old games on xp - hardware acceleration woes

Remember:
Old games (2002 fisher price rescue heroes by knowledge adventure for example) use macromedia director and the projector (basically the whole game) will crash on start up after flashing black screen IFF you turn on full graphics card hardware acceleration!!!!!!!!

Moving it one or two notches to the left fixes it!!!!!!!!

Alternative approach apparently is to install using windows compatibility mode (either NT or 95/98) - I wonder if you can set the runtime to use windows compatibility mode or if it only works on install?

EG: This one fails!!!
fisher price rescue heroes Lava Landslide
Windows 98/ME/2000, Pentium II 266 MHz, 64 MB RAM, 24X CD-ROM, 16-bit color 640X480.

deepdan blog and google

How does google choose which blogs to include in search?

It appears that you have to explicitly link to the blog to get google to include it in it's search.

So today I did that on my ancient http://users.monash.edu.au/~dan/
Which was first started while sitting in front of a decstation (no doubt fawlty1)

So, now the race is on, to see how often users.monash is cached by google and if this blog shows up.
Cached http://users.monash.edu.au/~dan/ has april13 date today, I wonder what the cycle is?

ldap in mozilla and IPv6

The bug has existed for so long:
ipv6 enabled on winxp
thunderbird, mozilla etc address book hangs because the ldap connection tries to create IPv6 socket to IPv4 address.

So easy to fix, why hasn't it happened?
I'd fix it for them, but haven't followed it through.
I note some statements about IPv6 support in latest mozilla stuff, but so far no fix.

The ldap directory service attempts to
connect to the ipv6 socket ::ffff:xx.xx.xx.xx instead of the ipv4 socket
xx.xx.xx.xx

This is consistent with the last few years and on the thunderbird 3.0a1 that I
just downloaded/installed it still fails in the same way on a dual hosted ipv4
ipv6 machine.
Logging ldap:5 only produces the following:
0[274310]: nsLDAPOperation::SimpleBind(): called; bindName = '';
2348[278d2d0]: nsLDAPConnection::Run() entered

channel deepening port phillip bay victoria

The newspaper reports today that the SEES will give the go ahead for channel deepening and dredging in port phillip bay, victoria.

As the SDFV secretary, I expected to see some prior notice - but we haven't received any thing through official channels.

What's the dredging going to mean for me?
Well it may interfere with some winter diving.
It's unlikely to interfere with summer diving (beach tourism too big for them to interfere with).
Long term should make no difference and if their predictions of fewer larger ships coming in are correct that means less ships to dodge while drift diving.

Alternatively it may absolutely ruin the ecology of port phillip bay - but the EES , SEES and monitoring process is meant to prevent that.
What's it going to cost POMC if they do stuff the bay? Is there an eco-bond?

Have to wait for the report I guess.

OSX 10.4.9 upgrade loginwindow crash

Mac OSX 10.4.9 upgrade led to loginwindow crash.
Repeatedly put you back at login window after you type your password in.
Safe boot made no difference.
This is a new intel powerbook pro model - from about jan07.

crashreporter showed loginwindow crashing.

Solution: Remove users keychain file!!!!!
Tried all the other things first though - you know: remove user preferences, delete user Caches
delete System/Caches and System/Library/Caches

This seems to have been a problem that nobody else has identified - may be unique to this box.
Was set up by using the import/migration from a powerpc based unit during system set up.


Perhaps this should go on macfixit or macintouch or apple proper.

deepdan

"This act of worship is called `deepdan', and the entire lake is illuminated" by candles.
So that could be why I can't get deepdan username on some systems like yahoo.

deepdan started as a name for me in forums back in the mid 80's to early 90's.
At the time I was considered a deep (air) diver.
Now the trimix community dives much deeper but I keep deepdan out of amusement.
I still prefer that 27-55m range though.
Which is where some of the best diving locally is.

viplus

Why do scuba tanks fail viplus?
Passed in 2001 failed in 2007
Chances are the tanks sat around and probably had no more than 10-20 fills.

Then again, what do I care? my one failed and was replaced (for a fee) ages ago with one that doesn't need viplus.