Geek archive

BellaBlocks Beta etc

Just a minor update… the beta of BellaBlocks went out tonight for some private beta testing. Oh, and Rise of Nations worked in Wine but was dead slow. Gave up in the end, trying a VM. Ubuntu is pissing me off again. I swear I’m not going to let this bloody operating system win. Grr…. read full entry »


Rise of Nations With Wine

When we moved to the new flat, I decided that I’d be setting up both my new and old laptops in my little ‘office’ so that I could run the Dell (Ubuntu) for my coding, any work stuff, browsing etc, and the old VAIO (WinXP) for gaming. However, the VAIO is not a gaming laptop… read full entry »


T-Shirts I Really Really Want

Due to the unfavourable exchange rate I’ve not bought a geek t-shirt in… quite a while. I try not to think about it too hard, else I might weep. To save myself the time and frustration of having to re-search (not research) for funny t-shirts next time I have money and no pending bills, I’ve… read full entry »


Misc Computery Babblings

Anyone following me on twitter may have since my minor temper tantrum in which I threatened violence towards my laptop on the 5th. Rest assured, I managed to get through the evening without beating it — or Karl — up, but it was a close call. Reason being (apart from raging hormones), I couldn’t get… read full entry »


Snark Meet-Up 09

As I’m sure many of you have already heard, the sexy Amanda of Jingwen flew over to the UK this week. After having trained it in to Telford with Rachael and Ben, she was met by Amelie, Sarah and myself for a day of jollies. Much conversation was had about penises (and whether or not… read full entry »

Favourite Ubuntu Tweaks

Coming from Windows, there has inevitably been some things that I had to ‘tweak’ in Ubuntu to make it work for me. Nothing major — it works great “out of the box” — but I need some little home comforts. Firstly, I had to set it up for single-click file/folder navigation. I guess I see… read full entry »


Oh No, Not Linux

Oh no, I’ve only gone and done it… I’ve only gone and installed Ubuntu on my Dell. It’s like… the end of an era! No more Windows XP. That makes us a Linux household now. Bill Gates will be crying himself to sleep tonight, you watch.


Not an End of Year Reflection

I was going to do one of my traditional “reflect on the year” thingies, but it occurred to me that there’s not much point. I have actually done very little this year that I intended to. Oh sure, I finally managed to get NinjaLinks in to a half working state, and rev.iew.me is doing really… read full entry »

Total Rows In MySQL Query ‘Trick’

Background: I wrote this post last week, after discovering what I thought was a nifty trick. Shortly afterwards, I found contradicting evidence that suggested the traditional route of using a separate query of COUNT(*) was faster, and/or it depends on your individual database design. Instead of deleting the post, I figured I should publish it… read full entry »