Hah, I forgot Luisa can post to my blog!

Posted by rae in Reid
at 9:37 am on Tuesday, 28 September 2004

Thanks Hon. :-)

3 Comments

Happy Birthday

Posted by dwjoyes in Reid
at 9:00 am on Tuesday, 28 September 2004

H A P P Y B I R T H D A Y , R E I D ! ! ! ! !

1 Comment

iChalk — doodle over the ‘Net

Posted by rae in software
at 1:16 pm on Thursday, 23 September 2004

Anyone with a Mac want to try iChalk with me?

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Of Smallville and Rogers Digital static

Posted by rae in entertainment
at 11:30 am on Thursday, 23 September 2004

Yesterday I was very happy when I realized that digital channel 213 on Rogers Cable was WNYO, which is a WB channnel. This meant that we could watch the season premiere of Smallville a week before it was shown on CITY TV. Woo hoo!

So I set up the VCR to tape ch 213 from 8 to 9 and looked forward to watching it. Well, when 8pm rolled around I … *tried* to watch.. but egad. It was the worst reception I’ve ever seen (barring pure static). There were digital glitches galore (my guess is sever packet loss) and even when the picture showed, it was all ghosty and fuzzy. The worst of both analog and digital worlds!

So, I hopped on the ‘Net and checked with my favorite source for TV shows torrents, Suprnova.org. Unfortunately, Smallville hadn’t shown up yet (I was hoping those west-coasters would be on the ball). Well, most of the shows I download have “[BT]” in their name, and i was pretty sure it was a reference to the “#BT” on EFNET, so I hopped onto IRC and checked the #BT channel.

About 2 minutes after I joined (and about 29 minutes into the then-airing episode), a torrent was announced for Smallville. It was “only” the VCD version (not the HDTV version from LOL), but it was the only thing available, so I grabbed it and started downloading. A lot of people were eager to get it, so there were immediately 55 peers. Even so, it took about 2½ hours to download.

The thing about this is that in the past, if Rogers screwed things up like this, there was no recourse except to perhaps phone them up and whine. Now, I feel empowered to do something about it, which is to get the show another way.

Personally, I feel that a BitTorrent-like technology will eventually replace broadcast/cable television completely. Indeed, your Rogers cable might still be there, but not for broadcasting shows, just for internet bandwidth. Hm, I wonder how much bandwidth you could get if the cable were 100% devoted to TCP/IP traffic? Anyone know?

Well, Luisa may be upset to learn that yes, I watched the Smallville episode last night after she went to bed. However, I also downloaded the nice HDTV-LOL version overnight, so we can watch that one tonight. The VCD version had a lot of problems with sound. The pitch of the background music was wavering a lot, like a badly stretched video tape.

Hm, rats. Just checked the HDTV-LOL version and it has the same music pitch problems. Oh well.

Now don’t forget, Sunday Dec 26th 2004 is World File Share Day. Get your copy of BitTorrent and be ready!

14 Comments

Recovery results

Posted by rae in Reid
at 5:02 pm on Wednesday, 22 September 2004

Well, first a list of everything that was nuked:

I had all of these on the web, so I at least still have small (480×480 max) versions of them available. For Wetstock, I’ve recovered almost all my pictures. I am missing a lot of Debbie’s hi-res shots, but hopefully I can get copies from her again.

For Starfest I think I have about 2/3 of the shots, and for Hrire’s LAN party, I have none. Alas.

I have now added the following entry to my crontab on my Mac:

# every day at 3am update pictures backup on media
0 3 * * * rsync -av –rsh=”ssh -l zz” \
    ~/Pictures/{friends,family,hardware,rae,net,software,desktops} \
    zz@media:/var/media/pictures
This means that every night at 3am my Mac copies over and new or changed files from my various pictures directories to my Linux media box (which will live in the libing room real soon now).

So now at least I will have all my pictures in two locations fom now on. Also, since the media box has a picture browser that can be operated with the remote control, it will make it easier to look at the pictures on the living room TV.

Only at 640×480 NTSC resolution though, of course.

1 Comment

Accidental file deletion

Posted by rae in Reid
at 5:48 pm on Sunday, 19 September 2004

I was working in my friend/2004 pictures directory when I accidentally typed “rm -rf *” in the wrong directory. rm is the Unix command to delete a file, and the “-rf” part tells it to delete recursively, and forcefully. I thought I was in a temporary directory one level down, y’see. So, I have managed to delete all the high-resolution pictures of my friends from August of this year onward (I have DVD backups of pictures before then).

So I scanned the net, looking for un-delete tools, and came across Data Rescue X. It’s running now, having “content scan”ned about 1/3 of my disk. I’m not even sure that “content scan” is the right thing to do. We shall see.

This happened *after* I had scanned (in 3 pieces) and cleaned up the article on Sara in today’s Star. The article is on the back page of section “D” (the A&E section). I would have had a nicely-cleaned up scan of it for you all by now. I had about 3 different versions of it (pre-flattening, post-flattening, big jpg, small jpg) so hopefully one of them will survive!

More later after the scans and attempted recovery. At it’s current speed, I think it will be about another 2 or 3 hours before it finishes just scanning (!).

3 Comments

18EU and Steamboy

Posted by rae in entertainment
at 1:24 pm on Thursday, 16 September 2004

Last night i went to Mark’s place to finally finish our game of “18EU”. 18EU is a game where you buy, run and trade shares in various train companies that existed in the mid-1800’s through the 1930’s in Europe.

Overall, the game was a bit too involved with numbers and, well, just too much data. I know there are people that really like that kind of game, but it makes for a steep learning curve and devoting a lot of time to one game, which isn’t what I’m after right now.

Maybe when I retire..

Tonight I am off to see Steamboy, the latest from the creator of Akira. I’m going with Craig, so expect to see him write it up on his filmfest site. You can view a trailer (in Japanese) at Apple’s trailers site.

I’m experimenting with the filmfest site, actually. Check out the beta site if you’re curious. Oh, and I’ve put up a much better scan (that I did) of Craig’s picture from the Star.

1 Comment

Craig’s filmfest site

Posted by rae in friends
at 10:24 am on Monday, 13 September 2004

Craig and I now have a good workflow, where he posts the plain-text film reviews to his FilmFest site, and then I go over them and add links, etc. Now I am thinking we should add some sort of index, so you can search the films he’s reviewed, either by date or by title, actor, director, etc.

Sounds like a job for PHP/MySQL. Really, it would be nice if the Internet Movie Database had some sort of XML-RPC or SOAP interface for this kind of thing.

2 Comments

Craig featured in the Toronto Star paper

Posted by rae in friends
at 6:34 pm on Thursday, 9 September 2004

If you get today’s (Thursday) Toronto Star, take a look at the front page of the Arts and Entertainment section. There is a big writeup on Craig’s FilmFest fascination, mentioning his FilmFest website (which I host on tnir). I’ll put up a scan later so you can see what it looks like. Hopefully the content will be put online by the Star so we can link to it..

Monday Update: This link may take you to the right page. Cross your fingers! (It might only for for a week or so..) Here’s a bigger copy of the picture.

1 Comment

There ain’t no flies on us!

Posted by rae in family
at 1:20 pm on Tuesday, 7 September 2004


Well okay, maybe we do have a few flies on our garage..

Went to open the garage door by the pool the other day and encountered a scene from a horror movie.. or maybe a nature movie, anyway. The window was covered with a swarm of flies. It was difficult to get a shot, because of the lighting and the reflectivity of the window, but this was my best shot from the outside:


Each one of those whitish blobs is a fly, and they were all moving around..

We must have left something especially yummy for flies in the garage, because there was a real swarm of the suckers. There was one huge, non-fly bug in there (see first picture), who must have just been trapped in there by coincidence. Here’s a closeup:


He’s a big sucker, ain’t he?

If anyone knows who the big guy is, I am curious to know. We ended up letting them out, but the next day there were several more (although nowhere near the first huge swarm in number), which I also let out. There have been a few flies in the house, but as of today, I have only seen one so far. Hopefully they are pretty much gone now. I wonder what it was that they infested. Luisa had thought it might be a dead mouse in the wall, but that wouldn’t have tapered off so quickly I wouldn’t think. We found some live larvae and what I took to be larvae husks or something. Perhaps larvae spores? But I’m pretty sure a fly larva stays soft and squooshie before they become flies, right?

Well, any fly experts are encouraged to pipe up!

8 Comments