A question for someone more in tune with Microsoft licensing. Is it acceptable under the terms of the Microsoft EULA to run an OEM copy of Windows XP in a virtual machine, provided its still being run on the same hardware it came on?
I've been running Windows 7 for a few retro games and Visio for about a year, and have finally had enough.
What a great idea! I have a thing for ultra modern buildings surrounding or complimenting older structures rather than just replacing them. In this case, the older structures aren't a classic building, but unused shipping containers which would take a large amount of energy to break up.
By rosenlof/lucas on Flickr.
Granted I'm more looking forward to post 4096 (2^12) in my cavalcade of pointless site milestones, but 4000 posts is still pretty big! To celebrate, I've dug out a series of screenshots showing the history of the site, for those who are mildly interested. Thank you for readership and patronage! ^_^
I registered Rubenerd.com in 2003 when I was in high school in Singapore. I didn't know what I wanted to use it for, just that it was to be named after the email address I'd been using since I was 12. Ruben + Nerd = Rubenerd, it seemed super smart… at the time.
I created a series of tabs using Paint Shop Pro, then lined them up. This was before YouTube and Flickr had only just started, so I hosted all my material under several tabs!
After realising a site with heaps of sections was simply too much work to maintain, I completely ditched the old site and rebooted Rubenerd.com as a blog. I had just started learning Perl so I created a simple CGI script to generate the pages. Ironically, I think this earliest version of Rubenerd.com was the best looking, go figure!
After a few months I moved to RapidWeaver, a Mac OS X client-side blogging platform. I still think it had by far the best user interface for writing posts I've ever used, though their themes at the time left a little to be desired!
When I started studying in Adelaide, I moved from RapidWeaver to WordPress. While RapidWeaver worked great on my PowerMac G5, I couldn't exactly take it back with me when I went back to Singapore during the holiday breaks!
I liked the Blix theme, but made the colours bolder and far less attractive. Someone should really have stopped me.
Up to this point my blog had been a sporadically-updated sideshow to my podcast, but in 2006 I started blogging on a more regular basis, as can be seen in my site archive. With this in mind, I decided to take the vanilla Sandbox theme and create new themes for my podcast site, and one for the blog to match. I was generally in a pretty dark mood (though not emo!) given family troubles and my mum's rapidly deteriorating health, and I suppose this was reflected somewhat here.
I also resurrected the logo I'd designed for my "business" in primary school helping expats fix their printers to tap some of that youthful optimism. This logo has been on all my stuff again ever since :).
Having been tired with a dark background for a while, I decided to start from scratch with a new lighter theme I coded myself, and on a new domain. The new site and the htaccess redirects from Rubenerd.com were live for less than 24 hours before I ditched it and went back to the previous one!
Changed themes again, also created entirely from scratch. I saw my original Rubenerd.com site design and felt a tingle of nostalgia, so I tried to recreate parts of it and match the colours of the original tabs, with mixed results!
Obviously not a lot of progress ;).
Upon asking our house guest and my sister what I should discuss for my PostADay2011 challenge, they elected I regale you with our adventures with CityRail on the weekend. As requested, the requested post!
First of all, an admission if you will. The above image, while being factually relevant to the current issue we find ourselves discussing this evening, was in fact taken by your narrator in this tale of public transport adventure back on the 2nd of July 2011, for a blog post about the closure of Borders. It still hasn't sunk in that Borders is gone. But I digress, and rather verbosely I may add.
Like all but the most sophisticated self-healing systems, public transport networks require a certain degree of maintenance in order to perform reliably, safely, and within acceptable guidelines.
Most public transport rail operators around the world perform preventative maintenance on their networks during the wee hours of the morning, in some places every night. This has several advantages to performing said work during light hours:
Sydney's CityRail network however prefers to perform their network maintenance, track alignment work and inspections in broad daylight, and over the course of several days. This not only ensures the maximum amount of disruption per tax dollar, but causes as much inconvenience as possible.
Secondly, with many of the roads closed due to the Sydney Half Marathon over the weekend, this trackwork along the city circle ensured that some folks couldn't get to work or other important establishments by either train or car. I suspect this was a conspiracy orchestrated by those who don't like their brethren working on Sundays.
Because this marathon was done over The Bridge, here's a stock photo of it which I took myself.
Over the weekend, one of our friends from Canberra visited us in our fair, public transport crippled city. Of course we drew the short straw with CityRail, with the Airport and East Hills Line chosen as one of the two to receive scheduled trackwork.
Fortunately, CityRail compensated for their missing eight car, double decker trains with single buses that looked as though they were built in the 1960s. Aside from the waiting at stations and on the side of the road for our sardine trips, the buses themselves had an old timely quaint charm to them, and were reasonably clean. I was just fortunate our friend enjoyed retro design!
As of today the trains are operating again, and to their credit Bardwell Park has received a fresh coat of paint. We still have the only station on the entire line that doesn't have extended under-cover roofs, or isn't in the process of having them installed. Here's hoping this changes soon.
Had a half hour long outage on Rubenerd.com and RubenSchade.com this evening. If you emailed me or left a blog comment, you might need to resubmit, or resend. Sorry for the trouble!
Saw this image from Tiger and Bunny on Pixiv and thought it was fan art from Kill Bill. Now that was an epic move series.
Should I be watching this?
If you've installed Windows 3.x in IBM PC DOS 7.0/2000 and it reports insufficient conventional memory, you may be running the wrong version of SmartDrive.
Insufficient memory or address space to initialize Windows in 386 enhanced mode. Quit one or more memory-resident programs or remove unnecessary utilities from your CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT files and restart your computer.
If you've installed Windows 3.x in IBM PC DOS 7.0/2000 (wait, didn't I already say that?) and received the above error message regardless of the amount of conventional memory you've painstakingly freed by loading everything into UMBs like a good DOS memory managing guru, chances are you're attempting to use the PC DOS version of SMARTDRV.EXE instead of the one provided by Windows.
While the PC DOS version uses less memory (ironically), I've never been able to get it to work with Windows 3.x. The only workable solution I've found is to go into your AUTOEXEC.EXE and CONFIG.SYS files and replace:
C:DOSSMARTDRV.EXE [/FLAGS]
with:
C:WINDOWSSMARTDRV.EXE [/FLAGS]
The DOS version of EMM386.EXE works however, and is newer than the one offered with Windows 3.x.
Since moving back to KDE, I've been reacquainted with a lot of my old favourite applications, and perhaps none are as awesome as the KDE Games, KNetWalk in particular. If you've ever played Pipe Dream from the Windows Entertainment Pack days, the gameplay should be a little familiar. Essentially, you're connecting all the chips to the power source.
Insanely addictive. If you're a KDE fan, install KDE Games from your package manager and launch it from the "Tactics and Strategy" menu.
This post originally appeared on the Annexe, in a post series pointlessly documenting every train I took.
S8 from Bardwell Park to Central
Cleanliness: Fine
These latest moves by the Australian government to launch a media inquiry are seemingly well-intentioned, but woefully misguided.
The question of whether media is biased and distorts the truth is a distraction from the real question: do people have the skills to disseminate facts and objectively analyse what they're told in the media?
Give a man a fish…
