Wrong keymapping on VNC connection to VMWare machine

While I'm here I thought I'd better write this one down while I remember it :)

VMWare Workstation 6 introduced the ability to allow VNC connections to running virtual machines without explicitly loading a server on the VM. This is really quite nice and works very well, but if you're not using a US keyboard then the keyboard mapping is wrong. In my case I'm using a UK keyboard and "\" was coming out as "#" on the remote machine, and "£" wasn't working at all.

Surprisingly the fix for this didn't show up in a Google search. I had to resort to RTFM! :) Basically you need add this line to the VMX file, replacing "uk" with the country code of your choice ("de" for Germany, "fr" for France etc. etc.)

RemoteDisplay.vnc.keymap = "uk"

Subversion and "Access denied: MKACTIVITY"

Another dull techie post. I was having problems with Subversion after doing a checkout on a new project. I could download the source but whenever I tried to check anything back in I got an error 403 and a message about access denied on MKACTIVITY for user whatever.

It turned out that the project name is case sensitive. When I setup the checkout in TortoiseSVN I'd entered the name of the project (which is all in upper-case in the repository) in lower-case. It connected just fine and allowed me to get the source, but then complained on the check-in. Doing a relocate in TortoiseSVN didn't actually change the case so it didn't work. Apparently using the SVN command line relocate would have worked, but in my case all I'd done was rename a file so it was fairly trivial to just delete the entire checkout folder and then redo it, this time using the proper case. After that it worked fine.

Hailing a cab in GTA 4

I bought GTA IV this week and I'm playing it in between WoW sessions. I like it, particularly the city itself which they've done really well.

One thing that was bugging me was how to hail a taxi. The instructions say you can do it by whistling for one but they didn't give the button to press, and I spent a fair while standing in front of a cab pressing every combination of buttons I could think of to get Niko to whistle - all to no avail. It turned out, as I had begun to suspect, that you can't hail a cab until the game tells you that you can. That happened a couple of missions in.

Once the game has unlocked cabs for you it's the left shoulder bumper on the 360 to whistle, hold down Y to get in. Tapping Y will carjack the taxi as per normal.

Upgrading the RAM on a Mac Mini

I'll be doing this soon - 2Gb from Crucial is pretty cheap at the moment and the 1Gb that's in there at the moment isn't enough now that Parallels is running XP in the background. I just want to make a link to this site that shows you what to expect when opening the case for future reference :)

SSRS and Date Formats

Bit of a geeky one this but it was annoying enough to find the answer that I thought it worthwhile to post. If you use Visual Studio 2005 to design a SQL Server Reporting Services 2005 report then VS will default the country code for the entire report to English (US). You'll find that the date picker and long/short date formats in the report all come out month first regardless of your locale.

One fix for this (if you're British) is to set the report language to English (UK). However if you're writing a product whose audience is global then that isn't good enough.

The correct solution was to set the report language to =User!Language. With this SSRS will pick up the locale from the user's web browser. It's up to the user to make sure their web browser is configured correctly, but c'est la vie.

(If you use this technique and you have any currency fields in the report then you'll need to set the language for those fields explicitly, otherwise the currency symbol will change depending on the user's browser locale... you probably want to keep the currency symbol constant).

Sainsbury's Strawberry Low Fat Yoghurt

I noticed a rather unexpected ingredient in Sainsbury's strawberry yoghurt today...

Carrot juice? Really? In yoghurt? I had a look at the peach and raspberry yoghurts sitting in the fridge, they don't have carrot juice in them... what's so special about strawberry yoghurt that it needs a carrot's squeezings to set it off right?

Small Site Update

Well I've finally gotten around to getting the Blogger template back to something resembling the old MovableType one. Next step is to bring over the old posts. Well, maybe some of the old posts.