So, santa was good to be this year – got a lot of clothes and other fun stuff, bought myself a GPS from Best Buy on Boxing day – btw, if anyone ever decides it may be a good idea to go to any store on boxing day, its NOT.  I literally spent 2 hours in Best Buy – 1.5 of them waiting in line to pay for my item.

Anyway, so far, happy with it, I ended up with the Garmin 250W, I haven’t updated the maps yet – perhaps I’ll do that today, but thus far it hasn’t failed me.

Tania and I are continuing to work on the wedding planning, which is moving along at a decent pace.  Tania found an idea for a centerpiece that I really like, but requires some construction work on our part, so I think I’ll likely build a sample and see how things go.  We also managed to book our limousines for the day of.  We decided on a 1961 Rolls Royce for Tania’s transportation to the church, and consequently our transportation to the photos.  We also managed to get a 20 person stretch hummer in the deal, so, all in all should be a good day.  We’re still working on the DJ and Decorations, which are kind of the two big things remaining.

Beyond that, work is going well for me – I got a promotion a few months back, and things have been doing well – though I never seem to stop working now-a-days.  I’m now the Director of Technology for MRX and the Ticats, which is more than a full time job.  Hopefully will have some extra help soon though.

Anyway – have to finish up building a site – I’ll post more details on it here soon.

Essentially we have a module in our application that moves a few files around via FTP.  Now this works fine on some servers, but some have problems – ftp_put returns ”, and creates a 0kb file on the remote FTP server.  Turns out – after much diagnosis, that enabling pasv mode in some cases fixes this problem (ftp_pasv).

I finally did a bit of searching around and discovered this gem:

il maestro ignoto » Blog Archive » slow projects loading in textmate

To save some typing, you can just copy and paste this into your preferences:

!(/\.(?!htaccess)[^/]*|\.(jpeg|jpg|png|gif|mp3|pdf|swf)|\.(tmproj|o|pyc)|/Icon\r|/svn-commit(\.[2-9])?\.tmp)$

This will tell Textmate to ignore graphics and whatnot when it regains focus and greatly speed up the loading of your projects.

Really nice piece of hardware – very well packaged and organized.  Anyway, I proceeded to shut down the fileserver to install the drive, got it all set back up – drive detected, go to boot ubuntu, and guess what it won’t boot.  I end up at a busybox prompt.  Really not cool.

It would appear there’s some kind of bug in the ubuntu kernel or one of the recent ubuntu updates that is giving me grief – I know its not the new drive because I unplugged it and continued to have the same problem.  Specifically if I try to boot up, it gives me an error saying it can’t mount /root – Device or resource busy.  Well, I mean, really, how can the drive be busy, there’s nothing open on it.

So far I can almost get it to boot up but I think I’m going to leave it for the night and see if I can come up with a solution.  Currently to boot it up I have to do this:

mount -o ro /dev/hda1 /root

ctrl-d

That will at least bring me to a prompt, but for some reason I can’t access any of my drives – they’re all saying device or resource busy.

Again – Really not cool.

Gizmodo UK : Wii Storage Problem ‘Urgent’ Admits Nintendo

At least now you’re admitting there’s a problem, instead of the year of plugging your ears and saying “la-la-la we can’t hear you… no there is no storage problem… no we won’t add a hard drive accessory to the Wii”.

“We have said publicly that we’re looking hard at the storage
situation, that we’re working on a range of solutions. We have nothing
to announce now. But certainly it’s an issue we are aware of and we’re
working to find a solution and we will. We have a consumer base who
loves virtual console. We have a user base who really is enjoying
WiiWare content.

So for us really our challenge really is how do we satisfy all
these consumers who are loving all of the product we make available on
a download basis? As we continue to have things, as you point out, like
‘Mario Kart’ that has its own channel when you’re playing from an
Internet perspective, we’re just making this challenge tougher and
tougher. So in our view this is becoming much more of a mainstream
problem, which is why we have a sense of urgency to solve it.”

So, if its such an urgent thing to fix the storage problem now, why wasn’t it a year ago when everyone was saying that it really is a problem? That and if they aren’t going to add a hard drive, what else could they do? Maybe make use of the SD-Card slot and finally allow people to play games off their SD cards?

To my surprise, its a notice saying they’re going to be upgrading my analog service to their new amazing “digital” service, because they can no longer maintain the analog phone lines. What a load of crock, I was actually a Sprint customer back in the day when Rogers bought them out, and I’m fairly certain that as a result of the buyout, Rogers had to maintain the analog phone lines. That being said, Ma Bell happens to own the lines and leases them out to Rogers, which I would guess cuts into their ever so precious profit margins. So, it would make sense, from a business perspective (aside from the whole giving Bell back their monopoly), for Rogers to try and stop paying the expensive leasing fees and give everyone VoIP, which costs them essentially nothing.

Anyway, the whole point of the argument, monopolies aside, is that I got the letter on July 4th. They are making the change to my line on August 1st according to the letter. Now, the real problem is that I rely on my analog phone line for my DSL, which I get through Sentex. Would seem Rogers can’t even get their act together to give their customers even 1 months notice of changes to their services. Unfortunately, you can’t cancel any contract without a month’s notice, GREAT GOING ROGERS! So, now, I’m forced to cancel my service with Rogers, get Bell to take over my phone line, and look, Rogers has lost another customer.

Really, wake up people, why can’t you get your act together and be a decent service provider like you used to be? Rising prices, crappy service, for what, a few “value adds” here and there? No thanks.