I recently found myself downloading a copy of the ReactOS platform. Ofcourse I did download the Live CD but wasn’t able to run it, because this stupid machine decided it didn’t want to after I deleted all of my partitions. I haven’t had chance to try it out on ‘the other machine’ but will do. Don’t think it’ll work because it didn’t in Parallels. It was only 22.[something I can't remember]MB, well it was an ISO but it was all safely zipped up. I thought that it was quite small for a operating system, because Freespire took several hours to download on a somewhat fast connection, but the actual ISO file is little more than a shocking 75MB.

So after all that kerfuffle of the live cd, I just downloaded the QEMU one, which was again very small, obviously because it was all zipped up. I extracted it and ran the “boot.bat” file. I must say how very fast QEMU was at emulating it, it didn’t lag at all and took less than 20 seconds to load up fully. So I started exploring, but soon realised that it was a huge work in progress. The main reason I downloaded was because its claimed that it has the ability to run EXE files. If you don’t know what they are, they’re executables, or programs for short. Those of you may know that I have made some software in the past, namely AMV Studio and AMV Studio Utilites (they’re both different programs) and I wanted to test them on they’re. One problem is that because it was emulating in QEMU that has no options, it automatically chose the wrong network adapter, my internal one for Parallels, not my Local Area or Wireless (but my LAN cable wasn’t plugged in at the time, only Wireless was connected), I couldn’t access the internet. I could hardly find the browser, since it wasn’t in the ‘Internet’ menu, what a minute, there wasn’t even an ‘Internet’ menu. I had to run the ReactOS Explorer program, which when I pressed the ‘Web’ button, prompted me to download some Mozilla ActiveX control thing.

To illustrate some problems I’ve had and what ReactOS is currently capable of doing, I compiled a small gallery with about 6 screenshots. To see it, visit http://www.callumhaywood.com/services/reactos/screenshots/.

No, I’m not turning into Britains next David Dickinson… I was looking for a 4GB USB Flash drive, you know, for general documents, programs, PHP scripts and stuff. First of all I checked out Argos. Whoah! £29.99 for a 4GB USB Flash drive? Then there were some more expensive ones, such as the LG Mirror that >>was<< at £69.99 but now its gone down to £32.99 in one of those ‘Argos Daily Price Cut’ things. So next I checked out Ebuyer and found one for £18.84 (or £23.32 with VAT) which actually wasn’t a bad deal, and having an account with them, I thought about it, and then I remembered Play.com… an incredibly cheap (as in price) website mainly specialising in DVDs. There I managed to pick one up for £17.99! Just waiting for it to arrive now (I ordered it a few days ago, but lost track since its the holidays )

I was wondering; is the internet faster the further south you go in Britain? This isn’t just some random old thought, its because Britain gets most of its internet data through BT Cornwall, I know, because I’ve been there… you may have been there too, its called Goonhilly, see this picture I took:

Image © Callum Haywood 2007 (because I took it).

Thats Arthur, Goonhilly’s international telephony satellite. Whenever your in the UK and you make a international telephone call, theres a very good chance that it’ll go through here. Also when your watching the news and there is a live report coming in from some far away country, there is a good chance that those live images your seeing are coming through this satellite?

Okay, so this post is titled a little oddily, let me explain; after forgetting the site that I previously went to, I googled it (what did I google? I googled on how to get the eyetoy on a PC, or laptop in my case) and it returned a lot of results to either forums or blog posts telling you to download some D-Link drivers and then edit them in notepad so they would work…

But I found a much better and simpler solution, just download a program called EOCP (or if you’ve already installed it, its got some long S.E.U.D.C.a.S folder name in Start Menu’s programs folder), this program is free and avalible from eocp.sourceforge.net and its open source too!

Woo-hoo! Today I launched my forum! You can get to it at www.callumhaywood.com/forum/ and I hope you’ll find it useful…

I do appologize for those last few posts of flustration. Since then I have now moved on from trying to get my Linux CDs to work, to computer gaming. Odd, since I’ve never really been a big fan of >playing< computer games, I have always been making them (yes, I have made 3D ones, not crappy 2D ones that Windows 1.0 might be able to run), so I recently dug out my Midtown Madness 2 disk. Ahhh… Midtown Madness 2, I remember that when I used to play it on a 650MHz machine, now I’m playing it on a 1.50GHz machine, its a whole lot better. I recently downloaded Grand Theft Auto III (from LimeWire ) but I found it to lag… lag an unnaceptable amount, well acutally it only lagged when I set it to 1280x800x32, since before it was on 640x480x16 which meant the graphics weren’t very good; thats why I really like Midtown Madness 2, it doesn’t lag. Well, what do you expect? It was made in 2000, when a processor with the GHz extention on the speed tag, probably didn’t exist, and a time when MHz ruled. Plus I’ve downloaded about 4 new tracks and 6 new cars for it, meaning its highly customizable.

Now, for the title of this post; its true. Its a mixed-post, sort of apologies and new found hobbies. If you’ve got Midtown Madness 2 then let me know, and we can have one of those multiplayer games!

Ubuntu 6.10 works!!! No other damn Linux disribution works!!! Why? My old, not-so-shiny, Ubuntu disk I burnt from the ISO that took an hour to download, actually works. I had a few screen flickers but it worked. The “acpi=off” didn’t work for Freespire, but I managed to get some black screen where I could actually move the mouse… but then it went all green and yellow, and very wrong indeed. I decided to boot up Windows to save any more potential damage that could have happened.

As the title of this post describes; it wasn’t my shiny new nice shiny (its not a mistake I’ve put it twice, it really is shiny!) Ubuntu disk that was causing the problem, because I downloaded my copy of Freespire. It was 686MB, and it only took about half an hour (fast DSL plus GetRight, which I told to do the 4 part thingy). I booted it up, selected the ‘FreespireLive’ option, waited about 5 minutes for it to load and guess what… as soon as it had finished loading, my damn screen turned off! WHY IS IT DOING THIS TO ME! It never did it before, that was before I deleted all of my hard disk partitions, and then started again with the ‘XP Recovery Disk’…

You may have read in some previous post, that I had the same problem with my Ubuntu 7.04 disk. Both of them, since I ordered 3 just to be safe (2x Intel x86-based systems compatible disks and 1 AMD64 or EM64T-based systems compatible disk). Its now really beginning to bug me, since ALL of my Linux disks work on that other laptop (argh! Its running Windows Vista aswell)…

I even Google’d for updates to my GPU (graphics processing unit, for those of you who didn’t know ) and graphics card (c’mon, you gotta know what one of those is, no? Well thats what Google is for…) but have found nothing. One thing I did find was that by pressing my ‘FN+F11′, FN is short for function (only for laptops) and F11 is the function key next to F12 at the top of your keyboard – anyway, pressing those combinations turns my screen on and off. So I pressed it (obviously) and the screen turned on (this was after it turned on after Freespire had loaded), but no luck… no it didn’t turn off again but it came up light grey with vertical black lines. Why? I don’t know… So I just hit the power button for 5 seconds, and left it to boot as usual.

I’ll post any updates Don’t forget to post your comments if you’ve experienced the same or similar issues. (But please remember, that I’m only 13 years old)…

Last day of term, and free time in French on the computers! So I decided to do a random post. I’ll probably do another random post in ICT, since I was told we’d have free time. Don’t know. Just have to wait and see, and when that bell goes, ITS THE HOLIDAYS!!!

I’m sorry for any current downtime you may have occured. I have now identified and fixed the problem. It goes as follows: my ISP switched me to their Mansfield / Nottingham data centre, instead of their one in Stevenage which I think has now been shut down, because my DNS address used to end in pol.co.uk, which Cable and Wireless now own and now it ends in orangehomedsl.co.uk, odd. Since then, there dynamic IPs have been incredibly dynamic, so dynamic, my IP is now chaning every day (or their DHCP server has malfunctioned). This means that if I decide to do an A record to it, I’ll have to update every single day (and 1&1 take over 2 hours for data to be live on their system, damn them!), so I CNAMEd to it instead, with my NO-IP subdomain thats automatically updated by my router, so if you experience any more downtime, its either my lines have gone down (unlikely), my ISP has gone down (less likely), my server has gone down (very likely), thus resulting in no more DNS updates that I have to do manually! Before then the only time I’d have to do a DNS update is if my router needed an update, my power went down or some other problem like the phone line came loose from the wall socket.