PSP

Last night I met a guy with a PSP. Wow. Have you guys seen a PSP in real life yet? It is absolutely astonishingly amazing.

The screen is ENORMOUS. Also, it's one of the best quality screens I've EVER seen, including anything that can be called a screen. SUCH crisp detail.

I can't remember what game he had on it (some kind of third person fighting game, like Prince of Persia?) but it ran totally smoothly, with lots of detail and excellent graphics.

That little machine is so incredible.

It'll retail in the UK for £179.99 apparently.

IBM

I was accepted!

*chuffed*

My SEG group rocks

http://www.soton.ac.uk/~cil103/seggui4.png

My group rocks, check out our work :) (still unfinished mind :/)

Also, I can't believe I complained about lack of time/too much work before... Because I am TOTALLY fucked now :| (Got a 10 minute presentation to prepare for my IBM assessment on Monday too...) Don't really have the time to collate my thoughts properly at the moment, I'm still reeling... And some odd smell seems to have followed me from work and I can't identify the source :/ Annoying...

Good night.

Funnyfox

http://www.funnyfox.org/

Thieves need to die

I know we've discussed this at length before, and I've gone from an extremist view-point to a slightly less extreme view-point to quite a forgiving view-point...

But I've just had my bicycle seat nicked, and all thieves need to die a slow and painful death.

Homerton IT Department

As both of you know, the Homerton IT Department has a terrible track record. Everyday I see instances of sheer ineptitude, and am aware of a variety of more effective means to solve their problems.

Today was just like any other day. However, I finally decided to tell them about it. Below are copies of a few emails that tell the whole story.

MIME structure of this message, including any attachments:

1. (text/plain), 12 lines Download this text
2. [paperclip] winmail.dat (application/ms-tnef), 271 K
--------------------------------------------

Please see attached Adobe Acrobat .pdf document containing the I.T Department Newsletter.

Regards,

Homerton I.T. Department
--------------------------------------------
Homerton College I.T. Department
http://www.homerton.cam.ac.uk/itdept/

Ext. 7/8009

Notice that the claimed PDF file is not attached! Instead there's something called 'winmail.dat'. "What the fuck is winmail.dat?" most would ask. Let's see:

Hello,

I feel I should point out a problem regarding the email the IT dept. sent out earlier today. The problem revolves around the fact that most users do not use MS Outlook to view their mail in hermes; rather the webmail interface is used.

It was claimed that a PDF file was attached to the email, but all recipients not using Outlook to view the email only see an attached file called winmail.dat. This is a proprietary file format which contains formatting data, attachments etc., and is not viewable by anything other than Outlook.

Given that most (I'm sure upwards of 90%) recipients use the webmail interface to their hermes accounts, the newsletter that exists as a PDF within winmail.dat will remain hidden and unread by this significant proportion of people.

May I direct your attention to the following web page which describes the problem in more detail, and proposes remedies for the situation:

http://www.gpc.edu/~jbenson/resource/winmail.htm


Kind regards,
Mark Florian

Ridiculous, hmm? I wasn't quite done, either.

Hello,

After manually extracting and reading the newsletter from the winmail.dat file described in my previous email, I noticed a request whereby the desire for a piece of software to be present on the network should be forwarded to the IT dept..

Therefore I would like to request two pieces of software to be made available:
- MATTER, a learning and teaching package for Materials and Mineral Scientists, and
- Mozilla Firefox.

The former is an extremely useful package for Natural Scientists, and work is reguarly performed using the software. With the current situation, students must travel to the centre of Cambridge to access it.

The latter is a web browser that offers *significantly* increased security over Internet Explorer. In conjunction with this, I would consider including an "Installing Firefox" stage at the start of terms just as valuable as the anti-spyware and anit-virus stages in terms of system security.

Kind regards,
Mark Florian

It is so relieving to get frustration out in a useful form. I'm telling them how to do their jobs!

Oh, and James, you'll like this bit from the newsletter (emphasis mine; [lack of] punctuation, spelling, grammar and formatting theirs):

Twelve Stages for Student Room Connections - Why Every Term ?

The amount of stages to complete is likely to be significantly less in the New Term but the re-connection process needs to be repeated at the beginning of each new term to ensure Adware, spyware or Viruses picked up from Broadband or Dial-up connections at home are removed before re-connection. We have to enforce these stages to ensure Stability and a reliable service to those already connected. We know other colleges have alternative arrangements some of these have proved to be at the expense of their users PC's

Quote from a UK University I.T Dept allowing students to plug in directly to the internet :
"On our residences network this year we have had support problems far beyond those experienced previously. Within about 20 minutes of a student PC connecting to the network it is likely to be infected by a "Spyware Trojan" and other "Malware" which displays popup web pages for pornographic sites. We have found the problem very difficult to clear from affected PCs."

Love it.

Hardcore.

I am working 11 hours today. That's 11, as in eleven, as in six more hours than I'd usually work. I'm planning to bring some work and games and such with me, hopefully it won't be 11 hours of serving people... But that's what I call hardcore, so I won't have any of you lot complaining about your work! I also have a coursework due last week to do, another coursework due next week (I think) and group project deadlines to work for - Also, another IBM assessment day in two weeks.

*That* is what I call hardcore.

Still, on a lighter note, I have a new phone! I've had two new phones in fact. The Fist of the North Star books STILL hadn't been dispatched and there was no sign of them being delivered anytime soon, so I cancelled those, sold my old phone and bought a new phone - The Philips 755. Possibly the most flawed phone in existence. The hardware is great, good camera, a touch-screen, nice-looking design... But they COMPLETELY ballsed-up the firmware. Here's a run-down of the things wrong with it:

• Not a single menu-item is in a logical place (when you go into the main menu, the primary option is 'Settings'.)
• There's a significant latency with input from the keypad.
• The camera sensor is aligned horizontally and provides no size between 640x480 and 128x160 (has a nice zoom though).
• A camera, yet no picture phonebook? wtf? (you can assign pictures to groups and groups to people, but there are only 30 groups...)
  
• Pressing the 'shift' or 'symbols' key on the on-screen keyboard results in a significant delay.
• You can't add words to the T9 dictionary (these last two making texting extremely frustrating).
• Java apps run HORRIBLY slowly, despite the quite adequate hardware.
• The Java VM handles menus extremely gayly, despite having the screen-space to handle them correctly.
• The joystick toggle is a bit shitty.

I took that back as soon as I could (mind you, had to put up with it for 4 days, as they were out of stock for the phone I wanted...) and got a Sony Ericsson T630. And wow, this is the best phone I've had in ages :) *Perfect* menu layout, lovely organiser features, bluetooth, decent Java performance (although it is still a little slow in the more modern games), fantastic looking design (you really have to see it, pictures never do it justice), perfect synchronisation with Linux/evolution using multisync and bluetooth, a good selection of default games... It's just so damn good :) I am very happy with this phone indeed :) (and if you've seen the T610 btw, it's pretty much the same phone, but with a *much* better screen, slightly smaller and slightly faster)

It's a real shame about the Philips phone though, it could've been excellent... (although I'm glad it wasn't, as I can't imagine it getting more excelleny than the T630 :))