webcam is now every 15 minutes

Posted by rae in Reid, web site
at 6:58 pm on Sunday, 31 August 2003

I decided that it is eaing too much disk space at 5 minutes. Maybe if I had over 500 GigaBytes of storage like Iain just bought(!) I could up it to every minute. :-)

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Sick time

Posted by rae in Reid
at 11:54 pm on Saturday, 30 August 2003

Something is bothering my stomach, so I’m not feeling too well. Apologies to Iain who was going to come over to look at some of my Dad’s slides. If it persists, I may go see a Doctor. :-P

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Smashed Car Window (not mine)

Posted by rae in Reid
at 10:15 am on Friday, 29 August 2003

I was driving to work today and noticed that the rear window of the car in front of me was completely smashed and gone. All that was left was little buits of glass all the way around the edge. Now it’s pretty likely that the driver of the car is the owner and will be getting it replaced (maybe he was on its way), but I memorized the license plate anyway. I often do this when cars exhibit weird/bad/dangerous behaviour, but I never do anything with the info. It would be easier if there was some web site where you could type in what you know in case it’s useful for someone.

Actually, a year or so ago I thought up a silly idea where cars with on-board computers would connect to a database and then automatically flag cars in a heads-up display that had been reported as exhibiting some sort of behaviour. e.g., a driver who tends to cut people off has a big red mad face over him, while a driver that goes 80 kph in the fast lane on the 401 gets a green turtle. Needless to say there are numerous technical hurdles, however the means of inputting the information could be fun. You could use a Quake-like UI in the heads-up display, switching weapons from “speeder” to “suspicious vehicle” to “turtle”, and then fire at the car, which tags that car in the database with your input. The graphics could be more interesting; say you are allowed to splotch the car as if a giant paint-ball gun had fired, or perhaps your dart could be sticking out of the car with your comment written on it. The mind boggles.

There could be more productive uses, too. How about a heads-up display that puts a giant red arrow pointing down at the house you’re looking for? Or maybe little flags on all your friends so you can notice when Jeff is driving by. Not useful, but I think it would make the big city feel a little smaller.

Hey, maybe I should patent this idea now, well before the technology could ever implement it. It would take a GPS, some sort of automatic car-recognition tech (either onboard transponders or license-plate scanning cameras), and a central database. Well, a distributed database would be a lot better.

The issue of privacy would be difficult. I guess entries in the database would also need to be meta-moderated. Maybe Phil Smith seems to tag almost everyone as a turtle, while everyone else tags him as a fast-driving maniac. you would need some way of detecting that and letting the user decide if they side with Phil or everyone else. :-)

Okay, enough rambling now. Obviously I just want to make driving a less tedious exercise. Heh. Oh, and the car with the missing back window was AFAH 901.

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Picture pictures pictures

Posted by rae in Reid
at 10:03 am on Friday, 29 August 2003

Okay, I think I’m going to follow jok’s advice and get my pictures developed at Henry’s. I have several rolls, which include shots from the pool party, the night of the blackout and MarsFest at the Science Centre.

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MSN Messenger changes

Posted by rae in software
at 5:48 pm on Thursday, 28 August 2003

I got the message to the right in Fire just now. The text reads:

messenger@microsoft.com (16:42:24): You are running a version of messenger that requires an immediate security update. Please visit http://messenger.msn.com/Help/Upgrades.aspx to complete the update.
Well, I’ve downloaded the new MSN, if only so that I can continue to chat with Luisa when we’re at work. Sheesh, and it was so nice having just one IM client. Bah, maybe a future version of iChat will have the licensed MS code in it or something. Or maybe we should just get everyone to move over to Jabber instead.

(bah, Kung Log kacked out posting this so I had to use the web page entry form instead. Bah bah bah.)

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MT/Kung Log problems

Posted by rae in software
at 5:11 pm on Thursday, 28 August 2003

Every so often I’ve been getting errors posting to Movable Type. The symptoms are that I will write a new post, click “Save” and … after a lengthy delay, get a message saying it failed. It seems like the posting gets saved in the database, and it’s the rebuilding of the pages that fails. This touches on one of my prime criticisms of Movable Type: that it uses static pages instead of dynamically-generated ones.

Kung Log, which I’ve been trying to use as my blog posting agent, is having more problems than ever recently. Here are some error screens. If anyone has any ideas, let me know. I should also check KL’s home site.


The two images above are the very top and bottom of the error I got when trying to upload an image using Kung Log. The rest of the error text was a hex dump of the binary data of the image.


This is the error I get when I tried to post the MSN Messenger blog entry with Kung Log. Very annoying. I would be motivated to fix it if it were open source. Alas, it is not. :-(

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Playing Video on a Mac

Posted by rae in software
at 11:46 am on Wednesday, 27 August 2003

Ran across this interesting hint on how to play more video formats in QuickTime player. However, the links were scattered and not always pointing tot he download page (which is what I would find useful), so I’m collecting them all here in one nice and tidy place.

3ivx [dl]
QuickTime plugin that lets you play non-mp3-encoded-sound DivX movies. Not incredibly useful since most DivX movies use mp3 sound.
DivX [dl]
The free DivX codec for QuickTime. Deosn’t include mp3 codec.
Ogg Vorbis [dl]
An Ogg Vorbis codec for QuickTime
MPlayer [site] [dl]
MPlayer is an alternative movie player to QuickTime.
AC3 [dl] [source]
An AC3 codec for QuickTime which allows the playback of AC3 audio in AVI files. First you need DivX 5.0.6 which correctly load the AVI file into QuickTime. Once you have DivX 5.0.6 installed, if you are on MacOS X, drop “AC3 Codec.component” into /Library/QuickTime, or if you are on MacOS 8.x/9.x, drop “AC3 Codec” into your Extensions folder and restart.
MS-MPEG4v1 [dl] [src]
Umm, another codec?
MS-MPEG4v2 [dl] [src]
Umm, another codec?
As mentioned in the forum: Warning! Many of these plug-ins cause problems with iMovie. When working with iMovie temporarily move them to another folder.

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More Old Slides

Posted by rae in family
at 12:01 am on Tuesday, 26 August 2003

These are shots circa 1965 of family and family friends.


Lynn, Uncle Ed, Aunt Barb, and Ted


Al and Genvieve Frick on the beach at our old cottage on the northern shore of the Moon River, Muskoka

I’m getting really excited with the quality of the slide scans I’m doing. Especially since I’m not being careful about dust and dirt (I should be and it wouldn’t be that hard), and I’m using a mid-level, consumer-grade scanner (Epson 1660). If the pictures look this good using the “quick-and-dirty” process I’m using now, I can only imagine how good they would be if I was being more careful and using a higher-end, dedicated slide-scanner.

The scanner I’m using now costs about $250, while a higher-end slide scanner would be more like $1,200. So I think I’d be willing to live with the good-enough quality I’m getting now.

To see what I mean about not being careful about dust and dirt, feel free to take a look at this larger version of the shot of Al and Genvieve above. Warning: it’s about 3600×2300 pixels, and 836k!

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Out with the LinkSys, in with the D-Link

Posted by rae in web site
at 11:37 pm on Monday, 25 August 2003

After the never-ending freezes I’ve been having with the LinkSys, I am now going to try out a D-Link router (or is it just “DLink”?). Iain has kindly lent me his to test out, and so far it is going swimmingly. My killer test is to load a pictures index page like the one menntioned below, and then click madly on images, loading them as fast as I can. With Safari and tabbed browsing enabled, this means clicking the middle mouse button on every thumbnail really fast (the pictures load in new tabs in the background).

One I got the D-Link configured, I tried this and had no problems whatsoever. Another problem area for the LinkSys is posting moderately long blog entries using Kung-Log (which I’m using right now). I think the length of this posting already goes over that limit, so this will be a good test too.

I’m going to “hammer” tnir as much as I can over the next while to see how the D-Link performs. Oh, btw, it’s a DI-604 model. I guess if it works well, I’ll buy it off of Iain or go buy one of my own (and sell the LinkSys hopefully).

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Any JavaScript gurus out there?

Posted by rae in web site
at 2:07 am on Monday, 25 August 2003

I want to add code to my page that, conditionally based on the viewer’s IP address (i.e. if it starts with 192.168), rewrites all IMG “src” attributes such that “pics.tnir.org” is replaced with just “pics”. This may prevent the problem where Luisa and I keep locking up the Linksys..

If you have any ideas, please feel free to add a comment. Here’s what I have so far, which just matches the IP address.. 

<script language="javascript" type="text/javascript">
    // use SSI to get the IP
    var ipaddr = '<!--#echo var="REMOTE_ADDR"-->'
    var re = /^192\.168$/;
    if (re.test(ipaddr)) {
        var urlEnum = new Enumerator(document.links);
        for(urlEnum.moveFirst(); !urlEnum.atEnd(); urlEnum.moveNext()) {
            // ideally, change pics.tnir.org to just pics
        }
    }
</script>
A quick test — this is what I think your IP is: . I hope it doesn’t start with 192.168! It may, because of the Linksys doing NAT. I dunno..

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