Category Archives: Computers

Upgrading to Edgy Eft (Ubuntu 6.10)

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Ubuntu LogoRight now rain my main linux machine at home is busy downloading the packages to complete the upgrade to Ubuntu 6.10 – Edgy Eft. It was pretty easy todo just dropped to the command line (well gnome-terminal) and ran ‘sudo update-manager -c -d’ typed in my root password and let it start downloading. I know this is going to take awhile, according to the little time estimate about 5 hours on my 384k ADSL line.

Upgrade to Edgy Eft So while I’m waiting for it to finish downloading I’m busy reading up about some of the cool new stuff in Edgy Eft and trying to decide what I’m going to tweak first. I think I’ll start with getting AIGLX + Compiz working, also want to see what kind of a difference upstart makes to startup times and then I think I’ll kinda wing-it and see what looks cool. Looks like I’ll be spending plenty of time on the Ubuntu Forums.

Release Notes for Ubuntu Edgy Eft, so you can see what’s new and cool.

Visual Studio ate my setup project.

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Well Ok, technically it didn’t “eat” the setup project just manage to nibble at the dependencies.. (Of course this happens when you’re on a deadline racing against the clock trying to get something finished and built so that it can go off to a customer who is about to fly off to install it.)

So the problem is as follows you’ve got a Setup Project and when you build it you get an error similar to the one below, possible more than one error message (I had 5).

The dependencies for the object ‘policy_8_0_microsoft_vc80_atl_x86.msm’ cannot be determined.

Continue reading →

How do you make money with a website?

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I want to know how people make money off there websites… I’m not talking the couple of cents they make from AdWords I’ talking real money.. the kind that lets you buy cars, plans and small countries.

The last few weeks I’ve been spending alot of time looking at online business’s with a particular eye towards how to make money with them and somethings got me very puzzled how do they all make money?

Continue reading →

It’s like riding a bicycle (re-learning PHP)

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So today I decided to fixup a few things on stuff.za.net and while I’m at it add a few cool plugins to wordpress.

One of those plugins was Now Reading which is pretty cool plugin that allows you too keep track of the books you’re reading. Of course once I added it I wanted to make a few “minor” changes to the templates so that it fitted in with the rest of my site better… that was about 4 hours ago. Continue reading →

It’s a Bug

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“Dear Google,

I have found a bug in your Google Maps service. A big one indeed.
In fact, I worry for my life, that it might come and eat me.
So please, won’t you fix this bug in a hurry? I’m sure you can ask
the German military to aid you in the struggle against this bug.

The bug in question can be sighted here, in all it’s scary godzilla-like
mean self: Link to Bug

Yours truly.”

A post on TheDailyWTF forum by nobody.

Fonts

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Been messing around with doing a little design work this morning… and discovered Pengiun Fonts.

If you’re looking for “free” fonts that look cool and instructions on installing them on your linux distro of choice this is the place to go look. Oh and if you’re using Ubuntu and want to install the fonts easily just open Nautilus goto the location fonts:/// and drag the font in…

Article on Online Retailing

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A really good read.. this article gives a very different view of the world of online retailing.

The articles called A view from (under) the long tail.

I really love the following bit from the article:

Where Amazon?s normal customer service seems to be run by suspiciously cheerful MBAs from Stanford, who break off from counting their stock options to write apologies and deliver refunds, ?Amazon Advantage?, the ironically named system for selling wares, is clearly based on the last days of the Soviet system.

Found via Slashdot?

Paint.NET

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Paint.NET ScreenshotI stumbled across this one while I was looking for a solution to an odd problem in .NET 2.0 (C#, trying to save a changed datasource.)

What’s cool about Paint.NET is that it’s a free Open Source photo editing software. The other cool part is that it’s written in .NET… that makes it really cool. It currently is only available for Windows but Miguel de Icaza (of Evolution and Mono fame) did try porting it to mono and it was mildly successful. As Mono improves they hope eventually to be able to get it to run on Mono properly, which will mean that it will become available on Linux (and the other *nix that can run Mono) and Mac OSX.

Paint.NET is not a direct replacement for something like Adobe Photoshop or the Gimp but rather a photo manipulation application thats easy to use and does the stuff that most of us really want to do. This is going to be the photo editing software I recommend to all my friends for there Windows machines (replacing the Windows port of the Gimp) simply because it’s so much easier to use.

Paint.NET Official Website.
Paint.NET Wikipedia Entry.
Rick Brewster’s Blog – One of the developers of Paint.NET

Apple’s new product – iTV

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iTVSo if you’re a Apple fanboy you’ve probably already heard about there cool new piece of hardware coming to a TV near you… sometime in the not too distant future…
What is this new device? oooh well it’s kinda like a mini MacMini… you plug it into the network or let it join your wireless one and then it’ll stream music/video/photo’s from iTunes…

I currently use my MacMini for this, it’s plugged into my LCD TV and acts as a sort of “entertainment PC” and plays all the stuff I have on my desktop Linux machine. But this new little box is smaller than a MacMini, doesn’t need a keyboard, mouse or anything and will have things like component video out.

So as you can tell I want one.. and I want one bad… the bad news is they’ll only be coming out sometime next year and they not going to be extremely cheap but probably less than a MacMini.

You can read more about it here and here