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Fri, 31 Mar 2006
[14:14] Greener Pastures?
Our mortgage is ticking down and D-Day is fast approaching - hopefully next month we're going to be mortgage free! This is good because it means I have the option of trying to find a job that doesn't suck in such a mammoth fashion. I've been pulling 6 or 7 day weeks pretty much since I got here (about 9 months now) and although that's a good way to gain money, the other side of the equation is that, for the most part, I've only seen the inside of my apartment and the inside of my office. We'd like to take some time to check out London properly, followed by the UK and, if possible some of Europe.
On the subject of new jobs, I finally had a phone interview for a job that I've been chasing for a few months now. It went a lot better than my last phone interview (where I found out that apparently it's possible to be "too technical"). Somewhat surprisingly I actually really enjoyed the whole interview process! The interviewer was really nice and obviously really enjoys his job - I'd like to rejoin that particular clique. Hopefully I'll make it to Interview II, I'm reasonably confident but I'm not great at gauging people over the phone (come to that, I kinda suck at it face-to-face). Fingers crossed.
[ Posted At: 31/03/2006 23:14 ]
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Mon, 27 Mar 2006
[23:17] Idiot Pilot - Strange We Should Meet Here - Rating 4/5
"Strange We Should Meet Here" is the CD I bought myself for my birthday after Shona recommended it to me (because she liked the cover). I listened to it on the magical Virgin listening stick and the 30 second clips sounded good so I bought it.
The first listen at home made me think "Have I made a bit of a mistake here?" but the fact that I've had it on high rotation since then makes me think "No". It's a bloody great album! The songs are generally built on a background mix of ambient electronica, soft guitar and vocals with some Deftones/Filter/NIN style screaming singing smashing in for backing vocals and the chorus every now and then. It's proving to be really great coding music and is what I spent a goodly portion of Saturday and Sunday listening to.
Weighing in at 14 tracks and just under an hour (57 minutes and 37 seconds) its good value for money in both the quality and quantity department. Favourite tracks? Hmmmm. The title track "Strange We Should Meet Here" which meanders in just past the halfway point of the CD is excellent and "A Violent Tango" provides a good example of what the majority of the album is like. "Spark Plug" is a nice mash of guitar and electronic distortion and you can even pick out the vocals on this one. "Moerae" is somewhat reminiscent in style of the Bram Van 3000 track "Drinking in LA" (which I really love). Meh...they're all good - just go buy the damn CD folks.
For more information check out the website at www.idiotpilot.com or you can sneak-preview a couple of the tunes here (which is cool!).
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Sun, 26 Mar 2006
[13:29] Yummy snacks,dismantling and CSS wrangling
Due to DR testing I got Saturday off which was well cool! We slept in (I got up around 0900 but that's sleeping in for me these days) and then scooted up to Borough Markets to do some produce shopping and have some fun. It was all pretty interesting and there was some really nice food around but the prices weren't really competitive with the chain supermarkets. With that in mind, the veges were definitely much nicer than what you'd find in Tescos so maybe it's worth it? We snacked on spicy sausage-inna-bun, toasted chorizo 'n rocket rolls (which we had to queue up for for about 15 minutes), cheeses, breads, brownies and cakes (award winning cakes no-less).
We rode home and I spent a happy hour dismantling a discarded stereo to get the magnetic tape reading head. I've been waiting for AGES to find one so that I can build a card reader, that's going to be my next project. My current project took up the rest of the afternoon, smashing together the new CSS layout for this site. It's taken me about a month of Sunday afternoons (and it's Sunday evening again as I type) but I've finally got the damn thing doing what I want in both Firefox and IE - what a pain in the keister! I'm no CSS guru (which is why I wanted to do this) but it's unbelievable how differently these two browsers will render the same HTML/CSS combo - god knows what Safari or Konqueror or some other browser I've not got access to at the moment will do.
Anyway, the static portion of the site is done (with a few data updates pending) and hopefully next weekend I'll be able to update the blog portion as well.
[Posted at 26/03/2006 22:28]
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Tue, 21 Mar 2006
[04:06] MSN Messenger Is Fugly
I installed MSN Messenger yesterday and was so disgusted with everything flashing and all of the built-in advertisments that I uninstalled it straight away. I was going to switch over to Trillian and then I remembered that GAIM now has a Windows port.
I installed the new Beta2 of version 2.0.0, fired it up and was rewarded with GAIM crashing out the second I tried to start it. However, being an open source project coming from the linux world, the programmers understand the incredible handiness of debug output and by running "gaim -d" you get verbose output of exactly what's going on, and going wrong.
In my case GAIM appeared to be inheriting aspell from the UltraEdit directory. I nullified the GAIM_ASPELL_DIR environment variable (as suggested here) and it now works like a charm, with NO advertisments, no flashing things, no *nudge* "functionallity" and no crappy emoticons.
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Mon, 20 Mar 2006
[15:53] Birthdays and Listening Posts
Yes, that's right, you forgot my birthday (I'm looking at you Don). I turned the big 2 9 on the 17th! For the most part t'was a day like any other - I got an exciting pressie when I got up, a nice black t-shirt with the words:
One by one the penguins steal my sanity
bannered across the front! I then went to work and did stuff and came home. It got more interesting from there:
We ventured out into Ye Olde London Towne, ostensibly to go and fetch the latest edition of 2600 which you can now only get from the Virgin store in Piccadilly Circus. We descended to the bowels of the store, where they keep the magazines and the DVDs (this is where it gets exciting folks), I went and fetched my mag whilst Shona did some browsing, she found......
I've been trying to find that for AGES! We spent then next half-hour or so marvelling at all the other cool stuff that was down there before heading upstairs to pay. This is when cool thing number two happened (I apologise if this is horrendously old and passe now but I don't get out much, and I spend money even less). Since we emerged into the CD section we had a bit of a browse around. As is always the way, you find something(s) that you think you might like but you want to listen to. I always hate asking because the staff wherever I happen to be generally are quite surly about having to dig up the CD just so I can listen to it and then you have to brave the "evil stare" when you say "Actually, I don't really like that". But I found something and I took it to the guys and he showed me how the listening posts work.
Basically you pick a post, scan your CD and it gets looked up in the database. They then play 30 second clips of each song. 30 seconds isn't the greatest but you can scan ANY CD IN THE SHOP and listen to it! I spent some considerable time hunting out "obscure" CDs just to verify this. The only things I couldn't get to play were my Trapdoor DVD and magazine. I don't know how long they've had this but I think it is very, very cool! We're heading back next weekend with a big ole list of things to listen too!
After escaping the consumer-paradise of Virgin we wandered the St Patricks day reveller-rammed streets looking for somewhere to eat. We eventually settled on a hole in the wall called Mr Wus because it was all-you-can-eat for £4.50, hoorah. The food was actually pretty good and we decided to walk home to walk off dinner (stopping only for a lemon sorbet from the gelato shop on the Strand). Good time had by all! A quick tangent on the subject of grub: I had to work Saturday (as with all Saturdays before it) but too make up for this injustice we've been working our way up Shoreditch Road (near where I work) every weekend for lunch. This weekend we found the BEST Vietnamese joint (we've tried one every weekend for the last month). It's called Song Que and they make the best Pho in this damn place, and they have those wacky Vietnamese desserts! More here.
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Mon, 13 Mar 2006
[16:15] What a T.W.A.T.
If you haven't heard of it yet, Today With A Tech aka T.W.A.T. Radio is a community media-cast and is, to quote the website:
...a hardcore tech daily internet radio show that has multiple hosts, guests and topics. There are 1000’s of internet radio shows that talk about what the hosts had for breakfast. This one is going to be HARDCORE TECH...
I really like it because of the sheer variety of topics being discussed. I've listened to some obvious audiophiles talking about setting up a recording studio, an interesting tour of the Boston Telephone System by a phreak (who better to run such a tour), how to design and build a softball launcher, cracking SAM files and more. The quality varies considerably (one guy actually recorded his by yelling into his headphones after plugging them into his MIC jack) but I've picked up a few interesting tidbits none-the-less.
The way it works is that people (I'm looking at you here) do up a show based on whatever they know something about. There's a lower limit of five minutes and an upper limit of "How long can you hold peoples attention for". A lot of people from the tech media-casting scene have pitched in, probably because they are already above the bar in terms of recording equipment and having what it takes to produce a listenable show.
So anyway, T.W.A.T. went dark in February after a successful two month run - ostensibly to produce some backup episodes and update the website. I freaked out a bit because I've seen three promising shows of a tech nature like this die because the guys making them didn't understand just how much work was behind doing a daily show. Droops and co have long history of this kind of thing but I freaked out anyway and as the last show to air was a request for content I offered to put a show together. What I wasn't expecting was the e-mail coming back saying "Cool, you're on in two weeks".
Well, I've been silent for the last couple of weeks because I've been pretty busy at work and in my spare time I've been busy researching for what I'd intended to do - basically a rundown of handy Windows command line tools to keep you safe from the nasty GUIs. This has been a reasonably successful endeavour and I've managed to write a 40 page discussion of tools and their usage with some sexy text-based screenshots.
I suspect the more astute amongst you have spotted the main flaw in my scheme, namely: CLI tools are REALLY hard to talk about with no visual references and I spent two weeks writing a huge article (yeah, with screenshots) that is going to be completely impossible to transform into audio.
I got down to trying to record this Sunday using Audacity and a free Skype microphone I collected from Liverpool Street station as a handout. Once I hit the hour mark at around page 4 I realised that I was in trouble. So, I sat down and re-wrote my treatise to try and mangle it into a 15 minute presentation, retaining all of the commands and just hinting at their functionality. Then I started recording again at about 2300. I was about three-quarters of the way through the content and about 38 minutes into the recording when my Beta version of Audacity politely informed me that some bastard had flogged it's memory. And then it blinked out of existence.
My first thought was "Well, that's Beta software for you", closely followed by "Gee, I really wish I'd saved that at some stage". Yes, that's right. I was on such a roll that I neglected to shut-up and save it at any stage. What a dick.
So, it's the day before I'm meant to hand this thing over and despite overwhelming ineptitude, I've managed to record it. My main problem now is that, compared to what I had intended to produce, I've got some smashed up and highly questionable material (vetted by a man half asleep you'll recall) recorded at high speed with no quality control. Yay. As I type it's busy MP3ifying itself back home and I WILL hand it over because I committed myself to a deadline and I'm going to meet the damn thing. I'll clean up the original article and add that as a link from the show so that if anyone actually listens to all 50 minutes of the audio and manages to pick up anything that I'm talking about they may be able to track it back to the article and find some understandable examples.
I guess that on the bright side, it's been an educational experience for me. My two day crash course on Audacity has been quite interesting (that's a real slick piece of software and I think it would run really well on a machine that had a little more than 300Mb of RAM). I've also learned that people who produce all the media that I glibly download and listen to put in a SHEDLOAD of work to produce interesting and listenable content. I will never hack on a "crappy" show again, I swear. Finally, I've picked up more than a few new tools and tips and found some really great websites whilst trying to provide a quality piece of information.
For better or worse, I'm a real T.W.A.T.
[Posted at 17:22 13-03-2006]
UPDATE: It occured to me on the way home that it might be a better idea to split my one mangled show into multiple short 'n sweet listenable shows. Hopefully this will also give me a break and let me get the quality back up to where I'd like it. I've pieced together a makeshift Episode 82 and if it's not too awful (volume seems to be really bad) then I'll see if I can make a go of it on the next one!
[Posted at 00:15 14-03-2006]
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[10:13] I Want To Safely Remove My USB Device
If Windows Explorer happens to "abnormally exit" it generally takes all the other explorer processes with it, including the one controlling the desktop and taskbar. When this happens you lose a certain number of tray icons that hooked in when they started up, one of which is the little "Safely Remove Device" icon that you're meant to use to remove USB devices so that they can flush everything to disk properly and all that kind of jazz. If yours goes missing and you need to get it back, you can do like this:
%windir%\system32\RUNDLL32 shell32.dll,Control_RunDLL hotplug.dll
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Sun, 05 Mar 2006
[14:07] Time Flies Like A Really Fast Thing
I was intending to catch up with a few posts this weekend (not to mention last weekend when I got caught up trying to work out how to redo my site using CSS instead of tables) but work and having a good time got in the way. I've been writing notes for myself over the last couple of weeks and I'm going to try and get it all up here over the coming week.
This weekend has been really good! I had to be at work early on Saturday morning for the change window and it was a bit of a shock as it was -1 when I rode in and, since they turn the air-con off on the weekends, 30 degrees inside! I finished around 13:00 so Shona rode in and we went for Pho at a restaurant in Hackney that Shona found on the interjobie, the Viet Hoa Cafe. The food was good and cheap and fuelled us on our cycling adventures!
We then went for a bit of an explore on the bikes and (after browsing through the local Yamaha dealership to check out the new XT660R) we stumbled upon the Geffrye Museum. It's a museum of English House Interiors from the 1600s through to now and it was actually pretty interesting. It was also somewhat disturbing to see the 1990-2000 interior which looked uncannily like a mix of a friends house and a our house back home. I found it really weird looking at "now" in a museum and the Fat Boy Slim playing the background really helped to make it completely freaky!
We cycled home via the Gerkhin and after that Shona noticed a building that looked a LOT like an oil refinery that I went to on a school excursion many years ago. It turned out to be the Lloyds building and it's really quite incongruous sitting in the midst of all the brick and stone buildings, not to mention all the glass of the Gerkhin. It looks a lot like Gigers work for the colony on LV-426 in Aliens. The most interesting part (for me anyway) was the fact that everything was inside out. The outside of the building is shrouded with plumbing and conduit, the staircases are all external to the building and all of the lifts are on the outside - big banks of doors running up the side (see here) look most bizzare.
Sunday I spent at work, working for the most part. I've signed myself up for a bit of extra-curricular information provision, so I spent four hours trying to finish that off as it's due on the 14th - more info on that soon.
Posted: 05/03/2006 19:58
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