March 2007 Archives

Well, it's the time of year again for Linux Northwest and Novell Linux's Reverend Ted will be there doing a Xen presentation. Any of the Linux crowd from this end of the woods (you know who you are) want to carpool down again?

A nice look at how to declutter your desktop. I don't need all that because I did some of it with my weekend project, however it is a nice idea that I'm sure I can use.

Found a link to a nice HDR tutorial from one of the forums. Not unlike the bevy of other tutorials on the subject, with the one exception being that instead of a straight gradient on the layer mask (to simulate a split density filter), the HDR Blend Tutorial by Roman Johnston uses a select by color range to do the mask. Going to give that a try when I get home. Here's the thread in question with some other info that might be interesting.

Also I've been playing with LAB color after buying Photoshop LAB Color on the recommendation on some random website. Very complex book it looks like (and I'm only halfway through chapter 1), but has some super-cool, yet subtle stuff.

So I'm working at home today, just typing and minding my own business, when Patches decided to come and drape herself over my mouse arm.

In case you were wondering, no, she wasn't inconvenienced by me at all :)

A fairly productive weekend I think. I actually got stuff done! Not a lot of code, that'll be in the evenings, but a bunch of other stuff. First of all, did a bunch of running around. I had a couple of projects around the house (computer related, go figure) that needed "stuff" for. So I headed to Abbotsford in search of a power bar and letter trays (more on that in a sec). I made about 7 stops at 3 different stores. Guh. And all of it in the pouring monsoon that we had.

My projects were to

• Make a $8 network rack which required plastic stackable letter trays (with a specific type recommended) and short (1') extension cords to let you plug many wall warts into a single power bar.
  
• Tame the wiring under my desk which required a long (4') power bar to hook under the desk.
  

First hit Staples looking for the power bar. Nada, so head to Home Depot for the same, they had one, but it was super expensive ($60) and only had 6 outlets. Ok, whatever, suck it up. Then I headed to the other Staples for the letter trays and extension cords. Nope. So to London drugs, where I found the letter trays (wh00t!). Ok, that's one down. Next to Canadian tire, where I found I think the exact same power strip that the Lifehacker article referenced. Yay! Ok, right, I forgot I wanted to get a labeler as well. So back to London Drugs, where they told me they don't have any, now back to Staples where I was looking at the labelers earlier (and decided I didn't want one cause they didn't have the one we have at work which I liked). Get the labeler and then back to Home Depot to return the first power bar.

*Whew*.

I managed to clean the part of my desk with the two hubs, cable modem and router were and actually created a decent version of the network rack (photos to follow Real Soon Now). I even used the fancy new labeler so I can figure out which power block and which end goes with which device. Very proud of myself.

The second project, putting the power strip under the desk to tame some of the massive number of power connectors, didn't happen. The power strip is perfect, but my desk has a metal rim around the edge that's in just the wrong position, meaning I can't mount the strip out the outside edge, and currently inside the metal rim I have a cord tray, in just the wrong spot.

I could just move the cord tray a couple of inches to the inside, but I just didn't feel like doing it at the time. Also it's completely full of cords of all shapes and sizes, so crawling under the desk and unscrewing it while wrangling all the cords just wasn't that attractive. Eliminating about 6 cords that are currently going from computers and monitors to power bars sitting on the ground would be really nice though.

I recently got a (legit even!) copy of Windows Vista and decided to check it out slowly. When I got my new system I got dual hard drives, and the second one hasn't really been used yet, so I can install a new OS and migrate over at whatever pace I need to without losing hard drive space, or having to go "all or nothing".

I don't want to focus on the boring stuff, benchmarks, screenshots of the install, all stuff you can find in pretty much any Vista review out there. Instead I want to focus on how using Vista affects me as a user. I'm a geek so I know about stuff, but honestly, I really want to just use the computer to get stuff done (in my case mostly game play and graphics / photography / photoshop work).

So here we go.

Read on for the geekiness.

Found a link to some more Lightroom color presets for the lightroom fans in the audience (and myself when I get home).

Passed on to me from my buddy Brian.

You might live in Abbotsford if...

1. You aren't sure whether marijuana is legal or not.
   
2. You can swear in Punjabi, English and Mennonite (Darnit!)
   
3. You've hunted mailboxes
   
4. You see a gas station on every corner.
   
5. You see a church on every corner.
   
6. You see a grow-op on every corner.
   
7. Five degrees is really cold and twenty is really hot.
   
8. Rain is a part of daily life.
   
9. You secretly have a firm stance on the great Blueberry Cannon Debate.
   
10. You don't get excited about Christmas lights anymore because people keep them up all year round.
    
11. Your town's automall is bigger than the actual mall.
    
12. You don't think seven hockey arenas is enough.
    
13. Your town has had 2 mayors ever.
    
14. Your current mayor is an octogenarian.
    
15. You know when the Diwali festival is.
    
16. You know when the Berry Festival is.
    
17. You've grown accustomed to the smell of cow manure in the morning.
    
18. Going to Vancouver is a long day trip.
    
19. You use the Trans-Canada highway to get around
    
20. You know you only have two dates with a girl to score before you have to start taking her to the same places again.
    
21. Someone asks you where you're from, and you answer, "Vancouver."
    
22. You tell someone you're from Abbotsford and they ask, "Where?"
    
23. Bowling is the highlight of your day.
    
24. Your yard is the drainage center for all of Washington and Vancouver's pollution.
    
25. You know what the "big orange bubble" is
    
26. You know how to spell and pronounce "Trethewey"
    
27. You celebrated your 25th birthday and 6th wedding anniversary in the same year.... at Sneakers.
    
28. You don't need Playland, because you got the Agrifair.
    
29. You've noticed your 'water tower' is really a cheese tower.
    
30. You know what the 'mechanical vacuum gorillas' are.
    
31. You know where to go for Karaoke 5 nights a week.
    
32. You sit on a bench which is actually a paint palette, farm machinery or a creepy guy.
    
33. You know that, despite what the sign says, the name of our club is Shitty Limits.
    
34. You consider a gravel pit a decent place to meet up and hang out.
    
35. You're SO much better than those kids in Mission [Editors note: hey!]
    
36. The flea-market is a must-go-to-event on Sunday... after everyone goes to church of course
    
37. You have been part of the glory days partying up on Sandy Hill before there were houses there
    
38. You think a pimped out 84 Honda Accord looks all right.
    
39. You see ten people that you know walking two blocks to a convenience store
    
40. You hate Chilliwack . I mean the Chillbillies.
    
41. You develop asthma.
    
42. Your city is both the murder capital and bible belt of Canada.
    

Note: It's ok to be confused, many of the above will make no sense to anyone who hasn't lived in/on/around Abby.

Dear universe, please stop hatin' on me. Please?

Working at home today, oblivious under head phones when at 5 or so (just in time for me to not be interrupted from work thankyouverymuch) Firefly noticed a squooshing that wasn't supposed to be there. The old copper washer that was securing the connection from the copper pipe from the city water to our recently replaced plastic plumbing had decided to crack, and now water was draining out into the storage closet under the stairs, through it and into the office, and then under the newly put down laminate flooring in the hall and big room. :( So the evening has been pulling up the new floor, positioning fans and heaters, and generally being far more unpleasant than it should be (fantastic dinner though, yummy stew).

I was very lucky though.... it was caught before it go to do too much damage, such as making its way into the office where the computers are. I'm also lucky that I have all my photos in waterproof plastic tubs (though they were on the floor). My box of star trek memorabilia and "memories" box also escaped more than a splattering of water on them. Not so lucky was the box of models whose bottom disintegrated and fell out, letting the already perilously stacked lot basically smash all over the floor :( They are now all in a big plastic garbage bag (more for ease of getting them out of the closet so we could mop up water than an indication of their eventual destination), however I'm not sure what'll happen to them. There were a lot of airplane tires, cockpits, missiles and other small parts strewn around the floor, and I haven't bothered to even look at the things since they were put there two years ago. On the other hand though, those bits of painted plastic represent a large part of my childhood and a lot of time and effort put into them. I'll have to dig through and see if anything is recoverable at all I guess, then ditch the rest :(

Sucky to have a flood yes, but I'm very happy it happened now and not when the entire basement was under new flooring. Would have been nice to have it a couple of days ago before any flooring was down though :)

Crap, after midnight again, bed time now.

Did a little project for ArcterDad, upgrading the laptop hard drive in a digital wallet he had from the 2G it came with with a nice new (used) 20G drive. After much digging I found these links:

• http://members.cox.net/steved64/mindstor (archive)
  
• http://members.cox.net/steved64/mindstor/oldupgrade.htm (archive)
  
• http://www.wmuma.com/digitalwallet/index.html
  

I found a reference to the first link in a Russian photo newsgroup, found it wasn't there, so tried in the Internet Archive. The first page involves writing out floppy disk images (what's a floppy disk daddy?) and doing all sorts of things that seemed like a kludge to get around people not running Linux. The second link seemed more linux-oriented though, and since I had the hard drive plugged into my linux box, it seemed logical.

To prevent it being lost even more I have archived a copy of it. All text and images still (c) the original author of course.

So I first tried the instructions on the 'oldupgrade' page and found they didn't work. At that time I didn't know that some older firmware versions on the digital wallets wouldn't recognize disks larger than 8G though, so I went through the last link until I saw the note about the 8 G limit.

I grabbed the upgrade script they had and hacked up my own version which simply grabbed the FW-IMG and SN.IMG files from the current directory and used them and the math magic from the script to calculate where to write the boot image to on the drive.

Long story short, writing it to 8G -16m worked just fine, device is now booting and shows 8G free. Sadly that's not much these days if you're going to be taking pics with a 6 or 10mp camera. Better than nothing though!

Fun little project, glad it worked out (mostly).

I'm going crazy here, my brain apparently fried from the weekend or the water or something, looking for some perl assistance from my perl-knowledgeable buds (you know who you are... :)

I'm creating a menu system and converting entries in a database into a perl data structure that I can then parse to create an HTML menu. I'm having a real problem with the first part. I want to take a list of strings such as:

/about/contact
/about/contact/map
/about/contact/email
/about
/products
/products/style1
/products/style2
/products/widgets
/products/widgets/foo
/products/widgets/bar
/products/widgets/baz
/products/widgets/baz/qux

(The strings can have infinite depth (not restricted to 3 or 5 sub-levels) and is dynamically pulled from a database.)

I want to take this and convert it into a datastructure such as this one here (which is part of HTML::Widgets::NavMenu).

The gory details are a bit.... gorier. The strings are just an element of an object created out of the database, and the 'path' is actually a list of numbers (/1/2/3) but this seemed easier to work with.

This stuff used to be simple.... argh, embarrassed :(