appelgren

I’ve put some photos from my recent trip to Scotland with my scouts, aged 12 to 18, on Flickr.

We walked from Fort William to a train station called Corrour, which was about 30 km. It was mostly fun with very varied weather.

Some time ago Google started to detect my p1i on the download page for the mobile gmail app. Unfortunately the p1i version does not work correctly on a p1i phone. No fullscreen and the back button does not work.

Fortunately it looks like the version for SE k750i works correctly on SE p1i. I got it using the following URL:

http://gmail.com/app/gmail.jad?make=Sony%20Ericsson&model=K750&ver=v1.5.0.1187&hl=en

Update 20080409: The above URL is now broken, and Google has fixed the fullscreen issue with the P1i version of Gmail j2me but not the back button.

Energialternativ, originally uploaded by appel.

When setting up my new Vista computer I ran into a minor localization issue. In the power options in my swedish Vista there are two things called “viloläge”, sleep in the english version.

The first one is most likely sleep, and the second one hibernate.

Just experienced my first crash in Bioshock. Apparently it’s not a good idea to take a photo of a little sister just after you’ve rescued her. Most likely that was just a coincidence, but now I have to replay quite a lot.

Why can’t I send a crash report from my Xbox 360 as is possible in Windows when applications missbehave?

Had some trouble creating a patch with MsiMsp.exe version 4.00 yesterday.


ERROR: Cannot overwrite patch '%TEMP%\~PCW_TMP.TMP\tempcopy.msp'. Check the permissions to make sure that patchwiz will have access to the file. (Note, this path cannot be a folder.)


The mistake I had made was pretty simple, but the error message above sent me in the wrong direction when trying to solve it. I thought there was a problem creating the temporary file, silly me. The issue was instead that the directory where I wanted the output msp file to be created didn’t exist.

Finished all the quests that give you achievements in Oblivion yesterday, and a lot more side quests along the way. I’ve been playing the game off and on since it came out with probably somewhere close to 300 hours total playtime. Sounds pretty crazy, but I sure got my moneys worth.

I skipped over most of the dungeons and ruins unless I had to enter them because of quests since they were so boring and repetitive. Also, since everything leveled with you all sense of progress was lost. What I did spend my time on was the quests and books in the game. I loved the Shivering Isles and Dark Brotherhood quests. The main quests that involved the gates to Oblivion were really boring though. There was nothing in Oblivion to discover, only lava and some really repetitive towers to climb.

Solved a problem with a build script last week. I had somehow caused the build to under some conditions take a very long time to start with heavy disk IO. After reviewing some recent changes I found the cause.

I had a ItemGroup that looked something like the following.

<ItemGroup Condition="'$(PathProperty)'!=''">
    <SomeItem Include="$(PathProperty)/**/*.dll"/>
</ItemGroup>

Apparently MsBuild evaluates all ItemGroups even if the condition of the group or item evaluates to false. The result is just discarded if the condition evaluates to false. So the item above included all dll files on the entire hard drive when PathProperty was not set. By trial and error I found out that the condition of Choose elements are evaluated before the items they contain.

So to speed things up I changed the above to the following.

<Choose>
    <When Condition="'$(PathProperty)'!=''">
        <ItemGroup>
            <SomeItem Include="$(PathProperty)/**/*.dll"/>
        </ItemGroup>
    </When>
</Choose>

Is this behaviour obvious to everyone else? Couldn’t find anything about it while reading the conditions documentation nor the documentation on items and properties on MSDN.

I wonder who thought a list like this would be helpful for anyone looking for more information.

From Varieties of Custom Controls on MSDN.

Do not touch things in an oven set to 200°C with bare hands!

When I changed the clock from winter to summertime on my SE k750i the calendar did not behave as expected. All events were moved one hour. I contacted Sony Ericsson Call Center about the problem and yesterday I got a response, this behavior is in the specification for the SE k750i. How stupid is that? I don’t care if they designed a bug on purpose or not. It causes problems for me, and I’d guess anyone else that uses the calendar on a k750i.

Update: After a few mails back and forth they’ve at least provided me with a workaround. Always sync the calendar with a computer and do a sync that overwrites the phone after each change between summer- and wintertime. Brilliant!