Oh No, A Diary!

Anyway, I happened upon avoision.com through BoingBoing, and wasted a few hours reading through the entries. Heh, blogs that go back years and years and have a lot of entries are always fun like that. It also reminded me of my own attempts of blogging, and then returning to the entries years later to think, “Wow, I’ve forgotten about that!”

So then I thought, “I should start (re-)doing that, blogging my daily life.”. Then I thought, “But all I do is sit around and watch my life tick away.” (not really, but that’s the “executive summary”).

Anyway, today I’ve been hacking a PHP script… hey, where did everyone go? … that creates HTTP Post requests, especially multi-part requests. The post body is made as a MIME stream, with a separator string that is unique and doesn’t occur in the contents. So I created said MIME stream, sent it to the server, and the server doesn’t see it properly. After a few hours of debugging, I saw the problem.

If the boundary (i.e. separator) is “abcd”, the first part is indicated with "--abcd", the last part is terminated with "--abcd--". Unfortunately the boundary Firefox generates is usually something like "------------1231231312". So two more -’s in front of that wasn’t really noticable.

Aarrgghhh!!!!

Oh well, that’s the problem with not reading the specs… you FAIL.

Our New Engine is Called “Engine”!

So here’s the story of the confusing (if you looked into it deeper) naming of Intel’s CPUs.

It began with their mobile CPU, a 32-bit next generation of the Pentium M. They probably asked marketing what name would be cool. And the geniuses came up with “Intel Core“.

Then Intel developed a new micro-architecture, which is new, and cool, and 64-bit. What did they decide to name it? “Intel Core”. D’oh! OK, to avoid confusion you should call it “Intel Core Microarchitecture“.

Then they wanted to sell CPUs with this new architecture. So they probably asked marketing again for an appropriate brand for CPUs equipped with it. “How about, ‘Intel Core 2‘?”…

So now you have Intel Core (CPUs), which doesn’t have Core (the micro-arch), and Intel Core 2, which does have Core (the micro-arch). And because two is better than one, they sell Core Duo, which just means 2 cores of Core, and a word “Duo” which means 2 in Latin. Yeehaw! There’s also Core 2 Duo, a chip with 2 cores of Core 2.

Simple, right?

Removing High-Pitched Noise from Canon Powershot Videos

One for the Googlers:

My Canon Powershot A630 also records videos. Unfortunately the microphone catches the sound of the internal mechanism (I think it’s the screen) and the video it produces has an annoying ringing noise.

Using this tip on audio removal from the wiki for the software Audacity, I managed to figure out that the high-pitched noise has a frequency of 4290 Hz.

I extracted the audio from the video using VirtualDub, and opened it with Audacity 1.3.4 beta. Like the Wiki page instructed, I used the Nyquist prompt and the command (notch2 s 4290 50) (yes the brackets are necessary), and this removed the noise flawlessly!

All that needs to be done is now to reinsert the audio into the video file. I can combine this with re-encoding the video with a more size- (and web-) friendly codec.

My First Word Processor

Talking about dot-matrix printers, a childhood memory of war (against the computer) comes back to me…

The year was when I was going to 7th grade (I’m 27 now, so calculate it yourself). A teacher wanted an assignment to be handed in computer-typed. No problem, I thought, I have WordStar and a printer.

At home, I booted up my DOS PC, put in the WordStar disk (5.25 inch!), and typed “ws.exe”. Bzzt, bzzt, I was back in DOS. Damnit, the program was infected with a virus!

With the assignment due the next day, I was desperate.

“I know, I’ll use Quick Basic’s features to control the printer, and make it print what I want”. All my program did: wait for input, and print it out. But the variable to hold the input can have a maximum of 255 characters!

“No problem, I’ll just stop after typing 3 full lines with 80 characters each, and press Enter. Put the whole thing in a while loop.”.

So that’s what I did, the printer screeching every time I hit Enter. One time I hit Enter too soon, leaving, aieieie, a big nasty gap in the middle of the page, catastrophe! (Was it in the middle of a word too? Can’t recall).

I was quite proud handing in that piece of paper with unformatted lines filling it. I tried to explain to my physics teacher why there was a gap in the middle, but looking back at it, I don’t think he cared…

Faceboof

Wow, Facebook has a pretty cool new feature, “People you may now”, probably those people who have a high number of mutual friends with me, a.k.a. “2nd-degree friends” or nodes on the network with distance = 2 via multiple paths.

Out of the three people it recommended for me, it got 2 wrong, and 1 right, I do know her, but eh, I don’t really want to be “friends” with her, because I think she’s a b***h…

Pictures in Google Maps

Wow, so Google Maps now has geo-tagged pictures from Panoramio. At least my account has it, I think it’s a limited beta which I got a lottery for.

I must admit, it’s pretty cool, to see pictures of Monaco, you just browse to Monaco. How intuitive!

The first time I visited Panoramio, I wasn’t really impressed with it: it had the Google Maps Javascript application embedded in every page, which slowness-effect just annoys you on a Gigahertz computer. And every time you click an image you navigate away from the current page, loading another page, with another JS-bloat, argh! [And here I am with a cool answer to this problem, but I'm just sitting on it!]

But then, even something as simple as that can be bought by Google. Geez, I wish I had thunk of that!

Stupid Bleeping MySpace…

What is it with MySpace and other sites’ insistence, that because I visit them from a German IP, they should supply me with the German interface? It’s so f-ing irritating to read profiles in English and then having German words and thinking “What now? Oh wait that’s a German word.”.

Can’t they respect the browser’s setting of preferred content language? They probably think “Users are too dumb to be able to set that!”. Well fuck you for disrespecting your users!

Serves me right for visiting MySpace…

Get Off My Internet!

Achtung, I am now going to rant about idiots on the internet…

I can’t believe how full of stupid people the internet has been. Take for example Ubuntu help pages…

Type these commands into the terminal: [bla bla bla]…

No longer do the writers bother to explain what these commands do. I doubt the readers are interested in reading them either, they are the so-called “noobs” who thought installing “Linux” would be cool, so they try it out, not knowing what the fuck they are doing, and resorting to asking questions in forums and googling about how to accomplish things. Sure it will get you somewhere, but will you understand what’s happening on the way?

I remember the good old days of reading man pages, well written ones that begin with the background of what’s what, before giving you an explanation of what each command does, and example command lines. None of the “Copy & paste this. If it doesn’t work come back and ask for more hand-holding.”

Reminds me of a girl who wanted to know how to get the text-mode console from X.
“Press Ctrl-Alt-F1″, I said.
“And to get back to X?”
“Ctrl-Alt-F7. Well, not always F7, you see there are these virtual consoles…”
She’s pressed those buttons already, and wasn’t listening to my explanation anymore.

This rant was inspired by the Tabloid-like Slashdot headline Ubuntu May Be Killing Your Laptop’s Hard Drive, which overblows an issue of a bad parameter in a script (which everybody can, and should, fix themselves) to a problem that sounds like something has gone horribly wrong with Ubuntu itself. This brings me nicely to the second class of Internet-idiots: The sensational-headline-writing dolts that are Digg submitters. Who are forced to write ready-for-tabloid bullshit headlines and summaries because that’s what grabs idiot user’s miniscule attention spans…

I got nothing… tabloids and reality shows are popular because they cater to the less intelligent, so I guess I can see why Digg is so popular…

Disclaimer: I do read Digg (although avoiding the site and lame commenters using the excellent Sitening’s Digg Feed), and am continuously disappointed at the level of bullshit in the content they link to.

Stupid Computers…

foo.zip contains executable files. For security reasons, Google Mail does not allow you to send this type of file.

“Fine. Rename foo.zip to foo.zip.yeszip. Attach. Send.”

It works.

“Dumbasses.”

Not to mention it was a ZIP file that didn’t contain EXEs, just HTML and JavaScript files. Oh no, is somebody afraid of JS files?

OK, it’s for the protection of the idiots on the receiving end of the file. If it’s ZIP they’ll open it without thinking, whereas giving it the “yeszip” extension will stop them. But really, I’m sick of computers telling me what I can’t do.

lets.have.sex

Well, I’ve been thinking of going to the next base of online existence, (drumroll) getting my own domain! And with it there is the process of coming up with that original, easy-to-remember and not-yet-squatted (damn you domain squatters!) domain name.

So, when I read this BoingBoing post about new top-level-domains and Cory’s editorial about the “.sex” TLD, I wondered if that TLD really exists, so I typed in “lets.have.sex” in Opera. An error came up. I guess they’re still just in the planning stages.

Yeah, come to think of it, “lets.have.sex” is a bit childish. . But anyway, you can’t really put that on the t-shirt without the “http://” in front of it (and the final “/”), which makes it very dorky and so 1997 (during the early days of the web, companies put “http://” on TV/print/billboard ads because I guess they were afraid their audience wouldn’t recognize that it’s their website. The “http://” is usually followed by “www”, which is a big freaking clue. I guess the Marketroids were afraid that their customers would put in “www.idiotcompany.com” in their browser and it would bring up an error, because it’s missing the protocol. Ah, Marketroids are dumb). But “lets.have.sex” would really be seen as a dumb t-shirt writing instead of an URL because of the missing “www” and/or “http://”. But if “http://”, can I also have, “gopher://”, “ftp://”, or “file://”?

Rant du Jour

My topic of the day is the brokenness of digital camera automatic image rotation.

Well, new cameras nowadays have an orientation sensor that can tell if it’s being held in portrait or landscape mode, and record this information into the picture.

Unfortunately it doesn’t save the JPEG image itself as portrait. It still stores all of them as landscapes. At least that what Canon does.

Complicating the matter is the fact that I use incompatible software.

IrfanView has a great Lossless JPEG rotation feature. I can browse the images in a directory, and when I find one I need to rotate, I hit Shift-J, hit Enter, and the image is rotated for me. I can also choose the rotation direction (90, 180 or 270 degrees) before hitting Enter, but it stores the selected angle between rotations and because my portrait pictures are taken from the same angle (90° clockwise) I don’t need to re-select the angle. The conversion is also lossless, meaning, it doesn’t convert the picture into a bitmap (with its compression artifacts), rotates it and saves it (adding even more artifacts), but instead it manipulates the internal data matrices via some clever transposition and mirroring, without changing their values. Neat huh?

Buuuuut (just one t)… the problem is, IrfanView doesn’t change the EXIF information regarding the orientation. And it doesn’t rotate the thumbnail (as far as I know) that is actually embedded in every digital camera image.

And then I started trying XnView, a great freeware browser. The problem (for me) is, XnView does read the EXIF orientation information, and displays the image with the correct orientation. Which is great, and not so great. If I just upload the pictures on the internet assuming they’re already rotated, people viewing them have to rotate their heads 90° counter-clockwise, because, well, so far browsers don’t read and respect the EXIF orientation.

[And imagine if a new version of a browser started doing that. Incompatibility hell! Then one would need an update of all HTML authoring tools, old browsers would still be incorrect, etc. etc.

Come to think of it, that's the internet today, so why isn't anybody doing it (auto-rotation) yet?

Or, could one build an extension (for Firefox) or integrate (into Opera) an option to rotate images for the viewers? Client-side only, of course.]

And, because IrfanView doesn’t change the EXIF rotation information, pictures I’ve rotated in IrfanView are displayed rotated yet another 90° in XnView. Argh!

So what’s the point of this rant? Well, probably it’s that I suck because I use IrfanView, which is outdated…

New Digicam!

Yay! Got my Powershot A630 in the mail today. And… that’s it. It’s not that exciting, it’s a Canon Powershot, just like what I already have (a Powershot A70, which died from the infamous CCD-defect), and, well, the options are just the same.

I still have to send the A70 to the repair center, they’re repairing them for free, which is nice of them.

This is Your Life, and It’s Ending One Minute at A Time

I played around with Google Calendar today. I noticed its reminder feature sends an email to my Google Inbox (I tested it a few months ago, I don’t think it did that back then). The almost natural language Quick-Add feature is also cool, though one can’t set the reminder time through it.

So I typed in a friend’s birthday (“X’s birthday $date $month repeat yearly”). “repeat yearly” does what is expected from it, and looking at it in detail I saw one can also say how many times it should repeat: a limited number of time, or infinitely.

But no one has infinite birthdays now, do they?

So that’s the story of how a small option in Google Calendar reminds me that we are all mortals…