In a multi-record breaking event, marred by controversy over the technology of the new swimsuits, the final day of the 2009 World Aquatics Championships featured a fairly typical line-up for the Men’s 4 x 100m Medley Relay. Aside from Australia replacing Canada, and Brazil in place of Italy, the event could very well have been made for the G8. A fact no less marked than that the victors had a full replacement team to the one that qualified earlier in the day. Whoever said sport and money were a bad combination?
All tourists are potential terrorists
At least, so you could be forgiven for believing. Taking photos of buses can get you in some trouble these days. Perhaps now the British government would think twice about stepping in to prevent their own tourists from suffering judicial heavy-handedness. Even snapping a bobby in London could land you up to 10 years, under Section 76 of the Counter-Terrorism Act 2008. You can see how important that “Counter” part in the title was felt to be; if they’d left it out you’d never be quite sure which way to interpret the act. Fortunately there are still some people willing to stand up for common sense. Nevertheless, the UK government policy seems clear. Whilst UK citizens have to accept being the people most spied upon by their government, the latter is taking every advantage to make sure the cameras only point one way. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
Ubuntu grub installation errors
I recently installed Ubuntu on a system with a slightly irregular hard drive configuration. Two SATA drives were running Windows on a mirrored (fake) RAID array, and a third SATA drive was ready to have linux installed. The Ubuntu installer recognised the drive as the third hard drive, and installed itself as expected, with Grub installed in the MBR of this drive, being first in the BIOS’ boot queue. However, all references in Grub’s menu.lst for the Ubuntu installation pointed to (hd2,0), which resulted in an “Error 17: Cannot mount selected partition.” message from Grub. The solution was simply to edit the entries to read (hd0,0) for (hd2,0) as Grub now recognised the third drive as the first on account of its place in the boot order.
Mapped drives in Windows XP
Having recently set up some network storage, I came across a rather irritating problem mapping network drives in Windows XP. The basic setup procedure, as outlined here, worked perfectly on some systems, but failed to retain the stored username/password for network attached drives requiring alternative login details. The solution found, courtesy of this blog, is to map the drives using the following command (replacing U with the drive letter, and NETHOME\LOCID with the relevant UNC network location):
NET USE U: \\NETHOME\LOCID /PERSISTENT:YES /SAVECRED
The necessary username/password details can then be entered and should be stored, allowing the drive to be mapped automatically when the user logs on.
Strange mouse cursor issues
A friend of mine was having a strange problem with her Dell XPS system, whereby the active area of the mouse cursor would move with apparent randomness, occasionally being located as it should be at the arrow’s point, sometimes at its middle, other times half an inch below. This post led us to the solution that a simple graphics driver update was required, coincidentally for the same ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT card.
