I’ve convinced the company I work for to start a corporate blog. So far it’s early days, with myself (blogger extraordinaire) being the only one brave enough to post anything (apart from an introductory “this is what we sell” post), but I’m hoping the others will also contribute, as the company markets a mucho good product, and there’s a lot of good knowledge of B2B, XML, and development in general, locked up in the various brains around the place.
Author Archives: daniel
AU analogue TV to continue to 2010
Probably sensing outrage from the populace, most of whom have no wish to either throw out their existing TV, or buy one of those fiddly set-top boxes (which rarely fit on top of the telly anyway), the Australian federal government committee overseeing such things has had a change of heart, and postponed turning off analogue TV until 2010, instead of the previous planned 2008.
Digital transmissions now reach 95% of households, but only 12% use them. To try and encourage people onto digital, they’re looking at letting commercial networks multicast from 2007. That’s what should get the punters enthused, after all, for most people a clear stereo PAL signal is all they want — give them the option of extra channels (more than ABC-2, that is) and they might start to shell out for STBs in bigger numbers.
(It’s not a done deal yet — it’s up to the Communications Minister to actually act on the committee’s recommendations.)
iPod Shuffle not recognised
What do you do if the iPod Shuffle that your 8-year-old was given for his birthday doesn’t appear to iTunes, the iPod updater, or Windows?
You roam around the iPod support pages, trying out the suggestions: reset the iPod, reset the computer, download the latest software (almost 47Mb for the iPod updater, and another 35Mb for the iTunes update with the bundled Quicktime that you don’t actually want), try resetting the iPod service, remove the software then repair it again… etc, etc, etc.
Then you notice footnote 5 of the iPod Shuffle specifications, which says: Some computers require either the optional iPod shuffle Dock or a USB cable extender (sold separately).
Sure enough, for me, a USB cable extender did the trick.
You know, including that in the support pages wouldn’t hurt.
On and about Google video
Very funny: Why Macs suck (Warning, occasional coarse language)
Speaking of Google Video, they now let you download Google Video (GVP) files and the Player onto Windows or Mac, Video iPod or Sony Playstation Portable. They’ve also got a thing producing the HTML to show the video on your own web site.
BBC BASIC for Windows
For die-hard BBC BASIC lovers, there’s a version for Windows which can be used to create fully-blown Windows applications, producing small standalone EXEs.
There are also implementations available for MS DOS, Mac and other platforms. (Though really, to do anything good, sounds like it’d be a hard slog. Personally I’ll probably stick to VB, despite the runtime libraries required.)
Emergency 000 vs 112
If you’ve ever wondered what the difference between the Australian emergency number 000 and the European standard 112 is, check this Australian Communications Authority document.
In past years 112 had network priority and other advantages that 000 didn’t, including working without a SIM, and when the handset is keypad locked. This is no longer the case, as most handsets and SIMs now sold in Australia have a firmware modification to treat 000 just as well as 112. My own handset, a two-year-old Nokia 6100, will happily accept 112 or 000 even when keylocked. (No, I didn’t press the dial key when trying this.)
The stuff on page 10 reveals just how ignorant of emergency numbers some people are, despite 000 being “it” for decades. Mind you, I’m not sure why they don’t make moves to allow 112 from fixed line phones, for the benefit of overseas visitors.
Oh, there’s also 106 for Telephone Typewriter (TTY) users. So far there’s no SMS-capable emergency number. But it’s notable that an emergency call where the operator can’t hear the caller is diverted to a recorded service allowing the caller to press “55” to indicate an emergency if they can’t talk, allowing the call to be passed back to the operator or police, and CLI to be used to despatch a response. Good thinking, whoever thought that up.
Commonwealth Games patch
The Commonwealth Games are looming, as is the week’s extension of summer time in Eastern Australia.
Microsoft have issued a patch for most (but not all) versions of Windows. What they haven’t done is made it an automatic update for affected users, nor made it easy to find — it’s not shown on the Microsoft Australia home page, for instance, you have to search for it. They also haven’t provided a smooth way of reverting to “normal” summer time for next year: users have to remove the patch and manually set the timezone.
Meanwhile Apple have done… nothing. Charles Wright has tracked down how to fix it on Macs, which involves going an finding a timezone update file on an ftp server, untarring and ungzipping, running an obscure (if you’re not a Unix god) command… jeez.
Ask yourself: is the typical non-geek computer user going to seek out these solutions, and even if they find them, are they going to bother to figure it out and do it? I’m betting not. I’m betting a lot of computers will be an hour out during the week of the summer time extension.
This is very sloppy behaviour from both sides of the OS fence, and something the millions of Australian computer users won’t be too happy about in March. (Though most will have forgotten about it by late-April, no doubt.)
PS. 29/3/2006. Still getting a lot of comments here, but there is a later post on this topic here.
Quick and dirty animation
I was asked how I did the animation of building the desks on my personal blog.
The camera was set up on a tripod in the corner of the room. It wasn’t set to automatically take pictures; instead I set it to its 10-second timer and periodically took pictures, generally when I was about to do something. So in a sense the pictures are all posed, and apart from the varying light outside you can’t tell that it took quite a few hours to put the first desk together, followed by a gap of a couple of days before the second one was done.
Unfortunately the camera got moved a bit while doing the second desk. I also forgot until later to take a picture of the completed desks, and by that point the tripod had been put away, so that last shot is handheld, and askew from the others. It was late, and I couldn’t be arsed lining it up exactly. Close enough.
I ended up not using some of the pictures, discarding many of those that had nobody in them, because I thought it would look better to see people moving around in each shot, rather than flashing in and out of view.
To do the animation, I considered what formats would work best for appearing on the blog page (rather than in a separate player or as a download). This ruled out using MovieMaker (which for online-use produces WMV only, so wouldn’t be playable on anything other than Windows). Animated GIF might have been quite economical bandwidth-wise, since much of each frame didn’t change, but I don’t have any good tools for that. Besides, GIF for photos sucks. MPEG compression would work a treat for something like this, but I didn’t have the time nor energy to properly explore that.
I ended up with Flash, using an old copy of Swish that came as a magazine freebie. (I have an old copy of Flash sitting around somewhere, but I never took the time to properly learn it). I’d previously used Swish for the toxiccustard.com 404 page and “Wanky Flash intro”, and while it isn’t as flexible as fully-fledged Flash, it’s not bad for simple stuff, and very easy to learn.
Swish was formerly installed on one of my old computers, and though the version I used (1.5.2) is discontinued, to my surprise I was able to re-download it from the Swish website and resurrect my old freebie licence via their web site. Full points to Swish for that.
All the frames were resampled in Photopaint to 400×300, and saved with some heavy JPEG compression to keep the filesize down to 15kb or so per frame. Plenty of artefacts, but who cares when each would be displayed for less than a second. I did use less compression on the first and last frames, which are displayed for longer. Again, properly using the newest Flash movie-playback features would probably have made possible much better compression, but no time Bellamy, no time!
Loaded a few of the pictures into Swish, and set them up to appear/hide every 4 frames (at 12 frames a second, so three pictures per second). I tried a few different options to get a speed I was happy with; fast enough that the whole thing isn’t too long and is interesting (I hope), and provides comic effect. But also slow enough that you can see some of the detail, such as hiding behind the polystyrene, and holding the beer bottle. The kids having a light-sabre fight with polystyrene didn’t quite work, as one of them was out of shot.
I noticed later that Swish lets you set the number of frames per second, making it dead easy to change the overall speed. Which would have avoided some fiddling. Oh well.
The final SWF Flash file came out at 450Kb or so, which shouldn’t be too slow to start up, even on dialup connections. Not that the speed of playback is critical anyway in this case.
I’m quite happy with the end effect, and people who saw it appeared to enjoy it too.
Acer’s web site needs work
I’ve set up my new desks at home, and have been looking around at good deals on LCD monitors. Officeworks have some Acer ones on special at the moment, so I went to look at the Acer web site to review their dead pixel policy.
It’s a mess in Firefox. Looks rather better in IE. But we’ll live with that for a moment.
Find the page with warranties, and try to look at their monitor warranty:
Error 404
Not found – file doesn’t exist or is read protected [even tried multi]
Great. Find their contact page. It insists on knowing what OS I’ve got installed, because it thinks it’s only for tech support contacts. I lie. Eventually get the form submitted with the info above. It submits, then takes me to… another 404 page.
Bzzt, strike 2. Hopefully the message got through.
So then I tried a site search for “dead pixels”.
Error 500
HTTP Web Server: Lotus Notes Exception – Database is not full-text indexed
Bzzt, strike 3. Acer really needs a revamp of its web site.
Where to rest in Pacman
Obviously if you’re playing in MAME you can just press P to pause, but on a real Pacman arcade game, what do you do if you’re playing a mammoth game and you want to rest? Go just to the right and up from the starting position.
The ghosts won’t find you, you can rest for a while.
That’s certainly something I wish I’d known 20 years ago…
Google’s Australia Day
Happy Australia Day. Here’s how Google is celebrating:
(Not so good press for Google on the news that they’ll be censoring content for the Chinese government. In the same week as they said they’d resist handing over your search history to the US government.)
IE’s mysterious status bar
I don’t normally use IE, so when I was taking a look at something in it, I suddenly noticed how many mysterious unnamed panels the status bar has.
A little tinkering identified some of them. Others remain a mystery. Left to right (this is IE6, and may differ according to what add-ons you have installed):
- Main part of the status bar. Shows the URL you’re about to jump to, or “Done” when it thinks it’s finished loading a page (though sometimes it hasn’t really), or nothing. Fair enough.
- Progress bar, only appears when loading a page
- Unknown
- Single left click gives me access to the MSN toolbar popup blocker settings
- Double-clicking takes me to a dialogue to manage add-ons
- Unknown
- Double-clicking gives me information on the Security certificate, if the page has one. On a secure page, you get a padlock icon here.
- Icon and text indicating the page’s zone. Double-clicking takes you to the Security options
Maybe someone can reveal what the two blank unknown panels are for. But it strikes me as pretty silly that these are here, blank, with no clues given. No tooltips when hovering, and no response when left-clicking, left double-clicking or right-clicking. Why bother having them?
Even those that do respond shouldn’t be blank, not if the designers intend people to actually use them. Why would you bother clicking around a blank panel? Are we supposed to use our sixth sense to work out what they do?