Noel IV

Posted on November 4, 2007 by Arthur

We Track #4seem to have lost shingles and a tree (one of its main branches seem to have broken off) but we haven’t lost power. Nova Scotia Power reports plenty of areas with no power, including Truro. I guess we’re lucky, for now (I’m assuming that we may lose power in case power needs to be restored to other areas, since we’re apparently on the main grid).

A couple of news articles for your interest: The CBC reports that as many as 170,000 homes and businesses have lost power and suggest that for some of them, power may be restored in a couple of days. CanWest notes that the strongest winds were reported in Cape Breton, where winds speed hit as high as 140km/h.

Oh, and while CNN and BBC are currently lacking news reports, it seems that the news of Noel hasn’t gone unnoticed in Europe (via Alfons, Dutch only).

Update 1: Updated article at CBC’s re: power issues.

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Noel III

Posted on November 4, 2007 by Arthur

According Noel trackto the news, NSP crews are allowed to use their own judgement to repair lines as long as wind gust don’t go over a specific speed (sustained): I see that some of the earlier mentioned areas all have their power restored while new areas with outages seem to pop up every hour.

Locally, the same pattern as usual: wind at times gusting, pockets of rain (“patterns” as one of the TV forecasters calls them) with casual power flickering. One good thing about it though: As I mentioned before, it was rather chilly this morning: Noel brings (at least) some warm temperatures, albeit for only a couple of hours.

This reminds me: Officially, Atlantic Daytime Savings ends tonight1, meaning that we’ll have an extra hour sleep. If you think of it, in Atlantic Standard Time, the storm is going to take ‘one hour longer’ to move out of the Maritimes: if meteorologists had never started to use UTC (Coordinated Universal Time), you could say that hurricanes can travel through time.

1 Clocks falling back means more pedestrians killed.

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Noel II

Posted on November 3, 2007 by Arthur

I just Noel trackwatched the special news bulletin and it looks New Brunswick is going to get the brunt of the rain and wind (image via StormAdvisory, via Ruk). It’s going to take a while too, for Noel to make its way through the Maritimes: earlier forecasts suggested sunny and dry weather for Sunday morning. If I’m not wrong, the forecast now warns (besides of heavy winds) for a whole lot of rain, between the 50 mm to 60 mm for our area.

At CTV, there was the (inevitable) comparison between Juan and Noel: A manager at the Hurricane center in Dartmouth said that Juan was a lot more compact and (for the remainder of its track) did not expand as much as Noel has been doing the last hours (compare here). Apparently, this surprised weather forecasters and watchers in the US, who are now reporting that New England is being battered.

1 NS Power’s ‘Outage information’ page (which won’t be much help if you’re out of power).
2 At 8:57PM: Wind is gusting and storming. Outages reported around Bridgewater, Chester, Dartmouth, Kingston and Middle/Upper Musquodoboit, with reported estimated time to restore ’11/06/2007 11:30PM’. I think somebody at NSP made a typo there. Obviously crews will be waiting for the storm to cease down.

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Noel, then

Posted on November 3, 2007 by Arthur

I have Path Noel (time in UTC!)been dreading this, but yes, I’ll be monitoring Noel today. I think earlier weather reports suggested that Noel was going to make landfall in the south-eastern part of Nova Scotia: currently, it looks like it will be more to the west of it and (probably) will cross either the Bay of Fundy or portions of New Brunswick. (Add.: Around Port Maitland, which is slightly north west from Yarmouth).

Notice that Noel is moving at a speed of 48 KM/H, which is approximately the same speed as Juan moved. If I have more details of where the storm will make landfall, I might make better estimations when we will be hit hard here in Truro. It will be interesting to see (and read) other people’s experiences (I’m currently only following Ruk’s blog).

So, there it is… that is until we get the expected power outage.

Additional notes: We had a clear dry morning and I think rain started at and around 2:00 PM, currently heavy at times with winds picking up speed. It’s still cold outside, though.

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Review: WPS54G

Posted on November 3, 2007 by Arthur

For aWPS54G long time I’ve been looking for a print server so that I can access that Canon MF5xxx printer from the network, without resorting to leave a computer on all day (you know, via the regular shared printing mess). I finally managed to get the Linksys WPS54G (product description) from the local computer chain. It’s an older model so it is not too expensive (they go for 69 to 79 CDN). If you need access to a multi-purpose printer (you know the ones with faxing and scanning), you probably want to look for the WPM54 series of this device.

If you’re familiar with Linksys devices, the setup is always the same: generally, you grab an extra network cable, connect the device to your computer connect to the web-based configuration screen (using the default IP address, which is generally at 192.168.1.1, or the IP-address provided in the manual) and start changing settings. This isn’t true for the WPS54G: the default IP address is nowhere to be found in the manuals, so the only way to find out the device’s IP address is to start up the Print Server setup program and follow the on-screen instructions. I stopped halfway (right before it wants you to setup the wireless section) after the setup program revealed the Print Server’s IP Address (you guessed it, the device will look for a DHCP server first). This is where I changed the IP address and other settings straight from within the device’s web server (which will generally require a restart of your computer).

If you’re not familiar with networks and networking, the setup program will probably do for you, I guess: however, if you’ve found the IP address of the WPS54G, I’d recommend to assign a static IP address to this thing. You may need to make changes to your router, though.

The next step is to configure your desktop computers: there’s a portion in the setup program that will do this for you too but you can ignore that. If you’re on Windows, make sure that your computer’s workgroup matches the one you’ve setup on your print server. For all Windows versions, you generally go to Printers & Faxes, select ‘Add Printer’. When the Printer Wizard comes up select the ‘Local Printer attached to this computer’ (make sure to uncheck ‘automatically detect and install’). Then, ‘create a new port’ (type of port TCP/IP). In the next screen enter the IP address of the Print Server (use generic networking card/port), select the printer from the printer drivers list (notice that most likely your printer driver has already been installed because you have been printing to this printer before…) and then, print out your test page.

For the rest, the WPS54G works as promised in the flyers: it’s reasonably fast but it gets a bit hot though after printing a couple of jobs. You may also wish to upgrade to the latest firmware (you can download the latest firmware from here). You can configure a couple of goodies or ungoodies from within the device’s webpanel: I think I saw a couple of settings that allow you to send print jobs via e-mail, which may fill your uh, needs. And that’s basically it.

Nowadays, a lot of printer models come with networking capabilities. If you’re looking around for a new printer, it’s a good idea to consider one with an ethernet connection.

Feb 2nd, 2009: It looks like the WPS54G died on me. I’ll have to either look for the same model or see if I want to go look at the M version

Feb 4th, 2009: And here is the WPSM54G.

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Don’t Fall, Do Winter.

Posted on November 2, 2007 by Arthur

I mentioned this a couple of weeks ago, and I discovered my gmail account finally has IMAP functionality too. Actually, I’m not using it as of yet. If you’re not familiar with the background of e-mail: your ISP generally provides basic POP3 services. POP3 is just a protocol to store and retrieve (download) your messages to your desktop computer. The moment you download your messages, references to these messages are deleted (not completely true: your local law enforcement authoritities may require ISPs to retain your e-mails for a while). This means that if you’re using multiple computers there’s no way to share your mail over these computers. IMAP, however, centralizes your e-mail storage and allows e-mail programs to synchronize e-mails over several clients.

Alfons forwarded me a link: One of his photos was selected to accompany an article about Fall and bicycling at About.com (which is part of the New York Times, since, when?)

And on a good note: it looks like we’re going to bunker down for the first major tropical storm (Noel!) of the year. This is going to be fun. No. Really.

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Twiggy vs. James Bond

Posted on October 28, 2007 by Arthur

So, I was Pizzicato Fivebrowsing through my music collection and found myself listening (and afterwards looking for) some Pizzicato Five (or rather ‘Les Pizzicato Five’) songs. You’re probably familiar with that song called Twiggy (30 second sample): you may have seen the absolutely hilarious (and serious apparently) video, or if you’re from a younger generation, you may have heard this song in the remake of ‘Charlie’s Angels’.

I’m not sure how I ran into the Pizzicato 5/P5 (I think early 1998, Alfons bought a P5 sampler with various songs, including the ‘Twiggy’ song and ‘Baby Love Child’). I know the context though: I had just discovered ‘Yo La Tengo’. Their records were released on Matador and it was that very same record company that launched the Pizzicato Five in the US and Europe.

Most of Pizzicato Five’s songs and videos can be found on Daily Motion and YouTube, of course. Daily Motion has a clip of the P5 doing ‘Baby Love Child’ acoustically while claiming that “This is the only song we can play”. Hilarious or brilliant, you pick.

So what is it that I like about the P5? Most songs sound heavily ‘programmed and sequenced’ and remind me a lot of the tunes created for older Japanese games: those cartridges that came with cassette tapes with the game’s music but then performed by hundreds of Yamaha FM synthesizers. Not to mention that mix of Japanese and broken English lyrics (take for example ‘Darlin of Discotheque’). Fun and absurd: Only in Japan.

1 P5 lyrics and translation (excellent translations actually)

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That famous painting (and other links)

Posted on October 28, 2007 by Arthur

Via the BBC I discovered that DaVinci’s ‘Last Supper’ has been digitized and posted to the Internet (actual site). According to the article, the produced image is about 1600 times detailed than a photo from an average DSLR: what can you say of a 16 bn pixel image. Wait I know: can you compress it? The actual site (see earlier link) is hard to get by today (sluggish, rather) but is worth a visit.

Argentina is about to choose a female president: As it looks like right now, the next president is going to be the wife of the current president, mrs. Cristina Fernarndez de Kirchner. There’s a comment from a BBC reader (a certain Brian from NY, USA) that made me laugh out loud:

The husband wife political swap reeks of corruption and nepotism

How about Polish evil twins?

The Dalai Lama has started his visit to Canada. The Buddhist leader addressed a (sold-out!) crowd of 8,000 people at the Ottawa Civic Center. Later this week, the Dalai Lama will meet with Stephen Harper. Also fom the CBC some excellent analysis on this visit.

Update: It looks like Kirchner won the elections.

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Das Assortiment

Posted on October 25, 2007 by Arthur

Assorted links, noteworthy and that:

Just last week, an EA executive said that rivaling console makers should concentrate on making a single gaming platform. According to him, incompatible consoles made life harder for both developers and customers. Not surprising, the article reminds of this one time Microsoft initiative to create a common home computer platform, called MSX. Hey, you’ve heard it here before!

Sandisk is on a litigation rampage. It filed suit against 25 companies, claiming that they infringed on patents for a technology that most likely was not invented in their labs. The sun is free and that.

Via Alfons, I found out Google’s ‘Current Time Trick’, which allows you to find out what time it is in your favourite international city or capital of the world. If you weren’t already aware of this, to do this trick, you MUST HAVE INTERNET ACCESS of course. I throw in another trick: Windows only, if you keep the alt-key pressed in and click an icon on the desktop it will open the icon’s (program/shortcut) property-sheet. See also ‘Shell extensions’ in your Windows SDK book.

So, hey, KeePass, the password keeper software I have adopted since ages, has moved to .Net, and to be precise, its 2.0 version is written in C#. The source packages compile perfectly (without problems) in any Visual Studio version as long as you don’t forget to enter the right key number. For the unmanaged libraries, you may need to have a C/C++ compiler.

And last but not least, Gimp 2.4 was officially released yesterday, which comes with many exciting features, like… well, see for yourself.

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Wolkers

Posted on October 24, 2007 by Arthur

Last week, Dutch author Jan Wolkers died (Wikipedia on Wolkers, warning: possibly NSFW because of a picture of author posing with a bare-naked lady). He was buried today (warning: Dutch language alert) in what newspapers call a well-attended funeral.

I mention Wolkers here because he was mandatory reading material in Dutch literature classes: His most famous work, of course being, ‘Turks Fruit’ (‘Turkish Delight’) eventually made it to the big screen in 1973, directed by Paul Verhoeven. The book (written in 1969) crosses plenty of boundaries, from morals, sexual topics to cancer (a topic that was literally a taboo to discuss in the Sixties). It’s an excellent book, though: I always thought ‘Turkish Delight’ to be the classic example of a book that just didn’t need to be filmed. After all, the lively acting of the two leading actors (Hauers, Van Der Ven) in the movie quite distract… Oh wait: CUTE KITTIES!

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What, Salamander?

Posted on October 15, 2007 by Arthur

By coincidence, I ran into videos of a guy completing the MSX game ‘Salamander’ (Salamander at Wikipedia). The video is in 4 parts and doesn’t include the very first stage: movies 1, 2, 3 and the end stage, 4. I discussed this game earlier: yesterday, last year and the year before that. Do I see a recurring pattern here?

There were a couple of things I recognized while watching those movies: I could identify most of the player’s actions. One of those actions is to spread out the ‘options’ [or clones as they were called too, so once in a while] as wide as possible so that every corner is covered by your firepower. I also recognized at what point ‘enemies’ would come from behind, a thought I find creepy and that only because it has been too many years ago.

While I’m on this MSX topic: In the early 80s, the MSX was heavily pushed by Microsoft (the company wrote the operating system [MSX-DOS at Wikipedia] and the BASIC programming language) under the slogan ‘one standard for computers’. I discovered this old video in which a very young Bill Gates explains why the MSX computers (both hardware and software) were the ‘logical next step’ in home computing.

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Shoot-em-ups

Posted on October 14, 2007 by Arthur

Earlier this Salamander!week, we were looking for co-op type of games for the XBOX: we weren’t looking for the typical ‘splitscreen’ first person shooter, so Halo and that kind was out. Eventually we settled on ‘Mortal Kombat: Shaolin Monks’, which allows 2 players to work their way through all the levels. This ended up to be quite fun but at times, say uh, tedious and repetitive. I noticed that there aren’t too many co-op games out there: a good reference I found in this About.com posting, ‘Top Ten Best Co-Op Games on XBOX’.

This also reminds me of the question asked at the local EB Games: where are the typical Shoot-em-ups arcade games for the XBOX. I mean, games in the style of Salamander, Nemesis (Gradius as many other people may know this game for) and R-Type. Glancing through a short-list of games (all of them tagged as ‘shoot-em-up’) seems to suggest that nowadays a ‘shoot-em-up’ game equates to a first-person shooter game. I guess, semantically that would be correct.

Update: More on ‘Shoot’em ups’ at Wikipedia.

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Evil feral stuff

Posted on October 13, 2007 by Arthur

I have NSPE 2007not really been following any news but ‘skirmished’ through some of the Nobel prize announcements: Doris Lessing won the one for Literature. In the Physics section, the prize went (deservedly so) to two scientists who were instrumental in the development of hard disks. But the biggest surprise was the announcement for the Peace prize, which went to both Al Gore and the IPCC (Nobel Prize website).

Feral Pigs On A Rampage: I can’t wait for the 100th installment of the movie based on a true story that made the headlines in 2007! The most notable quote comes from a ‘Boar Buster’ who equates hunting pigs to ‘guerilla warfare’:

I need to utilize the information that I gain from the local population and then to be able to effectively react to that information to respond to the incursions from the feral pigs.

What he needs is smart bombs.

I also read an article about the environmental issues concerning the Three Gorges Dam (Wikipedia). I only mention this dam because, well, it’s so prominently featured in the Civ IV game. I find that there’s some irony in ‘building a dam to provide clean energy’ versus ‘the dam could cause landslides, soil erosion and pollution’.

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