I was (for my sins) working on a Windows Server 2008 box today. To make it worse it was a VM with very little disk space. In trying to find things to remove I found hiberfil.sys sitting there at 4Gb! I tried to delete it but Windows wouldn’t let me. I then went into power settings, disabled hibernation (or so I thought) and tried to delete it again… still no joy.

Anyway, it turns out the easiest (or only, I don’t know) way of deleting this stupid file (why Windows SERVER would need to hibernate anyway is beyond me!) is to drop into command prompt and run the following command:

powercfg -h off

Easy when you know how, but annoying if you don’t!

This is something you are more likely to come across in an Intranet environment, but it is a useful trick configuration to know about. There are 3 settings you need to change in Firefox in order for it to work. Here’s how to do it:

In the address bar, type about:config

You may get a warning message, this is fine.

From the list produced, find the following 3 properties:

network.automatic-ntlm-auth.trusted-uris

network.negotiate-auth.delegation-uris

network.negotiate-auth.trusted-uris

You need to add the server you wish to authenticate to the end of the value associated with the property, so it should read something like “localhost, myserver.com”.

You need to set that for each of the 3 properties and you should be good to go, no restart needed.

Like I said, you are unlikely to need this in an Internet environment, but it is necessary to authenticate with Windows authentication in an Intranet environment.

Before I start, I think Sir Richard Branson is great! As a Brit, I think there are a handful of people that as a nation we can be proud of and Sir Richard Branson is right up there in my book. I have followed his adventures for years, have read his books and I think the man is truly inspirational.

That said, while browsing the Apple App Store for iPhone apps I happened upon the Virgin Atlantic “Flying Without Fear” program. I am not scared of flying at all, but I happen to know a few people who are and this app looks great. It covers everything from explaining what all the noises are, the procedures during the flight, the concept of turbulence, right through to what to do if you feel you are starting to panic. Brilliant!

I believe every airline should have things like this. In the grand scheme of things it costs them little to produce and maintain and can be one way in which they can make their potential customers feel welcome and valued, like they actually WANT you to conquer your fear and get on their plane (where you will subsequently pay through the nose for every aspect of your journey).

My problem with this app is they have priced it at $4.99 (£2.99 in the UK). Ok, it is not exactly re-mortgage the house money, but really, this should be FREE. People do not choose to be scared of flying, and as a national carrier, Virgin should be doing more to help those with a legitimate fear of flying. You don’t see airlines refusing to help disabled passengers board the plane, do you? Airlines go out of their way to help the disabled, elderly, and infirm. Why can’t they do the same for those affected by fear of flying?

I have the utmost respect for Sir Richard Branson, but when I first saw this app I thought “great, this is a guy who cares”, then I saw the price tag and was less than impressed.

Yes, I know they are a business and I know there are shareholders to satisfy, but for a company that plans on being one of the first in line to take paying passengers into space, maybe they could break some frontiers a little closer to home first.

I know there is very little chance Mr Branson is reading this post, but if you are… With respect, please don’t try and profit from peoples fears, and most of all, please don’t turn into Alan Sugar!

I made the jump from IE to Firefox as soon as I was told about it and I have never regretted it for a moment. The experience was faster, slicker, more accurate and altogether more enjoyable. This was when tabbed browsing had just been introduced and so that was welcome as well.

Over the years Firefox has grown up. As the market share continues to increase more and more developers are bringing out really cool and useful tools and plugins that make Firefox very powerful, especially for the web designer/developer. I would actually go so far as to say Firefox is now an essential part of my workflow as a designer.

Tools such as Firebug for HTML/CSS debugging, Colorzilla for grabbing a particular colour off screen, and SearchStatus for SEO information are just 3 examples of tools that I would really struggle to do without.

It is not all good news though. The more advanced Firefox has got the more problems it seems to have, especially on the Mac platform. It seems to have got progressively more sluggish and often consumes complete cores of CPU for no apparent reason (albeit more often than not it is Flash related). Stability is not what it used to be, and while all this is going on the competition are reigning it in and in certain areas overtaking it.

If you judge the browsers on a performance basis only then Google Chrome blows Firefox away, mainly in the javascript execution area but also arguably in stability. Firefox doesn’t even come second!

Unfortunately Firefox seems to have cornered the market in terms of plugins in the same way IE forced itself in the market based on being bundled with the most popular Operating System in the world. I say unfortunately because we are now in a situation where one of the best browsers available has a lot of people using it that have nowhere to go and no other alternative. This situation is never good for the end user.

The ideal situation is either one of the other smaller competitors will introduce a versatile plugin system to rival Firefox’s offering, or someone new will enter the fray with another, probably webkit based, browser which will force Firefox to pull its finger out and tidy up its core product.

Ok, this is not something I would normally do, but it seems I am out of favour with the Googlemeister at the moment. It seems I requested an invite at the same time everyone else did, yet the great God of Google has yet to take it upon himself to reward me with an invitation to the Wave party.

I was hoping to do a write up of Google Wave once I had chance to see it, but at this rate I guess it will be a bit late. So, if anyone happens to have a Google Wave invite going spare and would care to hook me up with one it would be much appreciated.

Thanks

It seems that not for the first time UK based Fasthosts Internet have experienced massive outages, this time to their email service. As reported in the UK Business Forums lots of people have found that they have lost access to their email over the past 24 hours. The situation is starting to get resolved for some users, but for many they have lost an entire days worth of email access.

This is not the first time it has happened either. Back in 2007 Fasthosts broke their email system and didn’t have reliable backups. Further back than that their backbone went down for nearly a week.

For a company that claims to provide reliable hosting and support they do not exactly have the best track record. I jumped ship with Fasthosts after one of their big outages as it cost me business. One of their flagship products is reseller hosting, encouraging customers to put all their eggs in one basket. That’s all well and good, but when things go wrong their phonelines tie up and they drop those eggs all over the floor.

This might be ok if you have some hobby sites, but if you rely on hosting for a percentage of your income I would recommend hosting with someone who does answer the phone and has people in place to fix faults fast.

Oh… one last thing… when was the last time you (or your host) did a backup of your sites and email?

I found this today on Stumbleupon. Am sure most people in business can relate to it!

Source: FLIRTing with the crowds

It looks like modern technology has brought the English language to a new low. “Unfriend” has been named the word of the year by the New Oxford American Dictionary, chosen from a list of finalists with a tech-savvy bent.

The word, meaning “to remove someone as a “friend” on a social networking site such as Facebook” was chosen ahead of other such ridiculous words such as “intexticated”, “funemployed” and “sexting”.

Maybe I am just old fashioned, and hell I am not one to get all high and mighty on grammar, I struggle at the best of times, but these words remind me of Newspeak from George Orwell’s 1984. The premise is basically to reduce the number of words in the dictionary by removing words that are not needed and replacing them with modifications of other words. So, the opposite of “good” would no longer be “bad” but rather “ungood”.

Watching the BBC it is clear the English language is in enough trouble as it is. The TV show “Strictly Come Dancing” is the worst offender by far. Alesha Dixon is no candidate for Mensa it must be said, but the BBC should really give her some lessons in English and not allow her to come up with sentences such as “you was good” or “I think you done it better last time”.

As far as I am concerned there should be more focus on teaching correct use of the words currently in the dictionary, rather than dumbing down the dictionary even more than it already is.

One last thing,  “Hashtag” was also a finalist. Sorry, I know what it is, but it sounds like a sport for drug users!

On Thursday I purchased the Acer Aspire Revo as my media centre solution. After living with it for a few days I thought I would write a quick round up of the positives and negatives of the Revo.

Positives

• It is quiet… VERY quiet
• Fairly small
• Has a VESA mount (I used it to put it on the wall!)
• Runs XBMC very well

Negatives

• Doesn’t currently like playing DVD images, although hi-def content and divx work fine
• No remote control
• No IR port
• Iphone remote is ok, but no solution full-fime, and keeps losing connection

The remote control issue doesn’t seem too important at first, until you look at the cost of remotes that will work with XBMC (no-IR port). They come in at around £20, but add this to the cost of the Revo, already more expensive than some media centres that come with remotes, and suddenly the cost is starting to creep up.

The main benefit I see of choosing the Revo over the likes of the Xtremer is the fact you can run XBMC on it. Some of the scripts and themes for XBMC are very slick indeed and the community is great.

One of the negatives I listed is playback of DVD images (std resolution). I think this could be the fact I am using the Alpha version of the new software. I cannot think of a reason why it could stream 1080p content fine yet struggle with DVD images. I will do a bit of digging and find out.

Overall I am very happy with my purchase. It does the job well (and quietly) and lets me run some excellent software on it. The only thing I am considering next is whether to replace the live version of XBMC with the Ubuntu version and see if I can add some TV playing/recording functionality in the future, maybe using MythTV?

UPDATE: I have figured out the issue with DVD’s. I run FreeNAS on one of my machines and for some reason it was maxing out around 1MB/s. I have upgraded the software version and now it is maxing out around 4MB/s, still not great but good enough for DVD playback. Anyway, as far as the Acer is concerned it is working fine

Yes, time for another rant… it’s been at least 24h since the last one

I ordered Call of Duty – Modern Warfare 2 on Tuesday morning because Amazon had it in stock and were price matching the local supermarket which I was too lazy to get out of bed and visit.

I chose the supersaver (free) delivery option as I wasn’t in that much of a hurry and thought as long as I get it this week it should be fine. Anyway, I just logged into Amazon and their estimate for delivery is 17th – 19th!

I must admit it is partly my fault. Mainly because this has happened to me before with Amazon. They offer the expensive shipping options and the reason people pay up is because Amazon sit on the order for 3-4 days before they even start the shipping process.

I should have known better, but it does seem wrong. I can understand paying extra to get it sent courier, or before 12 noon etc, but to pay extra just so the begin the delivery process in a timely manner is a bit off.