Peter Murdoch

My XPS M1730 has been confirmed for delivery this Wednesday, 22/10/8. Delayed by a week, but better than the original delay estimate of 30/10/8. So that’s good. I didn’t like that Dell didn’t notify me of the delay, though: spent a good long while on the phone to them trying to explain that passive communication (status tracker) is not notification, to which their response was “we only notify you if your system is the one causing the delay”. So apparently for them to email me to say “sorry, little bit of a hitch, should be with you shortly” it needs to be the right kind of delay? Heh.

Bad news is my X360 has kicked the bucket; Red Ring of Death ftl. It’s out of warranty by something like two days, but I called up the nice folks at Xbox Customer Services (they really are nice people) and explained the situation. They’ll repair it for free, and extend the warranty to cover any further RRoD’s over the next three years.

Blog coding is coming along nicely, adding comments and post displaying have been working fine for a while now, and the display and SQL APIs only need a few tweaks before I can start using them intensively. Next step is to probably get some session management working so I can implement a few permission-related tidbits like private posts and whatnot. The wiki can be used to track any progress that I make in any coding endeavours, though it’s not a priority for updating.

Talking of wikis, the ServerGeeks wiki is a promising source of documentation, assuming more people chime in with their own contributions.

I managed to pick up a 120GB HDD for my 360 for about £55 last week, which is less than half of normal retail price. Only catch was that it didn’t come with a transfer kit, but that didn’t stop me. I called up customer services a few days later after unsuccessful retail hunting and the advisor said that since I didn’t purchase the 120GB with an Elite console, I wasn’t eligible for a free transfer cable… but here’s the catch: he sent me one anyway. It’s pretty clear on the xbox website that unless you’re transferring from a Premium to an Elite you’re not eligible for a free transfer kit (they come with the HDD in retail stores normally), and all I was calling up about was if there was a way to buy one off of MS instead. So the CSA asked to put me on hold, went to talk to a warehouse or something, then came back and said “I’ll send you one for free”. That was awfully nice of him.

Point is, I now have this 360 Data Transfer Kit that I’ve only used once and didn’t cost me a penny. As such, there are no costs to recuperate. So the kit is open to whoever needs it, just lemme know.

Earlier I used Google Maps for the first time in several months: since I live in the city centre, there is no reason for me to check driving directions/distances as I walk everywhere. It was for this exact reason that during my flathunting period (last summer) I submitted a feature request to Google Maps for a mode other than driving, one that would take into account pedestrian roads: you can walk two ways down one-way roads in Glasgow (as with every other city I’ve been in) so I disliked that it added long detours onto my journeys as well as giving me inaccurate travelling times.

I’m geniunely not sure how long it’s been there (like I say, I’ve had no need to use Google Maps recently), but it appears that this feature has been added: you can now choose between public transport/walking and the standard driving routes with accurate travel times. Yes, it’s old news, but it’s new to me. I think I’ll start using it a lot more again to get to obscure places.

Anyway, for Google to spend the presumably long-ish length of time adding this, it must have been a pretty popular request. It pleases me that Google acts on the feedback of its users. If only other companies could do the same…