We Saw a Chicken …

Author: scruss

  • An Adventurer Is You!

    I’ve been playing too much Kingdom of Loathing, an extremely silly RPG. Its stick-man graphics are the best.

  • Goodbye, Grocery Gateway

    It seems that yesterday was probably our last Grocery Gateway delivery. The somewhat dejected driver said that service as we know it ends on Friday. If anything of the company remains, it won’t deliver the same range of stock, and it very probably won’t deliver in Scarborough.

    Apart from their recent payment debacle (where they claimed that MasterCard had stopped a payment fully two months after the transaction — and afterwards, Grocery Gateway’s payments department was spectacularly rude to me, and gave me derisory compensation for the half day I wasted sorting out their error), we’ve found them to be useful. Most of our 40+ deliveries have been as we ordered, and on time. We’ll have to find an alternative now.

    I’m disappointed that they weren’t more of a success. They didn’t seem to advertise very well, and never played their environmental card one bit. I don’t know how many car journeys a full grocery delivery van could cut out, but it’s a sane, rational way of dealing with our pollution problem.

    Waitaminute — sane, rational, anti-pollution, North America? What was I thinking?

  • Yay, sneakers!

    I’ve ordered mine: http://www.blackspotsneaker.org/preview

  • Autumnal

    The sumachs are beginning to flame, trees are beginning to brown, and I
    haven’t seen a groundhog for days. Looks like it’s doing that autumn thing.

    Hey little leaf, lying on the ground
    Now you’re turning slightly brown.
    Why don’t you hop right back on the tree?
    Turn the colour green like you’re meant to be.

    — “Same Old Man”, The Holy Modal Rounders.

  • Photos of the future

    I’ve just ordered some digital prints from Future Photo. Their website seems to work pretty well. Let’s see how they turn out.

    I do have one complaint — they send your username and password in clear
    text by e-mail when you register. Bad futureshop, no FMCG!

  • Messages from Steve

    Got two messages from the taller Holy Modal Rounder, Steve Weber,
    tonight. He was jamming away, and recorded a great song for me, Blue Navigator.

  • Help, I’ve been traded!

    My blog appears to be a (very minor) commodity in BlogShares: We Saw A Chicken …

  • We Saw A … Beaver?!

    Highly unlikely, but I saw a biggish brown animal with a strangely
    shaped tail swimming in the Don River. Could it be Castor?

  • Get outta my way!

    Thoughtlessly Parked Cars at Burlington Station

    I walk. And when mass thoughtlessness blocks my way, I get angry.

  • Another cool thing about WordPress

    …. is that you can e-mail in blog entries. Like this one.

  • bad scene on Kennedy Road

    There’s a big do at the Salaheddin Islamic Centre this weekend. It seems that there’s some convention being held by the Muslim Ummah of North America. Yesterday, there was a small but very heated demonstration, with a group of people being very opposed to a particular person being present. Obligatory placards, shouting and police cars; you know the deal.

    I still haven’t been able to work out what this was about. If I find out more, I’ll post it.

  • Linksys NSLU2 – Network Storage for the people

    I’d been looking for a backup solution for a while, and yesterday I found it in the very small shape of the Linksys NSLU2 – Network Storage Link for USB 2.0 Disk Drives. There’s been a lot of talk recently about hacking these tiny embedded Linux boxes, but I just want to store stuff from my Linux machines and Catherine’s eMac.

    I bought it, an external USB2.0 3.5″ drive case, and a 160GB Seagate driver yesterday from Canada Computers on College St for under C$350, including tax. It took about half an hour to assemble it, install it, and format the drive from the web interface.

    I find it’s easiest to make named users — and tell the unit to make a subdirectory for that user — than fiddle about with other methods of making shares. You’ll also need to enable smbfs (File Systems → Network file Systems → SMBFS support in your kernel config) on your Linux machines.

    I have created three shares: scruss (for me), craine (for Catherine) and mp3 (for our shared MP3 collection). I have created relevant directories from /mnt, and chmoded them to the appropriate user. These are the lines I have added to my fstab:

    //squirrel/scruss	/mnt/smb_scruss	smbfs	username=scruss,password=******,rw,users	0 0
//squirrel/mp3		/mnt/mp3	smbfs	username=mp3,password=******,rw,users	0 0

    I renamed the NSLU2 squirrel to fit in with the Canadian rodent theme I’ve got going with the other machines around here.

    With Catherine’s eMac, I’ve found I have to use the OS X 10.1 / .nsmbrc method. Once you have the shares defined in the .nsmbrc file, you can call them up by doing Connect to Server and specifying something like smb://netbiosname/share, like smb://squirrel/craine.

    The NSLU2 looks like it will be rock-solid. It has a couple of quirks — it formats the drive in Linux ext3 format, it will shut down at the slightest hint of a power glitch, and it’s rather slow — but I can put up with slowness if the data’s secure.

  • Mostly working

    Okay, WordPress works now. I’m keeping the old MT archives for now, as there doesn’t seem to be a sane way of getting Apache’s mod_rewrite to work properly here. I suspect PEBCAK, probably, with intensely arcane rewrite rule syntax as a mitigating factor.

  • Under New Management

    You’ll notice that the blog looks different. I’ve changed from Movable Type to WordPress. The latter is free, and looks more fun. All I need to do is work out how to reindex my archives.

  • dark stain ahead

    To avoid the rain, and in order to become sufficiently caffeinated for work, I ducked into a Tim Hortons and opened up my Toronto Public Library book, Jane Jacobs’s Dark Age Ahead.

    I thought I heard my phone ring, and in reaching for it, I upended my almost-full medium black coffee all over the book. Horrible mess, pages stuck together, much nastiness.

    This evening I dragged my sheepish carcase into the local library to explain what happened. The only way I could pay for a replacement book was to “lose” the book. I have to say, it reads pretty well for a “lost” book, but the smell of cheap, over-roasted coffee isn’t so great.

  • nice scaling

    My Nikon D70 makes images that are too large for the web, so I have to scale them down. Most image scaling routines use simple linear interpolation, which can lose a lot of detail, but some packages use cubic scaling. This keeps most of the detail.

    I was looking for a scriptable cubic routine, and I found it in Image::Magick, aka perlmagick. The syntax is simple:

    $x = $image->Resize(geometry => '50%',
                    filter => 'Cubic');

    I used this routine to resize my 2004 Ontario Renfest pictures.

  • two cheers for sympatico

    Sympatico finally fixed my DSL problems last night. It seems that my account was set to fast mode, when the cheesy old copper we have around here really needs interleaved mode, which trades higher latency for error-correcting operation.

    I’m happy now, but why did it take two calls — the second of which I was on hold to the Bell DSL centre for nearly 20 minutes — to sort this simple problem?

  • photo printers

    I want to print some of my D70 pictures, so I asked the GTABloggers what they used:

    I’m looking for a non-proprietary upload system, so Ofoto is out. I’d like to try photocentre.ca, but I know no-one who has tried them.

  • more vawts, yawn

    boingboing picked up on Worldchanging‘s story about Former Soviet Weapon Designers Take On Wind Power, claiming ‘this one is supposed to be quieter and less hazardous to birds’. I just had to comment:

    Sigh, yet another vertical axis wind turbine claiming world-changing characteristics. Wind Sail are to be congratulated for keeping their efficiency numbers in the realms of the possible. Many companies have sprung up claiming efficiencies (Cp) of greater that 16/27, the Betz Limit, or theoretical efficiency limit of a wind turbine.

    Reducing the tip speed ratio reduces the efficiency of the device, so the Wind Sail’s Cp of 28% at 12m/s is quite a bit lower than a typical horizontal axis machine (like the Lagerwey LW900, which has a Cp of 34% at 12m/s).

    This machine is miles ahead of the modified Savonius (drag) turbines that some manufacturers are touting. But still, very few knowledgeable wind engineers would advocate roof-mounting a wind turbine. There are issues with turbulence and vibration, not to mention that built-up areas tend to be quite sheltered.

    I also take issue with their claims about fewer bird kills. Any structure kills birds. Buildings and windows kill over 5000x more birds than wind turbines, and cats more than 1000x (source: Bird and bat kills and other effects, AWEA ). It would be a very dizzy raptor that could sit on top of a running vertical axis wind turbine.

    Vertical axis machinery is not some magical energy source suppressed by The Great Conspiracy. They were the subject of huge development projects in the 1970s and 1980s. There were problems with fatigue, higher costs, and lower operating efficiencies than horizontal axis machines. I design wind farms for a living, and I don’t know of a single utility-scale vertical axis machine that is operating, let alone available for commercial purchase.

    The aerospace industries have had limited success in developing viable wind turbines. NASA, Boeing and MAN all tried developing machines, but could never bring a machine to market. It’s interesting to note that most of the successful companies now manufacturing wind turbines started out in agricultural engineering, not aerospace.

  • whew!

    Well, as of noon, the Ontario Renewable Energy RFP deadline has passed. That means I can take a short break from wind farm design.