Monthly Archive for April, 2008

Delaying tactics

Published on 27 April 2008 in Computing and My Life. Closed Tags: ADSL, Telkom.

So you might be wondering where have all my blog entries of late been. Well, let me tell you. The local telephone provider here in SA, Telkom, has decided that its high time that my ADSL line experiences some significant problems. So almost every evening upon returning from home I am met with the site of my ADSL signal disappearing every 2 minutes. Now as you may very well imagine, this provides a significant problem to me when I try to go on the world wide web.

Compounding the matter is the fact that the support centre for Telkom is based in one of the seven levels of Hell Dante wrote of. When trying to contact them you should ensure that you at least use a speaker phone so that you can get on with something else as you endure the 45 minute waiting period to get hold of a human voice. During those 45 minutes you’ll be subjected to a form of torture as you are forced to listen to a constant looping music track with a woman constantly telling you that your call IS important and that you should hold on. She always sounds a bit hopeful that your call will be answered in a mere matter of seconds even after her voice comes on for the hundredth time. If you manage to survive the long and arduous wait then you are usually greeted by a human that sounds even more depressed than you and who will rattle off a series of irrelevant questions and try to get you off the phone as soon as possible.

My ADSL signal loss should be a simple matter of getting a technician to look at the line you’d think, but oh no, Telkom has other ideas. After getting them to promise me they’d monitor my line I never heard back from them. This is after they told me that clearly the problem lies with my ISP even though they have nothing whatsoever to do with my ADSL line. Then the second time I phoned they opened a fault report for my problem, only to SMS me afterwards stating clearly that they were monitoring a different phone line to the one I’d reported the fault for. After phoning them to query this I was told that I would have to go through the whole reporting process again! And just yesterday they phoned me for the first time to ask me if the problem was gone yet. This really does give new meaning to the term “positive thinking”.

So fingers crossed that somehow I can get my phone line fixed before the long weekend hits. The only saving grace is that GTA4 hits stores this week so I’ll have plenty of gaming to keep me occupied in the absence of internet

Studmuffins ahoy!

Published on 17 April 2008 in Gaming. 1 Comment Tags: Halo, studmuffin.

These past few weeks I’ve played more Halo 3 than any sane person should. Almost every single waking hour that I’m not at work I can be found hunched over my Xbox controller frantically running and gunning my way through hordes of like minded gamers in my quest to rank up.

Thankfully I’ve not been alone in my quest and have had the pleasurable company of Newlande and Mark as we have taken the Halo world by storm with Clan Studmuffin (pictured above). It certainly hasn’t been an easy road as we’ve had our fair share of losses but interspersed with those we’ve also had some momentous victories that have galvanised our spirits

Bungie has also been quite canny in grasping our attention with their Double Exp Weekends where they release special playlists that reward the winners with double experience points as the name implies. Take this past weekend for instance, Bungie introduced the Living Dead playlist in which players are pitted against each other in the form of humans and zombies. The maps are also slightly tweaked with the doorways being blocked to resemble a zombie movie. Players are also granted special abilities determined by whether they are humans or zombies. The zombies are usually faster and can jump higher. Sometimes they’re also granted permanent invisibility which makes the games even more exciting as a player. Unfortunately the zombies cannot pick up any weapons other than those they start with and cannot use equipment or vehicles dotted around the maps.

The humans on the other hand usually start out well equipped with weapons and can make full use of the vehicles and gun emplacements to mow down the encroaching zombie hordes. While they might not have the almost super human powers of their enemies they have to rely on good old fashioned team work to make the most of their number advantage.

Halo 3 also functions very well as a high tech version of a chat program in that you can just chew the fat with a few friends while running around the various maps online. Unfortunately some overseas gamers do not see things the same way as was witnessed when we played with an American who started shouting “SHUT UP!!!” at us every few seconds. It appears that some gamers don’t game for fun these days but rather to vent their anger on those of us more inclined to games as a form of recreation. I think it really boils down to who you play with that determines how fun your online experience will be. Every game I’ve played with the Take 2 forumites has been a fun experience that I’ve loved while almost every game I’ve played with other online gamers has been an eye opening experience in terms of colourful language.

I can honestly say that with the new map pack release for Halo 3 I will be addicted to it for a long time yet to come. Thanks to Bungie for making probably one of the most fun games I’ve ever had a chance to play.

Birthday wishes from the Ch33f

Published on 16 April 2008 in Gaming and My Life. Closed Tags: Arby, Halo, Master Chief, Wakeangl.

Recently I’ve become a fan of the Arby & Master Chief videos done by Digital Ph33r which details Master Chief’s struggle to co-exist with his room mate, the Arbiter. Its a hilarious send up of your typical Halo 3 player who professes to have l33t skillz and provides plenty of good laughs dealing with online gaming.

My reason for mentioning all this is that this past week it was Newlande’s birthday and as a surprise birthday present for her I took up the challenge of creating a Flash birthday card for her featuring the vocal talents of Arby and Master Chief. It was an inspired idea by Mark really and that very evening I went home and proceeded to write a little script and use Microsoft Sam and Microsoft Mike to bring the card to life. Thankfully it came out wonderfully and provided Newlande with a great surprise for her birthday. It even managed to get posted on a local forum! Here’s the link to it if you want to view it:

Wakeangl’s Flash birthday card

Happy birthday to Newlande as well!

Google Talk Labs Edition

Published on 5 April 2008 in Computing. Closed Tags: Digsby, Google Talk, labs edition, Pidgin.

Just as I posted about the potential new release of Google Talk lo and behold, Google releases an experimental desktop version of the client for download. The Labs Version of Google Talk is effectively a downloadable version of the web gadget crossed with the original Google Talk client. So the extras such as tabbed chats, group chats and new emoticons are all included. There’s also integration with Google’s Calendar and Orkut services which will pop up desktop notifications of appointments and alerts.

So it all seems nice and rosy so far, but unfortunately there are some drawbacks in my opinion. First off there’s no chat history functionality built directly into the client itself. Yes, you still have the ability to go into your Gmail and see the chats there but this is a bit of a long winded solution to a simple problem. Google has also not yet included the ability to log into AIM accounts through the desktop clients. Some of the smaller niceties of the desktop client have also vanished such as being able to set your status to the currently playing music track. It really is confusing that there is now no less than 4 different ways to use Google’s IM service:

Google Mail’s in-built chat
Google Talk desktop clent
Google Talk Lab’s Edition
Google Talk web gadget

Google really does have to look at amalgamating all their various versions into one client. What makes it even worse is that each of the versions differs from the others in their feature sets. I myself will be sticking to the desktop client for my own IM needs as well as other options such as Digsby and Pidgin for my multi-protocol needs. See Google Operating System’s article for more detils.

A refreshing change

Published on 5 April 2008 in My Life. Closed Tags: Blogging, Wordpress.

Logging in to do my last blog post was quite the experience. Upon logging into my dashboard here on WordPress I was pleasantly surprised to see that the dashboard had been totally redesigned to fit with the new 2.5 release of WordPress. Everything is now easier to navigate and the backend to my blog has been upgraded so that I can bring a higher level of quality to my readers.

Most of these changes will go unnoticed to those of you reading this as they are all behind the scenes so here’s a quick rundown of the pertinent changes according to the WordPress staff:

Cleaner, faster, less cluttered dashboard — we’ve worked hard to take your feedback about what’s most important in the dashboard and organize things to allow you to focus on what’s important — your blog — and get out of your way. In collaboration with Happy Cog and the community we’ve taken the first major step forward in the WordPress interface since WordPress.com was created.

Dashboard Widgets — the dashboard home page is now a series of widgets, including ones to show you fun stats about your posting, latest comments, stats, people linking to you, and we’ll allow more customization here soon.

Multi-file upload with progress bar — before when you would upload a large file you’d wait forever, never knowing how far along it was. And uploading more than one photo was an exercise in patience, as you could only do one at a time. Now you can select a whole of folder images or music or videos at once and it’ll show you the progress of each upload.

Search posts and pages — search used to cover just posts, now it includes pages too, a great boon for those using WordPress.com as a CMS.

Tag management — you can now add, rename, delete, and do whatever else you like to tags from inside WordPress.

Concurrent editing protection — for those of you on multi-author blogs, have you ever opened a post while someone was already editing it, and your auto-saves kept overwriting each other, irrecoverably losing hours of work? I bet that added a few words to your vocabulary. Now if you open a post that someone else is editing, WordPress magically locks it and prevents you from saving until the other person is done. You’ll see a message like below.

Friendlier visual post editor — I’m not sure how to articulate this improvement except to say “it doesn’t mess with your code anymore.” We’re now using version 3.0 of TinyMCE, which means better compatibility with Safari, and we’ve paid particular attention this release to its integration and interaction with complex HTML. It also now has a “no-distractions” mode which is like Writeroom for your browser.

Built-in galleries — when you take advantage of multi-file upload to upload a bunch of photos, we have a new shortcode that lets you to easily embed galleries by just putting [ gallery] (without the space) in your post. It’ll display all your thumbnails and captions and each will link each to a page where people can comment on the individual photos.

This just goes to confirm that I made the right choice in moving to WordPress. The entire feature set offered to professional and amateur bloggers such as myself is excellent. I really can’t wait to see what other exciting things the wizards at WordPress have in store for us.

Phoning home

Published on 4 April 2008 in My Life. 1 Comment Tags: cellphones, k850i, upgrades, Vodacom.

Isn’t it funny how quickly time passes? It feels like just the other day that I went for my first proper cellphone contract with Vodacom and became the proud owner of a Sony Ericsson W800i phone. Now 2 years down the road I’ve just returned from my local Vodashop with a brand spanking new Sony Ericsson K850i phone that looks the business.

My old phone really endeared me to the brand and ever since then I’ve know that I would choose a Sony again hen my chance to upgrade arrived. I’ll admit that the choice was tough though. I was sorely tempted to go for the Nokia N73 but in the end I thought that it would be pointless to get a phone that was released in 2006. My only other option was one of the Walkman series of phones but the fact that I have an iPod makes that feature redundant for me, hence my choice of the K series.

Am I ever glad I chose it as well The phone has an awesome 5 mega pixel camera with a xenon flash that can take some darn amazing pictures. Seeing as I don’t have a digital camera I really will make the most of this phone’s photo capabilities. Its got all the goodies and extras that I need; GPRS, EDGE, MP3 playback, etc. So all in all I’m of the opinion that I made quite a good choice for my next phone. Kudos to Sony for making some real great phones of late as well. Now here’s hoping my pudgy fingers can take those darn small keys!

Bright ideas

Published on 2 April 2008 in My Life. 3 Comments Tags: DIY, Light bulbs, plants, weekends.

If there’s one thing that makes you feel like a man, its doing some DIY around the house. This was proven to me this past weekend when I got the chance to test my home handyman prowess when my bedroom light decided to pre-empt Eskom’s power cuts and die an honourable death. Never one to shirk away from a challenge I immediately sprung into action and grabbing the nearest chair and my trusty Phillips screwdriver I promptly unscrewed the light fixture and whipped out the dead bulb and swiftly replaced it in a mere matter of moments. I then turned on the light and my manly skills were confirmed as a bright and radiant light shone forth throughout my bedroom.

Heck, I can still remember the first time as a kid that I walked through the local hardware store. The heady aroma of wood and paint mixed together with a crowded floor of men talking in depth about screws and plastic fittings and walking around with tape measures. Its the same story when it comes to plants. You soon find yourself lost in some far away world of strange Latin sounding names for very ordinary looking plants. The tags on some of the plants indicate some of the most stringent conditions that each plant needs to survive. Some of which even make Mariah Carey’s diva outbursts look tame in comparison.

I actually can garner a lot of joy from simple and mundane tasks such as changing a light bulb. I think it stems from my organised life style. If anything is broken or out of place then I feel obligated to correct it. Maybe this is how some of the more eccentric people in recent memory started out Don’t worry though, I’m far from being a germaphobe. Now please excuse me. I have to scrub myself down with a special chemical formula and lie down in my sanitised bed area.

Pidgin 2.4.1 released

Published on 1 April 2008 in Computing. Closed Tags: Pidgin, Pidgin 2.4.1.

The latest and greatest version of Pidgin has just been released and addresses some issues I mentioned in an earlier post. The full list of changes is as follows:

libpurple

Treat AIM Unicode messages as UTF-16 rather than UCS-2; this should have no functional effect, other than continued support on systems which have dropped UCS-2 conversions.

Add support for setting buddy icons on Gadu-Gadu (Tomasz Salacinski)

Fix a crash when clearing the buddy icon for an account on XMPP

Fix a crash during login for some ICQ accounts

Prefer more available resources on XMPP when priorities are equal

Fix incorrectly marking some Yahoo! contacts as blocked

Improved handling of UTF-8 group names on ICQ (beret)

Fix a crash when starting if you have a Zephyr account

Increase XMPP ping timeout to 120 seconds, to prevent poor network connections from timing out unnecessarily.

Don’t crash on XMPP forms with empty default values.

Fix issues with CHAP authentication for SOCKS5 proxies.

Pidgin

Remove a workaround for older versions gstreamer that was causing crashes on some non-Linux systems such as HPUX

Fix some cases of the conversation input entry area being 1 pixel high

Fix for displaying channel & buddy names in conversation window when they have ‘&’ in them

Some memory leak fixes, especially in the Text Replacement plugin

Rectangular but non-square buddy icons have rounded corners in the buddy list

Finch

Fix compiling with Glib older than 2.6

Ensure existing conversations selected from the ‘Send IM’ dialog are given focus

Move the tooltip on the left of the buddylist if there’s not enough room on the right to show it.

You can download the latest version from here. I’ve been using it for a day so far and it seems to have resolved quite a few issues that I had with the previous version. We’re still waiting on the MSNP14 branch to be released into the main release and there are some slight UI changes that might annoy some users but otherwise its a great overall package.