Day 0 - Packing, and worrying

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Well, only one more day until our trip to Korea!

Actually, I’m a little worried right now, because my girlfriend is really sick, and there has been some questions about whether she’ll be able to make it on the plane at all. :'( We’re all hoping you’ll pull through, lovely Grace, and I’m sure we’ll have a blast!

While in Korea, I’m going to meet Grace’s mum and brother (I’ve met her sister, who lives in Australia as well) and we’re going to go to her friend’s wedding. Other than that, I’m at the whim of Grace as to what I’m going to be doing from day-to-day, but I’m sure she’ll have plenty of fun things lined up for me (and not all helping out on the farm! :p)

Anyway, I better get packing, and hope that Grace is feeling better soon...

How to run NateOn when not an Administrator

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This was an interesting experience for me! My girlfriend is Korean, and apparently almost every Korean person in the world runs this IM program called “Nate On” (which is similar to MSN messenger). Anyway, I was trying to get it run for her the other day on my PC where I usually run as a non-Administrator. I’ve become fairly good at getting things to run as a non-Administrator, but this was a somewhat unique case.

The problem, of course, is that interface is in Korean and my poor girlfriend isn’t really technically-minded so her translations of the error messages were a little confused :)

Anyway, when trying to connect, it gave the following error message:

Error Message Screenshot

For the sake of the search engines, the lower text was:

socket error=0,error Server=DP3, send CMMD=CONF, error CODE=CONF, invalid protocal=FALSE
디스크 사용공간이 부족하여 네이트온을 실행 할 수 없습니다.

Which apparently translates to something like “check disk space” or something like that. Now, I knew there was plenty of disk space, but that set off my “it’s trying to write files, and probably in the Program Files directory” flag. So I fired up my trusty Filemon and a look. Sure enough, there were “Access Denied” messages trying to create a directory called “495B13F57BC15FEF2F3809ED03AC54FB” in it’s Bin folder and also a file called “nateon_server_config.ini” in the same location.

So I modified the security properties on the Bin folder to allow the creation of files and folders (but not to overwrite existing files, of course!) started it up, and it worked perfectly!

Now, if anyone else is having the same trouble, please note that I’m not Korean and I can’t speak Korean, so please leave your comments in English, thanks!! :)

Go Aussie!!

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First ever Soccer World Cup win!

What else can I say? Great work, guys!

Finally Upgraded!

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I finally got around to upgrading my installation of b2evolution (my blogging software, now using version 1.6-alpha – I used to use 0.9.0.11 so it’s a big update!). I was getting sick of all the lame spam I was having to delete, so hopefully this new version should help to curb it.

Unfortunately, this version doesn’t work when blogging directly from Word 2007, either. In fact, this version is worse than the old version, because now Word gets in a loop asking for the username/password and I’ve got to kill the winword.exe process from Task Manager!

Also, the upgrade process basically “invalidated” all my customizations (specifically my skins) so I’ll have to spend another couple of hours updating them all to work with the new version. So you all will just have to put up with this default version in the meantime...

Firmware, Lameware

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Am I the only one who thinks this this is lame?

Since when do consumer electronics need firmware updates? Do they expect my mum and dad to download firmware updates? Never mind that it is “easy” the fact is, they just won’t do it. Most people are quite happy using the drivers that came with their computer hardware on the CD, even though there may be much newer and more stable ones available for download – why will this be different? My mum and dad are generally happy “enough” working around buggy hardware, even though new drivers are available which may (or may not...) fix the problem.

Not only that, but I saw on the AVSForum website (is that not the most ugly website you’ve visited, or what?) that it takes ... wait for it ... half an hour to install over a broadband connection! What’s with that?

Now I’ll admit that this is a first generation piece of hardware. But if they’ve built-in firmware updating into the first version, do you think they’ll take it out once they’ve “got it right”? Probably not.

In other news, there’s a 233MB firmware update to the XBOX 360 as well. I suppose gamers are more willing to update the firmware of their hardware (though it doesn’t excuse it in my mind), but even still... 233MB is rather excessive, isn’t it?

Oh well, I suppose as time goes by and hardware gets more and more complicated, then firmware updates may be required. Especially in something like a HD-DVD drive or XBOX, both of which allow arbitrary code to execute (though in the case of HD-DVD, I believe it’s a form of JavascriptEcmascript which runs, but it’s essentially the same thing).