster server.

Hello all,

I’ve just installed Skype (skype-4.1.0.20-fedora.i586.rpm) on my Fedora 18 Beta version of Linux and I thought I’d share the dependencies with everyone as I have done in the past.

If you get a root terminal up and execute this command:

[code]yum install alsa-lib.i686 qt-x11.i686 qt.i686 qtwebkit.i686 libXScrnSaver.i686[/code]

that should pull in all the relevant dependencies required to get skype installed.

Then, download Skype from their website and install that RPM and it shouldn’t complain about missing any files.

There are strong suggestions around that Google will be using an Intel based platform for their next Nexus phone.

I can’t see them making a much larger device as the Galaxy Nexus, their current Nexus phone is already on the cusp of being too large, even though the Galaxy S III is slightly larger and selling well.

At the moment, I’m on the fence about an Intel based Nexus device, personally I would prefer another ARM based version, not least because of the ties to British engineering.

What do you think? Would having Intel x86 as the CPU powering the next Google Nexus device sway you?

I saw on a screenshot from a Galaxy S2 a dotted line predicting data usage based on current usage which I’d not seen on my Galaxy Nexus.

I had a look and it was true, it wasn’t there, I checked then menu to see if there was a way to turn it on, and stumbled across what seems to be a bug.

Here is how to repeat it, this is on my UK Galaxy Nexus running stock Android 4.0.4.

Go to settings and choose Data Usage

As you see, no prediction line.

Select Show Wi-Fi usage from the menu.

Press the Wi-Fi tab and then go back to Mobile

There you go, the dotted prediction line is visible.

Well, Skype, although it provides and RPM for Fedora 13+, it doesn’t really handle the dependencies very well.

I found I had to install these items seperatly:

yum install -y libXScrnSaver.i686 qt.i686 qt-x11.i686


you might find others though. To find it, do the following:

in terminal as your account, type skype and press enter. If it doesn’t load it will tell you something is missing.

In this example what’s missing is libXss.so.1

To find what has that you run this command:

yum whatprovides */libXss.so.1

It will tell you all the packages which include that file, however as Skype is 32bit, its looking for that library.

So, you tack on .i686 at the end, as above and it should deal with that minor issue.

A quick post just to put the installer script I’ve done for Fedora to get Spotify installed from the latest Debian packages available from their servers:

Tested on Fedora 16 32bit, Fedora 16 64bit, Fedora 17 64bit. All fine so far.
No uninstall script just yet though, I’ll likely incorporate it into this script anyway and have it as an option. -i install -u uninstall maybe.

#!/bin/bash
#
# This script will download the .deb packages, unpack them and put the bits where they need to go.
#
# This does not have an uninstall element to it, nor does it keep it up to date. Sorry.
#
# Updated to just work and grab everything required rather then searching out a specific
# This needs to be ran as root, because it extracts files into /usr/bin and /usr/share which is root only. sudo should work.

echo "Done, you should now be able to excute the spotify command succesfully. If not, something went wrong. Sorry"

I’ll put up another download at some point, but for now, that should work if you put it in a script and execute it as root.

It appears that the Spotify Linux client has moved along quite a bit, leaving behind Fedora again as they always appear to do.

As such I have recognised I need to make some serious modifications to my Spotify Linux Client Upgrader script.

This will come in time, here is what I had to do to get it work on Fedora 17 though as a quick and dirty notes section, I’ll script this at some point as when they change the file names, its breaking the script:
{after changing the download links in my script and running it again}

yum install qtwebkit-2.2.1-4.fc17.x86_64 nss-3.13.3-3.fc17.x86_64 openssl-devel
ln -s /usr/lib64/libssl.so.0.9.8 /usr/lib64/libssl.so.10
ln -s /usr/lib64/libssl.so.10 /usr/lib64/libssl.so.0.9.8
ln -s /usr/lib64/libcrypto.so.10 /usr/lib64/libcrypto.so.0.9.8
ln -s /usr/lib64/libnss3.so /usr/lib64/libnss3.so.1d
ln -s /usr/lib64/libnssutil3.so /usr/lib64/libnssutil3.so.1d
ln -s /usr/lib64/libsmime3.so /usr/lib64/libsmime3.so.1d
ln -s /usr/lib64/libplc4.so /usr/lib64/libplc4.so.0d
ln -s /usr/lib64/libnspr4.so /usr/lib64/libnspr4.so.0d

Facebook has filed to become public and start selling bits of the 5% of itself to anyone with money.

This has left some people questioning if Facebook is worth the $100 Billion it was valued at.

My opinion is they are, and more still. The reason as we all know is that Facebook sells your information by way of targeted ads. So a company says place my advert on females pages between the ages of 18-24 if they are in this area and have ever mentioned” diet” in their updates for example.

Fair enough, I have no problems with that, if a targeted ad shows up for me, I probably still won’t buy it. Saying that though, I DID buy my home server from a targeted ad on Facebook I seem to remember.

I have no problems unless the advertisers step over the mark. If they start to sell funeral services based on someone recently having suffered a bereavement, then that’s just TOO far. Will they know where to stop though? Will they care?

It appears that last nights Nation Wide Virgin Media Outage was caused by some faulty cooling in one of their main backbone racks.

This was explained in a recent resolution email I’ve received:

“Master Update: On Tuesday evening (17th January), Virgin Media Business experienced a network outage that impacted customers using IPVPN, Managed Internet, National Ethernet and broadband services. The problem was quickly traced to a failed cooling unit that had caused a core backbone router to overheat. Due to exceptional circumstances, other backup equipment also failed to activate properly. We’re are now working through a thorough investigation as to why this happened.

Engineers resolved the fault in about an hour. Virgin Media Business would like to apologise to all customers impacted by this outage.

If you have any queries regarding this update – please contact Technical Support.”

The issue was resolved mostly later in the evening on Tuesday but additional load issues due to having to bypass the problem was still causing issues for some people.

Hopefully Virgin will be able to identify why their contingency plan didn’t work.

I spent a good while debugging this not wanting to change too much incase it was something bizarre.

Turned out to be something simple.

So, we use OSTicket at work, and for the most part it works well. However, there are parts which are a little buggy.

One of these appears to be that, when we were trying to create a New Ticket using the New Ticket option when you’re signed in, it would highlight the Source field and give the error “Invalid Source”.

This happened no matter what option from the drop down you would choose.

I had a look at the code, and made a guess at the problem, at it appears to work:

In the file: scp/tickets.php

Change

Line 319:

if($_POST['source'] && !in_array($_POST['source'],array('web','email','phone','other')))

to

if($_POST['source'] && !in_array($_POST['source'],array('Web','Email','Phone','Other')))

This appeared to resolve my problem and the ticket was logged successfully without error.

Is Honeycomb the new Windows ME?

I’ve been playing around with my Hannspree Hannspad that I bought a few months back, and sure, its a budget tablet, but I think Ice Cream Sandwich will make it much better.

I don’t know what I’m holding out for, something between Honeycomb and Gingerbread. I’ve used a Honeycomb ROM on my Hannspad, and I’ve also tried Froyo and Gingerbread ROMs, and I’ve come back to Gingerbread since trying all.

I suspect that with very few Honeycomb specific apps around and ICS (Ice Cream Sandwich) just around the corner, development on Android Honeycomb will halt and ICS will be its successor.

What do you think?

So, the old theme was getting a bit long in the tooth and everytime I looked at it, I was frustrated.

This new theme is called BlogoLife from wplook.com.

It is nice, simple and clean. Didn’t make many tweaks other then to add a few more items to the Widgets on the right side and replaced the header image with my AdSense code.

Let me know what you think of it if you like.

I had the requirement for some tests to turn a big plain text file into a “more or less” formatted correctly ttx file.

Now, this is by no means something that you would want to open in Trados to start editing with etc, but it does surround the lines with Trados TTX tags in sufficient detail for me tests.

Get the script here: http://www.leenukes.co.uk/downloads/TXTtoTTX.py

Now I know, its messy, but I don’t care at the moment as it worked for me and saved me copying and pasting over 1400 tags to lines of text.

I also didn’t find anything online that would do this for me, hence me writing this. I’m not a programmer, and I know actually outputting XML using elementTree would be better, but it was more work to do that then I was willing to spend at the time.

This small piece of code would benefit from reading in language options from the user, and then slotting them into the tags and it would also benefit from a re-write to allow it to output XML correctly as at the moment it reads in the file stated, and outputs it wrapped.

Characters that are not valid XML still go through, for example if there is an & in the file, it will wrap that too, it doesn’t care. & isn’t valid XML amongst other characters and is commonly substituted with &

Call this script whatever you want, but I was calling it TXTtoTTX.py

So, what does it do?

Lets say you have a file with 3000 lines of text in it called mytesttext.txt, you would use this python script as follows:

python TXTtoTTX.py mytesttext.txt

this will then output it to screen for you to quickly check, then you can redirect the output to file like this to save it:

python TXTtoTTX.py mytesttext.txt > mytesttext.ttx

So, it appears that Spotify haven’t gotten around to releasing their latest client for Linux unless you’re running Ubuntu (or Debian?).

So, I had a quick look at the contents of the .deb files and determined that it should be easy enough to get it to work in Fedora.

I had a quick go, and got it working, and wrote a script.

So here is that script for everyone, all it basically does is extracts the .deb files, then unpacks the tar files into the correct places.

You have to run this as root, or run it via sudo as it unpacks files into places only root can venture, such as /usr/bin and /usr/share.

Take a look at the comments in the script before running it.

Let me know if you have any problems and I’ll take a look, but no promises.

Download it here

Unless you’ve been living under some kind of rock, igneous, sedimentary, or even metamorphic, then you will have heard about the new service from that small time internet based company Google.

This new service is their full foray into the world of Social, we’ve had Google +1, Google Profiles and also Google Buzz.

They are pitting themselves against both Twitter and Facebook, and people who have tried it so far like it.

However, one of the issues I see for their battle against Twitter is that can Google Plus get the celebrity following? Facebook became popular because your friends were on it, we have that now. Twitter, in my opinion became popular for that chance to communicate with celebrities and see what they’re upto.

I don’t know if this will be possible with Google Plus though.

So it appears the updates to Twitter have killed Peep for HTC Desire and possibly other devices.

Is this the start of their “stop making Twitter clients” argument?

Unless Peep and HTC can update and get around it, I think HTC will have to remove the app, and no doubt this will delay the release of Android 2.3.2 for HTC phones.

The tablet platform is hotting up with Apple releasing its iPad 2. I was never really interested in the iPad once I found out more about it, in fact, I was a little underwhelmed, I’m not sure why though.

With all the competition around now with Android 3.0, Blackberry and their Playbook and the “imminent” releases of HP’s WebOS based tablets everyone can actually have their own style of tablet, much like when the swathe of Android Smart Phones came out to challenge Apple for the iPhone crown.

I’ve created a run-down of the latest tablets in the below table, the details in it are as accurate as I can gather, prices are likely due to change though.

Tablet Comparison March 2011

The Fedora project has recently revamped its default startpage for Firefox ( http://start.fedoraproject.org/ )

This is how it used to look:

and this is how it looks now:

Screenshot of Fedora Firefox new startup page

This is a massive improvement over the old style. Good work Fedora Project.

Getting married brings with it lots of difficulties and what else but to bring my issues to “the cloud”.

So, which do you prefer?

First or Second?

Leave your comments below.

OK, as with my last server I used the nbench CPU benchmark which is pretty long in the tooth now, but as a comparison I ran it again:

BYTEmark* Native Mode Benchmark ver. 2 (10/95)
Index-split by Andrew D. Balsa (11/97)
Linux/Unix* port by Uwe F. Mayer (12/96,11/97)

TEST                : Iterations/sec.  : Old Index   : New Index
                    :                  : Pentium 90* : AMD K6/233*
--------------------:------------------:-------------:------------
NUMERIC SORT        :          764.32  :      19.60  :       6.44
STRING SORT         :             118  :      52.73  :       8.16
BITFIELD            :      1.8813e+08  :      32.27  :       6.74
FP EMULATION        :          186.16  :      89.33  :      20.61
FOURIER             :           11665  :      13.27  :       7.45
ASSIGNMENT          :          14.577  :      55.47  :      14.39
IDEA                :          3321.4  :      50.80  :      15.08
HUFFMAN             :          1184.8  :      32.86  :      10.49
NEURAL NET          :          21.828  :      35.06  :      14.75
LU DECOMPOSITION    :          726.08  :      37.61  :      27.16
==========================ORIGINAL BYTEMARK RESULTS==========================
INTEGER INDEX       : 43.090
FLOATING-POINT INDEX: 25.960
Baseline (MSDOS*)   : Pentium* 90, 256 KB L2-cache, Watcom* compiler 10.0
==============================LINUX DATA BELOW===============================
CPU                 : Dual AuthenticAMD AMD Athlon(tm) II Neo N36L
Dual-Core Processor 1298MHz
L2 Cache            : 1024 KB
OS                  : Linux 2.6.18-194.32.1.el5
C compiler          : gcc version 4.1.2 20080704 (Red Hat 4.1.2-48)
libc                : libc-2.5.so
MEMORY INDEX        : 9.250
INTEGER INDEX       : 12.038
FLOATING-POINT INDEX: 14.398
Baseline (LINUX)    : AMD K6/233*, 512 KB L2-cache, gcc 2.7.2.3, libc-5.4.38
* Trademarks are property of their respective holder.

I also re-ran the test on my other server:

BYTEmark* Native Mode Benchmark ver. 2 (10/95)
Index-split by Andrew D. Balsa (11/97)
Linux/Unix* port by Uwe F. Mayer (12/96,11/97)

TEST                : Iterations/sec.  : Old Index   : New Index
                    :                  : Pentium 90* : AMD K6/233*
--------------------:------------------:-------------:------------
NUMERIC SORT        :          1046.6  :      26.84  :       8.81
STRING SORT         :          100.64  :      44.97  :       6.96
BITFIELD            :      5.0524e+08  :      86.67  :      18.10
FP EMULATION        :           165.2  :      79.27  :      18.29
FOURIER             :           18467  :      21.00  :      11.80
ASSIGNMENT          :          35.808  :     136.26  :      35.34
IDEA                :            3620  :      55.37  :      16.44
HUFFMAN             :          1636.1  :      45.37  :      14.49
NEURAL NET          :          28.048  :      45.06  :      18.95
LU DECOMPOSITION    :          1243.5  :      64.42  :      46.52
==========================ORIGINAL BYTEMARK RESULTS==========================
INTEGER INDEX       : 60.118
FLOATING-POINT INDEX: 39.355
Baseline (MSDOS*)   : Pentium* 90, 256 KB L2-cache, Watcom* compiler 10.0
==============================LINUX DATA BELOW===============================
CPU                 : 4 CPU GenuineIntel Intel(R) Xeon(TM) CPU 3.06GHz 3066MHz
L2 Cache            : 512 KB
OS                  : Linux 2.6.18-194.32.1.el5
C compiler          : gcc version 4.1.2 20080704 (Red Hat 4.1.2-46)
libc                : libc-2.5.so
MEMORY INDEX        : 16.452
INTEGER INDEX       : 13.998
FLOATING-POINT INDEX: 21.828
Baseline (LINUX)    : AMD K6/233*, 512 KB L2-cache, gcc 2.7.2.3, libc-5.4.38
* Trademarks are property of their respective holder.

As you can see, its about a third slower but it uses about 3 5ths the power of my last server, and is almost silent.

Today, I should get my new HP ProLiant MicroServer to replace my far too large and powerful HP DL140 server.

This server was a bargain, I actually clicked on an advert offering £100 cashback on it. I had assumed the server would have been expensive but it wasn’t really.

It also uses less power then my current server so overtime I should save money on the electricity bills.

It also supports 64bit where the DL140 is 32bit only.

Can’t wait to get it up and running, should be nice and quiet by comparison.

Sony to develop hacker proof PS3 hardware

If you’re to believe what everythinghq are saying then Sony are currently working on designing a “hack proof” PS3.

This, in traditional terms doesn’t mean that people are breaking into PS3′s and stealing data or turning them into Zombie PS3′s. No, what it means is people are modifying the hardware to make it do what it wasn’t intended to do. Sometimes that is simply to run another operating system, but other times its fuelled by the potential of running pirated games.

I can’t help but get the feeling that claiming to have something that is hack proof, is simply like showing a red-rag to a bull.

Anyone care to hazard a guess at how long it will take until this “hack-proof” PS3 is taken over?

Microsoft are doing what they have done since day one with what would have been a potentially lucrative platform.

They are delaying updates for whatever reason and stunting the growth of their own platform. Personally I’m an Android user, and have been for a year or so now.

Ultimately competition is good, but Microsoft is too large a beast to move quick enough. They should have setup a separate smaller company to handle Windows Phone 7.

Today Google has yet again outdone itself with a new funky interactive logo.

You can use the arrow keys on your keyboard (cursors) or the lever with the mouse to the right of the logo.

At the moment its on the homepage, if you can’t be bothered investigating the sea Jules Verne style, I’ve grabbed the images and put them together for you here:

Just click on the image to see the fullsize.

A few noteable items are:

So in the next few days Google will update the Android marketplace on devices running Android 1.6 and higher.

Most of the changes are welcoming such as moving the screenshots for apps to the top of the screen and adding age ratings to apps.

One change that concerns me though is that the refund window is being changed from the 24 hours to just 15 minutes.

Does that really give you enough time to try it out?

I know 15 minutes is longer then the 0 minutes on Apples iPhone App Store but come on guys, that’s a huge change for the worse.

I will now be much more careful about what I purchase.

Not long until Fedora and Ubuntu release their distress with Wayland instead of X.

I’m looking forward to it but my worry is with drivers. I like to use the proprietary drivers for the performance gains as I sometimes play 3D games and use 3D effects on the desktop.

Anyone else interested in Wayland and what it will bring?

I recently installed Fedora 14 Beta Release 2 on my desktop PC at home and I’m going to go so far as to say its the best Fedora release I’ve used.

It was an upgrade of the existing Fedora 13 installation which in my opinion seemed pretty buggy, no specifics, it just didn’t feel very polished.

Totally the opposite for this release, just a couple of issues at present which are no problem really. The flash player is having some issue with creating crackling electronic noises when playing videos online such as YouTube etc but I’m hoping this resolves itself. I’ve tried reinstalling the plugin from Adobe but had the same issue. Same issue in Chrome as well as Firefox also.

It’s due out in a few days now. I also updated my netbook to Ubuntu 10.10, I’m not that impressed with this release though. Not a fan of the new Unity interface. Never really been a fan of sidebars. There is probably a way of getting the windows to overlap it, but for now I’m not impressed. They’re always breaking things those Ubuntu people. Grrr.

I noticed that in one of the scenes in Date Night, Joe Miletto(Ray Liotta) picks up a phone which looks very much like an iPhone 4.

Given this movie came out before the iPhone 4 was officially announced, I wondered if they had given any units to the production crew to use as product placement.

It could be that the props people had seen the leaked phones and made something similar for when the iPhone 4 did come out.

Here is an image (Click on it for full size):

I’ve read lots of release information about the upcoming Android 2.2 release Froyo which has now started to roll out to the Google Nexus One and I’m wondering if it will bring 802.11n to the HTC Desire.

People have managed to hack a kernel together for the HTC Desire and get 802.11n already, I just hope it comes officially with Froyo. And soon…