With limited time before Wendy House takes a massive three-month summer break, we partied hard post-Eurovision.
It came round so fast. Falling on the same night as Wendy House resulted in us having a Eurovision party slash Wendy House night, which meant that we did at least have the same generic music from two different events.
The best entry of the night was clearly that of Finland’s Krista Siegfrids, though it did surprisingly badly in the voting. The important thing is though that it annoyed the whole of Turkey for daring to suggest that gay people should have equal rights – what more could you possibly want from a song?
Last month, I length my thousandth dollar on Kiva.
This means I’ve now lent $1,000 to third world entrepreneurs who are working their way out of poverty. But the real genius of Kiva is that although I’ve lent $1,000, I’ve only deposited $240.
This is because Kiva doesn’t do donations – they do micro loans. You lend someone the money, usually quite a small amount, and they pay it back when they can afford to. Once they have done so, you can lend it out to someone else! This means that for every $1 I deposit, I’ve actually lent out $4.16 – and that number will continue to climb!
Best of all, Kiva is currently offering introductory loans for free. All you have to do is sign up and you get $25 to lend out to someone without having to deposit anything.
We live in an age where scumbags often try to rip you off. Paying with basically any method costs you extra money with RyanAir, even though they’ve been told they have to change it by the authorities. So it takes something special to cause outrage these days.
But Leeds Arena and their ticket partner Eventim have somehow managed it. I’ve just booked to go see Nickelback and tickets are at a fairly average £37.00 each.
But then there is a booking fee of £6.30 – per ticket! Presumably, this is to cover the cost of processing the payment, though I notice they don’t even take my American Express.
Then comes delivery – this is £7.50! Of course, I can opt to collect the tickets from the venue itself, in this case, I would have to shell out £2.50! Just to collect the tickets myself! And there is no print them at home option.
That means for £74.00 worth of tickets, I’m paying £20.10 in service charges – making up 21% of the entire cost.
Of course, you can argue that Eventim is just a company and therefore driven to make money, and having a natural monopoly they can just rip people off (we’re just doing our jobs – like the Nazi soldiers who worked in the death camps). But surely at a certain point, the authorities have to step in and say “look, you’re just lying about your ticket prices”, just like they did with the airlines.
If you find your screen resolution suddenly drops too 800×600 on Ubuntu 12.04, the following set of commands may help you resolve it. First, stop the graphical environment.
sudo service lightdm stop
Now remove all the Nvidia packages and reboot the system.
sudo apt-get purge nvidia* sudo reboot
This will reset you to the default video driver. You now need to reinstall the Nvidia driver, which you can do by going to System settings > Additional Drivers and selecting the top option with the following name.
NVIDIA binary Xorg driver, kernal module and VPDAU library
Select this and click activate. Now reboot your system again and the Nvidia drivers will be re-installed and hopefully working again.
If you’ve tried to switch to a different Nvidia graphics driver on Ubuntu and suddenly found that X / Gnome will no longer load and all you have is a command line, you can fix it by switching back to the original driver.
jockey-text -l jockey-text -e xorg:nvidia_current
These commands will show you a list of drivers available, and then activate the standard Nvidia driver.
If you’re using BDD (Cucumber or Behat for example) with Selenium, you may find you occasionally get an error where the framework is unable to communicate with the Selenium server.
Failed to connect to 127.0.0.1: Cannot assign requested address
This seems to occur when there are two many requests going to Selenium. This can be alleviated be rewriting your tests to ensure you are now sending too many requests at once.
For example, if you’re using Behat/Mink, then avoid using the wait() function on the Session object, as this can cause excessive requests to be sent to Selenium.
Last weekend, we headed up to the Yorkshire Dales for Elina’s birthday. We stayed at Hollins Hall, which is part of the Marriot chain.
It was quite a nice hotel, they have a big pool, although there were people in it which was always annoying and their spa bath was a bit rubbish. It was nice to have a decent length pool though.
The service was excellent, and the staff were friendly.
We dined in their Heathcliff’s Restaurant, which was OK, though I was a little disappointed by the roast, as the Yorkshire pudding was a bit hard and crispy. The white chocolate sauce that came with the profiteroles was a winner though.
If you’ve installed MacPorts’ mysql5-server, you may find that it doesn’t work after a restart.
This can be resolved by running the following commands to make sure you’ve killed off everything MySQL related.
sudo port unload mysql5-server ps -ax | grep mysql sudo kill
Once you have done this, load it again.
sudo port load mysql5-server
Not it should be working. This is fine, but quickly gets very annoying every time you restart your computer! A common cause is that you have a MySQL sock file in your tmp directory. Removing this may allow it to start automatically.
cd /tmp rm -f mysql.sock
Once removed, restart your computer and see if MySQL works first time – hopefully, it will.
Sometimes you might want to install an MSI on your Windows system, without being logged in as an administrator. Normally, you would just right click and select “Run as Administrator” but this option is not available on MSIs.
Instead, right click on “Command Prompt” in the start menu, then select “Run as Administrator”. Once this is running, use the msiexec command to execute the MSI.
msiexec /i Filename.msi
This will then run the installer using administrative privileges.