In completely and utterly unsurprising news, Halo 3 is the fastest-selling preordered video game in history. There are more than 1 million pre-orders for the game and a little more than six weeks to go before it gets released. My order is somewhere within those million preorders, and it just so happens that I have a few days break (purely by accident, I assure you) around that time. If you haven't ordered yours already (who not!?), check out this BBC hands on preview.
Halo 3 is popular before it’s even available
In completely and utterly unsurprising news, Halo 3 FastestSelling PreOrdered Video Game in History.
There are more than 1 million pre-orders for the game and a little more than 6 weeks to go before it gets released. My order is somewhere within those million preorders, and it just so happens that I've got a few days break (purely by accident, I assure you) around that time. If you haven't ordered yours already (who not!?), check out this BBC hands on preview.
Web forms are becoming unfriendly
I had to pay the phone bill today and duly went online to use the convenient online payment service that BT provide. As a side issue, the web interface to your account with BT is very good on the whole, providing access to bills, including details of phone numbers called, and the ability to download your bills too.
Unfortunately, some aspects are less friendly. The payment form itself for example, as with so many web forms that seem to about today, had data entry restrictions that seemed a little excessive.
For example, I had to enter a contact telephone number (yeah, I know, to pay my own phone bill I had to provide a contact number - shouldn't they know that already?). Now in the UK the format of the phone number is typically area code, then a space, then the phone number, i.e. 012345 456789. That's how it's written, that's how it's quoted by BT on the account summary page. However, the web form flatly refused to accept a space in the field for the phone number?
Web forms are becoming unfriendly
I had to pay the phone bill today and duly went online to use the convenient online payment service that BT provide. As a side issue, the web interface to your account with BT is very good on the whole, providing access to bills, including details of phone numbers called, and the ability to download your bills too.
Unfortunately, some aspects are less friendly. The payment form itself for example, as with so many web forms that seem to about today, had data entry restrictions that seemed a little excessive.
For example, I had to enter a contact telephone number (yeah, I know, to pay my own phone bill I had to provide a contact number - shouldn't they know that already?). Now in the UK the format of the phone number is typically area code, then a space, then the phone number, i.e. 012345 456789. That's how it's written, that's how it's quoted by BT on the account summary page. However, the web form flatly refused to accept a space in the field for the phone number?
Web forms are becoming unfriendly
I had to pay the phone bill today and duly went online to use the convenient online payment service that BT provide. As a side issue, the web interface to your account with BT is very good on the whole, providing access to bills, including details of phone numbers called, and the ability to download your bills too.
Unfortunately, some aspects are less friendly. The payment form itself for example, as with so many web forms that seem to about today, had data entry restrictions that seemed a little excessive.
For example, I had to enter a contact telephone number (yeah, I know, to pay my own phone bill I had to provide a contact number - shouldn't they know that already?). Now in the UK the format of the phone number is typically area code, then a space, then the phone number, i.e. 012345 456789. That's how it's written, that's how it's quoted by BT on the account summary page. However, the web form flatly refused to accept a space in the field for the phone number?
Brian is having the same issues
I mentioned the problem with setting up the stack on a new Solaris box yesterday and then realized this morning that I’d already added Brian Aker’s blog posting on the same issues to my queue (Solaris, HOW-TO, It works… Really…).
Brian mentions pkg-get, the download solution from Blastwave which I neglected to mention yesterday. It certainly makes the downloading and installation easier, but its’s far from comprehensive and some of the stuff is out of date.
To be honest I find that I install the stuff from Sun Freeware to get me going, then spend time recompiling everything myself by hand, for the plain and simple reason that I then know it is up to date and/or working or both. This is particularly the case for Perl, which often needs an update of the entire perl binary to get the updated versions of some CPAN modules.
Ultimately, though, it sucks.
Updating library paths
This is more of a personal note than anything else, but hopefully it might filter to the top of web searches too.
If you want to update the dynamic library loading path in Solaris 10 you must use the tool crle.
If you want to add a path, say /usr/local/lib make sure you use the -u option to update rather than replacing the existing library path info:
# crle -u -l /usr/local/lib
Setting up the developer stack issues
There’s a great post on Coding Horror about Configuring the Stack.
Basically the gripe is with the complexity of installing the typical developer stack, in this case on Windows, using Visual Studio. My VS setup isn’t vastly different to the one Jeff mentions, and I have similar issues with the other stacks I use.
I’ve just set up the Ultra3 mobile workstation again for building MySQL and other stuff on, and it took about 30 packages (from Sun Freeware) just to get the basics like gcc, binutils, gdb, flex, bison and the rest set up. It took the best part of a day to get everything downloaded, installed, and configured. I haven’t even started on modules for Perl yet.
The Eclipse stack is no better. On Windows you’ll need the JDK of your choice, plus Eclipse. Then you’ll have to update Eclipse. Then add in the plugins and modules you want. Even though some of that is automated (and, annoyingly some of it is not although it could be), it generally takes me a few hours to get stuff installed.
Admittedly on my Linux boxes it’s easier - I use Gentoo and copy around a suitable make.conf with everything I need in it, so I need only run emerge, but that can still take a day or so to get everything compiled.
Although I’m sure we can all think of easier ways to create the base systems - I use Parallels for example and copy VM folders to create new environments for development - even the updating can take a considerable amount of time.
I suggest the new killer app is one that makes the whole process easier.
Auto-starting movies in news feeds is rude
I'm a big fan of MAKE the magazine for builders, inventors and general fiddlers of hardware. But I'm not such a keen fan on their blog feeds. Particularly those that include a movie in their content.
For some reason, the movies in those feeds are set to start automatically on page load, without requiring a click to get them started. Now on an individual page for the item I can understand it, but in a feed it just becomes annoying.
While I'm feed reading I could be reading all sorts of posts and other pages in other tabs or windows, and I could easily be viewing 20 or even 100 feed items in one page.
Auto-starting movies in news feeds is rude
I'm a big fan of MAKE the magazine for builders, inventors and general fiddlers of hardware. But I'm not such a keen fan on their blog feeds. Particularly those that include a movie in their content.
For some reason, the movies in those feeds are set to start automatically on page load, without requiring a click to get them started. Now on an individual page for the item I can understand it, but in a feed it just becomes annoying.
While I'm feed reading I could be reading all sorts of posts and other pages in other tabs or windows, and I could easily be viewing 20 or even 100 feed items in one page.