White’s of Henry Lane

Seems I have more trouble with getting MySQL running with Apache and PHP5 than pretty much anything else I do. So to save myself — and hopefully someone else — much fruitless Googling and Apache restarting, here’s what I found.

If you have configured Apache and PHP5 on Windows XP using the outstanding howto Core PHP Apache 2, PHP 4 & PHP 5 on Windows XP, and can’t load the MySQL module, copy libmysql.dll to either your windows or windows/system32 directory, and copy both libmysql.dll and php5ts.dll to your /ext directory (off your PHP install).

From the Belfast Telegraph: Lewis “Scooter” Libby, once chief of staff to Vice-President Dick Cheney, has been jailed for 30 months for perjury and obstructing justice in the CIA leak case.

The sentence is bound to generate demands from conservatives for George Bush to issue a politically controversial presidential pardon to a leading architect of the Iraq war.

Libby’s punishment, which also includes a $250,000 fine, was at the upper end of expectations. He is the most senior official of any administration in two decades to face a prison term, and - albeit indirectly - the first senior Bush policymaker to be convicted of charges stemming from the war.

… versus …

WIRED: Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has proposed legislation that would make the DMCA look almost just. Among other things, the law would make attempted infringement a crime, and send some infringers to jail for life.

Note: This is one of the posts I made on my long-dormant Vox blog. I’m bringing everything over here in preparation for dumping Vox.

I was reading some blog postings on the Google Desktop Gadgets API, and came across this gem of a comment:

11 boat anchor….

It seemed like a great idea

when seeing it listed on a white board

but seeing it on my pc, it is worthless

I played with it the day it was installed, but never bothered with it again :-( Then I even had it startup each timeI rebooted, and still it gathers dust.

The google toolbar and homepage, I use all the time…..

Somehow the line breaks made this comment read a bit like poetry to me. Maybe I’m nuts.

Note: This is one of the posts I made on my long-dormant Vox blog. I’m bringing everything over here in preparation for dumping Vox.

Bullet Hell Shmups: I like classic arcade games. Growing up in Orangeville, I wasn’t often exposed to really great arcade games. We had one arcade in the mall; it was filthy and stank of smoke. Mum wouldn’t let us go in there, so I’d hover by the door watching the attract mode on the frantic shoot-em-ups. The rare time I’d get a quarter or two, I wouldn’t want to waste it on a game like this, when I knew it would be gone in seconds. The games in the arcade were always set to a higher-than-normal difficulty, and a quarter would get you two guys, not the normal three.

It was this lack of early gaming that hooked me on MAME, the “Multi-Arcade Machine Emulator” when I discovered it. Finally, I could dump virtual quarter after quarter into these games, and not go broke. I played emulated games on my Mac very heavily all through university. After school the interest dropped way off, and I ended up burning all my emulated games to DVD and clearing them off my computer.

My interest was renewed recently, however, when I saw that some real gems of the bullet hell genre had been successfully added to the list of games MAME could run. I was most excited about Radiant Silvergun, one of the best video games of all time, of any genre. RSG is likely the hardest game you’ll ever face (watch this video of some of the gameplay, and note the engrish catch-phrase “BE ATTITUDE FOR GAINS!“; I’ve never made it past the second boss. It came out in my last year of university, and there was a machine over at University of Waterloo. I would play while waiting for friends.

It turns out that Radiant Silvergun isn’t quite playable, but some other classics are: DonPachi, DoDonPachi, Gigawing, and best of all? Mars Matrix. Mars Matrix is one of those games where you don’t necessarily dodge bullets, you deal with them. Which is good, since even with your ships tiny hitbox (the area where it counts if you take a bullet), there’s just too much going on to dodge.

I’ve found a profound pleasure in busting out these straight forward, twitch-and-shoot games from days of yore. Something happens when you hit 30, and you just don’t seem to be able to find those big chunks of gaming time. Every so often I’ll be able to finish a longer PC or console game in maybe two, three weeks. But generally I need to find something I can do for 10 minutes while I wait for some other task to finish. Its very satisfying to start up one of these games, get seriously pummelled for $10 worth of quarters, see pink and blue dots when you close your eyes, all in a shorter period of time than shows up in your daytimer.

I did a quick diagram of how to connect your iPod to a TV using a cheapie camcorder cable. Its scaled to fit nicely onto your iPod as a photo. I based it off of Erica Sadun’s post at the Mac Dev Centre at O’Reilly. If you’re in Toronto, and you’re looking for a camcorder cable for cheap, I got mine from Active Surplus for about $4.

Through the accidental mangling of a URL, I discovered that my del.icio.us bookmarks are the first hit on Google if you search based on the username “awhite“. I’m also #5 on “Andrew White“, which I’m kinda proud of, seeing as there’s a popular musician of the same name.

Despite the ribbing I get from my PSP-owning coworkers, I love my NDS. I’m a particular fan of Mario Kart DS and Animal Crossings: Wild World, both of which feature custom decals. In Mario Kart, you can modify the hood icon of your cart; in Animal Crossings, you can change the town flag. I’ve done a few decals, but they’ve been pretty terrible, and largely based on the default shapes the icon editors give you. Some people go much further. Firewheel Design are a prime example with their brilliant DSIcons site. They give you a three pane view of the general shape of the icon, then progressively fill in the details. The way they lay out the grid really helps as well, allowing you to count out in each quadrant of 16 pixels, same as the in-game editor.

Inspired, and struck with the desire to get a bit more serious about this, I put together a template for icon editing. Its not as fancy as the DSIcons template, but it has the benefit of being properly pixel sized. The template is a Photoshop CS PSD. The palette, grid and blue checkerboards are all on seperate layers. If you want to work on an image you’ve shrunk down, you can position it between whatever layers you want, and draw on a new layer you create. The palette matches the Mario Kart palette.

One caveat: in order to drop lines in the middle of the drawing box, I had to make the box one pixel wider than 32 pixels each way. If you don’t like it, you can resize the boxes.

This template is in the public domain, but I’d love it if you could point me to your creations if you use it!

(PS - Buy the classic icon pack from the DSIcon site. I did, I love it. Its worth the few bucks to support something this out of the ordinary.)

Juice analytics has a great article that’s making the rounds on in-cell graphing in Excel using simple formulas and the REPT function. Its very similar to the common HTML bargraphing mehod of stretching pixels using javascript to calculate their width. (Pop over there before reading further, since none of this will make sense if you’re unfamiliar with the foundation.) I decided to give the demo spreadsheet a shot in the online spreadsheets I use. Here are the results, for the interested.

Google Spreadsheet Painfully slow to open, easily a minute. PositiveNegative shows NaN in the negative space if there is a positive value. You can fix that by opening any negative field, editing it, and resaving. Dots doesn’t work; spaces are treated as regular HTML white space. This would likely carry over to the Gantt chart, but after a few worksheet changes, G Spreadsheets stops displaying content.

Thinkfree Online The Quick Edit view displays most spreadsheets correctly. Anything using spaces for layout (eg Dots, Gantt), will crap out, since this view is rendered as HTML. The spreadsheet works beautifully in the Java app. Overall, very fast and responsive.

Zoho Sheet Same HTML-related space problems as mentioned above. Column widths came in all screwy, but that wouldn’t be an issue if you were creating your own worksheets.

Odeo has added the ability to use your podcast queue as voice mail. To leave voice mail, all you need is Flash and a mic. Send me something below!

I got an email back from Starbucks about my video card experience. They asked me to phone them up, which was good. However I had to go a couple of menus deep, wait on hold, then talk to the CSR, then answer a customer service satisfaction survey of at least half a dozen questions. For what? To confirm my address so they could send me a gift card.

Ah, well. That’s better than nothing, I guess.

There’s a Starbucks near my office that’s been open for a few months now but has yet to really get its act together. There are a couple of staff members who know what they’re doing, but far more who don’t. I’ll give you an example: just before Christmas I went in there on two separate occaisions to find that they had no coffee brewed.

Starbucks.

No coffee.

Of course, they don’t tell you that ’til you’ve handed over your twonie (or as I like to call it, a coffee token). And then you sit and wait, and they draw the coffee before the brewing is done and its really strong. Most annoyingly, though, they don’t give you those “Sorry we screwed up” free beverage cards. I can understand that, I guess. With the sheer volume of screw-ups at this location, they’d be broke in no time. I’m not a big complainer … no, that’s not true, I really am a big complainer, but I tend to do it in private. However, I’m not above writing Starbucks who trade on their customer service and the consistency of the coffee. I’ve written twice, and have hear nothing.

Today, however, took the cake. I went shopping for computer parts. Specifically the insanely afforable Sapphire Theatrix HDTV tuner card based off the ATI Theatre 550 pro core. I’m very excited. On the way back to the office with my little bundle of joy, I stopped off at this Starbucks, got a Grande Bold. Which the staff person knocked over, pouring it all over the counter, all down my leg, on my shoes, and most distressingly into the bag containing my tuner card. She apologized profusely, as she should have done. I worked at a coffee shop for a long time, and never ever did anything that close to boneheaded, but when you’re dealing with liquids these things happen. It was what happened next that really cheesed me off. She reused the cup that had been rolling around on the counter, did not refund my money, and did not offer me one of the sorry cards.

I left before I started shouting, which my wife says was a wrong move. I was very civil, despite a desire to use Strong Language. I’ve once again dashed off a letter to Starbucks this time using email, since comment cards get no response. We’ll see if they respond. Meanwhile, I’ve little option but to go to that Starbucks, since the next closest one is across six lanes of traffic and a TTC path. I guess I’ll just start wearing rain pants.

I get more email intended for Angela White and Anna White than I get for myself. These two clueless bimbos can’t seem to enter their own email address correctly to save their lives. They also seem to really fancy entering contests. As everyone but these chumps knows, all you win in these contests is a vat of spam. Anna’s friends also hate men, and send around all kinds of those “10 Reasons why a Sex in the City marathon is better than a man if you’re a misanthropic couch jockey” joke mails.

Angela, Anna, and whoever signed up for Match.com using my email with the username SteHutch, in case you’re reading this: start checking your email address when you enter it into forms and give it to your friends. Or better yet, please: get off the internet. There are too many idiots on it already.

I didn’t actually get tagged with the Fours meme, but I had it mailed to me. Pretty much every feed I’ve subscribed to has included it as well. And on a Friday after a company party when you’re waiting on the green light to promote some code fixes, you’re inclined to say its the same thing.

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A little less than a year ago, I wrote about a simple technique in Outlook that I’ve employed to simplify my email management. The technique is more social engineering than technical solution. In short, I suggest sticking agreed-upon keywords at the front of your subject line, and then setting up a rule to autosort them. The post has been very popular, and a number of folks asked me to explain exactly how to do this. This is that long awaited post.

This hack will be orders of magnitude easier if your company uses a docket system to track client work. My employer uses a system of three letters that are remiscent of the client’s name, then three digits for the project. So let’s say we’re doing some work for Brewsley Brewing Corp. We might have dockets like this that we charge our time against:

• BRU 101: Define and Discovery phase, consumer site
• BRU 102: HTML email newsletters
• BRU 103: Investor relations site redesign

The first step is to get everyone to agree to prepend [BRU 101] to their subject line. If you can’t make this happen, you aren’t totally out of luck. If you just stick that in the subject line yourself, you’ll be able to at least capture responses to your mail. But this is most useful if you can get everyone to agree to use this technique.

The next step is to create a folder for either the client (if its a low volume project) or the docket. Once you’ve done that, create a rule for each docket code that routes the email from your inbox to the appropriate folder. If you need help with this, you can check Microsoft Assistance’s “Create a Rule”.

At the very minimum, move the message. I like to also clear the new message notification, but maintain unread. I also do this with a set of rules that automatically flags the project managers from whom I get the most tasks as “Follow Up”. This gives me two quick ways of seeing what’s been dropped in my lap, and ensures that my inbox stays clean. This also gives you far more control over when you address your mail. If you’re not booked on a project, don’t open that folder.

One of the questions I was asked was “do you have to do this for every docket”? Unfortunately, yes, with the default rules wizard there are no regular expressions options that would allow you to capture the docket string, and use it for the destination folder. It seems to me, though, that there should be a way to do this with VBA. There is an article at Windows IT Pro with code that allows you to automatically move items marked “Important” to a folder which might work as a basis, if anyone is interested.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Along these lines, I’d suggest everyone check out this comment at Slashdot. The rest of the thread is a real corker, too.

UPDATE: I’ve caught some flack for this post, and rightly so. Despite two decades of life online, and getting caught in dozens of flamewars, it still escapes me from time to time that people can’t see the wry grin on my face as I type. I’m coming off as pretty anti-American, and I can see that, and it wasn’t my intention. The bit at the end about not wanting to be American stands, though. I want to be Canadian. If I wanted to be American, I’d move there. Since I don’t want to be American, and the web sites won’t let me be Canadian, I’m choosing Europe. You see, I still spell it “colour”.

I don’t get too steamed up about American sites that ignore the fact that the North American continent actually has three countries in total, not one. Its pretty standard, and you chuckle, point out that Americans see the world as “us, the French, and the people we’re bombing,” and you move on.

It does bug me, though, when I go to the Apple Canada store, and read that the new iPod Radio Remote “supports FM stations from 87.5 to 107.9MHz (in both the US and European standards)”. Radio here in the forgettable frozen north also covers the same bands, guys. You’re the Canadian Store, you should know that.

Some day, maybe, Canadian web sites for Yank companies will get some proper operating budgets. Until that day, I guess we’re European. I sure don’t want to be American.

The Australian comedy group Tripod sing a song that will ring true to everyone who’s ever said “we’ll leave in a sec, hon, I just need to get somewhere I can save my game.”

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I had an opportunity to complete my first foray into microformats today: my contact data is now available as an hCard.

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The title of this post is not entirely true. I was pretty keyed up when I bought my Qualcomm QCP phone with a five-line display and a rudimentary WAP/WML browser. At that time I was my then-employer’s “wireless expert”, and was really milking that status. Generally, though, my list is short: is phone, has data cable accessory for phone book export.

However Motorola has finally dropped a phone I want at CES, and its the ROKR E2, the iTunes phone redux. It has exactly all the features I’ve had in my secret dreamphone bullet list:

• plays MP3s
• 1.3MP camera with flash
• takes SD (I’m really trying to move to SD cards for all my devices so they can share memory)
• Bluetooth and USB2 connectivity

I have a Pocket PC running NetFront and PIE with the SPB extensions, and open wireless access points are plentiful in Toronto, so the inclusion of Opera isn’t a really big deal for me. However the PIM, Opera and Linux in the back end mean this phone might even make it as a PDA. I’m really hoping for the day I can get my Gameboy Micro, cell phone, iPod, passable digicam and Axim all in one device for about CDN$400. (On an unrelated note, its time for me to update my What’s In My Bag photo for Flickr.)

I’ve come back from a self-imposed web blackout to discover that I’m the featured desktop for December 29th over at the phenomenal Lifehackers site. This isn’t the first time that I’ve made it on Lifehackers. Gina has even been so kind as to send such interesting people as Clive Thompson my way for some great chats. I think the majority of my referrals now come from Merlin at 43folders.com and Gina et al at Lifehackers. I’m no crack programmer, and had despaired of making some tool that helped people squeeze an extra ounce of Things Getting Done from their day. The fact that I’m getting noticed and seem to be sparking some conversation on respected sites is very gratifying. So if you’ll excuse the gushiness, thanks Gina, Merlin, and everyone who’s taken the time to visit my site and mull over what I have to say. This is the push that I needed to recommit to White’s of Henry Lane.

A lot of very bright people have had a number of predictions for the upcoming year, and alot of them sound great. Some of them are pretty much “How to build the skills that’ll get you a resume that will allow you to own the world.” I’m not going to try to one-up these a-listers. Instead I’m going to provide my very modest prediction that I believe you can absolutely rely upon, and build your whole year around.

• 2003: Monkeys
• 2004: Pirates
• 2005: Zombies
• 2006: Cupcakes

You heard it here first. Take this one to the bank, folks.