Craig Mayhew’s Blog

If you’ve got GooSync on your mobile phone and it suddenly refuses to sync spouting a “511″ error code then simply log into your GooSync account (via a web browser) and reselect your mobile device (click the picture of your device). This worked for me and had been a problem for the last few days.

I imagine they have a database error where they no longer know what device you are using…

Ubuntu has started being a little slow to boot, as it turns out one of the drives was the cause of this. During the boot up processes ubuntu would hang for a while and then spit out the following: “ata8: SRST failed (error:-16)”. It seems one of my drives wasn’t responding properly during boot up.

To fix this I tried:

- Disabling floppy drive in bios (This didn’t help, but I’m sure it will speed things up slightly as I don’t have a floppy drive)
- Set the “IDE detect time out (sec)” to 0. It was originally 35. (This didn’t help. Be careful when changing this option if you are using IDE drives)
- Unplugged the SATA cable from my DVD drive and plugged it back in again. (PROBLEM SOLVED!)

I imagine either my sata cable is slightly loose or dodgy and reseating it has sorted the problem. If the problem occurs again then I will replace the cable.

After logging into my Ubuntu 9.04 machine I’m greeted with the following message “Cannot find or run the base session script. Running Gnome in failsafe session instead”. The reason for this was I had messed up my permissions and the following fixed it:

After logging in and recieving the errors message press Ctrl-Alt-F1 to drop back into command line. Then run the following:

Sudo chmod 755 /etc/gdm/Xsession

If for whatever reason you change the permissions on your sudoers file you will get a similar error to “sudo: /etc/sudoers is mode 0640, should be 0440″ whenever you try to run the sudo command. The problem is that because the permissions are wrong on the sudoers file, linux won’t let you run the sudo command!

To get around this press “Esc” at the grub loader screen when linux is booting and enter into the latest recovery mode. Then select the option that allows you to drop into a command line as root and type

chmod 0440 /etc/sudoers

Then reboot and your troubles should be solved!

These are all built from flickr images, but instead using a much improved version of the photosynth algorithms.

Fly through of the San Marco square in Venice. Reconstructed as part of the “Building Rome in a Day” project. The reconstruction contains 13,699 images.

3D reconstruction of Dubrovnik, Croatia, containing 4,619 images.

A 3D reconstruction of the Colosseum in Rome, built as part of the “Rome in a Day” project. This model was constructed from 2,106 images.

The grand canal in Venice.

A Friend of mine called Szymon pointed me in the direction of this very neat little app called PIM Backup. It’s currently on version 2.8 and available for free from here: www.dotfred.net.

Instead of being frustrated with the bloated active sync software that Microsoft provides simply copy the PIM backup application onto your device. Then run the application via the phone’s file explorer. Select your options and it will then backup your data into a compressed file called a “.pib” file. Copy a backup of the app and the .pib file onto CD/DVD and there you go, one very quick backup!