Charity

Just got one of those plastic bags through the door to fill up with junk in aid of the Air Ambulance.

It's amazing in this country that we think it's normal to have major charities for 2 really important things, #1, various Air Ambulance groups and #2, the RNLI.

How is it that we're prepared to spend millions, or is it billions, of pounds funding the armed forces to go and blow people up all around the world, but we can't spare a few boats and helicopters plus crew to save the lives of people in our own country?

Adria Altea 542 DT Caravan review

We bought this caravan last June (2009) and I thought it'd be good to do a small review to help other prospective purchasers.
We got ours from Broad Lane leisure in Daventry as VERY nearly new purchase, someone else had had it for a couple of months and only used it once, so it was hard to tell.

Our main criteria (in order) for selecting this caravan were:

1. Layout - a good compomise for us, as the bunk beds are very wide and the bathroom is still much more than a cupboard.
   
2. Weight - for the size, these vans are lightweight and we are limited by the car we tow with (Citreon C4 Picasso 138bhp).
3. Price - these vans are very competitivley priced.
4. Good reputation for build quality.

Of course, all caravans are a compromise and nearly all of the above come at a price of one sort or another, so I thought a list of the pros and cons might be useful, although I'll try and justify the reasons that certain things might be somewhat lacking.

Pros

1. Price, about £11K for a 6 berth van is pretty much un-beatable.
   
2. Layout is pretty much unique and as our 2 children grow older the wide bunks and also the wide single bed will hopefully be appreciated. A half-decent bathroom is also nice to have.
   
3. Lightweight - about 1300KG fully loaded is amazing for this size of caravan.

Cons

1. Small fridge - probably to keep the weight and cost down.
2. Slightly flimsy fittings in some areas, again probably to keep the weight down. In particular the bunk beds do seem to flex a bit an I wonder if their stated 85 kg weight limit might be a bit optimistic. Also the overhead cupboard stays are plastic and I wonder if they will last.
3. Heater is gas only, was sort of expecting electric as well, again probably budget related.
4. Nose weight has to be very carefully checked. We only have one small 3.9kg propane gas cylinder in the front locker and it's already on the limit.
5. Shower tray and basin plugs are very odd and I suspect peculiar to either Adira or continental caravan in general. They get jammed in very easily and you'd be advised to have a pair of pliars on hand to loosen them if necessary.
6. Velcro cushion fixings have nearly all come off but I'm manged to glue them all back down again.
7. Slightly dingy lighting at the rear end near the bunk beds, I noticed at recent show at Milton Keynes shopping centre, that the display model had an extra skylight there, not sure if this is now standard, or just an optional extra.
   

Spot the deliberate mistake

Got caught out today doing some Jave code at work.

I thought I'd be a good boy and use Commons Lang utilities to implement toString(), hashCode() and equals(). Spot the mistake here:

@Override
public int hashCode() {
    return new HashCodeBuilder(13, 73).append(field1).append(field2).hashCode();
}

Any ideas? Here's the corrected version:

@Override
public int hashCode() {
    return new HashCodeBuilder(13, 73).append(field1).append(field2).toHashCode();
}

An easy mistake to make when using an IDE with auto-complete.

Luckily I was saved by my unit tests!

More Ubuntu progress

With regard to my previous post, I have recently upgraded to 9.04. I was finally getting too fed up with sound and display issues on 8.04 so upgraded to 8.10 (Intrepid), but found no improvements with the NVidia integration and sound on Skype. I took the plunge and went for the 9.04 release candidate. I have to say it is a massive improvement for me with instant out of the box dual monitor support and the sound stuff all works without having to install pulseaudio.

I need Windows less and less now and I feel the writing really is on the wall for Microsoft. This seems to be confirmed by the increasing amount of laptops for sale with Linux rather than Windows.

Happy days.

Printing from Windows XP to a CUPS shared printer on Ubuntu

On the face of it, this task would seem to be very simple and there are various pages with instructions on how to set this up. Basically you configure CUPS to allow the local USB printer to be shared and then set up a new network printer on windows that has the address http://<hostname>:631/printers/<printername>. The problem is that, whilst this all seems to work OK, when you print, nothing seems to actually hit the printer. Nothing meaningful in the CUPS logs.

Lots of Googling brought me to this page.

The really critical part which makes things work is :

"Now, once you have that information, you can open a command prompt on
Windows, and type in the following command (all on one line, it is
wrapped here):

rundll32 printui.dll,PrintUIEntry /b "Printer on Ubuntu" /x /n
"blah" /if /f %windir%\inf\ntprint.inf /r
"http://<hostname>:631/printers/<printername>" /m "MS Publisher Imagesetter"

That command will install the MS Publisher Imagesetter printer driver
(which is a printer driver that uses PostScript, which is what CUPS
takes as input), and setup the printer spool on Windows. You can then
open the Printers control panel and set the printer as the default
printer, and you will be able to print to it."

Igloo in Milton Keynes

The most snow I've seen at home in my lifetime!

Prince Caspian

My son Dylan got a Corn Snake for his 7th birthday. I made it's vivarium, but there is still quite a bit of kit to buy like a heat mat and thermostat.

Feeding time is once a week and is pretty amazing!