KennyNet :: My Blog RSS Feed

A blog cleanup!

So the spammers got annoying enough for me to clean them out and add a very simple security image check - sorry for the added inconvenience if you would like to make a comment but spammers suck.

I will try to get around to making it so failing the security image will repopulate the comment form for you, but I'm busy these days.

At any rate, so far it's, spammers 0 - 1 simple security image.

Parking 101

If you work like most people you may drive to work and probably park in a carpark provided by that very same place of employment.

Most people probably also consider their cars safe from traffic accidents in a carpark, what, with the car being you know parked and hence um, stationary. The significantly less traffic passing by your car as compared to a road could also lead you to believe your car would be safe for the day. What could possibly happen?

Ok so parking, you park in bays most of the time as per the nature of carparks so e.g. if you owned the red car in this diagram you'd say that you were parked properly and that you'd left more than enough space to the right for another car to park:

As indicated by the yellow arrow, the parking maneuver required by the approaching grey car is a relatively simple one, it simply requires one to actually turn the wheel to correctly enter the adjacent bay.

At this point you may be asking yourself just what am I going on about, well here's what:

As is clearly indicated the aforementioned parking maneuver was grossly performed causing the grey car to hit, that's right, hit the parked, stationary red car.

Surely an accident you'd think? A one off? A momentary lapse in concentration caused this car to career into your very own car? No... No... No... This is infact not the first time this car has collided, in very much the same way, with another car where I work. Fortunately the last vict....car suffered no damage.

This time, however, damage was caused by the car in question... take a look for yourself in the gallery section: Car Damage 15-Jun-06

Note the gouges of paint missing from the bumper as well as the bumper being knocked loose.

All Change!

Well, I've finally gotten around to redesigning the site since the old layout, let's face it was pretty crap and was made when I first started dabbling in CSS. I'd like to think that the new layout reflects the fact that I've been doing web based development for almost a year now!

I've trimmed alot of the blog because it required alot of formatting changes that I just couldn't be bothered to do so the upshot is I've only kept a few of the entries - the important ones and the recent ones.

As well as a redesign, the site is now hosted by 3aIT Limited due to the far greater access to control the site I have (3aIT being my place of work). So the contact form once again works! I will also be overhauling the photos section with the gallery code I've written for 3aIT which will greatly improve this section of my site and hopefully provide some sort of showcase for potential customers as to what our gallery can do!

GCS does it again!

So I got the following gem of text in an e-mail from GCS a few hours ago:

GCS complies with the provisions of the Data Protection Act 1998 and
expects the recipient of this document/communication and any attachments
to do so in respect of the contents. GCS will not accept responsibility
for any failure by the recipient to comply with the requirements of the
Act in respect of any document/communications sent by GCS to the recipient.

Which is pretty funny and further underlines their incompetence since, as best I understand it, the Data Protection Act only applies to the entity collecting the data and is not transferred to a third party merely by sending a third party data that is covered.

Good ol' GCS!

New Computer

I have now finally built my new computer so I now have a high-end gaming machine.

For those who are interested:-

The combination is excellent and runs Oblivion very well at 1024x768@32 4aa Bloom. haven't yet played with overclocking but that will come with time, for the moment I have the fun task of reinstalling everything.

dabs.com :: Friend or Foe

So I recently attempted to purchase an AMD Athlon FX-60 processor from dabs.com simply because they had the cheapest price and I discovered a £10 voucher in my account. So with the processor ordered I waited for it to arrive.

I got told by my dad that the processor had arrived while I was at work, so once I got home I opened the outer packaging which was properly sealed. Upon removing the retail box from the packaging I noticed the first thing that concerned which was that I couldn't see the processor in the little "window" that you get on processor boxes. So perhaps the processor had fallen down. So I started to open the retail box and noticed the 2nd thing which concerned me even more the seal over the box to prove it's not been opened was, err, broken. So I cautiously opened the box to discover that the processor, the £700 processor was not contained within.

After thoroughly examining the box out of sheer optimism I promptly informed dabs of the problem. They checked with me whether the outer packaging had been tampered with then ALL of my further enquiries yielded the same basic (copy and pasted) "We need 48 hours..." e-mail.

Obviously this was very impersonal and I was getting quite frustrated after getting this very same e-mail 3 times in a row.

However this evening I got an e-mail from dabs's invoicing system stating that I'd been creditted for the processor and delivery charge (to the card I paid with) so I logged into "My Account" on dabs and sure enough there it was, a credit entry under "View Orders and Returns". There was no e-mail from dabs explaining what they'd done but regardless they had done it and done the right thing.

So even though I believe dabs's comminucation to customers needs to be improved they still refunded me and I will be placing my order with them again to hopefully get the complete package this time.

Your mileage with them may vary but for me they came through so I will be passing them repeat business.

Thank you dabs

2005 Round Up

Well, it's been quite a long time since I last updated this. Not as long as it looks though, it seems some entries have been lost!

Anyways, the past 10 months...

I've got a new job with 3aIT and it's going pretty well.

I started off contracting for 3 months using GCS as the agency. If you ever need an agency I'd strongly recommend you go somewhere else, never have I imagined such a large bunch of incompetent idiots gathered under one company name.

Firstly, I arrive at 3aIT to start work then find out they've mixed some stuff up and ask me to leave the premises as I won't be paid.

Secondly, they wanted to pay me £50/day but wanted to charge 3aIT £100/day. Now, really, I'm flattered, I really am. But that's such a REDICULOUS markup, 100%! I think eventually 3aIT got them down by about £10-15.

Anyway, so now I'm directly employed which suits me much better (read: no timesheets).

So our recent major project is doing the website for the British Bobsleigh Association - Take a look!

Also just to stick a shameless plug here, everyone should at least listen to the 2 sample songs from an up and coming band based in Sheffield, Monkey Swallows the Universe. You can find the sample songs (Jimmy down the well and Sheffield Shanty) in the MP3s section. If you like them, purchase/pre-order their CD.

I hope to keep this more up to date this year, and to infringe on Disney's copyright, somewhat:

That's all folks!

Liteon LVW-5045 - Disable Macrovision

As some people may or may not know we recently purchased one of these machines and one of the things we wanted to do was backup our old VHS to DVD with the aim to get rid of our VHS player.

However macrovision prevents you from doing this by protecting the content of the VHS.

After alot of forum searching without success, I figured out a way to disable the macrovision check:

Download the firmware for your region.
Find the hex values: "55 53 00 00 00 00 00 RGNCODE 00 00 00 00"
Replace it with: "55 53 00 00 00 00 00 RGNCODE-1 00 00 00 01".
Replace RGNCODE in the above steps with your current region number (e.g. UK: "02", US: "01" etc..).

Likewise replace RGNCODE-1 with your current region number minus 1 (e.g. UK: "01", US: "00", etc...)

Note: The region code is decremented so that when the last byte is changed from "00" to "01" the checksum remains the same (+1-1 = 0 - no change). This nicely avoids the hassle of having to find the checksum byte(s).

If you'd rather have this change done for you automagically then you can try the following perl command, substitute the correct filename:

perl -p -i -e 's/(\x55\x53\x00{5})(.)(\x00{3})\x00/$1.chr(ord($2)-1).$3."\x01"/e' LNJCE191.DA2
Now upgrade the firmware as normal and you will have removed the macrovision check.

Since this fix changes the default region, correct this by following these steps:

Goto the Setup menu.
Highlight the exit icon.
Type 2960.
Select your region!

DISCLAIMER: This could potentially kill your machine. Not likely, but possible. I screwed up 2 times before it worked, and there was no damage. It is apparently built to withstand bad upgrades and can be downgraded too. My machine is fine using this hack. Use of this hack should be solely for copying your legally owned content to DVD, piracy cannot be condoned.