For those who don’t yet know, Channel 4’s hilarious comedy The IT Crowd starts its second season next Friday (24/08/07) at 9.30pm.
The original series is currently available on Channel 4’s 4OD on demand service, though I’m not sure if the new series will available there after it has aired or not. I would hope so.
And just in case you don’t already know what to look forward to:
[tags]Channel 4, The IT Crowd, comedy, television[/tags]
Both project work and job hunting have been ground to a near halt in the last few days due to a problem with the computer. What looked like a hard drive failure has seemingly transpired to be a problem with the IDE controller (IMO, the box is currently in the shop for a second opinion).
I still have my laptop, but that thing struggles with Firefox open, let alone Visual Studio or Eclipse.
Hopefully, I will have it back to full steam in a couple of days time.
1) Read a recommendation for a new comic.
2) Spend said day reading the archives. All four years worth.
Possibly NSFW depending on your workplace, but still fairly funny stuff.
Thanks to Rob for guiding me to the comic and robbing me of another day I’ll never get back.
[tags]comic, leasticoulddo, Least I could Do[/tags]
Its been a long time since I did any work on my personal work server (my old desktop, bought back when Windows 98 was still all the rage. I’ve done a few upgrades since.) that sits under my desk here at home. Unfortunately, I never did quite get it working quite how I wanted it to. As such, I decided a few months back that I was going to rework the system entirely and get it just the way I want it this time around. I finally got around to starting at it this weekend.
Having something of a good experience with Ubuntu’s Desktop Edition of Linux, I decided that I would take a look at their Server Edition. Popping the disk into the drive, I click and tap through a very painless installation process. All the partitioning is done on my behalf, as you would expect, and I was even offered the option of a LAMP setup to be automatically installed. Wait 30 minutes, remove CD, reboot.
GRUB loads, computer reboots. GRUB loads, computer reboots. And again. And again.
After a bit of Googling yesterday, I discovered that this is a problem that has been known about for at least the last few versions of the OS (since 6.06). I am using 7.04, so there has been a couple of iterations since. Thankfully, there is a solution – uninstall linux-server and install the “standard” kernel in its place. It doesn’t take long either. What it does take is a more substantial chunk out of your hard disk (114MB as opposed to 53.2Kb), but then whats the cost of disk space these days anyway?
Now if only I had tested to see if sshd was installed before I disconnected the monitor and keyboard…
[tags]ubuntu, server, automation, tools[/tags]
If you’re going to give the user an option to change a default setting, make sure the setting is the default across the board. If you don’t, you are only going to end up frustrating your users.
An example of this occurs with Microsoft’s Office 2007 (at least in their Home and Student Edition, though I can’t imagine it being any different with any other). In this version, Microsoft updated the document formats to a new XML-derived specification. As a company well known for their efforts in backwards compatibility, in order to keep users not yet willing or able to adopt the new Office document formats satisfied the Office team decided to allow users to specify which document format should be used by default. By and large it works great.
However, this change of format doesn’t seem to effect the shell extensions installed, which allow a user to right click in a folder and create a new document. Those files are still created using the new format file. As it happens, this is my preferred method of creating documents as most often I find it more convenient than loading the application and navigating through the dialogue. My only problem is that it insists that it creates the documents in the new formats.
It might seem a small oversight (if it is indeed an oversight), but its one that regularly trips me up and that does hurt my experience with the application.
[tags]User Experience, Microsoft, Office 2007[/tags]
Hi. I’m Aidan. I’m 23 years old and live in the small tourist orientated town of Killarney, Ireland.
I’m have recently completed the Computing and Software Development course at the local Institute of Technology. As such, I am currently “between jobs” as the saying goes. I program mainly in Java and C#, though I do try to dabble into a few other languages when I can get the chance.
I have had this space for some time now and have been meaning to do something with it. I used also maintain another blog (or Journal, as the hosting site preferred to call it) but since it didn’t really fit in with the focus on that site I have decided to move it here. If you want to take a look at that, you’ll have to bounce back through the archives, since its been a while since it was updated.
One thing you might learn about me there is that I do tend to have some ambitious ideas. I would hope to be able to share some of those here, even if I do not end up developing any of them myself. Others, I do hope to pick up some day, and this blog will in those cases serve as a journal of their development.
I also have something of an amateur interest in user experience in computing. For all the good that has happened in the last few years, there is still a long, long way to go. It doesn’t help that I can be easily frustrated – I prefer things to “just work”. But how often does that happen, eh?
I do hope that you will stick with me. I will need all the feedback that I can get while I try to push forward in these. There may occasionally be some more personalised entries like this one. I hope they won’t put you off too much 
Onward and upward…