jasonrumney.net

Remote Control

2010-07-28T15:49:00.005+01:00

I eventually gave up on the idea of trying to prod the serial port on my Astro STB and bought a cheap IR transceiver from some guy in Hong Kong via ebay. My first attempts at learning the remote codes were frustrating - irrecord complained about something being wrong after incorrectly guessing the settings, and when I finally got some codes learned, I found that a lot of the buttons had the same code, so 2, 6 and 8 were all being detected as KEY_2. Eventually I started trying to manually configure the basic settings based on some of the standard protocols, and eventually hit on RCMM-32, which learned all the codes and can reliably detect them when I press the buttons on the remote.

So now the codes are learned, along with the codes for the extra buttons for controlling a Panasonic DVD player on the bottom of my TV remote, which have now found a use giving basic control of Freevo in case the wireless keyboard, bluetooth equipped mobile phone or one of many wifi equipped gadgets is not close at hand.

Next step is to go the other way and send the codes out to the STB. The transceiver doesn't seem to be sending anything out at all. I still haven't narrowed down the problem, it may be a faulty IR LED, or an incompatibility between the transceiver (MCEUSB gen 1) and the software driving it (LIRC 0.86). Now that I have the remote codes, it might also be a good time to go back to trying the serial link, but that'll have to wait for another night. For now, I'll just post up the Astro remote codes, in case anyone else is struggling to get them working with LIRC.


# brand:                       ASTRO
# model no. of remote control: 
# devices being controlled by this remote:
#   Astro Satellite Decoder STB (Malaysia) [Philips DSR4201/68]

begin remote

  name  ASTRO
  bits            8
  flags RCMM|CONST_LENGTH
  eps             2
  aeps          100

  header        417   278
  three         167   778
  two           167   611
  one           167   444
  zero          167   278
  ptrail        167
  pre_data_bits   24
  pre_data       0x225027
  gap          99817
  toggle_bit_mask 0x0

      begin codes
          KEY_0                    0x00
          KEY_1                    0x01
          KEY_2                    0x02
          KEY_3                    0x03
          KEY_4                    0x04
          KEY_5                    0x05
          KEY_6                    0x06
          KEY_7                    0x07
          KEY_8                    0x08
          KEY_9                    0x09
          KEY_RED                  0x6D
          KEY_GREEN                0x6E
          KEY_YELLOW               0x6F
          KEY_BLUE                 0x70
          KEY_KPASTERISK           0xF6
          KEY_TEXT                 0x3C
          KEY_MENU                 0x54
          KEY_SHOP                 0xAA
          KEY_EXIT                 0x83
          KEY_BACK                 0xA9
          KEY_EPG                  0xCC
          KEY_INFO                 0x0F
          KEY_UP                   0x58
          KEY_DOWN                 0x59
          KEY_LEFT                 0x5A
          KEY_RIGHT                0x5B
          KEY_OK                   0x5C
          KEY_VOLUMEUP             0x10
          KEY_VOLUMEDOWN           0x11
          KEY_CHANNELUP            0x20
          KEY_CHANNELDOWN          0x21
          KEY_AUDIO                0x4E
          KEY_SUBTITLE             0x4B
          KEY_MUTE                 0x0D
          KEY_MAIL                 0xF3
          KEY_FAVORITES            0x84
          KEY_HELP                 0x81
          KEY_POWER                0x0C
      end codes

end remote

Controlling my STB

2010-03-17T14:36:00.005Z

My latest experiment is to see if I can control my Astro decoder via the serial port on the back, so I can have Freevo record from different channels (currently I'm mostly recording the kids shows from NHK that are on in the middle of the night, so we have to remember to leave the decoder on channel 963 each evening). There is of course no documentation about the serial port anywhere on the net, but a few US set top boxes have been hacked, so there is some hope.

What I know after an hour of poking around:

Manufacturer: Philips
Model Number: DSR4201/68
Serial port: 115200 8N1 (diagnosed by observing the output)

Firmware seems to be developed in France, as the only thing I have got out of the decoder so far is some debug messages in French as I shut down. Thomson also supply decoders to Astro, so maybe they are providing the firmware for both their own and Philips boxes?

Here is the output I see:

TE : c0c9877c : Ln : b40 > ini_mem
TE : c0c9877c : Ln : b40 > : free_mem
TE : c0c9877c : Ln : b40 > gmhw_init
TE : c0c9877c : Ln : b40 > appel a la fonction Get_Dynamic_mem, retour 0
TE : c0c9877c : Ln : b40 > Valeur de la taille totale dispo pour Partition Privee =2363736
TE : c0c9877c : Ln : b40 > Adresse de la memoire Dynamique 0xc0dbeea8
TE : c0c9877c : Ln : b40 > ok

No hits on any of that on Google unfortunately, so I'm on my own.

Atoms Moved

2008-09-22T11:14:00.004+01:00

I've now successfully imported a 700 post blog into draft.blogger.com

There were a few more quirks of blogger.com along the way. Having next and previous links in the Atom feed causes blogger to reject the entire import file, so I ended up putting them in as comments. There were also some old posts that didn't have an author (perhaps from some beta version of Roller, and blogger rejected those due to the empty name field.

Finally, I had an old comment from the blog's early days that was not UTF-8 encoded in the database (it doesn't appear correctly in Roller either), so I had to reencode that before blogger.com would accept it for import.

Here is the final export template for Apache Roller 4.0.


#set($pager = $model.getWeblogEntriesPager())
#set($map = $pager.getEntries())
<?xml version="1.0" encoding='utf-8'?>
<feed xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom" xmlns:thr="http://purl.org/syndication/thread/1.0">
    <id>$model.weblog.id</id>
    <title>$utils.escapeXML($model.weblog.name)</title>
    <subtitle>$utils.escapeXML($model.weblog.description)</subtitle>
    <updated>$utils.formatIso8601Date($model.weblog.lastModified)</updated>
#if ($pager.nextLink)
    <!-- link rel="next" type="application/atom+xml" href="$pager.nextLink"/ -->
#end
#if ($pager.prevLink)
    <!-- link rel="previous" type="application/atom+xml" href="$pager.prevLink"/ -->
#end
    #foreach( $day in $map.keySet())
    #set($entries = $map.get($day))
    #foreach( $entry in $entries )
    <entry>
        <id>$entry.id</id>
        <title>$utils.escapeXML($entry.title)</title>

        <author>
#if ("$entry.creator.fullName" != "")
          <name>$entry.creator.fullName</name>
#end
        </author>

        <published>$utils.formatIso8601Date($entry.pubTime)</published>
        <updated>$utils.formatIso8601Date($entry.updateTime)</updated>

        <content type="html"><![CDATA[$entry.text]]></content>
        <category scheme="http://schemas.google.com/g/2005#kind" 
              term="http://schemas.google.com/blogger/2008/kind#post"/>
 <link rel="self" type="application/atom+xml" href="http://example.com/$entry.id" />
    </entry>
        ## use Atom threading extensions for comment annotation
        #foreach( $comment in $entry.comments )
        <entry>
            <id>$comment.id</id>
            <title>$utils.escapeXML($utils.truncate($utils.removeHTML($comment.content), 40, 50, "..."))</title>

            <author>
#if ("$comment.name" != "")
                <name>$utils.escapeXML($comment.name)</name>
#end
#if ("$comment.url" != "")
                <uri>$utils.escapeXML($comment.url)</uri>
#end
#if ("$comment.email" != "")
                <email>$comment.email</email>
#end
            </author>
            <published>$utils.formatIso8601Date($comment.postTime)</published>
            <updated>$utils.formatIso8601Date($comment.postTime)</updated>
            <content>$utils.escapeXML($utils.removeHTML($comment.content))></content>
            <thr:in-reply-to ref="$entry.id" type="application/atom+xml" href="$entry.permalink"/>
            <category scheme="http://schemas.google.com/g/2005#kind" 
              term="http://schemas.google.com/blogger/2008/kind#comment"/>
     <link rel="self" type="application/atom+xml" href="http://example.com/$entry.id" />
        </entry>
        #end
    #end
    #end
</feed>

Moving Atoms

2008-09-14T12:21:00.022+01:00

Having now found an apartment in Malaysia, I'm now faced with the logistics of moving. One problem I'm facing is that for the last 5 years I've run my own server, which now supports several blogs, a forum and my mobile phone's OTA backup. If I knew it was just for a week or two, I could take it offline temporarily, but from what I can tell, internet connectivity in Malaysia is probably not going to be reliable enough to keep all this online for a reasonable proportion of the time, and unless I pay serious money I'll be stuck with the hassle of a dynamic IP address. So I'm looking to migrate at least the blogs and forum off to other services. I've just finished migrating the posts and comments from my first blog (there are still hard links back to my server that need fixing), which was no easy task, as although draft.blogger.com supports Atom based import, it is very particular about some things, with very little documentation and completely useless error handling - it just seems to stop processing as soon as it finds something it doesn't like, and if nothing has been imported yet you get a general meaningless error message, but if one or more posts were successfully imported, it just silently fails to import the posts starting with where it failed. So here is what I found.

In addition to needing to be a valid Atom 1.0 feed, each entry needs a unique self referencing link: <link rel="self" type="application/atom+xml" href="post-id"/> The href does not have to be real, just unique, so I used example.com in my export from roller. The import process also does not accept empty tags for the post or comment author's email, name or uri (according to the rnc schema, only email cannot be empty).

The following is the template I used to export posts and comments from Apache Roller 4.0. It is based on an earlier export template for JRoller by Damien Bonvillain that output Atom 0.3, with updates for Roller 4.0, Atom 1.0 and blogger.com's undocumented quirks. The exported content still needs some post processing; removing or filling in empty author child tags, checking the truncation of comment titles or misformed content has not broken anything, and replacing relative references (which shouldn't be there in the first place), but generally it works for short blogs. There seems to be a hard-coded limit in getRecentWeblogEntries of 100 posts, so it needs rework to use a pager and an external script to fetch all the pages.

As with the original, paste the contents below into a new roller template, then use the template to access your blog. If you have too many posts for blogger.com or the export script to handle, you could try using a pager in the export template, or break up the export file manually after extracting everything.


#set($entries = $model.weblog.getRecentWeblogEntries('', 100))
<?xml version="1.0" encoding='utf-8'?>
<feed xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom" thr="http://purl.org/syndication/thread/1.0">
    <id>$model.weblog.id</id>
    <title>$utils.escapeXML($model.weblog.name)</title>
    <subtitle>$utils.escapeXML($model.weblog.description)</subtitle>
    <updated>$utils.formatIso8601Date($model.weblog.lastModified)</updated>

    #foreach( $entry in $entries )
    <entry>
        <id>$entry.id</id>
        <title>$utils.escapeXML($entry.title)</title>

        <author>
          <name>$entry.creator.fullName</name>
        </author>

        <published>$utils.formatIso8601Date($entry.pubTime)</published>
        <updated>$utils.formatIso8601Date($entry.updateTime)</updated>

        <content type="html"><![CDATA[$entry.text]]></content>
        <category scheme="http://schemas.google.com/g/2005#kind"
              term="http://schemas.google.com/blogger/2008/kind#post"/>
    <link rel="self" type="application/atom+xml" href="http://example.com/$entry.id"/>
    </entry>
        ## use Atom threading extensions for comment annotation
        #foreach( $comment in $entry.comments )
        <entry>
            <id>$comment.id</id>
            <title>$utils.escapeXML($utils.truncate($utils.removeHTML($comment.content), 40, 50, "..."))</title>

            <author>
              <name>$utils.escapeXML($comment.name)</name>
              <uri>$utils.escapeXML($comment.url)</uri>
              <email>$comment.email</email>
            </author>
            <published>$utils.formatIso8601Date($comment.postTime)</published>
            <updated>$utils.formatIso8601Date($comment.postTime)</updated>
            <content>$utils.escapeXML($utils.removeHTML($comment.content))></content>
            <thr:in-reply-to ref="$entry.id" type="application/atom+xml" href="$entry.permalink">
            <category scheme="http://schemas.google.com/g/2005#kind"
              term="http://schemas.google.com/blogger/2008/kind#comment"/>
        <link rel="self" type="application/atom+xml" href="http://example.com/$entry.id"/>
        </entry>
        #end
    #end
</feed>

Flat hunting

2008-08-12T06:12:00.028+01:00

Having just taken up a new job in Malaysia, I'm over here looking for somewhere to live before the family join me in late September. I've been here a week now, and am still getting handle on what flats, houses and apartments are available and where all the facilities are that we will need.

View Larger Map

Unicode and fonts

2007-10-30T12:27:00.004Z

Kenichi Handa has been hard at work on a Unicode based Emacs for some years now. For Windows users, there is nothing radical in the default build, a few more languages are supported, and a wider range of Unicode characters, but the Windows specific code has only been updated enough to keep working. In future, optimisations and simplifications can be made due to the internal encodings of Emacs and Windows being both based on Unicode. Messing around with code pages to get fonts displaying will be a thing of the past, and can be already thanks to the new font backend.

While work progressed in parallel on Emacs 22 and the Unicode codebase, there were several other developments happening outside the core Emacs development team. Multiple terminal support (multi-tty) has already been merged with the CVS trunk, though it doesn't mean much to Windows users. Limitations in the way Windows handles console output mean that it is never likely to provide much in the way of new features on Windows, though it may be possible to rid ourselves of the runemacs.exe hack without sacrificing console support using the multi-tty feature.

Another new development was support for X freetype font rendering. On the face of it, this doesn't seem to mean much to Windows users either, but after being merged with the Unicode branch, it has been refactored into a new font backend design, with better support for unicode fonts. No longer are fonts defined by their character-set, Emacs can make use of font meta-data to determine which Unicode subranges each font supports. Currently the font backend is not enabled by default, but has to be enabled with a configure option. A backend has been implemented for Windows native fonts, and is ready for testing.

Checking out the Unicode branch:

cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sv.gnu.org:/sources/emacs co -r emacs-unicode-2 emacs

Building Emacs with font backend support:

cd emacs\nt configure --enable-font-backend make bootstrap

Future work

The new font backend is noticeably slower on Windows. A lot of this is probably down to the fact that the old font code cached the font metrics for ASCII characters of fixed width fonts, whereas the new font backend does no such caching yet. We can probably do a better job of caching by calculating which ranges of characters the fixed width applies to, rather than just ASCII. We might even allow multiple such range/width combinations to be associated with a font, to speed up CJK text display (where characters in the font are one of two widths).

There is no support for BDF fonts in the new font backend. BDF fonts will be given their own font backend, hopefully mostly reusable on other platforms.

A Uniscribe font backend may be introduced to enable some of the more advanced layout features in Windows XP and later. The new font backend design makes it easier to add new support like this without complex dynamic loading logic to support older versions of Windows.

Izakaya ryori (pub food) - 居酒屋料理

2007-03-29T05:06:00.003+01:00

An izakaya is a typical drinking establishment in Japan, though they have always had more emphasis on food than the typical English or New Zealand pub. Like English pubs, and New Zealand cafes, some izakaya have recently started to modernize their menus, combining different styles and bringing foreign influence to traditional Japanese favorites to create new "modern Japanese" dishes. This is especially noticeable in competitive areas like Ginza, where izakaya have to differentiate themselves from the hundreds of other eating and drinking establishments in the area to attract customers.

Unlike Western pubs, much of the izakaya is private areas where you reserve a table, so more like what we would see as a restaurant, although many after-work groups use it as we would a pub. Some traditional izakaya have seats at the bar, where you interact with and are served by the owner, but more upmarket ones are strictly table service, with waiters and waitresses rushing about in response to bells at each table, making you imagine you are on an aeroplane.

Despite being in notoriously expensive Ginza at the heart of downtown Tokyo, a variety of dishes and several hours drinking at Tomoru came to approximately ¥6000 per head. As well as the crayfish salad, branded omelette and meaty morsels pictured, we also had several other mouth watering dishes washed down with wine and beer.

Okonomiyaki (savoury pancake) - お好み焼き

2007-03-29T03:17:00.003+01:00

Okonomiyaki is native to the Osaka and Hiroshima areas of Japan. It is a pancake made with potato flour, and containing cabbage, and assorted other vegetables and meats, and in the Osaka variation, noodles. Once cooked, the pancake is topped with brown sauce, mayonnaise and bonito flakes or tiny flakes of nori (seaweed), which appear to dance as the heat rises around them. If you are a connoisseur of Korean pa-jeon and Vietnamese banh xeo, then okonomiyaki is a must try dish, along with takoyaki, small dough balls containing octopus that are often sold from carts on the street.

This Okonomiyaki Special was ¥900 from a small store near Hiroshima station. We had another in a quick lunch stop at Shin-Osaka for ¥650.

You can easily make okonomiyaki at home following this recipe or many like it. Often at restaurants, you will be given a bowl of raw mix, and cook it youself on a hotplate at the table. At other restaurants, you might sit at a counter in front of the chef as they cook in front of you, as common in many types of Japanese restaurants, and probably the closest you'll come to "teppanyaki" style cooking in Japan.

Adding some zest to Picasa's HTML export.

2007-03-18T23:55:00.004Z

Google's Picasa is great for managing your photos. It even has an Export as HTML Page option, which lets you generate a webpage for your photos. But all of the page styles it generates are very simple - if all your photos aren't the same size and orientation, the result is messy.

There are some good web page designs around for photos. Lightbox 2.0 is one, but you have to code all the HTML pages by hand, which is tedious and error-prone.

Picasa lets you generate ugly web pages easily, and Lightbox 2.0 lets you generate good looking web pages with a lot of effort. Wouldn't it be great if there was a way to generate good looking web pages as easily as you can with Picasa?

When exporting from Picasa, you have the option to export the page as XML Code. This isn't very useful by itself, but with an appropriate stylesheet, you can easily transform it to anything you want. I wrote a stylesheet for converting to a Lightbox 2.0 style blog entry.

picasa-to-lightbox.xsl

Because I use this for blog entries, not complete webpages, there are some stylesheet definitions missing from the generated html, along with the rest of the html head section. See the Lightbox 2.0 webpage for details on what is needed.

To convert Picasa's generated index.xml using Xalan, I use the following command-line:

java -cp xalan2.jar org.apache.xalan.xslt.Process -IN index.xml -XSL picasa-to-lightblox.xsl -OUT blogpost.html

Leave a comment if you have any more Picasa tips.

Hiyashi udon　(Cold noodles) -　冷やしうどん

2007-03-17T15:01:00.003Z

At every tourist attraction, people will get hungry, so there is always a restaurant somewhere, usually something quick and cheap, so families can get on with sightseeing and save their money for the gifts they need to take back to friends, family and workmates back home. Here at Yoshimi Hyakettsu (Yoshimi "100 caves"), there was a small family run restaurant which had run out of everything on this chilly spring day except hiyashi udon - cold udon noodles. Udon are a thick white noodle made from wheat flour. They are normally served in a hot soup, but in summer they can also be eaten cold with a soy based dipping sauce on the side. Here you see the noodles, sauce and wasabi, chilli and ginger to be optionally added to the sauce.

Udon are not the only noodles eaten cold. Zaru soba (buckwheat noodles on a bamboo mat) is another popular dish, as is hiyashi chuka (cold ramen noodles). Harusame (rice or bean vermicelli) is another noodle that is commonly eaten cold in Japan and elsewhere.

Asari (Clams) - あさり

2007-03-16T23:05:00.003Z

Fresh seafood is very big in Japan, and it doesn't get fresher than when you collect it yourself. These live clams were collected in Ise Bay by the uncle of the family I stayed with as an exchange student in 1989. We used them in miso soup and spaghetti vongole, it sure beats the canned or frozen variety you would get in most Italian restaurants here in the UK.

While I was staying with the family, and whenever I have visited since, uncle Jouji would often bring some fresh food over. He lives just out of town, and is retired so has plenty of time for gardening, fishing and gathering shellfish.

Asking to be sued

2007-03-15T13:43:00.003Z

Spotted today on the front page of Google News UK. The article itself was worded slightly differently.

Someone's asking to be sued, but is it Google, or ABC News?

Yuba ryori (Yuba cuisine) - 湯葉料理

2007-02-25T17:56:00.003Z

Japan is home to many restaurants specializing in one specific type of food. Shozankaku Matsuyama, on the top floor of the Isetan shopping centre above Kyoto Station, specialises in Yuba - a byproduct of the tofu manufacturing process sometimes called tofu skin. Every dish they serve contains yuba, and their menu is extensive. I opted for the Takenoko Zukushi (Bamboo shoot set menu) for ¥5000, while Chizu went for the plain Yuba Zukushi for ¥4500. Each set menu consisted of around 7 courses and a drink. We both started with yuba sashimi, slightly different variations but both with fresh cold yuba alongside the more conventional raw fish.

Next up was another cold dish, of yuba in soymilk. After that the dishes diverged, and the bamboo shoot theme became apparent in my dishes, such as the steamed rice topped with peas served with pickled bamboo shoot, yuba and other pickles.

The dishes continued coming out, with yuba tempura, yuba rice, yuba noodles and others not pictured here (the photos were out of focus, or we were too busy enjoying the food and forgot to capture them), including yuba desserts.

Jin chess client

2006-09-15T12:37:00.003+01:00

I have just learned of a Linux.com article about the alleged GPL violation by IChessU using the Jin chess client with their proprietary video chat extension. I was somewhat surprised to read that Alexander Rabinovitch was quoting this blog as supporting his position. I cannot imagine what post he is referring to, and noone has contacted me about this. For the record, I do not support his position. From what I understand of the case, Rabinovich initially contacted the author of Jin about licensing his code for a proprietary chess client he was intending to distribute. The Jin author made an offer of licensing the Jin source for a one off fee of US$4000, which would have allowed Rabinovich to distribute unlimited copies without needing to comply fully with the GPL. Rabonivich turned down this offer and decided to try to sneakily get around the GPL, by linking to the Jin code via a socket layer which he wrote [update: it seems he may not have even used sockets in the end, and in fact linked more directly].

It is a common misconception that the GPL only applies to statically linked modules within a program. It is an even more common misconception that the GPL cannot apply if there is a socket link between two modules. This has never been tested in court as far as I am aware, and it all boils down to what constitutes a derived work under copyright law.

My opinion is that if you add a network protocol to a GPL program specifically to get your proprietary module working with it, then you are creating a derived work, and the GPL applies to the work as a whole.

Hi Mum

2006-05-19T11:55:00.003+01:00

Google Maps has just extended their mapping to Australia and New Zealand. The NZ maps even show the boundaries between sections! I wish I had this before I went to New Zealand in December / January. If only I could figure out how the searching works, at the moment it only seems useful for locating places that you already know where they are.

15 minutes of fame

2006-05-06T17:08:00.002+01:00

My brother Adrian has just had his 15 minutes of fame, after a $12.2M cock up by his bank which they couldn't seem to put right for three days. I'm still fighting my own bank over a £20 penalty they charged me a few months ago because I paid my credit card off before they sent the bill out so I wouldn't get stung with late charges while I was away. Thats the £20 penalty for late payment that OFT ruled as excessive last July and gave the banks three months to change, then finally followed up on last month after the EU competition commision came to the same conclusion.

Road to nowhere

2006-04-14T01:02:00.004+01:00

Check out this Satellite image of the M25 near Woking, from Google Maps. No wonder google's directions always seem to be about a block out.

Update: It looks like they've moved the problem
a few hundred meters north now.

Sanitized search

2006-01-27T22:58:00.002Z

Image 1 of 42 from a Google image search for Tiananmen Square on google.cn.

Image 1 of about 14000 results for the same search on google.com.

[Courtesy of a Slashdot post]

It appears from this and a few other quick searches I tried, that Google's capitulating to China and "filtering" their results amounts to only returning results for pages that are located inside the Great Firewall.

Time to think

2005-10-23T14:34:00.002+01:00

With Chizuko and Arata in Japan for the last 2 weeks, I've had a lot of time to catch up on where the industry is and do some thinking about projects of my own that might have some potential. I've been up late reading specs, and trying out new soft ware. Flock has introduced me to social bookmarking, something that sounded like a fad to me before, but with it built into the browser, I am finding it useful, if only to keep my bookmarks in sync between the different PC's I use.

The other main features of Flock are a built-in RSS aggregator, but it is not as good as BlogBridge which I've also discovered recently, and a built in blogging client, which looks suspciously like Qumana, but does not work with Roller, so is useless to me. Qumana on the other hand does work with Roller, but not with non-Latin languages, so for now I'm sticking with the web based "editor" built into Roller.

Part of the thinking about projects I could start has been thinking of names. The main criteria is whether a domain name is available. I thought briefly about placing dot's strangely, a la del.icio.us, but then I thought of the first site I'd heard of that did that - goatse.cx (not linked for a reason!), which put me off that idea. If I hadn't been put off already, I would have been today, after reading about the upcoming social bookmarking site ma.gnolia.com. Too much bandwagon jumping for me, and with the .com on the end they seem a bit confused about whether they want to be a hip Web 2.0 co.mpa.ny or a so last millenium dotcom. I'm sure the VCs are banging down the doors.

Looking at the latest buzz around Web 2.0, my impression is that tagging is to the Semantic Web what the web (or HTML) is to Xanadu. Its the inferior technology that comes along much later and steals your thunder. Its a simpler idea, and is here now and gaining mindshare quickly.

Sashimi - 刺身

2005-10-21T00:58:00.002+01:00

Often what the uninitiated think of when they imagine sushi, sashimi is raw fish, dipped in soy sauce and wasabi, and accompanied by ginger to clear the taste buds between bites. The fish has to be fresh, which is the main reason why it seldom tastes as good outside Japan.

Sashimi chef's will go to the fish market early in the morning to choose their fish for the day, in some towns, they may buy it straight off the boat as soon as it comes in. Being a good sashimi chef means expert knifework, as well as being at the fish market early and being able to spot the best fish.

This fish was prepared in my former host family's kitchen by my host brother, Ichiyo, who is now a chef in nearby Matsusaka, after working in Hawaii for a number of years. It was served on a bed of shredded daikon and shiso leaves, filled with slices of tuna in addition to its own meat.

Boys' Toys

2005-10-13T00:30:00.002+01:00

With Chizuko and Arata away, I have spent the last week stocking up on "toys" of my own. A new hard drive for the web server, which has dropped the background noise in the spare bedroom by several decibels, as well as giving us plenty of space to backup Arata's photos and videos to. A bluetooth headset for my phone (which I got as an upgrade last month), and a spare charger for it. The last two items have highlighted a trend. USB is becoming the new standard for power cables.

I deliberately ordered a travel power supply for the phone, as I'm going to Japan at the end of the month to chaffeur my family home, and to New Zealand for Christmas. I need a spare charger, as I'm forever going to work with an almost flat battery and not realising until I get there. The contents of the package were a USB to Ericsson cable (to charge from a PC), a car cigarette lighter to USB adapter, and a mains to USB adapter with clip on US, Euro and UK plugs. No NZ plug, but I'm sure I can find a PC or car when I'm there.

The bluetooth headset, I also intend to try out with my PC for Skype. Chizu complained that she couldn't hear properly last time I called, and forced me back to a real telephone, so hopefully the headset will do better than the built in microphone of my laptop. It also came with a USB charger, plus a mains and car charger, but they weren't smart enough to leave the cables off those and put a USB socket there instead. I guess I'll just use the USB cable and the adapters I got with my phone.

As for the phone itself, its a Sony Ericsson V800. I got a 3G phone, not so I can waste vast amounts of money downloading video and music from Vodafone, but so I can roam in Japan. The guy that sold it to me was a bit disappointed I think when I declined an "upgrade" to one of their 3G price plans for the bargain price of £40/month. "But it comes with free video, you'll have to pay lots more if you stay with your current plan", "Not if I don't download video". "But you get 200 minutes of calls and 300 free text messages a month", "I don't even use the 25 free minutes and 50 free text messages I get now". I guess his eyes lit up when I asked for a 3G phone straight away, but he ended up having to do the sales pitch in vain in the end.

As an MP3 player, its rubbish. You can't use any headphones other than the handsfree kit that came with it because of the stupid non-standard plug. After 3 uses, there's already a broken wire in there somewhere and the sound comes and goes from my left ear as I walk. The sound is flat and lifeless, and having listened to the same tracks on a Gizmondo with decent headphones, I know its not just badly encoded MP3s.

As a camera, its not bad. Not good either, but better than I expected. In low light the pictures get very noisy, and despite having the brightest LED spotlight of any phone I've seen, they're not bright enough to eliminate the noise. In decent light though, the pictures are OK. Probably comparable to the cardboard throwaway cameras you buy when you're normal camera breaks or gets left behind, but you just have to take some pictures.

My internet usage has gone up slightly, but its still well within the free allowance that I get pooled with the text messages. I've set up a SyncML server, so I can take a backup of my phonebook whereever I am (I could have used Vodafone's server for this like everyone else, but setting up my own was more fun, and I'm always suspicious about giving out my entire contact list to some third party to use for marketing purposes). It is slightly better browsing the web than my old GPRS phone, as long as there's a 3G signal, but its still pretty painful, especially if you have to type something. I set up the email to check my work account, but I mostly get spam, so I don't think I'll get much use out of that.

I might have to revisit the Java midlet I wrote a while ago, based on an idea that Chizu had for an alarm clock. At the time I found that my phone didn't support enough of the Midlet 2.0 spec for it to work, but hopefully, 2 years on, J2ME implementations have improved.

You might have noticed the addition of a "Mobile" category at the top of the page. I almost got the phone set up for mobile photo-blogging. Almost. Actually its the server that's still a problem.

Kishimen - きしめん

2005-09-08T02:40:00.002+01:00

There are many types of noodle in Japan. Fat, thin, white, yellow, brown, served in hot soup, with cold sauce or fried. Kishimen is a flat semi-transparent white noodle from Aichi, in this case served in a hot soup with mochi (rice cakes), fish balls and nori (seaweed). The restaurant was conveyer-belt style, only instead of a conveyer belt, there was a narrow moat with a continuous stream of bowls floating around with customers' orders on them.

Yakiniku (Barbeque) - 焼肉

2005-08-29T03:21:00.002+01:00

Yakiniku literally means grilled meat. The best Yakiniku is found in Seoul, but if you're stuck this side of the Korea Strait, you can still get your red meat fix from an "viking" yakiniku restaurant like this one in Akihabara. Raw meat and vegetables are laid out smörgåsbord style and you take what you want back to your table to cook on the gas barbeque provided (maybe charcoal if you're lucky enough to find a genuine Korean style barbeque restaurant). Eat your fill of ロース (sirloin), カルビ (beef ribs), タン (ox tounge) レバー (liver) and other bovine organs wrapped in lettuce, with pumpkin, capsicum, side salads, rice, and something approximating kimchi within two hours for around ￥1000 each at lunchtime, and wash it down with a ￥800 not-quite-a-pint of beer while pondering where the restaurant makes its money. In the evenings and weekends, when the customers don't have to get back to work and can spend the full two hours stuffing themselves, expect to pay a lot more.

"All you can eat" is not the only option for yakiniku. Japanese beef restaurants range up to the ridiculously expensive, often serving Kobe or Matsusaka beef. Teppanyaki is a popular choice of Japanese cuisine outside of Japan largely due to the theatrics of the chefs, though they are hard to find within Japan, and when you do find one, you'll probably be cooking for yourself on an electric frypan (as opposed to a gas or charcoal grill of Korean style yakiniku) with no show off chefs in sight.

Ekiben - 駅弁

2005-08-20T03:25:00.002+01:00

Eki 駅　- railway station

Bento　弁当 - Lunchbox

Ekiben is the name given to prepared lunchboxes, sold from stalls in railway station concourses and platforms. You can buy identical looking bento boxes from supermarkets and convenience stores too, even in restaurants, though there they are likely to be nice lacquer trays instead of cheap throwaway plastic. But only bento boxes bought from railway stations are ekiben.

The contents of bento boxes varies but typically there is rice, sometimes noodles instead, fish or meat, breadcrumbed with a worcester-like sauce or plain with soy sauce, vegetables (beans, bamboo shoot, tofu), cakes of unidentified processed seafood, and pickles.

This Ekiben was bought from a stall in Hiroshima Station for ¥840.

Sushi - 寿司

2005-08-11T03:17:00.002+01:00

Sushi is probably the most well known Japanese dish, though most people are more familiar with Nigiri (topped, often but not neccesarily with raw fish) and Maki (roll) forms. Home Cooked sushi though often takes the form of Temaki (hand-rolled - usually cone shaped) or Chirashi (mixed up in a big bowl) Sushi. Temaki sushi is sometimes on the menu of sushi restaurants outside Japan, but the rolls are premade, you don't roll them with your own hand, which is part of the fun of eating sushi at home. This spread shows the variety of fillings you can add to your cone of nori and sushi rice. Except the strawberries. We'd just been strawberry picking, those were for dessert.

Temaki Sushi Recipe

Ramen - ラーメン

2005-08-02T19:38:00.002+01:00

Ramen is a popular noodle dish in Japan. The soups vary greatly, and are the chefs' closely guarded secrets. This particular ramen shop in Omiya had been opened as part of a TV competition to find the region's best ramen chef.

First prize in the competition was the restaurant, and a points board outside keeps track of who is selling the most ramen. Each chef was responsible for one flavour of soup. As there were four of us, we tried one of each. Each bowl of ramen cost ¥630, or ¥730 with egg added.

ラーメン屋サーチ

醤油ラーメン - Shoyu Ramen

Originating in Yokohama's Chinatown as "Tang Mein", Shoyu (Soya Sauce) Ramen became popular in Tokyo when the first dedicated ramen restaurant was opened in Asakusa in 1911. It caught on quickly, and within a few years ramen chefs around the country were experimenting with their own variations, swapping the pork soup stock for chicken or fish. The classic ramen remains pork stock based, with a slice or two of Chasiu (Chinese Roast Pork) floating on top.

Shoyu Ramen Recipe

味噌ラーメン - Miso Ramen

Sapporo, 1954. Ramen Chef Morita Omiya sought to create a unique taste, different than the shoyu ramen everyone else was serving, but familiar and appealing to Japanese tastebuds. Thus was born Miso (soyabean paste) Ramen, originally associated with Sapporo, now popular worldwide.

塩ラーメン - Shio Ramen

Originating in Hakodate, Shio (salt) Ramen is the simplest and lightest of the popular variations. It's recent popularity is associated with its repuation as a healthy alternative to the other flavours, especially if the Chasiu is left out.

とんこつラーメン - Tonkotsu Ramen

Tonkotsu (pork bone) Ramen is said to have been invented by accident in 1937, when a chef in Kurume city, Fukuoka left the soup simmering too long, and the pork bones disintegrated becoming part of the soup. Luckily he tasted it before tipping it out, and a new flavour of Ramen was born. Other areas of Kyushu adapted the Tonkotsu soup in their own way, nearby Hakata (across the river from downtown Fukuoka city) becoming famous for its unique blend of thin Taiwanese noodles and Tonkotsu soup.

Although the shop in Omiya served Tonkotsu Ramen, our JR Railpass also took us as far as Hakata station one lunchtime to try the real thing at this shop recommended by a friend from Fukuoka. The ramen here cost just ǂ for plain tonkotsu ramen, or Ͱ with Chasiu (roast pork).

Tonkotsu Ramen Recipe

New Category

2005-08-02T16:59:00.002+01:00

A long time ago, I mentioned that I was making a webpage about Japanese food, after our trip to Japan last year. This project kind of stalled, and it was only recently that I came across a very similar page to what I wanted to make. Encouraged by Mizuka, the creator of that page, I have decided to post my food page as a category in my blog. Hopefully this will make it easier to finish the page step by step.

As promised

2005-07-13T02:12:00.002+01:00

Here it is, my entry in the joke car competition. I'm not sure what these things are called, but they were quite popular in Senigallia five years ago. This family had two of them, both in Italian racing red, of course. Nice place Senigallia, I went at the end of May, before the beaches filled up with tourists. Urbino was another highlight of that trip.

[due to excessive spam, comments have been disabled on this post]

New VeriSign Code Signing Certificate and old signtool.exe

2005-07-07T10:42:00.002+01:00

Our code signing certificates at work expired recently, and we got new ones from VeriSign. The IE cab file signing works fine, but jar file signing was failing. We sign our jar files with the old signtool.exe from Netscape, because the resulting jar works on the old version of Java shipped with Netscape 4.x, as well as the newer plugins.

I quickly diagnosed the problem to be an updated VeriSign CA certificate that the old signing tools did not recognize. Our new certificate was signed by VeriSign Class 3 Code Signing 2004 CA, which from the name, you'd guess has been in use for only the last 6 - 18 months.

Having diagnosed the problem, the solution seemed simple. Install the new CA certificate into signtool's certificate registry, and we're done. So I set about trying to find the CA certificate. This proved far more difficult than it should be, and is the reason why I decided to document this experience so others could benefit.

Clicking around VeriSign's website turned up nothing useful. Any parts of the site that looked like they might contain relevant information quickly took me to a form to enter all my details so a representative could contact me. I don't want to be annoyed by phone calls and emails from your sales droids, VeriSign, I already have a certificate, I just want it to work!

Next step was a google search. One article I found pointed me to the root certificate download on VeriSign's site, which sounded promising, but alas, the Root certificate zip file did not contain the Code Signing 2004 CA.

Eventually, I gave up searching, and started to look more closely at what I had received from VeriSign. I had a Microsoft Code Signing certificate that worked, and a Netscape Object signing certificate that didn't. I opened up IE, and had a look at the certificate that had been installed (Tools menu/Internet Options, Content, Certificates). On the Details panel, I found what I had been looking for. One of the details is labeled Authority Information Access. Under there, was a URL for downloading the CA certificate. After downloading that in Netscape, my code signing is now working again.

Cars, damn cars, and statistics

2005-05-17T01:49:00.002+01:00

About six months ago, I installed some log analysis software on the server, to get some idea of how people find this site. After the initial thrill of looking at it every day wore off (about a week), I quickly forgot about it. At that time, Chizuko's blog about her pregnancy was by far the most popular part of the site, with all her friends visiting for their daily dose, and with the frequency I update my own blog, I didn't expect that to change. Except it has. Our top ten referers (sites that point people to this one) are all Google. Mostly the different country versions of Google images, a couple of them are country variants of the general web search.
The top page they refer people to is my image of a sinking boat in Croatia. Chizu's blog is second, then her picture of a Yugo which seems to be a popular joke in car related forums. I'll have to get my scanner out for some of the photos of 3 wheel 2-stroke trucks I took in Italy once. I'll show them joke cars!

Arata's own website

2005-03-06T21:29:00.002Z

Arata now has his own website for his photo albums and videos, so instead
of disappearing down the list of posts on Chizuko's weblog, or crawling down the
page on mine, there will be a permanent home for them. So if you are a
proud grandparent, or just interested, bookmark
arata.jasonrumney.net now.

To start with, there are links to the first album of photos that Chizuko posted soon after his birth,
the video from my previous post, and a new album of my pick of the
best photos so far. Let me know in the comments or an email if there's anything else you'd like to see there.

Video

2005-02-09T23:38:00.002Z

These last six weeks have been busy for both Chizuko and me, as we get used to having Arata around to look after. With what little time I have left over, I've been piecing together some of the snippets of video we have of Arata into something that at least close family will find interesting, if noone else. If you click on the image to the left, you'll download a draft of what I've managed so far. Its a bit low quality (especially noticable when there's carpet in shot), but I wanted to keep it small for those of you still on dial-up. Even so, it weighs in at 6.1Mb, so will probably take 20-30 minutes to download over a modem, or around 3 minutes on broadband (which should be fast enough to watch as you download). If you haven't already found it, take a look at Chiko's site for a more detailed history of Arata's life, and some photos.

Windows XP SP2 Network Problems

2004-09-17T10:07:00.000+01:00

Chizuko's laptop finally picked up XP SP2 off the Windows Update site on Wednesday night. I'd updated mine about a month ago, using the manual download, but after the minor problems I'd had with it (mostly due to it not detecting Kerio Firewall, and installing its own) I decided to leave hers for the Windows Update version.

After the update (again, I had to manually disable Windows Firewall because it did not detect Kerio), her PC was unable to load any web sites. Actually, that's not quite true. It loaded Google, so I knew her wireless card was working, but nothing else. I started trying to search for problems on Google, and using the Google cache to read them, but eventually I wanted to follow further links, so I grabbed my laptop and worked with one on each knee. None of my searches turned up anything relevant so I decided to document my findings here.

Because I could reach Google, I knew that the basic hardware and driver level of the network was working. I also figured out that DNS resolution was working for all sites. Knowing a bit about networking (what is the average user to do in this situation?) I suspected MTU problems. After searching for the method of changing the MTU, I set hers to 1452 (a number I pulled out of a hat, actually it was the lowest of several values I saw being recommended for people having DSL problems). After a reboot, everything was working happily again.

So what is different between my laptop, which worked, and hers that didn't?

Mine: XP Pro, Hers: XP Home

Mine: TI ACX100 based wifi card, Hers: Prism GT based Dlink DWL-G650 wifi card

Other things that might be relevant:

Access point is a Linux box with an Atheros based Dlink PCI card running the madwifi
drivers in master mode.

Access to the internet is via a DSL modem connected to the Linux box, using PPPoA, and
an MTU of 1500 (default).

Laptops are using a private address space (10.0.0.0/8) and the Linux box is NATing them to a static IP.

I don't know which of those is the key to the problem, but I'd say the wireless card is most likely. All I do know is that mine works with the default MTU (1500), as did hers before SP2 was installed. I guess I could try swapping the wireless cards, but I'll have to dig up the driver disks.

A weekend in Italy

2004-07-22T00:31:00.000+01:00

In need of a holiday, Chizuko and I headed off to the South of Italy recently for the weekend. After flying into Brindisi at night, we hired a car and drove to our hotel in Selva di Fasano, a small town in the middle of a forest between Brindisi and Bari. Chizuko accuses me of driving fast, but beleive me, her definition of fast and the Italian definition of fast are two completely different things and I felt like I was holding traffic up on the motorway at times. The car was a fairly new Citroen with about 8000km on the clock, and like most rentals, flashing "-2700km" until the next service. The towtruck driver later told us that Citreons were number one for business as he took us back to the airport on Saturday afternoon to pick up a more reliable Ford Fiesta.

As well as jumping from rental car to rental car, we did get some sightseeing and lying on the beach in. On Saturday morning we'd driven to Alberobello and Ostuni, both of which were supposed to have plenty to see, but having left the guide book at home, we'd managed to miss it all. In Ostuni we spotted a market, and it was after walking around that that we came back to find the car wouldn't start. We never saw anything that made us uncomfortable, I think the seedier side of Southern Italy is concentrated in the downtown areas of Bari and Brindisi, but the first thing that popped into my head was that the car had been sabotaged and someone was about to come up to us offering to "help". After 20 or so attempts at starting the car, 3 of which it coughed into action only to die again 3 seconds later, I phoned the rental car company. By this time it was obvious that it wasn't sabotage, so we unlocked the doors and got out to wait in the cafe at the side of the road.

After changing cars, we headed for the seaside, where we had lunch and found a spot on the beach. After a few hours in the sun and a dip in the Adriatic, we headed back to the hotel and walked to a nearby restaurant for dinner. After accepting the waiter's suggestion of the house antipasti for starters, we ordered pasta and pizza on top of it. When a whole table of starters arrived, enough to feed a family of six, we cancelled the mains and just ate the antipasti.

On Sunday, we went to see some cave's I'd seen on the map. I remembered from the guidebook seeing an interesting looking town where a lot of the houses were built in either natural or artificial caves, it turns out I was thinking of Matera, a bit further away in Basilicata. These caves seemed to be fairly ordinary limestone caves, so since we'd only recently visited the Akiyoshido caves in Japan we decided to give them a miss. We then drove towards Lecce, again going via Alberobello and Ostuni. This time I spotted a sign as we came out of Alberobello pointing to the "Trulli zone". See the photos for an explanation of what a Trulli is. By the time we arrived in Lecce, we were famished so stopped in the first restaurant we saw rather than traipsing around town looking for the perfect pasta (sorry Chiko). While we were in the restaurant, the sky changed from bright blue to dark black, so we changed our plans for the afternoon from going to the beach to driving around the heel of Italy. There was some fantastic coastline, but in hindsight, it was a bit much driving, making me exhausted by the end of it, and leaving Chizuko uncomfortable from so much time sitting (though we did stop frequently for photos and a stretch). By the time we'd finished that, it was time to find some early dinner and head back to the airport. Unfortunately the early dinner proved elusive as McDonalds wasn't exactly what we had in mind, so we ended up eating instant noodles and sandwiches on the plane.

More photos and Chizuko's side of the story here.

Korea

2004-07-14T12:50:00.000+01:00

In early July, I got sent to Seoul for 10 days, to help our partners with some problems they and some of their customers were having. It wasn't all work, I got a weekend of sightseeing and a few nights out as well.

XAML, XUL, plain HTML, what is the future?

2004-05-27T22:04:00.000+01:00

On June 1st, W3C are running a workshop on Web Applications and Compound Documents. Some of the participants seem to think the two are linked, and it is no surprise to see it is being held at Adobe's offices, given their interests in pushing PDF (Compound Documents) Forms (Web Applications) as the platform of the future. Adobe's vision of a future of applications built on Compound Documents seems as absurd to me as Macromedia's vision of a future of applications built on Vector Animations.

Mozilla seems to have forgotten about XUL and, teaming up with Opera, proposes a future set firmly in 1997 where Mozilla and Opera strive for the goal of making DHTML/Javascript applications designed for the benchmark IE6 work properly on their respective browsers. Or not.

Microsoft's two position papers strike me as arrogant. With no substance, they might as well have just said We're Microsoft, give us a place at your workshop. Or else.

Most of the submissions talk about Compound Documents, which don't interest me so much, and a few of them seem to get sucked into making tenuous links between Compound Documents and Web Applications without substantiating them. I guess they just felt as confused as I do about the lumping of the subjects together and felt the need to appear knowledgable.

Origo seem to get it with respect to part of what we are trying to do with Altio. Reduced need for procedural code. Most proposals for the RIA (rich internet application) platform of the future retain ECMAscript (Javascript, ActionScript, whatever else you want to brand it) as the main way of providing richness. UI designers don't make good procedural programmers, and procedural programmers don't make good UI designers. We need to separate these tasks, and that means getting rid of the need for scripting altogether for most common UI use-cases. Then again, Origo goes on to talk about how great XForms is, so maybe they don't completely get it. XForms look great when you put it next to HTML, but it isn't rich enough for developing a real interface without writing dreaded procedural code to run the UI.

I had to laugh at the title of Laszlo's submission: The Future of the Web is not the Past of Windows. I thought for a minute they were going to launch into an attack XAML's obvious origins as a thin XML layer over MFC (AKA a thin C++ layer over the Win32 API). But sadly they are just pushing Macromedia's applications as Vector Animation bandwagon. Standard Widgets? We don't want standard widgets, we want graphic designers who make every app look and feel completely alien compared with everything you've used before. Pretty, yes. Practical, no. They have their place in advertising, games, marketing, interfaces that are fairly straightforward and difficult to get lost in, but for serious business apps, sorry but we need standards.

You know its time to turn off the computer when...

2004-05-27T21:13:00.000+01:00

While browsing the net just now, I wanted to go back to another window I was sure I still had open. Not seeing it on the task bar, I picked up my laptop and started looking around on the floor for it.

An early night tonight, I think.

Pictures of our Japan trip

2004-05-15T18:00:00.000+01:00

I have put some of the photos from our trip to Japan up. Some of the photos have a (very) brief note to go with them in case you don't know what its a photo of. More to come (I'm making a page about Japanese food), and one day I'll get around to telling you more about the trip.

Note: There are 3 pages of photos. Click on the numbers top left to see the rest.

Learn Kanji on your phone

2004-05-04T21:00:00.000+01:00

I knew I was a bit out of practice with my Kanji, so when I discovered I could study them from the comfort of my mobile phone (who wants to take a dictionary on the tube or bus) with KanjiQ I thought I'd have a go. So I downloaded Level 3 (thats what Japanese kids learn in their third year of primary school) to see how I did. Terribly! So, my ego put in its place, I'm back to Level 1 and slowly progressing.

More photos from Croatia

2003-09-20T14:40:00.000+01:00

Chizuko also has some photos from Croatia.

Photos from Croatia

2003-09-18T03:19:00.000+01:00

Photos from our week in Croatia. We stayed in a little fishing village called Fazana, near Pula in Istria (near the Italian border). While there, I read Lindsay Good's (Mum's uncle) Mussolini, Bella Maria & Tojo, the story of his experience during the war in Italy, where he ended up a few miles North of where I was in Trieste, then his later supervision of Japanese troops returning home in Chofu (now part of Shimonoseki, but then a town in its own right), close to Yamaguchi New Zealand Village where I spent most of '98.

Sydney in Transit

2003-03-26T00:03:00.000Z

Having not been to Australia since I was 8, I thought I should stop-over in Sydney on my way back to London from Wellington since the plane went that way anyway. I had a great time with cousin David (plus wife Karen and son Ben), and ex-flatmate Jayne.

Wedding in Wellington

2003-03-26T00:02:00.000Z

Over two years since I last went back to New Zealand, this time it's for Eddie and Claire's wedding. As well as the wedding itself, I caught up with brother Adrian for the first time in two years, now conveniently living in Thorndon, and surprised Mum by turning up to dinner unannounced a couple of months after I saw her off from London. Lots of good weather, good cafes and a Lord of the Rings exhibition at Te Papa kept me busy for the week and a half I was there. A few photos were taken, it feels strange being a tourist in your own country.

Christmas in Norway

2003-03-26T00:01:00.000Z

Some more photos from the Christmas Mum and I spent in Norway with the Jünge family. Multiple pages again, use the arrows at the top of the page.

Mum's December 2002 UK Trip

2003-03-26T00:00:00.000Z

These photos have been floating around for a while. Note: multiple pages, use the arrows at the top of the page to go to the next/previous pages or back here (up).

Electric Cocktail Blini's ate my toaster!

2003-02-02T00:00:00.002Z

Interesting factoid: Cocktail Blini's are excellent conductors of electricity.

Periodically on nz.general, a Usenet newsgroup I have periodically frequented over the last 10 years, someone intending to visit the country will ask a question about our electricity supply, and what sort
of adapter they need to bring with them. Inevitably, some helpful soul calling himself "Newsman", or "The BILL" will pipe in with a rant about how superior the UK's 13A fused plugs are, compared with New Zealand's plugs and sockets.

But the reality I have come to know over the last four years is very different. Plugs in the UK are so damn big and heavy, and the holes in the sockets for the pins so big and sloppy, that they have a tendency to pull themselves out of the wall. I discovered this shortly after arriving in this country, and have been constantly annoyed by it ever since, on one occasion losing an entire fridge/freezer full of food to the phenomenum.

I might have been willing to concede that the idea of a fuse in the plug had some merit, until a russian miniature pancake snack proved beyond doubt tonight, that it is all just a placebo.

The scenario: Sunday night, and I'm a little peckish. Staring right at me from the relative safety of the fridge shelf is a packet of delicious looking cocktail blinis, that look like they'd go well with that tub of Smoked Salmon Taramasalata sitting there next to them. So I grab four and put them in the toaster. Like little toddlers they squirm around in a futile tantrum trying to resist the downward motion as I lower the lever on the toaster. One cunning
little bastard manages to squeeze his way between the iron bars, intended to keep the toast central where toasting conditions are at their optimal. Suddenly, there is darkness. The little bugger has successfully shorted the elements in the toaster, and not the fuse inside the plug, nor even the circuit breaker for that loop of sockets, but the main circuit breaker for the entire flat is tripped.

After a fumble around in the dark for a cigarette lighter that doesn't work, the lights are restored, and I can now get on with the job of extracting the cocktail blini from the toaster. Did you know, that a cocktail blini fits perfectly across the gap between the elements inside the toaster, and is capable of getting into that position unassisted, but the only way it will come out is if it is cut in half by specialized rescue equipment which luckily I just happened to have lying around?

Font Dialog for X

2003-01-30T00:01:00.000Z

This is a work in progress that I started some time
ago, but haven't had much time for lately. Richard
Stallman doesn't like the set-font-for-face-at-point
interface, and wants it to work more like a
word-processor where you change the font of some text,
without other text in that face changing, and without
needing to know about faces.

x-font.el

Image Support in Emacs

2003-01-30T00:00:00.000Z

If you've been watching the CVS commits lately, you'll have
noticed that there has been a flurry of activity recently
concerning image support for Windows.

So how do you get this going?

Compiling

Image support will be compiled in if the necessary headers
are in your include path. You can extend the include
path for msvc by setting the INCLUDE environment
variable. For gcc, the INCLUDEPATH environment
variable has the same purpose. An alternative for both
compilers is to specify --with-cflags "-I ..."
when running the configure.bat script.

If you don't want support for an image format for some
reason (eg bugginess), you can force configure.bat to
skip detecting that library. There are
--without-... options for all image formats that
use external libraries.

Dependencies

The PNG library also depends on zlib, at both
compile and run time. TIFF depends on JPEG at run time,
but it is possible to compile an Emacs with TIFF support
without the JPEG headers. There appear to be some
incompatibilities between some binary versions of
libraries. The safest option is to compile the libraries
yourself, then use the headers from those versions
(which may include configuration info) to build Emacs.

Running

Emacs uses DLL versions of the image libraries. You can
compile these yourself, or download them from the
GnuWin32
project (the DLLs are in the ...-bin.zip packages) or
elsewhere.

An alternative to libXpm is elisp XPM support written
by Oliver Scholz, with some modifications by me to
support the splash-screen. Oliver's original version can
be found in the emacs-devel archives on mail.gnu.org,
my modified versions are below (mostly in image-add.el,
but there may be some differences in xpm.el):

state-m.el: A state
machine in elisp.

xpm.el: XPM decoder.

image-add.el: Replacements for some
functions in image.el

Usage: (require 'image-add)