Alex Holden
What the brisdesmaid dresses will look like except 1) they'll be more deep lilac and 2) they'll fit
Temporary visitor at my house. Very cool, but I think he likes to travel, and is a tad big for my living room...
Going to watch Who now. Might drive down tomorrow as their is going to be a lot of Stuff at work on Monday.
I hope you all have a wonderful 4th of July weekend. Eat, drink, be merry, and please, try not to blow off your hands with homemade fireworks.
Originally published at JeremiahTolbert.com. You can comment here or there.
So, my mum asked me to make a playlist for her wedding; it's only a few people who'll be there, and my mother (as usual) wishes to shake her bootie (I think, knowing my mum, that's about the best term for it).
This is - in theory - easy. I have a vast collection of music, and I did in a past life DJ. So, plan was I'd sit down at the Mac, connect to the EntertainmentMac and throw together a playlist of 70s and 80s (and possibly some 90s) music that my mum could get her groove on to. Yeah.
In the last few days the Router decided, somewhat randomly, that instead of taking the full 128bit insane-o-line-noise like password that we've been using for the past year it would, instead, take only the first 8 characters of it.
This hasn't been too much hastle, it's been annoying, certainly, but not insane amounts of hastle because all I had to do was chop the passwords down on the connecting computers and suddenly network connectivity came back. I'll grant it took me quite a long time to work out why the newly installed G4 laptop wouldn't connect. But once I'd got there it was all fine and dandy. Except I'd forgotten about the evil that lurks upstairs.
See the G5 has no posh apple gidgets to connect wirelessly, instead in has the fairly dismal Buffalo Airstation. It only has this because Nikki and Kate are very lovely and understanding my plight gave me one of their unused ones. I say dismal because while it functions adequately it's certainly got it's quirks and one of it's major quirks is that the default IP address of the one they gave me is not mentioned online or in any manual anywhere. I'm convinced I wrote it down. I put it on a stickie or something. But... I've had to reinstall the mac, the ent mac and the laptop since then and I can't find this vital piece of information.
And Nikki is out.
And so I've spent a frustrating hour going through all the 'default' IP addresses I could find:
192.168.1.1
1.1.1.1
192.168.1.169
192.168.11.1
Trying to find out if I can get it's IP address from it's MAC address (theoretically, yes. Easily? No). Fiddled with resetting it, trying to use the auto-magic-connect-to-a-router (it connected to a neighbours one!). I've wrestled with a strong desire to hurl it from the house, along with all the other shonky pieces of crap that muck up technological equipement. And instead decided to wait, and I'll do the music tomorrow, or whenever I've spoken to Nikki. Assuming she can recall it's default IP address. Otherwise I suppose I can write a little script that cycles through and pings each IP address from 1.1.1.1 to 254.254.254.254, until it finds it. But I fear that might take some time. Why Buffalo did this I don't know.
At any rate, I'm going to go and spray the car, which while it's not that rewarding (in so far as I'm doing a gash job incredibly quickly) is, at least, something I can actually *do*.

Hey everyone! Today marks the start of me using LiveJournal as a write-only service, because we are in Los Angeles! It's currently 23:40 PDT and so I'm writing up an account of the day. We stayed in the LAX Hilton last night, after arriving at LAX around two hours behind schedule. The flight was uneventful - we flew with Air New Zealand, who have a superb entertainment system on their planes, and so I watched Cars, St. Trinian's, Run Fatboy Run, The Big Bang Theory, My Family. We got up fairly early and proceeded to eat breakfast at the buffet (God bless America) before climbing into our hire car and driving across Los Angeles to Hollywood, and our hotel, the Magic Castle Hotel.
Upon arrival at the Magic Castle, we left our luggage with the very pretty girl before heading down to Hollywood Blvd to walk around and visit some shops. Ironically, the largest store on Hollywood Blvd is a Virgin Megastore (yay England!) but they have such a cool range of clothing and other merchandise. I wound up buying a baseball cap, which is brilliant - I will take a photograph of me wearing it tomorrow and you can all marvel at how great it is. I also saw The Coolest Wallet Evar, but I have refrained from buying it after my mother hinted that Father Christmas might well be kind to me this year and I may find it in my stocking - so y'all are going to have to wait six months before finding out about how cool it is!
After we'd visited Virgin, we also visited the Hollywood and Highland Centre, which has 'retail and entertainment'. This meant going to Sketchers and buying a couple of pairs of shoes, before visiting Hot Topic, from which I bought a nifty Zelda T-shirt. We also paid a visit to the Stone Cold Creamery, which was awesome but made me feel slightly sick so soon after breakfast. On a down note, however, the box I got The Onion from last time I was in LA has now gone, so it looks like no paper copy for me. When we got back to the hotel, we went for a swim in the pool and then headed up to the Universal Citywalk to do some shopping and eating. It turns out that Billabong's current range of swimshorts, whilst not at all bad, is not worth $58 per pair, whilst the current range of Universal Studios T-shirts available from their shop is really not at all good. Last time I got my Spider-Man T-shirt (the black one with the white and red line drawing on it), which is awesome - this time around, all the shirts were really obvious or had been designed for eleven-year-olds, so I didn't get one. I bought a limited edition copy of the Phantom Hourglass game guide because it had a bookmark in it, and I collect bookmarks (it's also a hardback book with gold-edged pages). We ended up eating at a very nice steak house, and then coming back to the hotel, where I'm typing this. Hope you're all OK!Getting IT folk to agree is like herding squirrels, but there’s one thing we do seem to agree on, and that’s that virtualisation is a good thing. It saves money, it saves space, and above all, it saves energy. Throw in a bunch of offload processing for complex applications (a Tesla box or some Azul hardware) and you’re well on the way to a shiny green data centre.Intel predicts an all IA future, consigns CUDA to the footnotes
With so many companies investing so much in virtualisation you’d think that software companies would be falling over themselves to develop licensing tools to support dynamic, flexible IT infrastructures. It’s surprising then to see that not only are they singularly failing to do so, but they’re also making it hard to justify installing software on a virtualised server. Microsoft has tried to appear to be a poster child for virtualisation licensing, but once you start drilling down into just what you can and can’t do with Hyper-V and the Windows Server 2008 Enterprise edition you’re in for an unpleasant surprise. Unless you’re ready to lock yourself into an Oracle-style site license there’s just no way to run your internal IT as a utility.
With Intel’s 40th birthday on the horizon (and with it the 40th anniversary of the microprocessor), Intel’s Pat Gelsinger took a few minutes yesterday to ruminate on the past, present and future - and to take a few questions.O2: business iPhone 3G will sync to Exchange without iTunes
Beginning with a look back to the i386, and the shift from 16 to 32-bit computing, Gelsinger pointed to a time of technical and industry transition, much like today. It was the point where Compaq moved ahead of IBM, and Windows and Microsoft began to shape the software industry. We’re in the middle of another shift at the moment, what Gelsinger called the “third era of Moore’s Law”.
But you’ll still need iTunes on every desktop to install applications. Would you put that in your organization?Beyond the valley of the CPU
We spent Friday with Telefonica at their new headquarters in Madrid, a campus laid out around a lake to deal with the climate; solar panels, vanes that push the heat up, a tower in each corner and wide roofs to add shade plus wireless antenna sprouting in the flowerbeds like candelabra. Telefonica has technology plans for the networks it runs as well, which includes O2.
Even Telefonica can’t actually show off the new iPhone yet: O2’s Steve Alder kept his in his pocket and described it instead. What he did show off was the price: free if you pay £45 or £75 a month for the tariff or £99 if you want the cheapest £30 a month plan. Existing iPhone owners get the same deal, although you have to sign up for the full 18 month contract again. None of the plans let you use the iPhone as a modem with your laptop and the price for international roaming is a hefty £50 for 50MB of data.
The white heat of technology in the 1980s was focussed on the BBC Micro. Not only was it the heftiest 8-bit machines around, its open bus made it possible to add more processing power. With everything from music machines to Z-80s running CP/M, the BBC Micro could share its keyboard with many different CPUs.A nation of snoops and gossips
Those days are on their way back.
You have no privacy, Larry Ellison said a few years ago; get over it. Is that because of governments and security agencies keeping track of you - or because of how much personal information you hand out yourself? If you want to break into someone’s bank account, most of the ’secret questions’ used for security are probably answered on their Facebook account. And how about the information you give away when you sign up for a special offer or fill in a survey?The case of the disappearing disk space
If you don’t remember to go tick the box to say it can’t go to third parties, some marketing companies will happily pass along anything they know about your religious beliefs (one in ten), ethnic background (one in seven) and sexual orientation (one in fourteen). And your mobile phone number and marital status… And if you don’t care who knows that, are you happy that one in four pass along your credit card details? Only 3% would hand over your national ID number if they had it - and they would keep secret your job performance, your biometrics - and possibly in light of the Facebook Beacon debacle, what movies you’ve rented.
Where has 32GB of disk space gone and how do I make Vista give it back, or there’s no such thing as a free lunch.Join the (beta) community
When we’re on the road at conferences I take a fair few photographs, and I copy a lot of PowerPoints and PDFs onto my notebook, not to mention photographing products I’m reviewing, and then there’s recordings of interviews… It all takes up space, so when I got an 8 megapixel camera the day we drove into Death Valley I did wonder if disk space on my notebook might be a problem.
TechEd is Microsoft’s instant university, a place where developers and IT pros go to get information about the current state of all things Microsoft. It’s not really a place for big announcements - though the odd one sneaks out.Behind the scenes with the BallmerBot
Most of the news from this year’s event has been about software moving from one stage of beta to the next. Whether it’s a new beta (like Silverlight 2) or a long running upgrade saga finally getting close to release (like SQL Server 2008) it’s not like a new release of Windows or a new Visual Studio. If anything we’re quickly moving into a world where the big bang launch is a thing of the past. Apple may be still spinning its “one more thing”, but even Snow Leopard will just be an evolutionary move. Instead public betas and community previews will become the way things get done, and the Web 2.0 perpetual beta will be the way of the rest of the IT business works.
The BallmerBot joined Bill Gates on stage at his last public keynote here at TechEd 2008 Developers in Orlando earlier this week. Waving an XBox Live lifetime subscription (Bill’s leaving gift from a grateful Microsoft, according to the latest version of the “Bill’s Last Day” video Microsoft first showed at CES), the robot waddled out of the wings looking like a cross between Johnny 5 and a Segway.In and out of the browser - how Microsoft and Google think differently
U-Bot 5’s new name may not be what the developers expected, but underneath the humour and the hype is a fascinating story of how PC technology and modern developer tools have simplified the development of what until recently would have been a very complex and very expensive piece of hardware.
For years, I’ve been saying that Google would be mad to build its own operating system. It should leave the thankless task to Microsoft and Apple and Linux distributions; you can debate how good a job they do, turn and turn about, but the scale of what a desktop OS needs to do and the range of devices it needs to support is far broader than what you need to do in a browser or on a smartphone. I still don’t think Google has any plans to create its own OS, but it’s pushing beyond the browser as a development platform with Gears and App Engine and the like. Microsoft has a whole range of platforms in the browser, out of the browser and around the browser, from Windows and WPF to Silverlight to SharePoint to Office to SQL Server – to name just a few of the platforms Bill Gates touched on in his last ever keynote at Microsoft TechEd this morning.