Micks' Musings

The Australian opposition launched its Broadband policy today. Inferior in every way to the current National Broadband Network and no cheaper in the long run due to the cost of maintaining the old copper network.  Is the cost of electing the LNP having inferior infrastructure, more expensive health care and poorer education? Do the opposition plan to charge all the people who are already connected to the NBN the $5000 they will make me pay to get FTTP once they get elected? My house is over 3.5KM from the exchange and I get 3M over ADSL2. You have got to question the motives of the opposition - are they protecting their biggest donors? They will be winning the next election regardless of what they say or do between now and September so there is no reason not to allow the NBN to proceed except for vested self-interest. One thing is for sure - if they ruin the NBN I will be cancelling my Foxtel subscription and will never buy anything associated with the backers of the LNP. I...

I have an iPad 2, Nexus 7, Kindle Touch, Smartq 7 and an ePad 10inch tablet. The SmartQ and ePad have been consigned to the back of a shelf out in the shed and I am actively using the iPad and Nexus 7. I use the iPad a lot - it has a decent sized screen so is comfortable for web browsing. I prefer its screen ratio to that chosen by the Android tablets. The Nexus 7 was bought to replace the Kindle (actually I used Frequent Flyer points that were about to expire so it was not a hard decision as it didn't seem to cost anything). The problem with the Kindle Touch is the difficulty reading it when the light is fairly poor. There is no problem reading the Nexus 7 and its screen is nice and sharp (1280 by 800 resolution for a 7 inch tablet is very nice). The only thing that might make me upgrade my iPad is the screen on the new models or when it breaks! Do I like iOS or Android more? I don't think there is a lot of difference - both are good at what they do - running apps! I find ...

I have upgraded my laptop to Windows 8 and all was fine for about three hours and then I started to get an error when trying to run any application that required Administrator privileges. Half an hour of Googling led me to this blog post   Case of the broken uac prompt This problem was caused by downloading themes. The final theme I had decided on included a new sound theme. Clearly at least one of the sounds did not play (the one for the UAC prompt!). Changing the sound theme (right click on desktop, choose "personalisation") to Windows Default sorted out the problem. Doing a clean install would also have fixed it but that would have been a drastic solution and as soon as I installed a new theme it may have happened again.

I have just migrated my Mozilla Thunderbird profile to a new computer and I discovered that Unified Folders were not working. I migrated using MozBackup, and when I discovered that the Unified folders were not working, and a second time by a direct copy and a modification of profiles.ini to point to the copied profile (so I did not have to rename the profile directory). In both cases the Unified Folders option could not be selected. The Error Console (select Error Console from the Tools menu) had the following error. Timestamp: 15/04/2012 11:52:20 AM Error: uncaught exception: [Exception... "Component returned failure code: 0x80004003 (NS_ERROR_INVALID_POINTER) [nsIMsgSendLater.hasUnsentMessages]" nsresult: "0x80004003 (NS_ERROR_INVALID_POINTER)" location: "JS frame :: chrome://messenger/content/mail-offline.js :: :: line 81" data: no] I discovered that the unified folders worked if I Ran Thunderbird using the "Run as administrator" opti...

Now for a topic with a possible audience of zero (which is probably the number - besides spambots - who read this blog!). Over the last few weeks I have been investigating the performance of our application on z/OS. The application is written in C and runs in batch and CICS. A customer reported that our latest version was not performing as well as the version they were currently running. Testing showed there was a difference. The same tests did not show a difference on other platforms. z/OS has unique characteristics, not surprising given the hardware it runs on, and there are bound to be factors that affect performance that do not affect other platforms. We build our application using unix system services and link the final modules into a Dataset (load library). What this means is that we can use standard unix shell utilities, make files and other tools just like on any other unix platform. This makes development much easier. The final link is the first time anything leaves the unix e...

My phone thinks it is daylight saving time already! There is no way to tell it it isn't! To be fair it is only the clock / weather widget on my Android phone and all the other places that show the time have it right.

My old phone (as of about three weeks ago) was a windows mobile 6.5 handset and it got about 1 days from its battery. Then I dropped it on to a hard stone floor (is there such a thing as a soft stone floor?) and it started to misbehave. The sound would turn off, including the sound of the person talking to me! No ringtone or any other sound until I rebooted it. Then it was okay for a day or two but then it would not answer calls for two days until I rebooted it again. So I restored it from the custom ROM back to the manufacturers version of Windows mobile and installed Android (as an executable that was run after booting Windows mobile!). Now the battery life was less than a day! So I got a new (Huawei Sonic) phone for less than half what the old phone cost. A very nice, android based, phone. Then I got a $2 prepaid SIM for the old phone. Recharged it, activated the SIM and called the old phone. It answered! Since then it has sat on my desk for 9 days - the battery life is down t...