This is quite interesting.

Well well well, my ickle Linux server Greebo has clocked up 300 days of uptime. Woohoo!

matt@greebo:~> w
 18:11:42 up 300 days,  7:06,  1 user,  load average: 0.00, 0.02, 0.00
USER     TTY        LOGIN@   IDLE   JCPU   PCPU WHAT
matt     pts/1     18:11    0.00s  0.11s  0.02s w

Oh, and I have some gmail invites if anybody wants one?

It’s funny how little nuances of error messages pass you by until it’s far, far too late, isn’t it? Take that lovely error in the previous entry (or rather, the ‘what you can do about’ section):


You can attempt to repair this file by starting Windows Setup using the original Setup CD-ROM.

…and now again with some emphasis added…


You can attempt to repair this file by starting Windows Setup using the original Setup CD-ROM.

Yes, this is another of those ‘Windows Recovery Console’ moments, and though I have been particularly lucky in the past (here, for instance), it didn’t quite work out so well this time…

I don’t know exactly what I was expecting, to be honest. Some kind of guiding hand, at the very least. At best, I was hoping for this wonder of modern technology to realise it was in a bad way, spot how to fix itself, and have me back in my familiar windowing desktop environment tout de suite, no questions asked. No names, no pack drill…

…no such luck.

I remember now that the ‘Windows Recovery Console’ is just a fancy name for a fake DOS prompt, and it soon becomes painfully clear why that error message said I would be the one trying to do the fixing… After a little bit of floundering about, I find a file called ‘system.SAV’, and make the kind of assumption that has launched a thousand re-installs: “Ooh, maybe that’s a backup of my knackered ‘system’ file, I’ll just rename ‘em, and everything’ll be fine.”

Well, 3 hours and one XP re-install later, I can say with some degree of certainty that no, actually, that’s not entirely the correct thing to do…

Ho hum.

Oh well… re-installs are good for the g33ky soul, or so I’m told…

Barely three and a half hours ago, I left my PC to go and partake of a few beers at the local pub. On return, I am presented with a resolutely blank screen. On reboot, I am presented with this nice message:

Windows could not start because the following file is
missing or corrupt:
    \WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SYSTEM

You can attempt to repair this file by starting Windows Setup
using the original Setup CD-ROM.
Select 'r' at the first screen to start repair.

Or, of course, I could just boot into SuSE and everything will be fine…

How come when I mention Windows on this blog it’s because something stupid has happened, and when I mention Linux it’s because something nice has happened?

Answers on a postcard, please, Bill…

Everyone’s favourite monopoly has unveiled a beta(ish) of their new search engine. I think it needs some more work, Bill

Click for bigger pic

Hello.

I’ve been getting a few email bounces recently, as it appears somebody is using a spoofed fretnoise.com email address in a very rudimentary phishing attack. So, if you’ve received an email claiming to be from a fretnoise.com account asking you to enter your citi-bank card details into a website, firstly – don’t do it, and secondly, I certainly did not send the emails.

Oh, and if the perpetrators are checking on the domains they’re using as source addresses… you are scum. May plagues of locusts rest on your land. May boils suffocate your skin.

This was a public service announcement – thankyou for listening. Duran Duran entry to follow

The Old New Thing is a blog I’ve been reading a bit recently. It’s quite techy most of the time, and the interesting bits are usually in the comment threads. It’s interesting to see the views of Microsofties and *nix advocates together, without the usual zealotry as seen on Slashdot and the like. Things even stay sensible when the topics wander into “religious” grounds.

Here I am trying to get open source software accepted at work – it’s good, it’s viable, it does the job… yadda yadda yadda… and what are the OSS folks talking about? The existance or non-existance of goats cheese, that’s what. You’re not helping!

Opte.org caught my eye today whilst I was surfing through ThinkGeek. It’s a ‘little’ project to map the Internet’s topology, and it produces quite nice images. So nice, in fact, that I have taken one of them and made it – albeit slightly modified – my new desktop wallpaper. My modded version is in the gallery.

It’s Saturday night and I have a sore throat and a head that feels full of stuff. I have just been beaten – some would say thrashed – at Minesweeper Flags over MSN. Concert tomorrow night in Brixton. Anyone know a place to park?

Oh and congratulations to Mary for finally beating Minesweeper’s expert level – does the obsession end now?

First things first, Happy Birthday to my Dad!

Thanks go to Adam for pointing out a kuro5hin post about the leaked Windows source. A chuckle indeed, and it’s nice to see that the guys at Microsoft have the same kinds of issues as everyone else.

Of course, by ‘everyone else’, I mean ‘me’

As this is a techy entry, I may as well go the whole hog. I have recently been playing with OO stuff in PHP, and now I understand the syntax, I am becoming a bit of a fan. I’ve also been looking at Smarty, a PHP templating engine. It seems that armed with these two things you can do true MVC programming in PHP. And that is A Good Thing™.