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Don’t try to IRC directly after playing “Through the Fire and the Flames” by DragonForce on Guitar Hero III

The result comes out much like this:
“I ahve been mostly playing Wii gmaes agianst my family
and i ahve been playing guitra hero
whcich has maed my fingres num”

An MP3 of the track is downloadable from the Official DragonForce website I am definitely going to be buying some of their albums soon.

Last weekend I went to the Devon and Cornwall Linux User Group meeting in a Computer shop in Penzance (which is why I skipped the Termisoc LOTR marathon) and thanks to Viv I got to see Virtualbox in use. Virtualbox is virtualisation software that lets you run several operating systems on the same computer at the same time by tricking the guest operating system into thinking it’s running on it’s very own computer.

Today I went about installing it using the Debian packages virtualbox-ose and virtualbox-ose-source and installing Windows XP home in a disk image which I’m probably going to use regularly for checking sites in Internet Explorer. To me this looks like a much easier solution than trying to force a program to work in Wine although the downside is that you need a copy of windows.

The guest operating system runs smoothly at a resolution of 800×600 but it feels bizarre to be using Windows in a window. I’m also considering installing some other things like maybe Solaris or BSD in other images just to have a play with them.

Since I thought I might want a bit more memory in the host OS before letting multiple other OSes have a chunk of it I decided to upgrade my PC (first major upgrade since 2004) this will probably be the last major upgrade it will ever get. It now has triple the RAM (now 1.5GB) and a slightly quieter CPU fan (or at least one that doesn’t make the case resonate).

Update: 2007/11/16 I’ve also replaced my NVidia GeForce 4 with a NVidia 7600GT unfortuantely due to my widescreen TFT and somewhat small desk I am unlikely to use the dual headedness feature of it (though if i did get another similar monitor I’d have a whole metre of horizontal screen space)

Decided to update my WordPress install, something which I’ve been meaning to do for a while.
This time though I’ll be upgrading wordpress using Subversion version control which should make things quicker next time.

Previously I downloaded the tar file and then extracted it to a separate folder then tried to figure out which bits I needed to keep and copy them across to the new folder.
Using Subversion this should no longer be necessary as when you update it checks for custom files and keeps them safe.

This looks like it would be very useful for scripting the upgrade of lots of sites at the same time.

Here is a render from Blender3D of the joystick that was spray painted gold as a trophy for one of Termisoc’s previous LAN parties. I changed the top around a bit, the real one has a turbo switch on the left side of the button, I left it out because I didn’t want it cluttered.

I am considering presenting another tutorial on 3D modelling for Termisoc this year.

I finally got around to getting myself a better display for my desktop, a 22″ widescreen monitor. It is great, I have loads more usable space on my desk now, mostly due to not having a CRT but also because I moved some of my junk onto my bed so I could take a nice photo.

Panoramic Pics

Before I went on holiday (I will be writing about this sometime, honest) the hard drives in (Sephiroth) my desktop machine decided to die on me, possibly because they were not getting enough power due to be installing a big-ass graphics card (I wanted dual monitor).

So now I am back it is time to take a look at fixing it. I remember my motherboard manual saying it supported SATA and I remember the motherboard coming with official MSI SATA cables (because they were a bright shade of orange). So I go out and get myself a SATA drive and then I try to install my new drive. There’s one big problem however, despite the manual saying it has SATA and despite the included SATA cables there is no actual SATA connector on the motherboard. Why include SATA cables with a mobo without SATA connectors? WTF?

I officially own a real motorbike now, a 600cc Yamaha Diversion that was previously my dad’s. It has already got a name, it’s called “Phoenix” because it caught on fire once.

The bad news is Wasi (my scooter) is gone now, I decided to traded in on my dad’s new bike in return for a discount on buying his old one from him.

Welcome to the new shiny website, I had a craving for rounded corners and gradient fills.

It was a nightmare to get it working in Internet Explorer.