I’ve had no luck with “supermarket self-serve checkouts”:http://www.nelson.monkey.org/~nelson/weblog/life/supermarketCheckout.html either.
These days I’ll use them for quickly picking up snacks on the way to the Rolemaster session, but that’s about it…
I got 94% (average error 38 miles) on “this US Geography Test”:http://www.sheppardsoftware.com/states_experiment_drag-drop_Intermed_State15s_500.html – much better than I expected!
(via “Perverse Access Memory”:http://www.whiterose.org/pam/archives/007206.html)
Jeff K says: avg 12 miles, 320 seconds. Maybe I should move there.
We had the first blizzard of the season today. When I left the house the roads were clear. About 5 minutes later, it started snowing, but the snow was just blowing around making the road surface look pretty. 15 minutes after that, the snow was sticking and turning to ice, and everyone was sliding around trying not to hit things with their expensive SUVs :).
At that point, I turned around, thinking that the drive home would be even worse. It took me more than twice as long to get back home. Then I drove the kids to school, and the wife to the subway, before making it back home again.
* Time on the road: 2 hours.
* Times stuck: 1 (on a relatively small hill, too).
* Skids: 5 or 6, not counting powering around corners with the front-wheel drive :-)
* Times _almost_ rear-ended: 2 (in both cases, I had left myself enough room to move forward and avoid the guy behind me who couldn’t stop ).
The afternoon drive was much better; the salt trucks had been out, and the freezing rain didn’t materialize (at least, not here). People always complain about how the first snowfall of the season is the worst, because everyone has forgotten how to drive in snow. I think it’s worse than _that_. For most other snowfalls of the season, the roads are covered with salt left over from previous days, and the snow melts as it hits. Today, with no salt (and -4°C) the snow fell, then was crushed into ice by passing cars…
SNow, snow, snow
Our first big snow As Harald points out, it snowed quite a bit today. I wouldn’t call it a blizzard myself, but then again, I didn’t have to drive around in it like he did. I did take some pictures and movies though….
Sadie’s bus was 10 minutes out of Finch station yesterday morning when the truck in front of it did a sideslip. Driver says, “Well folks, looks like we’re going to be stuck here for a bit,” and everyone (everyone) pulls out some sort of portable electronic device to let the office know they’re going to be late. (Punchline is, half the pelpl on the bus also pulled out knitting, ‘cuz they’ve been here before…)
There were two buses stuck on Don Mills yesterday. The first was stuck at a stop about halfway up a hill. The second obviously tried to go around the first, and then either it slid sideways or the first slid backwards, and _crunch_! They were blocking the two right lanes, which meant that all of the other traffic had to try to go around. Of course, they all had to slow down and stop, and then _they_ couldn’t get started again… What a mess!
This morning there was a car wrapped sideways around a tree a couple of blocks from my house. That guy was obviously going _way_ too fast, to have done as much damage as he did.
For about two weeks now I’ve been getting massive amounts of comment spam, both here and on some old Movable Type weblogs on the site. None of the comments appear to be making it through; WordPress has comment moderation (which just makes it annoying to delete them), and the MT sites have comments turned off. (For some reason the comments are still getting posted; but they’re not displayed on the blog pages, so no major damage).
Most of the comments are “Hey, what a great website!” comments, with no URLs (and no racy referrals, either); I don’t understand the point. Are they just trying to be annoying? Is this a test? Did the comment spammers suddenly find new tactics about two weeks ago, or did they suddenly notice my website again?
I guess it’s time to research WordPress blacklisting tools…
Jeff K says: “Spam” is of course the correct word for it, but I wonder if the intent is more like “electronic graffiti”. Which reminds me, did you see the horrible defacing of a Mayan cave drawing in Ecuador in this month’s National Geographic?
“Ubuntu”:http://www.ubuntu.com/ is cool; a Debian-based linux distribution that is more up-to-date than debian-stable (which is getting quite long in the tooth), but not as cutting edge as debian-unstable. I upgraded my hybrid stable / backports.org box earlier this week; the upgrade was completely painless, other than some confusion over which modules needed to be loaded at startup. Even my bizarre printer setup (I have a USB- based HP photosmart printer) survived the upgrade!
The new box is current enough to run Azureus without having to jump through hoops to upgrade the graphics libraries to the minumum required by SWT.
I was about to throw in the towel and go back to the RedHat (well, Fedora Core) distribution. I’m glad I didn’t have to :-)
chk@mythtv:~ $ uptime
20:46:42 up 22 days, 11:29, 2 users, load average: 0.69, 0.71, 0.75
I’m very happy with the box so far. It’s nice not having to change VCR tapes all the time; it’s really nice being able to watch one program while taping another. The P933 in combination with the PCR-250 is more than enough horsepower, except when I want to convert a file to XviD for archival purposes, and I can just leave that running overnight…
Our refurbished computer outlet has some nicely configured 1GHz mini-tower PCs for cheap; I think I’ll pick one of those up to build the permanent MythTV box, so that I can have my Windows desktop back. After Andrew’s party, though; I don’t have time before then :-)
(update) I was just over at a friends weblog, and saw a mention of Chef!, a Lenny Henry sitcom from the early ’90s. A couple of clicks later, and I’m recording upcoming episodes!
At this rate, I’m going to need a larger harddrive…
How does the quality of the recordings rate? Especially in comparison with (a) (S-)VHS tape, and (b) BitTorrent downloads. I would expect it to be about halfway between.
Of course, if you get one of those HDTV video capture cards, then you would get better than BitTorrent, since they are all only 640 pixels wide. :-)
I used to tape at LP on my VCR, so the image quality is quite a bit better. TV quality is worse than the XviD’s I’ve downloaded, but they usually start from digital satellite HDTV, as compared to my crappy analog cable signal.
The convenience is much more of an issue than the quality, for me. Besides, it’s NTSC; how much _worse_ can it get? (grin)
Scary statistics from the CIA world factbook. The 45% of the population is under 14; the median age is 17; the average life expectancy is 42.5. Why?
AIDS…
For the Star Trek Geeks in the crowd:
More for the star trek geeks, Star Trek Barbie is now a bluetooth device that works with your mobile phone.
Some guy pulled out of a parking lot in front of me today with ridiculously bright chromed wheels; they were very distracting, especially in the early morning sun. It took me a while to figure out why, though. It turns out the rims had a second piece attached, on a free-wheeling hub. As he drives, the outer part of the rim spins up; when he stops — they keep spinning!
These are a visual distraction, especially for magpies like me (Ooooh! Shiny!). But I can’t see how they’d be considered safe either; in an accident, these things would become lethal “Frisbees of Death”…
Are they legal? Or like so many after market auto parts, are they in that grey area: legal to sell, illegal to put on your car, but not worth pulling you over to prosecute?
jessie turner says: the rims if are illegal should not be its a way of expressing your self which every one desreves to do if a loser wants to look at them intead of the road in fornt of them its there fault not the owner of the rims “a owner of a pair on my car it should not be illegal and thats final”
Your right to express yourself with your fist stops at my nose…
Safety is a shared responsibility. Searching the net for a photo, I saw lots of flashy spinning rims that _were_ built safely; the ones _I_ saw on the road were dangerous.
leigh says: Spinners should be illegal. Too many people get veer out of the way from a stopped car simply because it looks like the car is still in motion. You see wheels turning what does that mean? In a short instant you may think you see a car run a light or turning into your lane. It causes accidents Ive seen them myself. Everyone has the right to express themselves but safety is still important above all. The spinners are a little much.
I think you must be pretty stupid to fall for that. Yes,I have gotten the same motion from cars moving back from a parking stall. If you get into an accident because of ‘spinners’ maybe you shouldn’t be on the road. Before one accelerates one should look ahead for pedestrians, other cars, green light etc. that give you the ‘real’ signal to get moving. This definately must happen with novice drivers, or people over 40. Just because the car beside me seems to move, or does move, doesn’t allow me to punch the accelerator without making sure I can do so first.
I think you must be pretty stupid to leave insulting comments on someone else’s weblog, especailly after comment #2 above. Ah well; this page seems to attract the weirdos. Kinda fun, actually, which is why I’ve been allowing these comments!
I’m going to (briefly) break a “long standing trend”:http://blog.cfrq.net/chk/archives/2003/01/16/blogging-politics/.
I find myself completely apathetic about the events of Tuesday. In fact, I didn’t even know what was going on until Wednesday morning when I arrived at work and my cow-orkers were chatting. But I know several people who are majorly bummed about the results. Is this simply part of my whole “If there’s nothing I can do, there’s no point getting worked up” philosophy, or am I missing something fundamental about what it means to have “W” back in power for another four years?
I think the coming crisis for the US (and therefore world) economies has little to do with which president is in power; it has more to do with greedy multinational corporations and lax regulation (which isn’t going to change anytime soon), and with the impending energy crisis; neither of which is going to be affected by any US president…
If Bush’s doctrine turns the Middle East into more of a cauldron of hatred than it is already then it’s bad news for us all. If he stops stem cell research it’s bad news for us all – to take but two issues. And of course while Kerry would not have solved the problems of greedy multinational corporations, lax regulation and the impending energy crisis he was at least on the right side of those issues while Bush will be doing what he can to make things worse on all three of those issues.
So I bought the “PVR-250”:http://www.hauppauge.com/html/wintvpvr250_datasheet.htm (on sale at “Best Buy”:http://www.bestbuy.ca/” :-), and slapped it into my P933 to play. The install was easy, and the hardware looks nicely designed. But the software that comes with the card sucks. I don’t know how hardware guys manage so consistently to ship their products with truly crappy software. Simple stuff like you can’t tab between fields, if you set a record time before you change the date the time quietly resets itself (because you can’t record in the past, I guess), and so on. It’s very _pretty_ though; if they had put all that skinning effort into usability…
Anyway, that’s not important, since I also downloaded “KnoppMyth”:http://www.mysettopbox.tv/knoppmyth.html in order to try out “MythTV”:http://www.mythtv.org/. I picked KnoppMyth figuring that I could find out if it worked and I liked the system, and then I could build from scratch if necessary later on. I’m glad I did; building a MythTV system from scratch is not for the faint of heart (and this from me, who likes tinkering with Linux :-).
First problem was getting the “TV-Out on my Matrox G400 to work properly”:http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/mythtv/dev/2993#2993. After several tries with various different X drivers and configurations, I finally discovered the real problem: the KnoppMyth kernel comes with the vesafb framebuffer driver compiled in, so my Matrox G400 modules were never getting loaded. One kernel rebuild (and several hours) later, I had TV out.
The next problem was the network. My on-the-motherboard, Intel-based network interface (from the 82801 chipset?) kept “freezing”, with a timeout: “eth0: wait_for_cmd_done timeout!”. Lots of googling revealed that this is a known problem that apparently still hasn’t been fixed. Fortunately, There is an “Intel provided e100 driver”:http://downloadfinder.intel.com/scripts-df/Detail_Desc.asp?ProductID=61&DwnldID=2896 that supports this chipset, and _that_ one works. Download, build the module, and install.
Next was sound. After every reboot, the audio out would be muted, and I would have to login remotely and use alsamixer to manually unmute the Headphone audio out and then pump the volume up. Again, it turns out that this a known problem, and that the usual fix (alsactl save/alsactl restore) doesn’t work, because the ALSA software doesn’t save information about the Headphone output? Strange, but one again I found a workaround. Running
/usr/bin/amixer sset Headphone unmute 100
would unmute the Headphone output and set the volume to max; I stuck this in /etc/init.d/local so that it would run on every reboot.
Finally, the machine kept crashing with out-of-memory errors. I never did figure this one out, because I made two changes at the same time. I downloaded and installed the “latest ivtv drivers”:http://67.18.1.101/~ckennedy/ivtv/, and I also discovered that the MythTV cache file I had configured was larger than the cache filesystem (this would cause mmap() based access to fail with the aforementioned out of memory errors :-). I’m not sure which fixed the problem, but the box has been up and recording for a week now with no problems.
Now to figure out all of this transcoding stuff…
(Oh ya, and Richard Dean Anderson was very young when MacGyver was produced :-)
john says: Most of the popular new PVR cards sold for Windows XP MC, known as “Blackbird”, haven’t hard drivers to use with Linux/Myth.
We have been working on these drivers and released an alpha version at http://plutohome.com. Pluto even has a self-booting kick-start CD that will automatically install & configure everything for you, including a ready-to-go Myth system. It’s the fastest and easiest way to get a MythTV PVR up and running, and also installs Xine, Asterisk and our own software to give you the most advanced media & entertainment, home automation, security, telecom & computing system, controllable with your Symbian Bluetooth mobile phone, as well as PDA’s and Webpads.
We’re working hard to harden the drivers as quickly as possible and would like as much feedback as possible. These 2nd generation cards are lower in price and offer better picture quality than the current models supported in IVTV, so be sure to check them out. A list of all the compatible cards, known as “Blackbird” cards, is found on our website.
visit: plutohome.com, click ‘support’, ‘support site’, and choose “CX88 Blackbird Drivers” from the projects menu
[…] Recompile the kernel without the vesafb driver (which I remembered thanks to my old posting: PVR 250 and MythTV) […]
Best Buy is having a sale on TV-in cards this week, so I stepped up my PVR research. In the process, I discovered that my old Baltimore Dell box has a TV-out capable video card (a G400), and I even have the magic breakout cable! A quick hardware swap and a test, and I’m left with one fewer item to purchase. Of course I still need a large drive, but they’re cheap. And LG DVD burners are on sale, so I should probably pick one up too. And I don’t really want to string network cable, so add a wireless network card. And while I’m at it, I should probably put the DVD burner in an external USB box, so that I can attach it to other machines. And in the meantime, I need a new desktop to replace the one I’m stealing for the PVR…
Technology. Ain’t it fun?
I’ve been trying to merge a series of changes from the mainline to the bugs branch all week. But every time I get into the flow, some critical interrupts would arrive. Even working from home didn’t help; the phone rang off the hook all day. (I’ve got two children in school nearby, so I can’t just turn off the ringers, alas). I’ve had to drop and restart the task so many times that it got completely befuddled, to the point where I realized this afternoon that I had to start over. On the plus side, I know what I need to do now, so it won’t take me another entire week… unless more interrupts show up!
I’m glad I’ve got two other team members now; at least _they_ are working on long-term projects, and are able to concentrate on one thing at a time. Without that, I don’t think we’d be making any progress at all…
Greg Wilson says: I’m really glad Blueprint lets me squat at one of their empty desks, but it’s a very noisy workplace — lots of side conversations about non-technical things going on all the time. I’ve taken to wearing earphones again for the first time in years, just to cut the accidental interrupt rate.
It’s the “30th anniversary of Dungeons and Dragons”:http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/dnd/20040722x today. In honour of the date, we’re having a session over at Gerry’s house. The other hard core gamers were strongly typecast during their days at “watsfic”:http://www.watsfic.uwaterloo.ca/, and so the party ended up needing a mage (and a cleric) to complete the set. So I volunteered to be the mage. Oops…
It occured to me after we’d created a character that I’ve never actually played a D&D magic user before. We’ve always replaced the D&D magic system with Spell Law. It never made sense to me that you had to “memorize” spells to cast them (and if you wanted to cast them more than once, you had to “memorize” them more than once!. The most recent D20 explanation at least makes _some_ logical sense, although it still doesn’t mesh with my personal opinions on magic.
I started reading science fiction and fantasy in the early 1980s; a teacher handed me “A Fall of Moondust” by Arthur C. Clarke and I was hooked :-). I quickly formed my own mental model of magic, and it aligns fairly well with the Rolemaster magic system (then “Spell Law”:http://www.icewebring.com/ICE_Products/RM1/RM1_1400_SpellLawBox.shtml, part of xLaw). You either know a spell or you don’t, and with practice you get better (and faster) at casting it. As you use magic you get tired, and as you get tired you start to make mistakes. You _can_ cast spells gagged and restrained, its just _really_ hard. And so on…
Spell Law made a lot more sense to me then (and still does :-), which is probably why I’m currently in two “Rolemaster”:http://www.ironcrown.com/RMintro.htm campaigns, playing mages in both. So it should be interesting to play D&D magic for a change…
Happy Anniversary!
Update: I had a lot of fun. We consumed vast quantities of pop and Doritos, told way too many puns, and it only took us two hours to get out of the inn! We even made it two rooms farther into the dungeon than the party Gerry ran the evening before…
On the other hand, I still dislike D&D mages, especially at low level; they’re wimps!
Greg Wilson says: I played my first game of D&D in Grade 9, when a supply teacher at the high school showed it to some of us. His name was Mister Scales, and wherever he is, I’d like to thank him for all the hours I’ve spent fleeing monsters, being crushed by falling rocks, and having my soul sucked out of my body by dread gleaners (don’t ask). Sure, today’s systems make more sense… but so what? Remember how it felt to be 12 years old and swinging a *really* big ax?
wjr says: I’ve been playing a D&D sorceror in a campaign, and they’re a lot of fun. None of the stupid memorising stuff – you have a list of spells that you know, and if you haven’t used up your quota for the day you can cast any of them you feel like. You can also cast them a lot more often than wizards (classic-style mages) can. The downside is that they’re ALL you can cast, and your list isn’t very long. Still, I end up doing a substantial fraction of the damage dealt out by the party, in my role as lightning-bolt artillery.
This campaign is also much higher-level (average is 14th right now) – I agree that being a first-level mage sucks. “OK, I’ve cast my Magic Missile. Now I go and hide in a corner for the rest of the day and protect my wimpy 4HP body”.
Yup; I like the sorceror concept (My character is actually multi-class wizard/sorceror; we found that to be the optimal solution to providing magical support in a one-shot adventure).
That’s the main difference in Spell Law that I like. Casting is based on “power points”, similar to a sorceror’s quota; again, no memorising stuff. You still have a limited list of spells that you know, but it’s larger, especially at first level. Casting takes longer, but that seems to balance out in most combat and you get faster with experience.
I’ll have to try a higher level Sorceror sometime, though!
This one has been sitting in my to-post pile for two weeks now. *sigh.
From “My head just exploded”:http://www.xoverboard.com/blogarchive/week_2004_10_03.html#000967
bq. So this website, by means of a Kevin-Bacon-style relationship of crossovers, has logically linked one hundred and sixty-two television series as existing in the same universe of continuity… and therefore are all the creation of the autistic Tommy Westphall.
Check it out…
If you’ve seen layout problems or certificate warnings recently, it’s because WordPress has two URLs for your weblog, that are _supposed_ to be for different purposes. Unfortunately, the code appears to use the two interchangably.
When I changed what was supposed to be the admin interface from HTTP to HTTPS (so that the naive referer check in wp-admin/admin-functions.php would work with my SSL-based webserver), it apparently broke _some_ (but not all) of the URLs on the main blog page.
I don’t have time to investigate right now, but I’ll get around to it eventually.
I remember being skeptical a few years ago when I heard about the technology, but it sure has taken off!
I missed the season premiere of “Joan of Arcadia”:http://www.tvtome.com/JoanofArcadia/. I fumbled the VCR programming and taped from 7:59 until 8:01. (Note to self: build “MythTV”:http://www.mythtv.org/ based Media PC ;-).
Prompted by a “recent entry”:http://rae.tnir.org/archives/000671.html on “Reid’s blog”:http://rae.tnir.org/, I “seached the web”:http://www.google.com/search?q=arcadia+bittorrent, “found a torrent”:http://torrent.youceff.com/download.php?cat=107&ref=0&subref=4, downloaded “Azureus”:http://azureus.sourceforge.net/, and about 2 hours later had a copy of the episode on my disk. In testing, I found that I had to find a copy of a “XviD binary”:http://www.xvid.org/, which was also straightforward (thanks to Google :-). We plan to watch the episode after the kids go to bed tonight.
There are days when I say “I hate computers”, but today has been a good day for technology!
Jeff K says: You may still hate computers… I have yet to be caught by bit-torrent, but on the other P2P networks it is distressingly common for a G-rated type file name to actually contain XXX stuff. I think I make my wife paranoid by hiding the screen and turning off the sound when I first fire up a music video or whatever. I’ve seen quite a few things I would never have wanted to on the P2P networks, but so far nothing of the highly illegal type [knock wood, thank God, etc.]
I must admit that I’ve never had trouble with bad files, either on P2P networks or with torrents. Maybe I’m just lucky? In any case, the episode of Joan was fabulous quality, and contained no ‘icky’ bits…
I’ve also recently started using Azureus, which has all the features I’ve wanted for a while. Unfortunately, I managed to K-O some in-progress, multi-gig downloads by turning on a setting somewhere that “imports” torrents, making them non-usable by other BitTorrent apps. Actually, not so much of a problem, as my slow downloads in Azureus were being caused I think by not enabling UDP communication. I still haven’t found where I can tell it how many ports it can use — I have over 100 set aside. The doc mentions how this app doesn’t need many ports like other apps somewhere, but I’m still not 100% sure it wouldn’t help.
P.S. Your site looks iccky today. Did the CSS file go missing?
Oh, never mind about the iccky CSS comment; all looks well now. I must have caught the site at a bad time or something!
“zombies seeking brains”:http://www.defectiveyeti.com/archives/001006.html
“Scientists find coffee really is addictive”:http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/health/2002052772_coffee03.html
bq. Don’t be surprised if missing that cup of morning coffee gives you a headache or makes it difficult to concentrate at work. It’s all part of caffeine withdrawal, say Johns Hopkins University researchers who released a study that could result in the official classification of the condition as a mental disorder.
This isn’t news; everyone I know already knows about caffeine withdrawl headaches, and I know of several hospitals that now give patients caffeine either right before or right after surgery, to prevent withdrawl symptoms from interfering with their post-op recovery…
This is where you find out you’re old school. My 8 year old is an expert at checking out. It is true the systems work hard to prevent theft, but that just puts them back on a par with ma or pa running the store. When the authoritative voice comes on, you’re supposed to look at the head cashier and wait for the ma/pa-like “everything’s okay!” look and continue. Actually, my 3 year old likes to scan articles, but she’s only good at cans, however she does know most of the self-checkout etiquette now [after some false starts and stern scolding from her sister]. Welcome to the 21st century.
I’m holding out for the day when I can just drive my buggy full of RFID tags past the reader, and have it bill my account automatically. *That* will be progress. Self-scanned groceries are just a cost-saving inconvenience.