Author: tony

DRM in Windows Vista. You know, it’s actually getting quite difficult to find anyone who recommends switching to Vista and who isn’t also either a)working for Microsoft or b)just plain yanking your chain.

Fun ways to fuck with Japanese people’s heads, by Chad the evil gaijin!

Ruby on Rails (or RoR) is a framework that prides itself on being really easy to get started with, and it is… to an extent. Here’s the message I got when I had finished installing it and tried to access it…

"We're sorry, but something went wrong."

Not a particularly useful error message. You have to dig through application logs and decipher the issue yourself. But the kicker is that this is the response to a basic permission error with the [project]/tmp directory created by the rails command, which I diagnosed and fixed. Still, shouldn’t RoR have been able to detect or maybe not cause the problem?

Car rental companies have come a long way since the bad old days of rent-a-wreck. Nowadays if you pay a little extra you get to try out cars that you probably wouldn’t own, and that’s what I decided to do last weekend for a road trip.

Continue reading Adventures in Car Rental: 2007 Mercedes-Benz C280 4matic

Not great: to get to work I must catch the last bus which leaves a subway station at 9:10, or I must catch a cab which costs me over $20. Bad: the train is delayed. Worse: it’s delayed because it’s standing still in the station. Worst: it’s standing still in the station next to the one where I catch the bus while I’m getting steamed up and impatient. There’s not much I can do about the STM’s apparent inability to make the trains run on time, but I’m starting to think that maybe I should work at a place that’s a little more convenient to get to…

Burkina Faso is the new Nigeria. I’ll give you 419 good reasons to trust these guys…

Microsoft steals feature from an independent developer… then patents it. No really, this is the patent claim filed by Microsoft. As you can clearly see from the main article, Redmond is claiming to have invented this feature several months after having admitted that the feature was taken from the other developer. This means that they are out-and-out lying in their patent application. In fact some may claim that the patent application itself is fraudulent. I’m curious to see how that turns out.

How much are your Linden dollars really worth? Apparently it’s loads easier to invest in than to cash out, and your real-world profit is unlikely to beat even anemic savings account rates.

Get a first life! 3D environments, no server lag, and you can make stuff, buy stuff and open your own business… just like in Second Life! Best of all you don’t have to buy genitals from someone else before you can have sex (unless that floats your boat, then you’re free to do that too).

Japanese girls in bikinis throw cream pies at one another while riding mechanical bulls (no, really). It’s exactly the perfect mix of cute, sexy and absurd that makes me love Japanese TV!