Up until a couple of days ago I still hadn’t tried out Windows Vista Release Candidate 1 which I downloaded a long time ago. Unfortunately, I discovered that the ethernet driver for VMware doesn’t work (and it used to in Beta 2), and so I was forced to wait until a convenient moment to install it on a physical machine (which wasn’t going to be my main desktop, funnily enough).

Windows Vista’s installer is still pathetically fussy about where it will allow you to install Vista. It requires installation to the first primary partition on a hard drive which is master.

Well, that’s really convenient, considering that my partition layout on the first hard drive on this machine was as follows:

Disk /dev/hda: 40.0 GB, 40060403712 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 4870 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hda1   *           1        1912    15358108+  83  Linux
/dev/hda2            1913        1988      610470   82  Linux swap
/dev/hda4            3009        4870    14956515    f  W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/hda5            4054        4870     6562521   83  Linux
/dev/hda6            3009        4053     8393899+  83  Linux

hda1 was my CentOS server installation, hda5 was a few gigs of data left over from somewhere else, and hda6 was my Ubuntu Dapper installation. Of course, the Windows install required the monopoly on hda1, which currently was occupied.

Well, thank goodness for the flexibility of Linux. I simply used the low level tool dd to make images of all the partitions (onto a spare 160 GB drive also in that machine), and then wiped off the disk.

One Vista install later, and the drive now had just one primary partition of rougly 17 GB with Vista on it.

I then created a partition to match the size of the CentOS install, and dd‘d the image back. After tweaking a few configuration files via the Ubuntu Live distro, I then rebooted with my GRUB bootloader CD in the drive, typed in the boot commands and CentOS booted like nothing had happened. 🙂

I then reinstalled GRUB to the hard drive (with a boot menu obviously, I don’t type boot commands every boot!) and added Vista to the list of OSs to boot.

The Ubuntu Dapper partition unfortunately would no longer fit (by about 2 GB), as Vista is now using a lot of the space, but instead I installed Edgy, and I’ll recover the important files off Dapper when I need them.

So after about half a day of partition shuffling, it now looks like:

Disk /dev/hda: 40.0 GB, 40060403712 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 4870 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hda1   *           1        2040    16384000    7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/hda2            2040        4870    22733220    5  Extended
/dev/hda5            2040        3952    15359384+  83  Linux
/dev/hda6            3953        3985      265041   82  Linux swap
/dev/hda7            3986        4870     7108731   83  Linux

hda1 is now Vista (NTFS), hda5 is CentOS, hda6 is Linux swap (for both) and hda7 is Ubuntu Edgy Eft.

The things I do to test Vista…

Wow. It took Google just over 1 day to index my site and produce results for the following (previously a no-hit) word:

banananananananananananananananananananananananananananananananananana

That’s probably helped due to the fact that:

• I’ve registered this site on Google’s Webmaster Tools
• My site has a Google sitemap (generated by this awesome WordPress plugin)
• Google consider my site worth enough to crawl it pretty regularly

In fact, Yahoo also yields results as does Windows Live Search.

I’m surprised at how fast it came through actually, considering my site isn’t exactly that popular (Google reports 3 out of 10 PageRank, but I’m sure that’s undeserved).

Anyway, interesting experiment.

I did a screencast yesterday of getting Firefox 2.0 yourself on Linux, at FOSSwire, which also features a lot of Linux/FOSS tutorials, tips, reviews, articles etc.

If you want to know how to install Firefox on Linux yourself, then this screencast is for you!

Watch it here.

Enjoy.

Excuse me, this post will sound a bit random.

I’m actually conducting a quick search engine experiment.

banananananananananananananananananananananananananananananananananana.

I’ll tell you what I’m doing a bit later. I’d also appreciate it if you don’t link to this particular post for now. All will be revealed.

I didn’t post about this while he was missing anywhere I blog – partly because it was covered so many other places.

Basically, CNET editor and geek personality James Kim went missing with his family in the Oregon wilderness a while back. His family were found, but until today, he was still missing.

I got the news via Engadget that he’d unfortunately been found dead by rescuers today.

This is so sad.

While I have to admit that I hadn’t actually heard of James Kim before this story first broke, it’s still quite shocking to know that this happened to someone so high profile. You just don’t expect something like this to happen. The sad fact remains – it does.

My thoughts and prayers are with Kim’s family as well as anyone else affected by this. I know this isn’t directly related to me and as I said I hadn’t actually heard of him before I initially heard of them going missing, but I felt compelled to publicly offer my condolences to anyone affected by this.

My good friend (and Oratos co-founder) Huw Leslie has just started a personal blog.

I just thought I’d give it a quick mention here to my (apparently 20-25 according to FeedBurner) subscribers, so if you’re interested in anything at all that he might have to say on tech, British politics or anything else, get over there and get subscribing!

From the about page:

I kinda thought I should have a personal blog; not necessarily to write what I had for breakfast everyday, because that’s not interesting to anyone. I expect this will be more like a personal column, with my opinions and writings on the world.

Gizbuzz is great, but the brand is Gizbuzz, not me. Sometimes I feel that restricts what I write, because I don’t necessarily want to write within Gizbuzz’s niche all the time. For example, if I have something to say about British politics, Gizbuzz just isn’t the right place for it.

Great domain name too – waah.co.uk.

Apparently, PC World is selling itself. What’s more – it’s a bargain at only £30 (roughly US$60, and PC World is one of the biggest computer resellers here in the UK).

It’s not real, of course. It’s just PC World listing ‘PC World’ as a purchasable product when doing a search for ‘recovery’ for only £30.

OK, fine, it’s not funny. I know.

Also, slap on the hand for the PC World site not working without JavaScript on. My quest for all sites not relying on JavaScript to operate goes on.

[via Channel Register]

One of the bad things about upgrading to a new Firefox major version is that inevitably, some of your favourite extensions won’t be modified to work with the new version. And with Firefox extensions being so awesome (and arguably crucial to Firefox’s success)…

But, thankfully, it’s not too difficult to hack the extension files to make your extensions work with the new version.

Before I begin – this process could make your extension (and maybe your Firefox profile too) not work – so do it at your own risk! Having said that, starting Firefox in Safe Mode and uninstalling the culprit extension usually fixes any extension issues that may arise.

I’ll be using BoxCheck for this tutorial.

» Read the rest of this post…

I’ve recently come across probably the worst web application I have possibly ever seen. I’ll keep the application anonymous for now, partly because it’s on accessible via an intranet, and because it’s literally peppered with security holes.

The interface is awful and looks like it’s just come out of the early 90s era of web design, with tables with those terrible pseudo-3D table look (you know, the default style that tables look like?). The login page also extremely rudely finds it acceptable to resize your browser window for you to the maximum possible size and due to the browser configuration on this local network, I’m unable to stop it from doing so.

It violates every single usability guideline for the web I’ve ever found, making the common mistake of navigating when a combo box’s selected index changes (not when a button is clicked, how it should be) and therefore making it very difficult to make the application accessible and providing no user feedback after submitting forms.

But worst of all, there appears to be no validation on returning data from this application. So if you look across at someone else’s screen and take their ID from the location bar, you can view (oh, and edit too!) their data. It’s also potentially vulnerable to SQL injection (although I believe it uses an Access database, so I’m not sure).

Please – don’t make these mistakes when you’re developing, whatever technology you’re using. Have a bit of experience before you get something rolled out. Please, for my sake. I hate manually resizing my window all the time.

Megaphone is now officially a project.

Why?

It has its own special page on my site.

Get visiting!