Is there hope?

Posted on December 16, 2008 by Arthur

I‘ve been working so much on Vista and XP lately that I forgot about the release of the first beta for KDE 4.2, so naturally, I decided to download the latest binaries (“Neon”). Barring any bugs, I have to say I’m impressed. The following I felt were worth mentioning:

  1. There’s an interesting fade out from initial boot-up screen to Desktop. It’s subtle but extremely effective.
  2. The Taskbar is finally looking good, and yes, it does actually auto- hide. Grouped applications are shown actually better than in Windows: KDE shows them stacked with a number of open ‘grouped’ windows. There’s plenty of more settings you can finally set: however, I’m not sure if I like the way how you have to set and move sliders to resize the Taskbar.
  3. The KDE Main menu has been overhauled (more ‘blackish’) and there’s a (once again) subtle change in the ‘hover over’ tabs in there
  4. The ‘Cover flow’ like Screen Switcher works smooth and perfect, even on lower-end graphical system.
  5. There’s a whole bunch of notification popping up when some actions finish. I don’t like them all (the less the better), but it’s (generally) visually ‘pleasing’.
  6. Wallpapers can be made dynamic: actually, these are more or less plug-ins now, which means that you can have running slideshows and even running Mandelbrots…

If you happen to run KDE 4.1, the easiest way to upgrade is to add the following line to your sources.lst file: 



deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/project-neon/ubuntu intrepid main

Then run a normal apt-update followed by an ‘sudo apt-get install kde-nightly’. Remember to log-out and select the KDE-nightly session at the boot screen and you should be good to go.

12/23/08: KDE 4.2 beta gets high marks from ArsTechnica

Posted in Ubuntu | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Is there hope?

You asked: Creative Live 24-bits review

Posted on December 14, 2008 by Arthur

A couple of yearsCreative Live 24-bits ago, I bought a Creative Live 24-bit USB, after finding out that my latest computer’s soundcard did not include a wave-out mixer. The logical choice was to find an external USB soundcard and luckily I didn’t have to go too far (or dig too deep in my wallet). Two years ago, the Live’s went for around the 100 dollars (Canadian): nowadays they go for a lot less (the Creative site even has them listed between 45-50 dollars US). However, they’re generally considered to be an older generation of soundcards: Creative now solely focusses on selling you the X-Fi line of soundcards, which also includes a portable USB version, for a reasonable price.

But back to the Live!: It’s powered by USB, which saves you from having to use one ugly brick of an adapter. The device itself isn’t too big but is definitely not ‘wallet-sized’: it feels sturdy enough to tag along and throw around the room. Installation of software and drivers is needed, of course, and this is where my main criticism comes in: I’m generally not so impressed with Creative’s software and the same is true for the software that comes with this card. To be frank: I’ve never actually used the software because there are generally better alternatives available to mix sound and create music files (I use Audacity for this). The default Windows Mixer is replaced with the one from Creative and it’s even in use when the card is not plugged in. So, don’t expect the typical USB behaviour of ‘plug-in anytime anywhere’: if you’ve unplugged the Live and plug it back in, most likely you need to restart you computer to have your Live! sound come back (obviously, the box doesn’t come with a reset/on/off button of sorts).

The most important part of a soundcard is the sound of course: This is excellent and doesn’t disappoint. I’ve read that some people heard ‘clicking noises’ over time, but at this time the Live is still doing good. The MIDI sound handling is a bit poor, but if you don’t expect Roland SoundCanvas quality you may be able to get away with it. The card is also properly detected by many of the MID/DAW software packages out there: however, in some cases, you may need to poke through specific settings to get your MIDI In/Out going. Another nitpick is that the Live! doesn’t really have an ‘Audio in’ facility: this is actually shared with the Mic-in (The manual states this too, but I only discovered this after the fact of course).

So, if you’ve managed to find the USB version of the Live! online and you just discovered that your laptop doesn’t have a Wave Mixer, then the Live! is a good buy. If you have more money in your budget, and are a so-called audiofreak who likes to brag about the latest and greatest 7-1 Dolby system, you may want to consider investing in something else.

Minor update: I managed to get the card working on KDE too, but obviously you need to go through a lot more steps to get it actually going.

Update 2: This is probably a related post, using VirtuAmp (guitar plugged right in the box).

Posted in Hardware, You-Asked | Tagged , | Comments Off on You asked: Creative Live 24-bits review

Oh: hello, what’s your name, again?

Posted on December 12, 2008 by Arthur

I think I’ve mentioned this before, but walking in a town far away from the place I lived for almost 30 years, I keep thinking I recognize faces of people who I knew and who I’m 100 percent certain of that they definitely would not be ‘pedestreeing’ around King’s Square, Saint John, New Brunswick.

However, it would not surprise me if I ran into Alfons and then the surprise conversation would go something like this:

Me: Hey. You.

Him: Hey. Me.

Me: Hey. Me.

Him: Hey. You.

Me: I will…

Him: Call?

Me: You…

Him: OK?

And then we’d be e-mailing one-liners the whole night.

Posted in xsamplex | Tagged , | 6 Comments

A bang.

Posted on December 12, 2008 by Arthur

Via New Scientist:A Big bang researchers have worked on a (computer) model that suggests that our universe could have emerged from another collapsing universe. The researchers based their model on a theory called the Loop Quantum Cosmology, which was (originally) proposed in 2003. At the end of the article, there’s a funny quote about how these physicist came up on LQC:

“From a physicist’s point of view, it is fully justified. Mathematicians perhaps would not be amused.”

I hear that if you give mathematicians a couple of beers, you can convince them that the Earth is only 5,000 years old. I’m not joking: please try it on your local math teacher!

This is important news: there’s finally empirical evidence that our galaxy, the proud Milky Way, has a white creamy coconut center and a soft crunchy chocolate crust, that melts in the mouth, not in your hands. Or as astronomers would say, a black hole in its center. I may have mentioned this a couple of years ago, but this black hole story is actually old news, I mean astronomers were already convinced that our galaxy had a black hole in its center. Obviously, it took many years to collect the evidence for this. Additionally, witness the smartness of the Slashdot crowd:

When i heard that there were black holes in other galaxies, i was fine with that, since they are so far away. But now i hear there is one in OUR galaxy? That’s kinda scary, since its so close to us!

Oh: this Hubble telescope that they launched in the 80s, yes? It still seems to be hitting the news: this time, astronomers managed to find CO2 in the atmosphere of a planet circling around a star, what, 65 million light-years away.

And hanging around the Discovery site: Did you know that 2008 will get one extra second? I remember this happened years ago too, which is exactly the reason why I tend to be at work 2 seconds later than normal. Who else can I blame for this?

Update 1: Weird The Onion picture about science.

Update 2: Related: Astronomers dissect a black hole with. What?

Posted in Scientifically | Tagged , , | Comments Off on A bang.

Fluctuating

Posted on December 11, 2008 by Arthur

I was complaining the other day to Alfons about the weather: or rather, I think he sent me a screenshot of the long term weather forecast for this area, dryly asking ‘if I thought the temperature was fluctuating’ and ‘how this compared with Truro, NS’. Oh, yeah, my favourite part, the Canadian weather.

We had 2 good days of a fair amount of snow: one day it was 20, and just last Monday, we had 10 or so. The amount of snow doesn’t bother me: I noticed that if it snowed it was freezing cold, or rather, like in ‘February cold’ (colder than -10 degrees Celsius). And then out of nowhere, warm wind moves in, pushing the temperatures above the 11 degrees. Today is another typical day: it started cold with incidental flurries and freezing rain. From what I hear, it’s going to be warm and rainy tomorrow again.

For your information: I’ve filed a complaint at the Canadian Central Registry of Weather Makers. Wait. is that the name of a book, too?

Posted in Saint John NB | Tagged , | Comments Off on Fluctuating

A public service announcement

Posted on December 11, 2008 by Arthur

So, yesterday, I noticed that the WordPress download site was already seeded with the new 2.7 version, while the official blog was still yawning about the RC2 of that version. For no particular reason I decided to deploy it. I’m proud to announce that AHCommentCentral still works as promises, although (thanks to the different styles used in the Settings screens), it looks a kind of boring. I thought the ‘zebra-ed’ row look, was a lot more interesting.

The UI is an improvement: it does remind me of NucleusCMS at times. The graphics, and particular the colour scheme seem to be taken from that other software I used a long while ago. There was never a real reason to move to WordPress, except that at one time (a long time ago), when Alfons hosted this on Doubtful, MovableType became less of an option.

And if time will serve me right, I might even look into updating AHCommentCentral. Who knows.

Oh. Yeah: with a new WordPress, I thought it was also time to move on from Varchar, the other theme heavily based on the excellent PlainText theme (screenshot) by Scott Wallick. I thought Simplish looked excellent on mobile devices like the iPod Touch and even on your regular wide-screen monitor for your Windows, Linux and Mac freaks. Have fun and on for the 6th year. If you’re curious about the previous layouts: 2003 (a customized MovableType theme (handcrafted: look at that 2 column section), 2004, 2005(last year Doubtful-hosted), 2005 (self-hosted) (Theme: GreyAll), 2006 (PlainText-modified) and 2007 (Varchar, heavily based on PlainText).

Update 1: Some minor cleanup in the categories section.

Update 2: I see that WP 2.7 now supports automatically closing of posts. This was a feature I was planning for AHCommentCentral but which I decided against to because I didn’t see a use for it.

Posted in Wordpress | Tagged | Comments Off on A public service announcement

L’Arena

Posted on November 30, 2008 by Arthur

There are certain directors who have a knack for picking out music that goes with specific scenes. One of them is David Lynch, the other one is Quentin Tarantino. I’m not particularly a fan of Tarantino movies but I thought his ‘Kill Bill’ series were done exactly right, closely mimicking that typical 70s-like Kung-Fu movies with overdone sound-effects, hilarious unrealistic ‘gore’ (I dare say ‘surreal’) and music.

One of the scenes that keeps sticking out is the ‘Escape scene’, where the protagonist (played by Uma Thurman) finds herself inside a coffin and accompanied by spaghetti western-like music manages to dig herself out of her predicament. It’s no surprise that the music comes from the 60’s Western‘Il Mercenario’ and was originally composed by Ennio Morricone. I’ve included a 30+ sample on this page. If you’re looking for visuals, try Youtube (link goes to video with that specific scene).

I’m not a fan of Morricone’s music, although I have to admit that his music always seem fit the Spaghetti-westerns and most Europeans will instantly recognize his music, since his music is literally tied to the many Italian shows we saw during our younger years (I think of the excellent ‘Octopus’/’La Piovra’ series, for which Morricone also provided his musical compositions). In 2007, Morricone received an honourary Oscar for his music, which was presented to him by Clint Eastwood.

Posted in Past-the-bridge | Tagged | 6 Comments

In Reverse

Posted on November 28, 2008 by Arthur

I thought this article (‘Learning the iTunesDB file format’) was an excellent background on the principles of reverse-engineering existing binary file-formats. I’ve done some ‘clean room’ reverse-engineering too and at the end of the project, I was able to extract and cross-reference data from an existing accounting package. The most interesting part of the process is that after figuring out the patterns and the essential algorithms (reading and writing the proper bytes) every byte just falls into place. To this day, I can still dream up the code, which is a kind of funny. That random-looking 8 or 9 in front of each formatted numeric amount? That was just a joke from the original designers of that accounting package.

So, I have a couple of left over links I’d like to get rid of: Way long ago, I noticed that the ODF (the people who are in charge of the Open Office document specifications) announced the (initial) release of the ODF Toolkit, which includes AODL, a .Net module that supports well, you know, Open Office documents. For a complete set of features, look here.

Months ago, Slashdot featured the topic ‘Please list your Useful Stupid Unix trick’. While the discussion (predictably) heads into the typical Slashdot direction, the posting actually has some good and useful commands and hints:

I’ve seen Windows people go slack-jawed in astonishment as I ssh to the other side of the world and run X programs over forwarding.

Some refuse to believe it, others shake their heads and walk away.

And believe it or not: Unix systems have been able to do that since decades.

Posted in Hyperlinks, Ordinateurs, Programming | Tagged | Comments Off on In Reverse

Barba-what?

Posted on November 25, 2008 by Arthur

Staying on the programming topic: One of the best parts of Roundabout (previously) was the filtering mechanism: before mail was downloaded, the user could (if needed) invoke the Filter dialog box and mark which mails were going to be downloaded (or left/deleted on the server). This happened all in a thread, where connections to SMTP and POP servers were made and commands were issued, synchronously (“blocking”, so you will). The threading class that took care of this was (appropriately) named ‘TOnlineThread’ and resided in a file called TDOnline.pas.

Many times I’ve cursed the existing threading code: I spent plenty of hours fixing up the code, or rather making the code thread-safe, as in, wrapping code that calls the main-thread (the UI thread) in so-called ‘Synchronizers’. Looking through the current code, there were plenty of changes done to this unit (the CVS history only spans a short time and doesn’t count the changes made prior to January of 2005). Anyway, if memory serves well, there were issues during the sending of mail (which happened in that thread) and the update (count of left-over messages) in a mailbox (which resided on the main UI thread) and I ended up correcting the issue, soberly stating:

– FIX (Arthur): Threadsafe RefreshNodes in TDOnline + additional processing…

Which was followed by a more cryptic:

– FIX (Arthur): Sharpened the RefreshNodes/Tree traversal.

Before you click the ‘Continue’ link, you may want to have this link at your disposal, which may explain the whole gimmick below.

Continue reading →

Posted in RoundAbout | Tagged , | Comments Off on Barba-what?

On. I think.

Posted on November 25, 2008 by Arthur

Meteorites collectors, astronomers and researchers are trying to pinpoint the track of the meteor that lit the Prairies’ sky, last week. According to the latest calculations (Newtonian, hahaha), the meteor had a mass of 10 tons. I say, it was probably a good thing the meteor hit a not-so-densely populated area.

Cancer rates are down in the US, and hopefully, the same is true for other areas in the Western world. As for the US, maybe this is tied to the ‘Obama’ effect?

I’ve been carrying a virus with me the last couple of weeks and it appears that my immune system is slowly getting a grip on it. I’ve not been sick that often as relatives know: I’m fairly resistant against colds, but when it gets to me, it gets me. Maybe my system got too comfortable.

This also means that I postponed some of my coding projects, including the ‘safe translation’ of DAWG from Delphi to C#. I’m surprised how popular my wordfinders are, and have been, the last, what, 6 or 7 years? I’ve been planning to slowly move these applications over to something more reasonable, but never had the time to work on the newer algorithms. Sooner than soon, I hope.

Posted in We-reflect-news | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Prints

Posted on November 22, 2008 by Arthur

We had the first snowstorm of the year, and from what I gather, it (was and) will be a lot worse in Nova Scotia, so why should I complain about our 15 or so centimeters? I mean, I dug out more snow than that and the tiring part is not the shoveling, but that hard ice, pushed in your yard by the provincial snowplow operators.

With the first snowfall, it was also a good time to make a quick checkup on the backyard: It looks a lot cleaner with the snow on the ground. I was a kind surprised to see fresh snow tracks already: upon closer inspection, it looked like deer were trying to get to the last bits of stuff hanging in the trees.

The neighbourhood seems to tell us that we should be hanging up our outdoors Christmas lights, which we (of course) don’t have for multiple reasons. One reason is that in our former accomodations it wasn’t really safe to put stuff outdoors. The other reason is that I’ve become a lot more cynical skeptic about Christmas.

Posted in Saint John NB | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Prints

Planet 9

Posted on November 15, 2008 by Arthur

US astronomers have made the first photo of an exoplanet that makes it rounds around the star Formalhaut. It took a couple of years (and a lot of patience) to actually confirm the planet though. Additionally, another team of astronomers made a picture of 2 planets orbiting a star called HR8799 (Washington Post report). Generally, it seems. it was a good week for astronomy.

New Scientist had an article about a theory that the Earth might be in the center of a void: at the heart of the discussion is the 1998 discovery that some galaxies seem to have been racing away from us instead of slowing down. This discovery is currently explained by introducing ‘dark energy’, the energy that tends to accelerate the rate of expansion of the universe. The new theory proposes that our universe (the Milky Way) is surrounded by a ‘bubble’ that causes photons to lose energy but gaining energy while leaving this bubble.

I also read that India has succesfully landed a probe on the moon. For the next couple of weeks, the probe (‘Chandrayaan 1’), will measure the composition of the moon’s thin atmosphere.

Posted in Scientifically, We-reflect-news | Tagged , , | 10 Comments

Retro-Code

Posted on November 13, 2008 by Arthur

I was looking for older code through some older projects and I ended up looking at the code of RoundAbout, a Delphi project I headed with a German (Roland), an American (Marcos) and plenty of other contributors. I thought, I might just as well make this an opportunity to breathe new life into this specific category: There is some exciting and funny code in the project and I wouldn’t do the project good by not showing the effort to collectively create something good out of nothing.

But first: In the early 2000s I ended up looking for an e-mail client for Windows. For years I had been using Eudora, but, I got a bit tired of looking at the ads that Qualcomm pushed upon users. I initially looked at Phoenix Mail, an e-mailer initially programmed by Michael Haller which in turn was passed on to American Delphi developers. Via that mailing-list I discovered Roland’s excellent modernized branch and, as any good open-source branch, I ended up branching his version into RoundAbout because we couldn’t agree on many issues: I believed in going more in-depth (technically speaking) while Roland was more or less adopting a wait-and-see, conservative approach. Both approaches had their successes, and both our branches had attracted a variety of Delphi luminaries and dignitaries (I’m looking at you Duntemann), including offers of help from the original Phoenix Mail branch. In 2004, RoundAbout was left for what it was and like many open-source projects, it died a silent dead. However, without doubt, its code continues to live on in the original branch(es) or is probably floating around on the Internets. I wouldn’t recommend people to try the e-mailer nowadays: it works fine but might look odd on Windows XP and higher.

This brings me to the first piece of code I’d like to point at, which is the ability of adding or dynamically creating toolbars and toolbar buttons: It was heavily pushed by Marcos and it required so many code changes, that I ended up taking the challenge, provided that:

It is possible to create new toolbars and buttons: however, the maximum of toolbars should be 255, the maximum of total buttons (application wide) are 65,5xxx (the number that fits in a word).

I mean, 65 thousand and some buttons should be enough for everybody, right?

Continue reading →

Posted in RoundAbout | Tagged , | Comments Off on Retro-Code