Probably not the best choice of photo possible, but here’s an interesting one that the camera threw up:
Answers on a postcard… or in the comments section.
Compsoc Holiday Caption Competition
July 1st, 2009Fun with compiling
May 28th, 2009In a desperate effort to procrastinate today, I’ve been tinkering on the Linux ITS machines seeing if I can supplement their provided software. To this end I’ve attempted to build some decent multimedia apps (vlc and mplayer), update Firefox from 2.0 which was being used, and install Chrome; all in a non-root environment.
Firefox was at least successful (eventually), after sorting out a mountain of dependencies and ensuring that they were all compiled against updated libraries (in particular, various libraries were compiling against old versions of fontconfig which later threw undefined symbol errors for FT_SYMBOL_SIZE). Unfortunately, until/unless I compile KDE for these computers (it’s presently on 3.5), it isn’t possible to compile gtk-qt, so Firefox looks somewhat horrendous on the default theme. KDE4 though… there’s an idea. Instead, I’m using the rather lovely Chromify theme, which hides most of the defects for now.
It’s taken years to get Chrome to start compiling, not least because of the dependency tree that needed sorting. A more trying problem was that Chrome uses SCONS via gyp to set up the development environment. Cruelly, scons uses its own $PATH variable which it determines of its own accord. This meant that all of the dependencies that I’d built into /local/usr weren’t being referenced in the SCONS path. Additionally, editing the scons files themselves with the PATH setting didn’t work because they were regenerated by gyp at each reinitialising of the environment. Eventually after much trial and error I found a workaround in editing the src/build/common.gypi file to include the line:
'ENV': {'PATH': '/custom/path/variable/here'},
Within the scons_variable_settings block for linux.
Warwick Word 2007 fix
April 17th, 2009There seems to be a problem on ITS windows machines at the moment where trying to do nearly anything in Word (even pasting content into the page, or attempting to print it), results in Word complaining that “The Macros in this project are disabled”. Until ITS presumably release a fix soon, you can fix this now by:
- Enabling the “Developer” tab in the ribbon – Open Word Options from the menu which is opened by clicking on the circular thing in the top left. Under “Popular” options should be “Show developer tab on the ribbon”. Enable it.
- Open the Document Tempalates dialogue – it’s under the developer tab.
- Disable the addins – On the templates tab, uncheck both the “MathType Commands 6 for Word” and “MathPage” Global Templates and Add-ins.
And you should be done! Yay!
HYS / Abolishing SATs
April 11th, 2009I know that ill-informed and stupid comments on HYS are a fact of life which are nearly as mundane to point out as the colour of the sky, but sometimes I just can’t help it.
With the recent news that the NUT wishes to boycott SATs this year, the right-minded British public shared some of its thoughts here. And they’re just not getting the point:
Boycotting SATs does not mean that teachers wish to abolish all assessment for Primary school students, only to abolish the ridiculous SAT system which only pressures headteachers and teachers to narrow the range of primary education to focus only on those areas assessed by SATs. Assessing student attainment is good, but compromising a broad education for the sake of very specific maths, science and english question answering skills is, frankly, ridiculous.
Also, Mr BAZ S of Scotland: the tax payer is exactly who should /not/ have a say in this. Taxpayers know dick.
Warwick SU Election Results
February 22nd, 2009Reposting from Dave McCormick.
President:
- Andrew Bradley
- Mitchell Fung
- Andy Glyde
- Sam Shirley
- Asen Geshakov
Unfinished Games
December 8th, 2008Returning my University float of games to my shelf at home made me very sad about my ability to complete them.
These are the games currently sitting on my shelf
Without counting the games purchased on Steam, of these, I have completed only… erm… COD2, COD4, COD5, Half Life 2 and… uhhh.. that’s it.
Christmas is a good excuse to play more, right?
Christmas Buyers Guide
December 7th, 2008
Here’s the week 10 Boar article which once again I left writing until the very last second; and then some. Will thoroughly dealt with the first three platforms, whilst I wrote most of the latter three consoles’ recommendations; though I must admit to the need to entirely retract the recommendation for Guitar Hero: World Tour. It was made in lieu of any other decent DS releases in Europe for this holiday period.
Page 56 Meme
December 3rd, 2008Fine. Now that it seems to have made it to Facebook statuses everywhere, I’ll give in and follow the crowd.
The amount of money in our pocket will not change as we walk down the street, jostling it up and down; the number of books that we have will not change if we pack them up in a box, load them into a car, drive one hundred miles, unload the box, unpack it, and place the book in a new shelf.
Does anyone fancy trying to guess which book this is? Answers on a postcard…
Suffice to say, it’s a book which I’ve now had for well over a year and am yet to even read the preface of. Seems to be a gripping read though…
Gaming on Demand
November 25th, 2008
For some reason, I’ve recently expressed interest in writing for the new games section of the Boar. The first issue was pretty slick, with a review of a Wii title, Fable 2, a first impressions of Red Alert 3 and a brief discussion of WotLK (it even had some of my photos from my simply frightening visit to the Leamington midnight launch).
This week’s issue is somewhat more brief, with a discussion of the merits of the Xbox 360 and PS3’s downloadable games services, as well as some brief reviews of what we consider to be some of the better titles to grace these services. Though seeing it in print is clearly much more pro, the article is reproduced (in an even more extended form!) here. The vast majority is written by Will Brierley, though I pipped in for the PS3 reviews, which it must be said, suffered the editor’s wrath with the most (quite correct) vigour!
Read the rest of this entry »
Facebook ads…
November 4th, 2008Really are rather fail. Failing to explicitly claim to be “interest in women” (rather than simply leave this field blank) results in an overwhelming predominance of gay pickup ads. And then there’re things like this:
which are fail beyond words.