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Text Entry on the Nokia N95 Apr. 27th, 2008 @ 04:43 pm
Subtitle:
Motorola iTap vs. QuickWrite vs. Nokia T9 Predictive Text
or...
How I recovered from Motorola-withdrawl
Predictive Text is a good thing. That's the feature that allows you to type in words very quickly on a cell phone keypad, using just one button press per letter, and then select the closest matching word. For example, for "cat", it would be 228, and then possibly a cursor key or * to move from "bat" and "act" to "cat". Eventually, if you write about cats more than about baseball, flying rodents and theatre, "cat" will pop up first.

The alternative is to scroll through the letters. "cat" would then be 222, pause or cursor, 28. Which doesn't sound so bad, but is much harder for the name "Sony" as in the electronics manufacturer... 7777666- pause or cursor - 66999.

In my experience, the best predictive text is Motorola's iTap. This actually came after the big fish of the predictive-text industry, T9, which I'll cover soon, but has some huge improvements over T9 such as word-completion. iTap does an excellent job of learning your preferences, and it allows you to easily select word completion. For example, after 228, you might have "cat" and "actually" shown as options, if you use the word "actually" frequently. Hit the cursor key to select it and you've saved entering in numbers for the "ually" portion. Very nice. And it works extremely well.

Nokia uses T9. And that system does not include word completion. It will give you common options for your entered text, but not for text you haven't gotten to yet. Better than nothing, but not much. And a huge step down from iTap, especially for words that are a bit complex.

So I decided to try MobileSystems QuickWrite. This is a $30 add-on program for S60 (Nokia) phones, to improve the predictive text. Since the trial period is only seven days, possibly I simply didn't learn it well enough, but I felt like it made things much worse For example, you still have to hit the 6 key multiple times for an "o". If you don't, you simply don't get the "o". In other words, using QuickWrite removes the T9/iTap functionality of interpreting the "6" key flexibly as one of three letters, rather than forcing you to specify it. I really hope this feature is really there and I just missed it, but other people on the same fora as I also didn't find it.

But on the bright side, it does feature word completion, just not with intelligent input. It may be useful on QWERTY devices while being sub-optimal for phone keypad devices.

So QuickWrite got dumped right quickly. And since I had assumed Adaptxt was basically a QuickWrite clone, I didn't even consider it for a few weeks. But as I was considering blogging about this problem with my phone, I decided I had better try it out, just to be fair.

Adaptxt does use the same one-key-per-letter approach as iTap and T9 (and as is lacking in QuickWrite), and adds to this the word completion of iTap. And adds to that optional phrase completion. Which seems a bit overkill but is kinda nice to have. It also has a bizarre "SMS" mode that can even do translations, such as,

The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dogs.
to
D qix brown fox jumped ova d lazy dogs.
Lord help me, I am not making this up! It's like a bad Ebonics translator!

It also has a really fun game built in. Well, not really, but kind-of. The "phrase completion" is fun because if you just accept it, you can get some pretty random sentences. The following started, and I kid you not, with nothing. The line was blank. So Adaptxt suggested starting with "The", a perfectly reasonable start for most paragraphs. And it went from there, to...

The first of the new york city of a new scientist that the last time and the same time of our new Zealand and a few of the new york city of...
I have no idea why it came up with that. But it's somewhat cool and no less meaningful or philosophical than most modern poetry.

There were some hiccups. Adaptxt has a few bugs (it does claim to be beta software, so this is expected), and some features that are annoyingly difficult to find:

  • The number of words listed in the pop-up menu is theoretically configurable, but the only accepted value is "3".
  • When Adaptxt is up, you cannot use the cursor keys to move around the text field (assuming a large data entry field), until after hitting <Cursor Left> to pop out of word-completion mode. If this is documented, I missed it. Found it by experimentation.
  • Similarly, to switch out of full-predictive (for example, so you can enter a software key, unusual name or other non-word), hold the # key for a while. Which is the Motorola way of doing it, not the Nokia way. The Pen icon doesn't have this impact. Tapping the # key changes casing and to numeric.
  • In more than a few cases, especially noticed in J2ME apps, adding a word to Adaptxt will exit the application you were using.
Adaptxt really should be using the Pen key for some of these features. Nokia put an "Activate Predictive Text" in their input extension, so Adaptxt putting it on the long press of the # isn't at all intuitive.

All that said, it's really small potatoes. Adaptxt brings iTap-functionality to the Nokia N95, which is basically what I was after. The only additional enhancement I'd like is to be able to configure how the 0-key works. Under iTap, the * key is space if tapped, but carriage-return if held. Since all the other N95 keys are numbers if held, but 0 is not, this is a point-of-inconsistency that could easily be rendered far more powerful. Adaptxt is still a (free) beta, but I'll be buying it the moment it's released!

Update: The online help for Adaptxt is pretty sparse, but the S60 Manual does document the left-arrow to navigate and the # for switching between "Multitap", "Predictive" and numeric modes. They call the pen key menu the "Fast Menu." I still believe they should add toggling the input mode to that menu.
Update #2 - 10 May:
After about two more weeks with Adaptxt, I have suffered a few foibles. Since Adaptxt doesn't have a forum...
  • The program sometimes crashes, exiting it and sometimes the program it is acting inside (e.g. Messaging, some J2ME apps). To re-enable Adaptxt, you must restart the Adaptxt Preferences!
  • The dictionary can be large, and many words can be considered matches. Suppose you write 45... it won't know if you're starting "goodbye", "goodnight", "image", "hopeful", "home", etc. 43 is even worse. And you can't easily narrow down the first letter or letters. In T9, you can enter a number, select (via down) the corresponding letter, and continue. In Adaptxt, only complete words (at least in my configuration) are displayed. Having the ability to choose, e.g. "h..." as the second option after "4", and then "ho..." as an option after adding 5 would make it much easier to use.
  • The word list window often pops up even when empty, e.g. when entering a username in Outlook Web Access in the Web Browser on the Nokia N95. This is ugly, but more importantly, it prevents easy access to "down" as a way to fill in the saved authentication data.

All that said, Adaptxt is still the best thing going. My hope is that they address these three issues before it leaves beta.


The Dreadful Saitek Cyborg Keyboard Apr. 7th, 2008 @ 04:35 pm
So I bought a Saitek Cyborg Keyboard this weekend. It's pretty cool - very high-tech - but has one major flaw: if I press the 'a' key quickly after pressing the spacebar... such as any decent typist will do three times in this sentence already, it effectively does the combination of a Ctrl-F Ctrl-A Ctrl-S, which typically pops up at least one dialog box and highlights everything... which if you're really quick results in it all getting deleted by your next character.

Resetting the keyboard didn't help. Switching operating systems (dual boot) didn't help. Removing the drivers doesn't help. It's not a fully functional keyboard.

So I wrote Saitek support. Both direct (email) and by forum. After a full business day, they hadn't responded on either one. I checked the manual for support; it tells you to call the number on the Technical Support Sheet included in the product packaging... but there wasn't one. So I called Corporate US... and got their tech support number. For your reference, it is: 310 972-9930.

That doesn't actually help much. After about eight minutes on hold, "Tony" picked up. He was about as close to rude as you can get without actually saying much unpleasant, but his end analysis (despite two operating systems being involved) was that I need to contact the manufacturer of my system for new USB drivers because, get this, We're not compatible with the generic Microsoft USB drivers..

Let's ignore for the moment that it claims to be compatible with Windows XP and Vista on this page.

Ummmm... this machine is only five months old. Asus has never released custom USB drivers for it, plus everything works with these drivers. I have hard drives, cameras, phones, optical mice, iPods. All work. None-the-less, Tony was clear that the Cyborg keyboard is not compatible with the generic Microsoft USB drivers, and that I should contact the maker of my PC for updated drivers.

And the problem also occurs on my five-year-old Toshiba laptop! But "Tony" was not to be discouraged. It's clearly a generic driver issue, he's positive. Didn't even want to try it on the other computer.

I tried calling corporate back and was told by the pleasant but apparently completely unempowered receptionist that there were no supervisors/managers/escalation paths available for this, the only one being out of the office. (This was around 4pm their time.) But I could leave her (Maline Griffith?) a voice mail.

So the bottom line is, Saitek isn't interested in supporting their keyboard or helping it work with your system. For your own good, stay away.

Update: I got in touch with someone at the U.S. H.Q.... and learned that the company was recently sold. Technical support has been outsourced to a third-party (who doesn't apparently care, if my call was any indication.) And the U.S. corporate office (e.g. "inside sales" and such) is being closed at the end of this month. Still more reason to avoid buying a Saitek right now.

Dr. Detroit and the Nokia N95 vs the V3xx Mar. 27th, 2008 @ 08:13 pm
I never did have those drinks. I guess I'd reached my saturation point. And so now, several days later, I'm having a few more drinks and what do I decide to do? Finish Blogging! Some of which was written but not uploaded during my previous session.

Dr. Detroit is a mediocre but fun movie where Dan Ackroyd (Ghost Busters, Driving Miss Daisy) plays a square geek (Clifford Squidlow?) who winds up in intrigue with a band of hookers (Fran Drescher - the Nanny; Donna Dixon - Busom Buddies/Spies Like Us/OMG), ???) and their pimp (Howard Hessman - Dr. Johnny Fever from WKRP) masquerading as an addled super-pimp in a James Brown style. (And James Brown actually makes an appearance.) Seriously. This was a bit ahead of time, in that the four hos where a blonde American, a JAP (Jewish American Princess), an Asian and an Black. Diversity in crappy comedy!

Ironically, in the movie, Dan Akroyd marries Fran Drescher. In real life, I may be wrong, but I recall he actually married Donna Dixon.

Pop trivia: Howard Hessman's character ended as Mr. Pago-Pago. Heehee!

Despite all this, there' s no actual nudity or mature content in the movie. In fact, it avoids anything like mature-content.

Did I previously mention that I own Doctor Detroit on LaserDisc? Yes, how cool is that! Very 80s, for like the most 80s movie I know! But of course not so great for picture quality.

There's no direct link between Doctor Detroit, Shaun Cassidy and the two phones. But sometimes things all come to a head at the same time.

So recently I bought a new Nokia N95-4. This is a "smart phone", by which we apparently mean "stupider than a feature phone". Most things the V3xx does, the N95-4 does about as well. Both play music, videos, do 3G/GSM, run J2ME, etc. The N95 has a larger display, better video camera, internal GPS, can run S60 apps and has an A/V jack lacking on the V3xx, but the V3xx runs J2ME applications much faster and fits in a pocket more easily. The N95-4 is shorter and slimmer, but quite a bit thicker. (It's also quite a bit shorter/less-wide than the iPhone but thicker than that also.) The N95-4 can do a better job of multitasking. Overall, it's a better phone, but the slow J2ME (compensated for by running on "phone" rather than "card" RAM) and the exposed display vulnerable to damage do reduce the benefit somewhat.

Anyhow, so I've had Motorolas for a very long time. And had ported my contacts to them from Palm, so my data was decently rich but very Moto-specific apparently. Nokia doesn't do Moto, and I don't do Outlook, so this left me in a lurch...

Just to convert my contacts (phonebook) from the Motorola V3xx to the Nokia N95, I had to do the following:
  • Because I don't use Outlook , I couldn't use the standard import/export.
  • So I had to boot to Vista.
  • Export from the Motorola to Motorola Phone Tools
  • Export from MPT to a CSV file, specifying a comma delimiter.
  • Import from CSV to Vista Contacts
  • Import from Vista to Nokia Phone

That's quite a few steps.

To maintain the contact list, I have moved fully over to my MacBook. The V3xx and MacBook never really got along. Apparently while I assumed they were fully communicating at least on contacts, it turned out that the V3xx was ignoring roughly 2/3 of them. Either the SIM or the Phone RAM contacts; I haven't checked which. And getting all the event (Calendar) data over took a lot of work and an external program run from Terminal that still couldn't process repeat-events.

But the Nokia iSync setup speaks fully compatible contact and event data. Which is very nice, once all are configured.

There is a wrinkle. Leopard (and Tiger) come with a Calendar app that can accept ics (iCal/CalDAV) requires in email, but... it insists on responding. There is no choicel Which can be troublesome if you forward the appointment for the sake of getting it on the calendar, since your response...
  • Comes from the email recipient on the Mac, not necessarily who you were originally (i.e. you at work)
  • Cannot be prevented like it can be in Outlook

My work-around is to turn off the WiFi ("AirPort") before accepting, and then delete the responses from the outbox.

But even so, the N95 is a much more capable multi-function phone that the V3xx, at a cost primarily of money and thickness.

Drunk Blogging 101 - Shaun Cassidy! Mar. 25th, 2008 @ 07:27 pm
Okay, like what evah!

No, seriously!

So like I had a few drinks this evening. I'm driving home, happily relaxed but not drunk. I'm just north-east of Seattle in the grey wet gloom, so I put on some sunny music. I tend towards heavy metal, hard rock or country but rainy gloom means pop! Bangles, Bananarama, Vixen, GoGos, etc. Or Shawn Casssidy.

Except I suddenly hear an absolutely terrible imitation of White Snakes "Once Bitten Twice Shy" (and they are known by these songs; big album one was "Once Bitten", big album two was "Twice Shy") playing. In a Shaun Cassidy album. Please, no comments on my masculinity; I have both Abba and Iron Maiden, 'K?

Anyhow, I seriously began to wonder how sober I was, and whether I'd actually crashed-and-died. But nooo! If you're reading this, either you died with me or Shaun Cassidy has that very Ian Hunter song as the bottom song on his greatest hits CD. Which I've checked. The CD claims his version is 4:08 long. So what exactly did I drink?!?

Even worse, I've had both the Great White albums and the Shaun Cassidy album for at least 15 years. How could I have not noticed this?

So I'm finishing the drive home, comtemplating this connundrum (a hard sentence when slightly buzzed) and decide I need an Animal House/Blues Brothers/Ghost Busters like show to watch. But I've seen all those recently, don't like Stripes, and so settle for having the wife pull Dr. Detroit (Dan Akroid, Howard Hessman, Fran Drescher, Donna Dixon OMG!) out on LaserDisc I kid you not!) out. So that's what I'm doing right now. Unsobering up (to some Baileys/Kaluha/Godiva as soon as I pour it) to a really bad flick from the 80s. To celebrate Shaun Cassidy, who I otherwise enjoy, butchering an Ian Hunter song made big by a hair metal band!

More in a sec... under a seperate header.

Windows runs best on a Mac? Mar. 7th, 2008 @ 04:33 pm
I've posted so often about my Vista woes on my high-end PC that I hadn't noticed I never posted about my newest Macintosh! At the start of January I had a week long trip (ironically, to work with an entirely different operating system for embedded devices) and, since my PC laptop is on the order of six years old and huge, decided to buy a new one.

A quick survey determined that...
  • PC laptops, at least at that point, aren't generally available with XP Pro
    • Which, given my Vista woes, ruled them out
  • MacBook laptops are as small and, feature-for-feature, competitively priced with Dell, Toshiba and Levanavo laptops
  • The Mac can, with a bit of help, run Windows XP Pro

So off I went to the Apple store. Came back with a MacBook and Parallels virtualizer. Installed XP Pro. After a call to Parallels due to it crapping out (apparently their boxed software isn't Leopard compatible, but a quick download fixes that), XP Pro boots faster on this 2.2GHz dual-core MacBook under Leopard than Vista boots all by itself on a quad-core 2.66GHz P.C.

Even better, XP/the Mac doesn't crash. And our VPN for the office works under XP under Leopard, but does not work under Vista or the Mac directly. Fascinating.

So, for the best Windows experience... buy a Macintosh!
Other entries
» Sean Connery as Bruce Willis?!?
In another dreadful movie posting, how about Outland. This has Sean Connery playing Bruce Willis!

That's not really fair. Bruce didn't even play Bruce until 1988, in Die Hard. Prior to that, he tended bars, with a brief (1985-1988) stint in the wonderful Moonlighting. So there's like no chance that Sean Connery was imitating Bruce. Plus this isn't that big a departure from the James Bond characters Sean played, prior to Roger Moore turning them into suave-camp.

Still, this was a fluff-action movie. As such, it had:

  • A basic intro. Good vs. Bad People. Bad people have more facial hair and tend to be large but flabby. Good people have problems with their relationships.
    • This seems to apply to real life too.
  • The love-interest leaves, increasing the dynamic tension... which must be hard work!
  • A good buddy-relationship is formed. (Uncharacteristically, in this movie, it's with a female doctor, but there's no sexual tension, just buddy.)
  • The good guy gets injured quickly. In his arm. Which somehow causes a limp. But it's always the left arm, so shooting can still happen. Except that now the weak-and-injured left arm has to support the healthy, sun-tanned, vacationing-in-Bermuda right arm.
  • And of course the odds are 4-to-1. Or 40-to-1 for Bruce later. Inflation donchaknow. Later in Hot Shots! Part Deux, Charlie Sheen did around 400-to-1. In a running on-screen count. I'm expecting Zohan to do 4000-to-1.
  • The good guy wins. Duh.
  • And gets his wife back. Except, remember, she did the leaving. Not him. He was too inthenthitive! So we've weakened-and-humanized him by showing dependency on a capricious disloyal love interest.

    Although in Outland, he simply emails her that he will make it to the ship on time. But this was 1980 or so. Manhood was still measured in chest hairs, gold chains and T-Top Firebird Trans-Ams. (An American car that looked sporty but had the same chassis, engine, transmission and weight as a station wagon.)

On the bright side, it wasn't a comedy romance. We know in the first fifteen seconds (and it was about six minutes to the first spoken dialog in the movie. I timed it. No, I'm not kidding. I'm an engineer. You can't sue me, but you can worship me.)...

Reboot...

On the bright side, it wasn't a comedy romance. We know in the first fifteen seconds the entire plot, which invariably consists of that bullet list above, but at the very least the whole "bad guy in power, outnumbered armed enemies, good guys win" shtick. And we know the character development: Somebody will prove unexpectedly loyal. So the only reason to watch is the battles.

This is why I like the unusual movies. I want to be entertained, but I don't want to watch the same rerun every time.

Oh yeah, and the movie? Uninspiring. The beginning was fine but a major theme throughout the movie was motivation. Specifically is O'Neil (Connery's character) fighting the system and drug-pushers because he wants pay-out (no), because he's trying to do the right thing (unclear) or because he's trying to prove that he's more than a two-bit wash-out space marshall (also unclear.) Typically this would be resolved by his response after taking down the top bad guys. But the movie ends right after their hired henchmen go down. When the credits roll, we know he has decided to leave the station and go to where his family has fled to, but the evil station manager and all corporate heads are still in-place.

Which means the movie lacks any closure. What a let down! At least Bruce tends to shoot the bad guys.

Disclaimer: Last week Bruce featured heavily. His appearance this week is only due to Sean apparently channeling him, and has nothing at all to do with Kevin Bacon.
Feb. 23rd, 2008 @ 09:21 pm
» Romantic Cotton Candy
Warning: Today's post is devoid of any technical or useful content. It is primarily a rant about the state of movies today.

I'm annoyed at romantic comedies.

I like lightweight entertainment. My various avocations are rather intellect-heavy. Even my down-time is heavily on the brain than most - this blog, various video podcasts, lots of hobby programming, fixing the errors in the universe... it never ends. Servers to maintain for business, servers to maintain for hobby. Fighting PCs, Macs, iPhones, RAZRs, Nokia internet tables and even the occasional Commodore 64 because I am a romantic.

So my entertainment reading and watching tends towards the brainless. Things like rollerderby, comics (Zits, User Friendly, Dilbert, Mutts, Foxtrot, Calvin & Hobbes - a comic named after dead economists, what could be better?!?) My favorite movies are, well, unlikely. My top five would probably be:
  • Oblivion and Backlash, a cowboys-and-aliens tongue-in-cheek movie with loads of sarcasm. And Meg Foster. And Lurch playing an undertaker, Cat Woman playing Miss Kitty who sells Pussy, George Takei (Sulu) talking to Captain Kirk through a bottle of "Jim, Beam Me Up", and more.
    Oh yeah, and the guy gets the girl.
  • Cherry 2000, with Melanie Griffith (who hasn't done that much great stuff, but I did like in Working Girl, which also fits the motif of this entry except it's not as light. But it does have Hans Solo and Ellen Ripley in it) as a futuristic Mad Max kind of character. In a quest for a sex robot body. It's off beat, and the best use of a Mustang since Gone In 60 Seconds, both versions of which really sucked.
    Oh yeah, and the guy gets the (human, not robot) girl.
  • Fifth Element, where Bruce Willis plays, well, Bruce Willis (He's like Chevy Chase, Martin Short and how Bill Murray started out that way), trying to help a space alien babe save the world in a Sci-Fi shooter.
    Oh yeah, and the guy gets the (alien, not human) girl.
  • Casablanca. Actually I like a lot of older films. All kinds. The original Mummy, Topper, most Preston Sturges flicks. But this is the only black-and-white to make my top ten probably. Except for Blazing Saddles, but that's not as rewatchable as the next entry.
    Oh yeah, and the guy, well, can have any girl he wants.
  • SpaceBalls, which is a Mel Brooks movie. More popular than the first two on this list, although with my twisted sensibilities, I view it as less well known. Simply because the first two are so far ahead of it in my mind.
    This just barely beats Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome for me. But actually The Man Who Knew Too Little beats Thunderdome, on the evidence that I have Man and not Thunderdome on DVD. Yes, I also have Toy Story, which I never rewatch, so maybe that's not a good metric.

    My point is, SpaceBalls is fun and I watch it probably several times a year. And it is a romantic comedy. Or perhaps a comedy with a bit of romance. But the Hans Solo character does get Princess Druidia. Which means...
    Oh yeah, and the guy gets the druish girl.

Five is a hard number to make. But the first two are both a bit uncommon, unique views onto alternate hard-but-funny worlds. And none have the, well, depth of, say, Chocolat (and which had Johnny Depp), but sometimes "accessible" is a good thing.

All of which is to say that I like my movies to be a bit on the light fluffy side.

But why, oh why, does this mean romantic? I'm not much of a romantic. Romantic isn't really my niche. I'd rather have action-comedies. The significant other likes leather-clad gun-weilding vampires. (She has bookcases, plural, and no, not something so minor as merely bookshelves, dedicated to them.) Romance in a movie is fine, but ideally it's peripheral. And if romance is involved, it should have tension. Remington Steele was far better than Moonlighting (Bruce Willis makes a callback, for those of you keeping score), although both were better than Dharma & Greg, which ironically starred Jenna Elfman, niece of Danny Elfman, who is married to Brigit Fonda, who represents all that is wrong with this category, in less than six degrees of inebrieated seperation!), is what I'm saying.


Maybe I should clarify.

  1. I know way too much about Hollywood. Won't tell you why here, but it wasn't a hobby.
  2. Briget Fonda has a cute face but is a lousy actress in very short dresses playing emotionally distant and dysfunctional characters. Not much fun.
  3. Jenna Elfman mostly plays breezy characters. Her major heavy was against Bugs Bunny, seriously, in Loony Tunes Back In Action. Which I have on DVD.
    Oh yeah, and the guy gets the (non-animated) girl.
  4. I often can't remember the names of my co-workers of two years. But meaningless trivia from a decade ago, no problem!
  5. Kevin Bacon once said something to the effect that pretty much everyone in Hollywood he's either worked with or worked with someone who has worked with. He has been prolific (and good.) And this will make more, or maybe less, sense as you read on.
There's no special kind of help available for people like me. But I would be digressing were that possible.

Back to those vampire movies... ever noticed that Blade wept over Nyssa at the end of Blade II? That Selene rescued and ran off with Michael in Underworld? It wasn't just the first vampires that were seductive; now the blood suckers believe in love!

Romantic Comedies. The point is, they can be mindless fun. For example, Hitch and Music and Lyrics are recent fluffy romantic comedies. Mr & Mrs Smith is a romantic action movie. Meaning a hateful action movie with an inevitable romantic conclusion. Focused on sex. Wedding Crashers, in contrast, merely uses sex as the duex ex machina; it's not the point, just a way to get there.

Hugh Grant has been referred to as a leading romantic actor for our time, along with Tom Hanks (who got saddled with Meg Ryan in many of his.) Part of this is on the back of "Four Weddings", but lets go the route less travelled (and less than 14 years old) and look at...
  • Music & Lyrics (romantic comedy with Drew Barrymore, a skank who plays nice girls), as a writer in what is purely a fluffy romance/comedy
  • About A Boy in the niche called heart-warming, meaning it's primarily a character movie about a kid. But Hugh gets a girl, but not the main girl - Toni Collette, as an unbalanced type, who was also wonderful in the dark Little Miss Sunshine and equally dark Abba's Greatest Hits movie, as well as in The Sixth Sense, a good non-romantic brain-bender with... he's everywhere! Bruce Willis! Where's Kevin Bacon when we need him?)
  • Two Weeks Notice, which really has no pretence beyond being one of those romances where we know how it will end five minutes in, but they apparently don't, or at least a five minute movie wouldn't sell enough popcorn.
    If you want this kind of movie, Just Like Heaven at least gives them a few reasons to be apart... likes she's dead! And doesn't know it! (kinda)


So back to my gripe with Brigit Fonda. She's got a pretty face, but she doesn't use it. No emotion. Disney built more realistic people out of plastic! She's the opposite of Meg Ryan - whose characters always seem on the verge of falling apart due to too much going on. Reese Witherspoon, who is in Just Like Heaven referenced above, seems a bit floaty, but better than Brigit. Alicia Silverstone, who generally played floaty characters in the very few films she did, at least played them with gusto. There seems to be a bit of a lack of good female comedy actresses. Cameron Diaz comes to mind, and Joan Cusack (which takes us also back to Looney Tunes - she was the secret lab head, to Jenna Elfman, to Danny to Brigit! And oh yeah, she's John Cusack's sister, was in Grosse Pointe and many others with him, and he was in Being John Malkovich with Cameron Diaz, so maybe they're almost the same person? And Alan Arkin was in both Grosse Pointe with Joan and in Little Miss Sunshine with Toni Collette mentioned above. And Joan was in Toys (a very quirky film with Robin Williams), costarring with Robin Wright Penn who was also in Unbreakable with Bruce Willis, closing our little circle! Kevin Bacon is so amazing!)

On the guy side, it's a bit easier. The movies seem kinder to some men. For example, Adam Sandler had done some truly awful stuff... but most of his movies end with a cute romantic end and a few are pretty good - 50 First Dates, Wedding Singer come to mind.

Which raises the question of, what does it take for a movie to not be romantic? As I mentioned, Mr & Mrs Smith ends as a romance. So does Ben Stiller's A Night At The Museum, which really is more of a kid movie. Heck, even the Lion King ended that way. And Cars. It's kind of annoying. Action flicks don't do this to us, why do comedies?
Feb. 16th, 2008 @ 08:03 pm
» Vista Of Doom
I've mentioned before my BSOD woes with Vista on my new QuadCore box. They continue unabated. A few days ago iTunes would blue screen the system when playing a certain video podcast in mere minutes. So I decided to try it under XP.

It took me a while to get XP running in a dual-boot configuration. Issues include that XP only reads drivers (during install) off of floppy and, of course, I don't have a floppy, and that it failed to put an NTLDR in place. Debugging all this was harder than it sounds because XP could see and write to the SATA drives without the drivers... but it couldn't properly uncompress everything! And the lack of the NTLDR doesn't result in a clear message. But eventually I got everything up and running in dual boot mode.

And then ran into issues installing iTunes. Getting Vista and XP to use the same "library" (itl file), so that the podcast data, iPod data and playlists apply, isn't hard... but it isn't obvious either. The trick is to hold "Shift" while itunes starts, and then when asked, point at the desired itl. Which is not where your "library" is (meaning media files). It's more likely in your "My Music" directory regardless of any settings you've made.

Okay, iTunes is up, but it won't play any purchased music! It turns out that the Operating System is one of the parameters used to determine an "Authorization". So of my 5 authorizations, one is needed for when running under Vista, and one when running under XP. This doesn't actually have any pragmatic impact on me because, despite having computers everywhere, I decommission iTunes before junking them and I usually simply use the iPod rather than sharing auths on iTunes.

Now iTunes plays some of the purchased music, but skips much of it, in both operating systems. That turned out to be because the iTunes I installed (over the previous one) was one version back. Apparently the AAC files care what version they run on. Since I had installed iTunes to one place (twice, to get the registry settings in both operating systems), it screwed both up. But only the XP version would allow an upgrade, because the Vista iTunes really thought it was at the newest version. None-the-less, upgrading in XP fixed Vista. Apparently iTunes only checks a registry key for the version data.

All that said, now iTunes is running on both operating systems, with the same files, with the same media. Try the podcast again. Yep, still dies in Vista. Works like a charm in XP. No crash, no blue screen.

I have a litany of other issues too. A Western Digital MyBook, that worked well on my previous system under XP, sometimes hangs Explorer in Vista and cannot apparently be formatted in Vista although Vista will happily try for hours with no progress. It works fine in XP. I am reformatting it (in XP, since I can't in Vista) to see if that helps with Vista any.)

One of my friends has a Vista box also. He's had no problems. He's not quite the power user I am, but he says he can reliably run Firefox and notepad. His computer is next to a refrigerator dedicated to cooling a CO2-pressurized (i.e. not hand-pump) keg, so our priorities may not be identical.
Feb. 10th, 2008 @ 10:49 am
» Wii like the Wii
In the last eight days, two more friends (families) of ours have told us that after playing with a Wii at our summer or autumn parties, they have now acquired one. This makes the uptake among non-games (people who don't have an X-Box or PSP, for example) something like 5 this last nine months off of our impulse purchase, also into a non-console family.

When the XBox and PSP fanboys denigrate the Wii and wonder why the sales are (still) so high, that's probably the reason. The Wii may not be the best platform for complex flying simulations with realistic graphics, and quite possibly the alien monster blood splatters from the hole made by the ZargMaster PhaserLaserBlaser++ OmniCannon are not entirely faithful to the same pattern of mist and stains in "real life", but it's a fun accessible platform that is selling extremely well, based purely on people playing with it and buying their own, to a new chunk of audience.

A related interesting tidbit is that only one of the now six (including ours) households apparently like playing Zelda (Twilight Princess?), with two households unaware of it and the other three (including ours) considering this a bizarre stupid senseless long annoying illogical game. Zelda has gotten good reviews, but our copy has very few hours on it.
Feb. 9th, 2008 @ 10:42 am
» Liquor - Washington Stores and Baggaged Bottles
I like good liquor. If you've followed my posts, some of the most rambling have been after a particularly successful night of drinking. So it probably comes as little surprise that I care about the selection of liquor at the local stores.

Unfortunately, I live in Washington State. Actually, for most purposes, that's fortunate. Sure, the politics are particularly loopy and ineffective, something common to the West Coast and the New England area; both areas are so far to the left that they aren't even in-play for Presidential elections. Some bizarre regulations, lots of taxation and rather crappy schools because we aren't allowed to fix them. But other than that, it's pretty much all good.

Another effect of the massive regulation is a state-run liquor store system. Stores are limited in size, prices are set by the state, taxes are incredibly high, and most important to me, only a few items can be had. Liquor store managers can choose what they want to carry from a very limited list, and I am told by several such manager that they also must sell an entire case in a given amount of time or they aren't allowed to stock that item anymore.

I don't mind the hyper-taxation so much. At least Washington State doesn't have an income tax. But the inability to get a decent selection of libations is rather annoying. I can't see any good reason for it' it's not as if there's a problem with people getting drunk off of $120 bottles of aged Tequila or $40 bottles of Illy Espresso liqueur.

In theory, there's a bright side. The state stores have their inventory online. To quote, "For a complete price listing of the products sold by WSLCB". Complete with which stores have what and how much.

We'll come back to that.

So I was in Texas last week. The first liquor store I saw was, and I'm not kidding, a drive-through. Specifically Legacy Liquor Drive-Thru in Frisco... oddly, several miles from Legacy Blvd. This tiny store had a better selection than most Washington stores, but when I asked where to go for a better selection, they pointed me down the street. To Goodies(?).

Goodies is huge. And has, by Washington standards, very low prices. So I bought several bottles of, well, goodies. And packed them, carefully padded, in my hard-side suitcase, for my flight back.

The airline in question has generally been fine by me; a few screwy policies, but mostly fine. I'm less crazy about the TSA (security), especially since we're not allowed to lock suitcases. I have no idea who to blame for this, but somehow the two center bottles, and only those two got shattered. Completely. There's not much chance they bounced into each-other, and they were padded from the edges, so my best guess is a hammer when the case was opened. Either way, so much for gentle handling of baggage. The results were a very sticky suitcase.

So I logged onto the Washington liquor site to check for some of these neat liqueurs. Most simply cannot be had here. Some are only in a few stores, and oddly, no single store had more than two of the nine or so I was interested in, even though about five were available in-state. But, since I was out-and-about anyhow, I stopped in a store to get one of them.

... and found a variety not mentioned on the Washington State website. I bought a handful (and made notes on the rest) and checked online after; sure 'nuff, the Washington State Liquor Site is incomplete. I got some interesting stuff that I couldn't find in Texas... but also wouldn't be able to find using the comprehensive list in Washington.

So not only do we have strange limitations on what can be carried, but we can't even find out about some of the edge-condition stuff that may make a sudden special appearance. Very annoying.
Jan. 19th, 2008 @ 03:14 pm
» Vista and iBuyPower Strike Again!
As I mentioned a few months ago, I bought a new quad-core PC from iBuyPower through Costco around Thanksgiving. It came, despite my misgivings, with Vista.

The good news is that this box is fast. Even with Vista, it boots fast enough that I can tolerate it.

The bad news is, it boots frequently. It blue screens a lot! Often when not doing anything in particular. Certainly compared to all my other systems. And the messages with the BSOD (blue screen) seem random. Today I got the win32k.sys error, so I decided to try to track it down. This most reportedly is associated with either flakey memory or bad NVidia drivers... but this is Corsair memory and passes both the Everest system stability tests and a full hard-core 90-minute MemTest-86 sweep, on top of which the NVidia drivers were provided with the P.C. But both could conceivably be issues.

Rebooting has been problematic once before. Rather than booting, the system went through the POST (Power On Self Test) fine, and then stopped when it should be loading Windows, instead displaying about ten characters of gibberish. This took quite a while to figure out, and today was quite persistent. I'm still not certain I've soused the problem, but my guess is this...

Asus defaults to a boot sequence of "Removable Drive", "CD-ROM", "Hard Drive". The iPod is seen as a removable drive. And mine must have just enough of a pseudo-boot-record to really confuse the BIOS.

This would be consistent with the boot failure being a very sporadic issue, because I don't hook the iPod up much. What would be nicer would be for the BSOD to be sporadic, rather than a constant companion, too. But I think XP is my only way around that. As I said, none of our other XP boxes have this issue, nor do our Server 2003 servers. And my new Mac Book is pretty solid, even running XP in Parallels. My wife's iMac 24" has only BSOD'd a few times, all seemingly related to putting it to sleep while running FinalCut. So either iBuyPower's commodity hardware really sucks or Vista is, at least pushed the way I push it, a terrible dog. Since the PC passes the tests I through at it, I suspect the latter.
Jan. 12th, 2008 @ 04:55 pm
» Adding a Root Certificate to a Motorola RAZR V3xx
Yesterday I covered how to set up a GoDaddy SSL Certificate to work with Firefox and Thunderbird without generating warnings, even through stunnel. So now, in theory, you have your email SSL protected. And you've hacked your phone a bit and are using the internal email client (Message Center - Email Msgs) that Cingular hides but Motorola builds into your RAZR variant. You've reconfigured your email to pick up using SSL from port 995. But now you get an Invalid Certificate warning every time you pick up or check email using the internal text-based client! (Which, super-savvy power users know, is the fastest way to get them. If you see that you want the full email, you can then log in using webmail to get it, but you don't have to bother for most messages.)

Here's how to address this.

But first get your tools ready. You will need OpenSSL, Christian Maas' XVI32, and a way to get files to and from your phone. I use P2kCommander for my RAZR editing. It's free, but I did send the author some money via PayPal. If you use it, I suggest you send him a few bucks too.

If you haven't done phone "mods" before, this may take a while to set up. You will probably need to register at Motorola to get the USB drivers, or this quick start guide may get you there quickly.

On the RAZR, Settings - Security - Certificate Mgmt - Root Certs will list all the current certificates. Odds are pretty good that the one you're using isn't there. It's a pretty small list. Even worse, there's no apparent way to add a certificate.

On the phone itself, the certificates live in:
/a/mobile/certs/root/x509/ssl/
And there aren't very many of them. A quick look at one at random shows it to be in a slightly modified DER form (i.e. has some plaintext in it) rather than in SHA form, the modification being a 00 01 at the start. So at the very least we have to convert our certs.


Remembering that we downloaded the GoDaddy root earlier (yesterday's entry), we convert the PEM style to DER with:
openssl x509 -in gd-class2-root.crt -inform pem -out godaddy_root.crt -outform der
GoDaddy has what they claim is a DER-format key available, but I couldn't get it parsing correctly, so converting a known-working key is easier.
(Note: I strongly suggest sticking with a RAZR-consistent name such as godaddy_root.crt because I've had some issues when using the more SSL/Unix names with hyphens rather than underscores. They may not be related, but why risk it?)

Next we put those two bytes we see in the stock certificate, into our new certificate. Using XVI32, load godaddy_root.crt and...
Edit - Insert String - Hex String, 00 01
File - Save
Finally copy the file to: /a/mobile/certs/root/x509/ssl/ and reboot the phone. The new cert shows, in this particular case as, "(P)USThe Go D", with full name of "USThe Go Daddy Group, Inc.GoDaddy Class 2 Certification Authority". And now your RAZR won't warn you when you access a GoDaddy-certified site.
Jan. 2nd, 2008 @ 10:00 am
» Authorizing GoDaddy SSL Certificates
This entry walks through the process of obtaining and installing an SSL Certificate from GoDaddy, such that they seamlessly work through stunnel and are accepted by Firefox and Thunderbird. I generally like GoDaddy; both their prices and 95% of their service are very good. Unfortunately they're more than a little bit clueless on the upper reaches of the technology, but at least they make an effort most of the way.

But this is a case where I was going right beyond their ability, particularly with my use of stunnel.

The Task


I have, for many years, used a self-signed SSL Certificate to encrypt data to/from my website, especially webmail. Back then (2004), SSL was not commonly supported for email, so this was pretty novel and high-security. But jumping forward four years, my self-signed certificate was expiring anyhow and my wife's iPhone isn't so fond of self-signed certs, so I decided to combine the addition of SSL to the POP3/SMTP with getting a fully-authenticated cert. Which, given the use and price, meant GoDaddy, where a 5-year cert can be had for about $90. Yeah, that's $90 more than signing my own, but in theory connecting browsers and email programs shouldn't squawk about it either.

In theory.

In practice, while Opera and Internet Explorer come knowing about GoDaddy, Firefox and Thunderbird do not. And therefore presumably several other devices also don't. They gripe that GoDaddy is an "Unknown Authority"... rather than silently accepting it. So the bulk of this entry is about overcoming that problem.

Background


SSL Certificates are basically encryption packets referencing other encryption packets, up a tree of trust. It's a bit like asking for references... "John, do you trust Tim?", "Jerry, do you trust John?". Your web browser knows a few top-level authorities, but certainly not a comprehensive list. So when you hit a new SSL certificate, your browser (or SSL library) checks it against the browser's own list of trusted authorities.

You can view the list of authorities in your browser pretty easily:
  • Firefox: Options - Advanced - View Certificates - Authorities.
  • Opera: Tools - Preferences - Advanced - Security - Manage Certificates - Authorities
  • IE7: Tools - Internet Options - Content - Certificates - Trusted Root Certificates and Intermediate Certification Authorities.

If you have both Firefox and Opera or IE7, you can see that GoDaddy has a 2004 certificate in the Authorities table in Opera and quite a few entries in IE7 (which seems extremely comprehensive, the one area where Vista became less annoying), but no such certificate in Firefox. (A Starfield certificate exists in both Opera and Firefox, which would seem helpful since Starfield is GoDaddy's parent company, but since GoDaddy's certificate chain for the certs they send out aren't related to Starfield as a root authority, this winds up not mattering.)

So the trick is to provide a chain of references from your new certificate up through GoDaddy, all the way up to a trusted authority that Firefox already knows about. Otherwise each new user will be warned about the site, and can choose whether to accept the certificate.

We will do this by including the certificate "chain".

The Process


The first part of this process starts with the certificate acquisition. If you already have your certificate, just jump past the first few steps. You will want the OpenSSL package either way though.

  1. Purchase an SSL Cert from GoDaddy.

  2. "Use" the TurboSSL Certificate. You will have to fill out a form with way too much personally-identifying information. Don't worry about it; it doesn't wind up in the key.

  3. Use your private key (generate if needed) to create a certificate request.
    openssl.exe req -new -key private.key -out my.domain.csr

  4. Fill in the form as needed. You can leave a lot of it blank. This is the data that winds up in the key. Be certain to put the actual server name, including any www. or mail., in the common name field!

  5. GoDaddy will send a confirmation email to the registrants for the server. If you have private (hidden) registration, the email may take an hour or so to arrive, assuming you don't greylist or spamblock it. This has a link in it that at least one registrant (admin or tech) must follow and confirm.

  6. Immediately there-after, your new certs will be generated and a link sent to your email address. You must download them from GoDaddy at the link.

  7. You may either create a PEM File - combining the private key and the certficate into one - or point to both separately.
    1. : Creating the PEM:

      GoDaddy delivered a CRT file. Build the PEM as a text file by putting your private key followed by your certificate in. The result looks like:

      -----BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY-----
      13 or so uuencoded 65-character lines.
      -----END RSA PRIVATE KEY-----
      -----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----
      25 or so uuencoded 65-character lines.
      -----END CERTIFICATE-----

      This file is referenced in Stunnel.conf:
      cert=my_cert.pem

    2. Configuring the files separately:
      In STunnel.conf, set:
      cert=(the crt file from GoDaddy)
      key=your_private.key

  8. Firefox/Thunderbird

    Most browsers will now work with the site because they know about GoDaddy/Starfield as root authorities. But Firefox/Thunderbird don't. So we need to get the chain working.

    Use the command:
    openssl s_client -connect my.server.name:443
    to dump out the data. The Certificate Chain is right before the Server Certificate. (When testing SSL POP3, use the port 995 instead of 443 of course.)

    Here's where that PEM file (Section 7.a) comes in handy. STunnel doesn't appear to obey the CAfile directive, but you can paste the GoDaddy certificates (from gd_intermediate_bundle.crt) into the same PEM file after your key and certificate, and the entire chain will work.


    To accomplish the same thing with Apache serving,...
    • Place the PEM file created in step 7.a into your Apache/conf/ssl directory
    • Place the intermediate chain file (gd_intermediate_bundle.crt or gd_full_bundle.crt) into the the Apache/conf/ssl directory.
    • Reference both files in the Apache/conf/ssl.conf file:
      SSLCertificateFile conf/ssl/your.server.name.pem
      SSLCertificateChainFile conf/ssl/gd_intermediate_bundle.crt
    • Restart the Apache service.


    In our case, we tossed the valicert_class2_root.crt root certificate for GoDaddy into the intermediate bundle, as it wasn't there, and renamed it "gd_full_bundle.crt". But that's just our style when struggling with a problem. Never settle for mere overkill!
  9. Email Setup
    To configure stunnel for SSL-POP3 (POP3S) and other SSL email, a second file is needed: stunnel.cnf. This one is very straight forward, with one small gotcha.
    The typical file will look like this:
    client=no
    [sslpop]
    accept=995
    connect=110
    [sslimap]
    accept=943
    connect=143
    [sslsmtp]
    accept=465
    connect=25
    That's all you need, as long as your firewalls and routing tables are correct. The gotcha is that the following is more intuitive:
    # Commented out protocols are because TLS is not supported by ISMail. So we use SSL alone.
    client=no
    [sslpop]
    accept=995
    connect=110
    protocol=pop3
    [sslimap]
    accept=943
    connect=143
    protocol=imap
    [sslsmtp]
    accept=465
    connect=25
    protocol=smtp
    But the protocol lines essentially invoke TLS instead of SSL. Which is fine, but only as long as the mail server is expecting it. You may be able to get that to work, but with the server I'm using, it didn't.

  10. Other notes: You can typically reach a server by name or by number. In a small network, it's often seductive to simply refer to them by number in the web pages to simplify routing and DNS management. Unfortunately that's not compatible with SSL. The "Server Name" checked is the reference.

  11. Resources


That's it. Not a huge task, but annoying when bumping into multiple hurdles, enough to deserve a few drinks. Happy New Year!
Jan. 1st, 2008 @ 11:25 am
» New Computer Blues
I bought a new computer last month. Actually buying new computers isn't that rare; we bought an iMac earlier this year too, and I regularly replace servers and such here, but replacing my "desktop" is generally traumatic due to the configuration, program migration, registration migration, and so on. So the system being replaced had been in-place for four years!

Because they last so long, I wanted high-end. Quad-core, 2.6GHz or better. And decently quiet. I heard ads for Puget Systems SilentPC on the radio, but they ask a heckuva markup. Very expensive for what you get. (Although in retrospect, if what you get is basically silent, it may be worth it.)

So looking at the usual standard-bearers for decent prices, NewEgg and Costco, I noticed they had an iBuyPower gaming system on sale. 3GB RAM, 750GB disk, dual DVD, top-end video, duel GHz NICs, WiFi, Quad-core Intel Q6700 running at 2.6GHz, in a system designed for overclocking. In theory. And some gizmos I don't care about such as...
  • Liquid Cooling
  • Acrylic Case Window
  • Blue cathode lighting

Seriously, why do you need to watch your computer chips? I don't get that.
Anyhow, the system was only available with Vista. Bummer. But onward I forge; I can install XP Pro if Vista is too painful.
I plug everything in... and go deaf. This was one incredibly noisy system! 68dB at six inches away, top-level! And through the case window I can see that the cooling hose is kinked. Un-kinking it doesn't reduce the noise at all; that appears to be due to the pump perhaps. But with the placement and hose length, it's gonna re-kink fast anyhow. And the noise is not just at high-load; if the system's on, it's emulating a jet engine.

I can't have that, so I nipped down to ComputerStop and bought a new case fan and CPU cooler, ripped out the "liquid cooling" system and put in air cooling. With the air cooling in place, the ASUS "Q-Fan" BIOS feature can raise or lower fan speed (and therefore noise) with the temperature. And this works, very well. My temperatures are up maybe 5C, but still quite low... and the system is at least 13dB quieter. (My sound level meter doesn't go low enough to get good resolution down there.)

With the liquid cooling out, I examined it. No brand name anywhere. Very heavy putty-like thermal grease, rather than the thinner stuff I'm accustomed to. And a big sticker saying "Engineering Sample" on it. Huh?

When I ordered this system, iBuyPower didn't offer their own liquid cooling. About a week after delivery, they now do on their web site. It's probably worth avoiding. Not the system, which is mostly working fine. Just the liquid cooling.

Other glitches and gotchas are:
  • The system includes a very convenient USB port on the top of the case. This is convenient because the system is too big to fit on a desk anyhow. But... that USB hub is 1.x, not 2.0. So it cripples high-speed USB memory sticks. They'll work, but slowly.
  • Even though the motherboard (ASUS P5N32-E SLI) is designed for overclocking, it can't overclock the Intel Q6700 at all without losing the ability to come back from a Vista Sleep. Overclocked decently, all memory and processor tests pass. Vista runs. But put the system to sleep and you're gonna have to yank power to get it awake again.

    This is a motherboard (or BIOS) issue, not a Vista issue; I can tell by the fan pattern. Remember above where I enabled Q-Fan? The boot process powers the fans all the way up, ramps them back down in about a second, and then starts the normal software boot. But the fans are never going back down. Oh well, it's a screamer without overclocking, but now I know why they don't.

Dec. 1st, 2007 @ 08:05 am
» Chain Stores and Noose Pricing
I hadn't been in a Circuit City in years. Hadn't been to Best Buy except to buy printer ink in several years also. My last experience involved a salesman being rude to me when I didn't buy his spiel on cellphones... a topic regular readers will realize I'm pretty much an uber-expert on.

So anyhow, I bought a new receiver this weekend. A Denon AVR 3808ci to replace my seven-year-old Denon AVR 3300. This provides much newer technology, 7.1 rather than 5.1, video switching, and most importantly, should eliminate a low-frequency throbbing on some soundtracks - not sure if my AVR3300 developed a problem or simply isn't properly recognizing some modern signals, but hopefully the new receiver won't have it.

Attached to this is my Denon DVD-2910 DVD player. Plus some new Definitive Technology bipolar surrounds to mate to my other DefTech bipolar surrounds, DefTech BP7004 mains and DefTech CLR2300 center. If a game plan is working, stick with it.

The AVR 3808ci can up-vert component video to HDMI, simplifying the switching of sources. Prior to the new acquisition, changing from watching the Dish to watching DVD required changing sources on both the TV, for video, and the AVR3300, for audio. Now all of the switching is on the AVR3808ci, which passes any appropriate video to the TV over HDMI. This is great.

Unfortunately, the Component conversion loses a bit, relative to going to the Panasonic plasma, on SD (low resolution) TV. It just doesn't convert it quite the same. HD seems pretty close even with the conversion, perhaps with a bit of motion pixellation, but the Panasonic did great up-sampling for SD. The only reason I was using Component for the Dish anyhow was that Component and HDMI are essentially equal in quality, though different in approach, and the Panny plasma only had a single HDMI input... which now is enough.

So off to buy a two-metre HDMI cable.

Most of my really long cables came from MonoPrice.com. Excellent quality cables, aggressive prices for everything including for both HDMI 1.3 and basic HDMI starting under $5 for six feet. But add shipping and you've added $6 to the part and three days minimum waiting. Blue Jeans Cable is also excellent, but they have the same flaws plus they accept PayPal (or you can send a fax!) However, 2-metre CL2-grade HDMI cables run $9-12 at both places, and a two-metre HDMI 1.3 CL2 is only $15 at MonoPrice. (HDMI 1.3 requires far higher bandwidth test passing than HDMI 1.2.)

Okay, off to the local stores to see how much extra I have to pay. I figured I'd pay $30 - in other words, about double the cost-plus-shipping for a basic cable - just to get it quickly. But that wasn't to be.

Best Buy only carries their own captive brand of cable, called something like Dynex. (Rocketfish is another Best Buy captive brand; Best Buy apparently doesn't allow profit-margin competition in their stores!) Dynex HDMI cables are $60 for 2 metres! (the web-site discount price isn't offered in the store.) And it's not HDMI 1.3 even at that price.

Circuit City has a variety of cables, but again starting at $69 for 8 feet, and again, NexxTech is a Circuit City brand. (No cheap six-footers and no price-competition from real brands.) Up to $139 for a "five-times-shielded" MonsterCable. Wow!

Clearly these chains make a lot of money off of cables. And even worse, people are buying something they don't need. HDMI is digital and electric. Five-times-shielding isn't going to help you. One faraday cage is sufficient, and "success" is boolean (either you have it or not), so after getting to a good signal point, additional shielding... or gold or green felt-tip pen or Tweak connection enhancer - can't make any difference.

Uggah. No wonder the chain stores are losing money and going down.
Nov. 20th, 2007 @ 07:18 am
» On Window and Door Salesmen
Our house was built in the 70s, before minor niceties such as double-pane windows, insulation, CFLs, cable, CAT5, lots of electric doohickies or fiberglass doors were common. Back when odd colors such as "Harvest Gold", "Almond" and "Avacado" were assumed to inherently match not only each-other, but also any decor, and when textured brown formica and shiny stick-on vinyl tile floors apparently seemed like a good idea.

In short, low on tech and high on drugs.

Much of this we or previous owners retrofitted. About half the house has been refloored (finding, in one case, three previous floors still in-tact underneath.) Several doors replaced, insulation added, new countertops installed, refacing, lots of new lighting and sockets, and RG6/CAT5 pulled through-out.

As we reach the tail of the process, replacing the front door hit the radar. It's leaky, old, not particularly good looking and doesn't really match the house. But having done several doors ourselves, we decided to have the front door "done" for us. Since we found a great looking high-quality door at Home Depot, we asked their installation service to come out.

This was interesting. In the Puget Sound area, there is a largely-reviled firm who I won't name but whose name rhymes with "You Get Pound Synergy Services", with a reputation for overstating benefits, overcharging, under-delivering and spotty quality. Some people have had good luck with them, but among my acquaintances it seems to run 85% against. And they aren't alone. Go to any fair and you will see window companies claiming you can save huge amounts even by replacing double-pane windows with new double-pane windows.

This is beyond slimey. We, being of scientific background, tracked our energy expenses for several years. We know exactly how much more we spend in the winter than in the summer. (Since we are in the NorthWest, summer doesn't include air conditioning... or even light bulbs really. And winter does require artificial lighting, even at 9am and 3pm, around Christmas.) Our total incremental energy cost for the entire winter would pay for roughly one replacement window. But that increment is due not just to heat loss from the window... there's heat loss from:

  • Opening entry doors - to come and go, and to let the puppy go out, which happens pretty frequently.
  • Heat loss through the walls and ceiling
  • Lights. Remember, not so many on in the summer.
  • TV, stereo, computers. We're outside a lot more in the summer, being entertained by mowing the lawn or barbecuing.
Replacing a single window (or several) won't help with those costs.

So our goal was to avoid that kind of hard sell. Our theory was, Home Depot would have an installer service, not a sales service. But none-the-less, the yahoo at some point decided to try to prove we were losing heat through the windows, by stating...

I have a heat lamp in the truck. I guarantee if you're on the other side of the glass, you'll still feel it.
Um... yeah... and sun beams too. My response was, "Sure, infrared light, but heat loss isn't in light form. I've got a forced air heater and a blow drying upstairs. Shall we try it with those?".

The fool agreed, but promptly interrupted my attempt to go get them. In short, he was a liar and he knew he'd been called out.

The moral? Before you contract for any door or window replacement, consider everything the salesman says to be false. Do the math yourself. Most power companies will happily send you the last year's bills, some will do two years, at no charge, and most also have on the bills your power usage compared to the previous same-time period and the average temperatures. Use these. If you have single-pane windows, you can probably pay off replacement, but otherwise... not so much.

One last gripe. In looking at entry doors, we want fibreglass or steel for the low-maintenance and long-life. But most of these have ugly screw covers around the window bezels (on the inside side of the door), which are completely lacking on wood doors. Why won't they spend an extra $15 in fine detail work on a $600 door? Sloppy.
Oct. 27th, 2007 @ 06:17 am

» (No Subject)
I'm back. Well, not really.

Post frequency has declined as we polish a product at work, forge new paths off work and generally stay way too busy. But a post to celebrate guilty pleasures.

Recently I photographed my alcohol. This took several hours. There's a lot of it, several thousand dollars of just the hard stuff (i.e. not beer, not wine.) It's also a regular theme through-out my blog. I know some people who drink too much, meaning their lives require the drink and their behavior changes. That's not me by a long shot, but I also don't feel guilty about the stuff. But I only like the good stuff. Expensive. Strong. Can't be guzzled, must be sipped.

T.V., on the other hand... I've been watching the DVD sets of WKRP and Get Smart. Love 'em. But also enjoyed "The Ultimate Coyote Ugly", a show about a contest of Coyote Ugly bartenders to bring new girls up to spec. Okay, not much plot. The characters do develop, but not far. None-the-less, a guilty pleasure.

My other main "guilty" pleasures are programming (phones, computer, etc., doesn't matter) and playing musical instruments. Not real good at the latter, very good at the former, but neither one really adds much value to the...

This may be hard to believe, but a temporal time-shift resulted in the above being drafted several months ago. But here we are again.

I saw "Grosse Pointe Blank" for the first time today. Saw the Simpsons movie opening week. Both were good. The thing about Grosse Pointe Blank, though, is that it is a Cusack flick. Yeah, it's got Alan Arkin, who has done great stuff... most notably "So I Married An Axe Murderer" but also "The InLaws", a small part in "Edward Scissorhands", and is in the new "Get Smart". But let's face it - he was also in Gattaca, which was one of the five worst (meaning "not fun" movies I've ever seen!) And it's got Dan Ackroyd, of "Blues Brothers", "Ghost Busters", and more notably for this posting, "Driving Miss Daisy". We won't talk about the leading lady, Minnie Driver (played Debby) whose only previous impact (on me) was South Park, and she's not even listed on the DVD case or liner notes! But at least there's Hank Azaria... many voices of the Simpsons and my addled brain believes we were on recognition terms long ago at a studio far far away, but...

The point is that, well, yes, it's probably another Alcohol-fueled posting. And aren't those really the best kind?

John Cusack is the main character. His assistant is played by his sister Joan (who I adore, more on that in a bit). Bill Cusack, a brother basically makes a cameo. He's not a common name though... except that I posted about Veruca Salt a while ago and he dated Louise Post, the primary perpetrator. Sister Susie didn't appear in this flick, but did in "Hero" and "High Fidelity"; the Cusacks appear to like working together.

No, really, the point is, I like Cusack movies. I like John in High Fidelity, Better Off Dead and Grosse Pointe Blank. The Grifters is a tremendously underappreciated flick. And "Say Anything" was a great film for its time. All, incidentally, character films. (Much like "Driving Miss Daisy", see above.)

Joan Cusack, yes, a sister of his, has an even warmer spot in my heart. Combining Allyce Beasley's vocal qualities with the prettiest face in show business, and some great flicks including "Looney Tunes: Back In Action", "School of Rock", "Toy Story 2", Addams Family Values", "Toys" with Robyn Williams, "My Blue Heaven" with Steve Martin, and "Hero" (which was much better the first time I saw it than the second.) And she was in "Say Anything" also.

Apparently they were both in "Sixteen Candles". I've never seen it. I hear it has Molly Ringwald, who I despise despite liking her live performance in the play "Sweet Charity" a while ago and respecting her performance in "Space Hunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone"

Another Cusack, Ann, was in a zillion decent sitcoms and in the movie "Tank Girl". I'm not saying that's a great movie, but it's worth seeing sometime. When exhausted, drinking and with old buds.

(Quick trivia: Despite playing unmarriable crones, Allyce Beasley has been married four times, including to corpse-like funny-man Vincent Schiavelli. Vincent was in many of the Dorf flicks. Not that you cared.)

Okay, so the alcohol is wearing off. The point is, I like character flicks. "The Ref" is like one of my all time faves. That just works for me. And "Grosse Pointe Blank", ostensibly about a hit man going to a high school reunion, is definitely a Cusack, meaning a character flick.

Two inebriated wobbly thumbs up! Or at least in a vaguely uppish direction.
Aug. 12th, 2007 @ 07:51 pm
» Rum-Based Observations
The S.O. is out of town.
I've enjoyed enough rum (three kinds) to make nearly a pint.
Life is good.
Until morning.

Huh?

A while ago, I posted a vodka-enhanced entry here about music. Oddly, this rum-enhanced entry is about T.V.! And T.V. on cell phones. And cell phones. Heck, Rum is involved, who needs a topic?

I recently purchased the Time-Life boxed set of Get Smart. For about $150 or so, all episodes, remastered on DVD, some with commentary. I haven't listened to the commentary, or even made it through season 1 yet. But one thing amazes me... Barbara Feldon loses a bit in up-rez DVD. The colors, the texture, just weren't for the current technology. It's not just her, and she still is fantastic, but she's now human! Oh, the horror!

Of course, it also shares a problem with the HD versions of UFO and Buck Rogers: 25-35 years ago, you could make computers out of cardboard with lights under construction paper and get away with it. Today we can see the lineoleum tiles, the tape and, in the case of Hogan's Heros, the "safecracker" (Newkirk, played by Richard Dawson) reading the wrong numbers off on the dial, simply because they never thought we could see them at all!

The stripping of essential illusion brings up obliquely Battlestar Galactica. My "manager", who we mostly consider our umbrella from the sole higher rank (they're both great guys, but a bit prone to randomization, and not at all caught up in the heirarchal crap) was having a discussion with one of my "team" (a team of one currently; sometimes they get caught up with maintaining a structure where it's not really sensible. But at least they don't let it impede anything.) About Battlestar Galactical. Normally my posts would include lots of IMDB and other links, this one won't because hitting the correct keys is a challenge. Anyhow, my manager referred to "Starbuck" as "Kari". That is, technically, her name. "Kari Thrace" or something close to that. But, as I pointed out, in the original series (TOS for Star Trek fanatics), nobody would have ever referred to Dirk Benedict's character by a first name. I'm not even sure we knew it.

I don't enjoy the current BSG as much. It's too dark, too involving. I don't need to imagine war, persecution, horror; we have it already. I liked the escapism of the original. Okay, it's not Hamlet, but prety much everyone dies in Hamlet, no?

So my response was, "See, that's the difference. We would have never humanized Starbuck with a first name in the original series!". Somehow that failed to make the point I was after. At least they enjoyed a good laugh.

Another interesting observation about Get Smart on DVD. You can go back and verify the bloopers. E.g "Close your mouth and open your eyes and I'll give you a big surprise!" The intent was for her to close her eyes and open her mouth, and that's what she did. I guess they missed the blooper on what was otherwise their best take.

Cell phones: I mentioned them a bit ago. (Here. You might read faster than I tipsy-blog.) I bought a new one again recently, which will come as a significant shock to my wife since I haven't told her yet and she reads my blog. Such is life. A few entries ago I ranted about convergence. At the time you probably didn't realize there would be a test. So the cell phone is a Cingular/Motorola V3xx, basically another RAZR (replacing my V3 RAZR), but higher speed. I had wanted a more hard-core smart-phone, but I like the RAZR form-factor. Any how, I had to modify this pup, as I always do. Cingular cripples the Java, making it ask for permission with every internet access. To give you some context, that's 6 or so questions per page-load in Opera Mini and many many (more than 20) in Google Maps. Cingular is evil.

Cingular IS evil, but less incompetent than their U.S. competition. That's a rant for another time/drink. Anyhow, so I got this fancy cell phone with a dedicated television button. Seriously. And I figured my modifications would break it, which was fine with me. But my mods didn't break it and I've discovered that the Colbert (pronounced "cole-bear") Report clips on it are great! It's a nice way to break up the day.

I don't believe that we will completely grey the line between phone and entertainment device, but we could get closer; I said as much six weeks ago. And this won't replace my iPod, because I don't want my entire music (or podshow) library streamed from someone else's server. But it could add functionality to an otherwise now-mundane device.

In a month or two, WKRP In Cincinatti comes out on DVD. You'll read drunk-blogging about it here first! (I'm not really the "get drunk" type; maybe it's old comedy and music that does it? ) That's really the last of the great shows missing. I mean, other than Square Pegs and Holmes and Yo-Yo!

Since I'm on a role, here's a short-list of must-see throw-away comedies, in order of importance:
  • WKRP - nothing like it since -
  • Sledge Hammer - Get Smart done 80s style
  • Hogan's Heros
  • Cheers - but give it time to gel
  • Night Court - watch season 1 for Ellen Foley, who was very spunky, and the rest for the show that was written with Harry Anderson and Markie Post, who was unavailable for Season 1. (Ellen Foley had a dreadful singing career too, one good song under her own name, but did stuff with Meatloaf too. Harry Anderson was on Cheers some also.)
  • News Radio
  • Police Squad (the precursor to the Naked Gun movies)
  • Alf
  • Sports Night (A Sorkin.)
  • Square Pegs
  • Married With Children - the most realistic TV family outside of the Simpsons.
  • Welcome Back Kotter - didn't age well, but a cool show still.
  • Greatest American Hero - a great cast in a real fish-out-of-water show
  • Mork
  • The Munsters. Okay, the Addams Family (same time) was a bit more original, but it wasn't as well written. Both rely on too many stock transition-cuts. But the Munsters movies weren't good, while the Addams Family ones were.
  • Dobie Gillis. This is old, but a really neat gentle comedy. Has Bob Denver, who later became Gilligan in a comedy that isn't so great now.
  • The Charmings - a very short-lived show about Prince Charming and Snow White, with associates, in the modern day world. Never given a chance, but it was enormously funny.

So what's not listed? Situation Comedies with painful situations or with too much relevance to the time. Like Brady Bunch, Partridge Family, Gilligan, Love Boat, Family Ties, Cosby Show, anything by Fox or Warner Brothers except listed above.

And no, I don't watch much T.V. But I do like escapism in the form of light-hearted fun. As opposed to horror or current Battlestar Galactica thriller-pain. The only network show we watch these days is... My Name Is Earl.
Mar. 15th, 2007 @ 08:04 pm
» How bad IS UPS?
I gripe about UPS regularly. They find the most astonishing reasons to fail to deliver packages. Such as, "a half-inch of snow fell, even though it didn't stick" or "we didn't expect sunlight in December."
In the last six packages they failed to deliver,
  • Four were due to "weather" even though the weather did not deter the post office or Fed-Ex, or UPS at the office a few miles away on any of those days!.
  • Another was due to them actually repeatedly losing the package, sending it to the wrong depot and back several times.
  • And another they simply returned to the sender as "refused" even though they never attempted delivery!
Those were six of the last eight packages sent to us via UPS!

It's so bad that it's reminiscent of Newman from Seinfeld; he was the letter carrier that wouldn't deliver if it rained. That's not the post office here; it's UPS.

It may not be quite that bad, but out of roughly 12 packages I've had shipped to me by UPS in the last 12 months, eight have failed to be delivered on time by UPS. This includes packages from Time-Life, CostCo, Amazon, New Egg, the National Geographic Store and others.

Time-Life's customer support claims that UPS 2nd Day Air is "2-3 Business Days". The UPS website claims otherwise:
Delivery Commitment
  • Delivery by the end of the second business day
  • Some locations in Alaska and Hawaii require additional transit time

But perhaps UPS has a lower level of service for stores, providing a lower rate.

At least I'm not the only one. See here,, here, here, here, here at ConsumerAffairs on failed deliveries and here on damages, here at PlanetFeedback, and especially here for more UPS woes. Note the links page at UPS Smashers also.

Either way, I avoid UPS whenever possible. Unfortunately, again perhaps due to price, they are typically the only choice. Bummer.

Incidently, I'm pretty pleased with the U.S. Postal Service. The prices are a lot higher than they used to be, but the reliability is high. My only gripes in the past twelve months have been a Delivery Confirmation they neglected to confirm and returning as undeliverable a credit card bill even though our address never changed. (That was a first for us! Hasn't happened again.) And we've only had one problem ever with FedEx... but that was about fifteen years ago and they worked extremely hard to solve it right then. Where as UPS has barriers set up so that even their customer service reps cannot actually talk to the dispatchers!
Feb. 28th, 2007 @ 04:58 pm
» MilliLock Update
If you use MilliLock, you may care. A significantly enhanced version of the desktop application has just been uploaded. I use this as my primary information manager currently. It works the way I do (which makes sense given the author) and it exports well to the phone.

Read the MilliLock news blog for details.
Feb. 18th, 2007 @ 10:47 am
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