Microsoft have released an interesting site that outlines their "Surface" concepts. Go check it out. It's kinda like Apple's multitouch demonstration on the iPhone, and exactly the same as this (which I saw a few years back and was very impressed with):
For our date night Maggie and I went to the the Brass Grill - the restaurant above the Brass Monkey in Northbridge.
Because the restaurant is known for its grill there was a large range of meats on offer. Maggie had some kangaroo and I had a rib eye steak. My steak was so, so tender and perfectly cooked (medium). I was really happy with that because often 2.5"-thick steaks are hard to get right. Maggie's 'roo was a bit tougher than she'd have liked but kangaroo's known for that.
We shared some carrot cake and I had half a latte, which Maggie said would keep me awake. It's 12:06AM so I guess she's right...
My Xbox 360 was returned safe and sound today. I plugged it in and it works fine. I needed to reconfigure some options but it wasn't hard. I also got a free month on Xbox Live, so it wasn't too painful an experience in the end.
I downloaded the Halo 3 beta and had a quick play. The problem is that as a relatively new gamer it's very hard to find active games that I'm actually competitive in. In one game I managed to kill 7 people, but suffered 14 deaths myself. I'm sure it's just one of those things that you have to practice at. Meanwhile, I had a real life that's more important. Still, it does look very pretty.
I have just returned home after spending the night in the cold and noisy machine room at AMCOM. In order to stay relevant we needed to upgrade prime (our development server) to the latest version of Ubuntu, 7.04 "feisty fawn".
A previous upgrade attempt three weeks ago had left us without a working Trac installation. This upgrade was rolled-back and I set about searching for the answers to my problem. The issue was a mismatch with the python-clearsilver package that meant moving from dapper to edgy broke the trac package. To get around this I removed the python-clearsilver package (as well as python2.4-clearsilver) via apt-get and reinstalled if after the dist-upgrade. This got us to a fully-upgraded edgy.
We had a few non-upgraded python packages, but using aptitude instead of apt-get forced them to upgrade too and I was all smiles.
To maintain monitoring I had to adjust the way that the SNMP server works - it was blocking access outside of 127.0.0.1 and had also changed the rocommunity string. I fixed this up and Cacti is back to graphing prime's intimate details.
As prime is a development server there was no interruption to client services.
Update: the upgrade from edgy to feisty broke trac... again, but thankfully I found the answers to these problems too.
Today I spent some time refining some of our simpler client tools.
We offer a range of training videos for AuroraCMS but I wasn't happy with the way they were being presented to the customer. It was necessary to authenticate with a simple username and password before you could gain access to the files, and even then it was only an Apache listing of some videos and a readme.html (which most people missed, and had crucial details on downloading Quicktime).
Now these videos are easily available from http://auroracms.com/training (which redirects to the right page on our website) compete with thumbnails so you can readily identify the separate lessons.
Also, in response to client demand, we've created a simple-to-use form that will allow you to change your email password. It's called mailadmin and you can access it through the client tools page of our website.