End of 2015

So another year, almost to close.This year I came to realize that I need to get out there and do stuff, here is some of the stuff I did: 

• I joined Georgetown Geeks and Gamers, who meet up once a month to play board games. 
• I went out in the summer to garage sales. 
• I invited friends over, I discovered this December that although a number of my friends live in Toronto now, I can still keep in touch with them via Skype.
• I continued doing things with the camera club.
• I attended several Christmas events

 Other things that happened in 2015:

• I was invited to a friend's wedding reception(thank you Yacoub) 
• There was a federal election. I think the new government will be better then the old one, how much better I'm not sure. 
• I upgraded to the free Windows 10, released this year. 
• My first credit card expired. 
• We got the new community mailbox just to be told the program is being frozen and evaluated. Although if you have a community mailbox your stuck with it.(at least thats what I've heard) 
• We got a new outdoor antenna! 
• Many more adventures 

Stay tune tommrow as my next entry will be about my plans for next year!

Microsfot Edge

I apologize to my readers, blogspot does not support Microsoft Edge, if you want this blog to display correctly, you will have to use another browser for now.

WIndows 10 update Part I

So I'm trying to install a Windows 10 update. It's not a security update(I have no problem with those). After a reboot I see a graphic that tells me the update is 0% complete.

Then my computer reboots again and reverts back to the old version of the old OS. The only message is a notification on login telling me the update failed

The update is fairly large and takes about 45 minutes to re-download. There is then about 2 hours of prep time before it can be installed. I've tried several times, waiting for the re-download and prep each time. I've decided to tell Windows to defer the update till a latter date(probably a weekend) when I can examine the issue further. If defering updates sounds like something that would help you out I will point out that it's exclusive to pro edition of Windows 10 and above.

At the moment it appears that are bootable DVD ISOs you can download. These appear to be effective, I have to make sure these are updates and not clean installs. This might seem like a wast of a DVD but I have a DVD-RW I got at the thrift store that would be perfect for this. You can also use a USB thumb stick but I haven't booted with those very often so I don't fully trust them.

I'll will follow up this post with a part 2 when I explain what I did. I'm fairly busy right now so it won't be till the new year.

End of door-to-door delivery part II

So I talked before a few yeas ago about how I was upset that Canada Post was going to(and has now) stopped door to door delivery of mail. Here is what I think of it now that it has actually happened.

- Like I said before it said that some people have lost their jobs, it's hard for older people to get their mail.

- It appears that any packages that require a signature must be picked up at the post office.  You must show valid ID to get the package which is a bit safer then just having to sing for something. This is actually a positive to come out of this. Also I didn't expect them to do this but the community mailboxes have a series of 4 -8(I  can't remember how many) boxes for larger delivers. This reduces the amount of people who have to drive to get the mail at another post office and is not as bad as I thought it would be. Mail for one household is never shared with another, so there is a fairly good chance of a number of people having to pick up the mail at the post office at Cristmass time.

- The boxeses are larger then I expected and acctually fit smallar packages(like adapters) very easily, this is also not as bad as I thought.

- Also the mailboxes are nicely spaced out and don't take up a tune of space like I thought they might. I think most of them are in walking distance too.

-Walking too the mail isn't bad in this weather but having too 'suit up' this winter is not something I look forward too. Although they don't take up much space I read in the paper that at least one person is sueing the town for having a mailbox installed on what she considers to be her propitiate (and not the towns).

- Lastly I found some liter(an ad) by the mailbox which woulden't be there if they delivered door-to-door.

So what do I think overall:

- It's still not the best but not as bad as I thought it would be. 

AnoutherJS problem.

I had a problem with JS today, as usually it related to copy/pasting. This time I did not get a syntax error when using 'aVar == "value"' even though you thought I would. This caused a veriable to never get assigned too, not what I wanted.

Site updated

My site has been updated:

• I have updated the backend and fixed a security issue that was not effecting me currently but may have in the future.
• I have removed the login panel since I am the only one who needs to login. 

That all for now but don't forget to check out the project I uploaded yesterday.

Makeing the same mistake twice

You know it's bad to make the same mistake twice, but I did. I spent about half an hour trying to get the current vestion of a site up on my machine(as I work on the 'next' release) and was trying to ounce again use the wrong database.

GUI Problems

Sometimes Graphical User Interfaces are made with odd design choices, for example "1 file(s) selected" in Windows 95. The only case in which the s is not used is if there is only 1 file selected, so they could have used an if statement to check how many files where in fact selected. Now this could be a hold over to save CPU cycles from a previous Windows system but is the extra cycle or so really that much of a problem?(maybe?) Also I'm prity sure they left this in the OS until newer systems such as Windows XP.

I created a C# program to demenstright some of the silly and annoying things seen in GUIs which I feel could probably be avoided.  You can download it here: Click here!

TV Attanna Upgrade

I'm listening to a classic music radio station, that may not seem that unusually but the station is a actually being broadcast as part of a over the air TV transmission. Still not that odd in states, the really story is until today I could not receive it. Since today we got a  roof attanna installed.

Lets take a step back, as I said before I don't have cable or satalight, instead i use an attanna for TV and have for years. I use something more suffistatated then rabbit ears but it's the same principle that was used since the 70's if not earlier. The only thing is today, it's all digital.

So this new attanna picks up most of the buffalo stations and all the Toronto ones. So I no longer have to worry about not being able to pick up Canadian stations and can pick up new stations.

Now although the installation was costly, the payment will be less then the price of eqevuelent cable in just 10 months!

Lastly we are all now wired into the same attanna so the same chanals can be recived anywhere in the house.

Here is a picture of what the atanna looks like:

You know you have too many computers when:

 I found this old blog entery I never finshed for some reason. Ok now I finished it. You know you have too many computers when...

• People start telling you this 
• You worry about blowing a fuse
• You don't have enough places to plug them in 
• You have you own personal wireless network in your name.
• You are running out of room on your KVM switch. 

For the record I don't have too many computers but I am getting there, I have:

• A mac running Mac OS X.5
• A old Mac running OS9
• A multimedia tower running Windows 7 
• A Pentium 4 with WindowsME
• A Windows 7 laptop 
• A Linux laptop(Linux mint) 
• My desktop has TWO monitors connected to it. It dual boots Win 7 and Linux.

I also have the following consoles which can be hooked up to the desktop's capture card:

• PS2 
• Xbox (2003) 
• SNES
• N64

 I also have a:

• Wii 
• Dead Xbox 360 
• Sega Genesis

Only one of the consoles can be used at a time.

In my room I also have:

• A trek Antan to revive HDTV through my computer
• A web came
• A KVM switch 

I also own:

• A Wii 
• A Nintendo DS Lite which I hardy use 

responsive design

As some of you know I'm currently working with Shawn Robinson on a web project. We will be adding 'responsive design'(via a template). 'responsive  uses CSS(and JavaScript?) to allow one to make one website that works and displays reasonable regardless of weather the end user is on a desktop, tablet or smart phone. This sounded cool so I updated my website[http://www.jamiemarchant.info] to use a 'responsive' Drupal theme! Check it out! Resize the window and you will notice that text looks reasonable and the site remains usable. I have also learned a couple of things about 'responsive design' while doing this. Here is what I've learned:

• In-line styles can break the 'responsive design' and cause it to no longer be 'responsive'.
• Iframes do the same thing and have they own styles.

Besides the new theme, here are some of things that changed:

• Removed some pages that I didn't need and that where broken due to the above issues. 
• Moved some content form iframes to page content so they would be styled constantly. I used iframes in the first place either as a work around for a bug I only got when the code was 'inbeaded' or since that made the site a but easier to move.(this happened often till I found a suitable host)
• Replaced the embedded PDF of my resume with a link to it. This is probably easier for mobile devices to deal with as they can make it any size they want and are not limited to styles.  Now I know PDF is probably not that mobile friendly(though most smart phones probably have Acrobat now) but I prefer that too HTML as my resume is allways displayed consistently.
• Removed the recreation section. Although the stuff in this section is probably available with a google search, I don't want to it to be on my professional website. It's also not as 'cleaned up' as the site is and I want people to go through the whole site before they see the stuff that was in that section.

91.200.12.81

Today I had a lot of traffic from

91.200.12.81 who is listed as a spammer, I suggest you block this user before he causes trouble. He may have caused issues which have caused my site to be slow due to heavy caching. 

Site problems

You may have noticed my site went down for a few hours today. I had two issues, one of which I am eager to discuss with you. The second issues was my sectary fix I did on the weekend worked but only temporally. What I was trying to do was block access so that users could not download my database. My database is SQL lite and is enchchaully a 'flat file' that acts as an advanced database. I had somehow made the sectury too high so no images could be accused by Drupal itself. This borke things. I couldn't figure out how to block just ".ht" files and I ended up blocking all files in the folder. As a quick workaround I moved the database to it's own folder.

The first issue I had is the one I want to talk about. After I updated the database and some modules, the site did  not look write and had some errors. I uploaded it several times in-case it was corrupt. (which seems to happen often with FTPing large files). I then decided to put the site into 'maintenance mode' so users would see a message saying the site is being worked on rather then the mess of a site I was seeing. I uploaded the database but I did not see the maintenance message and at that point I realized the problem! I was uploading the wrong database, now this CAN happen with 'normal' database engines too if you grab the wrong dump file. So the leason here is make sure you have the correct database. I have a lot of backups sitting around on the server and my local machine where the database belongs. I have to go out soon but tonight I will clean those up and move them somewhere else.(some in the trash depending on their age).

Site udpated:

I have updated my website. I have updated the .htaccass settings which where incorrect and allowed downloading of the database. This could be the cause of the random corruption of the DB. If it happens again, I will investigate further but the DB appears to be not corrupt this time even though in the past it took several uploads to get it 'correct'.(maybe I need to find a better way of uploading it.)

Thing happening this year(2015)

Here are some things happening this year:

• My credit card will expire for the first time. I've read the reason for this is so they can make sure you should still have a credit card. I think I have excellent credit so I should get a new one. This will take place in September.
• There will be a federal election this year. Legally the Consecrative Party must call an election sometime this year but it is up to them when it is. Those of us involved with political parties would like to know so that we can prepair our platforms and candidates.
• For years now people have doctored photos of Marty McFly's DeLorean inteirur to clambe 'this is the year Marty travailed too'. Well soon we will be able to say this for sure as the real year he traveld too was 2015. Now where can I buy one of those hover-boards?

I'm not sure what other things but I'm sure it will be a good year(and not because someone will buy new tires)