xsamplex

It’s another year of trying to win a single donut and I bet you are about to run to the local Tim Hortons to put the statistics into practice. Hold on a second: At xsamplex, we’ll get you the numbers, once again (click for all entries).

It looks like the number of contest cups is in a downward trend which peaked in 2008. Compared to last year, the number of contest cups lost stands at 1,474,2000. The general distribution of contest cups shows only slight changes, with Ontario losing the most cups (5 million or so?) and a small rise of numbers in the Alberta, Quebec and Atlantic provinces regions. Quebec is the winner this year, but, with only 2 million more cups, I’m not sure if that’s something to celebrate.

For the 5th year in a row, a Toyota car is the highest valued prize to win: We’ve gone back to SUVs, or rather, the RAV4 has returned. The last time the RAV4 was the main prize was in 2005. This year, there are 40 cars given away, which is 5 more than last year, and all these extra 5 can be win in Ontario. So, if you want to win a car, it looks like Ontario is the place to go for. I bet you’ll look great in your RAV4, 4-wheeling down Toronto’s Younge street.

The other prizes haven’t changed: the numbers are all the same and the distribution has changed in favour of Canadians. The Alberta region seems to be the overall winner here (with the Atlantic provinces next in line): I could make a joke about this (“The Americans get less prizes because of Sidney Crosby”), but the numbers for these two regions just don’t look all too appealing. And again, this yeaer, we see that Toshiba provides the computer gear. That is, compared to last year, this year you can win a sub-par Intel Atom-based netbook. If you win one of those make sure you look happy.

So, generally, I think this year, I’ll stick to instant coffee with a croissant. You should probably too.

I‘ve only sporadically followed the Olympic games: most of the time fellow travelers or colleagues kept me up-to-date about the latests. Since there’s only one day left or so, a summary of things that caught the eye.

First of all, before the games officially opened there was the luge accident involving a Georgian athlete. The day after the accident, the authorities reported that the athlete was at fault. However, from what I gathered, is that for the lugers’ safety, the IOC decided to slightly change the track (or rather, change the starting positions for lugers).

The talk in Canada, is of course, the Hockey final which puts Canada against the US. Earlier in the Games, the two countries also played against each other and the Canadians lost.

There was this weird incident in speedskating (the 10 kilometers for males): the favourite for this distance lost his medal because of an error switching lanes, which was blamed on the trainer who also happened to be a professional speedskater back in the past. That said, the US press core felt slightly vindicated (too bad that the IOC has been serving take-down notices for this particular video).

And I guess the most stunning report in the media came from the CBC, which dryly reported that ‘an emergency shipment of condoms’ was headed for Vancouver. Because, if you won a gold medal (or if you didn’t) you should still consider doing it safely.

Last weekend, I decided to pick up my Delphi compiler and work a bit on Fandro: in real life, I found out that I wanted to be able to launch Fandro from Explorer’s context-sensitive menu and henceforth, I worked on adding support for this.

I always thought doing Win32 was fairly simple in Delphi. Additionally, Borland used to have excellent demos and sample apps with full sources. However during this short coding stint, I admit, programming in Delphi ended up being sort of a pain, mainly because I’ve been by Visual Studio. And I always thought the language’s assignment statement was silly. There’s another thing of Pascal that has bothered me for ages: the fact that to return values from functions you can use the special ‘result’ variable or the function’s name. As in:

function MyOperation(a, b : integer) : boolean;
begin
   result := (Ord(a > b) = Ord( b < a))
end;

function MyOperation(a, b : integer) : boolean;
begin
   MyOperation := (Ord(a > b) = Ord( b < a))
end;

I don't consider myself a Delphi programmer anymore: however, don't you just love the part where compiling code actually means generating a stand-alone Win32 application?

Note: I believe that Delphi statement above holds the answer of life and it's this year's Valentine's present to you.

In a couple of days, the 2010 Winter Olympic games will start: this year, Vancouver, BC, Canada will host the games. If you’re into this, the full schedule is of course readily available online. Which reminds me that a couple of months ago, the Olympic torch did pass by Saint John, NB. On November 25th, I witnessed the Olympic procession on Prince William’s: this was quite a non-event. On the other hand, it was fairly early morning then.

The first Olympic Games I remember is the 1980’s one, hosted by the city of Moscow. This was at the height of the Cold War and for some reason, that year, was also the first time countries were calling for a boycott of the games, mainly to protest the invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviet army. Countries that boycotted the games organized their own games, which became known as the ‘Liberty Bell games’. The Dutch did send a delegation to Moscow and while I don’t think they won any gold medals, I do remember the silver medal of the marathon athlete Nijboer. Vaguely though.

I haven’t decided if I’ll be following some of the games: Most likely not. The only interesting sport would be speed skating, I guess. There was a time that only Dutch and Norwegian speed skaters took the major prizes. Hopefully that has changed.

My WPS54G just died yesterday: this is a Linksys (nee Cisco) Printerserver that supports a whole slew of USB based printers. I had it tied up to my Canon MF5650 printer and if I remember correctly, installing was as easy as.

So, to the local computer grocery chain where they only had the WPSM54G (Linksys info page) for a price of 89.99 CDN. The sad part was that we had to look for the device because obviously, not too many people will buy these printer servers. That is probably because most printers nowadays come with an ethernet connection. Additionally, installing printer servers can be confusing and I suspect many people will just give up after a couple of tries.

Here’s my first tip: You do not need to install the Linksys drivers or software. On all your local computers that need to have access to the printer, you only need the proper printer drivers and most likely you already installed those drivers.

So, here goes again:

• Wire up the device up to your network. By default it will automatically get an IP address (DHCP): it shouldn’t be too hard to find it on the network.
• Open up the ip address in your favourite webbrowser: leave the username empty and enter the default password (“password”).
• Set the IP address to a static IP address, change the password and set the wireless router properties. Here comes something that got me stuck first. For some reason, it’s supposed to work on wireless and not on wired. I have not been able to get it to work on both: so, make sure you set the proper gateway and credentials to your router. After you installed the firmware, take out the wired ethernet cable.
• Make sure you get the latest update of the firmware: 1014 is so shoddy that it didn’t detect my Canon printer. Version 1019, made the difference for me.
• At this stage, it should be time to start setting up your Windows machines and the principle is the same as described in the posting regarding the WPS54G, that is in 5 easy steps: 0. Add Printer 1. Local Printer… (uncheck auto detection) 2. Create a new port (TCP/IP) 3. Enter IP address (generic network card) 4. Select the proper printer and you should be go.

Afterthoughts: We had tried to print pages on our old printer server the day before and the moment the 1019 update was applied, these prints made it through. Note that I used the same IP address for the new server: so the moment the printer started spitting out pages from yesterday, I knew that the printer should be working, despite what the Linksys software suggested to me (“No Printer found, LOL, try again”). In short, the software is extremely lacking here and you can take my advice above at heart: There’s no need to install that Linksys crap load. Make note of the printer support page though (if you have a multi-functional printer…)

I guess, this is 2010’s first ‘Past The Bridge’ posting, and today’s band is ‘The Fall’.

There are two things I can tell you about The Fall. First, nobody knows them and second, the band’s music is extremely hard to categorize (Wikipedia). There’s no doubt in my mind that Mark E. Smith (the band’s leader and sole inspirational force) is still around and that he picked up new band members all along. After all, The Fall, that’s the band that has more ex-members than any band in popmusic’s history (50 or something?). The last thing I heard from the band was that during the 2006 US tour, 3 band members either got fired or left the stage in an incident that included a banana peeling thrown in Smith’s face. And if that’s not enough for you, Mark E. Smith’s antics are detailed and set to film in the movie ‘The Wonderful and Frightening world of Mark E. Smith’, which you can see in full glory on YouTube. Call him brilliant or mad; at least Smith has been consistent in his music, and that all along since the 70s.

Picking out the right song was quite a task too but here goes: the
traditional 30+ second sample of ‘Edinburgh Man’, a smooth nostalgic eulogy of the city of Edinburgh, Scotland. For a second, I was considering ‘Hostile’ from the ‘Light User Syndrome’ album, but, I couldn’t get it over me to put this right on this blog. ‘Edinburgh’, comes from the album ‘Shift-Work’.

I discovered ‘The Fall’ during my Roskilde 96 visit (previously) and I do remember that the show was delayed for the longest time (Roskilde organizers came up on stage to apologize multiple times). I can’t remember the particular reason, but it wouldn’t surprise me if there was some kind of argument between the members and Mark Smith. But the moment the show started, I was sold (and so were other festival-minders). Eccentric but excellent live performance. I do believe I shot pictures of the band, including a pretty close-up of Brix Smith.

So, generally, if you’re into post-punk music and don’t mind a ranting Mark E. Smith, The Fall’s music is excellent. Smith has a knack for writing biting rants and mumbling lyrics (I mean, he doesn’t sing) about current political and personal affairs , plus he always seems to find excellent session musicians. That is, until, he gets bored with them and shoves them aside. After all, ‘The Fall’, that is the wonderful and frightening world of Mark E. Smith. Since 1976.

One of Brooker’s ‘Screen wipe’ episodes reminded (a whole playlist on YouTube) of the many nuclear war shows (fiction and documentaries) that were shown in the Eighties in West European countries. Some of the shows I’ve mentioned here before. Most memorable was ‘The Day After’ and that only because it was shown in school to either scare us or scare our enemies. Remarkably, I don’t remember ever getting training in school about how to proceed during and after nuclear explosions but the most stinging reminder of the constant threat were the monthly (weekly?) noon test sirens.

Some events that seem to tip the balance to an all out war were the election of Ronald Reagan (relations between the west and the USSR started to cool down, the start of the rhetoric), the massive demonstrations against cruise missiles in West Europe and the arms race, with most notably, the ‘Star Wars program’.

I also remember the apparent sudden deaths of all these Russian leaders and the moment that Gorbachev was elected as the supreme USSR leader (Reykjavik summit). From then on, the Cold War slowly faded away to the background.

Thinking back, or rather, being reminded of those Eighties, brings up so many memories of events that heightened the threat level, that I wonder if we would have been prepared for an all-out war. Unlikely, I guess: and maybe as a young kid, it was probably a good idea not to think and worry about this.

Yesterday, we drove into town. The night before it had snowed and the roads were somewhat cleared, that is, depending where you were. Unsurprisingly, the closer we came to SJ, the better the roads. If only NB’s Department of Transportation used better paint for their road markings.

The main political topic in this province is the sale of NB Power to Hydro Quebec, which has been met with protests. At one time I was asked my (foreign) opinion about the sale: There are people who say a privatized net would spur lower prices or more competition. This is probably true for physical products, but for services, I highly doubt it.

I’m extremely fortunate for not having been seriously ill for ages or been prescribed medication for years. That said: My wife finally found a good family doctor apparently: that is, almost 2 years after moving to NB. I find the quality of health-care reasonably good over here: however, during our visits to walk-in clinics, I’ve not seen so many doctors with so many different opinions about my wife’s medication. If you can’t bring up a slight of compassion (for your patients), maybe you have picked the wrong profession.

I work in both environments: that is, whenever I think there’s a need for working in KDE or Gnome, I just logout and change session (I have both window managers installed). But that wouldn’t really answer the question, I guess.

Obviously, I really like KDE 4: it’s generally more streamlined than Gnome and while the new Plasma ‘paradigm’ was not really well received during launch, it has improved a lot. However, it’s still buggy, which is the reason, why I mostly login to Gnome. Gnome, is not without issues either: compared to KDE it’s visually less appealing and (from a user-perspective) less intuitive. At one time, I strictly logged into KDE because of Amarok: KDE’s music player is superior to the bunch of media players that come with Gnome.

So, for me the answer to the question ‘Gnome vs. KDE’ would be Gnome. We’ll see how the KDE team fares in the next (K)Ubuntu release.

Aghast. Is there no
notepad on my Ubuntu?
Wine to the rescue.

Obviously, a lot of people helped in getting Notepad to run under Wine.

There is nothing as glorious as opening up a terminal session on my spare Ubuntu laptop and log right into my server. That is, without downloading either Putty or a host of other MingW/Cygwin utilities on Windows. You guessed it: My main Windows computer is out of working order and until then, I’ll be working on my “Ubuntus b0xen”. No Steam games, no iPod Touch no nothing. Not that I miss iTunes.

There’s actually no real excuse for me not using this Ubuntu laptop more often: both Firefox and Chrome work like a charm and appear to be faster. I never really had problems using OpenOffice or VLC (remember this is a 512 MB Centrino laptop) nor did I ever run into heavy multi-tasking issues when programming. I noticed that ever since I upgraded to Ubuntu 9.10, MonoDevelop 2.0 was added as the default package, which is something I have not touched for ages (I run a development version of MonoDevelop).

This reminds me that my favourite photoeditor, RawTherapee has officially become open-source, and yes, it runs very well on this machine. I have to admit that it looks weird running it in 1024×768 resolution, but as long as it works and I can get my raw photos to work.

Earlier this week I found out that the French director Eric Rohmer (Wikipedia) died at the age of 89. Ebert has an elegant in memoriam: additional commentary at Metafilter.

My first introduction to Rohmer’s movies was (I think)‘Conte d’été’ (1996): The other movies in the Tales of the Season series followed soon after. What makes Rohmer’s movies likable are the long dialogues and the surprising twists his characters have and take: for example, in ‘Conte d’été’, the main character evolves from a shy guy into a full-blown womanizer. Rohmer’s take on relationships in all his movies is quite on the mark: that is, in real life, falling in love and dealing with mixed emotions about loved ones is a lot more complex than what Hollywood movies portray to us. Simplicity sells a lot, obviously, and that was not the business Rohmer was in.

With the death of Rohmer, humans have indeed lost one of the greater humanists in the movie industry.

I finished my first ‘Dragon Age’ (official site, Wikipedia) run earlier this weekend, so I thought a write-up was an excellent start of the year of 2010. You may have heard of ‘Dragon Age’, most likely because it received excellent reviews. Metacritic (currently) has it listed with an average of 91 (right here), where reviewers have lauded the game with so many good reviews that it makes you wonder. Let me quote Eurogamer UK, which is a review that will reveal my thoughts about the game:

In its desperation to infuse this setting with “maturity” – be it of the sober, political kind, or the game’s painfully clumsy gore and sex – BioWare has forgotten the key ingredient of any fantasy: the fantastical. Without it, you’re still left with a competent, often compelling, impressively detailed and immense RPG, but it’s one that casts no spell.

And that’s truly it: while extremely detailed (story-line wise), the game feels boxed. If you’ve played ‘Oblivion’ or ‘Fall Out 3′, you’ll find that ‘Dragon’s Age’ is extremely linear. Ferelden is not a place you wander or roam about, it’s a place where you move from A to Z.

It has it’s good sides though: If you like long elaborate storylines, you’ll enjoy ‘Dragon Age’. If you like elaborate interaction with your party-members (and Dog), ‘Dragon Age’ will probably satisfy you. If you love micromanaging your strategy, well, if you’re a programmer, the ‘Tactics’ screen offers a variety of commands to mop up enemies in no time. And since nobody in your party really dies, there’s no way you end this game unsuccessfully.

So, the game is highly immersive and entertaining, if you’d like. However, on my famous ‘Frustration level’, I’d give it a 7: Don’t be surprised if you need to do some parts over and again: battles can be unpredictable and repetitive at times making it less fun at some stages (the ‘brood mother’ battle for example). It’s highly re-playable though, which is a plus for this game and (obviously) that is something you don’t really see a lot in the current gaming world.