Micks Distractions

The main drag in Barraba on footy finals night. Not much action here.

Nor here.

Even though a don’t fol­low the footy, it would have been good to see the Eels win.

I found a bunch of old pho­tos of the Half Tonne Ute my brother and I used to troll around in, and scanned them in. These ones were taken after it endured a lit­tle bit of cre­ative remod­el­ling.
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Sun has always said that any appli­ca­tion writ­ten for Solaris 6 will be for­wards com­pat­i­ble with any other ver­sion. It’s a big claim, but as long as the appli­ca­tion adheres to the API it’s pos­si­ble.
Occa­sion­ally you bump into things that don’t adhere to the API, (quite a lot of appli­ca­tions really). This is usu­ally caused by devel­op­ers think­ing that they should do things “this way”, because Sun does it oh so wrong all the time. Con­se­quently, you end up with legacy appli­ca­tions that can’t run on Solaris 10.

Enter Solaris 8 brandz zones. Being able to run legacy appli­ca­tions in a Solaris 8 brandz gen­er­ally gets you around most of the issues in the remain­ing apps that do stu­pid things. How­ever, there’s a cou­ple of quirks with a zone that can intro­duce odd behav­iour in an application.

Progress for exam­ple.…… Read On.
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I came across this cool lit­tle iPhone app in my recent adven­tures into the world of dis­tract­ed­ness. A growl client for the iPhone.

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I recently moved my blog away from Joomla and over to WordPress.

This was for sev­eral rea­sons:
1. Joomla is a pain in the bum for blog­ging. Its too com­plex for a blog and I keep for­get­ting the dif­fer­ences between a “com”, “mod­ule” and a “plu­gin”.
2. Upgrad­ing is a pain in the bum. I just recently noticed that half my con­tent went miss­ing as part of a recent upgrade.
3. I had bought an iPhone and wanted to be able to post while out and about. Get­ting this going in Joomla was a pain in the bum, (although I dis­cov­ered after switch­ing to Word­Press that it wasn’t really Joomla’s fault).
4. My old TreeCam blog was run­ning on an old ver­sion of s9y, and I wanted to com­bine it all.
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This is a lit­tle rant from sev­eral angles.

Sun’s Java Web Con­sole is a nice lit­tle toy. Great for those peo­ple who pre­fer the less extreme learn­ing curve of a CLI, and great for man­ager types who like pictures.

I’ve used it sev­eral times before, but thought I’d try it in on x86 Solaris10u6 box I have here. Bloody Sun. You think a released ver­sion implies that it’s sta­ble, and work­ing.
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If you play facebook’s Mob­Wars then you may have noticed that you can now pur­chase land in other cities.
I’ve updated my Mob­Wars ROI cal­cu­la­tor to include all the new cities, (the ones of come across so far). If you run across any moer cities, then please leave a com­ment below, and I’ll add them in.
If you don’t like my fancy web­site wrap­per, then the direct link to the cal­cu­la­tor is here.

A rant about the state of play with Sun, and what I’d like to see Sun do to improve Solaris.
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I’ve been a user of Opera Mini for a long time. On my mobile it’s great. How­ever, there’s times when I need to view the web in a big­ger than 240x320 for­mat. I spend a fair amount of time on the train, and I have a lap­top with blue­tooth, and a phone with GPRS and blue­tooth.… but GPRS is slow and run­ning fire­fox over it is a pain… even with images turned off.

So, this howto shows you how to run Opera Mini on Linux in glo­ri­ous 1440x900.… and take advan­tage of the speed increase.
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