Found on the flipside of a DVD case:
This film is presented in “Widescreen” format. The black bars on the top and bottom of the screen are normal.
That sucks. I was about to call Blockbuster about this problem.
On a serious note: I see that some people don’t expect to see black bars as illustrated by these articles at Apple (Apple DVD Player: Black Bars at Top and Bottom of Screen and Apple DVD Player: Why Black Bars Surround the Picture).
I almost forgot to mention that it’s May 4th today, again. That means, if it’s your birthday today, it’s, let me think, I do remember this, on the same day as Pia Zadora’s!
On the serious note: It’s also Remembrance Day for the fooks across the ocean. If you speak Dutch, more over at nu.nl. Alfons reports about a special National Remembrance Concert, which featured the last performance of the Ebony Band in Amsterdam1.
1 Corrected and edited.
What you need to know before you plan to work on Serial port communication:
0. Create a good test environment. You may need com0com (earlier) which can simulate a loopback between 2 ports.
1. Carefully choose between non-blocking and blocking. You save yourself a lot of pain when you thought using non-blocking was going to make work a lot easier. If you’re not familiar with the blocking vs. non-blocking approach, consider the table below the fold. (More on blocking vs. non-blocking). Holy wars have been fought between proponents of either form.
2. While doing your serial port stuff, also note that ReadLine has a BLOCKING nature. This is not mentioned in the original FrameWork SDK help files, but yes, it is mentioned in the SDK online. There’s no problem using ReadLine in your OnDataReceived event, but you must clear the port’s/socket buffer first before you can close your port/application (you’ll get specific errors).
3. There is no 4.
A couple of things that need to be mentioned: Before I signed off last night, I was surprised about the flood of Digg postings that had to do with that HD-DVD. There’s no way to link to a specific day of postings at Digg, but I think this one (link to one of the founder’s blog) should give you a good overview what happened last night. The whole event was actually noticed by our beloved BBC, where it was reported as a ‘Internet user rebellion’. Quite true. (Metafilter and Slashdot coverage).
The TPMMuckraker is on to something too: For weeks (months?) the site has been monitoring the AG scandal and the recent postings all seem to have been quoting fired attorney-generals, all of them detailing or rather, specifically linking political motivations in this scandal. Carol Lam’s case (“DOJ official to Lam: Leave in Weeks Not Months”), Cummings case (DoJ Official to Cummins: Circumventing Senate Was “White House Plan”), Paul Charlton (USA: DoJ Official Wanted to Keep Me Quiet) and Daniel Bogden (Fired USA: DoJ #2 Said Performance Not Reason for Firing). Excellent reporting for a change.
I’ve not been able to follow the French presidential debate between Royal and Sarkozy (CNN link), but the result of the elections is going to be (probably) more of interest for my European relatives. Surprisingly, no mention of opinions on the future of Europe. That is unless I’m missing something1.
Two weird incidents: Earlier, I decided to look for a new version of The Gimp for Windows and ended up at WinGimp.org which provides downloadable Gimp versions, however, for a price. Right: I’m not sure if they’re related to the Gimp organization itself: so, if you need Gimp for Windows, go here, or download it straight from the here. The official Gimp for Windows homepage is right at Sourceforge. You can’t miss it. Notice that official Gimp packages are MD5-ed.
The second incident was that I decided to check out FoxTorrent. I was utterly surprised that the XPI installed an executable called RedSwoosh (which apparently seems to run a webserver/main torrent code). I don’t like that.
Staying on the software path: I read that Adobe has open-sourced the Flex project (more details). I’m not sure what Flex is all about, but if I remember correctly, this is what supposed to go head to head against Microsoft’s WinForms. Sample applications in Flex. And Slashdot discussion. Where does this leave Java?
Links then:
1. Earlier I mentioned “America at a Crossroads”, the excellent series broadcasted by the PBS. It appears that you might be able to find them as torrents online.
2. Via 3 Quarks Daily, too many ways of lacing your shoes. There are 2 trillion methods of tying your shoelaces.
3. You may have heard of Canada’s new enviromental plans. First they were (accidentally) faxed to the opposition. And then today there was a heated exchange between the Environment minister and well-known Canadian environmentalist, David Suzuki. What you may not have heard, is that the (Progressive) Conservative premier of Newfoundland and Labrador Danny Williams and prime minister Stephen Harper don’t really seem to get along together. Williams has gone so far by encouraging voters in his province not to vote for Conservative candidates in the next elections.
4. US then: Tenet blasts Bush administration. I saw a brief section on CNN about this but turned it off fast after John King appeared to be blasting Tenet. Quite confusing. Has CNN suddenly become ‘non-liberal’ media1?
5. Via Gothamist, this excellent live performance of Bjork (Earth Intruders) at SNL’s. I always thought Bjork to be a genius: of course she’s weird, yes, but she’s definitely unique and always at the forefront of changing the direction of popular music. Excellent. And oh. Yes: she makes no sense.
And that’s it for Friday the 13th.
Update: Looks like this is the official clip for ‘Earth Intruders’.
1 It just came to me that this has nothing to do with pro-liberal or anti-liberal slants of the mainstream media. US broadcast corporations are just commercial institutions and evidently, they follow the ‘mainstream’ trends because that’s where the money is supposed to be made.
Alfons made this great photo of 2 cellos (violins? It’s actually hard to guess the size of them in that picture), after attending a concert in The Netherlands. I guess copying is the highest form of flattery:
I was forced to use manual focus because the AF wasn’t able to distinguish details [dark]
Via CBC (article), I found out that Microsoft’s MSN Video relaunched (uh: beta it is). It’s heavily relying on the same company’s Soapbox software (here). And I guess you may just as well go to the official announcement, which is over at the Soapbox blog.
Is Microsoft too late to jump in the Video hosting boat (after Google, Yahoo and even AOL)? To be honest: I’m not so sure. At this moment it looks like Microsoft is aiming at hosting news snippets from a diverse amount of news organizations. Clips like (at this moment) the new discovered planet and Rosie, for the people who don’t watch the news on television. I guess it will work for thousands of people who come home late from and need a quick ‘headline’ ‘snack’. Notably is that this site uses Flash to play movies which I find ironic at least.
Update: Sony to reveal YouTube-like video sharing site in Japan.
Yo. Boris Yeltsin died. 
I can’t exactly remember how he became president of Russian Federation but I recall seeing video of Gorbachev’s last words as the official leader of the former CCCP. That was probably close after the August Putsch of 1991. Those were weird days.
I was briefly following the Tillman hearings (Crooks and Liars video) and read up on several statements (and more photos). I picked out the photo above because normal Americans are expected to make a sworn testimony and US government employees are apparently not. And then the LA Times comes with a report that says that the Office of Special Counsel will investigate the political activities of the Bush administration. (Oh dear)100
Closer to home, the CBC wants you to help find the Seven Wonders of Canada. You can nominate your favourite landmark right on that page too.
And, I guess, the biggest news comes from Europe, where astronomers claim they’ve found a planet that most likely resembles Earth and is only 20 light-years away1. The discovery is, for sure, a milestone in planetary research and the search for extraterrestrial life.
1 A light-year is the distance that light travels in one year, which approximately is 9.45 trillion kms (9.45 x 1012) (wikipedia). There’s nothing magic about this number: if you take the speed of light (in m/s) and multiply it with the amount of seconds in a year you get 299792458 * 365 * 24 * 60 * 60 = 9.45×1015 m, which we can convert to KMs by dividing that number by 1000 (Google calculator)
I added a minor project to the ‘Current Project’ section (Right here), a program in C# that generates classes based on table meta-data. It’s simple and it works: there are a couple of tricks how to collect metadata from ODBC datasources.
Currently, I used ‘hardcoded’ datatype conversion (SQL_xxx -> Dot.Net type): I was in a rush and decided to (conveniently) forget about using reflection. That said, I keep forgetting about my linefeeds [sorry], but then, your Visual Studio formats everything nicely out anyway.
This reminds me that I’ve downloaded ‘Orcas’ yesterday, Microsoft’s CTP of the new Visual Studio IDE. It comes with a visual ‘class designer’ that allows you to create classes from tables like the generator above does, but obviously (at this stage) that feature only supports the typical MS-like database interfaces. Not much of a help if you work in other environments. The only interesting items are the new C#/.Net language extensions, like LINQ and XAML. And yes, the Dev Team finally decided to add a Compile to Target feature, which allows you to compile and link your executables with other .Net Frameworks.
Meh.
Back 
in 83 or 84, Tim “Split Enz” Finn’s had a hit with ‘Fraction Too Much Friction’ in Europe (or maybe it was only a hit in The Netherlands 1). I mention this song because out of the blue, the last couple of weeks, I have been humming this song’s melody too frequently (20+sec fragment).
So, what’s so special about this song (Finally now at YouTube)? Nothing really: except for that it has a catchy tune and it has this elaborate musical arrangement that includes saxophones and other horns. Quite different from the standard 80s hits. Oh, and if I remember correctly, Tim Finn’s voice was often compared with the voice of that other great 80s singer Stevie Wonder.
1 Browsing through those Historical (Dutch) Top 40 pages linked above, I think the youth of those days were exposed to (generally) rather obnoxious music. It makes no sense. Maybe the Eighties made no sense.
Talking
about the Manji documentary: there was some typical footage of Amsterdam from bars, cafes where you allowed to smoke pot and yes, its famous Red Light district. And of course the canals with the boats and the pretty houses. It briefly brought me back to the very first interesting computing book store (I guess the store is still there) that we frequently visited because the city we lived in had no real good book stores with a computing section. Not even a single issue of the Dr. Dobbs Journal.
I’m also pretty certain that our first venture to that ‘sinful city’ was around age 14 or 15 and I’m not sure what the parents thought of that. Obviously they must have thought that we could take care of ourselves. I mean, what could happen to a pair of teenage twins venturing about through Amsterdam?
And then that reminds me that the Dutch have the most amazing dairy products: If you’re a foreigner and make it to Amsterdam, skip the Red Light district, run to the nearest supermarket and buy yourself a carton of vla, yoghurt with oranges (really) or lemon ‘kwark’.
All week, 
the PBS has been broadcasting an excellent series about the challenges we face in the world, particularly the conflicts between the religious and the secular worlds. Watching the series, I thought that the name of the series was a bit unfortunate: The majority of the independently produced movies do not all concentrate on specific US affairs. Yesterday, the series kicked off with an hour long documentary by Irshad Manji.
The second part was dedicated to Indonesia, in which the country was held as an example of religious tolerance and moderation despite the general view Westerners have of that country. That was apparently until (ironically) the fall of the Suharto dictatorship in 1999. That page linked above, points to some excellent background information on Indonesia (NYT!).
