So, some additional tweaking today and here’s where my li’l baby is at now:
Experience Index Part 2
Archive for the ‘Tech’ Category
New computer
21
Dec
Christmas came early this year, or to be slightly more precise, the Swedish postal service delivered my brand new computer 3 days before Christmas.
Took roughly 2,5 hours to screw it all together. (Yes, yes. I know, I know. I’m really rusty.)
I already knew before hand what probably the weakest link in the new power-chain would be, and I was right. The RAM is way too slow compared to the rest of the computer. I’ll throw the experience index from Win7 up for good measure, not exactly accurate, but before I get all giddy and just have to install three billion different performance test suites, it’ll have to do.
Without further ado, here it is:
Windows 7 Experience Index Score
I’ll update the true stats a little later as well as all the parts that this little black baby has eaten.
Ubuntu 11.10 – Setting up automatic connection to wlan
16
Dec
More or less some notes to myself again:
(Assuming, of course, that the wlan interface is wlan0.)
The magic command for generating the required PSK for WPA/WPA2 is wpa_passphrase.
janne@pingu:~$ wpa_passphrase ExampleSSID DamnLongPassword
network={
ssid="ExampleSSID"
#psk="DamnLongPassword"
psk=9981ece75e0eb563acbc783b1ce4250e7383d9ce7f71caa0d8406c0d1495f4bb
}
When that’s done add the information to /etc/network/interfaces:
auto wlan0 iface wlan0 inet dhcp wpa-ssid "ExampleSSID" wpa-psk 9981ece75e0eb563acbc783b1ce4250e7383d9ce7f71caa0d8406c0d1495f4bb
…and finally you might want to remove network-manager to avoid conflicts.
Now this combined with automatic login lets me reboot my laptop at home without having to a) login and b) connect to the wireless.
How-to: Resize hard disk in VirtualBox
07
Dec
Just a note to myself again, this time on how to resize a virtual hard disk in VirtualBox. Stupid as I was I never changed from the really small 8GB disk VirtualBox suggested per default and had to pay up quickly after I started fiddling around in my virtual Ubuntu installation.
Here are the steps:
- Run cmd.exe and cd C:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox
- VBoxManage.exe modifyhd “<full path to the vhd/vdi>” –resize <new size in MB>
(Note: there are two dashes before resize) - Boot up the virtual machine from i.e. a Ubuntu live-cd .iso
- Start gparted (if not installed run sudo apt-get install gparted and when it’s done sudo gparted)
- Delete the swap-partition within the extended partition, move the extended to the end of the unallocated space
- Recreate the swap within the extended partition
- Resize the primary / partition to include all the unallocated space left over
- Shutdown the virtual and remove the iso-image
- Try starting up the virtual and check disk space available with df -ah in the Terminal
10 billion Android app downloads
06
Dec
I was browsing the android market today and saw this big banner at the top saying something about “10 billion downloads”, slightly curious I decided to have a look at what the fuss was about.
They had a bunch of interesting apps for about 1 SEK each, among them SketchBook Mobile, Great Little War Game, SwiftKey X Keyboard, Paper Camera, Asphalt 6: Adrenaline HD and Minecraft – Pocket Edition. Also SoundHound, Endomondo and a couple others, but they did not seem that interesting. I bought all the ones I linked above. 
Sketchbook Mobile – Works nicely on my Samsung Galaxy S2, quite intuitive controls for drawing on the screen. Even small details can be drawn once you pinch-zoom enough.
Great Little War Game – Had this one from earlier, it’s quite a nice game. BUT, it seriously drains the battery. I mean drains in the way a 4 inch pipe drains a gallon of water.
SwiftKey – quite impressive keyboard, also cool that it’s multilingual and supports up to three languages at once. Meaning I can have English, Swedish and Finnish all at the same time and don’t have to switch between which I’m typing it, it will recognize which language I’m writing in and give suggestions based on that.
Paper Camera – This was probably the most “useless” of the apps I bought, but still a bit fun to see in real-time the overlay/effect which will be applied to the final picture.
Asphalt 6 – Fun racing game, but this one also drains the battery quickly. A rough dozen laps around the tracks resulted in almost 10% drain on the battery.
Minecraft – Never understood what the Minecraft fuss is about. I still don’t. Probably nice for those who are hooked to the blocks.
Here’s the link to the promo-page: https://market.android.com/details?id=apps_timed_promotion&feature=banner&pli=1
Whoopsie…
30
Nov
Just noticed that I made a mistake when I reinstalled my webserver.
Installed server – Check.
Updates? – Check.
Installed LAMP – Check.
Moved all files – Check.
Moved databases – Check.
Moved configuration files – Check.
Check if site works – Fail.
Enabled htaccess – Check.
Site works? – Check.
Now here’s where it went wrong, I never checked that any sub-pages work, just the front page. So in short, fail.
I forgot to enable rewrite for Apache. *Doh!*
Oh well.
Shit happens and then you fix your mistakes while maintaining the illusion that next time you’ll remember it.
Conditional formatting in Excel 2007 and 2010
28
Oct
I upgraded to Office 2010 this week and was today playing around in Excel. (I consider myself somewhat of an Excel power-user.)
Apparently there’s a bunch of new stuff you’re supposed to be able to do with Conditional Formatting, but I would’ve been very happy with them just working for starters.
Scenario A: Need to color cells in columns J:O based on the values in B:G on the same sheet.
This seemed simple enough and I quickly worked out that I could just use the normal format the cell depending on a formula. 3 rules to format in 3 colors. The formula itself was quite simple, an IF() to compare value1 with value2. Value1 and 2 fetched with INDEX().
Like this:
=IF(INDEX($A$1:$O$38;ROW();COLUMN())>INDEX($A$1:$O$38;ROW();COLUMN()-8);TRUE;FALSE)
=IF(INDEX($A$1:$O$38;ROW();COLUMN())=INDEX($A$1:$O$38;ROW();COLUMN()-8);TRUE;FALSE)
=IF(INDEX($A$1:$O$38;ROW();COLUMN())<INDEX($A$1:$O$38;ROW();COLUMN()-8);TRUE;FALSE)
Short explanation: INDEX(A1:O38; …; …) this grabs the values so far as an array. ROW() and COLUMN() just return the current row and column numbers so index can return the content of the cell.
Scenario B: Same thing as above, but use Icon Sets with arrows up, down and sideways instead of coloring the background.
I first tried to set the > and >= to use Formula. This resulted in the formulas disappearing from the input field half the time. Apparently they did not disappear, they just showed blank though the formula was in there. Reading invisible stuff is a bit of a challenge for me at least.
Switched to using type Number instead and just fetching the correct cell with INDEX($A$1:$O$38;ROW();COLUMN()-8), but this resulted in most of the arrows pointing in incorrect directions. Very odd, I would have imagined that this one would work right off the bat.
About 15 minutes later I realized that if I use INDEX() on just a single cell like I described above, it worked! Meaning I could now use the format painter to paint one cell at a time and it would show the correct arrow. At this point everything was more or less hunky-dory, until I gave the formula to a colleague who has Excel 2007… and of course that did not work at all.
*&%#¤!!
Scenario A worked in 2007 though. It also seems that if you’re not careful when entering the formula as Number, it will add =” ” around INDEX. This caused some of the problems I was seeing.
One really weird thing I saw in 2010 was that when I looked through the list of Conditional formatting rules, the “Applies to”-section would become blank as I scrolled down and back up. See the screenshots below.
Conditional Formatting rules, before scrolling
Conditional formatting rules, scrolled down a few steps
Conditional formatting rules, back to the top
How-to: mysqldump
24
Oct
Note to self:
mysqldump -u USER -p PASS -databases DB1 DB2 | gzip -9 > dumpfile.sql.gz
Samsung Blu-ray problems
06
Oct
Uncommon customer care? Yeah, spot on.
A while back (in August to be precise) I bought a brand-spanking-new Blu-ray surround system from Samsung (model HT-D5550), installed it at home together with the TV (also a Samsung), hooked up the Xbox 360 without problems. It’s got a nice glossy black finish (kinda plastic on closer inspection though) and the birds have been singing since then…
Until yesterday that is. My wife told me while I was at work that she couldn’t get the new Lion King-disc to work on it, I figured to myself that it’s probably just a question of who’s holding the remote.
Alas, it wasn’t. After getting home and turning everything on, shoving the disc into the player it starts up. I see the Disney castle. How quaint. The water is moving below the castle. Very nice. Checking what the info-button says on the remote yielded the positively delightful answer that this will go on for another 18 minutes. It didn’t.
I turned off the player, back on, checked for firmware updates (“No new updates available”, of course) and hit play again. Same story, same castle, same moving water for 18 minutes. This is the point in time I opted for the W-T-F-question-mark-combo.
A little googling later it appears some Disney movies might have playback problems in Samsung players. Effin beautiful.
Right, back to the shelf to grab half a dozen other blu-ray discs.
- Pirates of the Caribbean: On stranger tides (Disney)? Nope.
- Prince of Persia (Disney)? Nope.
- Gran Torino (WB)? Nope… uh, what?
- Bucket List? Yep. No problem.
After poking around the player to find where the serial number was located (in the back-bottom-corner of the player which is held quite firmly in place by all the cables in the back, of course) and rigging up a mirror to snatch a photo of it, I went to Samsung’s delightfully unhelpful support-pages to look for where I could submit a ticket, case or whatever they opt to call it. I spotted the “Ask us by e-mail” link and filled in the form with pretty much all the information I’ve just described here above.
Today I was being carefully hopeful while waiting for an answer. Pling! went the phone, new mail. Yay!
After scrolling through the mandatory mail-headers I found the reply to my question. It went pretty much like this:
Typically it’s the software which causes playback problems on some discs. In that case you will have to wait for a new update which will solve this. In your case when you already have updated the firmware you can either wait until the next update, to see if your movies weren’t included, or you can turn to your store so they can have a look at the equipment.
Please contact us again if you have any additional questions.
Best regards,
Samsung Support
Wait, what?
I can either continue to wait and see, if the next firmware update solves my problems or go back to the store (how easy that is, considering it’s online with offices in the other end of the country) with the equipment?
Let’s see. A surround-system with integrated blu-ray player should, by definition, play blu-ray discs.
Right?
Well, it doesn’t. What it does is play DVDs though, but had I wanted a fancy DVD-player for that amount of money, I probably would have bought one.
I guess you might read between the lines at this point and take a wild shot in the dark on what I selected in the feedback section under “This information was useful to me”.
I have a bunch of circle-shaped pieces of plastic in my shelf which are pretty much worthless now. So the big question is what the heck do I do now?
Contact the store?
Disney?
Samsung’s delightful “uncommon customer care” again?
