Coming at you from the US of A July 28, 2009
Posted by a1291762 in : Uncategorized , add a commentThe flight from Brisbane to LA was ok but I don’t think I slept much at all. I watched Watchmen, Igor and Hotel for Dogs. I also finished my book (Polity Agent by Neal Asher) and listened to a heap of music on my iPod. All this in under 13 hours (that’s how I know I didn’t get enough sleep).
As we came into LA it was a glorious day. That is, until we broke through the clouds. Underneath the cloud layer it was grey and foggy. I don’t know if the air is normally clearer but it was quite disgusting. I’ve been coughing ever since the walk between the terminals I had to do at LA.
Next was a short flight to Phoenix. Pretty uneventful. I didn’t have a window seat but the I saw out the window looked pretty bland and repetitive. I noticed cactus as we were landing.
I got given a “mini-van” because the car I was supposed to have wasn’t available. It’s a Dodge Grand Caravan and it’s like a Tarago but a bit bigger. No big deal to drive. They gave me a GPS so I had no problems getting to the hotel. I do have to keep myself from drifting right as my mind tries to put me in the “correct” part of the road.
I got out at the hotel and noticed just how hot it is here (weather report was saying 45 degC). It’s like being in a sauna only there’s no snow outside. Actually, it feels quite dry so while the heat is very feelable it’s not like the horrid summer in Queensland (which is less hot but much more humid). The hotel’s pool is broken so if I want a swim I have to go to the health club down the road.
I was to have a companion from another office but that hasn’t happened so it’s just me. I managed to skip lunch so I need to get something to eat (approaching starvation). Then I need to find something to do so I don’t go to sleep too early. I could go and introduce myself to the customer I suppose. I have no idea what else there is to do here in Chandler, AZ.
Eve is falling apart, upgraded July 25, 2009
Posted by a1291762 in : Uncategorized , add a commentEve’s Enter key has died. It’s that stupid plastic scissors design Apple used to use. This machine is really starting to look well-used :(
I finally installed Leopard the other day. Now I can run the Mojo SDK (yay). I didn’t have the space or time for a clean install so I did the upgrade thing. It was surprisingly smooth going. Only minor problems afterwards. Biggest bummer is that SubEthaEdit is dead. Turns out it’s not even free for non-commercial use anymore so RIP SubEthaEdit.
I’m currently evaluating TextWrangler as a replacement. So far it seems like it has what I need. Before I used SubEthaEdit I used BBEdit Lite and TextWrangler seems to have at least some commonality with that program. It has a retarded window placement policy but I don’t normally have lots of text windows open at the same time so it might not matter.
ooh. I can run the Chromium builds now. Apple, you should be scared for Safari (and it’s increasingly annoying UI). Let me count the ways…
1) Forced to have the “Add Bookmark” button (it could be removed before).
2) Stop/Reload on the _wrong_ end of the address bar.
3) Google search box that cannot be removed or configured (at least Inquisitor lets me use Google properly – I’m in Australia so give me google.com.au!)
Embracing the Social July 25, 2009
Posted by a1291762 in : Uncategorized , add a commentSo I can’t give up facebook now since I’ve managed to connect up to so many people on there but I’m not finding the facebook experience satisfactory for micro-blogging (even though I thought it would make a fine substitute for twitter). Thus I’m now going to have things spread between this blog (for longer posts), twitter (micro-posts) and facebook (well… really only stuff that my friends might be interested in).
I’ve got my twitter updates on the front page of this blog and the latest twitter appears on the sidebar of other pages. There’s a facebook status widget on the sidebar too but it doesn’t seem to work unless I post to facebook frequently.
The problem with TiVo July 21, 2009
Posted by a1291762 in : Uncategorized , add a commentTiVo is really good but it has a problem that has recently caused us much grief.
Simply put, the problem is that TiVo does not intelligently handle shows that run sequentially on the same channel.
A diagram will help to demonstrate the problem.
Here’s an example from the other day when Sea Patrol had a “special 2 hour presentation” (actually just 2 episodes back-to-back).
The overrun means that the second episode is recorded on the other tuner and there’s 10 minutes where both tuners are recording the same content.
This gets annoying when there is another show that is supposed to be recording at the same time. In this case, it was Supernatural. Actually, because of Supernatural’s higher priority the first episode of Sea Patrol was skipped.
If Supernatural had been lower priority than Sea Patrol then the beginning of Supernatural would have been clipped instead. Better than dropping a whole show but still wrong.
This situation actually happens quite a bit to us but there’s normally 3 programs involved instead of just 2. In that case, careful ordering in the Season Pass Manager can make the TiVo do something reasonable automatically (it normally clips the front of program 2).
If this problem had been spotted in time, it could have been worked around by removing the overflow on the first episode of Sea Patrol.
The TiVo could do this automatically but when you’ve got 3 programs instead of two it could lead to problems unless the shows are always watched together (ie. you don’t want the start of your show on the end of some other show you watched and deleted a week ago).
So a proper fix needs some extra logic. Here’s what I’d like to see the TiVo do all by itself.
The key is to detect that two programs are running on the same tuner, one after another and then to record the overlapping bit on just one tuner and stick it both on the end of the first show and on the beginning of the second show. This keeps the other tuner free to record another channel.
Text entry on the Pre makes me nervous July 17, 2009
Posted by a1291762 in : pre , add a commentNow that the Mojo SDK is available, I’ve played around with a Pre (or at least the emulator, which is pretty close). I happened to receive an email and decided to reply using the webOS email app. What I found worries me.
First, I should explain where I’m coming from. I currently have a Treo 650 which has a touch screen, a keyboard and a navigation key that normally moves the cursor in multi-line text editing apps. I have composed large amounts of code and a fair amount of non-code writing on my Treo with no problems. The keyboard lets me type fast and accurately. The screen gives me gross cursor movement (replacing a mouse on a desktop machine). Most significantly, the navigation key lets me move the cursor. When writing anything more than a few sentences this ability becomes important.
So how does this work on the Pre?
The keyboard is there and while I have yet to see a decent side-by-side with a Treo 650 keyboard I’m cautiously optimistic that the keyboard will be ok.
The touch screen is a little different. The lack of a stylus means the accuracy of gross cursor movement will be impacted. Since I was using the emulator it was not a problem because I had a mouse. The iPhone OS gives you accuracy by using a magnifying glass effect. While this is handy I noticed on a friend’s iPod Touch that gross cursor placement was slowed down by the need to first tap-and-hold to get the magnifying glass effect to come up.
Now for the missing bit, the navigation key. There is nothing like it on the Pre. Even the iPhone’s virtual keyboard lacks “cursor movement” keys. So what does that mean? It means if you want to move the cursor you have only 2 options:
1) If you need to move the cursor to the left and don’t mind re-typing stuff you can press backspace. That’s really only acceptable while you’re writing stuff (when you make a mistake).
2) You can touch the screen to position the cursor.
There’s a bit of a problem with 2 though. Unlike the iPhone (which has the keyboard right next to the content thanks to its on-screen keyboard) the Pre has about 2cm between the screen and the keyboard. On top of that, the keyboard is recessed thanks to the slider design. It was bad enough re-positioning the cursor with a mouse. I really worry that it will be practically unfeasible to move the cursor on the actual device. Also, while the iPhone OS could be extended to include movement keys on the virtual keyboard, there just aren’t any keys on the Pre that can be intuitively re-mapped for cursor movement.
Now vim key bindings are something I could use. Maybe I can hack the webOS to give me vim key bindings in text widgets.
Holiday Post July 10, 2009
Posted by a1291762 in : Uncategorized , add a commentOur holiday was great.
We drove up over 3 days (can’t really do more than half a day of driving with kids). Normally we go crazy trying to do everything there is to do up there but this time it was more relaxed, so much so that we had our last planned desert in the morning before leaving.
It turns out you can’t play 4 hours of Oblivion on battery. I’m running at what I would have thought were reasonable settings (I prefer low res/quality to low frame rate) but I still really only managed about an hour and a half on a full charge. This is a reasonably fresh battery too, running at 95% of the “as new” capacity. Still, I did get in a lot of Oblivion and I’m still loving it.
I’ve become a vampire (just because I read it could be done). It’s pretty cool except for the extra powers/sunlight damage trade off which sees me wasting the daylight hours hanging around in caves so I don’t die while travelling or missing out on the awesome 20 point bonuses. I tend to stretch my days so I was impressed when I finally made it to 100% vampire only to find out that my quest meant I needed to talk to some beggars and they don’t talk to vampires, even if you charm them. I also found out (some time afterwards) that a fight I had with a crooked official where I killed him to avoid getting killed myself meant I had committed murder. I only found out when the dark brotherhood came knocking (which ironically only happened because I couldn’t leave the cave I was in thanks to the sun damage thing).
I seem to be joining just about every guild there is (except for magic, I hate magic stuff because it’s too complicated – I make potions but only so that I can sell them). I’ve spent most of my time with a bow and arrow and a day at the arena showed me just how deficient my sword skills are. Taking out an opponent with a bow means minimal health loss and only slight fatigue (presumably from the few times I jump out of the way – no dodge yet but I’m working on it). Try the same thing with a sword and I seem to get hit much more while using up all of my (relatively low) fatigue. I’ve been carrying around a sword and shield for the times when an enemy gets up close but that rarely seems to happen to me these days.
With the enchanted armour, rings amulets and vampire abilities I can run faster than a horse now. Even better, I can enter sneak mode and/or attack while moving (you can’t do any of those from a horse). I guess a horse is good for the tank characters but I’m really questioning the usefulness of having one. My first was free from a quest, my second was a paint horse I bought after the first horse was killed by wolves (oh yeah, horses attract the natives more than I do).