Anthology of Interest

Must.... resist... best iPods ever!

This is totally me. OMG. Do NOT maximize my windows! ARGH! Who checking in code with lines longer than 80 columns!?!?! My eyes, they are melting!

Apple recently released a new version of the iWork office suite, which now includes a spreadsheet application, Numbers. One thing that annoyed me about Numbers was the data and time formats. I like to use ISO 8601 (YYYY-MM-DD) because I can never remember which is the month and which is the day in the MM/DD/YY or DD/MM/YY format, which is different between the US and Europe. Numbers doesn't have the ISO 8601 format, and doesn't allow you to specify a custom format. Which is kind of annoying, but it is the first release.

Fortunately, someone figured out how to do it. Here is how to do custom date formats in Numbers. . I Haven't tried it out yet though.

Now if only I could figure our how to add functions.... I need WORKDAY() for my schedules....

I replaced this keyboard from Tamara's iBook this morning with one I got off of eBay. All three screws that hold the body to the frame in the battery compartment fell out when I took the battery out, which was a little surprising. Makes me wonder how many other screws have worked themselves loose. The memory shield screws were still nice and snug though.

For a guy who never thought he'd work for Microsoft.

Ok. I'm done now. I just love advertising for dating services. That I don't use. And don't need.

Sigh. Headaches suck.

I finally managed to get our old photos imported into our newish photo gallery software. Our Cuba and Hawaii photos, among other things, are now back online!

It looks like Half-life 2 and releated products (Episode one, etc) are on sale on Steam today. I don't know for how long, but the discounts are significant. Half-life 2 (including the Lost Cost HDR demo) is down from $29.95 to $9.95. The +1 pack (Half-life 2, Half-life 2 deathmatch, and Half-life 2 Episode 1) is down from $49.95 to $14.95.

So if you've ever wanted to play Half-life 2 but didn't want to pay more than $10, today is your day!

I had my wisdom teeth and a baby tooth that didn't have an adult tooth behind it removed yesterday. It's going fine so far, no excessive bleeding or anything. I didn't even need to use teabags. Apparently tomorrow will be the worst day for swelling and stuff, but hopefully that is not too bad.

Tamara said that when she got hers out she just wanted to sleep the whole day. I was wide away and stayed up just as late a usual. I complained more about being sore from playing soccer on Wendsday that I did about my teeth. Hopefully it doesn't get worse. I feel like I could have gone to work today, except I can't talk that much and I would spend all my time trying to eat soup...

As advised by Google Maps.... I'm supposed to get across the Alantic Ocean how!?

Some people have been clamouring for some new photos of Wil. Sorry they look all washed out. I think iPhoto is messing up the colour space on export (or gallery is doing it, or possibly both). sRGB != AdobeRGB.

My employer, Acceleware Corp., closed a $3MM dollar deal with nVidia this week. A further $5MM dollar investment deal was also closed.

Coinciding with this news is a little bit of a PR blitz. Acceleware was featured on ROBTV this morning, and CBC was in our office this morning filming a little piece. Tamara recorded it and I converted it to an Xvid avi, which you can see here: CBC News Business report on Acceleware. Heh, I can't play Xvid movies in my browser. If you can't play it, let me know. If no one can play it, I encode it as something else.

I didn't read car magazines for a long time. I picked up an issue of Sports Car International to read on a flight somewhere. Thereafter, it became my reading material of choice for plane rides. I even picked it up a few times when I wasn't taking a trip, since I had come to like it a lot.

I came across another car magazine, a free ad supported online one that is very much like a print magazine. In exchange for your email address, you get an account which enables you to download issues in PDF format, or using their proprietary reader. Since it's a PDF, the layout is fixed very much like a print magazine, but unlike a normal print magazine, the layout is done in landscape, which makes it idea for reading on wide screen laptops.

Ads are embedded in the same way as they are in print magazines, but they take advantage of being a digital document by linking to movies and other content elsewhere. Their movies are obviously not their focus, but the photography and writing is quite good.

If you like cars and want something else to read, check it out: Winding Road.

The RSS feed is also good, if you like spy shots and up to the minute live-blogging autoshow coverage.

I recently upgraded a Dapper Drake machine to Edgy Eft. After the upgrade, the machine would not longer boot. A kernel panic occurred due to a crc error loading the initial ramdisk, followed by the dreaded "unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(0,0)" message.

I actually fixed this once before and forgot how I did it, so I'm documenting it for prosperity. The crc error suggests that the initrd file, which holds modules and scripts necessary for getting the system up to the point where the root filesystem can be mounted, was corrupt. It is possible that running update-initramfs -c -k 2.6.17-10-generic would have solved the problem. However, I also appended the names of the IDE modules and the VIA IDE chipset module to the /etc/initramfs-tools/modules file, so that they would be copied into initrd and loaded before the root filesystem had to be mounted.

The machine booted flawlessly with the new initrd installed.