What Jessie Did Next… – Page 17 – …being the inane ramblings of a mundane Yorkshire bird.

Page 17 of 26

Mac OS X Leopard: MacBook Pro Keyboard Problems

December 11, 2007 / Jess / 0 Comments

I experienced a rather annoying problem tonight. When coming back from sleep, my MacBook Pro “forgot” about its keyboard. No matter of power-cycling or removing batteries could fix it, and because it wasn’t “there” it didn’t want to reset PRAM either. External keyboard and mouse worked fine.

After much angry grrr’ing, I found that resetting the SMC worked.

Blogged in case other people have the same issue.

Update: it’s happened a few more times since then. Each time it disappears from the list of USB devices – external keyboard works fine. Lots of other people having the same issue, me and N have decided to downgrade to 10.4 this weekend and stick with that for a while.

Using GD With Leopard’s PHP Install

November 29, 2007 / Jess / 2 Comments

While developing a site which did some image resizing, I noticed this morning that Apple’s version of php5 which is shipped with Leopard didn’t have this library available! It does seem a rather odd omission, given that it’s probably one of the most commonly-used libraries behind mysql/mysqli.

A quick Google revealed that I’m not alone in this, and indeed Apple Discussions has threads on this particular subject albeit for Leopard Server (I’m running the bog-standard desktop edition). After trying a few solutions, I found that the Hill’s Dorm tutorial on installing GD gave the best pointers.

There are a couple of gotchas:

Don’t use the Darwinports version of libjpeg – it’s a 32-bit version. This wasted half an hour while I tried to work out what was wrong only to find that I had the 32-bit libjpeg installed when everything else (including php5 and apache2) were 64-bit; the instructions given on the tutorial above does tell you how to build 64-bit versions of things which any recent Intel MacBook will require. A telltale sign of this is seeing in your logs: PHP Startup: Unable to load dynamic library ‘/usr/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-20060613/gd.so’ – (null) in Unknown on line 0 if you’ve got the wrong architecture (you might also see architecture errors in config.log if you’re really mismatching stuff).
Don’t assume it’s not working because the command-line edition doesn’t work. This had me foxed and indeed seems to be that the CLI version of pph5 which Apple supply hasn’t got the capability to load dynamic libraries. The error is along the lines of dyld: Symbol not found: _php_sig_gif and puts the CLI version of php out of action pretty much.

I’m sure a more elegant solution will be along sometime, but for the moment this does seem to work.

O’Donogues in Wakefield Closes Down

November 22, 2007 / Jess / 4 Comments

What was once Wakefield’s premier pub for the music scene has closed down – O’Donoghues on George Street.

Apparently it was last open on 3rd November; the website’s gone too. I’ve heard it’s been handed back to the brewery by the latest licensee, who also owned the Graziers next door.

It does seem odd to leave it empty for three weeks though. With the Tut’n’Shive closing during the Summer this only really leaves Henry Boon’s as a place for musicians who don’t fit into the niche of the Snooty Fox’s rock crowd or Westgate’s dance and pop scene.

Domesday: Getting It Working

November 17, 2007 / Jess / 0 Comments

OK, i’m going to promise right now I won’t blog about this on a daily basis like I did with the Econet, but I’ve been asked a few times about this so here’s the update.

Easy one first: I removed the monitor switch from the equation and now you need to turn it on/off at the plug, but it works.

Now, there is a fault with the Philips VP415 player: it powers up OK and appears to work, but when a disc is inserted it won’t spin it up. If I put it in ‘replay’ mode, it will ‘jerk’ the disc as though it’s trying to spin, then stop. At that point it beeps and the red standby light flashes (indicating an error maybe? I have no manual for this unit). I need to acquire a service manual for it really then I can test it properly. And I need to buy a new multimeter, since mine’s gone walkies.

In any case, the Master appears fine, and the discs appear OK too – that’s part of the battle, I might still be able to find a spare LV player from somewhere (they were ‘hacked’ from a fairly popular Philips range I think, so some of the bits will be cross-range I guess).

More anon.

New Toy: BBC Micro Domesday System

November 16, 2007 / Jess / 3 Comments

Last night I acquired a new toy: a BBC Micro Domesday system, complete with laserdiscs (LVROMs), trackball, monitor, trackball and manuals. It’s been sat in a cupboard in a school for years, but almost works.

What needs doing:

The laser needs re-tracking on the LVD player itself – apparently it has issues reading from the disks. This isn’t a big job I don’t think unless the servo itself is gone, but I’m sure I can source parts.
The power switch on the monitor needs fixing – looks like the catch on it has either bust or come off. Not a big job.

The ROMs themselves appear in good state, as does the Beeb. I shall attempt to power it up over the weekend and get it going properly.

Update: More about the BBC’s Domesday Project here, and some info on CAMiLEON (the preservation of the Domesday data) here together with a photo.

Mac OS X Leopard on MacBook Pro

November 4, 2007 / Jess / 2 Comments

Yesterday I took the plunge and flattened my MacBook Pro (Core 2 Duo, 2.33GHz, 2G RAM) to reinstall Leopard. This was not an upgrade, this was a completely fresh install. It all went pretty OK really – nothing to write home about and certainly no disasters.

I can now quite happily report that out of all the applications installed the following seem to work without a hitch: Zend, Firefox, Adium, Azureus, Vienna, MS Word 2004, MS Excel 2004, Logic Express 7.2, MySQL 5.1, Mulberry Mail, Nokia iSync profile (for our new E65s).

The two apps which have little niggly problems that I’ve found are:

VLC (media player), which occasionally has problems resizing the aperture and hiding the transport bar as a result.
Parallels 3, which seems to ‘forget’ the bridging interface if you shut off the wireless interface.

I should note if you are a LAMP developer that the system comes preinstalled with php5.2 – I haven’t had to grab anything from Macports yet.

The annoyances of the transparent menu bar don’t really show in the backdrop I have, and the menu bar has been fixed with the hack I posted earlier this week. Additionally macosxhints.com had a nice hint on removing the stripes from Finder’s list mode, which were getting on my nerves.

Oh, while we’re on the subject of transparency, most of the presets in Terminal.app have a semi-transparent background. This can be changed in the ‘background color’ config section, the opacity option is hidden away in there. Took me 20 minutes to find that one.

Altogether so far an almost seamless upgrade. Tomorrow I try it in anger, and curse the missing wireless profiles I forgot to copy over 😛

Mac OS X Leopard: First Impressions

October 28, 2007 / Jess / 3 Comments

Matt arrived at our house on Friday evening with a copy of the latest incarnation of Mac OS X ‘Leopard’ for me. Since the MacBook Pro is my principal machine, I thought I’d install it on the Mac Mini (which after all doesn’t get used by me much, more by the kids when they want to play on the CBeebies website). Anyway, I’ve taken the plunge on the Mini and upgraded the operating system.

First impressions…

I like Spaces, the virtual desktop thingy. I used to use this sort of thing under Gnome and it’s really good to have it back – being able to have a workspace for worky stuff and a workspace for non-work so I can ignore it when I’m really busy is a very very good thing indeed.
The menu bar transparency pisses me off. Matt noticed this first, but it’s got more irritating as time’s gone on – if you have a blue backdrop for instance the transparency in the menu bar makes the bar go light blue. The busier the backdrop, the less readable the menu bar is; it would be good if the transparency could be switched off altogether (someone suggested putting a 60px-or-whatever-it-is white extension to the top of your backdrop to ‘fix’ the transparency to 0%). Matt also noticed the rounded corners are gone on the menu bar!
The reflection on the dock is a bit distracting too – I liked the old dock!
Actually, a bit more control over the graphical elements of the UI in general would be nice.
The new Finder is quite nifty, but it reminds me a lot of iTunes.
The file drawers thing on the dock is very very useful. I’d quite like to be able to squish the font down though so I can fit more documents in the curve.

I’ll probably take out next weekend to flatten the MacBook and install Leopard on there, once I’ve listed all the applications I’ll need to install. I’ve not zilched the machine since I got it, and in the first couple of months I installed all sorts of crap so I good broom is required to get rid of my learning curve 😛

Update: Barely 10 minutes after I’d written this blog entry, there was an Apple Update for ‘login and keychain access’. I wonder if it’s got anything to do with this…

Update #2: macosxhints.com has a nifty way of getting rid of the 3d dock at the bottom.

KWVR Beer & Music Festival 2007 Aftermath

October 28, 2007 / Jess / 0 Comments

If headaches and hangovers are a measure of how good the previous night was, yesterday’s score at Keighley & Worth Valley Beer and Music Festival was spectacular. We left the house at around 10:30am and got to Keighley for the midday steam service, stopping off at Haworth for fish and chips then getting up to Oxenhope shed (including beers en route of course – the train bars were excellent!). Colin, Si, Howard and Sarah joined us on the service from Leeds to Keighley where we had jelly babies and took photos.

We were presently joined during the day by George and Lizzie who’d come over from Hebden Bridge, Ruth and Brian who’d had a 3-hour journey from Kettlethorpe (!), Jem and Lee (you can’t keep that man away from a festival if it’s got trains and beer), and many other friends who we bumped into. The kids were absolute stars, and had great fun dancing to Welsh-T Band.

Looking at my programme (where I usually number what I had and when) I managed to get through:

Spotland Gold (Phoenix, Heywood)
Tawny Bitter (Cotleigh, Somerset)
Definitive (Durham Brewery)
Gold (Green Mill, Rochdale)
Good Ship Leonard (Newby Wyke, Lincs)
K&WV Festival Ale (Goose Eye Brewery, Keighley)
Cornish Knocker Ale (Skinner’s Brewing Co, Truro)
Hornbeam Bitter (Hop Back Brewery, Wiltshire)
Mid Autumn Gold (Mauldons, Suffolk)
Lush (Hopstar Brewery, Lancashire)
Hop Pickers Gold (Mayfields Brewery, Herefordshire)
Carousel (Southport Brewery, Merseyside)
Eden Pure Ale (Sharp’s Brewery, Cornwall)
Pacific Bitter (Bank Top, Bolton)
Blonde (Saltaire Brewery, Shipley)
Arizona (Phoenix, Heywood)
Rail Ale (Old Spot, Cullingworth)

The trip back was a bit hazy for me – I was utterly hammered according to Nicky and only just managed to hit the bench when I was sitting down. Because there were so many of us coming back to Wrenthorpe the cab wouldn’t take us, so we ended up getting a minibus from Leeds City Station back home (which actually worked out cheaper – thanks Fleet Taxis!). We had Chinese food for tea. I can’t remember any of it, but I assume I ate something since I didn’t feel too hungry this morning.

The hangover is almost gone now – photos of the day are here. Great to see so many old friends, and thanks to KWVR for a great day out!

Filling In The Gaps: Photos 1979-1994

October 23, 2007 / Jess / 0 Comments

For a while, Nicky and I were scanning in old pics from as far back as 1979 when I got my first little 120 roll camera (secondhand off Wakefield market, I think I paid 50p for it!). That stopped when we got a bit too busy since it’s quite time consuming and they had to be done on a flatbed scanner. Fast-forward to yesterday when, in a moment of getting away from a particularly evil programming problem I decided to have a play with the minilab’s scanner unit, finding that a strip of four negs takes about 10 seconds to scan and lab dumps the JPEGs in a directory on the fileserver. Hoorah! I can scan the rest of the stuff in!

A couple of advantages to this method:

There’s not as much image degradation as when I was flatbed-scanning the prints themselves.
I’ve filled in some gaps from around 1990-1994, where an ex-girlfriend had been through my prints and cut out the photos of any other ex-girlfriend (this is bizarre, it’s like getting a chunk of your life back, like discovering old photos left over from communist-era Russia).
It’s fast, there’s no messing around cropping stuff, and the frame numbers are preserved within the filename. I did about 600MB of pics in 45 minutes yesterday.

The disadvantage is in trying to remember or work out dates that things happened – I’d quite like the pics to be in chronological order but sometimes that’s almost impossible. I’ll have to dig out my old filofax from home, or see if my Palm has any other data imported from earlier (I kept an electronic diary, and wrote a journal from around 1990 onwards).

The only odd thing I’ve found is in scanning any Ilford FP4 film – for some weird reason it crashes the lab with an error. I have absolutely no idea why it does this, but I’ll bring it up with the lab engineer when he next pops round for a cuppa. Consequently spools such as the BBC Acorn User Show 1991 will have to wait.

I’ll add the pics as and when I have named and dated them.

Star Trek Prequel: Cast Photo Mockups

October 19, 2007 / Jess / 0 Comments

Slashfilm have mocked up images of the new cast of the forthcoming Star Trek prequel, directed by JJ Abrams.

To say I’m not convinced by Simon Pegg as Scotty is a complete and utter understatement.

Econet Fileserver Level 4 On An Acorn A4000

October 15, 2007 / Jess / 0 Comments

With Nicky away again for the evening I’ve spent most of it in the garage trying to consolidate some of the Beeb kit. Top priority has gone to replacing the 20MB MFM hard disk that was running the Level 3 Econet fileserver software, which was done quite simply once I’d worked out the logistics of it all.

By fiddling with a few A4000s I’d been given, I ended up with a machine capable of running the Level 4 fileserver software in multi-tasking mode. Coupled with a 270MB hard disk and 4MB RAM, I copied it over and started it running. One of the nicer differences from earlier versions is that it doesn’t use a partition, rather it uses the native ADFS filesystem (or whatever filesystem is running, so I guess in theory you could chain a network to another network) – so pretty much with a couple of hours of work I’ve managed to get a mechanism of archiving 5.25″ floppies over to a more reliable disk system, on a box which will read 1.44MB floppies (which was the hardest bit of tonight, finding some of those!).

The A4000 also has an Atomwide NIC in it – the plan being to bridge it over via NFS to the Linux box, which is something that the Level4 fileserver seems to be good at doing (presumably to do with the RiscIX stuff and the Unix workstations).

Next step is to remove the older fileserver at the end of the garage, and get the rack cleared so I can start racking some of this stuff ready for the next BBS to go in there. Hurrah!

Rediscovering ‘The Orchestra’

October 14, 2007 / Jess / 2 Comments

Many, many years ago – well, 1987ish – I discovered this programme on Channel 4 called The Orchestra, which consisted of a story told in mime and slapstick centered around a conductor called Julian Joy-Chagrin. The programme was prone to being shifted in favour of cricket, football, racing, well pretty much anything, so I ended up only seeing two or three episodes.

Since then, I have been on the search for copies of the programme. Tonight I was pottering around a few torrent sites when I thought I’d have a look (finding nothing as usual), but one thing led to another and I googled to see if I could find a DVD. Imagine my utter surprise and delight when I found Greg Donner’s website complete with downloads of all 10 episodes! Hurrah – but go easy on his bandwidth (for VHS rips they really aren’t bad quality either).

It is quite hard to find anything online about this show, so it’s a real find to not just get episode lists, but the episodes themselves.

(btw – in case you were wondering, the copyright on this is probably something of a murky area – the company owning the rights wents titsup and under Israeli law it’s got very confused!)

Wakefield Beer Festival 2007

October 14, 2007 / Jess / 0 Comments

Last night saw me popping off to the Wakefield Beer Festival, which (as seems to be usual now) took place at Lightwaves Leisure Centre. I arrived before any of my compadres so managed a few more than usual, half a pint of each of:

Magna 800 (Wapping)
Ale To The Tsar (Fernandes, Wakefield)
Best (Ludlow Brewery, Shropshire)
Idle Chef (Idle Brewery, Notts)
Grasshopper (Westerham, Kent)
Chameleon (Kelham Island, Sheffield)
Woodcote (Hammerpot, West Sussex)
Scotts 1816 (Copper Dragon, Skipton)
Best Bitter (Ballards, Hampshire)
Seasider (Ramsgate, Kent)
Bishop’s Farewell (Oakham, Peterborough)
OSB (Oldershaw, Lincolnshire)
Takeout: Pater 6 (Sint Bernardus, Watou)

I was joined after the fourth by Lee and his friend Jerry, some odd nutter of a gentleman we’d never met before appeared around the fifth (he wah’d about his wife, then disappeared), and around the sixth Colin and Howard turned up. Howard flaunted his ginger beard in our general direction, which was nice.

Lightwaves is an odd venue for a beer festival – the main hall has no natural light, and gets very very stuffy during the course of the day owing to a lack of ventilation, plus of course the odour contributes to the general atmosphere (I pity the poor sods who’ll be wanting to use the changing rooms where the nearest toilet was – it stank).

A nice touch this year was the cheese stand provided by Cryer & Stott, my favourite cheesemongers who had some excellent Fountains Gold and the ubiquitous Yorkshire Blue.

Photos here.

Apple Keyboard: Update

September 26, 2007 / Jess / 1 Comment

OK, it seems I was a little hasty in my Apple keyboard whinging. I’ve cut my fingernails and it seems fine now. The posture change has helped a bit too.

Sadly, the function key melarky is still annoying. You can’t have everything, eh?