I’m going to the Abbotsford Airshow in a few weeks with my friend Chris.  I’m not terribly knowledgeable about aircraft, but I enjoy being able to get up close and personal with fighter jets in particular.

But maybe not this close (Gizmodo)….at least not when they are flying at several hundred miles an hour.

This image is taken looking out the back of a Hercules 130 cargo transport.  They were filming the Eurofighter Typhoon, and apparently the director kept asking the pilot to come “closer…closer…”.  Looking at the photo, I’d say the jet is perhaps three or so metres behind the cargo plane.  Now *that’s* close

I spent an hour or so today looking at xkcd, which is a stick-person comic for geeks.  Some of the humour is somewhat esoteric: math and statistics jokes, for example.  But there were plenty of gems.  This one is my favorite so far:

A couple of days ago I hooked up a USB headset.  For fun, I also activated Windows Vista’s voice recognition system.

It works, after a fashion.  Some of what I’m typing here I’m typing more or less directly using voice recognition.  But I have to do a tremendous amount of correction.  Let me give you an example.  The following text I will type directly using voice recognition, without any corrections.

I’ve often had doubts about the usefulness of voice recognition.  Basically I have to wonder how low will be applicable in an environment like an office.  Really, even here in my own home, I’ve found many instances where its an inconvenience to be talking to the computer.  But I would assume something select from botched to something damn the correction isn’t working correctly.  Actually, since I said I wasn’t going to correct anything in this paragraph. , I suppose is a good thing that is not correct incorrectly.  Enough of this crapola ready.

The above paragraph is after spending an hour or two training the system, using a high quality mike in a quiet room.  I suppose that, one day, we will have nearly perfect voice recognition technology.  We are far from that state today: getting a paragraph or two typed takes me a lot longer than simply hammering away at the keyboard, given how many mistakes I have to correct.   That said, I’m still reasonably impressed with how capable it is already.

But where would I use voice recognition?  Not in an office: it would be incredibly distracting there.  At home, possibly: although it could be irritating to other people in the household who want to do other things like watch TV.  In a car?  Certainly: voice recognition makes tremendous sense there: being able to say “Radio 1130 AM” instead of reaching over and fiddling with buttons is both a convenience and a safety feature. 

You might ask yourself, ” what, Kelly what about this is fun?” The answer is, you have to have a bit of a sense of humour with regards to some of the errors that the system makes.  Every once in awhile, for example, it comes up with a true gem.  When I was for starting the training, for example, I ended up laughing so hard that the voice recognition system mostly typed ha ha ha ha, ha, ha ha ha.

OK, so was funny at the time…

I found this quote on The Register from Intel’s VP and Director, Digital Enterprise Group, Steve Smith, really tickled my funny bone:

“Having enthusiasts play with our parts is our goal here…”

No offense, Steve, but I have no desire to “play with your parts”.  Hopefully, Steve has a good sense of humour. 

I think this quote probably came in the context of Intel’s “Viiv” platform, which I understand to be intended to standardize/simplify use of Intel products in home entertainment devices.  It isn’t a new technology in and of itself, at least I don’t see one: it’s more like a recipe.  Take a Core Duo/Quad core, chuck in some audio and video, and add a funky remote, pay Intel so you can put a sticker on the box- presto, Viiv.

To me, Viiv looks a lot like the Microsoft Origami thing from a year or so ago- a platform standard, not a product, and frankly that’s hard for me (and probably others) to get excited about.  Intel has some promotional things going on to generate some buzz around Viiv.  For example, they had a competition for companies/people to submit system designs using the Viiv platform specifications.  The winner doesn’t look bad, but what’s up with the beige second place finisher?  Sorry, but that thing is uggggleeee.

Ah well…at least there are *some* techno-gadgets that are interesting: for example, a snazzy looking new USB microscope.

Some folks might have noticed my posting of a Youtube “video” (actually, it’s mostly an “audio”, but that’s being picky) here a couple of days ago.  The really observant probably noted that it didn’t work the first 68 times I tried to publish it.  I thought I’d share a little about what I discovered in that process. 

The normal “embed” code from Youtube itself doesn’t seem to work, at least not with IE7.  It looks like this:

<object width=”425″ height=”350″>
<param name=”movie” value=”http://www.youtube.com/v/Hjhi_FHxY8k”></param>
<param name=”wmode” value=”transparent”></param>
</object>

I did some poking around and found this thread of comments on the topic, which basically resolves that the underlying problem is that the Youtube embed code is improperly formed.  Within that thread is an alternate set of code that does work…it looks like this:

<object width=”425″ height=”350″ type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” data=”http://www.youtube.com/v/Hjhi_FHxY8k”><param name=”movie” value=”http://www.youtube.com/v/Hjhi_FHxY8k” /><param name=”wmode” value=”transparent” /></object>

Interestingly, it appears that Wordpress likes to mess up the embed code even when it *is* correct.  I’d get it working, then edit the post and it would “break” the above code, removing some of the parameters.  Or at least that’s what it seemed to be doing. 

I finally got the post to work by turning off the rich editor in WordPress and using the second set of code above.  Hurray for persistance!

I mentioned a couple of days ago that I’m cleaning up my office.  Stage 2 was supposed to be “re-do the wiring”, but that became “stage 3″ when I decided I needed to add a new filing cabinet and a few other things to help organize. 

Stage 3 took place today: this site was down for a while as a result.  Rewiring always causes mixed feeling for me.  On the one hand, I derive some satisfaction from turning a gordian knot of cables into some sort of organized, hopefully neat configuration.  On the other hand is the near-certainty that, within mere days of making everything organized, I’ll have to fix something and tear apart the cable routing in frustration.

One “happy surprise” of this cable re-structuring was coming up with a new/safer way to situate my network router.  For years now, both the router and my ADSL modem have been attached to the second desk in my room.  But that was becoming a problem, primarily since the area behind the second desk had become a favorite play area for the kittens.   What happened was this…

• I wanted to replace an aging (plastic) file cabinet with a sturdier metal one.  The cabinet I bought on sale had a funky little “shelf” on top, ostensibly to put your printer on, and under which you could then store paper.  Since my printer is happy where it is I had no real intent of using this stand.  But I thought perhaps my router and modem could go under it….but I like having that gear “bolted down” to prevent certain felines from deciding it looks better on the floor.  So, I set that idea aside and continued reorganizing
• wanted to remove the computer shelf on my desk, which has been irritating me for years since it inhibits access to my computer.  Instead, I would put my computer on a wheeled computer stand
• The computer shelf thus removed left me with two large laminated “chunks” of particle board.  I had no idea what to use this for…wait a sec.  That one chunk looks sorta the same size as the funky shelf on the cabinet…would it slide underneath?  Yes!  Perfectly, with less than a millimetre on either side.  Of course, it is nearly inconceivable that the router and ADSL modem would bolt onto the board and slide underneath the shelf…
• Good gravy, it fits!

I have to assume that this nearly miraculous series of events is a re-balancing of my techno-karma after my recent series of Vista problems.  Either that, or it is a sign of the impending apocalypse.  Either way, my network is back up and running, and my cabling looks elegant for the moment.

On Thursday I decided to install some driver updates for Vista.  ATI has a new video driver, version 7.2.  I had this crazy idea that this might solve my problem with putting the computer in standby mode.  The rest of what happened is proof that, despite having a moderately high intelligence, I’m often rather stupid…

Read the rest of this entry »

Vista has a fancy utility program to help manage photographs and videos called “Windows Photo Gallery”.  It has a bunch of nice features like the ability to tag images, and to automatically categorize them by date.

Unfortunately, it hasn’t worked properly since I migrated to Windows.  Every time I tried to use it, it came up with nothing except for the pictures in the “Public” (\Users\Public\Public Pictures) folder.  When I tried to add my own pictures folder (\Users\Kelly\Pictures), it failed with an error saying (paraphrasing): “Cannot add this directory: it or its parent are hidden or system folders- please use the Pictures folder”.

I eventually came to the conclusion that this was a permissions problem (d’uh).  And I then came to the even more profound conclusion that this was a result of me using the “Windows Easy Transfer” utility, which transfers files from your previous Windows machine to your new system.  What I surmise happened is this: when I use Windows Easy Transfer, it transfer my user files (E.G.: my pictures) and attempts to retain the old Windows XP permissions.  In XP, a user’s home directory has different (odd) permissions compared to Vista. 

Sure enough, when I looked at \Users\Kelly (right click=> properties), it was marked as “hidden” and with some of its contents “read only”.  Irritatingly, the “hidden” permission was greyed out- meaning I couldn’t change it.  Sigh.  After some pondering, I deselected “read only”, and said “this folder only” (I.E.: not recursive).  I was then able deselect hidden. 

After this, I was then able to re-launch Windows Photo Gallery, and chose File-> Add Folder to Gallery successfully.  Moral of this story: Windows Easy Transfer transfers easily, but appears to do (or arguably not do) some rather unfortunate things with file permissions that will come back later to bite you.

I keep making headway regarding outstanding problems with my migration to Vista.  It appears that I’ve overcome the problem with EQ2Map Updater. 

• Apparently, some of the files in the map directory for EQ2Maps (E.G.: C:\Program Files (x86)\Sony\EverQuest II\UI\EQ2MAP) are/became read only.  I removed the read only property
• and then EQ2Map Update stopped freezing and generated a big ugly error message.  I’d paste it here, but I’ve not been able to re-create it.  I made the error message go away by stopping my anti-virus program, Avast, which also seems to be having some problems with Vista (see below)

The odd thing is this: I turned on Avast again, and EQ2Maps still works.  I’m puzzled by this behavior.  I like Avast: it has been a great AV program under Windows XP X64, and I expected great things from it under Vista based on their website.   But what I’m seeing is very odd.

I disabled Avast’s Web Shield a couple of days ago when I noticed some websites weren’t loading.  There are some postings in Avast’s forum about this behaviour, but no real responses thus far.   To further confuse matters, I re-enabled Web Shield earlier today, thinking that perhaps the autotuning correction I made yesterday might have an impact on Avast’s behavior.  Sure enough, the websites that were consistently failing with WebShield previously were working fine now WebShield enabled and autotuning turned off.

I’m going to try rebooting.  If everything still works, I’ll assume there is some voodoo taking place involving Avast WebShield, Vista’s autotuning, and strange evil spirits…

I’ve been having some “odd” email problems since installing Vista.  One of my email accounts (Telus) fails (times out) with an error 0×800CCC19 whenever there is an email in my inbox longer than about one or two kilobytes.  If I use my email service’s web interface and delete any such messages, the connection works fine. 

I tried the obvious things, such as disabling my anti-virus program and increasing the time out value in Windows Mail.  I then launched my trusty Google search, and found this forum thread on the topic.  The thread included the usual advice, but one post stood out:

 Jake  (Msg. 5) Posted: Tue Feb 06, 2007 4:03 pm
Post subject: Re: Receiving Mail [Login to view extended thread Info.]
 

There is a fix floating around that goes like this.
This is very step-by-step, so bear with me.     

1. Go to the Vista start menu and type cmd
2. The search results will display a program titled cmd
3. Right-click on the link and select “Run as administrator”
4. type “netsh interface tcp set global autotuning=disabled” without the
quotatioin marks
5. Test your POP account and see if you can now download the files.
6. If nothing changes, reenable the autotuning feature by typing “netsh 

I followed the instructions exactly, and voila- email worked!  I’ll have to do some more research later on what “global autotuning” does, and why it is causing my email session to fail.   Thanks, “Jake”, whoever you are!   

UPDATE: I found a good description of what Vista’s “autotuning” is about, and why it might be causing problems.  Basically, autotuning is a negotiation between the client and the server regarding network packet size, and the problem arises when the process agrees to a large packet size but where some part of the negotiation gets blocked by an intermediate router/network device.  Apparently, turning it off doesn’t have a significant performance impact in most situations.  Now I’ll have to investigate my router to see if it might be causing problems with the negotiation….