Today’s example of Apostrophe Abuse comes courtesy of Energy Innovation in Halifax. You’d think that when you’ve gone to all the effort – and expense – of getting a shiny, custom, mirrored sign printed you’d proof read it. Apparently not. Bravo, sirs. Bravo.
Apostrophe abuse is something that get’s (sorry) my goat, and so I’m always amused to see examples of it in the wild – especially from people who really should know better.
Today’s example come’s (excuse me) from the Design House Restaurant in Dean Clough Mills, Halifax. Note the “if it has an S, it needs an apostrophe” approach – and enjoy the additional bonus of a note regarding “accsess.”
After I leave work of an evening, I cross the road via a Zebra Crossing. This is something I achieve each weekday evening, although not without the occasional hiccough.
Take tonight, for example. After stepping out onto the crossing, I noticed that a car on the far side of the road was making a fuss about having to stop. He eventually – grudgingly – halts with the front of his chavwagon sticking over the crossing. I walk past and get on the pavement.
As he sets off, he winds down his window and shouts “You’re supposed to wait for the car to give way, you fucking nob!”
Well, I’m always willing to be wrong, so I looked it up. It turns out – according to the Highway Code – that cars are required to “look out for pedestrians waiting to cross and be ready to slow down or stop to let them cross” and “MUST give way when a pedestrian has moved onto a crossing” (emphasis theirs.)
Never mind, chavwagon driver. I’m sure you’ll learn to drive properly one day. Possibly when you hit puberty.
I use the open-source Pidgin IM client, and came home to discover it had stopped connecting to my MSN Messenger account with the error “Unable to retrieve MSN address book.”
Turns out that Microsoft have blocked the version of the protocol Pidgin’s MSN plugin uses to communicate with their servers. While this is bound to be fixed in an updated version of Pidgin soon, I got impatient and fixed it myself.
To sort this error out, simply install the MSN Pecan plugin and restart Pidgin. If you edit your accounts, you’ll see a new option for account type – WLM. Choose that instead of MSN and it’ll start working again.
MSN Pecan is available for Windows, Linux, and MacOS and is fully open source – albeit unsupported by the main Pidgin developers.
EDIT 20090119: The problem can also now be resolved by upgrading to Pidgin 2.5.4 or later, saving you having to install a third-party plugin.
I’ve been meaning to post something about this to my site for a while, but I’ve been busy. Oh, alright – I’ve been playing Guild Wars. Sheesh.
Anyway, on Friday I was treated – along with the rest of the staff at Frog – to a sneak peek of Frog 3.0, the next-generation software we’ll be showing off at BETT. While I am, for obvious reasons, as biased as a very biased thing, I have to say I’m honestly impressed. It’s shiny.
Having been in charge of an implementation of the open-source VLE Moodle in a past life, I thought I knew what a learning platform was. Turns out I was wrong – the new Frog does things I never even thought possible.
I can’t say too much about it until it’s officially unveiled, but if you’re heading to BETT be sure to find the big blue stand with Bob the Frog on it and have a play – I guarantee you’ll be impressed. I was, and I’m notoriously fussy.
With the missus getting increasingly addicted to Guild Wars, it’s been getting harder and harder to get on my PC of an evening. Accordingly, I have treated myself to a new toy – an Acer laptop.
The specs are reasonable, although I could have lived without Vista. It’s taken me almost a full week to beat the thing into submission – it’s amazing how irritating Vista is when you’ve used a grown-up operating system like Ubuntu for a while. Actually, that’s the next step – dual-boot the thing, with Vista for games (and Blu-ray playback) and Ubuntu for actually getting things done.
One thing I’ve noticed about the specifications, actually: it’s fitted with an ATI Radeon Mobility 3470 chipset, but CPU/Z shows it as a 3450. I’m assuming this is an artifact related to the fact that I removed the crippled drivers provided by Acer and replaced them with hacked desktop drivers based around the latest Catalyst version. The new drivers work fine – and with the performance of a 3470 – but display as a 3450. Strange.
All complaints – and between Vista and some of the stupid things Acer has done, there’ve been a few – aside, it’s a reasonable new laptop, and it only set me back £470.
Oh, and in honour of its status in the house it’s been christened TOYBOX – after the debris recovery vessel from Planetes.
If you’re struggling to find somewhere with the Wii in stock – or can’t afford to shell out a hundred and eighty smackers on a console – then check your local Morrison’s. I was pleased to find a Zone Wireless Gaming console in my local for under £18 – that’s a tenth the cost of the Nintendo equivalent!
Sadly, I was ordered by my better half not to buy it – despite the “incredible 16-bit graphics” and 7 in-built sports games – 2 more than you get with the Wii. I guess I’ll have to make do with Nintendo’s offering.
Being a huge fan of Ubuntu, I’ve been using the OS on most of my hardware for quite some time – including my first release spec Eee PC 701. Originally running Ubuntu 7.04 and then upgraded to 7.10, it’s always been a bit ‘finicky’ – mainly as a result of the non-standard hacks I’ve had to implement to get things like the shortcut keys working.
I decided the time had come to move to something a bit newer, however, and have just finished installing Ubuntu 8.04. Using the ISO from the Ubuntu Eee website, it was a fairly painless install. I was disappointed to see that the installer didn’t set up fstab in the manner I prefer – with a limited number of writes on the internal SSD available, I like to put /tmp, /var, and others on a tmpfs mount – but that was easily sorted.
What wasn’t quite so easy was the wireless. Unfortunately, Asus have opted to use one of Atheros’s less supported wireless chipsets in the Eee – with no official Linux driver available. The madwifi-ng driver included as part of the Ubuntu-Eee package sort of worked, but tended to drop out rather frequently – oddly, when the signal was at its strongest rather than its weakest.
Steam – Valve’s digital distribution mechanism – is having a sale at the moment with some reasonable bargains, including a decent deal on Max Payne and Max Payne 2. Having enjoyed the original and never having played the sequel, I snapped it up.
There are problems, however: while the original works fine, Max Payne 2 suffers from major audio glitches in the video sequences. Sticking, juddering, popping every few seconds – it’s a mess. I tried setting processor affinity, turning Direct3D acceleration off, setting Windows 2000 compatibility mode – the works.
I finally figured out that it’s not actually Max Payne 2 that’s the problem, but rather the Bink video playback DLL that comes bundled. Having upgraded the RAD Video Tools to the latest version, I was able to recreate the problem outside the game engine simply by playing back the – admittedly fairly high-resolution – intro video within the Bink Player.
It turns out that some older software – Bink playback tools included – don’t like SMP systems, i.e. systems with two or more logical processors. The good news is that there’s a relatively simple fix.
Well, not Santa per se… More one of his helpers.
Okay, it was company MD Gareth (no relation) Davies in a daft hat handing out the results of the Secret Santa we’ve been running.
I’m pleased to say that I came away from it with an absolutely awesome toy crossbow – which is powerful enough to send a dart flying half-way across the office. I don’t know who was buying for me, but they know me scarily well. The only problem was keeping Lee away from it for the safety of people around him.
Sadly, I was too distracted by the crossbow to see the recipient of my gift’s reaction, so I’ll just have to hope that they were suitably pleased.