October 26th, 2009 :: graham.reeds
Categories:
Leisure ::
LifeI preordered Windows 7 Home Premium from Amazon. These are my thoughts.
First off I thought I backed up my system. Unfortuntely I didn’t. I assumed it worked as there was a large amount of files copied and it took a long time. So I lost all my app settings.
I dropped the 64bit version into my drawer and rebooted. Selected the SSD, formatted it and installed. It was quick compared to WinXP MCE which was on there previously.
A few problems after initial install: Sound thought it was running through SP/DIF (it isn’t), Belkin Wireless G USB wasn’t working, and there was a mysterious yellow exclamation mark. Gigabyte drivers for the mobo and onboard sound fixed the sound issue but Belkin doesn’t issue 64bit drivers it seems. So I plugged in my Netgear WG111T usb wireless. That worked.
The WG111T caused a few blue screens. Turned out the exclamation mark was Away Mode system being 32bit. No crashes since I disabled it in BIOS.
The new interface will take some getting used to. Also where do you put your own codecs now? You used to drop them in system32 and run regsvr32. There isn’t a system64 and everyone on the net makes stupid directories in the root for them.
Doesn’t feel any faster. In some cases it feels slower. This is on a dual-core AM2 5300+ running at 2.7GHz with 2gb of memory. Also memory at start is 500mb.
Installation of MediaPortal was pretty straight forward if not without slight hiccups.
October 7th, 2009 :: graham.reeds
Categories:
LifeMiL is now home: Been told to take it easy for a couple of weeks but I think she will start cooking before the end of the week. All lines have been removed from Mrs Bear which is good. However she is now in some discomfort, in no small part due to the amount of fluid she needs to drink (7 litres yesterday). She’s also been visited by the dietician whose promised not to change her food choice from the non-KPI but vegetarian Quiche to the KPI friendly but non-vegetarian Ham Sandwich. Also from this change she can get her hands on Cheese and Biscuits.
Final Comment: I am becoming a dab hand with the rear wheel turning wheelchairs!
October 2nd, 2009 :: graham.reeds
Categories:
LifeJust to let you know that I am back from spending 2 nights in a dingy motel on the outskirts of Newcastle!
Mrs Bear went into theatre about 2 hours after MiL did, at 2pm yesterday. They managed to remove MiL’s kidney by keyhole which was a surprise since they thought they’d have to do it via standard surgery. Mrs Bear left Recovery near midnight, but they allowed me and FiL to visit her while there just briefly. She was very pale and quite puffy. Early today, about 10am-ish, she was still pale and weak, drifting in and out of conciousness as the drugs she was being pumped full of kept her sedated. This afternoon saw a marked improvement. She was sat up in bed, chatty – moaning about the horrid hospital food – and talking to the patients/nurses. We bought her some prawn sandwiches and laters some Ploughmans which she was grateful for. MiL was quite nauseus this morning but feeling a lot better in the afternoon. Me and FiL went on a wheel chair hunt that took us what seemed like two hours to find one (though it only took 45 mins) – they are like gold dust! They had a good chat before wheeling back and we relinquished the ‘chair.
Hopefully Mrs Bear will be home later next week!
September 25th, 2009 :: graham.reeds
Categories:
Leisure ::
LifePicasa has had what all programs seem to get at some point in their life: A .5 update release.
This one is pretty good too. The feature I’ve wanted since I poured all my photos I’ve ever taken is now here and it is pretty good too: Facial Recognition.
The interface is nice and the algorithm is pretty good. I have several shots of a friend with red hair and then a few with black hair. If you’ve use the interface you’ll know that Picasa groups faces together that might be similar. I’ve seen her face several times while removing the majority of the faces (me, Mrs Bear, etc) and getting down to the less photographed. So I tag her the first time, tag the second, but the algorithm they use must of decided that the larger sample of her face now does include the photos with black hair and so decided to include it. Another example is it accurately tagged a female friend at a fancy dress party as a pirate – complete with beard.
While it is quite accurate there has been some mishaps – two of my friends ended up with photos in each others folders, one being indian and the other white. Pictures of faces side-ways to the camera seem to get lumped in together. For the pictures which Picasa is unsure of it gives you a little tick or cross to decide, though sometimes it mistags a person and doesn’t give that interface. Speed could do with a bump – 18,000 photos took about 6 hours to analyze.
Now I have 9,300 faces to sift through…
It’s been a while since I posted, so what has been keeping me busy?
Work, it’s getting easier – I think I am getting into the VB6 mindset, but I still hate VBA with a passion. When is the nice .NET extension becoming available? Is it already, and could Reporting Services save our souls (not to mention our sanity)?
Space is coming along very slowly. Any time I sit down to work on it I have to spend about an hour refreshing my mind on what I have done – and I only have about 40 mins to do it in.
Had my birthday: One of my presents was an iPod from Mrs Bear – which gave me a lovely opportunity to hate iTunes all over again. This time I accidently deleted my play list, there is no undelete and then it synced it – wiping it. I’ve installed iTunes 9 but I don’t hold out any hope for them fixing all the problems with it. Another present is an ant farm – so along with my Sea Monkeys you could say I have Surf’n'Turf.
Another side effect of my birthday was my the choice of venues for a meal. Since I’ve always wanted to eat there I picked Kaminaki and had some of the nicest fish I have ever eaten, and definately the nicest pitta bread ever. All this and despite the grumblings of some of my friends.
Owning a book called Getting Things Done and never getting around to reading it.
August 14th, 2009 :: graham.reeds
Categories:
Leisure ::
LifeToday Mr & Mrs Bear had an interesting interaction with animals.
…but not kissing. That would be like kissing a red-headed cousin or something.
As you do with anything programmig related you jump straight in at the deep end. In this case I wanted to take SVG input, and output a JPG, from PHP.
So taking a look around there wasn’t much to choose from:
- GD for PHP can take and output practically anything, but not SVG. And unfortunately its vector object model doesn’t seem to be as expressive as SVG is. There is GD::SVG, which is a perl module. Perl is enabled on the server (we have a horrible perl script for backing up the DB every hour but that is another post) but I’d rather not mess with a language I know nothing about.
- Call ImageMagick and have that do the conversion for us. While actually not that difficult, the cost of starting ImageMagick for each image is prohibitive – while you won’t get 300 people all trying to convert images at the same time, it is possible to get 10 or so clumped together.
- Call Batik to handle the conversion. I’ve used Batik and, if you ignore the first time cost of starting a JVM, it is wonderfully responsive. Unfortunately it is written in Java and Space is written PHP.
I know Java better than Perl, I decided to go with the Batik option. This means enabling the PHP-Java extension, which is simply editing the ini file to uncomment out the line that reads extension=php_java.dll.
In addition to that you need to edit the [Java] section of the ini file. And that is where things get problematic. If you read the scant information on installation you will find that the last known installation was with Java 1.4. I have Java 1.6.14. I found a pretty detailed instructions on the O’Reilly site for Java 1.2. Shouldn’t be too different should it? So I configured it as best I could and ran a simple test program:
<?php
ini_set(“display_errors”, “1″);
error_reporting(E_ALL);
$systemInfo = new Java(“java.lang.System”);
print “Total seconds since January 1, 1970: “.$systemInfo->currentTimeMillis();
print ” Java Version: “.$systemInfo->getProperty(“java.version”);
?>
The output was Fatal error: Unable to load Java Library C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.6.0_14\jre\bin\client\jvm.dll, error: The specified module could not be found. in C:\Develop\projects\zerosumgames\php\map\htdocs\java.php on line 6 which is never pleasant. So I pushed and poked with the ini file settings – there are only 4 variables so there isn’t much to play with, but nothing would make it work.
So it sat on a back burner for a few days, nagging at the back of my mind: What if I used the JVM that they used themselves? That should work shouldn’t it? So I rooted around on Sun’s site and found what I was looking for: An archive of the all the old JDKs!
So I grabbed the last 1.2, 1.3 and 1.4 JDK’s (after reading very, very carefully Suns EOL agreement) and began by installing Java 1.2 and configuring the ini file:
java.home = "C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.2.2\bin"
java.library = "C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.2.2\jre\bin\classic\jvm.dll"
Bingo the output was Total seconds since January 1, 1970: 1248652639311 Java Version: 1.2.2.
Java1.3 went on – and worked too. This is exciting as Batik needs a Java 1.3 runtime (or compatible) to work: Total seconds since January 1, 1970: 1248652802706 Java Version: 1.3.1_20
What about Java 1.4? This gives Batik a speed increase and allows Batik to use additional features (though I don’t really care about mouse-wheels): Total seconds since January 1, 1970: 1248652920024 Java Version: 1.4.2_19
You beauty! So why doesn’t 1.6 work? Surely it is possible? I know the JVM has moved from the classic folder into a client and server folder, but the internals must surely be the same. I pointed at the correct location, but are there any other 1.6 JVMs beside the client and server ones? Well there is the one that exists in jre6 folder put that produces the same error as before.
And finally 1.5? Well I never tried that one – I have a working PHP-Java bridge – and now I need to move on to bigger & better things.
While researching this post I came across Image_Canvas which might do what I want it to and entirelly in PHP – no Java required. However the problem with the documentation is that it isn’t very thorough and your are pretty much on your own. If I get stuck with Java & Batick then I will probably take a closer look but until then…tada!
Just got back from the cinema after watching The Empire Strikes Back. Now we have to wait until The Return of the Jedi is released.
I like to be honest – at times it is easier than being a naughty pirate downloading stuff 24×7.
So why can I download Top Gear from Mininova before it appears on BBC iPlayer? Do the BBC download it themselves first or something?
« Previous Page — Older »
« Newer — Next Page »