the weekly whinge

I’ve recently changed laptop to one with Vista64, which bothered me because I’ve stuck stubbornly with XP; however I’ve been impressed with the speed and usability of what is now a pretty stable OS.

One thing, though, that’s been really annoying me is that copying and deleting files on USB flash disks has suddenly added an extra layer of irritation: a “calculating time remaining” message that usually takes about 5 times as long as the actual operation. Quite how you can take 5 minutes to delete a file is beyond me.

The solution seems quite simple: change the settings for the flash drive from “optimize for quick removal” to “optimize for performance”. The problem simply goes away.

This is definitely a bug – the amount of time we’re talking about here is massive and isn’t explainable by write caching; however at least now I can cope. I just have to remember to click “remove” on the device before pulling the stick, but to be honest I always do that anyway.

.

So I had an online chat with an ebay support representative about the fact that ebay’s “detailed item information” boxes, which are provided automatically by ebay, often actually contain incorrect information.

The response:
“we always advise buyers to contact the selelr (sic) directly if they have any clarification on the item listed”

Nice. So I’m supposed to assume that everything is untrue, and if I actually care about the thing that’s listed I should check with the seller, otherwise ebay will disclaim all responsibility.

As an aside, I also like the fact that if someone sells you something in auction, and it turns out not to be as described, ebay’s own recommendation is that you should cover the cost of returning the item.

.

Asda's website shows us the true mathematical genius of cloud computing

.

So I don’t usually post links to stuff like this, but if you haven’t seen Vivian Maier’s street photography, you really must.

.

Lesson number 36 of Android.

Want your android phone’s alarm to wake you in the morning? Don’t kill the “clock” process.

I thought that process was just the front-end bit. It seems not. Thank goodness Willow was there to remind me it was time for walkies…

Tags: android.

This Dr Dobbs article caught my eye when I was looking for a Windows Mobile NTP client (long story). I read it with some alarm as the introduction implies that they’ve found a fundamental problem with NTP and then became steadily more incredulous as I read the article to find that they were talking about periodically running – on mission-critical systems, of course – ntpclient to synchronise with a single time source.

They’ve basically written up alarmist crap that’s worthy of the Daily Mail about the fact that if you use what’s essentially a test program against a single not-particularly-stable server it doesn’t work very well. Big surprise.

Does anyone really use ntpclient like that on a critical production server? I’d have thought configuring ntpd with a few ntp servers wasn’t exactly hard – there’s even a pretty noddy Redhat howto for it. And yet the title of the article (and especially the introduction) suggest that they’ve uncovered a fundamental problem with ntp.

I’m left wondering if timekeeper is a Dr Dobbs product, to be honest.

.

So there’s a few places on the web asking how to do this; while it’s easy to do

SELECT x'1fb5';

if you have the hex string stored in a field you can’t do that.

The answer is to use CONV()

ie

SELECT CONV(myhexfield, 16, 10);

It’s that simple.

Tags: mysql.

This is the latest offer from Tesco’s. Looks like a real bargain to me!

Edit: they’ve since spotted this, and have made the juice more expensive (it’s now £1.35 or 3 for £4). I’m not sure that was quite what I was hinting at when I posted this…

.

I don’t tend to post links, but this one just made me lol more than most.

.

So betfair have a £5 free bet game (probably only works if you already have an account, although I’m not sure of that) which at first glance looks like a scratchcard – you have to click on the three hearts from nine which have a £ behind them. Except that if (after clicking start) you do nothing for a few seconds it quietly shows you which ones to click.

I guess it’s intentional but I don’t care: these free bet offers are great – I won £120 on the National this year risk-free and haven’t used my account since except for their free bet offers, and yet they keep on sending them to me

.