davidrickard.net

Random stuff, randomly updated.

Archive for February, 2008

I’m the real me. Honest

Friday, February 29th, 2008

Well, it happened. I’m now the a victim of credit card fraud. It seems my card has been cloned, and somebody was able to change my account details, and then attempted to make some large payments. They failed on the last step, as it was refused, which I’m pleased about. I’m a wee bit miffed and perplexed that they managed to access my account details and change all that, yet when it came to exchanging funds, they couldn’t.

Still, I phoned the bank and they very quickly sorted it. Basically cancelled the card, re-set everything, and added a few new things to sort it all out. Then again, it happens so often, they probably have it down to a fine art.

I’m just so annoyed it happened. I’m always so careful with my cards. I can only assume an employee of some retailer I’ve used that card with has copied the details, and then found out the rest of my info from public records. They’re probably UK-based, as the money was withdrawn in the UK as far as I know.

Now the electoral register is online, anybody can search for stuff. It’s annoying that in order to exercise my right to vote, I have to sign away my privacy. Or at least, I think that’s the case, so I’ll look into that too. It’s ironic. I shred EVERYTHING with my name and address on it, and am incredibly careful about where I use the card, and I’m the one that get’s had!

It’s just made me very paranoid about such things now. I suppose I’ll just have to tighten things up a bit.

Damn them.

Posted in General, Rant | Comments Off

Bluray!!!! Bluray! Duh duh dah dah dah dah

Monday, February 25th, 2008

I bought a Bluray drive recently, to go into my media centre PC. I installed it, and… it didn’t work. Big surprise.

So, if you have a Pioneer BDC-SO2BK (or BDC-202BK, as the Pioneer website calls it – the box it comes in uses the former), you’ll need to enable AHCI support in your BIOS, or it just won’t work. Or at least, it didn’t for me on an Asus M2N-VM HDMI motherboard.

You’ll probably find, if using Vista, you can’t boot any longer. So make sure you do this first:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/922976

And that’s it. Otherwise, it seems to behave, and plays Bluray discs fine. I have a little bit of stuttering, but the CPU usage is only around 25%. There is, however, a lot of hard disk thrashing, so I’m going to fix and defrag the swapfile and see what happens.

But so far so good. I just need to get some other little niggles sorted, and it’ll all be wonderful.

Posted in Computers, General, Links | Comments Off

Well there’s ya problem!

Sunday, February 24th, 2008

I was looking at the awful photos I put up on Flickr last night I took at the gig. I was trying to work out quite what went wrong, and I think I now know.

Firstly, I was shooting in the high sensitivity presets. There’s one on this camera called “High Sens.” which purports to be useful for taking shots in dark situations, like a show. It seems to do that by opening a high aperture, and whacking the ISO up to maximum – 3200 on this camera! That would explain why the pictures are so horribly grainy. Not only that, but it was OVER compensating, because I’d rather cleverly disabled the flash. I usually don’t bother with flash in such circumstances, as it falls off too early, and you end up with all the kit at the front of the stage nicely illuminated, and everything else in darkness. So, yes, I got pictures, just really bad pictures.

The other ‘simple’ modes didn’t help either, as they too were horribly noisy too. Also, the focus was pretty bad on most things, as I wasn’t allowing the camera to focus on what I wanted. It’s a common trick of mine. I do it less on my DSLR, as I’ve been tending to manually focus with that of late, but compacts I always seem to end up with blurry shots.

So, lessons learned:

  1. Use the flash. It’s there for a reason
  2. When focusing, point at the thing you want to focus!

All my silly fault, really. I am still learning this stuff though!

Posted in General, Photography | Comments Off

In Oxford. No commas.

Saturday, February 23rd, 2008

I went to see Vampire Weekend this evening. A good show! They’re a young band, so they don’t have a lot of songs to play, so the set was a bit short, but it was entertaining all the same. The band for the most part seemed to be having fun, even if there were a few hiccups along the way, like flubbed notes, and a guitar strap deciding to part company from the guitar it was supposed to be supporting.

The support act – an Australian band by the name of Sparkadia – were also quite good, even if when they came out, there was probably barely 50 people in the venue. Still, they played some good, high-energy songs, so I might keep an eye on what they’re doing.

I took my new camera along too, and took some truly awful shots. The ISO boost the camera was using was a wee bit too much, so most of the shots are horribly noisy. Most look like there were taken on my mobile! Stipply water-colour impressions.

Here’s one of the (slightly) better ones though.

Vampire Weekend

Still, it was a good gig, and that’s the main thing!

Posted in General, Music | Comments Off

I can haz funny pikchure?

Saturday, February 23rd, 2008

Humorous Pictures

I don’t know why I find Lolcats funny. But I do. I can waste hours browsing.

Posted in General, Intarweb, Links | Comments Off

There I am!

Sunday, February 17th, 2008

I’ve had my ‘Are you David Rickard?’ page up for a while, and I get a fairly constant trickle of emails from others with the same name.

I’ve been meaning to do this for ages, but now, you can see them all on a map too.

I can tell you’re excited.

Posted in General, Intarweb | Comments Off

Suddenly UAC

Sunday, February 17th, 2008

Windows Vista has introduced a new technology to Windows-based PCs called User Account Control (UAC). The idea behind it is that if a user makes a change which could potentially effect the system in a detrimental way, a dialogue box is shown in order to tell the user this change is going to happen, and to ask for confirmation. The user can cancel out, and no change is made. It also protects against rogue background applications doing bad things. The most common being a downloaded trojan which installs a ton of junk into startup locations, so every reboot, it re-installs everything, thus slowing the spread of malware.

It’s similar in some respects to the admin prompts Mac OS X uses when asking for permission to make system changes. Various Linux distros also do the same, including Ubuntu and SuSE.

When it was added to Windows, it managed to attract a lot of criticism, and negative coverage. In the early beta releases of Vista, it would pop up almost constantly, often during quite trivial changes. The developers at Microsoft honed it, and now, it’s actually quite unobtrusive.

When I moved to Vista, I did exactly what most people did – switched it off. Recently, I was goaded into re-enabling it though, which I have, and thus far, it hasn’t really caused any problems. It will pop up when installing new applications, and when launching system applications I could break things with, like the Windows registry editor, regedit. That’s fair enough. It might slow down fiddlers who think they know what they’re doing.

One thing I’ve come to realise though, is that there is a time when disabling UAC would be a good idea. I often produce system builds at work for deployment to many desktop PCs, and a great number of installs take place on that base setup. Clicking through all those UAC prompts would probably drive me slightly insane, so disabling UAC at that point wouldn’t be a bad idea. It’s a fairly controlled environment; I’m not browsing the web, I’m only installing known, tested things, so in theory, should be safe. Once everything is as I want it, I could re-enable it, to stop users breaking all my hard work!

Similarly, my home PC could be treated the same way. I could disable it when I first set the PC up, then re-enable it when I’m happy everything is as I want it. Then I have protection from rogue applications, and me doing stupid things.

In my day-to-day use, I’ve not seen it much, and when I have, I’ve expected it. I think it could prove to be useful.

Posted in Computers, General | Comments Off

John Cleese’s “Letter to America” « Things Are Looking Up…

Saturday, February 16th, 2008

It’s funny. Not sure if John Cleese actually wrote it though.

John Cleese’s “Letter to America” « Things Are Looking Up…

Posted in General | Comments Off

Of Modems and DSL

Saturday, February 16th, 2008

I had been using Zen for quite some time – since August 2004 apparently. They’ve been pretty good to me over the years, and I’ve had stellar service from them. BT, less so. My line speed had been steadily degrading, and for no good reason. I’d gone from getting around 4Mbs down to around 2Mbs, and lower on a bad day. No matter what I did, I couldn’t produce any sort of improvements, and Zen were unable to help as there was no ‘fault’ as such. The line was stable, and it worked, even if it was a bit slow.

I decided to move elsewhere to see if I could resolve this issue. I decided to use a company called Be. Be are what is known as an ‘unbundled’ supplier. Basically, they install their own kit into BT’s exchanges, and plug your phone line into that. All your calls still go via BT as normal, but your Internet access takes a different route at the exchange end. They also use a newer technology, ADSL2+. Zen’s product uses BT’s ADSL product, with the more recent ‘ADSL MAX’ add-ons, which allow the line to negotiate the fastest speeds it can. ADSL2+ works in pretty much the same way, only it uses all sorts of new methods to achieve the same thing, and not surprisingly, does it better.

My migration to Be took place last Tuesday. I came home from work, configured the router, and found I was now getting 3.8Mbs. A fairly good improvement. Not only that, but my upload speed has more than doubled, so sending files and emails is now much quicker too.

It proves to me there was some sort of issue on my line though. Various BT engineers have told me that sometimes at the exchange end, if equipment is overloaded, a situation can occur where line noise bleeds into neighbouring connections, i.e. mine. This then degrades the connection. BT can sometimes perform what is known as a ‘lift-and-shift’, whereby they simply unplug your connection, and physically move it to a different point. Unfortunately, getting BT to do it is very difficult, so it didn’t happen.

The only option left was to move the connection myself, by changing supplier. So far, I’m glad I did. I’m getting a better speed in downloads, and overall, the connection is far snappier at doing things, like web surfing and the like.

So, to Zen, so long, and thanks for all the fish.

Posted in Computers, General, Intarweb | Comments Off

Just Listen

Friday, February 8th, 2008

New music is always good. Good new music is better though. Two diametrically opposed bands to talk about here.

Clare and the Reasons – The Movie

Clare and the Reasons - The Movie I first saw Clare and the Reasons supporting Duke Special. They play a blend of beautifully orchestrated strings, mixed with some tightly layered harmonies, and other miscellany you normally don’t hear in songs, including a saw.

The songs are very beautiful, and really do show off the technical competence of both the chief song writer Clare Muldaur, and the rest of the group (which incidentally, includes her husband). That’s not to say the songs are all show and no substance. Quite the opposite in fact. A song like Alphabet City is still sufficiently hooky to have you humming it.

For such a seemingly young band, they play live like they have been playing for ever, and on stage seemed to be having far too much fun. Their live rendition of Pluton (sung in French) was completely in the dark, save for each band member wearing a flashing head-light. The inspiration for the song Rodi was explained; Clare had a neighbour who she had though was called Rodi, and Clare imagined a whole story to go along with her. As it turned out, her neighbour wasn’t called Rodi, but the song stands as a tribute to her anyway.

An entertaining band, for people who appreciate music with real depth, and slightly more complexity than a simple three chord trick. These songs are worthy of being listened to carefully. Like a fine wine, you’ve got to savour it, and appreciate more than just what you might casually hear.
Myspace Page

Reverend and the Makers – The State of Things

Reverend and the Makers - The State of Things Hard-Fi are from Staines, near London. They sing about being stuck with a life you might not like, and all the problems it has. Reverend and the Makers are from Sheffield. They sing about being stuck with a life you might not like, and all the problems it has.

Don’t get me wrong, they AREN’T the same band, and they aren’t singing about identical things, but I can personally draw a lot of parallels. And in a good way too. Thematically they’re singing about similar things, and the musical styles are similar, although Hard-Fi might lean more towards guitars in their songs, Reverend and the Makers have a slightly more electronic edge.

Lots of good, earthy songs. Bandits stands out to me, as it seems to show a conversation between a gambling obsessed man and somebody else egging him on. The bridge is genius as it throws another person into the equation; the protagonist’s wife trying to find where he is, and hoping he’s not spending all their money.

Also we find a lot of guest vocalists and writers on the album, which adds a nice bit of spice to the vocals. Alex Turner of the Arctic Monkeys (a good friend of the band’s front man) guests on a few songs, and indeed wrote song The Machine. A song which fits perfectly on this album, but doesn’t fit in with typical Arctic Monkeys songs.

There’s quite a few short, fast-paced songs on this album, all sufficiently upbeat to offset their slightly downbeat themes. What The Milkman Saw is a wonderful piece of how suburbia and gossip works. Rumour and idle chatter ruling the suburbs.

One slight downer I noticed is that there’s a very similar rhythm throughout all the songs, and there’s a chance that they could end up just repeating themselves over and over. Hopefully not though. Good car music when driving – best listened to loud!
Myspace Page

Posted in General, Music, Reviews | Comments Off