Anthology of Interest

I used gnome-blog to post the last entry about spark plugs. It put the title in the body again, and it added extra paragraph tags around my existing paragraph tags, and I don't see a preference to turn that off. It also suffers from a distinct lack of spell checker, which you can probably tell by reading that.

You also can't set the category of a post in gnome-blog.

ecto: 3, gnome-blog: 0

With an August road trip to Calgary in the works, I've been trying to get my car fixed up and ready to go. Basic stuff, oil change, tire pressure, etc. I'm sad to say that I've been particularilly negligent about tire pressure. My bad; that's poor fuel economy, increased wear, and increased squeek! They should also be rotated probably....

Today I changed the spark plugs. I don't even know when the last this they were changed was. They probably have over 80,000 km on them now. That's about 30,000 km over the recommened change interval of 50,000 km.

Since the car stumbles a bit at certian RPM ranges, and ocassionally knocks, and burns oil, I was curious as to what the plugs look like. They all had excessive gap. Two were oil fouled, indicating worn piston rings or valve seals, so it's especially no surpirse that it burns oil. The other two were just old. So hopefully new plugs will help a bit. I should probably also measure the wire resistance...

Other things on the list are fuel filter and battery. The guy who changes my oil recommended these, saying that the fuel filter looked like the origional equipment. I have records indicating that it was changed at about 100,000 km, so it's probably ok. The battery will need to be replaced before winter though.

Other than that it is running ok. It should be able to get us around until we get real jobs!

Well, it appears to connect and retrieve the blog name and everything. That's a good sign. Let's see if it will post.

Neither ecto nor gnome-blog seem to put the title in the title place though. They both put it in the body of the entry. Maybe this is more of a s9y bug though....

iTunes integration. Cool.

I'm just testing ecto as recommended by Dave. It's pretty nice so far, but I don't think I like the colors of the html tags. I bet that can be customized though. Nifty.

Oooh, it uses the same spell checker as Mail. That's helpful!

One of freenet's big things was that it help political dissidents communicate. Their example at the time was China. Now I see that things the American government doesn't want you to see, such as flag draped coffins and prison abuse photos are being shared on P2P networks like Kazaa.

Slashdot has an article about how some guy is pulling stuff on Gnutella and putting it on his blog, purportedly to show the US Military how P2P networks are security leaks.

If anything, this points to the power of the internet as a communication medium for political purposes, such as fighting an unjust regime by exposing its fallacies. If the military wants to keep secrets, fine, that's their prerogative, but if some random guy is able to take pictures, then they are not working hard enough at security.

As some guy on ./ points out, what is this guy trying to acomplish? Ban P2P networks? Ban the internet? Will constructive political discourse (think Howard Dean's blog and meetup.com thing) be affected?

Is it prime time for a highly anonymous, highly encrypted, P2P system like Freenet?

Well, I'm testing a new blog engine. I decided to suck it up and just install something that works. The engine is Serendipity, and it uses Postgres as it's database, which is part of the reason I chose it over any other (I prefer Postgres over mysql). Choosing to use a database I know and love turned out to be a good thing, because I had to mess with the tables a bit to get the rss2 import from the old blog to work.

Unfortunatly, the categories were lost from the old set up, but that's not a big deal. It is now possible to leave comments.

p.s. This means all my perma-links from the old system no longer work.

We went to see I, Robot this evening. It was good. The effects were nice, acting was pretty good, story held up alright on the first viewing...

Virtual Desktops on Mac OS X have turned out to be indispensable. Although Exposé is very handy, nothing beats having separate desktops, which allows you to have no two windows overlapping.

There is a commercial product that does this, but Desktop Manager is free and is available on SourceForge. It's the best thing since sliced bread for someone who is used to virtual desktops from X on Linux but uses Apple stuff because it's just so portable (and pretty too).

Our iBook has started to develop white spots on the LCD. I talked to a guy at the university computer store and they can repair it under warranty. I think it's a fairly well known problem. Tamara and I need to hold onto it because of an upcoming trip, but well get it fixed after that. Shouldn't take more than 2 weeks, and that's only if they have to order parts....

close window before driving into car wash....

I was at school this evening to work on some of the presentations, projects, and papers I'm supposed to be doing, and instead I was looking around on the internet. I came across a thread on a board about mirror adjustment.

Most people, including myself, apparently have the side mirrors aligned such that a bit of the side of the car can be seen in the mirror when the driver is sitting normally. I think this is the conventional wisdom, and I think this is what I was taught in drivers ed, but that was a long time ago and my memory is rusty. This message I came across suggested that the better way was to adjust them so that the field of view in the side mirrors barely overlaps that of the rear-view mirror.

This has the effect of pretty much eliminating the blind spot. Side mirrors which once showed pretty much the same thing as the rear-view mirror now show what would have been the blind-spot. I've often watched people come up behind me and then proceed to sit in my blind spot, so maybe this will help me keep track of such folk.

This should help reduce the need to do shoulder checks during lane changes, but that's probably still a good idea anyway, unless your driving skills are similar to my atrocious bike riding skills: look behind for other riders, almost swerve off trail. A flick of the eye is also faster than cranking the head around.

I went and got in my car, and sure enough, the side and rear-view mirrors field of view pretty much completely overlapped. So I adjusted them as above. The driver's side mirror can be adjusted by putting your head against the window and adjusting until you can just see the side of the car in the mirror. The passenger side one can be done by similar adjustment with your head centered (left to right) in the car.

As I drove home I realized another benefit: people in trucks or with hi-beams on can no longer shine their headlights directly in your eyes via the side mirrors, which is nice once the rear-view mirror has been dimmed.

...sucks. Well, it's ok I guess. Maybe I was expecting too much because everybody has been saying that it is better than the first one. Oh well.

I liked the sort of recap of the first movie during the opening credits, and I liked the struggle to deal with the clash between ordinary life and super-hero life. But something was missing; it was somehow hard to suspend my disbelief. I kept thinking that this or that wouldn't work, or whatever. Which is silly, because how often to people who get bit by spiders gain super-powers?

MILD SPOILERS

Another things that bugged me was that Peter's super-powers becoming intermittent was never really explained. Why should his vision come and go? Why should the web slingers stop working? I guess it could be chalked up to tiredness and stress. The spidey-sense could have been used to heighten the conflict between the desire for an ordinary life and the responsibilities of having great powers.

I found the CGI to be really obvious and cartoony in places. It can be hard to do though, because the setting isn't dark and dreary like Gotham City. The brightness makes it more obvious I think. There were points in the movie where I was thinking to myself that they didn't put enough effort into some of the models.

2 and 1/2 out of 5.

Cam was looking for photos of her and Ryan together, and I was going through my old APS photos and found a couple. I decided to post them here, even though they aren't that good.

Surprise!

Ryan and Cam play Tetrinet on an early multihead machine

My scanner sucks and my Gimp skills are poor. But anyway.