Archive for January, 2006
Consignment
I ordered an adapter for the iMac last week, a mini-DVI to VGA connector, so that I could plug it into one of my other screens and expand the desktop. I expected this to simply be shipped with Royal Mail, being a small item, and therefore got it delivered to my home address. Unfortunately Apple shipped it using TNT, who require a signature, and they tried to deliver it last Friday when I was out for lunch.
I got a phone call from them yesterday to arrange a re-delivery, but like all bastarding courier companies, they think there are only five days in a week, leaving me fresh out of luck. I was just asking about whether they could send it to a different address (my work) when I realised the depot wasn’t far away anyway and I could pick it up. I confirm with the woman that’s where it is, get the consignment number, and go on my merry way.
Today I took the trip out to pick it up and after waiting for about 15 minutes for somebody to actually come out and deal with my query was informed that all Apple stock actually went to another depot, because it was treated as an international delivery.
Liars for staff, no sense of time and a five day week. TNT are bastards.
Region
Holiday over, I returned to work not so much refreshed as wishing I had another month off. No shortage of things to do of course, and returning to 300 emails is always fun.
On an unrelated note, damn the existence of DVD region coding.
Feature
As I work towards the release of Chatbear v3 I thought I’d post little feature profiles on what’s new.
Feature Profile #1: Mixing Content
Chatbear v3 is part of a larger launch platform that includes a new administration system for all things Bearkey, a proper public version of Blogbear and perhaps some other little things I throw in along the way. While I’m pulling back from the idea of using Bearscript (instead focussing on being really, really simple to use), one idea that continues is the idea of combining the services into your own site. So instead of having a board like http://www.chatbear.com/?3 and a blog at http://blog.blogbear.com/ you can have one site, http://richard.bearthing.com/ and have both boards and blogs on there (at /blog and /forum for example, but it’s your choice). This setup also provides future scope for placing other services on your site or for those with more HTML knowledge, combining board and blog content onto the same page.
Waterfalls
I picked up the Learn to Speak Japanese book again tonight, trying to start afresh. Near the start of the book they introduce a bunch of characters who will be used throughout the text, a family and their Japanese friends. Why must every book that tries to teach a language have these trite concepts, like families going on French holidays or German exchange students standing under waterfalls?
Computer language books never try similar approaches, I’ve never seen programming exercises wrapped in stories of John trying to complete his homework or Mr and Mrs Conditional trying to have children like little Junior Elsif. I think they’re the better for it.
Biography
Mark gave me the Robbie Williams biography Feel as a Christmas present and I finished reading it today. At first I thought it was an odd choice of present, but having now got through it, I can recommend it highly. It’s a very interesting insight not only into the life of Mr. Williams, but also the life of a celebrity in general, with some astonishing revelations on how they are sometimes treated by the press.
He describes fame as having everybody in the street constantly throwing sponge balls at you, not enough to hurt individually, but an exhasting ordeal when they come as a non-stop barrage. I think this is why I said yesterday I’d give most of the lottery money away, drawing that much attention doesn’t sound fun.
Lottery
I’m not normally a lottery participant, but the jackpot on the Euromillions this week is an incredible £100,000,000. It’s obviously a life-changing amount of money, and I think my initial thoughts are that I would give most of it away so that I could still be myself as much as possible (and still have everyone treat me that way), but that doesn’t mean to say it doesn’t the get the imagination going. I don’t see myself as one for fancy cars, clothes, servants, boats and planes, but my list of four dream purchases would be…
1. A farm like that of the Kents in Superman.
2. A house on a lake in New Zealand.
3. A bar like Cheers.
4. A 70’s disco nightclub in San Francisco.
Post your own in the comments.
Argued
I finished Things My Girlfriend And I Have Argued About, the first book by Mil Millington earlier this week and I recommend it to anybody looking for something good to read. There are some truely laugh out loud moments, and the way Mil describes things is often a catalyst for astonishment, especially after my own lacklustre efforts at novel writing at the end of last year.
Unfortunately the plot ultimately becomes a bit redundant, twisting and weaving without an ultimate conclusion which is a bit unsatisfying, but the ending is heartwarming enough and the ride entertaining enough to allow some forgiveness.
If you are thinking about picking it up, I also recommend his second novel, A Certain Chemistry, which is not only the funniest book I’ve ever read, but is also satisfying to the very end.
Giraffe
Transfer
Despite being on holiday I had to go into work this morning and pick up my shiny new iMac. Which to be honest, wasn’t that much of a hardship.
I set it all up and switched it on, and one of the first things it asked me was whether or not I would like to transfer all my settings from an existing Mac. So I brought over my old one, connected the two up with a firewire cable, rebooted the old machine and was then asked by the wizard what I’d like to transfer over, users, settings, files, even applications, although that was the one thing I declined. It took over an hour to copy it all over (it was about 35GB of data) but it sure made the setup easy. When the OS loaded everything was just like the old machine, same files on the desktop, same user login, same network settings, perfect. What wasn’t the same was the speed.
Oh yes, this thing flies. It’s quite a different experience using OS X on a machine with so much horsepower, especially in comparison to the 1Ghz G4 I had before. This doesn’t feel any slower than the 3.2Ghz desktop PC I have with nothing but instant response times from everything I’ve tried. The difference in applications like iPhoto is incredible, while iTunes loads far quicker than it does on my Windows install.
One other nice thing on the setup wizard was that it associates a picture with your user account, and it asked me what one I wanted by displaying live video of me on the screen (thanks to the built in camera) and giving me the option to create a video snapshot. A nice touch.
It’s not all perfect, the mini-VGA connector has been changed to a mini-DVI connector, meaning I need to buy a new cable, and part of me now wishes I’d went for the 20″ model just to get more screen real estate, but neither of these are killer problems.
I’m using Synergy to share my mouse and keyboard across both machines, allowing me to literally move the mouse from one computer to another, just like I move it from screen to screen within Windows. I can even copy and paste between OS’s, which is so cool. I had to give up one of the three attached to my PC just so I could fit everything on the desk, so it’s nice that the Mac now plays the role of the third screen so well.
All in all, very impressed. OS X feels like such an amazing operating system when you get to run it on decent hardware. PC owning non-game players should really check it out.
Drum
A week of free time awaits, and I’m making no promises to myself whatsoever over what I might do. Whenever I plan to use the time to get something done, I over procrastinate and end up doing absolutely nothing.
I saw the Matador today, a review of which will go up on whatinterest eventually. One word sums it up though, average.
Still haven’t managed to drum up any interest from anyone who wants to write for the site now that Graham has decided he’s too important to be seen writing for anything except money. I guess the promise of hookers and blow just isn’t enough for some people.
Promised
I had actually promised myself I wouldn’t redesign the blog until Blogbear launched to the public, but I just couldn’t wait any longer, especially after going to all the trouble and expense of buying a Polaroid camera and having Graham take the photos. So here it is, the fresh look for 2006. There are 20 different header variations and over 1400 date graphics involved in it’s production.
It wasn’t all plain sailing, the main blog post database table errored today as well, much the same as the board one did a few days ago. I managed to do the same trick, export and import, and it all appears to be running smoothly, but I find it strange that it happened on this table too. My best guess is that it has something to do with the fulltext index both the blog and board tables have on them, it’s the only thing that sets them apart from all the other tables on the server that appear to be fine. I guess something changed with how that works between MySQL 4 and 5.
Reinstated
I found out today that some data from the relationships system wasn’t being displayed since I rewrote the Bearkey admin (that’s the admin that nobody actually has access to apart from me), so if you’ve noticed any of your friends or enemies weren’t being displayed, they should all be there now.
I also regenerated all the small pictures, so if anybody has uploaded a new photo in the last couple of months, that’ll now be reflected in the thumbnail.
I promise the new system will go live at some point, I just want to get the new Chatbear and Blogbear admin systems into it as well.
Snail
Well after a day of Chatbear running like a snail shuffling through superglue, I think I’ve resolved the issues.
The slowdown is really a case of the database getting larger, and v2 not having enough query caching (something I fully intend on fixing in v3). One thing I found interesting when looking at the queries being run was how MySQL was actually more efficient with a larger data set than a smaller one.
At the moment the board posts table is around 850,000 records. Whenever someone posts on Chatbear, the parentid field is set with the id of the post that is being replied to. If it’s a new topic, and therefore not a reply to anything, then it gets an id of 0. When someone visits the topic listings page, the database is queried for all the posts on that board with a parentid of 0, which are then displayed in the appropriate order.
Now most people would probably design the database differently, they’d have a seperate table for the topics, thinking that there’s much less of them and ultimately it would be quicker to get the topic listings page from there, not from the massive posts table. In reality, this isn’t actually true.
With the help of a script that converted all the existing posts into a new table of topics, and looking at some of the database output, I found that in order to get the topic listings for board 2116, the database had to check 850 or so rows in the current table (thanks to the indexes) to get a result. When pointed at a topics only table however (also correctly indexed), it had to look at 1900 rows, resulting in queries that could be half the speed.
The lesson - don’t assume the database is going to do what you think it’s going to do. And take that book on database theory and throw it out the window, it’s useless in the real world.
Ass
I awoke this morning to two emails notifying me that Chatbear was well and truely on it’s ass.
A visit to the server confirmed that the main board posts table was indeed corrupted, which normally wouldn’t be a big deal, but then my first attempt at a repair failed.
I then tried the second, heavier duty repair. So heavy duty in fact that it took almost 8 hours to complete. At the end the result was actually worse, I couldn’t query the table at all now. Not good considering I had no backup any more recent than October of last year.
I tried the quick repair again, which was actually more successful, allowing me to mysqldump everything into a text file, after which I deleted the tables from the disk and imported them back in again. All is now well, although things are running very slowly.
The server was upgraded this week to MySQL 5.0 (not exactly my choice, just the perils of living on the Debian unstable tree), and clearly something in that table wasn’t liked by the new version. The index file created after I reimported everything was actually half the size of the corrupt one, so there is also the possibility that 6 years of inserts, updates and deletes was too much for it, but it does seem like too much of a coincidence that this all happened after the upgrade.
Ripping
Can anybody point me in the direction of a good, free, DVD ripping application for the PC? I’m looking for something that allows me to just put in a disc, click a button and be done with it. I’m a registered DivX user, so I’ve been using Dr. DivX (the original, not the latest abomination), but it’s started giving me issues.
Now I’ve got hard disk space again, I’d like to get back to transferring some of my large collection of discs onto WOPR.
Shanghai
Well my iMac order shipped today, three days earlier than the Apple estimate. Unfortunately it’s not coming from Cork at all, but directly from the factory in Shanghai, resulting in a 4-5 day delivery estimate.
I’ve had things come from Hong-Kong before, be shipped on the Monday and arrive on the Wednesday, so let’s hope the Chinese New Year brings me some luck.
Sweating
Well 24 is back, and damn, it’s back with a bang. Quite simply the best first 20 minutes of any season opener ever. It’ll be interesting to see if the sense that nobody is safe continues throughout the rest of the season.
I literally can’t watch episodes of 24 now without sweating profusely throughout. I don’t know exactly what buttons it’s pushing in me, but it’s got a very busy finger.
It was also an equally excellent week for The West Wing, with both a funny and dramatic episode that was a great reminder for how brilliant the show used to be (I mean, it’s still great, but the Sorkin years are when the show was truely alive). Will’s character truely has been reset to what it was when Sorkin was the one putting words in his mouth, almost as if his entire presidential campaign last year has been forgotten, much like the passed-over vice-president.
Fixes
Some fixes for Bearkey Alerts today. The feed for Wired should be working again, the strange HTML encoded characters that were appearing in the Weblogs Inc. posts should now be replaced correctly, and a couple of daft things with some other feeds have been sorted out.
Deathwish continues to move on apace with the Bearkey Alerts replacement, Alertbear, which is a fully fledged RSS client as well as still delivering your Chatbear alerts. I spent a bit of time this afternoon working on the logo for that, as you can see.
Scrubbed
In reality it took more like two hours of scrubbing, but my carpets are now clean. The Carpet Power wasn’t quite as successful as my first tests had indicated, I am left with a few blood spots that have been more watered down than removed, but it’s ultimately been a huge success. If anything I’m now left with some areas of the carpet that are actually noticably cleaner than the rest, but I’m sure with time the colour will even itself out again.
Crawling around the floor on your hands and knees removing the last traces of the dog isn’t the best fun you can have at the weekend, especially when it just reminds me how much I miss having her here.
Memory
Well the problems with my laptop are solved, it was the 512MB memory expansion. Mere moments away from conceding defeat and working out who to call in order to get it fixed, I decided to remove the little stick as somewhat of a last resort. Incredibly, I’ve not had a single issue with it since.
Now I did run memtest86 for a few hours on the machine without it finding a single thing wrong, so I’m not sure what was wrong with the memory exactly, but it’s nice to have it all working again. I haven’t really noticed the difference now that the machine only has 256MB either, I guess I just don’t tax it with a web browser and a text editor.
