Summer HAS arrived!

Today it was hot ... in Dunedin!



Read it and weep! We've had great weather for the last week - here's hoping it will last for a while yet!

By the way, you can get realtime weather info from Dunedin at http://www.fairfieldweather.info/. Sometimes the site comes up with a blank page so try again later...

Update: 31/03/2006. I was contacted by Bruce who is the guy who runs the site. He told me that the site is "my own personal weather station that is set up and outside. Its a Oregan Scientific WMR-968 all the units are wireless, it sends them to a console inside which in turn sends it to a dedicated pc i have which uploads to the internet at 10 sec intervals 24/7". Cool huh? :)

New Spam Nasties

Today it happened - spam entered a new era. Quite simple really, I'm not sure why "they" haven't done this before. I received some spam that was HTML based and the entire text of the message was contained in an embeded image. The message itself was about 60kb.

Nasty! There are ways to combat this but they're *very* extreme. My favourite is some kind of confirmation message that uses CAPTCHA (sp?) to verify to the sender that they want to be on my list of valid senders. Easy. But does it exist?

WINE and MS Office

Before you do anything, make sure you have the latest WINE from WineHQ. You can use the Synaptic Package Manager to do this if you're running Ubuntu/Debian (which is what I did). The main advantage of this is that it will do a "smart upgrade" if you already have a WINE installation on your system.
» http://www.winehq.com/site/download-deb

There's a useful list of what applications are reported to run under WINE, alone with some installation instructions at Franks Corner. This is a great place to start if you're one of those people like me who can't RTFM in the first place:
» http://www.frankscorner.org/

I managed to get MS Office 2000 installed and running thanks to the tips at Franks Corner. The installation process was a little painful but it helped a lot to upgrade to the latest version of WINE.

When I installed the installer crashed out the first time and so I ran it a second time and selected "Reinstall MS Office". There seems to be something dodgy with the interface in the setup where you can see the things that it's going to install but can't select or deselect them.

Steps:

1. wine setup.exe (to run the installer)
2. Ran it a second time, asked it to reinstall again.
3. Complete! I think I might have had to do a "wine wineboot" at this point.
4. Running "wine WINWORD.EXE" or "wine EXCEL.EXE" in the c:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office directory started the applications.

MSACCESS.EXE won't start because it requires IE3.0 or greater. "Clippy" should be turned off (he causes problems) by clicking Show/Hide/Show/Hide/Show/Hide in the Help Menu. He then asks if you want to turn him off and you can answer yes. There's a tick box somewhere for this as well.

Streetwalker

I'm sure that I came out of the Christmas break with a few extra pounds. While they do give me that cuddly look'n'feel(tm) and I have been getting a fair bit of random stranger action, it's probably time to look at a removal strategy.

I had an idea last night and Linda reckons it's great! We're going to make it a medium-term mission to walk every street in Dunedin. There's lots of details to sort out but it should be a load of fun.

Stay tuned!

Changing your MSN passport address

About 9 months ago I left the UK, and my previous employer. I had set up a MSN messenger account with their domain name which was fine for exchanging links between others in the office and general copy/pasting of code etc. As time went by more and more addresses outside of work found their way onto my contact list.

I had wondered about changing the address before but didn't want the hassle of having to re-add everyone and potentially lose contact with people who were in the IT industry. A visiting friend recently mentioned that it could be done via Microsoft's passport.com website. I decided to take the plunge.

The change itself was straightforward and I was sent an email to my newly chosen personal address to confirm the change, however all of my contacts on MSN messenger appeared to be offline. This I knew was not right, but it seemed that there was no option to send an update out. I googled and based on http://xphelpandsupport.mvps.org/how_do_i_use_windowsmsn_messeng.htm I found that these steps worked for me:

1. Open MSN messenger, sign on to your new account.
2. From the Contacts menu, choose Save contacts to list.
3. Delete each of your contacts from your contacts list (it's a manual process)
4. From the Contacts menu, choose Import contacts from a file.
5. All your contacts will be added again, and they'll all be notified of your change of address.

Simple really, but the passport.com site semeed to imply that this would happen automatically. Maybe it does under some circumstances but I had to go through these steps.

Good luck!