Manners
They cost nothing. Someone should tell the guy at 0141 560 2246 that. He phoned up, asked if it was the police he had gotten through to, and hung up without a word when he was told it wasn’t.
Grrr, twat
Archive for September 2006
Computers
I have just rediscovered the joy that is UPnP. I installed linux-igd on my router (apt-get install), tweaked the config file to tell it what interfaces to use, and lo and behold I now have a UPnP advertised router on my network. It’s great having a wide open network…
Whilst poking around in UPnP world, I discovered that MythTV 0.20 also has UPnP/AV support, and it was pimping itself on my network as well to any devices that would listen. Unfortunately my MythTV backend is currently broken, so I couldn’t play with that :-p
Stuff
Should you ever be unfortunate enough to be falling out of an aeroplane with no parachute, I can highly recommend reading this page before you encounter solid ground. 
Birthday
A departure from the norm, this year I’m going to actively tell people about my birthday 
Part of the process involves pointing everyone I know at my lovely wishlist
Computers
I thought it was about time that I got my Vista Beta2 install back up and running. It had been mysteriously hanging at the startup phase. Just before the Windows logo appeared, and during the fade-up of the initial progress bar. This behaviour also took place with the install DVD – not a good sign. After some trial and error, it was narrowed down to the SCSI card. This linked up the drives that Ubuntu was kept on, so could be unplugged for the purposes of this task. The downside was that now Grub failed to load, probably due to /boot vanishing… reinstalling the Vista bootloader seemed to be the way to go.
This normally simple task would be accomplished in XP or 2k by running fixmbr or fixboot. Not so in Vista. After much hunting about, poking at BCDEdit, and generally getting annoyed at the thing, I discovered the wonders of c:windowssystem32bootrec.exe, and the flags /fixmbr and /fixboot. Absolutely nothing is needed of bcdedit.exe in order to rewrite the bootloader, it’s all down to bootrec.exe. The automated repair function of the DVD also failed to fix this problem. Many thanks to Venkatarangan for this information.