Fixing a Macbook power transformer

Just over a week ago I found that my MacBook wasn’t charging, but the charger was plugged in and on. I inspected the cable and found that it had melted just outside of the transformer! I temporarily fixed it with some blue insulation tape, but today, it failed all together :( I have already ordered one off of eBay, ordered on Tuesday and dispatched the following day. Should hopefully be here anytime soon. Read On →

Down to Surrey - Day One

We left Aberystwyth today at 10:30, Tom, Steve and myself on the road to Surrey to work for Sun for a week. We stopped in Gloucester to drop off one of Tom’s mates, who’s parents had kindly made up soup for lunch, then we were off again! We had to be at our accommodation by 4:30, and we were told it could take three hours to get to Surrey from Gloucester, leaving at 2pm, we didn’t feel too confident. Read On →

Facebook: I'm a Fan of...

When did these start cropping up? Noticed them yesterday, seems that someone signs a person/thing up to Facebook and you can all become a Fan. Quite a good idea, similar to appreciation societies I guess… So far I’ve become a Fan of Bill Bailey and Aber uni…Why? Because they both rock and both contain beardy people…Who are, of course, the best kinda people around :P

10.5.2 is out!

Today, 11th February, Apple release the second system update to Leopard. So what did we get? As normal, there are a number of things to make the system generally more stable, these include updates to ‘Back to my Mac’, ‘Active Directory’, Networking and some other bit. One thing that I’m looking forward to is the improvements on 802.1X and general AirPort stability. Some things that are updated, which are quite cool include: Read On →

iPod Touch

Last Saturday (2nd February) I placed a bid on an iPod Touch on eBay, £199 plus £5 for p&p, bring the total to £204. This was a two month old Touch, 16GB capacity, along with charger (£20), protective film (£15) and four socks (~£20). The 16GB iPod Touch is £270 alone on the Apple Store (at time of buying). The bid was won on Saturday, the iPod arrived on Tuesday. Everything stopped. Read On →

MacBook Air Vs. Eee PC Vs. OQO

The MacBook Air has had much said about it. Jobs claimed it was the thinnest notebook ever, the most portable Mac ever, the Apple site declares that it is ’thinovation’. But is it really so great? I heard about OQO computers today in a lecture, and there has been talk about the ASUS Eee PC, so I went to look at these computers and compare them. Lets start with the OQO machine. Read On →

Coding week - Day 5: Crunch Time

Up at 8 am this morning and on the bus by 8:50. Got to an empty computer room to find only one of my team members there. I sat in wait until about 9:30, waiting for team members to appear, or even just other groups… At 9:30, I moved to the Sun Lounge when a couple of team mates came in. I spent this morning looking at files, formatting them, making sure they were commented right etc. Read On →

Coding week - Day 4

The morning started late with hardly anyone turning up on time. I spent the morning looking once again at some Postgres stuff, but gave up a little before noon. This afternoon I looked at creating an ANT file. ANT is like a UNIX make file, except it uses XML with some basic commands. Once I had gotten to terms with what things did, it was really quite easy. I made a file that you could issue commands to from the command line to arrange the source files, clean the build directory, clean the source directory, compile all the source code or just the client or the server code. Read On →

Coding week - Day 3

The day started by running around the Old College looking for the workstation room, after finally finding it, I settled down to work on looking around for Java with Postgres, as this was the database we are working with…Looking around the web wasn’t much help,nothing was going to be easy, especially as I’m not great with SQL. I came home for lunch and got back to the workroom for about 3pm, I spent the afternoon looking at trying to get Postgres onto my Mac. Read On →

Coding week - Day 2

Ugh, off to another late start, rolled out of bed at 8:10am again…Just about to have some breakfast…Today’s blog may be more of a continually updated commentary of what’s going on…But who knows, eh? 08:41am - Already we have had a suggestion by a fellow team member that all the XML files should be translated into SQL and then form a database…This undermines everything we worked towards yesterday, but as long as it gets done we’ll get the marks I suppose… Read On →