Was walking to the train station with the childe on the way home from town, going by Leinster House. To prompt the dawdling girl into hurrying up I told her the Garda stationed at the gate would catch her if she was bold, which naturally caused her to sprint away at full pelt. As we passed, the young cop called out: "Ah don't make me run, I'm full of chocolate!"
Good to see a Garda with a sense of humour (and a decent knowledge of Simpsons episodes) :D
Saturday, April 10, 2010
Friday, April 09, 2010
Subclipse: "An existing connection was forcibly closed by the remote host"
Subclipse "suddenly" stopped working, so I couldn't commit or synchronise to a svn repository anymore:
Maybe a recent update of TortoiseSVN bolloxed it up, who knows... anyway, I worked around it by going to Team->SVN in Eclipse's preferences dialogue and changing the client in the "SVN Interface" section from JavaHL (JNI) to SVNKit (Pure Java). Works so far, although I had to re-enter the username/password which had been stored before.
RA layer request failed
svn: Commit failed (details follow):
svn: OPTIONS of 'http://big-long-svn-path': Could not read status line: An existing connection was forcibly closed by the remote host.
Maybe a recent update of TortoiseSVN bolloxed it up, who knows... anyway, I worked around it by going to Team->SVN in Eclipse's preferences dialogue and changing the client in the "SVN Interface" section from JavaHL (JNI) to SVNKit (Pure Java). Works so far, although I had to re-enter the username/password which had been stored before.
Wednesday, April 07, 2010
Interregnum
Saw a nicely vandalised sign in the DCU car park today which reminded me (pleasantly) that this is Ireland. Someone had crossed out three letters so it read:
NOSMOKING BEYOND THIS POINT
Chinese character frequencies
After a long time of somewhat naïvely trying to learn Chinese by adding production flashcards for new words (where the front side is a English term with hints to avoid guessing an answer that was correct but not the one on the back side, and the back side is Chinese characters and phonetic pinyin), I realised the task was far too difficult and time-consuming. For each of those cards, I'd write the characters on a graphics tablet and speak them, then flip the card and fail it if I made any mistakes in either the writing or speech. This was needlessly laborious since there was so much redundancy and opportunity to make small mistakes even if most of the answer was correct (writing out 印制电路板 (printed circuit board) many times was extremely tedious and unproductive).
So some reading on Glowing Face Man's blog led me to switch things around a bit, changing my deck so that the only characters I would write (production) were single characters, of which there are still very very many (over 20,000!) but the most common 3,000 account for over 99% of what you'll see in actual modern Chinese. All the other cards changed to recognition, where the front side is the Chinese characters and the back side (what I speak out loud before flipping the card) is phonetic pinyin and a (sometimes rough) English translation. Rather than mess about with Anki's deck format or exporting/modifying/importing, I wrote a dodgy AppleScript program to automate moving through the deck interface and sending keystrokes to cut, paste and rearrange the text... even crappy automation can be better than changing 2,500 cards manually. In fact, it would still be better even if it took the same amount of time, because of the sense of reward that it spurs.
This has helped immensely, reducing the pain and greatly increasing throughput and efficiency. However, learning the characters still takes time - my current plan is to go through the 3,000 most common ones and learn them as production cards before carrying on with sentence recognition cards.
But why 3,000 characters? Why not half or twice that? And which ones?
That's answered here - a computer program can quickly go through a huge corpus of text and produce a sorted listing of characters by frequency. Predictably, the first couple of hundred characters account for a huge fraction of written Chinese: 200 characters will get you 55% understanding (that's "most" Chinese already, heh), 400 will get you 70%, and so on. (Of course, when I say "understanding", I'm ignoring the fact that you need to learn the grammar, idioms and so on, and which of many possible meanings a character will take on in different contexts.)
A quick plot of the numbers provided produces a roughly logarithmic shape, showing diminishing returns (given the roughly constant time required to learn characters):
So it looks like the payoff is small by the time you're hitting around 2,500 characters (98.5%), but it would be nice to say that you only don't know <1% of written Chinese when you hit 3,000 characters (99.2%), and only add more unfamiliar characters to the deck as you encounter them during reading, less and less often.
So some reading on Glowing Face Man's blog led me to switch things around a bit, changing my deck so that the only characters I would write (production) were single characters, of which there are still very very many (over 20,000!) but the most common 3,000 account for over 99% of what you'll see in actual modern Chinese. All the other cards changed to recognition, where the front side is the Chinese characters and the back side (what I speak out loud before flipping the card) is phonetic pinyin and a (sometimes rough) English translation. Rather than mess about with Anki's deck format or exporting/modifying/importing, I wrote a dodgy AppleScript program to automate moving through the deck interface and sending keystrokes to cut, paste and rearrange the text... even crappy automation can be better than changing 2,500 cards manually. In fact, it would still be better even if it took the same amount of time, because of the sense of reward that it spurs.
This has helped immensely, reducing the pain and greatly increasing throughput and efficiency. However, learning the characters still takes time - my current plan is to go through the 3,000 most common ones and learn them as production cards before carrying on with sentence recognition cards.
But why 3,000 characters? Why not half or twice that? And which ones?
That's answered here - a computer program can quickly go through a huge corpus of text and produce a sorted listing of characters by frequency. Predictably, the first couple of hundred characters account for a huge fraction of written Chinese: 200 characters will get you 55% understanding (that's "most" Chinese already, heh), 400 will get you 70%, and so on. (Of course, when I say "understanding", I'm ignoring the fact that you need to learn the grammar, idioms and so on, and which of many possible meanings a character will take on in different contexts.)
A quick plot of the numbers provided produces a roughly logarithmic shape, showing diminishing returns (given the roughly constant time required to learn characters):
So it looks like the payoff is small by the time you're hitting around 2,500 characters (98.5%), but it would be nice to say that you only don't know <1% of written Chinese when you hit 3,000 characters (99.2%), and only add more unfamiliar characters to the deck as you encounter them during reading, less and less often.
Saturday, April 03, 2010
Tip of the Tongue learning is bad!
This article came as a surprise - my default assumption was that "working through" this tip of the tongue state until I came upon the answer. The research demonstrates that the time you spend agonising and searching for the answer causes the same thing to happen next time - you're "practicing" the stuck condition.
So the best thing to do is to have a short timeout (10 seconds was better for future remembering than 30 seconds, in the study) whereupon you give up and look up the answer, or make a note to check later or something. Anything but keep struggling until you remember the answer the hard way, since it only facilitates the same wrong mental paths in future.
Two more suggestions...
1. When you struggle with a tip of the tongue thought, whichever way you manage to resolve it, make an entry for it in an SRS program like Mnemosyne or Anki.
For example, the researcher who carried out the study said that she often struggled to remember the word "obsidian". So when you notice that you tend to struggle with this word, you add a flashcard to your SRS with "glassy lava rock" on the front, and "obsidian" on the back. Then when reviewing the cards, if you can't remember the answer after 5-10 seconds, you give it a fail mark. If you remembered it quickly, give it a passing mark. The SRS program will take care of the rest, managing the transition of the properly-learned knowledge into your long-term memory.
2. When you see a friend (or a child!) struggle for a word and you can guess what word it is, put them out of their misery ASAP, and if they say "ahh, I would have got it, why did you tell me?" then explain why!
So the best thing to do is to have a short timeout (10 seconds was better for future remembering than 30 seconds, in the study) whereupon you give up and look up the answer, or make a note to check later or something. Anything but keep struggling until you remember the answer the hard way, since it only facilitates the same wrong mental paths in future.
Two more suggestions...
1. When you struggle with a tip of the tongue thought, whichever way you manage to resolve it, make an entry for it in an SRS program like Mnemosyne or Anki.
For example, the researcher who carried out the study said that she often struggled to remember the word "obsidian". So when you notice that you tend to struggle with this word, you add a flashcard to your SRS with "glassy lava rock" on the front, and "obsidian" on the back. Then when reviewing the cards, if you can't remember the answer after 5-10 seconds, you give it a fail mark. If you remembered it quickly, give it a passing mark. The SRS program will take care of the rest, managing the transition of the properly-learned knowledge into your long-term memory.
2. When you see a friend (or a child!) struggle for a word and you can guess what word it is, put them out of their misery ASAP, and if they say "ahh, I would have got it, why did you tell me?" then explain why!
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
Blinkenwords
Uploaded a small utility called Blinkenwords on RubyForge. It's a simplistic RSVP (rapid serial visual presentation) program which takes input from the clipboard (shortcut: up arrow key) and displays it (shortcut: down arrow key) in vertical chunks. You can change the number of words in each block (from 1-10 at a time) and change the speed in words per minute (shortcuts: -5 wpm => [, +5 wpm => ]).
There's lots of similar programs out there, some implemented as Javascript programs - I only wrote this because none of the ones I tried rendered text as I wanted to see it (i.e. reading in vertical columns, 3 words per column, but not scrolling a 3-line textbox one line at a time). It has a couple of very basic heuristics which insert a slight pause when a group of long words or end of sentence/clause is detected. Also, I took the opportunity to add easy keyboard shortcuts to streamline things (i.e. copy some text, switch to Blinkenwords, press up key (paste), press down key (play text), left/right keys (skip backwards or forwards)).
Whether reading this way helps or hinders speed and comprehension is questionable (see this blog post I wrote a while back on the topic of speed reading), so this is pretty experimental and YMMV (if you can even get it working - had some troubles with source file encodings and a couple of other things). Personally, I find it useful when there's lots of drudgery-reading to be done (e.g. catching up on forums/lengthy emails/news articles), but have problems with difficult, dense texts.
Update: You can download a Windows build of Blinkenwords is here. I used a very impressive program called OCRA to automatically bundle the Ruby interpreter and required libraries into a single 4mb(not enormous) packed executable.
There's lots of similar programs out there, some implemented as Javascript programs - I only wrote this because none of the ones I tried rendered text as I wanted to see it (i.e. reading in vertical columns, 3 words per column, but not scrolling a 3-line textbox one line at a time). It has a couple of very basic heuristics which insert a slight pause when a group of long words or end of sentence/clause is detected. Also, I took the opportunity to add easy keyboard shortcuts to streamline things (i.e. copy some text, switch to Blinkenwords, press up key (paste), press down key (play text), left/right keys (skip backwards or forwards)).
Whether reading this way helps or hinders speed and comprehension is questionable (see this blog post I wrote a while back on the topic of speed reading), so this is pretty experimental and YMMV (if you can even get it working - had some troubles with source file encodings and a couple of other things). Personally, I find it useful when there's lots of drudgery-reading to be done (e.g. catching up on forums/lengthy emails/news articles), but have problems with difficult, dense texts.
Update: You can download a Windows build of Blinkenwords is here. I used a very impressive program called OCRA to automatically bundle the Ruby interpreter and required libraries into a single 4mb(not enormous) packed executable.
Plink beta 0.60 broken
Spent about 20 minutes wondering why Plink (part of the free PuTTY SSH suite) was acting extremely oddly on my machine - not displaying help when run with no arguments, and completely ignoring PuTTY saved session configurations, and generally not working at all.
On the off-chance, I downloaded the snapshot release of Plink (from the same page) and it worked straight away. Argh! A completely useless buggy version has been the official release since 2007?!
On the off-chance, I downloaded the snapshot release of Plink (from the same page) and it worked straight away. Argh! A completely useless buggy version has been the official release since 2007?!
Sunday, March 28, 2010
Polaroid TLU-02241W blank screen oddness
Picked up a Polaroid TLU-02241W LCD flatscreen TV cheapish on eBay a year or so ago, intending to set it up for use with my Atari STe, which didn't happen until today (and is still pretty crappy with the horrendously low quality RF cable - will need to pick up a special 13-or-something pin DIN to SCART cable).
When I received the TV I did a quick test and it seemed fine, but turning it on this time only displayed the Polaroid logo on boot and then the display seemed to power itself off, even though the blue LED showed that it was still "on". Also, it seemed to pick up some analogue broadcast via the RF cable and produced a good sound output.
A quick Google indicated that this model (and many other Polaroid TVs) has serious problems, particularly relating to bad quality electrolytic capacitors in the power/control boards. While watching a series of videos on Youtube showing how to identify and replace the dodgy caps, I went back in and booted the TV again, this time repeatedly hitting the menu button on the remote. Surprisingly, it went from the logo to a blue screen with a working OSD.Problem solved, even after turning the TV off and on without the same button mashing.
Sounds like it will eventually fail, with all the bad reviews, but for now it seems ok. If you're seeing the same symptoms, see if this works.
Update: Problem not solved - came back again the next day and no amount of button mashing will help it. Also, tilting the screen backwards or forwards causes the power LED to flicker and go dim, which is disturbing. Looks like it's a painful capacitor replacement job which is somewhat likely to fail anyway if it turns out to be another problem.
Poor show, Polaroid!
When I received the TV I did a quick test and it seemed fine, but turning it on this time only displayed the Polaroid logo on boot and then the display seemed to power itself off, even though the blue LED showed that it was still "on". Also, it seemed to pick up some analogue broadcast via the RF cable and produced a good sound output.
A quick Google indicated that this model (and many other Polaroid TVs) has serious problems, particularly relating to bad quality electrolytic capacitors in the power/control boards. While watching a series of videos on Youtube showing how to identify and replace the dodgy caps, I went back in and booted the TV again, this time repeatedly hitting the menu button on the remote. Surprisingly, it went from the logo to a blue screen with a working OSD.
Sounds like it will eventually fail, with all the bad reviews, but for now it seems ok. If you're seeing the same symptoms, see if this works.
Update: Problem not solved - came back again the next day and no amount of button mashing will help it. Also, tilting the screen backwards or forwards causes the power LED to flicker and go dim, which is disturbing. Looks like it's a painful capacitor replacement job which is somewhat likely to fail anyway if it turns out to be another problem.
Poor show, Polaroid!
Saturday, March 27, 2010
Phone IQ test failure
*phone rings*
GF: "Hello?"
Caller: "Hi is that Danny?"
GF: "No, I think you've got the wrong number... Ok bye!"
...... *6 or 7 seconds pass... phone rings*
GF: [It's the same number, you talk to her this time]
Me: "Hello?"
Same caller: "Hi, Danny?"
Me: "Eh... no, I'm pretty sure you have the wrong number."
Caller: "Oh right! Sorry."
Me: "Ok, good luck."
...... *5 seconds pass... phone rings*
Me: [Just leave it, answer again if she does it in an hour or so]
*voicemail icon flashes, we check the mailbox*
Same caller: "Hi Danny, this is Anne-Marie here at Classic Cuts, just checking if 1pm on Wednesday is ok with you. Bye!"
Why would someone dial the same number twice and, after being told twice that they've got the wrong number, dial AGAIN and leave a voicemail for "Danny", even though the voicemail greeting clearly identifies as someone other than Danny?
What could possibly explain simultaneously having the ability to dial phone numbers and speak English, while being unable to comprehend the most obvious facts? If you call a number TWICE and are told that it's a wrong number, it's STILL going to be the wrong number the third time.
Top Tip: No amount of redialling the same wrong number will cause Danny to answer the phone.
GF: "Hello?"
Caller: "Hi is that Danny?"
GF: "No, I think you've got the wrong number... Ok bye!"
...... *6 or 7 seconds pass... phone rings*
GF: [It's the same number, you talk to her this time]
Me: "Hello?"
Same caller: "Hi, Danny?"
Me: "Eh... no, I'm pretty sure you have the wrong number."
Caller: "Oh right! Sorry."
Me: "Ok, good luck."
...... *5 seconds pass... phone rings*
Me: [Just leave it, answer again if she does it in an hour or so]
*voicemail icon flashes, we check the mailbox*
Same caller: "Hi Danny, this is Anne-Marie here at Classic Cuts, just checking if 1pm on Wednesday is ok with you. Bye!"
Why would someone dial the same number twice and, after being told twice that they've got the wrong number, dial AGAIN and leave a voicemail for "Danny", even though the voicemail greeting clearly identifies as someone other than Danny?
What could possibly explain simultaneously having the ability to dial phone numbers and speak English, while being unable to comprehend the most obvious facts? If you call a number TWICE and are told that it's a wrong number, it's STILL going to be the wrong number the third time.
Top Tip: No amount of redialling the same wrong number will cause Danny to answer the phone.
Sunday, March 21, 2010
Freeline skates... feasible for transport?
After my bike was robbed [smiley face indicating that I'm loudly shouting "cunt!"] in November or so, I figured I'd experiment with alternative forms of transport, hoping to find something more casual and less stealable (i.e. something I don't leave outside my house only locked to itself might be appropriate).
Doing a bit of looking around online, I was intrigued by so-called "Freeline" skates (Wikipedia article appears a bit anaemic), which are very much like the old snakeboard, albeit without the connecting bar between the two plates. To propel yourself forward, rather than kicking off the floor like with skateboards and inline skates, you use your hips, legs, shoulders, arms and whatever you can to swing your body weight around and turn your feet so the skates follow a kind of S-curve.
It's called "non-holonomic motion" and I found it very difficult to understand via textual descriptions which were far superior to this one, so basically you just have to try it until you get the knack, which took me quite a while on the Freelines.
So I picked up a pair on eBay around Christmas (very expensive too, ended up around €110 delivered from the UK).
1. Standing on the skates without doing the splits. As you stand on the skates, the axis of movement is just off horizontal so the skates want to slide out to your left and right and you accidentally do Jean-Claude Van Damme sidesplits. Most people, including myself, can't really do that without our legs falling off and exploding, so you quickly learn to control the relative position of the skates with your inner thigh muscles.
2. Rolling across the room with losing your balance. This is presumably the same with any kind of skates/skateboard, but exacerbated by the fact that these behave in a slightly more unexpected way due to the wheels being angled slightly differently: there is a distinct left skate and right skate, so when they're side by side the wheels make a shallow V-shape. Getting used to this means rolling back and forth on flat ground by a railing or low wall so you can pull/push yourself and keep steady with your arms, until eventually you can coast a few metres unaided. Or get a friend to hold one hand and walk back and forth, but that's limited by their patience since it can take a long time.
3. Launching from stop without pushing against a wall. It's difficult to even stand still on the skates - a little bit like on a bicycle. Sometimes you see bicycle couriers with gearless bikes and no freewheeling clutch, stopped at a traffic light (yes, many bicycle couriers actually stop at lights :D) and very slowly inching forwards and backwards on the spot rather than putting their foot down. You can do a similar trick with these by angling your feet into a T-shape, but it takes practice, and actually pushing off from that position to get moving is even more difficult (I tried it about ten times and succeeded once, and awkwardly at that).
Normally, to push off moving from right to left, you put both skates in front of you, then knock the right skate over away from you and step onto it so your toes are also touching the floor. Then you put your weight on those toes and place your left foot on its skate, and push in that direction (without extending too far or your right foot will fall off the skate), pulling the right skate upright with your foot as some of your weight moves onto the left skate.
4. Propelling yourself! After all the other challenges, this one is pretty easy, to begin with anyway. Your feet will probably start to do this automatically in step 2, when you're just trying to roll without falling. Essentially, as one foot is moving in an upwards curve, pushing it forward will increase your speed, and similarly when it's on downwards curve.
Well, I only got them to replace my bike, so all the tricks people do with them (mostly pirouettes, riding on one foot and dropping/stomping the second skate, switching etc) are not really relevant. If I ever get supremely good at riding the things, maybe I'll experiment a bit.
Mostly, I want to find out if I can travel any kind of significant distance on them, somewhere between walking and cycling speed. A measly 8km/h for 4km (the distance between my house and DCU) would suit me just fine, but so far I have to stop riding after about 1km (about 10 minutes) because I get pains in the following places: the middle of the soles of my feet, my calf muscles, my instep. By then my thighs basically just run out of energy and I start moving more and more slowly and my form gets sloppy.
I don't know if this is poor general fitness (I'm a lazy, lazy man who likes sitting on his arse with a laptop or playing PS2 for hours on end), or specific muscle conditioning that needs to happen for everyone, or if I'm literally physically incapable of adapting to the skates for longer periods, or even if the skates are just not suited for that kind of travel, especially over the crap, laughable pavement conditions we have here in Dublin (stupid 1 inch deep, 3 inch wide drainage channels between every few houses, cracks and bumps everywhere, corrugated concrete driveways which make skates trundle and vibrate like a broken shopping cart).
That said, if you're going at a reasonable speed you can get over small cracks and drains by leaning slightly onto your back foot - that way the front skate can bounce past the obstacle and even if it gets caught and stops dead, you just hop off since they're not tied to your feet. If your front skate gets caught and most of your weight is on that foot, your balance can be thrown off badly.
And I've seen a couple of videos on Youtube which suggest that people can and do cover more significant distances on them - about 34km in this one.
One recent change that's working much better for me is focusing more on my back foot to push myself forward, rather than trying to drag myself with the front foot which causes it to slip out of position and seems to tire me out. Maybe it's just more efficient for the way I happen to distribute my weight on the skates. Who knows. Even if it turns out to be a complete failure, it'll be a fun failure!
Doing a bit of looking around online, I was intrigued by so-called "Freeline" skates (Wikipedia article appears a bit anaemic), which are very much like the old snakeboard, albeit without the connecting bar between the two plates. To propel yourself forward, rather than kicking off the floor like with skateboards and inline skates, you use your hips, legs, shoulders, arms and whatever you can to swing your body weight around and turn your feet so the skates follow a kind of S-curve.
It's called "non-holonomic motion" and I found it very difficult to understand via textual descriptions which were far superior to this one, so basically you just have to try it until you get the knack, which took me quite a while on the Freelines.
So I picked up a pair on eBay around Christmas (very expensive too, ended up around €110 delivered from the UK).
The initial hurdles
1. Standing on the skates without doing the splits. As you stand on the skates, the axis of movement is just off horizontal so the skates want to slide out to your left and right and you accidentally do Jean-Claude Van Damme sidesplits. Most people, including myself, can't really do that without our legs falling off and exploding, so you quickly learn to control the relative position of the skates with your inner thigh muscles.
2. Rolling across the room with losing your balance. This is presumably the same with any kind of skates/skateboard, but exacerbated by the fact that these behave in a slightly more unexpected way due to the wheels being angled slightly differently: there is a distinct left skate and right skate, so when they're side by side the wheels make a shallow V-shape. Getting used to this means rolling back and forth on flat ground by a railing or low wall so you can pull/push yourself and keep steady with your arms, until eventually you can coast a few metres unaided. Or get a friend to hold one hand and walk back and forth, but that's limited by their patience since it can take a long time.
3. Launching from stop without pushing against a wall. It's difficult to even stand still on the skates - a little bit like on a bicycle. Sometimes you see bicycle couriers with gearless bikes and no freewheeling clutch, stopped at a traffic light (yes, many bicycle couriers actually stop at lights :D) and very slowly inching forwards and backwards on the spot rather than putting their foot down. You can do a similar trick with these by angling your feet into a T-shape, but it takes practice, and actually pushing off from that position to get moving is even more difficult (I tried it about ten times and succeeded once, and awkwardly at that).
Normally, to push off moving from right to left, you put both skates in front of you, then knock the right skate over away from you and step onto it so your toes are also touching the floor. Then you put your weight on those toes and place your left foot on its skate, and push in that direction (without extending too far or your right foot will fall off the skate), pulling the right skate upright with your foot as some of your weight moves onto the left skate.
4. Propelling yourself! After all the other challenges, this one is pretty easy, to begin with anyway. Your feet will probably start to do this automatically in step 2, when you're just trying to roll without falling. Essentially, as one foot is moving in an upwards curve, pushing it forward will increase your speed, and similarly when it's on downwards curve.
Then what?
Well, I only got them to replace my bike, so all the tricks people do with them (mostly pirouettes, riding on one foot and dropping/stomping the second skate, switching etc) are not really relevant. If I ever get supremely good at riding the things, maybe I'll experiment a bit.
Mostly, I want to find out if I can travel any kind of significant distance on them, somewhere between walking and cycling speed. A measly 8km/h for 4km (the distance between my house and DCU) would suit me just fine, but so far I have to stop riding after about 1km (about 10 minutes) because I get pains in the following places: the middle of the soles of my feet, my calf muscles, my instep. By then my thighs basically just run out of energy and I start moving more and more slowly and my form gets sloppy.
I don't know if this is poor general fitness (I'm a lazy, lazy man who likes sitting on his arse with a laptop or playing PS2 for hours on end), or specific muscle conditioning that needs to happen for everyone, or if I'm literally physically incapable of adapting to the skates for longer periods, or even if the skates are just not suited for that kind of travel, especially over the crap, laughable pavement conditions we have here in Dublin (stupid 1 inch deep, 3 inch wide drainage channels between every few houses, cracks and bumps everywhere, corrugated concrete driveways which make skates trundle and vibrate like a broken shopping cart).
That said, if you're going at a reasonable speed you can get over small cracks and drains by leaning slightly onto your back foot - that way the front skate can bounce past the obstacle and even if it gets caught and stops dead, you just hop off since they're not tied to your feet. If your front skate gets caught and most of your weight is on that foot, your balance can be thrown off badly.
And I've seen a couple of videos on Youtube which suggest that people can and do cover more significant distances on them - about 34km in this one.
One recent change that's working much better for me is focusing more on my back foot to push myself forward, rather than trying to drag myself with the front foot which causes it to slip out of position and seems to tire me out. Maybe it's just more efficient for the way I happen to distribute my weight on the skates. Who knows. Even if it turns out to be a complete failure, it'll be a fun failure!
Saturday, March 20, 2010
Snappy?
(trying to reassure scared 2-year old daughter at 3am)
Me: Ok, if there's a monster there, just give it a kick.
Aela: How 'bout YOU kick monster.
Me: Ok, if there's a monster there, just give it a kick.
Aela: How 'bout YOU kick monster.
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
Saturday, February 27, 2010
Stage Irish in "Murder, She Wrote: The Celtic Riddle"
Just watched "Murder, She Wrote: The Celtic Riddle", set in Ireland. I've seen worse imitations of Ireland by American films and TV (notably an episode of the old Mission Impossible where people were terrified of a fake banshee and the carriage of death or something, jeeeeez that was pathetic), but still, it seems at least 75% of the 'Irish' cast were not only American, they seemed to have spent less than 10 minutes practicing their Irish accents... the better ones manage to mix some kind of Irish accent in with English, Scottish and a bit of a Russian twinge. The worse ones (e.g. the spiky-haired mechanic modelling his look after Johnny Rotten who sounds more Scandinavian than anything, and the blonde male cop) make a complete bollox of it, or just give up completely. I guess almost all the dialogue scenes were filmed in the States? Otherwise there's really no excuse for hiring Americans with bad stage Irish accents to play Irish characters - if it was filmed in Ireland, why would you ship American actors over to do a crappy job?
Can you imagine an Irish film crew flying to the USA and bringing Irish actors over to play Americans, with horrible cheesy accents that don't convince anyone?
Apart from the actors, there are cars you don't see here (e.g. Chevrolet police cars or the big Ford van which tries to drive someone off the road) and obviously fake number plates (with non-existent county codes)... which is to be expected I guess. Plenty of modern films and TV series simply do without number plates altogether (Fringe, IIRC), which kind of spoils the realism IMO.
Some stupid did not do the research mistakes:
Other than that, it was basically an extra-long episode of Murder She Wrote. It kind of petered out a bit, perhaps because I was getting distracted by the silly errors, or perhaps the 45-minute format worked better for the series?
Can you imagine an Irish film crew flying to the USA and bringing Irish actors over to play Americans, with horrible cheesy accents that don't convince anyone?
Apart from the actors, there are cars you don't see here (e.g. Chevrolet police cars or the big Ford van which tries to drive someone off the road) and obviously fake number plates (with non-existent county codes)... which is to be expected I guess. Plenty of modern films and TV series simply do without number plates altogether (Fringe, IIRC), which kind of spoils the realism IMO.
Some stupid did not do the research mistakes:
- Who... WHO refers to the Irish language as "the Gaelic language"? Christ on a bike, do some research!
- The same supposedly Irish character also failed to recognise Ogham script (which is fairly distinctive) but then later seemed to know about its history... which is it - does she know about it or not? Be consistent, damnit!
- A letterhead addressed to "Dublin BT238479, Ireland" or similar - Ireland is not in the UK and we don't use UK postcodes!! WTF
Other than that, it was basically an extra-long episode of Murder She Wrote. It kind of petered out a bit, perhaps because I was getting distracted by the silly errors, or perhaps the 45-minute format worked better for the series?
Replacing the electromagnetic clutch brushes on a Micra CVT
Soon after buying my first automatic transmission car, a ten year old Nissan Micra (K11) with the CVT gearbox, I found that the carbon brushes which supply power to the electromagnetic clutch tend to wear down.
The clutch operates (as far as my limited understanding goes) by passing a current through some kind of magnetic powder (maybe just iron filings? Anyone know what this is?) which fills the gap between the driving (engine-side) and driven (gearbox/wheels side) plates. When the engine is at idle, no (or very little) current is passed through the powder so the engine spins without transferring force to the driven side.
As you hit the throttle and engine speed increases, the current passed through the powder is raised and the powder becomes magnetised, sticking together more strongly and transferring more of the rotational force from the engine to the wheels.
The electrical current is supplied by a pair of carbon brushes which rest against turning discs (I think they're called slip rings, which just slot onto a splined axle), since you can't just stick a wire into something that's constantly spinning. After a while, both the brushes and the slip rings start to wear down - hopefully the brushes more and the rings less, since the brushes are easy to replace while the slip rings are probably almost impossible (i.e. cheaper to buy a new car than to get the clutch out, open it up, replace a part, put it back together and re-install it in the car, argh). When the brushes wear down, springs in the brush holder push them further out until a certain limit, they either lose contact completely or periodically slip out of contact briefly, triggering the "N-CVT" warning light on the dashboard. As they wear out of reach of the clutch wheel/slip disc arcing can occur which is apparently a bad thing, too.
So anyway, my Micra had started to get sluggish, needing more revs than before, and I figured it might be the clutch brushes. I checked the web for similar problems and solutions and found a LOT of problems and NO solution other than buy a new brush holder/new gearbox/new car.
Nissan refused to talk to me on the phone, telling me to call local dealers instead. Two separate dealers quoted me a laughable €218 for the whole brush holder assembly, which is apparently all they will give you short of an entire new clutch (again, more than the cost of the car).
This seemed a lot of money when it was just the carbon brushes which had worn down. So I took the brush holder assembly out anyway.
Where is it? Here, on the front of the transmission bell housing:
(edit, new pic to help locate it)
You can disconnect the power plug by pressing a tab on the left side of the upper half and pulling it upwards. Blurry closeup of power socket:
The hole down into the clutch after removing the brush holder. Looks... not so great:
And the brush holder after removal:
Knackered. Right down to a stub on the engine-side brush and while not so bad on the driven side, the spring was jammed up with cruddy carbon deposits and failing to push the brush out to maintain contact with the slip ring.
So I disassembled and cleaned it (on the left is another brush from a mk3 Ford Fiesta's broken alternator... similar!):
The brushes looked so similar to what you'd find in an alternator, serving the same purpose anyway, that I went to a shop ("Electro Maintenance" in Baldoyle) to find something suitable. A guy came out of the back room and took the disassembled holder away before coming back with some Delco alternator brushes, for which he charged a pretty reasonable €7. He also suggested that I snip off the old brushes, leaving just the bit of wire that was somehow attached to the metal mount, and then solder the copper wire of the new brush on top of that. Before doing this, we threaded the old black plastic insulation piece onto the wire, fed the spring through and cut off the excess wire (to stop the brush from falling out the end of the holder!).
Soldering the new wire onto the bit of old wire (no idea how the old wire is attached to the metal so nicely but still conducting current):
And reassembled after soldering:
Note the slight slant in the brush faces where they contact the clutch wheel/slip rings - the longer edge is on the bottom and the shorter edge on the top (where the power socket is pointing). This is what the wear pattern in the old brushes looked like, so I oriented the new ones in the same way (if I'd bought brushes without a slanted edge, I might have used sandpaper or emery cloth to file one in, since it probably helps them fit into the clutch properly).
Also, if you have a multimeter, check the continuity from pin to brush for both pairs. Each pin should form a circuit to the brush on the same side.
After installing the brush holder (much easier than removing it, bizarrely - it took about 5 minutes of gently sliding it around and twisting to get it out, after removing the battery and its tray* and moving a relay box out of the way), I sat in the car and gingerly started the engine. It fired up, and I listened for any horrible scraping noises and watched the N-CVT lamp on the dashboard, which didn't light up. Knocked off the engine and did a self-test of the gearbox (put it in D, ignition on but don't start engine, brake on, accelerator on, cycle Ds-D-N-R-P, accelerator off, brake off, start engine) which reported okayness (N-CVT indicator flashes one long, then seven short and repeats).
* Note: I recently checked the brushes again and was able to get the holder out without removing the battery or its tray. If you have the right screwdriver or a ratchet with screwdriver bit, you can get it out in less than 10 mins! I did have to lie under the car and ask my SO to hold the ratchet end in place though.
I carefully reversed and turned from the cramped shed into the cramped laneway and drove home. Feels a bit more responsive so far but I was literally a 2 minute drive from my house so no chance to get it up to speed.
Hopefully the fix is ok and won't trash the clutch or wear down within 2 weeks - time will tell. (It'd be pretty funny if it completely failed within a couple of days :/)
Replacement from Nissan: €218
DIY hack job with alternator brushes: €7 + time (one hour if you're smart, 4 hours messing about if you're me).
Hope this helps anyone in the same boat!
Update 26/10/2011: it worked fine for over a year and a half, until...
...Until I stupidly drove through at least a foot of water in a flood on Monday (yeah, who'd have thought it might rain in Ireland). This seemed to short out the coil and some kind of safety interlock started switching it off despite my repeated attempts to stop and restart it. Eventually after an hour or so hanging around near where I'd parked the dying car, it managed to get going again, albeit warning me that the clutch's coil circuit was shorting (IIRC, the fourth flash during the self-test mentioned above).
If I'm lucky, either the brushes have simply worn down, or a bit of trapped water is occasionally making a short in the connector. If not, water may have leaked into the clutch and contaminated the powder or something, I don't know. That hole is near the bottom of the engine, so for all I know the bell housing has a pool of water in it, bathing the clutch and promising rust or some other disaster.
I wonder if it's the same type of clutch used in the older Subaru Justy - it looks like they can lose their powder, which would not be good.
30/10/2011
Finally got round to removing it, which just took a couple of minutes this time - amazing how much easier some jobs are in direct sunlight rather than in a dark garage. Last time I removed the battery and its tray and pulled a bunch of stuff out of the way, needlessly.
Turned out the brushes were hardly worn at all, but they were very wet. When I replaced them last year, the generic alternator brushes may have been slightly too long for the available space, and I was afraid to break something so didn't tighten the brush holder's bolts nearly enough, leaving a gap large enough for water to pour in as I foolishly rammed the car through floodwater.
Might be a good idea to file down the brushes a tad before installing them, enough to push the brush holder absolutely flush in its socket and screw it in tight enough to prevent water entering the clutch housing.
The clutch operates (as far as my limited understanding goes) by passing a current through some kind of magnetic powder (maybe just iron filings? Anyone know what this is?) which fills the gap between the driving (engine-side) and driven (gearbox/wheels side) plates. When the engine is at idle, no (or very little) current is passed through the powder so the engine spins without transferring force to the driven side.
As you hit the throttle and engine speed increases, the current passed through the powder is raised and the powder becomes magnetised, sticking together more strongly and transferring more of the rotational force from the engine to the wheels.
The electrical current is supplied by a pair of carbon brushes which rest against turning discs (I think they're called slip rings, which just slot onto a splined axle), since you can't just stick a wire into something that's constantly spinning. After a while, both the brushes and the slip rings start to wear down - hopefully the brushes more and the rings less, since the brushes are easy to replace while the slip rings are probably almost impossible (i.e. cheaper to buy a new car than to get the clutch out, open it up, replace a part, put it back together and re-install it in the car, argh). When the brushes wear down, springs in the brush holder push them further out until a certain limit, they either lose contact completely or periodically slip out of contact briefly, triggering the "N-CVT" warning light on the dashboard. As they wear out of reach of the clutch wheel/slip disc arcing can occur which is apparently a bad thing, too.
So anyway, my Micra had started to get sluggish, needing more revs than before, and I figured it might be the clutch brushes. I checked the web for similar problems and solutions and found a LOT of problems and NO solution other than buy a new brush holder/new gearbox/new car.
Nissan refused to talk to me on the phone, telling me to call local dealers instead. Two separate dealers quoted me a laughable €218 for the whole brush holder assembly, which is apparently all they will give you short of an entire new clutch (again, more than the cost of the car).
This seemed a lot of money when it was just the carbon brushes which had worn down. So I took the brush holder assembly out anyway.
Where is it? Here, on the front of the transmission bell housing:
(edit, new pic to help locate it)
You can disconnect the power plug by pressing a tab on the left side of the upper half and pulling it upwards. Blurry closeup of power socket:
The hole down into the clutch after removing the brush holder. Looks... not so great:
And the brush holder after removal:
Knackered. Right down to a stub on the engine-side brush and while not so bad on the driven side, the spring was jammed up with cruddy carbon deposits and failing to push the brush out to maintain contact with the slip ring.
So I disassembled and cleaned it (on the left is another brush from a mk3 Ford Fiesta's broken alternator... similar!):
The brushes looked so similar to what you'd find in an alternator, serving the same purpose anyway, that I went to a shop ("Electro Maintenance" in Baldoyle) to find something suitable. A guy came out of the back room and took the disassembled holder away before coming back with some Delco alternator brushes, for which he charged a pretty reasonable €7. He also suggested that I snip off the old brushes, leaving just the bit of wire that was somehow attached to the metal mount, and then solder the copper wire of the new brush on top of that. Before doing this, we threaded the old black plastic insulation piece onto the wire, fed the spring through and cut off the excess wire (to stop the brush from falling out the end of the holder!).
Soldering the new wire onto the bit of old wire (no idea how the old wire is attached to the metal so nicely but still conducting current):
And reassembled after soldering:
Note the slight slant in the brush faces where they contact the clutch wheel/slip rings - the longer edge is on the bottom and the shorter edge on the top (where the power socket is pointing). This is what the wear pattern in the old brushes looked like, so I oriented the new ones in the same way (if I'd bought brushes without a slanted edge, I might have used sandpaper or emery cloth to file one in, since it probably helps them fit into the clutch properly).
Also, if you have a multimeter, check the continuity from pin to brush for both pairs. Each pin should form a circuit to the brush on the same side.
After installing the brush holder (much easier than removing it, bizarrely - it took about 5 minutes of gently sliding it around and twisting to get it out, after removing the battery and its tray* and moving a relay box out of the way), I sat in the car and gingerly started the engine. It fired up, and I listened for any horrible scraping noises and watched the N-CVT lamp on the dashboard, which didn't light up. Knocked off the engine and did a self-test of the gearbox (put it in D, ignition on but don't start engine, brake on, accelerator on, cycle Ds-D-N-R-P, accelerator off, brake off, start engine) which reported okayness (N-CVT indicator flashes one long, then seven short and repeats).
* Note: I recently checked the brushes again and was able to get the holder out without removing the battery or its tray. If you have the right screwdriver or a ratchet with screwdriver bit, you can get it out in less than 10 mins! I did have to lie under the car and ask my SO to hold the ratchet end in place though.
I carefully reversed and turned from the cramped shed into the cramped laneway and drove home. Feels a bit more responsive so far but I was literally a 2 minute drive from my house so no chance to get it up to speed.
Hopefully the fix is ok and won't trash the clutch or wear down within 2 weeks - time will tell. (It'd be pretty funny if it completely failed within a couple of days :/)
Replacement from Nissan: €218
DIY hack job with alternator brushes: €7 + time (one hour if you're smart, 4 hours messing about if you're me).
Hope this helps anyone in the same boat!
Update 26/10/2011: it worked fine for over a year and a half, until...
...Until I stupidly drove through at least a foot of water in a flood on Monday (yeah, who'd have thought it might rain in Ireland). This seemed to short out the coil and some kind of safety interlock started switching it off despite my repeated attempts to stop and restart it. Eventually after an hour or so hanging around near where I'd parked the dying car, it managed to get going again, albeit warning me that the clutch's coil circuit was shorting (IIRC, the fourth flash during the self-test mentioned above).
If I'm lucky, either the brushes have simply worn down, or a bit of trapped water is occasionally making a short in the connector. If not, water may have leaked into the clutch and contaminated the powder or something, I don't know. That hole is near the bottom of the engine, so for all I know the bell housing has a pool of water in it, bathing the clutch and promising rust or some other disaster.
I wonder if it's the same type of clutch used in the older Subaru Justy - it looks like they can lose their powder, which would not be good.
30/10/2011
Finally got round to removing it, which just took a couple of minutes this time - amazing how much easier some jobs are in direct sunlight rather than in a dark garage. Last time I removed the battery and its tray and pulled a bunch of stuff out of the way, needlessly.
Turned out the brushes were hardly worn at all, but they were very wet. When I replaced them last year, the generic alternator brushes may have been slightly too long for the available space, and I was afraid to break something so didn't tighten the brush holder's bolts nearly enough, leaving a gap large enough for water to pour in as I foolishly rammed the car through floodwater.
Might be a good idea to file down the brushes a tad before installing them, enough to push the brush holder absolutely flush in its socket and screw it in tight enough to prevent water entering the clutch housing.
Friday, February 12, 2010
What is the proposer's occupation?
Looking up insurance quotes on a few different sites, I found a funny form on Britton Insurance's website, which asks among other things, "What is the proposer's occupation?".
The choice available is quite amazing - here are some examples:
I'd like to put down balloonist, but it would be a wishful lie.
The choice available is quite amazing - here are some examples:
Bacon Curer, Baggage Handler, Bailiff, Baker, Bakery Assistant, Bakery Manager, Bakery Operative, Balloonist, ... Skipper, Slater, Smallholder, ... Stock Controller, Stock Manager, Stockman, Stocktaker, Stockbroker, Stone Cutter, Stone Sawyer, Stonemason, ... Sub-postmistress, ... Tachograph Analyst, Tacker, Tailor, Tank Farm Operative (WTF?), Tanker Driver, Tanner, Tarmaccer, Tarot Reader/Palmistry Expert
I'd like to put down balloonist, but it would be a wishful lie.
Saturday, February 06, 2010
Sign language on kids' TV
There's an episode on CBBC of "Lazytown", a kids' show from Iceland of the "eating fruit and getting enough sleep gives me the energy to be a muscular annoying man!" variety. BBC have a woman (uncredited) overlayed like a subtitles track, only she's conveying the speech and sounds with sign language.
The interesting thing is it appears to have been done entirely in one take - I haven't been watching all the time, but had my eye on it for about half the programme and didn't notice any fadeouts/cuts. Signing a whole episode of a somewhat hyperactive children's show in one go, conveying the tone of voice with body language and doing a couple of songs on the way - that is damn impressive!
The interesting thing is it appears to have been done entirely in one take - I haven't been watching all the time, but had my eye on it for about half the programme and didn't notice any fadeouts/cuts. Signing a whole episode of a somewhat hyperactive children's show in one go, conveying the tone of voice with body language and doing a couple of songs on the way - that is damn impressive!
Tuesday, February 02, 2010
Toyota/Lexus stuck accelerator crash
Saw this article about an extremely dangerous suddenly-stuck-on-accelerator problem in the Lexus ES 350. The awful headlined crash in the USA involved a driver realising his accelerator was stuck on and the car speeding out of control toward a busy intersection, so he called 911 and prayed that they would be ok, which they weren't.
This is tragic, but surely in this situation, you would try the following things:
1. Knock it into neutral/reverse
2. Handbrake
3. Stamp on the footbrake anyway, maybe it actually does work
4. TURN THE ENGINE OFF so it doesn't keep accelerating at least
Rather than these things:
1. Call the police and expect them to somehow help
2. Pray
3. Nothing else
Certainly, Toyota/Lexus is at fault for allowing a car out to market with a severe and dangerous problem which was reported and dismissed many times, but that doesn't help this guy and the other three people who died in the crash - surely there was a better option to avert or mitigate a high-speed collision than dialling 911 and praying that everything would be ok. The fact that the driver was an off-duty highway patrol officer just makes the outcome even more incomprehensible.
Why didn't they knock it out of gear and/or turn off the engine? How is calling 911 going to help avert a crash that is seconds away?
This is tragic, but surely in this situation, you would try the following things:
1. Knock it into neutral/reverse
2. Handbrake
3. Stamp on the footbrake anyway, maybe it actually does work
4. TURN THE ENGINE OFF so it doesn't keep accelerating at least
Rather than these things:
1. Call the police and expect them to somehow help
2. Pray
3. Nothing else
Certainly, Toyota/Lexus is at fault for allowing a car out to market with a severe and dangerous problem which was reported and dismissed many times, but that doesn't help this guy and the other three people who died in the crash - surely there was a better option to avert or mitigate a high-speed collision than dialling 911 and praying that everything would be ok. The fact that the driver was an off-duty highway patrol officer just makes the outcome even more incomprehensible.
Why didn't they knock it out of gear and/or turn off the engine? How is calling 911 going to help avert a crash that is seconds away?
Sunday, January 17, 2010
installing rsdl on OS X i386 via rubygems
I was getting this problem trying to install rsdl, a wrapper program for ruby which initialises SDL/Cocoa:
The solution was to add an ARCHFLAGS environment variable which stops it trying to build a ppc version:
The "File not found" message at the end doesn't seem to matter.
It's handy that SDL, SDL_image and SDL_gfx seem to build and install the UNIX way (./configure && make && sudo make install) with no problems - at first I was worried by the lack of a .pkg installer for SDL but it seems to work fine so far. Cool!
Jehannum:SDL-1.2.14 oisin$ sudo gem install rsdl
Building native extensions. This could take a while...
ERROR: Error installing rsdl:
ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.
/System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/bin/ruby extconf.rb
checking for ruby_sysinit()... no
checking for ruby_run_node()... no
creating Makefile
creating rsdl.c
make
gcc -arch ppc -arch i386 -Os -pipe -fno-common -I"/System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/universal-darwin9.0" -I/usr/local/include/SDL -D_GNU_SOURCE=1 -D_THREAD_SAFE -c rsdl.c
gcc rsdl.o -L. -L/System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/lib -L. -arch ppc -arch i386 -lruby -lpthread -ldl -lm -L/usr/local/lib -lSDLmain -lSDL -Wl,-framework,Cocoa -o rsdl
ld: warning in /usr/local/lib/libSDLmain.a, file is not of required architecture
ld: warning in /usr/local/lib/libSDL.dylib, file is not of required architecture
Undefined symbols for architecture ppc:
"_main", referenced from:
start in crt1.10.5.o
ld: symbol(s) not found for architecture ppc
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status
lipo: can't open input file: /var/tmp//ccEkUyfQ.out (No such file or directory)
make: *** [rsdl] Error 1
The solution was to add an ARCHFLAGS environment variable which stops it trying to build a ppc version:
Jehannum:SDL-1.2.14 oisin$ sudo env ARCHFLAGS='-arch i386' gem install rsdl
Building native extensions. This could take a while...
Successfully installed rsdl-0.1.2
1 gem installed
Installing ri documentation for rsdl-0.1.2...
File not found: lib
The "File not found" message at the end doesn't seem to matter.
It's handy that SDL, SDL_image and SDL_gfx seem to build and install the UNIX way (./configure && make && sudo make install) with no problems - at first I was worried by the lack of a .pkg installer for SDL but it seems to work fine so far. Cool!
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
Schneier: "Stop the Panic on Air Security"
A good article by Bruce Schneier on the tendency for overreaction to dramatic and rare events, such as hijackings and attempted underwear bombings, while ignoring far more common dangers which don't make the news headlines.
Nothing he hasn't really said before, but well stated and all the more significant these days, given the hilarious ban on liquids and the ridiculous fiasco of Newark Airport being temporarily shut down and causing hours of delays because an innocent Chinese student crossed a laughable rope barrier to give his girlfriend a goodbye kiss.
Of course, instead of admitting that security was basically a joke (on the one hand, you're made to take off your shoes, be frisked, have your luggage X-rayed and possibly have someone examine your bits in a full-body scanner, then you enter the 'secure' area which is separated from the 'insecure' area by a cinema-waiting-line rope) and that they overreacted badly, New Jersey Sen. Frank Lautenberg stated that "what he did was a terrible injustice" to the thousands of people who were inconvenienced. Even though it was what airport security did that caused the inconvenience...
Let's stop the panic!
We're doing these things even though this particular plot was chosen precisely because we weren't screening for it; future al Qaeda attacks rarely look like past attacks; and the terrorist threat is far broader than attacks against airplanes.
We're doing these things even though airplane terrorism is incredibly rare, the risk is no greater today than it was in previous decades, the taxi to the airport is still more dangerous than the flight, and ten times as many Americans are killed by lightning as by terrorists.
...
We can see the effects of this all the time. We fear being murdered, kidnapped, raped and assaulted by strangers, when it's far more likely that the perpetrator of such offenses is a relative or a friend. We fear school shootings, even though a school is almost always the safest place a child can be. We worry about shark attacks instead of fatal dog or pig attacks -- both far more common. In the U.S., over 38,000 people die each year in car crashes; that's as many deaths as 9/11 each and every month, year after year.
Nothing he hasn't really said before, but well stated and all the more significant these days, given the hilarious ban on liquids and the ridiculous fiasco of Newark Airport being temporarily shut down and causing hours of delays because an innocent Chinese student crossed a laughable rope barrier to give his girlfriend a goodbye kiss.
Of course, instead of admitting that security was basically a joke (on the one hand, you're made to take off your shoes, be frisked, have your luggage X-rayed and possibly have someone examine your bits in a full-body scanner, then you enter the 'secure' area which is separated from the 'insecure' area by a cinema-waiting-line rope) and that they overreacted badly, New Jersey Sen. Frank Lautenberg stated that "what he did was a terrible injustice" to the thousands of people who were inconvenienced. Even though it was what airport security did that caused the inconvenience...
Let's stop the panic!
Thursday, January 07, 2010
No Nokia PC Suite on the Mac? Try Gammu!
With almost every mobile device I've had, the amount of freedom to run arbitrary software (especially software you've written yourself) has been low. Obviously needlessly low, too.
I once bought a USB datacable for my old Sagem X-5 to upload ringtones and Java programs without having to upload them to a webserver and download them with the Sagem over WAP/GPRS. I got ringtones working, but it turned out that it was impossible to upload Java programs over the cable.
Why? Well, there's no apparent technical reason for it - but it works out in the operator's favour, forcing you to download (from yourself) over their very expensive data service - at that time, it cost €0.02 per kilobyte with Meteor, which works out at €20.48 per megabyte, a shocking waste of money!
Similarly, when I bought my Nokia 6230i back in 2006, I soon discovered that while it could download Java applications with no problem, it was impossible to install them via its MMC card. The JAR/JAD would appear in its filesystem browser, but it would declare it an "unrecognised format".
Nokia did, however, release a package called the Nokia PC Suite, which was a reasonably comprehensive tool for doing lots of different things with the phone, including the installing of Java programs. And it worked via data cable and Bluetooth. Great!
Except that now, I don't have a Windows PC (at least, one with Bluetooth or a data cable). And it only runs on Windows (surprise!). My Macbook has built-in Bluetooth and can send files via the built in utilities, but the same "unrecognised format" issue pops up.
So that was the end of my frustrating search, until yesterday... enter Gammu!
This open-source program comes with a host of features for working with different types of phones, including my 6230i, and I was able to upload and install a Java application to the phone with Gammu over Bluetooth, finally!
What's the catch? Well... Gammu itself is a command-line tool so installing a program looks like:
And Gammu uses a textual configuration file - mine looks something like:
The port value can be found in Apple's "Bluetooth Explorer" in Devices->Show Device Discovery (cmd-D), under your phone's name (but replace the hyphens with colons).
Also you have to build the program from source which requires installing CMake and MySQL, but these have automated installers which caused no brainache. Getting Bluetooth to work required a small fix to one of the build scripts, but this has since been fixed so the latest version should work out-of-box.
So, if you have a Mac and a phone which requires Windows-only software to install applications, try Gammu.
. o O ( Now if I could only find a simple way to upload programs of my choosing to my iPod Touch without having to jailbreak the thing or pay Apple, again :/)
I once bought a USB datacable for my old Sagem X-5 to upload ringtones and Java programs without having to upload them to a webserver and download them with the Sagem over WAP/GPRS. I got ringtones working, but it turned out that it was impossible to upload Java programs over the cable.
Why? Well, there's no apparent technical reason for it - but it works out in the operator's favour, forcing you to download (from yourself) over their very expensive data service - at that time, it cost €0.02 per kilobyte with Meteor, which works out at €20.48 per megabyte, a shocking waste of money!
Similarly, when I bought my Nokia 6230i back in 2006, I soon discovered that while it could download Java applications with no problem, it was impossible to install them via its MMC card. The JAR/JAD would appear in its filesystem browser, but it would declare it an "unrecognised format".
Nokia did, however, release a package called the Nokia PC Suite, which was a reasonably comprehensive tool for doing lots of different things with the phone, including the installing of Java programs. And it worked via data cable and Bluetooth. Great!
Except that now, I don't have a Windows PC (at least, one with Bluetooth or a data cable). And it only runs on Windows (surprise!). My Macbook has built-in Bluetooth and can send files via the built in utilities, but the same "unrecognised format" issue pops up.
So that was the end of my frustrating search, until yesterday... enter Gammu!
This open-source program comes with a host of features for working with different types of phones, including my 6230i, and I was able to upload and install a Java application to the phone with Gammu over Bluetooth, finally!
What's the catch? Well... Gammu itself is a command-line tool so installing a program looks like:
Jehannum:Downloads oisin$ gammu nokiaaddfile Application Bart1.4
[snip debug warnings]
Searching for phone folder: *********
Information: Declared JAR file size is different than real. Fixed by Gammu.
Adding "Bart" version created by Bart
Writing JAD file: 100 percent
Writing JAR file: 100 percent
And Gammu uses a textual configuration file - mine looks something like:
Jehannum:~ oisin$ cat .gammurc
[gammu]
port = 00:16:BC:xx:xx:xx
model = 6230i
connection = bluerfphonet
synchronizetime = no
logfile = /Users/oisin/gammu.log
logformat = textall
use_locking = no
The port value can be found in Apple's "Bluetooth Explorer" in Devices->Show Device Discovery (cmd-D), under your phone's name (but replace the hyphens with colons).
Also you have to build the program from source which requires installing CMake and MySQL, but these have automated installers which caused no brainache. Getting Bluetooth to work required a small fix to one of the build scripts, but this has since been fixed so the latest version should work out-of-box.
So, if you have a Mac and a phone which requires Windows-only software to install applications, try Gammu.
. o O ( Now if I could only find a simple way to upload programs of my choosing to my iPod Touch without having to jailbreak the thing or pay Apple, again :/)
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