Tag: rant

sound of a brand new world

I’m liking In Rainbows. But sick of folks kvetching about the perfectly adequate bit rate.
Thinking of torrenting flacs made from the mp3s under the guise of a perfect bootleg. Would look forward to the musos banging on about the much improved fidelity. Losers.
But that would be too much work. Mustn’t betray the expectations of society on my generation.

that’s just great

I’m trying to book tickets for Catherine online at aircanada.com. The site does something bad in Firefox, so the helpdesk person said to use Safari (after suggesting “Tools -> Internet Options”, which in my case I have not got), which is supported. So on I go to the site with Safari, and I’m redirected to:

Unsupported Browser Warning. We have detected that the browser you
are using is not able to view some of the more advanced elements of our website, and may prevent you from completing your booking.

Supported Browsers:

  • Internet Explorer 5.5, 6.0 and above (Windows 98 and higher)
  • Netscape 7.2 (Windows 98 and higher)
  • Firefox 1.0 and higher (Windows 98 and higher, Mac OS X)

Yup, so the browser I had been using is supported, but the one they recommended isn’t. After many retries (‘You failed to check Futile Checkbox #36, and therefore must restart your booking’) it finally worked. Took the best part of an hour. The booking is almost as bad as the flying.

can’t get here from there

I was trying to send a largish promotional image to our marketing department yesterday. It was too big for e-mail, so I put it on the department share, assuming that marketing could read it. Nope. Moved it to a company FTP site. User has no access to ftp. In the end, I had to send it on a CD, even though I’m pretty sure it originated somewhere inside the company.

I also had to point an (internal) reviewer to an engineering report on our servers. Again, it’s on a share – you know, those things that people are supposed to be able to, y’know, read. No dice. I think the reviewer ended up requesting hardcopy from the original consultant, even though I know the file’s on a server in the very same building as the reviewer. Aagh!

If one company that spends a truckload on IT can’t get communications right, there is no hope for us.

the beast of the bios

I now have a 16:9 LCD monitor for the front room computers. The Ubuntu box needed a little reconfiguration of the X Server to work perfectly, though I think the bandwidh for 1440*900 might be a bit high for my old KVM, as I’m getting some sparklies on solid colour.

The mini-ITX box was another story. It resolutely refused to see the wider screen. Then I found out I had to update the BIOS. Yuk.

Since Catherine is of the teacherly profession, she bought a USB floppy drive with her iMac five years ago. The drive hasn’t seen much use, but it was essential here. First I had to find a floppy that worked (discarded a couple), then I found that Windows XP’s “make bootable floppy” option doesn’t actually make a disk that boots. I had to go off to bootdisk.com to find a super-minimal floppy boot image. Once I got that, I installed the bios tool and the flash image onto the floppy, and rebooted.

At this point I got really annoyed. The bios tool linked from all the VIA pages is too old to recognize the new bios file format, so exits with “It is not Award BIOS” error message. Once I found the right link (thanks, filupn), I was in business. Or was I?

I then discovered that my SP13000 had its BIOS protect jumper on. This meant dismantling the box. For most PCs, it’s not such a big deal, but for mini-ITX, it’s a horror. I had to remove the DVD drive, the hard drive, the PCI card and riser and many cables just to get down to the motherboard. Putting it all back together was hard, with the expected amount of squtcha, squtcha‘ing on the cables to get everything in.

The BIOS upgrade, the machine rebooted, and now all I need to do is update the graphics driver. Unfortunately, there are many that are described as the VIA/S3G Unichrome Pro Integrated Graphics Driver. Argh.

Almost as good as “Keyboard Missing: Press F1” …

Bought an RJ Tech DVD player today because it has VGA output, and we have a spare 19″ monitor. It seems that you need a composite video display to be able to use the on-screen menu to select VGA Out on this unit. This is teh smrt programming.

Update: Yup, the RJ Tech RJ-800DVX does need to have the VGA output enabled from a composite video source. This is very strange, as the composite does seem to work with the VGA enabled, so why not enable both out the box? I’m glad I still had my Plextor TV tuner from my abortive attempts to run a PVR. I hooked it up to the PC and DVD player, fiddled with it until I got an image, then selected VGA video output. It works beautifully now, playing every region of DVD, MP3 CD, and downloaded MPEG I can throw at it.

Update #2: Just got this e-mail from RJ Tech:

N/P won’t solve the problem.
You need to press V-mode to change the dvdplayer setting to VGA mode.

I’m sure I did this and it didn’t work, but props to RJ Tech for answering in one business day for a $50 player.

Update #3 – 12 August:  I’m now on my third RJ-800DVX. The first one fell over last night, with no disk being recognized and a nasty screeching sound as it tried to seek. The one I got in return from Canada Computers was DOA with the same problem. The new unit is quite different – it has a much cheaper looking remote, and now has a SCART socket as well as VGA on the back. This one works, for now at least.

oh no, wait, this is even more moronic

I was mildly incensed to see an ad truck tootling about downtown. What was even worse was that it advertised cleanourair.com, a site purporting to help individuals reduce their carbon footprint.

Get this: the founding sponsor of the site is VisionAdz, a company whose sole purpose is to have ad trucks tootling about downtown, polluting our air and my eyes.

Bill Hicks was right about advertising types.

flying sucks

Flying – especially to the US – is such a tawdry experience. You trail out to a part of town that noone would otherwise go to, you wait in line, ticketing systems malfunction in ways that airline staff accept blindly, you wait in line again, a bored immigration official grills you half-heartedly, you wait in line again (this time without shoes), then you look forward to some dinner in the departure lounge – and have to make do with some cardboard pizza, since the only other choice is a hockey bar. And all of this is a good 90 minutes from your departure time.

Why does anyone put up with this?

your vote counts – or does it?

I was a little bemused about Ontario wanting 21 extra MPs, so I did some sums to see how many MPs each province/territory should have:


 2005 Population ‘Fair’ Ridings Actual Ridings %age over/under represented
Canada (total) 32,270,500 308 308  
Newfoundland and Labrador 516,000 5 7 +42%
Prince Edward Island 138,100 1 4 +203%
Nova Scotia 937,900 9 11 +23%
New Brunswick 752,000 7 10 +39%
Quebec 7,598,100 73 75 +3%
Ontario 12,541,400 120 106 -11%
Manitoba 1,177,600 11 14 +25%
Saskatchewan 994,100 9 14 +48%
Alberta 3,256,800 31 28 -10%
British Columbia 4,254,500 41 36 -11%
Yukon Territory 31,000 0 1 +238%
Northwest Territories 43,000 0 1 +144%
Nunavut 30,000 0 1 +249%

The population data is from StatsCan for 2005, and the riding counts from Wikipedia, and checked on CBC’s election 2006 site. My analysis is a bit simplistic; everyone counted as population gets the same federal representation.

Ontario, BC and Alberta are getting stiffed. Quebec is the fairest of them all. But if you really want your vote to count, and you can’t handle the Territories, move to PEI.

GPS Central: in stock, with a silent “not”

For the upcoming midwestern trip, I’d ordered some Mapsource maps  from GPS Central to help navigate across the mitten. They said they were in stock; indeed, they still do at time of writing:

gps central

I was very disappointed to get a note today saying that they were really out of stock, and they can deliver after the time I need it. GPS Central had previously been great, but they let me down by misrepresenting on their website. I cancelled the order.
Prairie Geomatics came to the rescue. They’re shipping tomorrow, for the same price (and cheaper shipping). I spoke to a real person to confirm.

a pox on nonstandard USB cables and those who would create them

I’m trying to get all the bits of my Sony Cybershot P100 kit together, and I can’t find the dad-blamed USB cable. It’s a weird connector, and two reputable camera dealers have cried ixnay on the vailabilityay. So I have to find it.

I have already turned the house over looking for it. Yes, I know that the recipient could just use a card reader, but it wouldn’t be so good.

Gah! Things! They’ll get you in the end.

more on WordPress dates

I got sick of the annoying date display bug, and so dug through the default theme files looking for specific references to date formats. And there were many …

I found that, instead of using the WordPress the_date() function, there were many calls to the_time('l, F jS, Y'), which forces a specific date format. If you replace instances of the_time('l, F jS, Y') with the_date(), your date and time format set in the Options panel will work as expected.

How hard was that? Not very. How easy would it be to be modified in the default template?

in and around the van

Spent a pleasant, if damp, day scooting around Vancouver and environs with Dave. After a quick tour of Granville Island, we headed off to the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia. We then had lunch at Fuel, which is extremely good.

We had to work off lunch somehow, so we hiked around Lynn Canyon Park, which includes the nifty and shoogly Lynn Canyon Suspension Bridge. Back at Dave & Leanne’s place, we decided on dinner and a movie, but I had to bail on the movie ‘cos my cold was getting bad.

Vancouver is so green. I like it.

Anssi, not ANSI

Note to IKEA: while cheese has many excellent qualities — nutrition, sustainability, yumminess amongst them — it is not a suitable material for making nuts and bolts. While building an Anssi bar stool, I managed to round out just about every fastener, despite using good tools.

Building the Anssi was especially frustrating, as it’s the only IKEA piece I’ve ever built that had such poor tolerances that everything needed slackened off in order to make the next part fit. It’s built now, though, and hasn’t imploded from internal stresses (yet).

I bought it as a banjo seat, for while I was at Casa Wakefield in Missouri the other week, I noticed how good a bar stool is for comfortable playing.

Costco Photo Centre, part II

So I got the photos back today. The service is pretty quick; I sent the order at 16:45, and had a ready-for-collection confirmation at 10:41 the next day. After braving the lines at Costco (no fun), I had a look at them.

The prints are pretty good; colour’s bright, everything’s sharp, and there’s no obvious digital artefacts. But I got a bunch of dupes (maybe those failed uploads didn’t really fail at all). If I needed pictures again in a hurry and cheaply, I might go for Costco, as long as it wasn’t for anything really important.

I’ll still thinking about a networkable photo-printer, though. CompuSmart had a demo HP Photosmart 8450 for cheap, but it had no cables or PSU, so was pretty useless.

Costco Photo Centre: cheap, but stupid

So I’ve got the holiday photos, and want to print them for those that like that. I’d used Future Shop in the past, but Costco is offering such cheap prints, I thought I’d give them a try.

Probably a mistake:

  • Their drag and drop uploader is an ActiveX control that only works under IE on Windows. Use any other browser, and you get presented with an old-school HTML form. For 94 pictures, that would get dull quickly.
  • The uploader transmits several images at once. It seems that if any of the uploads should fail, all the files uploading at that time also fail. Uploading a few at a time doesn’t seem to help much; around one in ten files will fail randomly.
  • While the uploader does warn you when an upload fails, it’s up to you to remember which files haven’t worked. Clicking Retry just takes you back to the uploader, and since it’s an embedded applet, there’s no browser history to take you back to note your failed uploads.
  • The albums store files in the order uploaded, and can’t be changed.
  • Long file names get truncated, and then get uselessly used as the title on the back.

Still, I’ll let you know how it all went when I get the prints in a couple of days.

in the running

Almost ‘Best of The Year’ time. In the running are:

A Hawk and a Hacksaw – The Way the Wind Blows
A.C. Newman – Souvenir of Canada – EP
Beck – The Information
Calexico – Garden Ruin
Casper & the Cookies – The Optimist’s Club
Colin Meloy – Colin Meloy Sings Shirley Collins
Eels with Strings – Live At Town Hall
Elf Power – Back To The Web
Erynn Marshall – Calico
Faun Fables – The Transit Rider
Grandaddy – Just Like The Fambly Cat
Grant-Lee Phillips – nineteeneighties
Hidden Cameras – Awoo
Joanna Newsom – Ys
Jolie Holland – Springtime Can Kill You
King Biscuit Time – Black Gold
Mayor McCa – Cue Are Es Tea You
Peter Stampfel – The Jig Is Up
Robyn Hitchcock & The Venus 3 РOl̩! Tarantula
Sufjan Stevens – Songs For Christmas – Volume V: Peace
Sufjan Stevens – The Avalanche – Outtakes And Extras From The Illinois Album
The Be Good Tanyas – Hello Love
The Decemberists – The Crane Wife
The Essex Green – Cannibal Sea
The Flaming Lips – At War With The Mystics
The Handsome Family – Last Days of Wonder
The Instruments – Cast A Half Shadow
The Sadies – In Concert Vol. 1
The Wailin’ Jennys – Firecracker
Thom Yorke – The Eraser
Thomas Dolby – The Sole Inhabitant
Wendy Arrowsmith – Crying Out
Yo La Tengo – I Am Not Afraid Of You And I Will Beat Your Ass

Miraculously, all of them fit on my iPod Nano, so they’ll be in heavy rotation over the next week or so while I decide.

spiked!

Took advantage of the holiday to scoot down to The 12th Fret to have my banjo looked at. I’d managed to do a bad thing to the tailpiece (which I’d rather not talk about, thank you), and had Grant fit capo spikes at 7, 9 & 10.

While working on the fretboard, Grant confirmed that these really were model railway track spikes — or more correctly, model railway enthusiasts use capo spikes to hold their rails down!