Core Memory

In the recent Melbourne heatwave, track buckling was one of the many problems that contributed to problems on the network. Buckling is an issue with modern continuous welded rail (CWR) as it lacks expansion gaps. The traditional method of trail construction was to use lengths of rail joined with fishplates. These could be left slightly loose one one side so that the rail could expand and contract a little bit in response to the prevailing conditions.

The correct way to lay CWR is to stress (stretch) it to its length at the hottest expected temperature and then fix it to the sleepers, preventing it from contracting. However, this requires heavy concrete sleepers firmly fixed in the road bed, wooden sleepers wont take the strain.

So with that in mind, its good to see that maintenance work at Pascoe Vale Station has been done with an eye to the future. No wait, that would be what happens in some city with competently-run public transport.

The following line does what I want:

gpsbabel -t -i garmin -f /dev/ttyUSB0 -o kml,points=0,units=m -F route2.kml

Quite interesting to see how closely (or not) the GPS and google maps line up.

Due to the continued unavailability of a locker at work, I don't get to ride as much as I used to. In fact, casual clothes Friday is about the only opportunity I get. So I need to make it count.

Moonee Ponds Creek trail is the most direct route, but it is hardly the most scenic. There are a few nice parts, but mainly it is a concrete ditch that weaves in and out of Citylink. So Friday I took a detour via Merri Ck and the Yarra trail. This makes for a nice roundabout route as can be seen in the map below:

I assume this is due to heat stress; else Autumn has come real early this year.

Sofie has a rather nice compact camera I bought her, a Fujifilm FinePix F50fd. On Monday, Gillian decided to give it a bath. We're not sure exactly how long it was in there, but it got a good dunking.

On Monday night, the camera wouldn't turn on at all.

On Tuesday morning, the camera would turn on but it was in a pretty bad way. It made sad beeping noises and refused to extend the lens, throwing up a "zoom error."

Tuesday night the lens would extend most of the time, but the rear LCD was showing inverted colours and was flickery.

Wednesday morning the LCD came good and the camera would take pictures but it was having trouble with AF lock, and the pictures came out all blurry.

Thursday the blurriness had disappeared and Sofie used it to take these pictures at Ripponlea. The pictures out of the camera look fine, all that remained was a little blotchiness on the rear LCD.

Friday even the blotchiness had disappeared. Pretty amazing, eh?

I've been fixing up a Sony Vaio laptop for a friend of Sof's. Having wasted much time on this black hole in the past, I normally avoid this sort of work, but when the missus says "Jump", I say "What colour?"

The problem report was to the effect that they couldn't connect to the Internet. However, I quickly discovered the real problem was that Windows had been reinstalled, leaving the laptop devoid of drivers. Pretty much everything except basic VESA video was non-functional, no wireless, network, bluetooth, 3D graphics, sound, media reader, power management, sleep function or modem.

Normally this problem can be solved by a visit to the vendor website. I tried Sony Australia first, but they led me to believe that no drivers were available for download. A bit of Googling led me to the Sony APac site, where I discovered a helpful link to the original drivers. All 29 of them.

This includes such essential "drivers" as the "Sony Shared Library" and "OpenMG Setup", all of which I downloaded. At about 6 kb/sec. You'd think Sony might be able to afford a decent Internet connection, but apparently not. Installing the 29 drivers solved most problems, although as there were undocumented dependencies between them, I just had to keep installing each one until it worked. The sound drivers wouldn't install, failing with an obscure error message until I found an unofficial download of a Microsoft hotfix that allowed it to continue.

I was also asked if I wanted to install in U.S. English, French or Spanish about six million times. Apparently having a system locale of English doesn't mean you wouldn't like your power driver to be in French. Just to liven things up a bit. I imagine that the usual shutdown options of Suspend and Hibernate would be replaced by "Surrender" and "Run Away" or something like that.

None of the 29 drivers enable the Bluetooth, by the way. Apparently to get that working you need to edit an INF file. I kid you not.

So after all of this, I'm left with a laptop that more or less works. It locks instead of powering off, and the battery never stops charging, but the owners, raised on low expectations of Windows-based machines, will no doubt be delighted. And Sony are supposed to be the Apple of Wintel hardware! Next time some moron spouts that line about Apple needing to license its OS to Dell and Sony et al in order to succeed, just knee him in the nuts.

Conversation with Dan via IM:

Dan: Haha. "Save the Children" are against Internet filtering.

Ian: I wish somebody would think of the children.
Ian: No wait.
Ian: Isn't that the problem?

Dan: Ewww!

Encoding for iPod on my Athlon 64 3000+ ran at about 25 fps. On the new 3.0 GHz hackintosh, it is doing about 72 fps. Have to add an extra argument to use both cores though, "-threads 2". Also, they changed the name of the h264 vcodec, from "h264" to "libx264" (obviously!)

Current encoding line is:

ffmpeg -deinterlace -y -threads 2 -async 5000 -i input filename -cropleft 56 -cropright 56 -acodec libfaac -ab 128k -vcodec libx264 -crf 20 -flags +loop -cmp +chroma -me_range 16 -g 250 -partitions +parti4x4+partp8x8+partb8x8 -me hex -subq 5 -f mp4 -s 480x320 -r 25 -aspect 480:320 -level 30 -title "Title" output-filename.mp4

What do you say about something that "just works" ? That is what EFI-X does. I built a machine with components only from the (short) HCL, connected the EFI-X module to a spare motherboard USB header, switched on and then installed from a retail Mac OSX X 10.5 DVD.

Once past the EFI-X boot screen, it is just like using a real Mac. Compared to the Power Mac G5, it is very fast, and somewhat quieter. There's no hacking, disabling, fiddling, modifying or other faffing about required, even updates to OS X install from Software Update as they would on a real Mac.

No product is perfect, but the limitations are few and minor and include:

• The EFI-X booter is not Open Firmware, and therefore cannot boot from Firewire (yet.)
  
• Windows and OS X can't share a single drive due to the different partitioning schemes required (MBR vs GPT)
  
• Booting into the EFI-X environment adds about 10 seconds to the bootup process.
  
• Audio doesn't automatically switch between line-out and headphone out when you plug headphones in.
  
• Scraping the bottom of the barrel here .. System Profiler shows the graphics card as 256 Mb when it is actually 512 Mb ... cosmetic only.
  

So for $1000, you can have your very own yum cha brand Mac Pro.

So now Street View has been enabled for many Australian cities and suburbs. I have a suspicion that the Street View car might've been doing some wardriving at the same time, because my entirely GPS-less iPod Touch can now locate me when at home (in the suburbs) to a high degree of precision.

"Locate Me" on the Touch used to only work in the CBD, and not that accurately either.

Looks like JoikuSpot had a competitor already - WalkingHotSpot.

Remembers when I suggested a portable device that served a 3G connection over Wifi? Well turns out someone has already done it.

A company called Joiku (those clever Finns) have written an application that does just that, turns your Symbian Series 60 (and possibly Windows Mobile) 3G phone into a Wifi access point. It is called JoikuSpot, and there is both a free and a premium edition.

A significant number of mouth-breathers are incorrectly referring to this app as JaikuSpot, which is confusing all round.

Having recently sold the Audi, I am now able to calculate exactly what it cost me over the past couple of years.

Period of ownership: April 2006 - July 2008 (2 years 3 months, approximately 117 weeks)

If the Libs want to regain credibility on the climate change issue, they're going to need to front someone a lot more convincing than the nasal and repetitive Greg Hunt.

I can't believe Barrie let him get away not once, but several times lumping LPG, LNG and solar together as "Clean Energy!" Yes, they're all clean ... except that one has about 60% of the emissions of coal, and the other is ... 0%.

This is how I encode shows recorded by mythtv for viewing on the iPod Touch. (or iPhone. If I had an iPhone.)

ffmpeg -deinterlace -y -async 5000 -i inputfile -cropleft 56 -cropright 56 -acodec libfaac -ab 128k -vcodec h264 -crf 20 -flags +loop -cmp +chroma -me_range 16 -g 250 -partitions +parti4x4+partp8x8+partb8x8 -me hex -subq 5 -f mp4 -s 480x320 -r 25 -aspect 480:320 -level 30 -title "Title" output-filename.mp4

Explanation follows.