Well, that's the end of the dodgey wooden chair I've been sitting on for the past ~6 years in front of the computer.

Not the best chair, but works okay if you're playing games or watching a movie :P
Somewhat difficult to type with, if you lean back.

Well, after last week, when she was trying to explain a point to us, using examples such as the Sony Wii and the Nintendo Xbox (apparently the Microsoft Playstation wasn't good enough), this week, she used images to explain to us some core values that some firms try to put forward to their employees, such as:


















































(found more, but I think that's enough =P)

After the death of my old USB thumbdrive, I've been using my portable HDD these days, to carry stuff around.

But yeah, it's larger, and has moving parts...  so I decided to buy a new USB drive, seeing the prices of them now dirt cheap.

Got myself an 8GB cheap/generic brand (my experience with generic brand USB drives aren't that bad - sure, they're not the fastest, but usually reasonable).
But this one has absolutely horrible write speeds...  It's like USB 1 speeds.  Copying from the drive feels more like USB 2, but seriously, What the fudge?

Urgh, oh well.  It didn't cost that much anyway.

I've probably mentioned this before, but I've been dabbling in a bit of disassembling lately.

One thing that was interesting was Oblivion.  When I copied the game off someone else, interestingly enough, the game had no protection whatsoever.
I recently installed a patch however, and now, the game seems to require the DVD to be inserted to play the game (as everyone knows, a darn pain).
Anyways, just to test it out myself, I decided to see if I could fix that myself.  Loading oblivion.exe up in IDA, I quickly found out where the message was being disabled (the check just happens to be in WinMain()), and glancing at the execution graph, it's just a simple jump statement.  Fair enough - all I did was change the jump and voila, game cracked.

I guess Bethesa software never really bothered much with trying to copy protect Oblivion... (glancing at the code, the game only seems to check if it can find OblivionLauncher.exe on one of your CD drives).


Still, I doubt I could handle anything complex (or moderately so) at the moment...

Aside: I can't seem to get IDA to assemble anything, which is a pain.  So I'm having to resort to hexing to modify things, but I can't seem to find a good opcode reference either, unfortunately :S

Currently at library, downloading at 1.5MB/sec - w00t!

Best connection I've been on.

... is really something I couldn't care about ...

But anyway, had to go out to vote for Brisbane's lord mayor and local councilor yesterday.  It's really great since I knew basically none of the names on the ballot paper...
(By the way, for those who don't know, voting is compulsory in Australia)


So when walking to the polling centre, you see tonnes of posters around the place, advertising the parties' candidates (hmm, is it a crime to take down those things though?).  When you get to the entrance, there's all these people from each party, trying to shove in their "how to vote" pamphlets.  The pamphlets look really similar though - I mean, I would've thought that if they were trying to sway some last minute deciders, they'd try something more spectacular at least (don't they want to stand out?).

Well, for the actual voting, all I did was fill in random numbers in each box - pretty much what I did for the federal election.  Oh and with the fedral election here, held at the end of last year, I recall the senate voting paper - there were two ways to vote for the senate - either pick one, of fill in your preferences for the candidates from 1-65... ya, that's... 65...

Isn't compulsory voting just wonderful?

Well, I had an interesting experience.

My computer suddenly froze, totally.  So I shut it down, and started it up again.  Problem was, the computer wouldn't start up (ie wouldn't even show the BIOS screen).  So I switched everything off, waited a while, and tried again - same result.
So I pulled out everything from the back of the computer, except the VGA, and pulled out all my drives, but the computer still didn't start up.
Puzzled, I decided to set up my motherboard's diagnostic thingy, which pointed to a memory issue.  So I tried pulling one of my 2 512MB sticks out, nothing happened.  Replaced the stick, and pulled out the other one, and, the computer started...
So it does seem like something is stuffed with that stick of RAM.
Oddly, when I restarted the comp again, (without the "faulty" RAM) I got the same issue - diagnostic saying memory issue.  So I turned the power off, waited a while, and the computer booted.  So to me, seems like one stick was dead, and the other was dodgey.

Well, at least I found out the problem.  More worrying was that when I pulled out all the drives, I carelessly kinda half bent the SATA pins of one of my HDDs (note, I have a RAID0 array).  The pins seem fine, but the plastic backing of the pins snapped off and now is stuck inside the SATA cable.  I managed to put the cable back in with the pins, and it seems fairly firm (but I've put some extra sticky tape in case).  Luckily for me, it still works, so I frantically started backing up all my important data (otherwise I could've lost 8 years of stuff ).
Anyways, at least now I have a backup of some stuff (not everything) in case my HDD does entirely die.  Though gosh, my computer runs slow on 512MB RAM...

Interestingly though, I decided to stick the "faulty" 512MB stick back in yesterday, to see if it worked...  and... it did!  I also no longer get those weird memory errors when I start the computer up.

Meh, what gives?

Well, I've been wanting something like this for a while, but never got round to it.

I'm the type of person who tends to have tonnes of folder windows open (and generally switch between them with Alt+Tab).
I've tried explorer replacements, but, although most of them are good, most have far too much clutter for my liking, or sorely lack something I like in explorer.
So I Google'd for anything that could give me tabs for folder windows, and found QTTabBar.
Works quite nicely here actually.  Also there's a handy plugin for it to allow you to assign a shortcut for creating new folders (I've been looking for something like that for ages!).

Probably the main hassle about it is that it's Ctrl+Tab / Ctrl+Shift+Tab shortcut for navigating tabs only switches forward and back - whereas Windows' Alt+Tab switches based on most recently active applications.