Firefox woes...

This is will be a pretty brief post. I have recently been having trouble with certain websites not fully loading, mainly webpages with dynamic content (eg facebook or twitter) it turns out this was because I was running an older version of JAVA,  having now updated to 6.17 it seems to have fixed the problem

SO if you find that certain webpages in firefox will not load or never finish loading try going to
www.java.com and check that you have the latest version installed.

I hope that helps someone

Who ever says windows "just works" can sod off..

I have recently got the orange box. I love it. Well that's a lie. I love the copies of the games I've played on other people's machines as mine it seems to have a grudge against.

I can play 'counter-strike' and anything up to and including 'Half life 2: episode one' but beyond that it stops working. As in no error messages (not even a crash) it just stops. It sets up the loading screen and sits there, filling up my primary screen with hazy boxes (I'm trying to play portal).

I'm not sure what it is (as if windows was ever helpful with methods to interrogate start up of programs or even useful error messages) and I can't close it because it fills my primary screen where pop-ups appear. I can open the task manager and see that nothing much is happening and its not responding but if I try to close process it just sits there.

For anyone with a similar problem here is an exact run down of whats happening.

I'm running a Windows XP system
AMD 3500+ processor
MSI AM2 motherboard
2Gb RAM
Nvidia GeForce 7600 GS with a 24" (1920x1200) Dell as primary and a 17" (1200x1024) samsung as secondary
I have the latest driver (Nvidia 182.something)

I can run 'counter-strike'; 'counter strike-source'; 'half-life 2'; 'half-life 2:episode one'

but with 'half life 2:episode two'; or 'portal' it will run the valve video get to the hazy loading screen (ie the menu but out of focus with 'loading' in bottom right) and stop. I can move the mouse around, although when I move it over the loading screen I get an hour glass I can move it to the secondary screen (where I'm typing this) and work normally.

In fact it just seems as though it locks down that part of the screen and stops.

I have tried manually setting the width and height of the game with the:

'-width 1920 -height 1200'

launch options in case it was something to do with loss of the actual menu or weird graphics problems (none of the half-life games auto-detect my resolution). I have also tried:

'+mat_forcehardwaresync 0 +snd_async_prefetch_priority 1'

which should force the game to use the monitor's defaults. Neither have worked and I'm about to try the

-console

command to (hopefully) bring up just the menu options with out real graphics controls.

I will update with whether it works - or if I go mad....

UPDATE 01:52 26-04-09: well '-console' failed....

UPDATE 02:13 26-04-09: GAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH *~$£*%"£$%"$£% WINDOWS turns out that portal had been going full screen. This meant that when steam bounced stuff off a server somewhere zone alarm froze the game and wouldn't allow further loading until I clicked something in a pop-up. This pop-up was cunningly underneath the full screen window. GAHHHHHH. Those that are interested the useful launch command was

-sw

I hate windows.... wine + ubuntu can't be much harder than this...

Something that everyone should see

... so posting it here I expect is of limited use but never mind.

This is a link to a very useful presentation on how people steal card details from ATMs well worth a read. Quite frightening how hard most of the additions are to spot.

http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/consumerist/2009/04/Skimmer_presentation_v1_230109_ppt_1__01.pdf

Serious Post: LaTeX Tomboy!

Well not really I thought I would put up a post that is actually useful to someone. Possibly.

Anyway this post is going to be the first on useful bits and pieces I've found for Linux.

so here goes: LaTeX for tomboy notes.

reasonably obscure I know, and probably only useful to the very very small number of people who use tomboy for more than just very basic notes but it is useful (and once I fully get to grips with latex it will, no doubt be even more useful).

Firstly you have to have to have version 0.12 of tomboy notes as a minimum. If you need help with this on ubuntu I suggest you look here http://ubuntu-virginia.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=928585 otherwise I suggest giving it a google if it isn't part of your package manager.

Next you need to make sure you have a latex render so go to your package manager and search for LaTeX and make sure that you have enough to get a fully working version going (for me I used texlive which needed a '-base'; '-base-bin'; '-latex-base' and '-latex-recommended' as well as '-fonts-recommended') Once this was installed another quick search for 'image-magick' and another install (just so you know the latex packages are for latex - duf and image-magick allows the text to be rendered as code).

With these installed you just need to go here http://www.reitwiessner.de/programs/tomboy-latex.html and download the .tar.gz a simple:

$ tar -zxvf tomboy-latex-0.5.tar.gz
$ sudo ./configure
$ sudo make
$ sudo make install

this should add a "LaTeX Math Addin" to Preferences>>add-ins>>Tools clicking enable will give you full access to LaTeX rendered text within your notes when enclosed between \[...\]