June 30th, 2008 by Ben Haines
The good people at http://www.symfony-project.org have released Symfony 1.1.
Presetcentral.com is using Symfony 1.0, but I suspect I’ll update the appropriate bits in due course to work with 1.1.
Good news all round :)
read more | digg story
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June 21st, 2008 by Ben Haines


The time has come to bid farewell to Paradise. Lots of happy memories, meals and friends. Until next time.
Posted in Friends, Personal | No Comments »
May 18th, 2008 by Ben Haines
Seems Coppermine is proving too much for me to keep patched… as a consequence our server has suffered a series of injection attacks.
I’ll be taking the photos offline and will replace it by some other gallery system.
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April 21st, 2008 by Ben Haines
So let me get this right… in this BBC segment 6 clips of motorists speeding are shown, two of which end up in horrible crashes. According to the presenter this is because the motorists spotted the Police camera vehicle and “jammed on his breaks”.
BBC Video
Do I need to point out the obvious?

Posted in Motor Bikes | No Comments »
November 25th, 2007 by Ben Haines
Once again I find myself blogging about something I spent way too long having to hunt down. Listed below is the download for Sony’s Vaio Zone software. In particular this is for the full install of Vaio Zone, not just the upgrade. :)
Why is this such a big thing?! If, like me, you have been trying to find this download on the main Sony website you’ll know why. Its impossible to find! :)
Enjoy!
Sony Vaio Zone full install download (from Sony)
Credit goes to NotebookReview.com
Posted in Technology | 14 Comments »
November 20th, 2007 by Ben Haines
Once again… hoping this will save somebody lots of time of hunting around. It seems there is a bug in Java that prevents the installer from launching.
It currently produces the following error message when launching the installer:
java: xcb_xlib.c:52: xcb_xlib_unlock: Assertion `c->xlib.lock’ failed
See this tutorial for details on how to resolve the problem:
http://kaviarovetoasty.com/blog/
Posted in Linux | No Comments »
November 17th, 2007 by Ben Haines
I’m posting this hoping that is will save somebody several wasted hours of effort.
Do not use the original DBDesigner4 download available on the fabForce.net website. Instead download the dbdesigner-fork package from here:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/dbdesigner-fork/
Once you have unpacked it. Edit the bin/startdbd_using_kernel2.6 script and remove the assume kernel 2.4.1 text:
Original file contents: LD_ASSUME_KERNEL=2.4.1 LANG=en_US.ISO8859-1 LD_LIBRARY_PATH=./Linuxlib/ ./DBDesignerFork
Edited contents: LANG=en_US.ISO8859-1 LD_LIBRARY_PATH=./Linuxlib/ ./DBDesignerFork
Save it and run it. It should all work as expected on Linux Fedora 8 or indeed any other modern distribution like Ubuntu, etc.
Posted in Development, Linux | 8 Comments »
September 13th, 2007 by Ben Haines
Some good memories of my bike still in one piece!
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Posted in Motor Bikes | No Comments »
September 4th, 2007 by Ben Haines
The crash at Brands Hatch left me with a crumbled tank, bent clutch lever, smashed front cowl and headlight unit. Due to the gravel the engine also suffered some cosmetic damage, but I can’t do much about that.
I almost choked to death when receiving the quote from my Kawasaki dealer in Watford. Are you ready? … £1200 for a tank, headlight unit and cowl. I remember shouting “my bike is only worth £3000!” in disgust over the phone to the poor chap giving me the quote. I asked whether or not the bike’s unique colour of orange had anything to do with the extortionate quote. To my surprise Kawasaki charges the same no matter what the colour.
So this is what I’ve settled on:
Tank - ebay.co.uk bought for £70, however the colour is red
Headlight unit - Kawasaki
Headlight cowl - Kawasaki
Exhaust bracket - Kawasaki
Indicator - Kawasaki
Grand total: ~ £650
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Technorati Tags: Kawasaki, Z750
Posted in Motor Bikes | No Comments »
August 30th, 2007 by Ben Haines
Truth is I don’t know the answer to either, however the two photos below should help us find the answers. ;)
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A Gatso speed camera I found burnt out on my way to Merton College (more on why I was going to College later)
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I took this photo at work. Our company has recently started recycling batteries. Somehow I don’t think the employee fully understood the service was only suppose to cover batteries used at work!
Technorati Tags: Gatso, speed camera, bike battery
Posted in Motor Bikes | No Comments »