Archive for the ‘Life’ Category

Having seen out 2010 in style, I began the year, in January as usual, by explaining I didn’t care what happened to me, after I died. At work we launched our website and I finally said the L word – to my iPhone. Meanwhile, CWF announced the Perspective Citywide course, open to the general public and running alongside the campus version.

The month after was of course February which began with CWF launching the Galileo Day pack for societies, giving them hints and tips on running a great event. Feeder were a little underwhelming, but Super Bowl XLV wasn’t. The Humanist Society of West Yorkshire launched its new logo and Michael Bramham delivered the Galileo Day Lecture and festivities followed. It was also the first ever month we ran Fry Up Club (I think).

I delivered a talk on the history of atheist charity in March and paid a visit to Hope City. With me and Elina now officially being a couple, we celebrated her birthday meanwhile James took the helm for Reason Week 2011 which finished with the traditional All Night Debate. CWF began building it’s library and I attended the AHS national convention.

I also kicked off April with a talk, this time to Hull Humanists while Michael and John were giving a very similar talk at LAS. The final Perspective Citywide was given by Nicola Jackson and my life was changed forever when I finally got my hands on an iPad 2. We got Rebecca in a Batgirl outfit and Humanist Community returned due to popular demand. The Humanist Action Group launched their guides and we finished the month by hitting the beach.

It was a busy month at work in May as we launched cricket and we voted for and against the alternative vote. I wrote to my MEPs about ethical meat and Sainsbury’s refused me service even though I had ID. I complained. James was elected president of LAS, I went to see Uncaged Monkeys and West Yorkshire Humanists had a very interesting discussion about animal experimentation. The month was finished off by the Secular Ball 2011.

The EDL were causing trouble in June, meanwhile I was still in love with my iPad. We had a McReunion while CWF announced Leeds Transhumanists and its partnership with Daily Motion. I proposed Try Vegetarianism Week and we celebrated our anniversary as Row One.

In July I met Matt and finally gave up my paper diary. I proposed we introduce equal opportunities in sport and took Elina down to London for the weekend. We got Elina and Kat dress up as bunny girls for our poker night, Jenson Button lost a wheel and I spoke at Nottingham Skeptics. I met Elina’s mum, Atheist Stock moved out of beta and leeds Slutwalk took place. We also said goodbye to the Space Shuttle programme.

I left Firebox for Chrome in August while CWF launched the Atheist Stock API and later launched Worfolk Lectures too. We also announced Sunrise 2011 and cooked a crab and played my first live poker tournament. We attended Leeds Pride 2011 and CWF held its AGM. I also cooked a fish and inspired by Franklin & Bash, we held a Margarita Mondays.

It was a big month for CWF in September with Sunrise Conference 2011 and I took Elina to Roundhay Park, Ilkley Moor and the Leeds Liverpool Canal before she flew back to Finland. I continued my poker exploits and we headed down to Sheffield Humanists for a talk on paying for sex. I lifted the ban on family being friends on Facebook and it was proved that atheists are smarter than religious people. We celebrated Norm’s birthday, twice and we introduced to the dangers of shot roulette before hitting up the Zombie Prom.

Skeptics in the Pub learnt about cults in October, Steve Jobs passed away and it turned out all freshers are morons. I chaired the first One Life with a discussion on the meaning of life but having waited ten months for my chance to see Rihanna – was too ill to go! Elina returned for a week and I spoke at Sheffield Skeptics in the Pub. Dr David Jenkins delivered the 2011 Worfolk Lecture and CWF announced SocietasPro. Meanwhile in inaugural Leeds Transhumanists meeting took place, I reached middle age and we held a kick-ass Halloween party.

There was a sad start to November with Sir Jimmy Savile passing away, to which I later launched several campaigns to have things named after him. I had more problems with Sainsbury’s, this time trying to buy alcohol free wine and read Sam Harris’s The Moral Landscape which is well worth a read. CWF announced SocietasPro v0.1 and the 2011 Holiday Food Drive and after two and a half years of genius, Row One was brought to an end. By the end of the month, SocietasPro v.0.3 was out too! Unfortunately, I was in the country to see Evanescene, though the gig itself was great.

Finally in December we hit the Christmas market several times and spent most of the rest of the time watching Nothing to Declare. I finally got round to attending Leeds Salon and we celebrated George’s birthday. I said goodbye to my trusty hosting company of eight years and CWF delivered food to local homeless shelters. I managed to prove I invented Facebook and went to my first meeting of Toastmasters.

With Wendy once again rolling around, we headed out for some good music and good times.

With my auntie in Leeds for the weekend, we headed out for a family meal at the Queen’s Arms, which has since been taken over from it’s former life as a generic food-serving pub and become a Toby Carvery.

Overall, it was a mediocre experience. The staff were reasonably friendly, but they got one of our drinks orders wrong – a dilute orange arrived instead of a fresh orange, but my Gran not wanting to make a fuss bless her, just accepted it. That is until she tasted it and realised how weak it was.

The food was enjoyable, the meat was very nicely cooked, but the Yorkshire puddings really let the entire event down. To say we are actually in Yorkshire, they were the worst Yorkshire puddings I’ve ever had. The only comparison I can really make of them was that it was like eating a giant prawn cracker. Also, their strawberry ice cream turned out to be regular ice cream with a bit of strawberry sauce on, but the chocolate fudge cake was excellent.

Overall, I would rate the experience as acceptable, but below par. Maybe they just had a bad day with the Yorkshires, but I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone.

Yes, you can update views in MySQL! A lot of people seem to be under the impression that you are unable to, but this simply isn’t the case. There are a lot of restrictive rules, which can be found in the MySQL manual, but as a rule of thumb, you can update them, but only one table.

For example, lets say you have a view which links table A and table B.

You can run an update on this view, but only if you are only updating the columns from one table. So you could run a query that updates a number of columns from table A, or you could run a query which updates columns from table B – but you can’t run a query which updated columns in both table A and table B.

If you need to accomplish this, you need to use a join instead.

Snapz really annoys me because I paid money for what is supposed to be the best product out there, but it’s actually incredibly hard to use because every time I want to take a screen shot I have to google for the shortcut key. By default, it’s this.

Cmd + Shift + 3

If you are using Flex Builder on Windows, you may run into an error where Flex Builder says it is unable to find the executable for Flash Player. The error will look something like the one below.

Flash Builder cannot locate the required version of Adobe Flash Player. You might need to install the FLash Player or reinstall Flash Builder.

Do you want to try and run your application with the current version?

This will give you an attempt to continue dialog with a yes or no option. If you click yes then you would get another error similar to the following.

Cannot run program "C:\Users\chris\Desktop\flashplayer_11_sa_debug_32bit.exe": CreateProcess error=2, The System cannot find the file specified

You can fix this by following the steps below.

1. Go to the Adobe website and download the standalone Flash Player Debugger edition.

2. Open up Notepad and insert some text (literally, anything).

3. Save the file as dummy.swf on your Desktop.

4. Open your Desktop and right click on the file. Select “open with…”

5. Browse to the location of the Flash Debugger you downloaded and select it, making sure to tick the “always open these types of file” option.

From now on, you should be able to run the application from Flash Builder.

Over the years, the Worfolk Online network has run a lot of technical websites. Dozens and dozens of them. Each one had a selection of interesting and useful content, which for one reason or anther has since been closed down.

So, we decided to rescue them.

The result is that we’re currently working on importing articles from a number of old websites from our network.

It’s stretching our remit a little further than we already do – most of the articles are about web development and programming, but we thought it would be better to put them on here then for them to be lost forever – though that’s probably a big claim given how old the content is in some of them – it’s things we haven’t been doing for a decade!

Never the less, you may notice that our archives now date back to before the site was even founded in 2005. This is as a result of the new content we have brought on board and with articles dating back to 2002, we are now pulling together resources from the past decade!

Earlier this month, I was invited to a wedding reception over in York. Due to the medication I’m on, I can’t drink, so I figured the most convenient thing to do was drive over. I didn’t want to arrive dead on 7:30 in case nobody else turned up at that time, so I decided to set off at 7:15, allowing 45 minutes to drive there, get parked and find the venue, thereby arriving a fashionable 30 minutes after the start time.

So I set off at 7:15 and got as far as the roundabout by the big Tesco when I ran into road works which had closed off the A64 entirely, so I followed a badly sign posted diversion route which took me up to Weatherby Road.

They seemed to disappear at this point so I kept driving as far as village which I believe was called Cottingham, at which point my sat nav finally provided me a route which was something other than make a U-turn and head back to the A64.

This involved joining the A1, and heading back down the motorway towards Leeds until I got back to the A1/A64 junction. By now I was massively behind schedule but I thought hey ho, at least I’m now on a dual carriageway all the way to York.

So I carried on down the A64, and suddenly saw a bunch of cars with their hazard lights on ahead of me. Next thing I know both lanes have come to a standstill and I can see some flashing emergency lights up ahead of me.

Apparently someone had been run over.

After being sat there for a while with an increasing feeling that I was going to be trapped on the A64 all night, the traffic eventually started to move again as a police officer started directing cars to take it in turns to make a U-turn and drive the wrong way down an on-ramp to the A64 which lead us into a village that was either near, or was, Weatherby.

By this point I had been on the road for almost two hours and didn’t really know what roads there were into York without the A64, so I just gave it up as a bad job and gave up. That meant that not only had I missed my friend’s wedding reception, but I was also now forced to buy dinner from McDonald’s because I had missed out on the buffet. Is there some kind of compensation fund I can claim that back from?

Need to uncompress a .tar.gz file from the terminal? No problem.

tar xvzf filename.tar.gz

Hello everyone! I just wanted to post a quick update on what the status of the site was now.

We first acquired Hardware Tutorials back in 2005, but since then there hasn’t been much content added to it – and indeed the content that was posted back then wasn’t exactly amazing quality. But for prosperity sake, we have kept it.

Never the less, it has always been an ambition to develop the site further and one thing I constantly find myself doing at work is googling for solutions to problems, usually when I’m trying to install something, usually on CentOS. Though that isn’t to say I don’t have my fair share of problems dealing with OS X, Windows 7 and Fedora too.

Rather than just leaving the solutions I eventually find for these problems, Hardware Tutorials seems a reasonably appropriate place to post such solutions – a lot of it isn’t strictly hardware, but as I said in my opening post six years ago, we would almost certainly be straying from that criteria anyway.

So please enjoy the new and updated Hardware Tutorials. Hopefully, you will be seeing a lot more regularly updated content from now on.