PaulFarrow.com

Now I keep forgetting the key combination for getting the hash key on my MacBook Pro. Now this is as much for me as everyone else.

Wait for it, its ….

Alt + 3

Its all self explanatory, lets help Chris get to a 1000 pounds. Get funding here…

Chris made it. Click here to see the stats from his monitoring software. And stage two of his trip here.

One of my experiences here in the USA has been to be a voice over for a set of TV commercials. My friend from church Tom Kotti asked me if I was willing to use my English accent and be the voice over for a TV commercial he was making. I was game, so I said “yes sure”. The TV commercials were for the 36th annual Palmetto golf tournament at the Palmetto Golf Club which has been established in Aiken since 1892. Here is one of the commercials.

I enjoyed the experience immensely and if any one wants to use my voice again please contact me via this blog.

So since upgrading Perl I am presented with qw warnings coming out of the cron job checking that BackupPC is running.

Use of qw(...) as parentheses is deprecated at /usr/share/BackupPC/lib/BackupPC/Storage/Text.pm line 301.
Use of qw(...) as parentheses is deprecated at /usr/share/BackupPC/lib/BackupPC/Lib.pm line 1412.

The way to get rid of these warnings is to enclose qw in parentheses and Perl processes the foreach parameters without warnings.

Like so

Text.pm (Line 301)

#
# Promote BackupFilesOnly and BackupFilesExclude to hashes
#
foreach my $param (qw(BackupFilesOnly BackupFilesExclude)) {
next if ( !defined($conf->{$param}) || ref($conf->{$param}) eq "HASH" );
$conf->{$param} = [ $conf->{$param} ]
if ( ref($conf->{$param}) ne "ARRAY" );
$conf->{$param} = { "*" => $conf->{$param} };
}


Lib.pm (Line 1412)

foreach my $param (qw(BackupFilesOnly BackupFilesExclude)) {
next if ( !defined($conf->{$param}) );
if ( ref($conf->{$param}) eq "HASH" ) {


One of my work colleagues put me onto this place, Vallarta Mexican Restaurant, Washington Road, Augusta, GA. It serves what I thought was excellent Mexican food and I liked the place very much. So much my wife and I made it a regular visit every week, as we loved the Patron chicken salad which is on special for lunch on Tuesdays.  We have been going there every week for about a year when this week (Tuesday 24th January, 2012) we ordered two Patron salads and the meals arrived. I tucked into mine and commented that it tasted slightly different. My wife told me that it was me, it was fine as always. Then about ten minutes into the meal my wife spat out some chicken stating it was rotten. On closer inspection it smelt like the worst trash can you had smelt. The chicken was clearly rotten. I was nearly sick when I smelt it.

We got the waiters attention and he got the manager. The manager looked at us like we were mental and didn’t really say anything about it. We paid for our drinks and left. It was one of the most disgusting things that I have experienced in my life, it has really put me off going back there.

Just like to give out a shout to a young man Neil Bostrom who I had the pleasure of working with at Standard Life Healthcare.  It seems in the last year he has not only launched a company TreeHouse Development but a new game for the Microsoft Windows 7 Phone platform and its called CryoDefense.

The Official Royal Wedding photographs a photo by The British Monarchy on Flickr.

Congratulations to the newly weds, Olivia and I were up at 5.45am watching it all happening. So glad it went well.

Good luck from the ex-pat in sunny Augusta, Georgia, USA.

Back in May of 1994 I opened my company Farrow Computing Limited when I was a mere boy.  I never thought I would be as successful as I was with it.  But finally because of my emigration to the USA, it was closed at the end of March 2010, sixteen years of running my own business.

Looking back there were plenty of times of “what if I cant get work..”  “What if I mess something up”, but looking back it really did go well.  Enjoyed most of it.

Truly the end of an era.

Zotac ION-ITX-F

Originally uploaded by paulfarrow

After putting a power meter on my home entertainment system realised that my equipment was using a lot of power 350 watts at peak. So thought I would do some investigation into a recent low power mini-itx board from Zotac. I chose this one because it was dual core and it has a pci-express card on it which is good for a cable tuner I am looking at to use in it for when I am in the USA.

Ordered the board from mini-itx.com as they are the only people I could find doing this board. It came and everything looked fine except that the fan isnt fitted and there are no holes for it on the cpu heat sink. After talking with mini-itx they told me to screw it to the heatsink even though it doesnt have any predetermined holes. I also noticed that the manuals that came with it – the quick installation and the main manual werent for this board. Which was a great start.

Zotac ION-ITX-F

Originally uploaded by paulfarrow

I had already converted my old system from Vista to Windows 7. I then put the new Atom board into my case and started it up. Immediately I was getting checksum errors and just stalled. I was like oh dear must be memory related so twiddled about a bit with the memory until I found the culprit. From going from 1 board to the other, one stick of my 2Gb DDR2 had decided to die.

Not a real problem as really 2Gb of memory should be ok for what that board needs to do. So once over that everything came up fine. I use this as my media center so mainly playing music and watching tv (SD & HD blu-ray).

Initial reaction was that its great. So lets put it through its paces, watching blu-ray with fast moving action – didnt phase it at all everything was running fine at 17% cpu and wattage was about 270 watts so it was already saving me about 70 watts of power. I then decided to get it to record two tv stations and watch a recorded program at the same time.

It did this as well although cpu was about going from about 50 to 75%. And when navigating through the menu it was a bit sluggish although livable. All in all it is great because it will save me money and the Windows 7 media center is a little better than the old Vista one.

FURTHER UPDATE:  having recently bought UP on blu-ray I have noticed something that is important for this board.  Some of the later blu-ray’s are recorded in MPEG4 – I have tested UP and The Taking Of Pelham 123, they are both recorded in MPEG4 unlike I Am Legend which is VC1.

MPEG4 is currently running at around 47% cpu usage which is fine on its own but if (like I was at the time of trying to play UP) you are recording tv at the same time its just a bit too much for the little NVIDIA ION board which then runs at 100% and frames and audio drop on the play back of the blu-ray movie.  Its a shame because its a great board and just what I want when the machine is on all the time but its a trade off between performance and cost of running the equipment.

Overall I am still impressed even though there are these obvious trade offs.