If you’ve ever wondered how election results make their way from the ballot boxes onto the screen on the ABC, Antony Green’s written a fascinating post about how it how it all works, and how the technology involved has changed over the years from paper slips to XML feeds.
I have a algorithm for detecting summer. Seven consecutive days in a row with a temperature of or above 20 degrees Celsius. I give you Summer, from the Bureau’s seven day forecast for Melbourne:
Forecast for Monday Max 20I should also point out that I consider there to be two seasons in Melbourne: Nice-but-hot (summer-ish) and a-bit-iffy (winter-ish).
Forecast for Tuesday Min 8 Max 24
Forecast for Wednesday Min 10 Max 25
Forecast for Thursday Min 12 Max 28
Forecast for Friday Min 16 Max 29
Forecast for Saturday Min 18 Max 28
Forecast for Sunday Min 16 Max 26
It appears that almost nobody except Microsoft themselves are publishing documents in XPS format. Not really surprising — why would anybody use it over PDF, for which readers are near-universally installed?
Searching Google for XPS documents vs PDF documents:
NineMSN’s video pages appear not to work in Chrome, but even when you get them to display in IE, the maths on the stories is a little odd. How can “August 4, 2009″ be “1 year ago”?
I have a algorithm for detecting summer. Seven consecutive days in a row with a temperature of or above 20 degrees Celsius. I give you Summer, from the Bureau’s seven day forecast for Melbourne:
Thursday Fine. Min 6 Max 21
Friday Mainly fine. Min 12 Max 25
Saturday Fine. Min 12 Max 30
Sunday Shower or two. Min 15 Max 22
Monday Fine. Min 10 Max 23
Tuesday Fine. Min 12 Max 28I swear, this gets earlier and earlier each year.
Let’s say, for example, that a system supplies you the time of some event in UTC, you convert it to local and shove the date/time up on the display. Say, for argument’s sake, you also include the Day Of Week, ending up with a format of DD/MM, DOW HH:MM. Everything looks fine, until someone notices that the Day Of Week is wrong. The 28th of May is a Wednesday, not a Thursday.
What happened?
The date conversion routine that generates the DOW string does a bunch of odd stuff, but seems to work correctly; it certainly works in other parts of the code, and generates the right string there.
WTF?
The UTC time seemed to be converted to local time twice, but that wasn’t the culprit; surprisingly, no-one is killed in an explosion of silicon splinters when that code is double-executed. Whatever.
Could it be that the system supplying you the time of that event in UTC is off by a year? One year into the future. That would give you that behaviour.
Check it.
Some Unicode symbols have surprising effects but… u?op ?p?sdn ?u????? s? un? s? ?l???u ?ou s,???? -, or, if WordPress doesn’t support Unicode properly, you miss out.
Ed Bott on how to fix the time sync in Windows (and the godawful error: “The time sample was rejected because: The peer’s stratum is less than the host’s stratum.”)
He notes this list of alternate time servers in the US. It makes sense for reliability purposes to choose a server close to you; indeed some big corporates run their own time servers.
As it turns out, Microsoft has a KB article documenting a number of servers around the world: 262680: A list of the Simple Network Time Protocol (SNTP) time servers that are available on the Internet.
Choose one near you today!
In a demonstration of how difficult it is to single out a root cause the changes in a figure derived from complex behaviour, an economist (using the exact methodology that John Howard cites for determining the contribution of Work Choices to labour market growth) has shown that:
… [Kevin] Rudd has added many jobs – in fact 10% more jobs per month than Work Choices did.
So: politician lies; footage at eleven. If the government wanted to actually measure if Work Choices made things better, they should have said something like “everywhere except WA”, or “only applies to people born after the 6th of the month” or whatever. Then they’re would be two systems, and you could actually measure it.
Myself, I’m looking forward to the decrease in employment because Rudd is no longer leader of the opposition (read the article, you’ll understand that comment eventually).
Oh no, George is at it again:
Q. I want to archive family photos and slides from our hard drive onto a DVD. However, I have read that home-burnt DVDs and CDs can have a short shelf life of about five years. What is the best technology to store 1-5 GB of irreplaceable images?
B. McGregorA Manufacturers claim life spans of 30 to 100 years for DVD-R and DVD+R discs and up to 30 years for DVD-RW, DVD+RW. Your advice about a five-year life may apply to a CD that has not been burnt, as in that state the storage life is much shorter. For archiving you should use a premium-quality product, which in my opinion is Verbatim as they come out on top in almost all independent reviews that I have read.
No no no no no. You don’t tell someone who wants to store irreplaceable images that it’s fine to chuck it on a DVD, and blindly believe the manufacturer’s claim of the 30 years plus lifespan. The technology is not yet nearly that old, so while theoretical lab tests might claim that, in my book it’s not conclusively proven, and plenty of people have had problems.
If the files involved are genuinely irreplaceable, the message here is to make sure you don’t rely on one copy, or even on one medium. You make multiple copies, in a format that is futureproof (JPEG probably being the best for photos), distribute them widely (for instance with different family members) and check and copy them regularly onto new media.
You sure as hell don’t burn a single copy and chuck the DVD in the cupboard and hope nothing renders it unreadable.
For the story so far see Part 1 and Part 2. If you’re totally bored, then please don’t read on… this is the longest post yet!
So I got my Linksys NSLU2 home. I thought I’d fire it up and make sure it worked. There’d be nothing more frustrating than flashing it with the Linux OS, find it doesn’t work and then wonder whether the issue is with the new Firmware or the actual hardware.
Plugged it in, fired it up, plugged in and formatted a blank external drive I dug out of the cupboard. All good so far! I can’t plug in a disk with anything on it because the LinkSys requires disks to be formatted with EXT3.
Hmmm… what’s this… a firmware upgrade to the NSLU2 that allows it to read NTFS! That’d make the device usable until I get my head around the Linux options!
Loaded up the upgrade, all went smoothly. Plugged in my external hard drive to see if it works. Get “Drive not formatted” message in the NSLU2 admin screen, so it must not support NTFS after all. Oh well. Plugged the external drive back into my desktop PC.
“This disk is not formatted. Do you want to format it now? Yes/No”
My
heart
stopped.
An entire disk’s worth of data… gone. Video from when the kids were little, lots of photos… gone. I know what you’re all thinking… why wasn’t this data backed up? I have two responses to this. 1) It’s not that easy to back up a 14GB video file. 2) Part of the reason I was setting up this solution is to make automated backups more accessible!
Some have said that I shouldn’t have trusted the device with my data, but in my defence, it’s a shrink wrapped consumer device that’s designed to have drives plugged in to it. If I can’t trust this device with my data, I don’t have much use for it!
I kicked off a File Recovery scan and went to bed very sad.
In the morning, the file recovery had found a bunch of deleted files, but none of the files that were not deleted at the time of the corruption! I tried loading the drive up in a couple of EXT3 file viewers, but they couldn’t read the drive either.
I’d pretty much given up hope of getting my data back.
Then my neighbour nonchalantly suggests I try a partition table repair tool. I load one up and run it. It tells me “The partition table on the disk is incorrect. Would you like to fix it?” I click “Yes”. Bang. All my data is back!!!
Yay! Waves of relief! Not to mention proof that the Linksys had screwed up the disk. The partition table was written for an EXT3 disk, even though it was still formatted in NTFS.
Yesterday I took the Linksys back to Harris Technology and threw it at them as hard as I could. Actually I didn’t and they were incredibly helpful, giving me a full refund without any hassle.
So back to the drawing board. Now that I realise how precious that data is to me, I’m going to have to get a proper, RAID based network drive solution. More money 
I’ll probably go for a Thecus N2100.
Lesson the First
Imagine losing all your data that is not backed up. How do you feel about that?
Lesson the Second
No, really. Losing it. Right now. Seriously, how do you feel about that?
Weigh your reaction to the above questions against the cost of getting dedicated backup.
Here endeth the lesson.
Update: I was talking to Josh last night and he said it wasn’t clear that I hadn’t installed the funky open source firmware on the LinkSys box yet. It was running the latest official firmware release. I probably also didn’t emphasize enough that I wouldn’t recommend anyone buying one of these pieces of junk
A couple of times now I’ve had to hunt down the location of the dictionary for Firefox because in the popup for a misspelled word has ‘Add to dictionary’ too close to the word I want to change to (and now I’ve inserted a misspelling into my personal dictionary).
The location of the dictionary for Firefox (under Windows) is: somewhere under Documents and Settings is the file persdict.dat.
Maybe this time I’ll remember it. I suggest this behaviour shows a usability problem.
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