The world's most expensive laptop?

So here I am browsing my supplier prices, and I stumble upon this rather nice looking laptop...

The Lenovo NRPFEZA thinkpad W700DS (just a review site, but gives you a good impression).

Basics; quadcore, Blu-Ray; 10" retractable screen (to allow dual screen); 2 * 200GB RAID drives; 17"; 4GB RAM; yadda yadda...

Price?

R59,999.00+VAT ...

Check it out!!

Hurricanes by 6

I can't believe it. I knew the Hurricanes would take the Crusaders by 6, and instead I went for the 'Saders by 6 because I wanted to be "sensible". No guts, no glory. 8.4% of the superbru.com community picked the 'Canes. Good on you guys for being brave, or lucky.

Would be cool to have a Methodist minister as president

http://www.dailynews.co.za/?fSectionId=3532&fArticleId=nw20090220171454288C283001

Don't know this guy from a cake of soap, but it would be pretty cool were our president to be a man who fears and serves God.

Live rugby scores

Need to know a rugby score in a hurry?

http://www.rugby365.co.za/livescoring/

SANZAR Rugby calendar for GOOGLE

I don't know precisely what's happened with GOOGLE CALENDAR's system for subscribing to public calendars, but in the past one could simply search and add from a useful list; now it's not so easy to get to public calendars. After doing some roundabout searches, I found iCalShare which had an obsolete Super 14 rugby calendar on it; after digging into the comments I found a message from the author saying that he's updated the calendar with an address change...

The URL to add to your google calendar is:
webcal://ical.me.com/benfrost/Super%2014.ics

And just remember to set up notifications if you want SMS reminders etc.
Thanks to Ben Frost for saving me from wasting precious time doing such a calendar myself - you are a rugby hero :)

Other sites which have useful lists (including 3N which obviously Ben's Super 14 calendar doesn't have) are:

http://www.rugbyheaven.com.au/calendar/
- not iCal format though :(

http://www.circa.co.za/calendar.aspx
- not iCal format though, and I think it's a hospitality calendar with sporting events?

Windows cannot copy file ...

[ UPDATE April 2011: the solution / code mentioned at the end of the article can be incorporated with AUTOEXNT so that the script is run on PC startup as ADMINISTRATOR before any login is invoked. Check out my post on AUTOEXNT to get further clarity ]


Windows cannot copy file c:\windows\system32\profiles\student\Local Settings\Temp\Temporary Internet Files\Content.IE5\C1Y7S1IV\!fcHandoff%2CSW2%3A!fc

After running my desktop lockdown solution for the UKZN LABs, I get this bug cropping up every once in a while:

Windows cannot copy file c:\windows\system32\profiles\student\Local Settings\Temp\Temporary Internet Files\Content.IE5\C1Y7S1IV\!fcHandoff%2CSW2%3A!fcHandoff%2CSW3%3A!fcHandoff%26f%3D150550152%26p%3Dmail_candygram%26id%3D1%26cbk%3DfcLoaded%26bg%3Dtransparent%26tgt%3D_blank%26hs%3D2%26en%3Diso-8859-1%2&r=0 to location C:\Documents and Settings\student\Local Settings\Temp\Temporary Internet Files\Content.IE5\C1Y7S1IV\!fcHandoff%2CSW2%3A!fcHandoff%2CSW3%3A!fcHandoff%26f%3D150550152%26p%3Dmail_candygram%26id%3D1%26cbk%3DfcLoaded%26bg%3Dtransparent%26tgt%3D_blank%26hs%3D2%26en%3Diso-8859-1%2&r=0. Possible causes of this error include network problems or insufficient security rights. If this problem persists, contact your network administrator.

DETAIL - The filename or extension is too long.

And then:

Windows cannot log you on because your profile cannot be loaded. Check that you are connected to the network, or that your network is functioning correctly. If this problem persists, contact your network administrator.


DETAIL - The operation completed successfully.

---

Here are some places that are "helping" me to fix the problem...



UPDATE: This seems to help the problem, but I still get the occasional bug out as I did before... still working on a complete solution.

http://social.microsoft.com/forums/en-US/windowssteadystate/thread/2186fd6f-4ce9-420d-a44b-0de9fa5e431c/
- this forum works on the Windows Steady State stuff but same principle should apply here. The most interesting solution offered so far is that it's a permissions issue, or a long file name issue (really?? gosh), and the one dude's solution is to set up a script to run on logoff (if it's graceful) or startup (if it's been ungraceful). I'll try the startup solution, but must make a note at this point:

Deleting the temporary user profile in C:\DOCUMENTS AND SETTINGS\ when logged in as Administrator does also remedy the problem, but it means manually intervening. We don't want that with 300 PCs - it's far too time consuming. I've also attempted to avoid this problem by reducing the temp Internet Files capacity to 1MB (minimum), but that didn't fix the problem either.

Another comment: C:\Documents and Settings\student\Local Settings\Temp\Temporary Internet Files\Content.IE5\C1Y7S1IV exists, but there's no corresponding LOCAL SETTINGS folder in c:\windows\system32\profiles\student ...

My solution / code:
rd /s /q "c:\Documents and Settings\student\Local Settings\temp"

I'm thinking of just removing LOCAL SETTINGS completely and seeing if that fixes the problem. Not much grace with this solution, but it works, so we're 3 steps ahead. Of course if there were something as useful as UPHCLEAN for this, it would help :)

Great digital camera tool

Back in 1999 I bought myself a Chicony DSC-800 digital camera for R1,500.00 which could do 1024x768 photographs (800k) and stored these onto a 2MB Smart Media card (yes, 2MB). Since I was practically the first guy in the city to own a digital camera, I took a lot of photographs - over time, it became almost impossible to keep track of them all, especially when I upgraded my memory to a whopping 8MB. True, back then the camera couldn't store EXIF metadata, but the problem of cataloging multiple excursions of photo-sets was as real then as it still is today.

If anyone's like me, they are going to have quite a few digital photographs they want to keep for posterity (or until the next HDD crash, if they don't back up). It becomes a real mission if anyone's like me, and also hoards all 2GB of photographs on your memory card for months, and then multi-dumps them all over the place with no idea which are duplicates, which are from what date or category, etc. To add insult to injury, you'll have multiple events clumped into one subfolder and "conveniently" renamed by the MS picture renaming tool, so your 2006 Christmas photo's are clumped with your 2007 knee-surgery photo's along with your 2009 graduation photo's (not all literal examples here, although if I finish my MMedSc in time, this could all be true, but I digress) as "Christmas 2006".

If only we could use our EXIF-compliant cameras to our advantage! Introducing...

Namexif (TM)

This little beauty professes to rename your photographs into EXIF data, so not only does it help you clump them by date order (which to be honest is the most sensible way to catalog pictures), but you can now compile your friends' photographs of the same holiday together with yours! No more Christmas 2006 albums which last beyond Christmas 2009! Neatly and conveniently store all of your photographs in the right place, at the right time (pun intended).

I give this my "Two enthusiastic thumbs up" award for PortableApp category (it's truly portable), and I give it my "5 Stars" award for the useful software category.