Should Liverpool be able to defend their title?

Posted on May 30th, 2005 in Sport & Recreation by Jim Prince

Steven Gerrard

After a spectular come back against AC Milan to win the title I really think Liverpool should get the chance to defend it in next seasons Champions League.

It’s a difficult situation since the top four teams from the premier league also deserve to play.

I really can’t see rivals Everton pulling out, or anyone else for that matter. It’ll be interesting to see what Uefa decide.

See the BBC Sport website for more details.


Longhorn Developments

Posted on May 25th, 2005 in Technology by Jim Prince

Microsoft Watch have an interesting article on Microsoft’s long awaited Longhorn Operating System.

Personally I thing it’s a good thing that Longhorn won’t be based on the .Net Framework. The technology is just far to new.

I wonder how things develop between now and the 2006 release date. What features will be in the final version? Will the release date slip again? Will Longhorn be any good?

Windows XP is beginning to look quite tired. Microsoft need to get this one right if it’s to maintain their huge market share.


United were robbed

Posted on May 22nd, 2005 in Sport & Recreation by Jim Prince

This years FA Cup final was a great game, but Man United definitely deserved to win.

Jens Lehmann, the Arsenal goal keeper, and the rest of the Arsenal defence were superb, but United were extremely unlucky.

Freddie Ljungberg deflected a goal bound header onto the bar. Rio Ferdinand had a goal disallowed and Wayne Rooney hit the post and had several near misses.

I only wish all games were as entertaining. Hopefully next weeks Champions League final (AC Milan v Liverpool) will be just as good.


Crap error messages & SATA Raid

Posted on May 18th, 2005 in Technology by Jim Prince

IdeqMy Biostar IDeq 200n recently developed a hardware fault.

On boot the following error message was displayed.

"hardware initiate failed please check device the bios does not be installed. press <g> to continue"

Bad English aside, this message wasn’t particularly useful and even after pressing <g> the system was still dead.

Turns out one of the disks in the RAID 1 array had developed a fault, why this should cause the whole system to fail is beyond me. After swapping the bust disk things returned to normal but that’s not the point.

It’s a good job this box wasn’t used for anything too important. Never use SATA RAID for mission critical apps unless you first invest in a decent controller. I’d suggest something from HighPoint or Adaptec.


Single Sign-on … sort of

Posted on May 4th, 2005 in Technology by Jim Prince

I’ve just been reading on Jon Udell’s Weblog about a possible solution to the plethora of websites that require a login and password to enter their site.

Basically you choose a strong master password then combine it with the domain name of the site you wish to login in to. A bit of Javascript then generates an MD5 password from the two fields.

This provides a very simple yet affective solution. See Nic Wolff’s website for more details.