I am currently working on a brand new website, i’m not allowed to release the name of it and its purpose just yet but its going to be a big one hopefully, its not unique but the philosophy behind it is, since no other website of its kind can boast what this website can. It already has over 1,100 lines of pure working PHP code, all written by me.

I’m not a huge fan of social networking websites myself. I admit I have a Netlog and a Bebo account but never MySpace. MySpace is bad. More to the point, you don’t actually get “space”, by that I mean online storage where you can put images, videos, programs, files, etc; I was thinking more of an online filesystem like Gmail Drive than what MySpace actually is. Read this http://www.teenchatdecoder.com/myspace-info.htm, and think twice about using the badly designed website… (note I didn’t read all of it :p)

Okay so I am sorry for the downtime, technical problems, etc… So even if it was for 4 days, the server kept on BSOD’ing me.

Well I didn’t really go anywhere, I just haven’t found the time to post lately, more to the fact of what is there to post about? Not much, quite a lot of time on MSN, lots of activity on my forum, upgraded to Abyss 2.4.9.8 (Beta 2) hopefully to stop the random crashing due to lack of RAM, haven’t used linux lately.

Don’t expect a post tomorrow, and onwards for a few days because I will be without my laptop. Oh dear, what will I possibly do? My sites *should* be up but if they go down, I won’t be available to sort them out…

Yep, unfortunately last night, I thought my server had died on me. Abyss kept on crashing, I couldn’t even open Task Manager because it kept displaying the “Out of Memory” error message. Today, I forced a hard reboot, and finally; yes! My server now lives, and is serving a little slower that usual, but I need a hell of a RAM upgrade, if you didn’t know, my server currently has only 64MB, according to server expert, Andrew Whyman, this is no way near enough. He runs a server powering I think 4 of his own sites, using the same program as me, Abyss Web Server, but his server has a) a faster processor than mine and b) lots more RAM than mine, plus mine is a laptop, optimized for mobile use, obviously resulting in less power, so less speed, and so on. He very kindly offered to put me up on his server, but I declined, because I wanted to see if my server could survive on its own, obviously it has because otherwise you wouldn’t be seeing this.

Yay! I sort of got Ubuntu to work. Well that is SORT of. Okay, so I managed to install it and that was it, with the help of a newish open source program called Wubi (nice name). At the moment, it only supports Ubuntu 7.04, Xubuntu and Kubuntu (can’t remember what versions, since it was well over an hour ago before posting this plus I’ve drank lots of non-diet coca cola), but damn you stupid screwed up graphics drivers and the damn screen went off as soon as the loading screen had finished its loading! I’ve searched Google but found nothing. My graphics drivers are VIA/SG3 UniChrome Pro IGP but the VIA website took me to the S3 (not SG3 though) website which took me to a different VIA website, I think it was VIArena, but anyway then it asked me to select operating systems so I did then it made me choose a driver catergory… what? Luckily while I was at the S3 site, I downloaded this thing that told me what one I was using but damn the drivers, mine wasn’t there. Typical, innit? I desprately need to figure out a way to either update my graphics drivers OR get Ubuntu to boot up in Safe Mode, then change the driver settings (because Freespire will only work when I choose “xdriver=vesa” under ‘Advanced Options’), but the only problem with Safe Mode is that the resolution is 800×600 and my screen is 1280×800.

Never mind, I will not give up on my quest to get atleast some sort of Linux installed and working. As they say in France, au revoir et venu encore!

Tags: ubuntu, wubi, via, sg3, s3, drivers, display

No, not my laptop. See this image:

A pretty serious incident where a Dell laptop exploded due to a Sony battery overheating somewhere in Japan, see the image above. A couple in Tokyo are currently (as of July, 2007) suing both Sony and Apple Japan for over Â¥2 million ($16,700 USD) regarding the incident. On August 14, 2006, Sony and Dell admitted to major flaws in several Sony batteries that could result in the battery overheating and catching fire. As a result they recalled over 4.1 million laptop batteries in the largest computer-related recall to that point in history. The cost of this recall is being shared between Dell and Sony. Dell also confirmed that one of its laptops caught fire in Illinois. This recall also prompted Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry to order the companies to investigate the troubles with the batteries. The ministry said they must report on their findings and draw up a plan to prevent future problems by the end of August, or face a fine under Japan’s consumer safety laws.

Some history in Sony batteries…

On September 19, 2006, Toshiba announced it was recalling 340 000 Sony laptop batteries. This recall, however, is not related to the recalls by Apple and Dell, as the batteries are known to cause the laptops to sometimes run out of power. No injuries or other accidents have been reported, according to Toshiba spokesman Keisuke Omori. On September 23, 2006, Sony announced its investigation of a Lenovo ThinkPad T43 laptop overheated and caught fire in Los Angeles International Airport on September 16, an incident that was confirmed by Lenovo. On September 28, 2006, Lenovo and IBM made the global recall of 526 000 laptop batteries. On September 28, 2006, Sony announced a global battery exchange program in response to growing consumer concerns. On October 2, 2006, Hewlett-Packard (HP) determined that it is not necessary for HP to join the global battery replacement program. On October 3, 2006, the Yomiuri Shimbun reported that Sony was aware of faults in its notebook PC batteries in December 2005 but failed to fully study the problem. On October 16, 2006, Fujitsu announced it was recalling 278,000 Sony laptop batteries. It was also reported that Fujitsu, Toshiba, and Hitachi may seek compensation from Sony over the battery recalls. On April 25, 2007, Acer announced that 27,000 batteries from TravelMate and Aspire series notebooks sold from May 2004 to November 2006 were recalled due to 16 reports of overheating and explosions.

Again browsing the internet I was faced with another completely random IE ad that obviously Microsoft have made. Take a look:

What really sticks out in my mind is what the heck does this have to do with a browser? Do you understand what I mean. Its nothing more than an old man and some clever computer graphics put together to create some weird advert. There is no mention of computing anywhere in that advert. The text ‘designed to make things easier’ may have answered some questions that gathered while watching it but I still have no idea of what that has to do with a browser?

Whoooo! Now I got Ubuntu 7.04 working AFTER the loading screen, only in “Safe graphics mode” though. Same with Freespire but I have to boot from the options screen choosing the “xdriver=vesa” option which obviously means that my computer now only works using VESA drivers. I must say that Ubuntu 7.04 detects my wireless hardware (built in adapter) and can connect to my wireless network which is a nice improvement although it could do this before the interface is much better now. Plus I >really< like Freespire, if I could find a nice way to ‘safely’ partition my hard disk I would install it. Plus I like the one click installation system called CNR, just click the install button next to any of the 34,965 listings and give it about 30 seconds and its in your “Launch” menu (basically the Start menu in Windows, but its in the bottom left corner). Not forgetting that the taskbar (same in Windows) is more customizable and can hide in one click and is avaliable in four different sizes; tiny, small (my favourite), medium and large (about 1 quarter of the screen).

I think that a good beginning to this post would have been ‘Okay’ but I’ve used that too much to begin previous posts, so it all starts like this…

One day I was browsing the internet and came across this www.orangeproblems.co.uk website, because Orange are my ISP. I thought it was quite odd that they were voted worst ISP of 2007, they’re not that bad from my experience. Anyway I found this article of how to set up your printer with a Inventel Livebox (the routers that Orange you get ‘free’ with their wireless and talk packages but as soon as you cancel you’ve got to send them back to Orange – I would have prefered to have used my old NETGEAR router but the Livebox seems to be faster plus it has a phone plug for Orange’s talk service), so I followed this guide and got to the point where it came to select the drivers, and I thought i’m not digging out the printer disk, it’ll take ages and under my computer desk is a right mess; pieces of paper, lots of blank disks that have data on them but not labelled, random disk cases without the disks in them, etc. So I decided to use the nearest driver on the list, since the actual driver I want wasn’t on the list. I wanted a HP PSC 1510 driver but the closes to that was a HP PSC 950 so I just chose that and completed the guide. Then I set up the other machine (the one running Vista) exactly the same and printed a test page. When it started printing, first of all it took about three sheets of paper with it and began. It was about a third through the first page when it stopped and the light kept on flashing, and continued not to do much. Maybe it will continue, but no it didn’t so I checked the “See what’s printing?” screen and nothing was there. I thought a good old unplug would do the job. It did sort of but I’ve still got the problem of it locking up and not doing much.

When I get the time to dig out the printer disk then I’ll hit the “Have disk…” when resetting everything up. So the moral of this story is never choose the closest driver to the one you need if its not there because if you do then something really bad could happen like in my case where I nearly broken my printer and also using ‘Okay’ to begin a post too many times isn’t good so you should start off with something like “I think that a good beginning to this post would have been ‘Okay’ but I’ve used that too much to begin previous posts” when blogging.