Can you spell cacophony?

Another post that spent far too much time in my drafts folder. The original title was “Why did I win this year?”. Sorry ’bout that.

I am speaking of course, of my finally winning at NaNoWriMo. It was my third attempt last year and I think it would be quite a stretch to call my efforts in 2006 and 2007 “attempts” at all!

Creative commons licensed image

So what did I do differently? What made the difference?

Here’s what I reckon (in no particular order):

1. I got started straight away. In previous attempts, I fell behind on day 1. I don’t think I need to explain this further
2. I got involved in the community. My primary community was the “Elsewhere in Australia” regional forum (we have even continued our association at the new Elsewhere Wrimos forum. The Fantasy Genre Longue was just too busy.
3. A bit of competition. Had a month-long word war with my writing buddy Kamu. She got to 50K first, but I was never more that just a good day’s work behind. It kept me motivated.
4. Used my bread maker to keep me up. We eat home-made breadmaker bread at home. I set the bread to cook every night so that it finished at about midnight. Once that is done, I can’t do to bed, otherwise the bread will be soggy in the morning. I have to stay up to get it out. This saved me from quitting early (for the night, not the month) on more than one occasion.
5. Realised I can write 2000 words in a stretch without too much trouble. Once that clicked, I knew that I could do it. Good days could net me 4K or more, but I knew that on any one day I could the minimum required without any trouble
6. Made and kept to a writing quota plan. I set up a spreadsheet table. Calculated how many days I had and how many words I had to write. Each day was given a weighting: either 1 for a normal day, 0 for a day I was not going to write at all or 0.5 for an easy day. It turned out a normal day was 2.5K (see above) and 1250 words for a lighter day and I had planned days off (eg Friday nights). I never fell behind in my total plan (I kept track of that too) though I did have a couple of days where I didn’t quite make my required total for that day. But because I knew where I was (and I had a great day 1, see #1 above) I could do that safely.
7. Almost killed myself in the first week due to lack of sleep (funny how the headaches went away during week 2).
8. Listened to the podcasts. I even got my voice on one episode! I was always looking forward to the next one coming out.
9. Plan. I’m a bit ambivalent about this one. It was good knowing where the story was supposed to go, but I think with all the other positive things that went right this time I might have managed without it. For this year I am tempted to start blank with the Mythic Game Master Emulator. Don’t ask me to explain now, I’ve got a Mythic post in my drafts folder too!
10. Jer’s Novel Writer. To be fair, I used JNW in 2007 and yWriter in 2006 (when I was still a Microsoft slave), so this is not a new thing. But I could not have managed this without the appropriate software.
11. Mini-goals with cheese. What? I set myself little goals through the night. “You can’t have your first coffee until you hit 500″. “No toilet break until you finish another 100″. “You can listen to the podcast once you’ve done 1000″. That sort of thing. The cheese was Blue Castello cheese. My favourite (actually, red is my favourite but no one sells it!) and I couldn’t have any until I had done 2000 words.

Please don’t take this as a how-to-win guide, you can find plenty of those around the place. This is simply a list of some of the things that gelled for me in 2008 and helped me win! Roll on NaNo ’09.

Since November, I have finally read my novel and on reflection is what a lot less pathetic than I first thought. If there are any masochistic readers of derivative fantasy out there who would like a look, just leave a comment to that effect.

This is a follow-up to my 2006 post. It’s a shame I’m not using Windows any more and I can’t figure this out for OS X, but the old post continues to get hits, so I thought I would neaten things up a bit!

I haven’t completely tested this system with more recent versions of Azureus/Vuze, but all the files seem to be much the same, so I’m guessing it will be OK. Please leave any comments with news to the contrary.

As before, I have taken much of my information from other places, but I feel put it together in an easier to follow manner. In particular, the bulk of ideas came from the azureus wiki

Step 1: Install Azureus and enable Headless operation

1. Download the executable installer from sourceforge
2. Ensure that the installation directory contains the file Azureus2.jar
3. Download the files log4j.jar and commons-cli.jar from here and place into the Azureus directory. This will allow command-line (headless) operation.
4. To run, use command java -jar Azureus2-XXX.jar --ui=console

I switched to a Mac late last year (traded a Powerbook for a Compaq Presario) and immediately started being jealous of all the owners of newer Macs with their intel chips. Specifially, I wanted VMware fusion so that I could run those select few windows apps I have yet to find reasonable mac substitutes for.

So when I bought a new MacBook Pro recently, I made sure I got a copy of Fusion at the same time. It works as advertised and has been very useful.

Unfortunately, I decided to use my Boot Camp partition as my Windows VM, which was a bad choice as far as convenience is concerned. It is not possible to “suspend” the VM, so starting up Fusion to quickly run Solitaire is not all that simple… It has to wait for Windows to boot.

Today I decided to start a new virtual machine, and it has made a great difference. After suspending the machine before closing Fusion, starting Solitaire from its dock icon takes less than 10 seconds. That’s not much more than a native app.

OK, here’s to the point of this post… I don’t use the dock much. According to all the help docs I could find, when a windows app is running in Unity mode, its icon shows up on the dock. Ctrl-click and then choose “keep in dock” and you have your shortcut. That’s great if you use the dock. I don’t as a rule. I use Quicksilver normally and sometimes just Finder.

So here is my solution:

1. Have a look in the Finder for your VM. Normally it will be in ~/Documents/Virtual Machines. Ctrl-Click and “show package contents”.
2. See there… a folder called Applications! As far as I can see, that contains links for all the programs you have previously run in Unity mode.
3. Go to Quicksilver preferences. Under catalogue, add your VM directory. In my case it was “~/Documents/Virtual Machines.localized/Windows XP Professional.vmwarevm”.
4. Wait for a rescan and away you go. (If an app isn’t in the catalogue, run it at least once manually: either from the VMware dock icon or menu bar).
6. Alternatively, you could just find the shortcut in the directory above and create an alias somewhere useful (eg Desktop).

I am looking forward to having much more convenient access to all my (fortunately few) indispensible Windows apps. (there’s a topic for another post)

At Wongutha CAPS, where I am the sysadmin-by-default, our accounts people use Quickbooks 2002.

At the end of last year, we upgraded our network to a whole bunch of lovely new desktops and a super-duper Windows 2003 server (replacing our old NT4 server). Thanks to Google search and Microsoft TechNet I have been able to come somewhat to grips with Active Directory and even managed to set up a few useful Group Policies.

I have also managed to set up appropriate levels of access for most of the users, so that we haven’t simply had students with low level access and almost all the staff as administrators!

Unfortunately, Quickbooks managed to throw me a curly one in the form of this error:

User Access Rights Problem: Your user account for Windows was created with restricted access to system resources. This will prevent Quickbooks from operating properly. Please contact your system administrator and ask him or her to grant you standard user rights.

I searched high and low for a solution to this problem without joy. Eventually, when pushed by higher priority jobs, I just made all the users of Quickbooks administrators (against my better judgement…) and left it for later.

Later came, and I order a trial version of QB 2007, which I hoped might have solved this problem.

It didn’t. Back to the google drawing board.

I did find a fairly convoluted hack that involved making a QuickBooksUser group, and changing permissions on certain directories and registry keys to allow this group full access. I couldn’t get it to work with group policy, and it just seemed a bit unreliable.

So. I thought outside the box for a minute (which is very much against my normal nature ) and came up with this partial solution: I created the QuickBooksUser group as above, but rather than try to fiddle all the keys and directories, I simply made that group a member of the local (NB: Local, not domain or global) administrators group on the boxes that had quickbooks installed, like this:

In control panel, go to User Accounts, and then select the Advanced tab, and click the Advanced button. This brings up the “Local Users and Groups” dialogue. On the right, open Groups, and then double-click on Administrators. You can then click “Add” and type in QuickBooksUsers and OK all the way…

So to describe this another way: All the users who need to use Quick Books, when they log on to one of the computers that has it installed, are made into Administrators while on that computer ONLY. Yes, this is a security flaw in that I have given them permissions that they need not have. However, they are limited to doing bad things on that computer only.

So I feel I have limited the risks, while still allowing necessary use of an important program, without giving them full domain admin rights.

In other news: this has solved another problem that I have had. Many staff members have their own notebook computers. By me not giving them full administrator privileges, they are limited in their ability to install programs, run certain programs and generally managed their own PCs (all of which are used for personal as well as school business).

My existing solution has been to set them up a local account on their computer, give it admin rights, and teach them how to use the “run as” command. Worked sometimes, but not a seamless solution.

This new trick works perfectly well for this too… Just search for the individual user whose computer it is, and add them to the Administrators group. And there you go, they can trash their own computer to their heart’s content, without me putting the whole domain at risk!

I am currently running three sites.

Not being one to reinvent the wheel, I am running them all with WordPress, Sandbox and Unsleepable for Sandbox, a combination I find manageable and appealing.

Unfortunately, when everything is much the same, the same problems will appear as well! Check out the following screen shots of CastletownChemist.Com under firefox and IE7 for windows:

As you can see, while similar, they do not look the same. The net seems awash with bloggers having problems with IE (firstly IE6 and even now IE7) messing with their look-and-feel. My problem (the nav menu being below the title rather than next to it) seems to be minor in comparison to some.

I found two posts from last year that have addressed the problem (both were focussed on IE6, but the problem remains): Sam Devol’s “WordPress Troubleshooting: My blog looks horrible in IE!” and Nektros’ “7 step guide to fixing your WordPress sidebar in Internet (bloody) Explorer”.

Neither of these related directly to my setup, calling for an addition to header.php in the theme file. Because Sandbox then calls another function within header.php, I needed to dig a bit further.

Now please understand, I do not know php and I only know basic programming principles, but I can look at what others have done and try to steal their ideas.

This is what I did:

1. Create an iestyle.css file in the unsleepable directory (/wp-content/themes/sandbox/skins/unsleepable)
2. Found functions.php in /wp-content/themes/sandbox

3. Edited the function sandbox_stylesheets() by adding the following code under the existing stylesheet link:

   <!--[if IE]>
   <link rel=”stylesheet” href=”<?php echo get_template_directory_uri() . “/skins/$skin/iestyle.css” ?>” media=”screen” />
   <![endif]-->

In English, this checks if the browser is Internet Explorer, and if it is, calls another stylesheet (in the directory of the current skin) and uses it in addition to the regular stylesheet (and with priority over it).

I have done this and confirmed that it does in fact give styles to the page. Now I just need to go through Nektros’ article to see what I can actually do to the CSS to improve my problem.