Mostly Harmless

Hector – We Negotiate with Terrorists Review

Rowan — Mon, 06 Jun 2011 20:06:07 +0000

Alright, quickly now: ‘Hector – We Negotiate with Terrorists’ is a point and click crime comedy game that I purchased for less than a fiver and completed in a rainy afternoon. The puzzles are mostly pretty logical and clearly laid out and there is a nice hint system if you miss anything. The game is [...]

allsimple.net VPS Review

Rowan — Sat, 16 Apr 2011 18:56:47 +0000

Time certainly does fly… as such this is a three month review of the VPS service at allsimple. I picked up one of their VPS via LEB to host this blog and a few bits and pieces and have been pleasantly surprised with the results.

The closest equivalent retail package would be at a somewhat [...]

Slicehost 2.5 Year Review

Rowan — Sun, 06 Mar 2011 10:43:54 +0000

Most of what I said here stands. In the time I was with Slicehost the hardware I was on had an issue requiring a reboot once, other than that the service and network was solid across the entire two and a half years. I didn’t have much reason to call on their support so can’t [...]

Michael Pawlyn: Using nature’s genius in architecture

Rowan — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 22:30:25 +0000

I don’t like simply reposting things, but this has to be one of the most inspiring talks I’ve seen in a while.

“You could view nature as being like a catalogue of products, all of those have benefited from a 3.8 billion year research and development period. Given that level of investment, it kind of [...]

Android / Eclipse Error generating final archive: Debug Certificate expired

Rowan — Mon, 27 Dec 2010 23:02:22 +0000

It appears the android SDK / debugger generates a certificate in .android/debug-keystore only valid for a year. You may come to generate a new project in Eclipse, go to run the debug / android emulator and find it won’t run.

To fix this, delete the keystore file from your home directory, then run Project [...]

Installing Git on CentOS

Rowan — Sun, 01 Aug 2010 18:37:22 +0000

Git can be found in the EPEL (Fedora Project) complimentary packages repository. The command to install the package will be similar to the following

user@computer:$ rpm -Uvh http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/epel/5/x86_64/epel-release-5-3.noarch.rpm

Remember to sanity check this against your RHEL version…

Tree houses…

Rowan — Sun, 04 Jul 2010 15:57:37 +0000

It’s true that you can waste a lot of time on the internet, but whilst doing so, you can also come across some really interesting stuff. Such as this little three minute video lecture from Mitchell Joachim on growing houses. The main idea apparently relies on a well established growing technique to form the main [...]

Thoughts on Green Hosting

Rowan — Sun, 09 May 2010 17:20:52 +0000

At work we had a query recently asking if we offered any “green” hosting packages. My initial reaction was a roll of the eyes and slight annoyance. This is because in my book “green hosting” sounds like a total oxymoron. Computers, for a variety of reasons aren’t exactly the most environmentally friendly things in the [...]

Kubuntu: Rolling back a package

Rowan — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 22:44:03 +0000

Kubuntu is currently my desktop OS of choice for 40+ hours a week of paid eye strain. It’s a good OS, basically Ubuntu with KDE as the desktop environment, however over the three or four years I’ve been using it the quality of the package management GUI applications has been somewhat variable. What we have [...]

Eclipse: new Android project. Can’t select Build Type / Target

Rowan — Sun, 27 Dec 2009 18:13:58 +0000

This caused a good 30 mins head scratching. When creating a new Android project in Eclipse it is not possible to progress past the initial screen as it complains “an SDK target must be specified”. In the window you will see “Build Target” but no box listing your installed Android Versions. The area of the [...]