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Electrical work September 23, 2006

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We had an electrician in on Thursday. The main trigger for calling was that our front light switch was failing. We haven’t used it for a few weeks now because it sounds all fizzy and makes the lights go strange. We had 2 more switches replaced because they were close to failing. We had the switch in the laundry moved too. Frank put a door on the laundry for us ages ago but since there wasn’t room for a regular door, we’ve got a sliding door. Unfortunately, it slides over the light switch! Our original plan had been to move it to the other side of the doorway but that was going to be a very involved process. The electrician had the idea of putting it above the oven. It was a much easier movement but the switch is now outside the laundry.

One thing we’ve wanted to do for ages is move the cable point from Isaac’s room to behind the TV. It’s a small job but you need someone with extra qualifications or something. Since we have both the cable modem and the wireless router connected to the cable point that would have exhausted the points behind the TV. We asked about adding a new point and ended up with a new product called an entertainment pack. It’s a massive wall point with 6 independently switched points and a cable outlet. It’s designed to go behind TVs since most people have much more than just a TV and a VCR these days. Unfortunately, our TV cabinet requires more than 6 points but at least we’ve got heaps of extra capacity now.

For reference, this is what’s plugged in behind the TV.
- TV
- PVR
- 2 x VCR
- DVD Player
- CD Player
- Radio/Amplifier unit
- Cable modem
- Wireless router

I also want a computer plugged in and available all the time. I’m thinking of either putting seven behind the TV or putting a wireless card in Asteria and using Linux to drive it. I’d use Luksusdyret but it’s rather unstable these days and the (third party binary-only) wireless drivers for the wireless card don’t handle connecting automatically which kind of ruins the point of an always-on server.

Kid Update September 17, 2006

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Emily has been coughing at night for a while now. She’s also had a rash on her face. Bree got concerned and took her to the doctor. It seems she might have athsma. She’s been coughing after running around at kindy and all the coughing is causing blood vessels to burst in her face, giving her the rash. She’s on ventolin 4 times a day and we should know in a day or two if it’s helping. If it does, then she’s got athsma. The doctor’s pretty confident given the history in Bree’s family.

Isaac has a third tooth through. The teething seems to be making his reflux play up though. He’s still eating his solids but he’s not into his bottles at all and even he’s even turning away custard. Hopefully it’ll die down soon.

Update 20 September 2006

Emily can clearly name Wags, Dorothy and Henry. She can even say Emily a bit better. It’s now more like “Emmy”, which is a step up from “Elly”. She even said something that was almost “Emily”.

Han shot first September 16, 2006

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Despite George Lucas’ attempts to rewrite history, Han did in fact shoot first. I now have the DVD to prove it!

That’s right. I’m now the proud owner of the limited edition original Star Wars trilogy. Each movie comes with both the original theatrical version and the revisionist, butchered version.

So what’s the first thing I thought to do? Compare them of course.

The original theatrical version is supposedly taken from the Laserdisc edition. It’s encoded in 4:3 letterbox format which means around half the vertical resolution is wasted. There hasn’t been any attempts to clean up the presentation so you can see things like film grain and occasional visual jitters. Nevertheless, both my computer and my widescreen TV are able to present the disc zoomed appropriately. One of my biggest concerns when I heard about this edition was getting a 4:3 cut but that’s not what I’ve got so I’m happy. Of note is that the few subtitles that are shown (eg. when Greedo talk) are presented outside the movie area so if you zoom the presentation for a wide screen, you can miss out on them. I didn’t try turning on subtitles but I’d guess that they also display outside the movie area.

So what’s different in the revisionist edition? To start with, they’ve cleaned up the source material. The film grain is almost completely gone and the occasional jitters have been removed. The encoding is 16:9 letterbox format so there’s move vertical resolution. Combined with the cleaning it makes for a much better picture. However, there was one very important downside to the presentation. The contrast has been increased, making the video appear darker in most places and the colour has been boosted quite significantly. The thing that really highlights this is when you see the droids walking away from the escape pod. The pod’s shadow was showing up as blue! I’m not sure why they’ve screwed with the contrast and colour but I’m guessing it has to do with how modern LCD and plasma TVs display stuff. The Greedo subtitles were actually shown inside the movie area for this edition. While it obscures the picture a bit, it does mean that you can crop the sides of the movie to fit your screen without missing out on the subtitles. I’d guess that the regular subtitles do the same things but I haven’t tested that.

Of course by far the biggest problem with the revisionist edition is what was replaced and what was added in. The scenes in Mos Eisley are the worst. I think the point was to turn the city from a bare desert town into something that would more closely resemble the depiction in The Phantom Menace. The rally cry from the fans of the original is “han shot first” and well, I really don’t know what George was thinking when he changed that part of the story.

Something odd I noticed was from the scene where they’re leaving the deathstar in the millennium falcon. There’s a particular shot of a tie fighter flying along. If you look really closely and turn up the brightness a bit, you’ll see that the fighter has been inserted, along with a lighter square of star field, onto the real background. I didn’t notice this watching the original version but because I had to play with the contrast and colour settings for the revisionist edition, that lighter square became quite visible. It’s still there in the original edition and if you crank up the brightness a bit you’ll see it. What’s really puzzling to me, and I guess what gets me the most about the revisionist edition, is that square is something that could have been trivially fixed.

I think the thing that has always annoyed me the most about the revisionist edition is that it’s not consistent. Some things have been left in, even though they could easily have been fixed while other things were replaced for no particularly good reason. Everything from the Jawa transport to lots of space ships got replaced with CG abominations. This would not have been cheap to add and did absolutely nothing for the movie, other than showing just how crap CG looks compared to the model tech that the rest of the movie uses.

Ironically, if the original versions hadn’t been bundled with the revisionist versions, I would never have done this kind of comparison.

More photos than you can poke a stick at September 13, 2006

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I got around to looking at iLife and it seems that iPhoto can export to iWeb, which can publish to a folder, ready for me to upload to my ISP. It handles scaling and thumb-nailing the images but it’s still putting larger images that I used to have. That’s good for anyone that wants to look at the pictures but I’ve now got 5 MB worth of iWeb-generated files which is half the space Optus gives me.

There’s pages for Emily and Isaac.

I’m noticing problems already (web server claims it can’t find the image but it’s there). Hopefully it’ll get better.

Update 13 February 2009

Oops. Noticed these broken links. I’m planning on putting pictures up on flikr or picassa or something (who knows, I might even put up the iWeb stuff again because I’ve got some decent storage on my web host now).

Looking after the kids September 12, 2006

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A last minute issue meant I got to look after the kids yesterday. Bree left for work leaving us all asleep until 7:20, when Isaac woke us up.

Talking about breakfast requires knowledge of the new teats so a quick diversion…

We started Isaac on new teats recently. Bree has been wanting him of nipples and onto something else for a while but with the other problems we’ve had, it just never seemed a good opportunity to switch. Unlike Emily, Isaac can’t be tempted to try new teats by starvation. We tried 4 different things until I suggested using regular (non-thickened) formula, since the thick formula is quite hard to suck through. It worked but Isaac spent the rest of the day vomiting everywhere, something he hasn’t been doing since we got him on the thick formula. Luckily, he can handle the thick formula with the new teats, he just needed the one time with regular formula to get the idea of how the new teat works.

So we’re now using 3 Pigeon stage 2 nipple things. They’re white and have a much bigger opening when you squeeze them. They’re meant to help transition from a nipple suck to a straw suck. Isaac can now drain a bottle in less than half the time it used to take him.

So for breakfast, Isaac had his regular cereal but didn’t want his bottle. It took me a while to realise it wasn’t just the new teat. I noticed half a Losec tablet, which I guessed (correctly) meant he’d missed out on it the night before. He hadn’t had his morning one yet either which meant he was operating on full stomach acid, making it totally unsurprising that he didn’t want liquids. I got the Losec into him and hoped that he’d be right by lunch. No such luck. He was again happy to eat solids for lunch but no liquids. Not even water. He also didn’t manage to sleep all that well, I suspect because his stomach was upset.

Emily and I had hard boiled eggs and toast for lunch. I don’t know if Emily has had hard boiled eggs before but she seemed to enjoy them.

Because we were going to the Gold Coast in the early afternoon, Emily’s normal sleep time would be missed. I tried to get her to sleep earlier but it didn’t really work. She had quiet time on her bed but I don’t think she slept.

Between Emily’s changed timetable and Isaac’s poor sleep, I had about 10 minutes during the day to get anything done. I had to do the dishes since there was several days worth there, including all 7 bowls we have.

The trip to the coast was exciting. It was only supposed to be cloudy but it was raining. Bree had said not to bring the pram or backpack carrier so Emily had to walk and I had to hold Isaac. It was cold so we all had jumpers on. Emily was holding my little umbrella (it normally lives in my backpack) and I had a big one. Emily also wore her raincoat for the first time. The sight of Emily in raincoat, sunglasses, hat and holding the umbrella was very cute. I wish I’d got a photo or something. I had to keep swapping arms holding Isaac because he’s quite heavy now. Luckily the rain wasn’t that heavy so I managed to keep us dry with the umbrella.

We managed to get out of the house and walk down the street quicker than I’d anticipated so we were at the bus stop with 20 minutes to spare. I was quite impressed that Emily didn’t get antsy for the first 15 minutes. Every time a vehicle bigger than a car came down the road she’s say to me “daddy, bus”. Every time I’ve been on a bus with Emily, she’s either been in the pram or held by me or Bree. Since I was holding Isaac, she had to sit by herself. It was quite humorous watching her leaning into the corners to avoid falling off the seat.

From the bus to the train. Emily was definitely antsy but managed to stay in her seat. She did talk though, asking me if we were there yet, if we were going to mum-mum’s (her name for Bree’s mum), what various things were and just exclaiming “ooh daddy” at nothing in particular. I think the whole carriage must have been relieved when we got off.

The plan was to arrive on the one train, dump the kids on Bree and immediately jump on the train that was leaving from the other platform. This was the only way to avoid a lengthy wait due to how the bus and train timetables interacted, mostly because busses on my street only go every hour. Unfortunately, the timing didn’t work and the other train pulled out as the doors of the first train opened. To pass the time till the next train I helped Bree load the kids into the car and got some Nando’s chips, which I promptly burned my mouth on. I got a taxi home instead of waiting the 40 minutes until the next bus. It’s annoying that the taxi costs more than the return bus and train ticket. At least it didn’t have to wait for ages, like the previous Sunday when I came home from a family lunch on the Gold Coast. It’s times like these when I can’t wait until we get another car.

Emily is learning words pretty fast now. Since The Wiggles is what she gets exposed to the most, it’s where she’s picking up her words from. At swimming, she got an octopus stamp, pointed to it and said “Henry”.

New photos of the kids September 10, 2006

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There’s some new photos of both Emily and Isaac up.

I really need to check out the new stuff in iLife ‘06 (came with Eve) to see if there’s something that makes posting photos easier. I’m pretty sure there is…

Of iMacs and Meroms September 9, 2006

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So there’s a massive amount of “discussion” about what’s going on and what it means. Unfortunately, most of the people involved with these discussions are totally clueless. Here’s what’s actually going on.

Apple chose to use the Core Duo in their iMac because it’s a better chip than the P4 and “Core 2″ wasn’t around. Also, it means the iMac can share its internal design with the MacBook and MacBook Pro. Maintaining 2 designs (MacBook [Pro]/[i]Mac [Mini] and Mac Pro) is easier than maintaining 3 designs so as long as the chips perform well compared to their “desktop” counterparts and supply isn’t an issue, it makes sense for Apple to do this.

Intel has 3 “Core 2″ products: Merom (mobile), Conroe (desktop) and Woodcrest (Xeon). Reports are that Intel’s manufacturing is running at 70% Woodcrest, 20% Conroe and only a trickle of Meroms. I’m not so convinced of the numbers (I don’t think they come from Intel) but I certainly wouldn’t be surprised if there are more Conroes being made than Meroms. The PC industry seems to be picking up Conroe for desktop machines but is still using Pentium M or Core Duo chips for many laptops.

The Merom is a drop-in upgrade for Core Duo but there are limitations with this. Most importantly, the chipset remains 32-bit so you can’t have more than 4 GB of address space (only 3 GB RAM, since around 1 GB is needed for device I/O space). Most important for Apple though is that dropping in a Merom brings the iMac to about the same performance as PCs with Conroe have. Apple could redesign the iMac to use Conroe but that would take longer and mean maintaining 3 designs instead of 2.

Despite a claimed 20% increase in performance from Core Duo to Merom, people aren’t seeing this on actual PC laptop that are shipping. This makes it less important to have a Merom in a laptop. In fact, other than different model number, there’s nothing to differentiate a Core Duo and a Merom in marketing material. The platform name for both chips is Centrino Duo. The thing that will really help the Merom pull away from Core Duo is the new 64-bit capable chipset but as with Conroe, that means a new design. Delaying the Merom in laptops gives Apple a chance to build a system based on the new chipset so that there’s a significant performance improvement.

So Apple’s use of Core Duo for most of it’s machines is the primary cause of the current situation. Other than the current supply shortages, doing this is advantageous. Apple might consider switching the iMac over to Conroe but that’ll take time and money and might even ruin some of the nice points of the current systems (cool and quiet). The portables won’t see a significant advantage from a Merom upgrade right now so Apple’s using the limited chips they have to ensure the iMac remains competitive with desktop PCs. Going forward, I’d expect Apple to continue using Merom in the iMac. When they get a system design based on the new chipset, Meroms will go into the MacBook Pro. I think the Mini and MacBook will remain on Core Duo for a while yet. Core Duos are getting cheaper now and it’ll let Apple drop the price on these machines to pre-Intel levels while remaining relatively close to the performance of the other systems. Sure, it means having 3 designs around but the MacBook/Mini design has already been done so it’s not the same as aiming for a trio of Merom/Conroe/Woodcrest.

Finally, there’s been calls for a low end Conroe-based Mac Pro but unless the iMac switches to Conroe (which as I’ve said, is doubtful) that means a new system design for a single, low-end “pro” machine. Worse, it would be a system that directly competes with the iMac and while some people would like a non-all-in-one machine with similar specs to the iMac, I really doubt Apple will ever provide such a system. It’s just not something teh Steve is interested in.

Blogger Beta looks interesting September 5, 2006

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I noticed that there’s a new Blogger Beta. My initial thought was “meh” because it’s not much use without blogspot hosting and that has some problems. The minor problem is that you have to have the navbar enabled. The much more major (to me) problem is that all of your content has to somehow make it into your template because you can’t upload files. Currently I have
blog.css and functions.js to hold the CSS and Javascript my site uses. While these can be rolled into the template (at the cost of more code to download all the time), the images I use can’t be. Worse, files relating to posts can’t even be stored there. It’s not trivial to convert random data into a format suitable for posting to the web so it’s nice to just post a link to a real file type.

Mind you, using blogspot doesn’t mean I have to give up my ISP hosting. It doesn’t seem optimal to me but I could keep blog.css, functions.js and other such files on the ISP host. I could even upload the images to a special “placeholder page”, like how I’m moving my static pages to blog entries.

Today I noticed that you can now edit your Blogger Beta template. I don’t just mean picking a new one, I mean editing the XML that’s used to present your site. I had a bit of a go merging my existing template/CSS into the new XML format. I’ve put it up at http://a1291762.blogspot.com/. Despite my misgivings, I might end up moving over to a blogspot-hosted blog. It makes all my recent navigation work less useful but I suppose if I want the navigation stuff to remain, I need to figure out how to do the same thing in the new XML format. At least I’ll know what I’m trying to do, even if I don’t know how to do it.

Along came a spider September 5, 2006

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On fathers day, we were sitting watching the Wiggles DVD that came with the paper when a spider came down the hallway like it owned the joint. Emily and I waited outside while Bree killed it.

Recycled sound effects September 3, 2006

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Perhaps I’m just hypersensitive to this sort of thing (a side effect of my musical abilities perhaps?), but I seem to have an uncanny ability to pick recycled sound effects. The most recent one was the use of the DOOM door sounds in the latest Doctor Who episode (I think it’s called “Impossible Planet”. Mind you, it was probably done on purpose since the “monster” for this episode was Satan himself, also the star of the DOOM games.

Another one I remember was the elevator sound from Duke Nukem 3D. It turned up in some B grade science fiction movie I recorded late one night. It was a long time ago so I can’t remember much about the movie except that it must have had less than $100 to spend on the special effects, they were crap.

I never bothered to write down the sounds I’ve heard before. I’ll start with these two. I do remember hearing recycled sounds in games but I can’t remember any details.