From the forthcoming book The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture, here’s an article about how Google got started.
How to deploy Visual Studio .Net applications to Linux. (via Brad)
Now maybe I can sell off my old BBC B, once I get a Beeb emulator working. Shame I might never recover my old Ultima clone that some friends and I were working on in 1988.
After watching Sin City the other day I decided I didn’t want to wait.
What I want is a directors commentary that I can take to the cinema with me. I’d download it, throw it on the pod and listen to it in the cinema. I’m sure it would be great for repeat business; go once to watch the film, then again to listen to the commentary. It would be spoken word, you could play it soft and no one would hear it.
Maybe Cameron‘s The Podcast Network could try and flex their muscles?
I don’t normally link to the excellent DailyWTF, because it’s full of good stuff, I’d be linking every day. But yesterday’s picture of the server room with a fishbowl to catch the airconditioner water outlet is an absolute classic. (Make sure you read the article as well as look at the picture.)
Classical music labels have criticised the BBC for offering Beethoven’s symphonies as a free download. This strikes me as a tad narrowminded. I’d imagine there’d be a number of people out there who might otherwise not be interested in classical music who might listen to these then go out looking for more to buy. (via Dave Winer)
Microsoft are now offering free evaluation sessions in their products, making use of their Virtual PC technology so you just try things out on a remote session via your browser and Citrix Java client.
New version of Firefox (1.0.5) is available, fixing some vulnerabilities.
As part of the ongoing antenna saga, the weekend before last I acquired some coax from Bunnings (I thought 20m would be plenty – wrong! Just enough), and a mast. I mounted the mast on the facia and strung the coax up in the roofspace, and left it at that.
This weekend it rained cats and dogs Saturday and I was out of the house until mid-afternoon Sunday, so I wasn’t left with much time to finish the job before sunset Sunday. But, like a fairly well oiled machine I managed to disconnect the antenna, loosen all the bolts that needed loosening, cut it down, fold it up, drag it to the manhole, try putting it through, pull it back out again, fold it up better, put it through the manhole, drag it outside and up to the roof, mount it (very cool that the mounting bolts were still hanging on the antenna even though it had originally been hung in the roof space), realise there wasn’t a hope in hell I was going to hook up the coax with the antenna floating out in the air like that, dismount it, hook up the coax (noticing of course how easy it is to slice through the braiding when slicing through the plastic sheath and having to do it again), discover that the weather sheild for the connector was knackered and ‘repaired’ it with a metre of electrical tape, remount it, discover the mounting bracket was on back-to-front, remount it, tighten up all the bolts, tape down the coax to the mast and return to ground level just as the sun set.
A very tidy piece of work, which only required me to attach the other end of the coax to the splitter and away we’d go. My figuring was, hook what we’ve got into the splitter and I’d see how the picture was and make adjustments later; worst case scenario was that our TV reception for a week would consist of bunny ears. Except the modern coax differs from what’s already in the house in two ways: firstly, it’s aluminium shielded instead of copper; secondly it’s smaller and thus the mounting clamp in the splitter wouldn’t actually grip the de-sheathed coax. I ended up creating a solid mechanical connection by restoring the sheath on the top half of the coax.
Testing revealed a miraculously improved analogue picture quality, including rock-solid SBS reception and Channel 31 visibility. Some negative ghosting was evident, and the Channel 31 picture could improve a little more, so perhaps there will be some fine tuning of the direction next weekend utilising the advanced technolgoy of our radio phone. The splitter doesn’t seem to be detracting too greatly from the signal, so it could be staying. I ought to get some 75 ohm resisters ‘tho. I think there are only two active leads from the four-way splitter.
Signal strength reported by the HDTV cards on all channels has improved to the 95-98% range.
Primus are hopeless. They make Telstra look like really with-it, hoopy froods. I had no problems at all for about 4 years while I had just one phone line connected and didn’t try to change anything.
We signed up for another line. They connected the new line, and cut off the old one. Ring, complain, apologies. Disconnect the new line, reconnect the old. Ring, complain, apologies. The fun continued for a while.
Remember I said iPrimus had a great deal on ADSL? Not long after we signed up for ADSL, our line went dead. “Completely unrelated” says Primus. “Telstra line fault”. Sure. Have you tried reporting a dud phone line when the phone line’s dud? Doesn’t work so good.
Then there was a massive delay with the modem. Eventually we rung up and asked where it was. “We tried delivering it two weeks ago. No one was home. We left a card.” Searching high and low produced no card. However, we found the card the following weekend – they tried to deliver the modem to our old address. Which is not our billing address, or the address where the ADSL line was being set up. I have no idea why they’d want to deliver to that address.
They rung up last night about a missing payment. I didn’t get that bill. Somehow they sent it to 457/457 St Kilda St so I don’t know what would have happened to it. Probably lost in that great postal delivery hole in the sky. Much apologies later, late payment fee waived, all that stuff.
These guys seem to have a lot of bugs in their computer system. Being a telco in Australia only requires that you bill the customers and pay Telstra’s bills. So all primus needs to do is run a billing system. How hard could it be?
But their customer service after these stuff-ups is always really good. Once you get through to a human which can sometimes take a while. At least their call centre isn’t in India. That would be the last straw.
Why has nobody made the perfect Jumpman remake?
Caveat: it has to run on my secondary 1.7 GHz Windows 2000 PC, which though it has a 3D graphics card, the 3D doesn’t work because of some weird-arse issue with DirectX (Short version: It’s a Diamond Viper V550. I’m sure DX 7 and 8 worked okay with it, but DX 9 doesn’t… and it’s pretty much impossible to downgrade without re-installing Windows.)
Given this computer is over a thousand times as fast as a Commodore 64, that shouldn’t be too hard.
Of the Jumpmans (Jumpmen?) listed at remakes.org there are:
Okay, so maybe it’s time to look at a C64 emulator instead.
The Podcast Network has launched the Mac User Show. They also have a Linux show. Good to see them covering lots of different topics — not just the Wintel crowd, and in fact plenty of non-geek mainstream subjects such as music, drama and lifestyles which should help podcasting make it from geek novelty into the populace at large.
When we moved into the new home, I couldn’t find the TV antenna. But when we plugged in the TV, we got acceptable reception and then lazyiness kicked in. But the digital reception doesn’t cut it, so I decided to find out if our TV reception was coming from a coat hanger or something more sophisticated. Turns out you can hang an antenna in your roofspace using a length of rope and have a passable signal. Excpet for SBS. Pretty roofline, poor reception. A pretty roofline would be more important if it didn’t already have a evaporative cooling stack and a skylight breaking it up.
It’s winter here, and the roofspace was roasting hot. So, while the insulation had been abused and moved, there was enough of it doing it’s work that… gaugrh. Hot.
I also found out that our ventilation fans vent straight into the roofspace (great for both heat loss and moisture damage) and that our kitchen extractor fan doesn’t vent anywhere, even though it has a riser in the kitchen. Another housing disaster I’m going to have to address.
Now I need to buy a post to externally mount this bastard of an antenna onto. And a length of coax… or perhaps I’ll recycle one of the many lengths running around up there. There used to be a satelite TV link running off to the garage, I think that one might be long enough (turns out no: satelite hook-up was disconnected with wire cutters, leaving insufficient wire to make the distance). Currently the coax runs into a four-way splitter (three splits used), and I have my concerns that the splitter is contributing to our reception issues. Any opinions?
Speaking of old video games, for those in Melbourne, check out the installation in the Degraves Street subway at Flinders Street station at the moment. It features images of, and actual, Nintendo NES and Game & Watch systems. Plenty of 80s games nostalgia.
What pre-1985 video game character are you?
 I am Mr Do.
I am sedentary by nature, enjoying passive entertainment, eating when the mood takes me, and playing with my food. I try to avoid conflict, but when I’m angered, I can be a devil – if you force me to fight, I will crush you. With apples. |
(via Lauren)
I tried hooking the cards up to the included antenna. Far worse than the bunny ears. Hooking the cards up to the house antenna made things a lot better. Channels nine and seven are 98% strength, two and ten are passable at ~80% strength, and SBS, with just 60%, is unwatchable.
My house antenna is a funny beast. I can’t find it. It doesn’t have a presence on my roofline. I have to go up into the roofspace this weekend to see if its one of those magical in-roofspace antennas, but I don’t think so. There used to be an antenna mount on the back of the house, which you can tell by the holes and lack of paint at that particular spot. I’m thinking a better antennna (or maybe even having an antenna) will improve the reception.
I’ve also got it doing output via the video card to the TV, but it’s not ideal as it stands. The TV software wants to put a grey boarder around the picture, which is fine if you’re watching a monitor, but bites arse if you’re watching a TV. And, not surprisingly, 16:9 doesn’t look that big on my 4:3 TV. Hopefully switching to PVR software like MythTV will help with this.
As for noise, the plan is to have the box in the next room and run cabling through the walls. Quieter. But it will make loading a DVD a pain in the butt.
So, more problem fixing, but given the hardware seems to work, I’m going to start fiddling with the OS next.
The Podcast Network has launched the Linux User show.
Here’s a great rant about modern game design.