I signed up for an Xbox Live Silver account (the free one), and it said that I’m eligible for a free month of Gold, like Jason said, so I took it.

So apparently my dog Gizmo likes to chew on the ends of my Cat 5e cables that go from the switch behind my HPTV to my laptop, but only if it’s not plugged in. He chewed the end of two of my cables now, rendering a 25ft and a 100ft ethernet patch cable useless.

So I fixed them. I went to Home Depot and bought a crimper and 25 RJ45 plugs for $32 - $25 GC (thanks Uncle Bob) = $7. Then on my PSP (don’t ask why), I looked up a wiring pinout, and crimped it accordingly.

Now that I’ve seen how easy it is, I’ll never buy precrimped cables again. I’ll be looking for a cheap deal on some bulk Cat 5e soon.

Also took some pictures.

I needed a lawnmower, so I added a Craig’s List search in my Google Reader, responding to any reasonable ads. I ended up with a working used $25 lawnmower. It started first time and did a great job on the first lawn mow in the new house.

Yet another praise to Craig’s List, it’s pretty hit or miss, but I’ve had good luck with it.

I took some pictures.

A client of mine recently came to me with issues updating subversion from his Windows box. After some investigation, I figured out that the problem was that subversion had two copies of a file, “logo.png” and “logo.PNG”, the difference being one of the extensions was capitalized. This didn’t appear to be that uncommon, I know of at least one Windows app that saves all files as capital extensions by default (MSPaint). Committing these files is perfectly legal with subversion, and since it is hosted on a FreeBSD box, those files are perfectly distinct. But Windows is a case insensitive OS, so it viewed those files as one and the same. When updating, the SVN client would grab one, then attempt to grab the second and fail with an error message similar to “Object of same name already exists.”

Using tortoise SVN, there was no easy way to fix this issue. You can’t update to a working copy because of the issue, and so you couldn’t delete and recommit. On a non windows box I had to delete one or the other, then recommit. Tortoisesvn.net had a solution that didn’t really work for me, because each time I would attempt it, it would error out and I’d have to cleanup, effectively restarting the operation. Once the problem is resolved, they suggest a pre-commit hook script which would detect for a case insensitive filename clash. Were I too concerned that my client hadn’t learned his lesson, I would implement that. However, more careful usage can avoid this issue.

I looked for all too long for this list.
http://www.xbox-sky.com/xbox360_regional_compatibility_guide/
and
http://egamia.com/wiki/Region_Free_Xbox_360_Games
also one from play-asia
http://www.play-asia.com/paOS-00-3-xbox360_compatibility_guide-49-en.html

Very good info. Quite often for Xbox 360 on NTSC/U you can play games that are region encoded for PAL. These lists tell you that info.