Category Archives: Culture

Geek culture

Vegan Lunch Box

Wow, blogging is an insane new media. One gal posts daily photos and descriptions of what she packs her in her kid’s Vegan Lunch Box. The public exposure of this has got to improve the food quality dramatically. If only my Mum was doing this, perhaps I would have opted for something more sophisticated than peanut butter and jam sandwitches every day.

Now, you’re not going to see a column in a newspaper on this, are you? You’d have to be a homemaker like the blogger, but she must be making mad coin given she’s getting 50-80 comments per entry; if I could see the ads it’d be peppered with them! Look at this place. We’re excited when we get one comment!

DVD layer changes

What is it with DVD authoring that the production houses can’t put the layer changes somewhere sensible, like preferably between scenes where there’s no sound? Looking through Michaeldvd.com.au’s reviews, they note a variety of stupidly placed layer changes:

  • The Princess Bride — The layer change is at 49:58 – it is not a good layer change, because it interrupts the score, but it only lasts a moment. The R1 Special Edition has a far better layer change – it’s inside a silent black frame after Westley is knocked unconscious.
  • O Brother, Where Art Thou? — The pause is a little jarring and noticeable
  • Virus — This is during a natural fade to black, but it is still quite noticeable due to the interruption to the music.

With TV series on DVD, most authors do the sensible thing and put the layer change between the episodes. But sometimes, evidently from pure laziness, they just let it fall elsewhere.

  • The Office — For some reason, the layer change does not occur between Episodes 3 and 4 (as I would have expected) but about 3:57 into Episode 4 (Title 4, Chapter 1).
  • Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em volume 2 — This is an RSDL disc, and once again the DVD authors have inexplicably put the layer change within one of the episodes instead of between them.
  • Empires-Peter & Paul and the Christian Revolution — This disc is RSDL-formatted, with the layer change occurring at 2:30 in Episode II – a crazy and infuriating place to put it when it could have more easily and logically been placed in between the two episodes.

Given it’s a well-known drawback of dual layer DVDs, surely it’s not that hard to put the change somewhere where it won’t be noticed. Crap layer changes really destroy the atmosphere of a movie or TV show, and show up a big flaw in what otherwise is a very satisfying and popular domestic playback medium.

A buncha quick stuff

EFF highlights an Australian House Standing Committee report on the US DMCA, and whether or not it should be adopted wholesale by Australia under the Free Trade Agreement.

Meanwhile there’s an open letter to the OFLC about the banning in Australia of the grafitti video game Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure. (Mind you, Metacritic only gives it a 73/100 on XBox; 70 on PS2).

OPML 2.0 is out. Let’s hope it doesn’t break OPML 1 like RSS 2 broke RSS 0.9?

The Age on the retro games boom.

Pah, this sucks. After 64 years in Swanston Street, the Technical Bookshop in Melbourne has moved out to the boondocks of LaTrobe Street near Queen Street.

Play School dumps clock with Big hand, Little hand

Monday morning I discovered that Play School has dumped the clock with Big hand, Little hand. I was running late to work, and while Owen was being breastfed Play School came on, and I overheard the presenter reading out the time. No more Big hand on this, Little hand on that.

I remember that some kids got analogue clocks quickly when we learnt in grade 3, and others just didn’t get it. My dad has always said that digital clocks aren’t an appropriate way to measure time, especially in a wrist watch or wall clock – because that’s not the kind of time you’re interested in – 19:37 is actually half past seven, or maybe a bit after half past – the precision is false/meaningless precision.

Oh, and in case I’ve been misleading you, the hands are now called Long hand and Short hand; clearer to the kids because the hour hand, whilst shorter is also stubbier, which could make one think it was larger. And no longer in this day and age is shorthand as common as it once was, so the risk of confusion there is reduced. And in a subsequent viewing of Play School (I’ve been home sick – stupid baby), they were back to Big and Little, so perhaps the presenter misspoke.

Oh well, time marches on…

While we’re here, a little tip: time should only ever be stored and (inter-system) communicated in UTC. If you’re designing a database that has time fields, for The Love of Sweet Merciful God store the time as UTC, regardless of the hoops involved in adjusting to that time zone. Because, when it comes to query, and you’ve got to start allowing for the fact that when daylight savings ends there are two 02:17s – and one came before the other; in addition you have the difficulty of knowing if the time on the clock was wound forward/backwards correctly – Australia has so many states with different time zones, and a propensity to diddle around with when the changeovers are meant to happen. Whilst effective, it is not desirable to use the “solution” one company I worked for went for – shutting all the machinery down for an hour when the clocks rolled back (especially given this was at the peak of processing for the day, not some idle time – and I mean business processing, not running the computer centre!). And figuring out when something happened in one time zone, compared to another, is a nightmare if all you’re storing is localtime; but equally, getting comprehensible output is tough if you’re not storing localtime alongside UTC. Here endeth the lesson.

Thursday night I had a dream – no, stick with me, this is relevant and interesting. Anyway, for whatever reason I had to build an analogue-to-digital clock converter, out of Lego. Now, I know how I did it in the dream, and on reflection, it would have worked. As a hint, I used Lego Mindstorms (in the real world I don’t earn enough to own, or for that matter to have ever touched, Mindstorms).

How would you construct an analogue-to-digital clock converter out of Lego?

Binary Output

Last night Owen started experiencing the symptoms of his first cold, which prompts me to talk about communications with babies. Newborn babies have only one output mode: screaming. Communicating with the world is a somewhat limited experience when joy, fear and hunger are all exhibited using the same mode of operation. From observation, crying may mean:

  1. Please feed me.
  2. I need to burp.
  3. I’m cold.
  4. I’m tired, please put me to sleep.
  5. I wish my nappy to be changed.
  6. The { toy | valuable object | fragile object } that I can’t reach – give it to me. Now.
  7. No, not that one, the other one.
  8. I’m bored. Amuse me.
  9. Ow, that really hurts.
  10. Carry me / lift me up.
  11. Holy crap! Don’t let that happen again! Are you listening?

Often, context will allow distiction between these options. It’s like a computer system saying “Something went wrong.” I’ve seen computer systems, particularly embedded ones, behave in a similar way. Often through design. Like, if they give you one red / green LED, then you’ve got green – all is good, red – not so good. You might get away with blinking them, and maybe even combining them to form orange, but there’s only so far you can take that (“Hmm, 600ms blink rate – that must mean that ethernet port two has a receive failure – because a 650ms blink rate would mean RAM failure”). That BIOSes doing their Power On Self Test use the PC speaker to report error codes prior to the video system coming online, I think the maximum number of beeps you’d get out of that was eleven… better pay attention and count them out. And a lot of Common Object Model errors are along the lines of “COM didn’t work because something failed”.

Interestingly, often babies don’t care too much that you understand them. They’ll keep on with the output, secure in the knowledge that you’re doing everything you can to determine what it is that they’re trying to say. And servicing one system fault may merely unmask another – a wet nappy may be followed by the need for a feed.

Screeching may also mean:

  1. This is great fun.
  2. Ha! You found me!
  3. Look at that guy, he’s funny.
  4. Hello, toy. You’re red.

The point being, the obviously inferior nature of binary output means it’s replaced as soon as possible by something else. Talking, outputing to screen, COM+, whatever. Oh, except COM+.

Cathy and I want to increase the output vocabulary of our son by using Baby Sign Language, mainly as a way of avoiding the expected trantrums: apparently, kids can sign much earlier than they can talk – like, children of deaf parents are signing from six weeks of age. Most excellently, I got given a book on the subject for Christmas, and joy-of-joys it was Australian made, so rather than American Sign Language, it was filled with AUSLAN, meaning it will have some use as a language outside on family communication (6500 Aussies – my perceived use rate is higher, because I work on St Kilda Road – home of the Victorian College for the Deaf). I’m seeing some comprehension from him, but I’m yet to see him generate any signs. Having re-read the Wikipedia article on the subject, I’m going to try to sign with Cathy when he can see us. I’ll let you know how this little experiment turns out.

Elevator ‘close’ button

In the building where I’m currently working, I think I’ve found the first “close doors” button on an elevator that actually does something.

I might have come across one other elevator where the close button causes the doors to close. I’ve heard that it’s always put there, but not hooked up to anything – to provide psychological relief while waiting – to give the occupants a sense of control. Is this true, or are the door close alogorithms such that pressing the button normally has no effect?

I am not alone in considering the door close algolrithms. Apparently having a door close button that works is considered a feature by some lift manufacturers.

The User Interface on elevators is highly variable and most questionable.

And another thing: what’s this fascination with refurbishing elevators, with the shiny mirrors, the inlaid wood panelling, halogen downlights and computerised displays featuring today’s weather forecast – but an ongoing inability to tell which floor they’re on, nor operate in a manner that even the occupants of the elevator can tell is an efficient journey-planning mechanism?

Are elevators something that has preoccupied our readers’ attentions? Do they wish to rant?

Does blogging pay?

Charles Wright has made a momentous decision. No, he’s not going to stop writing in plural. He’s closing the Razor blog on The Age/SMH, and asking for subscribers to Bleeding Edge. Some people are taking him up on it. (At least, he’s abandoning Razor. No hint there of him moving on, which seems pretty silly.)

Funnily, Darren Rowse at Problogger has considered this, and from the way he writes about it, has got mixed up by Charles’ writing in plural, and thinks it’s a whole team of people. (“…forms of writing that they could earn money from.“) Some very interesting points made though.

Meanwhile Scoble ponders how to make money off RSS (and blogging in general).

A foray into corporate blogging

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.

eVision — RSS feed

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.)