Sydney Perl Mongers - This Tuesday
I'm up in Sydney until the end of Thursday teaching our Programming Perl course. Tomorrow night (Tuesday 28th August 2007) I'll be presenting an illustrated history of failure at Sydney Perl Mongers I'd love to see you there, even if you have absolutely no interest in Perl.

svchost and nvsvc32
This will be dull and boring to most people, so I'll keep it short and sweet. If you're not using Windows, nvidia drivers, and svchost.exe process running RPC services is consuming more CPU than you'd expect, then rejoice, this post is not for you.

If you are having those problems, then try killing your nvsvc32.exe process, which is an nvidia driver "helper". If that provides relief, and you experience no problems because of it, you can disable it entirely from Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Services -> Nvidia Display Driver Service -> Properties -> Manual.

For me, I've had no almost ill effects whatsoever. I can still run fullscreen games. I can still run Windowed games. I can still nvidia's incredibly cool keystoning software so I can project slides onto really oddly shaped surfaces. The only thing I can't seem to do is apply a custom gamma to individual screens; oh, my poor heart bleeds.

use.perl.org technorati and digg enabler
Skud recently commented that use.perl.org is getting a bit long in the tooth, and doesn't have all the swishy swishness that we'd expect in a modern web 2.0 site.

Well, if you're using Firefox and Greasemonkey then you can upgrade use.perl to web 1.01 with the use.perl.org technorati and digg enabler.

Put very simply, the enabler adds a technorati favourite link to the user info box, and a digg it link to each post. A screenshot is available for the curious. If you've already got Greasemonkey installed, you can install the enabler now.

Right now the script is just something I hacked together quite quickly, so suggestions, comments, bug reports, test cases, and patches are all very welcome.

If you're feeling so inclined, you can even digg this.

OSDC Keynote; dopplr and flickr
I've just been asked to present the dinner keynote at the Open Source Developers Conference in Brisbane this year. This is a great honour, and also just a little bit scary. Not only will I have a hard time approaching the amazing delivery of Damian's keynote last year, the Da Vinci Codebase, but I'll be standing in the way of hundreds of hungry developers eager for their dinner.

In other news, after a little delay (ironically due to travel) I've accepted Skud's invitation to dopplr. If you're a dopplr account holder, then feel free to look me up. If you need an invite, feel free to ask.

I've also got photographs online from my recent trip to the Walka Water Works near Maitland NSW. I didn't exactly take the regular tourist route.

Building a StepMania machine
My social demographic consists almost entirely of geeks. When I go to parties, activities intend to include Wii Tennis, boardgames, and physics debates. They usually don't involve much in the way of dancing. Overall, that's a good thing, because if I were to dance then anyone nearby with a camera is likely to record the moment in an attempt to squeeze $500 out of Australia's Funniest Home Videos. That's why I love the Dance Dance Revolution (DDR) style games so much; I can still look like a fool, but I can get points for doing so.

The simple addition of a couple of dance mats and a scoring system results in an amazing behavioural change. Songs which would previously had one silence the radio with a sledgehammer suddenly become "cool" and "groovy" with "interesting footwork" and "awesome combos". As such, I've been putting together my own StepMania setup. This post is primarily to record two painful experiences that I'd rather not have anyone else encounter.

The first involves video drivers. I'm using a mobile GeForce 7800 Go graphics card, and all the official drivers are ancient. Using drivers from Laptop Video 2 Go have always provided me with some relief here, however the more recent versions would install fine, but break the control panel. It seems this is a well-known problem, and an .ini fix is available for those wishing to try it. It didn't help me with all versions, but it helped me enough to get the control panel happening in 9424 release, which made stepmania happy to run on my TV's native resolution in fullscreen.

The second involves my purchase of a Super Joy Box 5 Pro, which are readily available on eBay, and sound awesome, allowing four playstation controllers to be converted to USB using a single box.

Do not buy the Super Joy Box 5 Pro. It is not awesome. It allows only a single controller to be attached; any more and they start interfering with each other, which makes all controllers but one effectively unusable. It appears that this isn't unique to this particular device; a number of the items from MayFlash have similar problems. I'd be very cautious before buying anything in the Super Joy Box series.

Instead of paying for some crapola from eBay that doesn't work, go read the StepMania page on USB adaptors and ignore the ticks. The ticks lie. Read the user comments; all USB adaptors suck, but some of them suck less. Play-Asia delivers to Australia and seems to have reasonable prices and postage. I've just ordered a EMS dual shooter from them, which seem to be highly recommended.