Logaan’s Site

Life with no toungue would be really difficult. Aside from the problem talking, how about eating food? Or holding your breath?

If you had no teeth that would really make it difficult

Most of my friends know me as a bit of a M$ fanboy, and if you read some of my previous posts I don’t agree with some of the comments people make about IE… but IE8, Oh.. My.. God.. (to put it lightly)

I think they (you know, them) are right, IE8 could break the internet. I started using it when it was in Beta, and I have tried using the RC, and I still find it failing to do an adequate job.

So I had a choice, continue using IE and get used to the fact that my browsing experience may become a bit more brittle, or find another browser.

I have used Opera for a long time as an alternative browser. Its fast and easy to switch off all the javascript and “content” (i mean flash etc) which makes it very secure and quick webbrowser. But, Opera still feels to “alien”. I wanted an experience like IE, yet better. I want my tabs to open my homepage. I want the pages to actually look the same as they did in IE. (As I often found previously that pages not only rendered differently but fonts and various objects always looked different to me)
It just boiled down to the fact that I like IE. (Or the way IE does it without the crappy crashy bits)

Hmm… better be careful… this could turn into a moany whiney post :P

So I tried Firefox 3, and I was surprised at how quickly it felt so natural. It was quick, much quicker than my previous experiences of Firefox 2. Pages I frequently visited looked the same as they did in IE.

Not only that, I found add ons that reproduced various behaviours that I liked in IE.
Like Tab Mix, so my homepage loads in my new tab. How new tabs open next to my old one, how and when new tabs are opened from other tabs. Really sublte finicky things like that makes a really big difference to me.

But one of the nicest things I love in Firefox is the NoScript add on. Its really easy to block things on pages, I find that I have used Opera less and less to open pages that I don’t like the look of. NoScript blocks the scripts and content, and if I need to I will allow it in a simple click.

So it’s official, Firefox 3 has turned me into a convert!

I have seen so many people make the move from phpBB 2 to 3, then make so many mistakes with permissions. I don’t really know what causes this but they seem to apply permissions to objects rather than use roles. I can understand that the permissions in 3 can seem a bit overwhelming but once you understand the part that roles play it should all click into place.

So here are my recommendations for dealing with permissions in 3:

Use Roles
Roles are sets of permissions. Avoid explicitly setting permissions on any object (person, group, forum etc) in the system. Instead reuse the existing roles or setup new ones.
This helps because you cannot easily see or manage lots of permissions on individual objects. If you use a role, you can grant additional permissions or remove all permissions (if for example, you plan to remove that role).
 
Use Groups
Add users to a groups, then grant groups a role against certain forums.
This makes it really easy to categorize lots of users, and there is no reason why you cannot have more than one user in more than one group, so you can make some of the groups really specialized.
For example, our officers group, only has permissions to the officers forum and nothing else. But they also belong to the members group so they also have permissions to the rest of the forum.
 
 
So, this is how you grant roles to a group against a certain forum:

 
• Go to the Forums tab
• Go to the Groups’ forum permissions
• Pick the group your are interested in
• Select the forum or forums you wish to set roles on (at the moment you have a managable number of forums that you can tick All Forums, however later on I wouldn’t recommend it. Lots of javascript can slow the browser down)
• For each forum listed, select the appropriate Role you wish to assign
• Now click Apply.

To test it, go to a users profile (back to the main index, click on the user or administrate the user and view the profile)
You get an option which says “Test out user’s permissions”, using this you essentially become the user, and you can see and do everything that the user can do. Really helps with testing out settings, means you don’t have to create test users all over the place.

Dear diary,

I woke up this morning with the most peculiar craving for human flesh. I can’t quite put my finger on it; I am missing my right hand.

Walking into the kitchen I was greeted by my parents; my father rolling around on the floor and my mother bumping into the table.

*Sigh* Looks like rain, I should find a hat to cover the hole in my head.

Felt left out on sunday. My fellow guild mates had bought Left 4 Dead and sounded like a hoot.

Before I comment on the game, I just want to state how far and how good Steam has come along in the several years it has been about. When I first used it, it so flaky that I had to scrap it and go back to CS1.5 and running Valve games from the start menu instead of through Steam (you know what I mean)

But now it is really stable now I cannot believe it. Another gripe I used to have with it was that all games in the store were listed in dollars, and you could only use credit cards to pay for new games (at the time I didn’t have a credit card).

I was also against buying “the virtual box”; I loved to purchase the game box in store. Feel the box and take pride in the artwork. It is a very different matter nowadays, it is a real pain in the arse to keep track of all those disks. In fact, I find myself favouring services like Steam and Stardock over the physical game since I don’t have to worry about installing the thing or keeping it up to date, that is all done for me.

Anyway, they game.

BEST GAME EVER!

It is so simple, 4 people, kill zombies, achievements, great laugh. Best played drunk I think.

Well I finally finished putting the thing together on saturday. I nabbed the sound card and the DVD drive out of my old machine and fitted them in my new machine. Spent ages routing the cables behind the motherboard tray but eventually it all when in. Looks really tidy too.

One failing I found, which could be attributed to the case really, is that because the power supply is located at the bottem, it is a real stretch for the 4pin power to reach the top of the mother board. Also, the main 24pin power socket is kind of awkwardly placed. If you have a graphics card that is longer than the one I have, it will interfere with the power supply cable. Also the placement for some of the ports made it difficult to route the cables nicely.

I couldn’t be arsed with taking photos of the second part, it was just too much bother for a boring part of the build. i do have some of the result however =D

Installed Vista with no problems. On first impression I would bet that my old machine is faster for desktop actions, I am sure it boots faster. Once in Windows however, its fine.

Got a lovely 5.9 for everything from Vista. And its quite a quiet machine, doesn’t rattle like my old machine. I left all the fans on medium, seems to be the best overall choice.

Blue screened my machine twice though within as many hours, nTune was not happy, so I cannot find out the temps for my graphics card. CPUIDs Hardware Monitor puts the CPU @ 45ish C on idle and 60 C under load. Couple of months time I’ll stick a new cooler on it.

Once all the crap was out of the way I got stuck into installing games. Vegas 2 runs like a dream, only I still die as much… can’t use the stuttering anymore as an excuse ;)

Also stuck Sacred 2 on it as well. Now, this was the game that gave me the nudge to get a new machine as it failed to render graphics on my old machine. However I ran into the same problem again. Thanks to Matt though, he gave me a command line to use (/skipopenal). It seems to be an issue with Sound Blaster sound cards, can’t understand why but that all works now too.

End result, I am a happy chappie.

I could not build it last night, wasn’t “allowed” to clear off the table >.<

Managed to get it cleared off tonight, and started work.

Heres some piccies, I apologise for the quality and lack of more pictures but the anti-shake seems to fail much of the time, so I had to cull alot of them. Sadly this is the cream of the crop.

The CPU heatsink was the most difficult part. I struggled to push the pins into the board and I was scared of breaking it. In the end I took it out of the case, placed the board on top of its anti static bag and resting the lot on a blanket I managed to get the pins through the board. Looking at it closely the board is slightly warped, will have to see what damage I might done once I boot it up.

During one attempt my thumb slipped and I cut it open on one of the heatsink fans. I saved you a picture of the gash (bit excessive :P)

Thats it for the night, I plan to continue tomorrow and will post more pictures.

I have had a few computers in the last couple of years, and each time I have learnt something about the design or the brand.

In particular I want to focus on cases, they seem to be a undervalued component for a PC. Pick the wrong one and you can suffer from subtle air flow problems or rattles.

Heres my 2 pennies worth, its my opinion on good case design.

• Motherboard trays are useless
  If you want a decent motherboard tray, find one that slides out the back. The ones that lift out really are a pain in the ass
• Don’t mount hard drives side on
  In my current case I have a huge problem with vibration. This is caused by the sata cables touching the side of case and causing vibration (even with the right angled cables)
• Front doors are just hassle
  My last two machines had front doors, these became difficult to deal with since machine is under a desk and around a corner. One problem I had to be careful is not to scratch DVDs on the top of the case door.
• Rails, pah, who needs em?
  Someone who will be replacing lots of hard drives all the time, I won’t, don’t need em.

I was expecting a few more :P Of course my logic could easily be flawed, and I just picked the wrong cases. For a simple entusiast I can’t imagine needed funky features.

It has been 4 years! 4 years since I last bought my computer and it is time for an upgrade. It has only been within the last 6 months that I began to feel the strain of a low speced graphics card (nVidia 7800GTX 256mb) pulling me back when it came to gaming.

Everything else is perfect, but the problem is that the motherboard is too old to support some of the newer features (such as SATA2, PCI-E 16x etc) so as a result I am just going to replace the entire lot. (Except for the soundcard, thats fine)

As always I obsess over the specs, checking all the fine details, reading reviews, pre-plan upgrade paths etc… but since I never really do upgrade or overclock, I just bought what seemed to work.

Heres what I bought:

• Western Digital WD2500AAKS Caviar SE 250GB 7200RPM SATAII/300 16MB Cache – OEM
• Intel Core 2 Quad Q9300 2.5 GHz (FSB 1333MHz) Socket 775 L2 6MB Cache Retail Boxed Processor
• Asus P5Q3 DELUXE/WIFI-AP P45 Socket 775 8 channel audio ATX Motherboard
• Inno3D 9800GT i-Chill Edition 512MB DDR3 Dual DVI HDTV Out PCI-E Graphics Card
• Antec 1200 Twelve Hundred Full Tower Case – No PSU
• Antec NeoPower 550W Modular PSU With 80mm Low Speed/noise Fan 18db
• Corsair 4GB (2x2GB) DDR3 1333MHz/PC3-10666 XMS3 DHX Memory Kit
• Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate – Licence and media – 1 PC – OEM – DVD – 64-bit – English

That should do the job at least for another 2 years. Will hopefully have it up and running sometime tonight :)

The old machine will get cleaned up and given to my darling sister to replace her old slug of a Cellery.

I am currently in the process of creating my own application to help manage my guild wars skill templates, when I came across this application: GW Teddy, you can find it here: http://gwteddy.manuthie.de/?menu=home&lang=en

It certainly has all the aspects of what I was hoping to acheive in my guild wars build manager, however the most useful features I am looking for are not there.

Such as searching folders recursively for a specific build, or automatic organisation of the skills, or backup mechanisms for saving the templates.

Still, a very good app worth mentioning.