ReidNews

Places to look for my posts

Tue, 05 Jul 2011 14:53:54 +0000

This blog isn’t posted to very often. Better places to find me are Facebook, Twitter and now Google Plus:
http://profiles.google.com/reidellis
https://www.facebook.com/reid.ellis
https://twitter.com/clith

Apple is not a computer company, and hasn’t been for some time

rae — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 13:18:36 +0000

This is from Chart of the day<http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-in-case-you-had-any-doubts-about-where-apples-revenue-comes-from-2010-4>:

Between the iPhone and iPod, the Mac doesn’t have a chance!

Assuming most of the iPod $$ are from those expensive (and high-margin) iPod Touch’s – all three profit sources run Mac OS X, just with different window managers. So you could make the case that they’re all Macs of one form or another.

Reid

Posted via email from clith’s posterous

Windows Diff Tool – WinMerge

Tue, 06 Apr 2010 14:56:57 +0000

When programming, it’s very useful to be able to find the differences between two text files. On a Mac, I would use the built-in awesome diff utility, FileMerge. It even has a nice command-line interface via the “opendiff” command.

But currently I’m stuck on Windows (curse you, gaming industry, for preferring the Windows platform for game development!) and need to find a diff tool there. There are several, and I was going to go through them writing mini-reviews for each, but a clear winner emerged so quickly I won’t bother.

WinMerge quickly became the obvious choice. It is GPL licensed, and hosted on SourceForge. I did briefly look at FreeDiff, but it suffered from

clearly being a “gateway” app to other commercial apps (ad dialog on quit)
being written in Visual Basic
requiring 8 clicks to cancel an install!
trying to overwrite C:\Windows\system32\scrrun.dll!!
looking like a Windows 95 app
Separating line numbers from content with a period
Not supporting mouse wheel e3vents
Not knowing which DLLs it could remove when uninstalled (I probably have a few ancient DLLs hanging around now)

The initial UI for WinMerge has huge fonts. Thankfully you can reduce them quickly using ctrl-minus (ctrl– doesn’t quite look right..). It seems to be quite a rich application, complete with plugin architecture(!).

I’ll try to write more after I’ve had some time to check it out more.

A Couple of Good New Shows

Sun, 06 Dec 2009 06:06:44 +0000

Two new shows are on BBC that are pretty good.

Paradox is about what look to be cell phone pictures from the future appearing at the lab of a solar astronomer of some kind. He contacts the police, and they end up trying to prevent the disasters predicted by the pictures.

It seems to be a mini-series with only 5 episodes, but I’m not sure.

Misfits is about a group of young offendors doing community service. Thanks to a freak lightning storm, they (and many others in the area) are given special abilities. Yes, it’s another “Heroes”-inspired show. But the kids in this one would never be seen on mainstram US TV. There’s no end of sexual innuendo, foul language and bad behaviour. It’s great!

Testing a Post via Google Wave

rae — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 00:47:55 +0000

Testing a Post via Google Wave
I’ve created a wave with the Posterous bot, and apparently this wave will be posted on posterous.com. I assume updates will also automatically be propogated? We shall see.

I will embed a picture to see if that works.

You should see a humourous “communist party” image above.

via google-wave-robot

Posted via web from clith’s posterous

Whither Firewire S1600 & S3200?

rae — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 14:18:12 +0000

The spec was finalized in early 2008, and parts have been available since October 2008, yet I cannot google any sign of *any* Firewire S1600 or S3200 devices!

These things would transfer data at 1600 and 3200 Mbps, which (egad) is a bit slower than USB 3’s 4000 Mbps.

Maybe that’s why?

Hrm.

Posted via email from clith’s posterous

Why did nobody tell me of this? “Batman: the Dark Knight Strikes Again”

rae — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 00:03:41 +0000

I had no idea that Frank Miller revisited the “Dark Knight” mythos. But today I discovered, seven years after the fact, “Batman: the Dark Knight Strikes Again“, by Frank Miller and his wife, Lynn Varley.

Apparently reviewers were upset that it wasn’t exactly the same as the dark, gritty original “Batman: the Dark Knight Returns”. I think I’ll read it and see how it is for myself..

After Luisa and I dropped Michael off at rez at UofT, we took a leisurely drive along the Danforth. We had lunch at Astoria, and then went to the Carrot Commons. Or, rather, Luisa did, but everything seemed closed for Labour Day.

I noticed what *I* thought was a “new” Mac store across the street and took a snap with my iPhone — RiverdaleMac

I posted it to Facebook, where I was informed it is, in fact, a very old store, that used to be called “The CD Shop” (gee, wonder why they changed their name? ).

I trundled over to the book store just east of the ‘Carrot whose name escapes me.

And they had a graphic novels section.

And there I saw the tome above.

And bought it.

Luisa found me a copy of the latest Cinefex, which I’ll probably also read on the GO train.

All in all, a nice day. Great weather, too.

Posted via email from clith’s posterous

My Favorite iPhone apps, Sep 2009

rae — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 19:49:07 +0000

My Favorite iPhone Apps, Sep 2009

The iPhone Facebook app (free) is pretty good. The recent update has seen its UI overhauled, very much for the better.

There are still things you cannot do with the iPhone app, but for most things it’s just fine.

“Now Playing” (free) is the best app for movies. With it you can find what’s playing near you, at what time, and what score it has on Rotten Tomatoes. It has the phone numbers for theatres, and a Google Maps link to show you where they are.

One feature I appreciate is that it shows you DVDs as well. You can restrict this to show you only Blu-rays, so I find it handy to find out what’s coming out on Blu-ray this week.

“Stanza” (free) — recently acquired by Amazon — is the best text/book-reading app. It comes with built-in links for downloading classics like “Pride & Prejudice”, “War of the Worlds”, and others to your Stanza library.

You can adjust font size, and the page turning is nicely done. It also works in portrait mode.

“WeatherEye” *(free) is my favorite weather app. It doesn’t have the fancy graphs and graphics ofr “MyWeather”, but I find it’s short- and long-term forecasts very useful.

”TouchTerm” (free) and “VNC” (free and $$ versions) kind of go together, because they’re somewhat geeky. I dunno. But they are very good.

VNC struggles a bit when I view my dual-24″ monitor desktop. It tells me it is getting short on memory. I persevere though, and I haven’t head it crash on me.

TouchTerm is nice to have so you can ssh in to anywhere you like … except your iPhone. *sigh.

“eBuddy” (free) seems to hold the crown currently for multi-protocol IM app. It supports “push” notifications, but only stays connected for a maximum of 30 minutes. The AIM iPhone app, by contrast, stays online for 24 hours without your having to run the app once during that time.

Now iPhones can save websites as “app-like” icons on your screen, and I have a few favorite sites that I do this for.

”Google Latitude” is a way to share your up-to-the-minute (but not second!) location with friends. This is very handy when you’re supposed to meet up with people somewhere. When I’m driving I just start it up and leave it running.

Beware, however: the frequent access to the GPS necessitated by Latitude can drain the battery somewhat. It’s best using it when it’s plugged in (in your car, for example).

I use http://ping.fm/m to update all my various micro-blogs like Facebook, Twitter, Linked In, etc. It’s a one-stop spew shop.

You can also set it up to do real blog posts etc, but this mobile-based web page isn’t suitable for that. How much can you type into a single, one-line text input box?

I’m curious to see how this is formatted on http://clith.posterous.com since I’ve used float alignments to float the inline pictures to the left or right of the paragraphs..

Posted via email from clith’s posterous

New Mac store on the Danforth

rae — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 18:01:35 +0000

Saw this store this afternoon, right across the street from the Carrot Commons.

Reid

Posted via email from clith’s posterous

Pride & Prejudice Blu-ray

rae — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 18:55:49 +0000

I bought the Blu-ray version of the 1995 BBC miniseries “Pride & Prejudice” a little while ago. They did an excellent job of the transfer.

Take a look at Elizabeth Bennet’s first glimpse of Pemberley:

DVD

Blu-ray

Just to be completely fair, these are not actual Blu-ray stills. Rather, they’re stills from an mkv down-encoding of the Blu-ray. But they’re of sufficient quality as to demonstrate the amazing difference the new transfer makes. All the colours have been corrected. As well, the soundtrack is much clearer – you hear things you never heard on the DVD.

I’d give this Blu-ray a 9/10 — I took one off because the dark scenes were too grainy. But I suspect this to be the fault of the equipment and film that was used during original filming, not of the Blu-ray transfer; you can’t make it better than the original film, after all.

Posted via email from clith’s posterous

Testing out Posterous

rae — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 16:38:23 +0000

Found out about posterous.com from Andy Ihnatko’s blog. Testing it out with a picture.

Posted via email from clith’s posterous

Recent ‘Net Stuff

rae — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 13:43:57 +0000

There is a new book that could be as important as Version Control with Subversion was several years ago. It’s called Pro Git, and the source for the book is available on GitHub.

Another item of note is an online Settlers of Cataan dice-rolling app that Vartan should like, since it keeps track of how many of each roll there has been. However, it does not track who rolled what each turn, so perhaps not quite up to scratch.

Then there’s two sites for Mac OS X users who like the QuickLook feature: QuickLook Plugins and QLPlugins. Between the two of them you should be able to hit spacebar with a huge variety of files.

Finally I’ll mention the Google Maps API V3, because it has lots of stuff in it aimed at mobile devices (specifically iPhone, Android). The major feature is going to be how fast it loads up. I can attest to the fact that V2 does take a long time sometimes on the iPhone.

ni9e

rae — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 18:11:31 +0000

It’s all about 9 this movie season.

Won’t people get confused?

This kind of thing seems to happen relatively often in Hollywood. Silly people.

Yet More Medical TV Shows

rae — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 13:58:03 +0000

With the passing of shows (some of which we wish hadn’t passed) comes new shows. I grabbed a few recently and here’s what I thought of them.

Nurse Jackie

Nurse Jackie

Mrs. Soprano strikes out as a not-even-remotely-perfect nurse at a hospital. She swears, takes pain drugs for her back (shades of House) and has sex with doctors. But unlike House or Grey’s Anatomy, this show has a much grittier, more real feel to it. So far though, I’m not sure if that aspect is adding to or subtracting from the show’s appeal.

Edie Falco is a very strong actress, and I could understand why she might want to have a dark, gritty, and above all *serious* show. But she also has a comedic side, and that is completely smothered by the cynical realism of this show.

Royal Pains

Royal Pains

I’ve seen all of 10 minutes of this show so far, but it’s yet another doctor show. I’m getting tired of doctor shows, but Mark Feuerstein is keeping my interest (so far).’

We’ll have to see where this one goes.

Hey, this theme is very mobile-friendly,…

rae — Mon, 25 May 2009 22:30:52 +0000

Hey, this theme is very mobile-friendly, too. Nice..

Figured out the avatars – you have to be…

rae — Mon, 25 May 2009 22:17:26 +0000

Figured out the avatars – you have to be using gravatar.com I think.

Trying out the “P2″ theme, which makes…

rae — Mon, 25 May 2009 21:33:21 +0000

Trying out the “P2″ theme, which makes WordPress look not unlike Twitter. Maybe I’ll post more. Hm, if I had a plugin for ping.fm, I definitely would post here more.. In the course of doing this, I had to upgrade to WordPress 2.7.1, which was a big no-brainer..

Success! ASUS A7N8X + terabyte hard drive

rae — Sat, 02 May 2009 22:18:04 +0000

Tnir, my household Linux box, has been down for a couple of weeks now. I hit a bit of a roadblock when the motherboard erfused to recognize a new hard drive I had bought. It was too big — 1 TB (which is 1000 GB, or perhaps 1024 if you’re a programmer, or 999 if you’re a sales droid).

So I did my usual check for a new BIOS, which would normally fix things. There was a moderately new BIOS, only a few months younger than the one I had, but installing it had no effect. Still no drive.

After googling around I ran across an article that laid out all the steps I had to take, which included creating my own BIOS. Egad.

That scared me a bit, so I put it off for a while.

But today I tried again, and realized that the BIOS is really like a zip file, with a bunch of other little files in it, and I was just replacing the (SATA) disk part with a new version. And sure ernough, I got my new drive listed, with 938 GB (damn those marketing droids!)

SciFi Channel —> SyFy Channel?!?!?

rae — Fri, 01 May 2009 13:15:57 +0000

new name of SciFi Channel

The US “SciFi” channel is going to be renamed in July to the “Syfy” channel.

I am speechless.

Are they morons?

…

What the frak?

P.S. Wordpress seems unable to handle UTF-8 characters in the title of a post. I *tried* to use a proper arrow character, really I did. *sigh

April 23rd is Download Day

rae — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 14:59:02 +0000

I seem to be downloading a couple of Gigs of stuff this morning. First off is Ubuntu 9.04, which was released today. I am grabbing both the “desktop” and “server” editions. I plan on using the server edition when I rebuild Tnir.

Next up is Qt 4.5.1, and this time there are Cocoa, 64-bit Binaries for Mac OS X (last time, with 4.5, you had to compile it yourself to get 64-bit goodness). But you have to dig around to get them. Here are the links to save people some trouble.

If you want to debug, you should get both the normal and debug libraries. And the debug libraries are huge compared with non-debug.

Bell Canada wants to impose universal 60 GB bandwidth caps

rae — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 17:11:43 +0000

I got notified about this by Tek Savvy today, so I entered the following on their comment page.

File Number # 8740-B2-200904989 - Bell Canada - TN 7181
Bell's attempts to limit the availability of inexpensive high-bandwidth service would have a grave consequence: Canadian users would lose affordable internet services such as high-quality video downloads available from online producers like Apple and http://revision3.com -- downloading just ten 430 MB episodes would consume over 7% of the proposed 60 GB monthly cap.
This kind of tariff would kill modern services such as HD movie rentals on iTunes, turning Canada into an internet backwater.
Canadians have been able to boast about our high-tech infrastructure to the world. This one action would topple Canada from the top to the bottom of the internet world.
Thanks, Reid Ellis, Toronto ON

If you’d like to make your comments/concerns known about what Bell is attempting to do, go to the CRTC web page set up for it. Just select the word “Tariff” from the drop down list, and add the following in Subject Line: “File Number # 8740-B2-200904989 – Bell Canada – TN 7181″ – make your thoughts known!

The deadline for comments is tonight at midnight, so hurry!

TV shows tonight

rae — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 18:58:19 +0000

shows on tonight – click for large

Wow, quite a few shows on TV tonight.

Until recently I used the site TV Rage to have a calendar showing upcoming shows. But then they changed their APIs to not include iCalendar data.

The place I found out about TV Rage, TV Calendar says it also uses EPGuides.com, so maybe they have iCalendar data I can use?

Worst case I can write a quick CGI script to read XML from TVRage and convert it to iCalendar on the fly.

Seems like a lot of work to go to though..

Update:
So, along with the screenshotted shows…

House
Greek
Gossip Girl
The Big Bang Theory
How I Met Your Mother
24
Heroes
Saving Grace
Medium

there were some others!

My Boys (back for seaon 3!)
The Listener (new show)
Castle (new show)

So wow, that’s like 12 shows! Which is good because the rest of the week is pretty bleak until Friday..

Books to read

rae — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 14:15:36 +0000

I’m finding it harder to find good hard SF books to read. One recent “find” was Charles Stross, a friend of Cory’s who he’s worked with.

I’m just going to put a list of books to look into here, possibly updating it over the next while.

Charles Stross, “Saturn’s Children”
John Varley, “Mammoth”

I guess this would be an ideal opportunity to use my Amazon Associates thingee, but I’d have to dig it up out of email. Ah well. Here are Amazon.ca links: Mammoth, Saturn’s Children.

Why Qt 4.5 is a really big deal

rae — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 14:38:12 +0000

Okay, this will be a post about software development, but I’ll try to avoid using jargon in explaining the impact of yesterday’s release of Qt 4.5.

Qt software

So first of all, what the hell is Qt? Well, it’s a software library that allows programmers to easily write programs that run on Mac, Windows, Linux and even cell phones. If a developer want their code to run on all these platforms without using something like Qt, it often means man-years of work, and platform-specific oddities can arise, such as Adobe not having a 64-bit version of Photoshop on the Mac (because they use Code Warrior’s PowerPlant on the Mac, which is no longer supported except as an open source project). Qt is also an extremely powerful and fast library, which is not often the case for these kinds of things.

Ok, so what’s the big deal with version 4.5? Until yesterday, if you used the Qt library, you had to either:

release your application’s source code to the public under the “Gnu Public License” (GPL), making it Free Software, or..
pay a lot of money (thousands of dollars) annually for the Qt “commercial license”

But yesterday for the first time, Qt is available under the terms of the “Lesser Gnu Public License” (LGPL). This license allows developers to use Qt, and not release the source code for their program, and not have to spend thousands of dollars a year.

That’s enough for now. My compile is finished. I may come back and add more later.

Hmm, I really should cleanup this blog..

rae — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 16:12:59 +0000

It’s looking pretty sad at the moment. :-/ It’s because I haven’t fully recovered pics.tnir.org, so there are missing graphics here and there. Maybe I will just use a pre-canned theme so that it looks ok or something. My main problem is that I turn off Wordpress’ “translate returns into
tags” auto-filter, which isn’t a setting. I have to hand-edit the PHP code every time.

gmone.com

rae — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 14:44:25 +0000

I own the gmone.org domain, so about 2 months ago I started getting spam from several domain-selling companies that they would reserve “gmone.com” for me when it expired for a fee. That fee was pretty high.. at first. As time went by, the price fell lower and lower. When the domain actually expired, I logged in to my Dreamhost account and bought the domain at the regular cost. A rare instance of spam actually providing a service—in this instance, as a calendar-ish reminder alarm. P.S. Luisa, this is the domain i was thinking of, not tnir.com (which I don’t think will ever be available)

ReidNews now on DreamHost

rae — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 23:07:30 +0000

.. and so are Tech Tok and 33 and a Third.

After my linux box seized up, I decided to finally get around to moving stuff off my personal server. This *should* result in faster access for everyone but us here at home.

While I was at it, I added the capability of using your Facebook account to leave comments in the Disqus system. But there are still many missing images. I am rsync’ing them as fast as I’m able. It’ll take a little while longer, I’m afraid.

Amazon.ca now has electronics

rae — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 20:01:19 +0000

The selection is pretty anemic so far though.

No Canon camcorders for instance. Only Sony.

Amazon.ca electronics. [kickback-free!]

Back to Disqus again

rae — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 18:38:37 +0000

I’m switching ReidNews back over to using Disqus now. It’s worked really well on Tech Tok. This gets rid of the headache of de-spamming comments.

I just sucked all my old comments into Disqus and its “processing” right now. So for a little while all my old comments are hidden.

I think.

TWiT HD harangue

rae — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 19:48:45 +0000

Getting tired of people screwing this up. Especially people who should know better.

On either “This Week in Tech” or “MacBreak Weekly” (I don’t remember which) the participants were constantly *incorrectly* saying “1080p” when describing all sorts of cameras. The cameras they were talking about are all unable to do 1080p, at least at 60 frames per second (fps).

All of the cameras, however, can do 1080i. That one letter makes all the difference. ‘i’ stands for “interlace”, which means it only records every other line. I like to call 1080i “squished 540p”, since that’s how many scan lines are recorded.

Some cameras can record at a slower number of frames per second. e.g. the Canon I want to get can record at 30 fps and 24 fps. At both of these speeds it may be able to record at 1080p. However, since 1080p implies 60 fps, it would be better to include the frame rate somehow, and call it something like 1080@30p (I think I’ve seen that notation somewhere).

The only video cameras that can do 1080@60p are very expensive. Over $5,000.

Well, not counting the new stuff from Red coming out tomorrow. That might be a game-changer. At least I hope so..

Imperial Asia

rae — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 14:24:34 +0000

The rondel I’ve done so far for our version
of “Imperial Asia”. Click for larger image.

We play a lot of Imperial on Friday nights at boardgaming, and recently we tried a new map someone came up with called “Imperial Asia”.

It’s nice, but the quality of the map left something to be desired, so I have embarked on the task of doing another one. Should be fun!

So to this point, I’ve got a general map of the area and an almost-finished rondel, which you see to the right. Below is a mockup of the map, which is still in the process of being traced out in Illustrator.

click for larger version

Testing, 1 2 3

rae — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 05:33:33 +0000

My site seems to be un-red-eyed.

Please leave a comment if you can see my blog. It would make me happy!

Google banned rae.tnir.org

rae — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 14:17:51 +0000

Well, I think it’s more of a combination of Google and Firefox.

My site was hacked via a Wordpress exploit. I’ve updated to the latest (I was at 2.5, now at 2.6.1), which should fix the issue.

I’ve applied to Google to get rae.tnir.org re-evaluated. But their form for re-evaluation says it will take “several weeks”! So until then, my site will be red-eye-banned by all Firefox users.

Ye gods.

2008-09-18 13:05 Update:
Found out that Google is in cahoots with stopbadware.org, and applied to them to get my blog reviewed. Their turnaround was significantly faster than that of Google (which hasn’t done anything yet). I got this email reply from them a day or two after I asked them for a review:

We have received and processed your request for review of your website, rae.tnir.org/. Google’s most recent test of your website found no badware behaviors on the site. As such, the Google warning page for your site has either already been removed or should be removed shortly. In addition, if your site has been listed in our Badware Website Clearinghouse, we will remove your site from the Clearinghouse list.
Sometimes website owners are confused about why Google placed a warning in the search results for their site. In many cases, a website run by an innocent site owner has been hacked by a malicious third party, causing the site to distribute badware without the site owner’s knowledge. If your site was distributing badware because it has been hacked, then simply removing the bad code from your site is not enough to keep your site clean in the future. You will also need to work with your hosting provider to fix all security vulnerabilities associated with your site.
Please note that we will be retesting your website at periodic intervals in order to monitor that it remains free from badware. If we find that you are hosting or distributing badware in the future, the reviews process may take considerably longer than the original review.
Answers to commonly asked questions from site owners who are the subject of Google warnings can be found at: http://stopbadware.org/home/faq#partnerwarnings For tips on keeping your website clean and secure, please visit: http://stopbadware.org/home/security
The StopBadware Team

So with any luck, this blog will be out from under Googles Red Screen of Death sometime soon.

A Qik video from boardgaming last night

rae — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 16:50:19 +0000

I use the “Qik” iPhone application last night on my jailbroken iPhone to stream some live video to the ‘Net.

You can see all my awesome videos over at qik.com/rae.

Ow

rae — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 13:31:43 +0000

I did something to my leg. No idea how. Maybe the long-ish bike rider over the weekend?

Whatever the reason, it’s now hard to walk. I may have to take time off work to let it heal, or something.

Sat around all weekend at Tony’s cottage up near Minden feeling about as useful as a doorstop. Managed to get 2/3 of the way through “The Bourne Identity” though. The book is very different from the movie. And still good!

I was amazed that I actually managed to get an EDGE internet connection up there.

Ronnie starts D&D camp at the ROM today. He’s loaded to bear with his Warcraft III Monster Manual and bag o’ dice (my bag o’ dice, actually).

David at Bat in Wasaga

rae — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 04:24:21 +0000

iPhone Updates

rae — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 15:34:40 +0000

It seems that (a) Apple is pissed at Rogers data plans and is limiting its shipments of iPhones to Canada as a result, and (b) Rogers will let you buy an iPhone on your existing plan, without a data plan.

Now, *I* would think that you would have to pay a higher price for the iPhone, since Rogers is subsidizing them with their onerous data plans, but Sergey says that you will still be able to pay the $200/$300 prices. We will see, I suppose.

P.S. This is a “blog post” submitted via ping.fm , and I’m curious how it will look..

P.P.S. This is a second attempt. Hope I can delete the first one from LiveJournal..

Moments in Time

rae — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 17:39:31 +0000

This week marks Ronnie and Michael’s respective graduations. Ronnie from Grade 8, Michael from Grade 12.

Next year they both head out to new schools, and both of them will be taking the TTC instead of walking to school. They’ll both be in classes with completely new people, almost all of whom they don’t know.

This week was the last time both of them will be seeing many of their schoolmates. And yet, they’re both somewhat unaware of all this. Luisa mentioned Michael’s reaction, and Ronnie’s — although perhaps a bit more elequent — hasn’t been much different.

I suppose it’s often the case that you can be unaware of some large changes when they resemble other, smaller changes that have gone before. Ronnie and Michael are used to starting summer vacation. It’s the end of that vacation that will really be different.

“Southland Tales”

rae — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 19:19:10 +0000

I just saw “Southland Tales” which is a mind-warping SF movie. It reminded me of “Charlie Jade”, “Repo Man” and “Johnnie Darko” (the last makes sense since it’s the same director). But before you see it, be sure to read parts 1 to 3 in graphics novel format first. The movie starts with “Part IV”.

It has some surprising names, for such an unseen movie. Sarah Michelle Gellar (”Buffy”), Dwayne Johnson (”The Rock”), John Larroquette, Christopher Lambert, and Jon Lovitz. There is a bizarre musical in the middle starring Justin Timberlake, who plays a minor character.

My favorite comment on the new hi-res galactic snapshot

rae — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 13:30:34 +0000

NASA has released a HUGE image of the milky way galaxy (396,032 x 13,520 pixels!) (yes, I downloaded all 16 full-res pieces — new desktop pics abound!), and there was news that some of the spiral arms of the galaxy may be “demoted” from bring major spiral arms. Shades of Pluto!

There was a very pithy comment on slashdot:

“two minor spiral arms of the Milky Way may be demoted.”
I suspected something like this might happen, I just didn’t dream that they’d go so far.
I mean, you have to be just a little suspicious about whether all star-forming arms are on an equal footing when you look at the names. There’s Perseus and Sagittarius. Then we get to Scutum-Centaurus, and you have to wonder if the astronomers needed a leg up in the imagination department. And then all doubt vanishes when we get to the fourth arm…Norma. Yes, Norma. Like the girl who couldn’t wait to get old enough to disown her parents, legally change her name to Chantal and get a job at the brass-pole ballet.
You just had to know they were having their doubts about arm number 4.
On a more positive note, the same bunch of guys who just slammed Scutum-Centaurus and, um, “Norma”, are also telling us that they “obtained detailed information about our galaxy’s bar, and found that it extends farther out from the centre of the galaxy than previously thought”.
A bar that’s closer to the house than you thought can’t be a bad thing. Especially when you need to walk home.
– I’ve calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.

Firefox Download Day 2008

rae — Thu, 29 May 2008 14:24:56 +0000

The folks at Firefox are trying to set a new world’s record for the number of downloads in a single day. I dunno, what’s the current record?

Okay, I got sucked into it. I even created a Facebook event for it, and joined the Facebook group.

So sue me.

And download Firefox 3 on the day it comes out!

Trying out “Disqus” for comments

rae — Mon, 26 May 2008 16:51:01 +0000

Let me know what you think of the new comment system. I’ve installed if for all zero-comment posts (which includes all new posts), so old posts with comments still have the old WordPress commenting system.

This may involve you having to create a Disqus account, but the idea is that you can use that account across blogs. I am also setting up Disqus on Tech Tok so you only have to create your account once for both places.

Leo Laporte has also set up his blog to use it. Maybe it will spread everywhere.

The idea is that your comments belong to you, and Disqus makes it easier to follow people, as opposed to blogs.

gdb_stl_utils for Mac OS X

rae — Thu, 15 May 2008 18:31:33 +0000

Oh ya, this will have a wide audience..

There’s a very useful little utility for debugging STL under gdb, and it’s called gdb_stl_utils.

However, the Makefile that comes with it doesn’t account for multiple architectures like Intel/PPC on the Mac. So I updated the Makefile and posted the whole thing on clith.com/gdb_stl_utils. I’ve mailed the new Makefile to the person who most recently updated it in hopes of helping others use this very useful tool.

GeForce 8800 GT in my Mac Pro lets me run Windows games again!

rae — Mon, 12 May 2008 15:42:35 +0000

With my new GeForce 8800 GT installed in my Mac, all my 2D window-drawing artifacts are gone, and I am once again able to play 3D Windows games (via BootCamp) without having the machine crash from overheating after 10 minutes.

So Walter, Iain and John should watch out for a new Team Fortress 2 user by the name of Clith de T’nir!

Most Romantic Books

rae — Wed, 07 May 2008 17:46:48 +0000

Not sure how I got there, but this page has a list of people saying what their favorite romantic books are.

A quick Perl script later, and here are the top books with the number of people on that page that mentioned them:

15 Gone With the Wind

15 The Bridges of Madison County

12 The Thorn Birds

11 The Notebook

8 Outlander

5 Wuthering Heights

3 A Knight in Shining Armor

3 Jane Eyre

3 Pride and Prejudice

3 Whitney, My Love

2 A Farewell to Arms

2 A Town Like Alice

2 Cyrano de Bergerac

2 Five Smooth Stones

2 Green Mansions

2 Joy in the Morning

2 Katherine

2 Love Story

2 Rebecca

2 The Flame and the Flower

So there you go.

Iron Man

rae — Wed, 07 May 2008 04:52:04 +0000

I went to see Iron Man on Thursday, the day before the erstwhile opening day.

With me were Andy, Jeff K and Craig. Overall, it was quite a fun movie, which required the usual comic-book suspension of disbelief. A quick explanation of why Tony Stark was able to ignore inertia would have been nice. “Engage inertial dampeners” would have sufficed.

Definitely recommended. I certainly enjoyed it enough to go see it again on Saturday with Luisa and Ronnie. (Ronnie had piano practice on Thursday night)

This year’s April Fools

rae — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 15:43:46 +0000

Virgin and Google team up to colonize Mars
YouTube changes all “Featured Videos” into RickRolls
xkcd goes to the wrong comic
GMail Custom Time

More as they appear..

CBC distributes “Canada’s Next Great Prime Minister” via torrent

rae — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 15:52:29 +0000

Wow, not only did the CBC use BitTorrent to distribute the show, they also encoded it as a 545 MB, 720×486 Xvid AVI (as well as a smaller, 320×240 MPEG4 version for iPods). I was half-expecting wmv or QuickTime…

And to top it all off, they put the torrent file up on Mininova! How cool is that?

Apple TV Hacking: success!

rae — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 06:11:06 +0000

I managed to get ssh working at last. And then I tried to enable USB storage, but that was a mistake. I thought it meant I could plug in a USB drive and the Apple TV would play content off of it. But no, it meant rebuilding the kernel so that any USB drive plugged in to the Apple TV would have its main disk copied to it.

The idea is that this external, much larger disk will be the new boot volume. But that’s not what I wanted at all. So the Apple TV got stuck, so .. I reset to factory settings (that’s a brilliant option, btw).

So, I know I can do it now. The scripts “out there” are pretty rough and tumble. I’m thinking I may create a Mac OS X 10.4.9 partition on my Mac Pro, just so that I can copy over all the missing frameworks and libraries so that I can get things like wget to work..

Apple TV

rae — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 19:44:59 +0000

I just popped out to the Apple Store in the Eaton Centre and bought myself an Apple TV (take two).

I got the smaller model since Apple charges over $100 for 120 GB more storage. For $143 I can get a 210 GB more storage from Canada Computers.

Many thanks to Iain, who pointed me at appletvhacks.net. It needs to be hacked, to add support for other codecs like DivX, XviD, and mkv (Merikovian? Merovincian?)

15	Gone With the Wind
15	The Bridges of Madison County
12	The Thorn Birds
11	The Notebook
8	Outlander
5	Wuthering Heights
3	A Knight in Shining Armor
3	Jane Eyre
3	Pride and Prejudice
3	Whitney, My Love
2	A Farewell to Arms
2	A Town Like Alice
2	Cyrano de Bergerac
2	Five Smooth Stones
2	Green Mansions
2	Joy in the Morning
2	Katherine
2	Love Story
2	Rebecca
2	The Flame and the Flower