Posts by Mushy-pea

I wouldn`t have believed time travel was possible through the use of programming, before I watched the Futurama feature length episode "Bender`s Big Score". It turns out you just need to utter the Universal Machine Language time code and bumf....a time machine turns up. Also, it`s a paradox correcting time code, so everything works perfectly....right up until when it DESTROYS THE UNIVERSE! I can`t write the code here in case the time machine sends this website to an era before the internet was invented, but it starts with 1011010101111011.

Steven.

If you have the XP CD I think you can change/install the language for US/UK english. Have a look for the language bar on next to the clock.

Did you download the US version?

The guy in the shop did say this is possible, but that you have to do a new installation from the recovery disk. I decided to pass on that option in case it didn`t recover. I managed to find the language options in Opera. For future reference, they`re in the bottom option of the 6th menu to the right, the lowest drop down menu in the window. Thank you both for your help. I just didn`t fancy searching for ages if this facility didn`t even exist.

Steven.

Hi. I live in Japan and recently bought a second hand laptop, with Japanese Windows XP on it. When I got it home I promptly installed Opera 9.61 (my favourite browser :) ) and started browsing away. The only problem is that the install program thought I was Japanese and listed every language option in Japanese Kanji symbols. So, I`ve not got an instance of Opera using some unknown language that may be from Eastern Europe. Just out of interest, does anyone know if it`s possible to change the language from within Opera or if I`d have to reinstall and try again?

Steven.

Hi. If you gained the ability to look inside every other mind that exists, do you think you would lose the ability to hold any particular point of view, given that you were now aware of how everyone has reached their individual view.

Steven.

Hi. Some people might remember a post made a long time ago, which contained a link to one of this set of irritating games. Well, as you can see they're still there (plus a few more) and just as irritating as ever. But, what you might have missed the first time is the strange story of the games' creator Kek and Virginie. You might find it worth a read.

Steven.

Hi. I recently removed one of the user accounts from a Vista laptop I've been using. I was asked if I wanted to delete the user's folder as well and selected yes. However, after creating another user I noticed that the previous user's folder was still there. As the administrator, I tried to delete it manually but was informed that "The folder is in use by another program". Explorer shows the folder as empty, except when I look at the properties and thousands of sub-folders and files are apparently found.

What is even stranger is that different numbers of files and sub-folders are shown some times than others. I would be interested to hear if anyone else has encountered such strange behaviour and if you are aware of a fix for this. Thanks.

Steven.

Hi. In my house we have an IPv6 capable router, for which the owner of has kindly given me the password for the settings page. It is a Linksys DD-WRT wireless device with Linux installed. When you enable IPv6 support it gives you the option to enter a Radvd configuration script. After a bit of searching I have found some Linux oriented articles about what Radvd is and how a basic script might look. However, what I could do with knowing is whether Radvd can interoperate with DHCP.

In other words, should I be able to set up the router with a script that will allow my Vista machine to obtain an IP address from it automatically in this way? If this is possible, does anyone know of a useful article about how this might be done. Any advice appriciated.

Steven.

Hi. I was at work in my call centre today when a colleage asked me to have a look at a customer issue. We support BT broadband customers, but we're not BT (they just pay us to do it). So, this guy is saying he's getting slow web page loading on his Vista PC, but during a remote desktop session to him it is shown he can download a 5 MB file from our speed test site at about 4 M bit / s. Considering the service he's using has a network contention ratio, this is quite good and certainly not slow enough to indicate a fault. However, when doing a tracert to web servers the report always shows only one hop being covered (which does correspond to the targeted server).

Needless to say we "refered the customer to their computer / software vendor". I was just wondering if anyone else has seen this kind of glitch before, or might know what could cause it?

Steven.

Hi people. The idea of this game is to make people guess the answers to rather obscure questions, like....

Which of these two has the larger data capacity?

(a) My CD collection

(b) The hard disk on my laptop

Steven.

It must be possible to get a dropdown menu by right clicking the install file. This is most likely the way to solve the problem.

Steven.

No, it's running at the out of the box speed. There is another sightly odd issue with it though. It's supposed to have 1 GB of RAM, but the BIOS shows it as having 894 MB (which is also 2 MB less than the first time I checked). I still haven't worked that one out yet.

I'll give that idea about the BIOS a try. I've got a 9 year old computer which the battery is still fine on.

Hi. I've got this issue on my Vista laptop that's been there since I got the thing about six months ago. The system clock falls behind the actual time at a silly rate, which can be up to several minutes in a session but varies sporadically. Then every so often it will synchronise with a time server and suddenly catch up. Has anyone heard of a Vista issue that could cause this behaviour, or does it seem more likely to you that it's a hardware problem? Any advice appriciated.

Steven.

Hi guys and girls. Has anyone else heard the new Radiohead album In Rainbows? The gimmick is, you can choose what yoy want to pay for it on their website.

Steven.

That's a good suggestion. Except that the machine has an off board ATI graphics card with 256 MB dedicated RAM. At least, that's what the specification says.

Steven.

Hi. I've got a Packard Bell laptop that is specified as having 1 GB of RAM. However, looking in the Windows system information and the BIOS both show it as having 896 MB. Does anyone know how I would go about determining whether the missing RAM is being used for another purpose (like borrowed by the graphics card), or if there is a technical problem here? Any advice appriciated.

Steven.

It's more a case of where we'll draw the line. I'd just refuse to give a sample if it came to that. Same with identity cards or having to tell the government the moment I move house. In any case, the real solution in the UK is not having a load of horrible "types" around in the first place. Can't say I can come up with an answer to that one.

Steven.

Hello. I started learning Perl some time in 2006 and found it very suitable for the development of a web based application. I was impressed by the way you can get so much done in just a few lines of code. To be fair, I haven't done much work with other high level "scripting" languages (Python, Ruby etc.), so I don't have much to compare with. I would still suggest you do spend some time learning Perl and see what you think though.

Hi people. Just thought I would warn about a little issue I had with my Vista system last night. I tried to install colinux and the system crashed to a blue screen. When I tried to start it again normally it suffered some kind of kernel mode exception, did a core dump and restarted. Oh dear, I thought :( . Next time round, the vendor's (Packard Bell) recovery console was able to do a system restore and the machine can boot normally now :) .

So, be careful. Somthing in the device driver that comes with that software can really bite Vista quite hard.

Steven.

Firstly, I work on a BT Business technical desk in Bristol. I must say Serunsun, there is nothing more satisfying than getting a residential customer come through to you and politely transfering them through to India, then having a little chuckle about it :) . Also, I think corporations are shooting themselves in the foot out sourcing as much CS to India as they do now (seeing how many people here don't seem to like it). Then again, if every company in a particular market does it you don't really have a choice in the matter.

Steven.

Hi. I wrote a simple test web server script in Perl a few months ago. Did I read any HTTP specification documents before starting to find out what I'd need to parse? Hell no, I just listened on port 80 and reverse engineered the protocol from there :) ! Well, kind of. The HTTP requests I got from Opera browser during testing looked somthing like this:

GET: test.html
ACCEPT: Content-type: text/html
ACCEPT: encoding: iso 8859-1
....etc

So, basically the browser said what file it wanted and then listed what kind of response would be acceptable (including the expected encoding type). I hope this helps.

Steven.

I think there is another option to consider here. Perhaps it would benefit some people to ditch the OS concept and run software on the "bare metal". You'd have to write the stuff first of course, but to someone as masochistic as me that sounds like a nice idea :) . Well, I'll be going for now then folks. I've got a TCP / IP stack to write so I can make my home brew browser work....

Steven.

I work for an ISP (BT Retail, business broadband) in the UK, on the help desk. We're getting a steadily increasing tricle of businesses calling us about Vista issues. However, I've not so far identified a case of Vista being "incompatible" with either the DHCP server of the RAS or one of our supported routers. I've managed to get a few people connected over wireless as well. We use PPPoA and VC - MUX.

Steven.

Hi everyone. Could anyone tell me how I can enable non - admin users to run programs installed by the admin user? I installed Opera 9.1 as an admin, but I'm not sure how to allow other users to access it. Any advice appriciated.

Steven.

May I take this opportunity to point out a few other treats from "over the pond" to our American members? OK, great....

1. Phoenix Nights: It's difficult to make Oldham famous, but Peter Kay managed it.

2. Peep Show: It's like a first person shooter, but with no guns and those guys who are in the Apple adverts (Mapin and Webb).

3. The Mighty Boosh: bit hard to explain really....

Steven.

Hi everyone. My apologies if this has already been said but....having come to this thread late I'm too lazy to read all 52 pages. I have read enough to get the gist of it, honest :) . So, what you believe does not affect what the truth is (unless you actually are God, of course). I have questioned the nature of existence and the point of my own existence for so long that it left me feeling empty and pointless. These days, I'm content to just wait for whatever is going to happen and deal with that. I know I'll never escape from this mystery, save for death.

One thought I did find interseting is: what would it be like if you could see inside other peoples minds? If I could see how everyone else reached there opinions and decisions, how could I have an opinion of my own?

Steven.

In fact, what you just said makes them seem pretty related. State changes in materials usually do occur as a result in temperature change and it is usually a progressive transition that can occur over a range of temperatures.

Steven.

You could use the wget Unix utility in combination with Perl to do this. Even if you don't have a Windows port of it you could use this: http://pages.interlog.com/~tcharron/wgetwin.html. Just call it with system and it will put the content of a web page in a file on your machine. Then you can do what you like with it in Perl. I hope this helps.

Steven.

Hi Josh. In fact, I didn't even state the question right. 400 nm is of course 4 * 10 -7 m. Evsn so, the answer is still far smaller, being 600 nm (6 * 10 -7 m). The resolution is given by laser wavelength / numerical aperture. This is actually somthing that came up during my final year project at uni, 'cause I was building a two photon microscope. Anyway, do you have another question?

Steven.

The strength of a classical gravitational field is measured in N kg ^ -1 (Newtons per kilogram). On the surface of the earth this is measured to be about 9.8 N kg ^ -1. Apologies if this has already been said in the thread, but I'm in an internet cafe so in a rush. If no one minds I'll set another question seeing as the last one apparently went a bit "stale":

An imaginary new HD video system (called Purple - Ray) has been launched and the laser it uses to read the disks has a wavelength of 400 nm (4 * 10 ^ -9 m). The lens used has a numerical appature of 1.5. What is the minimum size the markings on the disk (that represent the data) could have and still be resolved by the laser?

Note: numerical aperture is a dimensionless quantity, hence the lack of a unit.

Steven.

If the IP addresses of the sites are dynamic (which sounds a bit freaky :!: ) but their names stay the same, you could use URL referer blocking. This will only work if people are reaching your site by clicking links on the other sites. Referers are fairly easily faked, so this won't stop malicious flooding. If you want these visitors to not even reach youi pages or scripts, you'll need to change the web server settings to block these URLs.

Steven.

Having considered the situation further, I have decided it will be better for me to find a work around within the workings of my site, rather than going through the hassle of changing providers. It would be a fairly simple matter to make the scripts generate static versions of dynamic pages. Thanks for the advice, anyway.

Steven.

Hello everyone. I informed Google of my forum website URL via the standard method recently. Within about five days, it started finding search terms inside my forum when given "Mushy-pea [search terms]". Nice one Google, I thought :) . However, when you click links that go from Google directly to a request on my forum script visitors are presented with "Access denied" from the host's web server. After a couple of support requests I managed to get them to admit they use referer checking that blocks links to CGI scripts from outside the same domain. They say it's to prevent people searching for insecure CGI spam relay possibilities (which won't ring true to anyone here who knows how easily referers can be faked).

I wondered if anyone could offer advice on a couple of points:

1. Does this sound like un - reasonable service to you (on a £5 per month hosting account) ?

2. Can you recommend a decent host I could migrate the site to, that doesn't operate such draconian and (to me, unfair) restrictions?

Any advice appriciated.

Steven.

Just a quick update about how the forum is going:

1. The website has "gone multiple", with a Haskell forum being added today.

2. A Major Site Update (MSU) is currently in progress. When it's finished the software will be up to version 0.6 (beta). Features to be added include admin and user control panels, user profiles (avatars etc.), a better looking front end and a search engine.

Enjoy (soon) :) .

Steven.

P.S. They'll be smilies too :) :p :surprised :twisted: .

Hello everyone. I'm trying to install a Ralink tech. wireless PCI network card on netBSD 3.1. I've looked at a netBSD online manual page and it says there is a driver for this chipset in the distribution I'm using (namely ral(4)). However, after booting up with the card physically installed and running dmesg I find this entry in the log:

Ralink Tachnologies device 0x030 at pci0, function 20 not configured

The part that is troubling me is the absence of a device name in /dev (i.e. no ral0 or other such thing here, as you can see). Does anyone know why this might be and how I can fix this issue? I'm pretty sure I won't be able to get a driver to work with it if it doesn't have a device name. Any advice appriciated.

Steven.

To expand on what masijade said (which is correct): .pm files are library files. This means they contain subroutines that many programs may find useful. They can be used in a program as follows

require image_verify.pm

as an example. Your program will then be able to call subroutines within the file you called require on as if they had been pasted into the program.

Steven.

I followed your advice and it worked joe :p . Because I had no web browser on the comp. I was doing this on I had to look up the location of the dependencies (in NetBSD pkgsrc online) in an internet cafe and write them down. Then I used wget to download them "non - interactively". Now I've got Opera 9.1 working. Well, it beats reading HTML you've downloaded manually and trying to work out what the page looks like in your head :) .

Steven.

Hello everyone. We were introduced to a nifty little tool in my job today (I'm in broadband tech support). It's called Go To Assist and it lets you "share" a customers desktop to help solve their problems remotely. I came up with tyhe idea of trying to do a reciprocal session where two win XP systems are controlling each others desktops. The result when we tried it on each other? Imagine placing two mirrors opposite each other and you'd be getting close :p . I would advice you try it.

Steven.

Hello everyone. I recently "migrated" my 8 year old computer from Windows 98 to NetBSD 3.1. The installation went fine and the machine is able to connect to the internet through a local router :) . However, I still have a couple of questions to ask:

1. When you run a command and pipe the output into "less" i.e.

ls /usr/bin | less

the only way I can find to stop the less process when I'm finished with it is to press CTRL + Z (CTRL + C and CTRL + D do not work). So, I end up using kill every so often to terminate the stopped less processes (so I don't get a big chunk of them building up). Is there a way to terminate "less" without having to stop it first like this?

2. I have been trying to install a set of applications to let me carry on my web development work on the system. I was told on one of the NetBSD chat rooms that pkg_add will automatically retrieve dependencies from the netbsd.org servers when you run it on a package file that has them. I tried to install the Linux version of Opera 9.1 like this, but pkg_add said it had failed to find some Linux libraries it needed. Have I been inadvertently mislead about this issue, or has pkg_add just gone wrong on this occasion?

It isn't too critical, as I can use wget to download the required …

Yes. I have checked out the Perl documentation and that's just the job. Thanks.

Steven.

Hi. The problem has been solved now. I reset the CMOS and un - bent the pins on the keyboard cable (which I can only assume I damaged myself a few days ago). The ethernet card got installed easily as well :p .

Steven.

It is a PS2.

Steven.

Hello everyone. I added an ethernet adapter card to a computer of mine yesterday and the keyboard stopped working. I've checked the connection and it's fine. The keyboard appears to be disabled at BIOS level because I can't get into setup by pressing DEL during the boot process. Windows still boots up fine and the mouse works. I think my only option is to remove the CMOS battery and replace again to make the BIOS scan for devices again. Has anyone else had a problem like this and did resetting the CMOS sort it out? Thanks for any advice.

Steven.

Say your data is in a variable called $page. You can use the split function to split on the first line break only and then only apply your data processing code to the text that appears after that. Take a look at this:

@stuff = split(/\\n/, $page, 2);

You can find out how the split function works here:

http://perldoc.perl.org/functions/split.html

In the example I have given above, the data in the variable $page after the first line break is put into $stuff[1]. Remember, some characters (including \ ) have special meanings when used inside a regular expression (//) and therefore need to be escaped with a \ . It would be useful to give this page about regular expressions a good read if you haven't yet:

http://perldoc.perl.org/perlretut.html

I hope this helps.

Steven.

At 17 I was cleaning toilets in a large London hospital, because it was better than being on the dole (unemployed.)

If you think that's bad Davey; prepare to cringe;) . In my work today we were asked to take part in a game about questioning (related to questioning customers). The object was for each team to pick an occupation and get asked questions about it by the other team (3 open, 3 probing, 3 closed). Anyway, we got talking about jobs we'd actually done. This guy called Mark tells us how he worked in a hospital laundry for a few hours. We're talking dealing with surgical gowns with blood and the occasional bits of organs on them (respirators provided). Oh and the constant bits of skin floating around in the air and sticking to him.

McDonalds, ASDA? Luxury, man :) .

Steven.

Hi Avik. What you require is a program that replaces each instance of \n with \n\n. This could easily be done in Perl, but is so simple it would be neater to use sed. Seeing as you said a Unix script would be OK I'll assume you've got sed on your system and that you're in fact using a Unix system. In this case type the following into the shell:

cd /usr/bin
sed 's/\\n/\\n\\n/gw /path_to_file/new_file.txt' <good.txt

To add spaces before the start of each paragraph just add them to the end of the regex (between the first // block). If a mod reads this feel free to move it to the Unix scripts forum. I hope this helps.

Steven.

Try to get some voluntary work for a while. It is usually easier to get then paid work and can look pretty good on your CV. I worked in Oxfam bookshops voluntarily several times over the last few years and I think it helped me get my current job in IT. In the interview 75% of the questions were about customer service and 25% were about IT. Also, don't be disappointed you didn't get a job in McDonalds. No matter how well you do, they'll pay you as little as possible for it for as long as they can get away with it.

Believe me, my friend was an shift runner there and still on less than £6 an hour. Keep trying and you'll be OK in the end.

Steven.

Well, it's no wonder you were a Prolient fan. What a useful feature.

Steven.

As an update to what I said about the job earlier; I failed the trial at the mill and the owner replaced me with someone else :mad: . However, a couple of weeks after that I got a job in a call centre in Bristol supporting BT broadband users :) . It's known as first line IT support, which is why I've changed my user title to reflect this role :p . I've already moved into the city and I start tommorow. Happy days, hey?

Steven.

Hello everyone. I have been using the Haskell compiler GHC 6.6 a bit recently to test some simple programs (for learning purposes). In it's default mode it produces three output files for a given source file: a .exe, a .o and a .hi. The .exe is quite big and I found out elsewhere that's because it contains all the base Haskell runtime functions statically linked. Does anyone know what goes in the .hi file? I've just not used a compiler that produces three output files before, so I'm curious. I would assume the .o is an object file (i.e. contains the instructions generated from your source code).

Steven.