The faucet, the cat and the universe

Posted on April 4, 2009 by Arthur

Earlier this week, The famous catI had the honour to replace the kitchen faucet: the original one was rusty and apparently, leaking water down under the sink. Finding a replacement is not too hard as long as you remember three things: 8 inch, three holes and teflon tape. Replacing the old faucet isn’t too hard either, that is, if you can monkey your way around underneath the sink: Plumbers have either teeny hands or mini wrenches. Maybe neither.

It has been raining all night and everywhere else the snow seems to have gone, except for around this region. The patches of yellow and green grass look promising though. The ground is still hard, so here’s hoping that the excess of melt water is flowing down hill.

Our youngest cat (previously), who panned out to be the most destructive cat I’ve seen, has one good side: she’s extremely good at finding and returning toys. I foresee a bright future for her out in the wild and I can’t wait for her to return with a deer. Or a bear for that matter.

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The mist thereafter

Posted on March 29, 2009 by Arthur

Yesterday, it was Earth Hour day, which is a WWF-supported event that urges people to turn off the light switch for an hour. While I didn’t join the call, I understand that this is a highly symbolic gesture (CBC coverage of the event). Related to this: I see that Europe finally went to Daylight Savings Time.

I have a whole bunch of older links sitting in my bookmarks and this is probably a good time to get rid of them, some of them related, some of them out of order.

Last month, I ran into the Worldfish Center, an organization that published a press release laced with pretty graphics that showed which fishing countries were vulnerable because of climate change (Summary report + PDF files).

Recently, an Edinburgh researcher came up with a number of intelligent alien worlds that may be out there. The researcher ran simulations in 3 scenarios: The first one assumed that it’s difficult to form life but that it evolves easy (361 intelligent civilizations). The second scenario assumed life was formed easily but struggled to develop intelligence. Under these conditions, over 31,000 forms of life were estimated to exist. The last scenario examined that life was passed on to planets during asteroid collisions, which led to 37,000 intelligent civilizations.

How are your GW-BASIC skills lately? Good I hope? I read this article and it threw me right back into BASIC. The article slams Dembski for not paying attention to the finer details of a BASIC program written by Dawkins to illustrate the difference between random mutation and random mutation with selection. Musgrave’s BASIC code can be found here and it’s remarkably not written in GW-Basic (oh the disappointment). However it features the use of those elegant GOTOs.

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Red

Posted on March 24, 2009 by Arthur

I can’tSomething red recall the link to this specific page where I took that screenshot, but yeah, it’s about the colour red and the emotions it invokes in men. I think the link was originally coming from Reddit (or Digg), but I’m pretty sure it’s old news because I read about this a year ago. That said, red is for “Scarlett Johansen” and “meet local snowboarders”. Really.

There are rumours that Oracle might be willing to acquire Red Hat and this probably makes sense, because installing Oracle (XE) on Debian isn’t the administrative task you’d be wanting on your plate.

Alaskan volcano ‘Redoubt’ finally erupted, exactly a month after Republican maverick Bobby Jindal’s sneering remarks about Democrats’ spending on ‘volcano monitoring’. Also, the name Redoubt reminds me of other stuff than forts and volcanoes.

Update 1: Pretty pictures at National Geographic.

Update 2: Not related, WHO issues pessimistic TB report.

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Talisman

Posted on March 22, 2009 by Arthur

Quilty as charged: I have a soft spot for good “a cappella” performances, or even better, people who can sing extremely well, either classical or popular music. A couple of years ago, I found out that the song done for the Civ 4 game was sung by a Stanford “a cappella” group called ‘Talisman Acapella’. From what I know, or what I can decipher from the online sources, is that the group is actually called Stanford Talisman (official website: warning loud music ahead…) and that, since 1989, every year new students/singers will step in and replace the ones that leave the Stanford University to pursue professional careers. Since the group ‘broke through’1 with the Civ 4 song ‘Baba Yetu’, they’ve slowly moved into publicity maintaining a Facebook group, a YouTube channel, MySpace and a permanent entry on Wikipedia.

For today’s “bridge”, I decided to go for a sample from a live performance of ‘Baba Yetu’ (30+ second sample, or click here to view the performance on YouTube). If you’re familiar with the theme song from Civ 4, the sample above will probably surprise. The performance of the song highlights something trained musicians and singers will recognize: it is well-arranged, carefully accentuated and extremely dynamic. The YouTube video shows this clearly too: notice how the singers collectively (and individually) progress through the song, appropriately falling in and ‘fading out’ at the end. Another excellent demonstration is their performance of the spiritual “Lift every voice and sing’. Music 101.

The only problem I have with a capella is that I somehow associate this with singing spirituals and (generally) religious songs. Additionally, a capella, I find, is only suitable for ‘church’-style situations, i.e., physical locations where there’s a lot of reverb and echo, as opposed to say, intimate settings. However, without a doubt this is excellent material and I hope that the group keeps on going for another couple of decades.

1 ‘broke through’ is between quotes, because the group (of course) frequently changes setup.

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Here-o

Posted on March 22, 2009 by Arthur

For what it’s worth: Don’t bother looking for a complete IDE for Javascript development. They’re out there, but they don’t work and come with a huge payload of crap that needs to be installed for your popular browser. You may just as well do that the old way: in notepad, vi or edlin and with an abundance of alert dialogs and “printf lines”.

Via Alfons and others, I ended up reading an excellent analysis of Conficker”. This is the worm that has many network people worried because everybody knows it is out there (and there’s an official Microsoft patch out for it [pretty colours there]) but nobody knows what it exactly does. There’s a doomsday thread over at Metafilter, so if you’re into reading doomsday threads, go for it.

And last but not least, there was some kind of controversy around the current Canadian minister for Science and Religion (OK, that’s a joke). I can’t remember the context, because, I’ve not been following the news recently. The discussion there (at that CBC page) ended up in a evolution vs. creationism fight which seems to show quite some polarization and discontent at both sides of the aisle.

Is Canada turning into a pseudo-scientific country? As of now, I’m not too worried about this: I don’t think that there are people who believe that the Internet was created on the seventh day or that their WiFi connection (i.e., electromagnetic waves) was provided there by Jewish and Greek gods (and goddesses).

Update 1: This just in: Stallman on JavaScript…

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A circular thing

Posted on March 15, 2009 by Arthur

I‘m extremelyA some control impressed with the Google Chrome download indicator: for some kind of reason, a circular progress meter makes a lot more sense than a linear one. Maybe it’s because of Pi.

Since I was so impressed and because it was ‘Pi day’ the other day (Pi Day), I thought now was a good time to write a component that does just that: show the progress of something in a somewhat circular form. You can find the code right here: a reminder, it’s C# and that means it is meant for .Net. I’d be really surprised if it wouldn’t work on Mono (it should) [just tested and confirmed that it works].

A couple of notes:

  • FillColor is the colour that’s used to fill up the circle
  • ForeColor is used for the Text (progress text)

The code should be pretty clear in what it does: I was planning to also paint a bunch of “spokes” in the meter but couldn’t be bothered at the end1. It shouldn’t be too hard (use the sin/cos methods of the Math class to get the right x/y coordinates).

1 Also, this would have given it the Trivial Pursuit look: Google’s progress meter reminds me of that too.

03/16/09: Introduced drawing of Text/Label/Caption.

03/18/09: Good rewrite: Mostly introduction of ‘progressbar’ like properties and methods (Value, Min/MaxValue), Marquee. Introduction of a ProgressType enumeration (maybe should use the regular ProgressbarType). Also, same license (Commercial/personal free use, but please leave the credits in).

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FFMPEG

Posted on March 14, 2009 by Arthur

I saw that ffmpeg 0.5 was released the other day (I don’t have any link here) and since my Msys/MingW environment was already ready to go I decided to compile my own ffmpeg executable.

I expected it to be ‘an exercise of eating your own hat out of frustation’, however, there are a couple of things you should do to prepare yourself:

  • Evacuate your wife, kids, dogs and cats.
  • Move your coffee brewer next to your computer.
  • Have Kleenex ready for all the spit you probably have to remove from your computer screen.

On a serious note, compiling and finding the sources is not overly hard: The hardest part is to get Msys and Mingw to work right and find the right set of gnu compilers/binaries. If you’ve got that all working, the fun part is compiling the needed packages one by one.

If I can make time, I’ll add an entry how to compile ffmpeg yourself.

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Ice, Ice, Maybe (part 2)

Posted on March 8, 2009 by Arthur

I finally figured out why help is skimpy on Wix (the Windows Installer XML toolkit): that’s mainly because the original designers of Wix don’t want you to use Wix. It’s that simple: Wix’s learning curve is so steep, I wouldn’t even recommend it if you’re not willing to spend time at it. Additionally, don’t bother looking for sample templates (that is if you can find them) or help for the cryptic warning and error messages.

On the good side, there are a couple of good tutorials that should give you some leeway in your custom install script: There’s Gábor DEÁK JAHN’s (excellent) basic tutorial on Wix, which is probably the first site you should take a look at. Additionally, for more advanced application and use of Wix, you should probably check out Alex Shevchuk’s pages: his articles are highly technical and you may actually pick up some stuff regarding the inner workings of Microsoft’s Setup Installer SDK.

Anyway: if you just figured out that you need to add an additional data directory to your application setup program and you ran into a roadblock of cryptic messages (don’t bother going in here if you’re not interested):

Continue reading →

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Savings Time

Posted on March 7, 2009 by Arthur

We’re going to DST this weekend (as shown in this picture with so many pretty colours), which came to a surprise to many. Currently, at 6:30 AM, there’s already plenty of light to shoot photos at 100 ISO: By Sunday, it’s probably time to change your pants into shorts. If I’m not wrong, Europe is still basking in the dark at 7 AM: compare Amsterdam, NL (haha intentional abbreviation pun) with Saint John, NB: there’s almost 20 minutes difference there.

The only reason why we’re going so early to DST is (of course) because of the silly US Energy Act of 2005 (previously at xsamplex). Now might probably a good time to follow-up on this.

Update 1: DST in Europe starts on March 29th.
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Blitzkrieg Bop

Posted on March 7, 2009 by Arthur

I have no idea
but your point was taken. Wait:
a Java update?

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Roll Up The Rim 2009

Posted on February 28, 2009 by Arthur

OhRoll Up The Rim 2009 Contest Rules yeah: I happened to walk downtown and found a couple of Roll Up The Rim cups laying around, which effectively means that that specific time of the year has arrived. So, yeah, the contest rules are right above (or on the right side, depending on your geographical location), they are there once again (notice that the Tim Hortons site still has the year of 2008 in its title tag).

No breakdown of winning cups per size this year: the numbers don’t look really appealing either (open these two in separate tabs: 2008 and 2009). BC, Ontario and the Atlantic provinces are the losers in the amount of winning cups, Ontario leading the pack. Alberta and that area north, south, west and east of Tikrit Calgary is the big winner this year: it looks like we see the same pattern as last year (Both Quebec and the US once again are winning out here). Be advised: If you recently moved away from Nova Scotia to, lets say, New Brunswick, just to get a bigger chance in winning something, you’ll be disappointed. New Brunswick is considered part of the Atlantic region. This is a a lame attempt to make a joke. Thanks.

The actual prize distribution hasn’t really changed either: I find it funny that the price this year is a Toyota Venza AWD V6 (obligatory link to Toyota): Since 2006 Hortons opted for Toyota cars as the first prize. Maybe that’s telling. This year (“The Year of the Ox”1), cash prizes seem to be the preferred choice and yes, Toshiba laptops. These are not overly expensive laptops and they carry that boring T3400 processor: However, Toshiba is so happy to be part of the Tim Hortons Roll Up The Rimmm-uh-whatdoyoucallit, that the laptop comes with a special sleeve (obligatory Toshiba link. with photo of sleeve).

You’ll look so hot when you bring that to school. Who’s bringing the donuts today?

1 The Year of the Ox has of course nothing to do with the topic. I just brought it up for no particular reason. Get it?

Previous entries: 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004, 2003 and 2002. Or click this tag for all posts tagged with ‘Roll Up The Rim’.

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Some KDE

Posted on February 22, 2009 by Arthur

I runKDE 4.2 a mix of Gnome and KDE on one of my computers: for a couple of Mono related things, I ended up frequently running the Gnome desktop. Just today, I decided to follow-up on the notifications telling me that I needed to do a dist-upgrade (or rather a partial upgrade), which seemed to suggest that the latest KDE version was finally making it to me. Yay.

Everytime I re-open (or rather revisit) KDE I get surprised, and today was not an exception: once again, it looks like the KDE team seems to hammer out excellent releases. I don’t see a point to go through what has changed, this something you can probably find from the release notes, which, today, I don’t feel like pointing out where they are. OK, that was a joke.

But seriously, on this lowly laptop, windows zoom by, close up, roll down and all in a sober and subtle manner. There appears to be less disk activity, which suggests that performance has improved since the latest Neon release I was running here a while ago. I find Konqueror still clunky and not so flawless yet (there’s that evil non-Flash player bit), however, the spelling checker finally seems to be working. There are still too many unnecessary messageboxes popping up (the notifications are pretty good and useful) asking me to confirm too many things at times. I definitely (still) can’t stand the “Plasma” desktop windows. For some kind of reason, I can’t stand the way how the “close bar” seem to automatically appear on the right or left side of the window.

Delicious, nonetheless.

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The reds, whites and blues

Posted on February 22, 2009 by Arthur

I slightly follow US politics now: even after a historic change of presidency, my general impression is that it’s just politics as usual and that is not really of interest. The other day, I noticed that Fox News is spearheading ‘the warnings on the wall’ shows, where the usual pundits warn of an impending US collapse (or apocalypse) because of the the ‘socialist’ tendencies of the Obama administration. Too much static. Too much noise. I predict that in a couple of years the differences between a Bush and Obama administration will be hardly noticable.

We were hit by a snowstorm last (was that Thursday) which added another 10 or 15 cms snow to the pile in the yard. There’s another storm forecasted for Sunday night, Monday morning and I bet, it will probably arrive on schedule with more of that white stuff. Where am I supposed to keep this snow now?

On the good side, there are signs that Spring is slowly turning the corner: the weather has been moderately cold at night (between -11 and -15) and is slowly becoming bearable during the day, almost sub-tropic when temperatures hit the magical 0 degrees mark.

Update 1: The official warning says 25-35 cms.

Update 2: A CBC report about the snowstorm, today (02/23/09)

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