Schinckel.net

My laptop hasn’t been much of one lately. The screen (or perhaps the inverter) seems to be on the way out, and I lose picture from time to time. What it is outputting is fine on the external display, but it’s like the backlight is on (I can change the brightness, and see the “black” of the LCD change), but noone is home.

I was tempted to take it in for repairs, but then tonight opened the lid again (I’ve been running with it closed), and the picture came back.

I’m thinking I might crack it open and check that the cables are all connected. I don’t fancy paying $75 for some monkey to do just that…

Update: Apple has announced these models are eligible for free repair, even if out of warranty.

From one perspective, anyway.

I’ve just returned from a week in Melbourne for the 15th Australian University Games. It’s probably one of the more memorable weeks I have had in recent years. It would at least be up there with the 1992 National Mathematics Summer School.

I’ve called it, from one perspective, the Best Tournament Ever. By that, I mean the tournament that I have had the most personal success at. I played 9 games, lost to only two teams, and refereed 11 games. All but one of those 20 games was on the first four days - I saved myself for the Bronze medal game on the Friday.

For the past two years, Flinders Uni has not won a single game of Touch Football at the AUG. This year was a bit different.

We started by playing University of NSW, who we expected to be quite tough. Indeed, after my initial touchdown at the very beginning of the game (I think I caught them off guard) they scored a few early touchdowns, and at one stage were up by about 3. However, we clawed our way back to a first victory, 5-4.

With the team then on a high, we played Charles Darwin Uni, who were one of the less strong teams in the competition. We played very well, and consistently kept on scoring. 16-0 was the final score, which would later prove to be an important victory.

Day two came, and half the team was still drunk by the start of the 11am game. This one was a different story to the previous day, with Queensland University of Technology up first. They were a much faster, more polished team, and we didn’t manage to overcome them. Final score: 5-11, although in the second half, I think we actually outscored them by one. (On a personal note, in this game I scored 4 touchdowns, and passed the ball to James who scored the other. It was probably the best individual game I played all week).

Second game of the day was against University of Sydney, who turned out to be our best friends by the end of the competition. This game was played in great spirit, and resulted in a draw, with 5 touchdowns apiece.

Day three was still at the State Netball and Hockey Centre, and we started off with ACU, who only started the game with 5 girls, and no boys. Technically this is not allowed (there must be at least one male and no more than three on the field at any time), but we let them play. It was only a couple of minutes before the rest of their players arrived, but the final score was 11-4 our way. By this stage, we were in second place in our pool, and actually thinking for the first time that we might make finals.

The last game at SHNC was against LaTrobe Uni. Another not-so-close game, with us getting over the line with a comfortable 8-2. The fields were now in tatters, and thankfully we moved to Monash Clayton for the next day’s competition.

The final round game for us was against University of Technology Sydney. We were ahead of Sydney Uni only on percentage, and they needed to beat LaTrobe by 11 more touchdowns than us to knock us out of the semi-finals. We won our game 9-5, and Sydney won 13-1. It was that close - our touchdown difference was one better than theirs! In actuality, the first game of the tournament was what cost them their place in the final. They played CDU, and only won 9-0. They fluffed about 10 other touchdowns, many of them passing unnecessarily to a girl to get her to score her first for the tournament. Having said that, two of our boys didn’t make it until half time, so we played the first half of the game with one (and a bit) males.

Finals were a bit tougher. We played in the crossover game with the top-ranked team from the other pool, University of Notre Dame Australia, who were very polished. This was the only game I personally didn’t score a touchdown in, and we ended up losing this 13-1, our worst result for the whole tournament. QUT lost to the second ranked team in the other 1-vs-2 crossover, so we were set to face them for the Bronze Medal.

I wasn’t expecting us to have much success in our second run at QUT. They had twice as many boys (by this stage, we were down from 5 to 3 male players, I was limping on both legs, and both other boys were struggling too).

The game began with a bang. We scored first, followed by QUT. We then managed to score another three consecutive touchdowns, and were looking in a strong position. Eventually, however, QUT scored a couple more, and by the main break, we were only leading by one, 4-3. The second half proved too much for us, with us only able to find the scoreline once more, while they managed to get in another 6 touchdowns. Final result, 5-9. Better than our round game, but not good enough for the medal.

So, that was the playing stuff. I hinted earlier that the games were crappy in other ways. I personally refereed 11 games over 4 days, which was way more than I really wanted to. There wasn’t much choice - we were short staffed for referees, so I just coped. At the Monash fields, things were even worse, apparently. I think it turned out we ended up having the better of the referee situation, so I can’t complain too much.

It gets worse. On the first day, the fields were not even marked. Games started nearly two-hours late, and overall the organisation was just woeful. I kept making jokes that it was so poorly planned because it was in Melbourne, and I was only half joking. Last year the School Sport Australia champs were there, and again there were fuckups all over the show. I don’t know if it was Monash Sport this time, or if Touch Football Victoria had their fangs in the pot too.

Still, it wound up being fun. They haven’t announced the Green and Gold as yet, so that might still be a possibility. It would cap it off for me.

I have a Windows box on my desk at work now. ugh.

To make it bearable to use Visual Studio, with her three areas and a scroll mouse:

KatMouse

This makes it operate like OS X, where the controller that the mouse is over scrolls, rather than the active one.

If you instantly go “Yes, I know what you mean”, then you’ll need this.

I’m very sick of the INFO cmdproc.c:98:show_debug_cmd() rubbish that the latest Adium release is spewing into my Console Log twice a minute.

I’m finding I’d rather leave IM off, than see it traced across my desktop.

(I use MkConsole to keep an eye on things).

Update: it looks like 1.3.2b1 fixes this. Yay!

Most monitors seem to be able to be driven at a higher resolution than it says they can. In some cases, the higher resolution gives a better picture, in other cases it doesn’t.

My work just bought me a new LG W1942T, which is rated as running at 1400x900, which for a 19” monitor isn’t that high. My laptop (15”) does the same resolution. It’s possible to run the W1942T at 1680x1050, but I really don’t know if the blurriness is caused by that, or if it just isn’t the best monitor available.

My boss bought a 22” LG monitor, which is rated at 1680x1050, but it does 2048x1280 quite comfortably. And I have an nice old Dell E172FP, which looks best at 1344x1074, rather than the 1280x1024 which it says it can do.

I’ve had cause to transfer a whole stack of data from an old sqlite database to a PostgreSQL database, and since on the new database I am using SQL Alchemy, I used SA to do the transfer.

Because of some of the relations, I have had to keep IDs constant across some of the columns. This is fine, but because they have Sequence objects associated with them, these are not kept up to date with the ‘custom’ created IDs. Thus, when attempting to create a new row in the table, it often fails, since it is trying to add a primary key that already exists.

After a little bit of research, I discovered it is possible to force the sequence object to increment, using the command:

nextID = engine.execute(Sequence('sequence_name'))

Using a little bit of magic, we can find out the largest index currently in use:

maxID = db.query(Object).order_by('-id').first().id

And a simple while loop will keep incrementing until we have reached the correct id.

Less than 12 months ago, my (effective) father-in-law bought a new Acer laptop. It came with Vista installed, and was “better than a MacBook Pro, and heaps cheaper.”

I’ve spent countless hours since then trying to get it to work smoothly. For instance, if you create a bluetooth connection to his HP printer, it prints. Once or twice. Then you need to delete the printer and re-create it for it to work. My MacBook Pro connected once, and all was good.

Another issue has been with network connectivity. He’s using a GSM USB dongle to get wireless internet, and it’s rather flaky. I plugged the same dongle into my laptop, and it worked. I can’t recall if I needed to install any software, but, and here’s the important part, if I did install a driver, it used the system’s networking stack, rather than installing another one. This is something that the PC world just doesn’t seem to get. I had to “fix” a similar problem with my sister’s machine. Using the basic Windows WiFi driver gave a much better result than the one that came with the laptop.

Finally, he decided that it was worth the effort getting an iMac. He’d then set up most of the stuff before I arrived, including the wireless internet, and all I had to do with install VMWare (and WinXP) so he can run his share-tracking program, and anything else he may have to run under Windows. Oh, and Office. I’ve got him trying out iWork, but we’ll see how that goes.

I also had to help him transfer across all of his iTunes music and photos. I’d bought my laptop with me, and had set up an ad-hoc wireless network, which I had confirmed was working. I had shared his Public directory on the iMac, and was able to connect to it from the PC, but was having trouble getting the PC share to actually appear on the Macs. Eventually I did, and copied the files across. As it turned out, I needed to change the ad-hoc network name several times as I tweaked the settings, as Windows seems brain-dead when dealing with changed network properties and the same network name. I’d hit this issue in the past when trying to connect with an old laptop (no WPA) to an ad-hoc network created by one of my machines.

I then imported all of his photos into iPhoto. Which, I discovered, is now not the clunky old program it used to be. It feels more like iTunes, but is even more snappy. It has the nice little feature of scrubbing over all of the contained images like the new iTunes view.

I think I’m going to have another try with iPhoto. I got right into Lightroom when I had a DSLR, but since I don’t take too many photos anymore, so something less high-end will do me fine.

And, I can then use the fairly cool screensaver that uses the iPhoto library to create mosaics. I’d forgotten how cool that was. I think that feature alone caused his other daughter to proclaim she too would get a Mac.

I’ve reinstalled Leopard - hopefully that will fix the problem I was discussing yesterday. I really don’t know if it’s a software or hardware issue, though.

Getting rid of the cruft I had installed seems to make my machine boot up a whole lot faster, but.

For some reason, iSync appears in the menu bar after a reboot sometimes, even though I have unchecked “Show status in menu bar”.

When I reload iSync, the setting has reverted back to being checked. This doesn’t seem to happen all of the time, just sometimes.