Ice, Ice, Maybe

Posted on February 21, 2009 by Arthur

Everytime a Wix script (Windows Installer XML) fails to compile, it logs ICE errors. For some kind of reason, whenever these errors or warnings pop up, I keep humming the tune of Vanilla Ice’s “Ice Ice Baby” (Youtube, if you’re so obliged).

I have always been a fan of NSIS (@sourceforge), the Nullsoft Installer System, but I hear that NSIS’s installers don’t run 100% flawless on Vista systems. Wix then, and that’s not because it’s the best system: it’s slow, clunky and the errors are highly Vanilla Ice, Baby.

A couple of years ago, I used to use InnoSetup, but nowadays, I find it too tied to the Delphi language: There’s no doubt in my mind that Embarcadero has great plans for Delphi, but their “reasons why you should buy Delphi” remind too much of the old ‘slogan’ days. You know: “RAD”, “productive”, “rich” and “ease”. I don’t want that: I want Push-Button Spreadsheet Power.

And shit, yo.

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Sardines, cans, computers

Posted on February 15, 2009 by Arthur

A couple of daysSardines in tomato-sauce ago, I was watching Planet Earth (BBC’s award winning documentary) and I noticed one of the documentary’s crew member trying to though out a can of sardines (see photo). We used to eat that stuff too, that is, on white bread and that. I don’t recall seeing it too often in our kitchen, so I wonder if it was (regularly) part of my dad’s yearly ‘Christmas package’1. It’s not that bad as it looks like. Seriously.

I have been running Windows Vista (64-bit, represent!) lately (the last three months or so) and don’t have really much to complain about except for that, yeah, it doesn’t run some of my old stuff (Delphi 7) and it generally feels ‘unorganized’ or ‘inconsistent’. My biggest pet peeve is Vista’s Reliability Monitor: its concept makes totally no sense. What is that saying again? Lies, damn lies and statistics?

A couple days ago, I marked ‘Fandro’ as a legacy project. I have not looked at the program’s sources for months and I’m not even sure if I still remember how it exactly works. I’m currently considering in changing the license for the program, provided that I can find a way to properly clean up the code and that. After all, my Delphi 7 copy doesn’t run under Vista 64.

I’ve been steadily working on Convendro (my FFMPEG front-end). I was planning to do some extra stuff this weekend, but decided against it and started up cleaning and reorganizing the code. There are still some open things I have to set my brains on: for example, I’m considering supporting other encoders, which will require changes to the way some of my Preset objects work. But yeah, I’ve been converting older avi files to mp4s (for my iPod Touch), just to see how it holds up against WinFF, Videora and others.

1 During Christmas, Dutch employers give their employees a box of ‘goodies’.

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Debian 5 (“Lenny”)

Posted on February 15, 2009 by Arthur

Via Slashdot, I found out that Debian “Lenny” (or 5.0, so you will) has been released. On February 14th. I can feel the Debian love at Slashdot.

Seriously, this looks like a major release (or setback if you’re in the other camp), with features like KDE 3.5, OpenOffice 2 and, yeah, oh, dear, I know where this is going to, why, Debian, why? From the earlier mentioned/linked to interview with the Debian Project Leader:

TR: But have you ever considered a Gnome-like approach to releasing – that is, always release after 6 or 12 months, and stick steadfastly to that?

SM: So far within Debian we’re happy with the ‘release when it’s ready’ approach. We like to do stable releases, it’s very important for us and to our users, but we want to make sure that it’s right. We can aim for a particular date, but unless we get a lot of buy-in and know for a fact that it’s going to be ready, we’ll happily let it slip another couple of months and make sure it’s good.

On the flip-side, Debian’s careful release schedule at least ensures that users won’t get the KDE 4.0 and other bleeding-edge crap: By the time KDE has matured, Debian user will have a working desktop environment. And as they say, when packages land in Debian ‘stable’, they’re most likely stable.

I also see that the website finally contains that note that you (only) need the first CD to install a standard Debian install. To find out what’s new in Lenny, check the Debian Wiki. Previously on xsamplex (“Etch”, “Sarge” or just all related posts or tags).

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Against The 70’s

Posted on February 15, 2009 by Arthur

The only Against the 70s reason to get Mike Watt’s very first solo album, “Ball-Hog or Tugboat” was because his name had popped up on Sonic Youth’s ‘Whitey Album’ (and others). If I remember correctly, I wasn’t overly impressed with Watt’s album: It features a whole pot stew of musicians (Sonic Youth, Eddie Vedder) except for the onions. What. Huh.

From that album, the only interesting song is ‘Against the 70’s’ (30+ second sample), which features Eddie Vedder on the vocals and the onions. The only thing I can say about the song is that to this day, I have no idea what Vedder is singing about. However, for some kind of reason, I find the song amusing in the light of the the current US corporate mess: a CEO invokes the 5th amendment in a tainted peanut scandal that killed at least 9 people and the current banking crisis.

What’s more to say?

1 I used a generic album sleeve: I was kind of surprised to see the actual song appear on a Pearl Jam collector

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FFMPeg III

Posted on February 8, 2009 by Arthur

Note to self: Meh... Or Yay.the source version of ffmpeg comes with h264 presets. Earlier, I mentioned where to get the ffmpeg binary from (note, as far as I can see, the last build was done in 2008), so there may (indeed) other recent versions hanging around somewhere. The presets are in ‘ffpresets’ directory: Most of them seem related to x264 encoding.

I also noticed that the commandline parameters seem to change at the whim of the developers. I already ‘compensated’ for most of these issues, but was rather surprised to find that my ‘latest’ SVN build wasn’t so ‘recent’. Alright, at least we took care of that during the initial design stage.

For more details on specific iPod based command-line arguments, Robert Swain’s ‘iPod video guide’ got me past most of the initial encoding issues.

Added screenshot (see above): Lets see how good the commandline arguments are…

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Links go here

Posted on February 6, 2009 by Arthur

I was playing with Mono last night, only after I found out that it supports static compilation which makes Mono a lot more compelling for going cross-platform. Much to my surprise, I found out that some of my (personal) applications came unscathed through the Mono wrench: that is, they run and impressively, in some cases they do what they’re supposed to do. If I have time during the weekend, I’ll see if I can put some side by side comparison images together.

Back to physics: The Physics Factbook lists facts only with some hilarious sample calculations, like ‘the speed of a subway in ‘Batman Begins’, the speed of a ‘Rogue Bludger’ and the ‘Force of a SuperHero’. Not all of it useful. Of course.

I was duly impressed by this set of images of Earth (Warning: might load slowly). All images seem to come from the Earth Observatory and some of them make good background/wallpaper.

If you’re into American politics (and the current Obama administration): A couple of weeks ago, the New York Times featured Barack Obama’s top-advisers, aides and members of his administration. For some kind of reason, some photos look unreal (creepy at times). Unintentional, I gather.

Noteflight reminds me of a sequencer (Musicator GS) I used to program my Roland SCC-1. Noteflight is a site that allows you to write music online and (oh noes) share them with others. It looks neat, but I’m not sure if this concept will be a money-maker. That said, yeah, what happened to Musicator GS? Wait, maybe the company that made the programstill exists (the price hasn’t changed either, after all these years…).

Update 1: Recent Slashdot discussion about Mono.

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The Googles

Posted on January 31, 2009 by Arthur

I think The Googles is br0kensome kind of rollout of Google’s ‘warning harmful site ahead’ feature went amuck this morning. Please refrain from clicking the link that says ‘This site..’: it’s inaccessible because I suppose everybody in the world is trying to find out what went wrong.

Your trusty Google engineers are on it, and if not, now is a good time to do some snow shoveling if you’re living around the eastern coast of Northern America.

Thank you, and have a great day.

11:41 AM: looks like it was fixed while I was shoveling snow. Coincidence? You decide!

Update 2: Best comment ever: “Is google doing this to me because I’m an atheist?”

Update 3: At the BBC’s, “‘Human error’ hits Google search”.

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The Other Third Kind

Posted on January 31, 2009 by Arthur

I‘m not sure where this all came from but this week it appears that ternary logic is the craze on reddit (proof 1 and proof 2). The first link goes to a short Wikipedia article about the Russian’s (successful) attempts to build a ternary computer (as opposed to the binary-based computer you’re reading this on). The other one goes to a scientific article in praise of the ternary system, which points out the drawbacks of the binary computing. To sum it up:

The cultural preference for base 10 and the engineering advantages of base 2 have nothing to do with any intrinsic properties of the decimal and binary numbering systems. Base 3, on the other hand, does have a genuine mathematical distinction in its favor. By one plausible measure, it is the most efficient of all integer bases; it offers the most economical way of representing numbers.

If you’re all for doing math during the weekend, an excellent article can be found right here

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Spring? Is that you?

Posted on January 28, 2009 by Arthur

You can almost hear Spring coming! There’s 10 – 15 cms of snow going to be piling up tonight. This means we finally get a break from those -20 degrees mornings, because it will be a hot Winter day with temperatures around the -5 degrees! Yes!

And then in the morning, the snow will slowly change into freezing rain as the temperature will creep up to the 0 degrees (subtropical temperatures, no really), possibly to +2 degrees. Oh, then the storm will move away and the temperatures will sink down the drain, back to the double digits (minus) again. Oh noes…

Wait a second: didn’t I see the same pattern a week or so ago? No Spring in sight, just yet, then. On the plus side: at least the freezing rain will make everything look like a shiny ice palace.

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FFMpeg II

Posted on January 25, 2009 by Arthur

I haveOh Dear been making small progress on my own front-end for FFMPeg (earlier on xsamplex). Earlier I was rounding up the serializers (data persistence, data schmersistence): the threading code was finished months ago. I just have to connect the last dots, which is basically user interface stuff. Most likely I’ll end up redoing some of the serialization but it’s, like I said, pretty much done.

This reminds me of a couple of things: The FFMPeg developers maintain a list of software venders that violate the software’s license (GPL). Their list (“Hall Of Shame”) can be found at the FFMPEG website. Just a couple of seconds ago, I saw a google ad (see picture above) and I thought the name in that ad rang a bell. Oh noes, they’re in the issues trackerz!

I also noticed that a lot of people ask for ‘how to track progress FFMPEG’ and they end up at the very first post I wrote on interfacing with FFMPEG’s command-line. This is not too difficult and requires parsing of the error output (you probably need a state machine too). At one time, a programming board linked here with pointers how to track the frames and translated that to time, which they basically extracted from the bare information that I put in my sample code. I can’t find the link though, so will add that at a later stage.

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This. means. Winter.

Posted on January 18, 2009 by Arthur

The last couple of days I had the tune of the game ‘This Means War’ (Microprose, 1993? 1994?) in my head and that, generally, is not a good sign.

I mean, from Thursday to Saturday the thermometer hit a new low with 30 degrees Celsius at night and in the early morning. If you can’t imagine how that feels, lets say it this way: -19 degrees is a lot warmer than -30. You can also easily tell the difference between the two temperatures: if it’s -30, whatever you breath out will freeze right on contact with the cold air. This doesn’t happen rightaway at -19 degrees Celsius.

There were also early warnings that we’re were going to get snow on Monday (tomorrow), but today, I have already cleaned the deck twice. Tomorrow it will be a bright white day, I think.

But I don’t want to close on a bad note, though: As they say in the US, ‘the state of the climate of New Brunswick is strong’. For example, I was always convinced that February was the coldest month of the year: However, Weather Canada says that statistically (the numbers, the numbers), January is the coldest month:

January is the coldest month in New Brunswick… [ ] … At Edmundston, the January mean temperature is -12.2C. As we move south, however, this coldness is gradually tempered by the effects of latitude and, to a greater extent, the sea. Along the south-eastern shores, the January mean is around -7.5C.

Uh, although I think they have to include this years temperatures. That will probably bring the average down to, a uh, slightly bit more.

Posted in Saint John NB | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

Web Traffic

Posted on January 18, 2009 by Arthur

IConsolidate Statisticst’s that time of the year again, and a quick summary of last year’s statistics for this domain

As suggested last year, December 2008 pageviews hit beyond 100,000 mark: either directly or via any of the popular search engines. My prediction (that it was going to be earlier than December) was wrong though: Only January came as close to the 100,000 mark with ‘only’ 90,966 views (50,985 single page requests). However, the percentage of visitors that come via referrals has gone up substantially if compared to the regular views.

Over the year, the most popular search term is ‘the people are the heroes now’ (which tops on the Googles, I noticed). Initially, the search terms ‘pico salax’ dominated in both January and February of 2008. The rest of the year it was a fight between that ‘heroes’ thing and ‘serialport C#’. Apparently, there are a lot of people who look for the LinkSys wps54g printer device: most of them look for either a review or the default IP address (for the ones to bored to look it up, it tries to get an IP from a DHCP server). And way later in 2008 (November and December), people were looking for ‘Toshiba TA9’ reviews. I gave mine away in December and since the laptop wasn’t part of Toshiba’s official line that year, I assume others gave them away too. For what it’s worth: it’s is an excellent laptop.

I find it curious to see that there’s a huge dip in June 08: The regular ‘holiday’ dip always seems to occur in July and August. The other curiosity is that while Internet Explorer is obviously still the leading browser, both Firefox and Safari (KHTML) are solid 2nd and 3rd. I don’t expect Firefox to take over Internet Explorer: the browser market is too fragmented, particularly after the introduction of Google’s Chrome.

Update: I noticed that OpenOffice has changed the default colours for their charts.

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Heathrow, sucks and then III

Posted on January 17, 2009 by Arthur

My Heathrow sucks. No, really. favourite peeve is a rant about Heathrow, London’s premier airport with those long line-ups, confusing pedways and oh-so helpful security guards (earlier on xsamplex). And irritating survey people who question you why you didn’t buy that backpack even after you punted that the British pound is a bit overpriced. So what else is there to bemoan about?

Runways!

On the bright side, if the British Tories win the next elections, they promise to scrap the plan, which will keep Heathrow in the top 10 of most hated airports in the world.

01/28/09: It’s going to be a third runway.

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