Over the weekend, Carly and I visited Rasa, an Asian restaurant on Gympie Parade in Noosa Heads. It was really awesome.

After watching the sun set, we sat down and perused the menus. It was comprised of standard fare Asian dishes, notably sweet and sour chicken or pork and satay chicken or pork. In addition, they had many sides which interested me, specifically ‘Bert’s Balls’ which came in steamed or fried varieties, and were made from something that was of similar taste to dim-sims, but they had something a little extra. They were very nice.

So, Carly and I had some of Bert’s Balls as an entree, alongside some special bread which was herb-ful and delicious. I can’t quite recall the name, so I’ll have to get back to you on that one. We chose our mains; Carly decided on satay chicken, and I chose something else entirely; I do not recall the name, but it was made from chilli, onion, tomato, chicken, and various vegetables, and it was absolutely yum.

The prices were definitely agreeable; at under $20 per meal, the portions were more than considerable and the quality of the food was excellent, most definitely not the fat-soaked cholesterol-fest that Asian food is typically presented as.

We had a wonderful time. After which, we visited Hastings St where we purchased some gelati from one of the local confectionary cafes; I had chocolate and strawberry. It was beautiful. The strawberry gelati, being made from real strawberries, tasted exactly like… strawberry. Simply incredible. The chocolate had a lovely hazelnut flavour to it.

Preferred Editor: Notepad++
Microsoft VBScript: Language Reference
FFDeploy: Automated deployment of Firefox with extensions, themes, and pre-configuration

We don’t have many strict policies regarding installed applications at work; employees have their choice of web browser, for example. When it comes to using our Sharepoint intranet site, this poses a problem. By default Firefox will prompt the user for a username and password when attempting to login to the site, whereas Internet Explorer will automatically use built-in NTLM authentication to authenticate with the site using Active Directory.

Fortunately, Firefox can be setup to do this, however it does require some tweaking of sorts. In the about:config page, you’ll find an option called network.automatic-ntlm-auth.trusted-uris which will enable Firefox to use Windows’ built-in NTLM authentication; allowing users to simply open the Sharepoint site without hassle. Unfortunately, having to set this manually on all the computers on the network that were already using Firefox, plus the additional worry of setting this manually on any new systems or users who decide to use Firefox seemed like an annoying task.

I Googled for a solution, but unfortunately there weren’t any that immediately performed the actions I required. Fortunately though, there does exist a nice utility by the name of FFDeploy which I was able to take parts of — specifically, the VBScript — in order to make possible what I had envisaged.

Essentially, all my script does is check for the existence of a Firefox directory buried within Application Data of the user logging on; if this exists, we copy over a special user preferences file, user.js which overrides or appends to same-values set in the global prefs.js (reference).

The bulk of the script I will keep seperate, as it can be had by downloading FFDeploy. My simple use is as follows:

GetINIString is a function provided by the VBScript in the FFDeploy utility; though it would be relatively straightforward to reconstruct, or write a sub to perform the same action for this specific usage. The line FSO.CopyFile() near the bottom is where we actually copy the user.js file from the server. When the condition isn’t met, we simply exit the if block and do nothing.

Simple, huh?

Creative are screwing around again
Get the community driver packs here
View the complete unedited thread here
My hatred for Creative is apparently not only justified, but shared by thousands.

An excerpt:

Daniel_K:

We are aware that you have been assisting owners of our Creative sound cards for some time now, by providing unofficial driver packages for Vista that deliver more of the original functionality that was found in the equivalent XP packages for those sound cards. In principle we don’t have a problem with you helping users in this way, so long as they understand that any driver packages you supply are not supported by Creative. Where we do have a problem is when technology and IP owned by Creative or other companies that Creative has licensed from, are made to run on other products for which they are not intended. We took action to remove your thread because, like you, Creative and its technology partners think it is only fair to be compensated for goods and services. The difference in this case is that we own the rights to the materials that you are distributing. By enabling our technology and IP to run on sound cards for which it was not originally offered or intended, you are in effect, stealing our goods. When you solicit donations for providing packages like this, you are profiting from something that you do not own. If we choose to develop and provide host-based processing features with certain sound cards and not others, that is a business decision that only we have the right to make.

Although you say you have discontinued your practice of distributing unauthorized software packages for Creative sound cards we have seen evidence of them elsewhere along with donation requests from you. We also note in a recent post of yours on these forums, that you appear to be contemplating the release of further packages. To be clear, we are asking you to respect our legal rights in this matter and cease all further unauthorized distribution of our technology and IP. In addition we request that you observe our forum rules and respect our right to enforce those rules. If you are in any doubt as to what we would consider unacceptable then please request clarification through one of our forum moderators before posting.

Phil O’Shaughnessy
VP Corporate Communications
Creative Labs Inc.

Forum Moderator
Creative Labs

Essentially, Creative has a bad history of customer support. Their driver packs typically provide less features than are advertised. Whenever a new operating system comes along (or in my case, even a new service pack for an existing operating system), Creative throw their hands in the air and shout “no!” — they refuse to support older products on new operating systems. At all.

Some of you might say, “fair enough” — but that’s not entirely the issue here. A forum member, Daniel_K, was packaging and releasing — for free — to the public updated driver packs that as I understand it were created using chopped-up existing driver packs. This was all fine and dandy until of course Creative stepped in and instructed Daniel_K to discontinue this activity, as apparently it was a breach of Creative’s copyrights.

It’s absolutely ridiculous; but you don’t need me to tell you that. You can read the thread here.

Preferred Editor: Notepad++
Microsoft VBScript: Language Reference


Sometimes Windows, for reasons unknown, gets confused about printers. This is a problem in an office environment where people are printing almost non-stop. At my work we have about thirty employees, and in approximately six months, they’ve printed over 100 000 pages. I know this because one of the ink cartridges in the printer was recently replaced, and the printer keeps tabs on these kind of stats.

Anyway, an issue we sometimes encounter is that peoples printers simply don’t work. When they’re selected in the print dialogue of whatever application, the application locks up while the operating system tries to remember where the printer really is. I have no idea what causes this; if you do, please drop me a comment. In an effort to avoid this kind of behaviour, I’ve made an addition to our login script that removes and re-installs all the printers on the system. Hopefully by keeping the printers “fresh” in this way, I can avoid having peoples’ time wasted by silly, preventable printer problems.

The Script

Essentially, what the code does is grab the existing printer connections, delete them, and then re-add them. The in-code comments are enough to satisfy anyone with a web browser capable of looking up Microsoft’s VBScript references. What may not be immediately obvious is the last part — the script will re-add them in the order they existed, but without further input, will make the last added printer the default printer. This isn’t what we’re after at my workplace, therefore we need to fix that. However, I’ve just figured that in my particular instance I could re-add the printers in reverse — problem solved!

I’ve finally figured out the cryptic alsamixer to configure ALSA properly for use with my SoundBlaster Live 5.1 and my 5.1 speaker setup. I think a recent update has made this work properly because I’ve intermittently played with alsamixer over the years I’ve been using Linux, and I’ve never been able to get it to work properly. Though, today I can finally announce that it does. The following configuration, when pasted into your /etc/asound.state file (remember to backup your existing one first!) will hopefully “just work” — no further configuration necessary. It’s advisable to use your physical volume knob to adjust the overall volume level as I would not recommend playing with the software volume levels.

File’s here: asound.conf

Do you read mX?

I picked up today’s issue as I was on my way through Central Station; I figured I might as well give my brain something vaguely interesting to churn through as I readied myself for the long journey home. mX isn’t the worst printed publication I’ve read; though it certainly isn’t the best. This was confirmed for me as I read through it, and came across an article about someone creating a bot system which automates mundane tasks for you in World of Warcraft. “Hang on,” I thought to myself, “This feels like deja vu.”

It was a very strong case of deja vu.

I had read the same article earlier that day online; on Slashdot originally, though they’d linked an article first published on the BBC. Slashdot’s linkage of the article I can accept; the audience of the BBC news site, while almost definitely having some cross-section with the Slashdot audience, is by no means similar. In addition to that, Slashdot’s audience are provided with the means to discuss articles with great depth and fidelity with the use of Slashdot’s comment and moderation system.

This got me thinking about a few things; firstly, it totally ruined any conceptions I’d had about the mX newspaper. I knew it was more a throwaway paper than any of the big-name journalistic strongholds (as is clearly evidenced by advertising throughout the pages, urging readers to ‘pick me up, then bin me’), but I thought that, even so, there was original research and good old-fashioned journalism going on behind the scenes. Apparently not quite as much as I’d thought, however.

It seems to me as though mX is mostly a paper version of the day’s internet news — no doubt the WoW story is not the only news adapted (barely — the text in the mX article and that of the BBC/Slashdot ones were nearly identical) for consumption “IRL” by the news-reading masses. It makes me wonder just how much original thought is left in the news articles we read every day; be they online or printed.

I suppose it’s part of the reason why blogging was such a big thing — it’s essentially millions of people, worldwide, for the most part, thinking, and writing down those thoughts. Makes for an interesting digital landscape.

Funny shit.

I’ve employed Shutter to make putting images on my site that little bit nicer. It’s a nifty little Javascript plugin that will, upon click, display an automatically resized version of the thumbnail image. It integrates well with Wordpress’ existing image upload function, which allows you to upload an image, automatically creating a thumbnail for you to insert into your post. All I need to do is add an extra line to the `a` tag and Shutter does the rest.

You can see it in action on a few previous posts. I’ll be posting all of my images like this from now on.

If anyone wants to buy me one of these super awesome OLED display watches, that’d be real neat.

image stolen from http://store.dieseltimeframes.com/