Tuesday, November 4, 2008

Vista Ultimate virtualisation; openSUSE 11.0; Open Flash Chart; Down Across and Up

While searching for an answer to my reactivation issue with Windows Vista Ultimate after a BIOS upgrade, I found a nice *thing* to allow me to use Vista without having to authenticate with Microsoft's web servers.  It does a nice job to trick the operating system in thinking the BIOS of the computer is from an eligible company for pre-activation.  So now I have a copy of Vista running in virtualisation.  Not sure what I'd want to do with it though...

While looking for computer parts to retrofit into the now deceased Compaq, I noticed that the prices of parts I used to build my PC rig (hackintosh) have increased quite a bit.  It now costs more to buy the parts now than a year ago.  Just shows how fast the online stores change their prices based on the FOREX.

With the help of a friend, I managed to get openSUSE 11.0 up and running with wi-fi.  After upgrading Ubuntu from 8.04LTS to 8.10, the UUID of the openSUSE partition changed or something about the partition changed and the bootloader couldn't find the root device.  I ended up reinstalling openSUSE because I didn't know better and I had already wasted 1 day changing the menu.lst file and grub.  After getting openSUSE booting, I had the same wi-fi problem.  I couldn't get it to make a connection to the wireless access point.  In the end, my friend found a link that basically told me to extract the firmware (rt73.bin) of the wireless adapter (ASUS WL-167g) into /lib/firmware/ and then restart the wireless module.  After that, I was able to connect to the access point but I only had intranet access.  Couldn't access the internet.  The problem I found was that the DNS server wasn't resolving the namespace correctly.  Retardly, this was probably because of my fetish for static addresses.  Once I started using DCHP, I could access the internet and pull down some updates for openSUSE!

I looked at Open Flash Chart (OFC) for a brief period.  Pulled down version 2 and had a little play around with the Python library and demo.  It seems to work quite well and feels more light weight than version 1.  I noticed that the point where the x and y axis come together is missing.  It's almost as if it's a bug in how the origin is drawn and just looks wrong.  Version 2 requires an ActionScript 3 compatible interpreter so that's basically version 9 and above of Adobe Flash Player.  So the consequence of upgrading StockShaping to use OFC is that people need to have one of the latest Flash Players from Adobe.  I guess it won't be too much of a problem since the ubiquity of version 9 is quite high given the popularity of youtube and the like which require Flash Player.

Just came back from a private screening of a movie made by a couple who are my sister's friends.  The movie was called "Down, Across & Up" and documents the couple's trek around New Zealand on horse back.  It was made possible by sponsorship, family and friends who supported them throughout their journey using horses.  Unfortunately it was shown that the phrase "Animals were not hurt during the production of this movie" couldn't be used but all the animals used seemed to have come out fine in the end.  They had a nice journey around farmland and lots of random people coming out to help them along the way; even if they had never met them.  All in all, it was quite a fun movie and they did a good job of taking us around New Zealand, quasi-horse back style!  Hmm also my first movie premiere XD

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