Rabidgremlin's
Soapbox

Alright I’ve updated my blog software and started a brand new, more sophisticated blog. I’m using the WordPress software.

The content of my old blog can be found here. I’ll be porting the post from the old blog over shortly.

_Updated: I’ve corrected the link and the 3D maps seems to have disappeared._

Someone just sent me a link to an Auckland traffic site. It shows a nice 3D map of the region and highlights the traffic state on the main routes.

If you click on the little “C” icons you also get an up-to-date webcam shot. Pretty nice.

Google have a couple of J2ME applications for your phone that are really cool.

The first gives you access to your GMail account. It’s really easy to use. Just browse to http://www.gmail.com/app with your phone to download it.

The second gives you access to Google Maps. The travel directions are great (although it can be a little messy to type in addresses on your phone). In certain parts of the world it will even show the heavy traffic reports overlaid on the maps ! Point your phone at http://www.google.com/gmm to download it.

Remember to make sure you have some kind of data plan for your phone otherwise it will be very expensive to use these applications.

Watched this over the weekend. Its very very good and very thought provoking. Its a documentary by Al Gore on global warming. Has some very shocking graphs and statistics. I did find it a little personal, very US centric and perhaps a bit too sentimental in places but very good overall. I’d urge everyone to watch it.

Checkout http://www.climatecrisis.net for more information and for things you can do to help.

Being plagued with an achy wrist of late. I suspect the cause is a new desk at work so my screen was not at the right height making me sit funny. So apart from resting my hand over the xmas break and getting my desk set up correctly I have also installed Workrave.

This application pops up frequent reminders to take breaks and pauses. It works very well and I reckon that everyone should have an application like this running on their computers. Maybe it should even be part of the standard operating system.

Ok so I now had the install all going but during startup the TV was filled up with squiggly text.

The cause of this I discovered is that the splash screen that was shown during startup was running at a resolution that my TV did not enjoy.

Turns out the fix is quite easy in /boot/grub is a file called menu.lst after making a backup of the file I simply added vga=771 to the list of boot parameters and saved the file.

In doing this I discovered that Ubuntu creates a special user that you login as. To change any of the system files you need to be root. So you have to use the sudo command to run a command as root. For instance:

sudo vi /boot/grub/menu.lst

So now I have a nice fresh install. The next step is to be able to play back my music and videos….

Ok so I have this EPIA Nehemiah M10000 based PC that I put together as a media center for my lounge.

I generally use it as an MP3 jukebox, playing back movie clips and surfing the web.

I initially ran Windows 2000 on this box but I have had some disk corruption issues in the last few months and have lost all my media at least twice!

Seagate drive tools indicate they drive is ok, but windows keeps messing up.

Two days ago it happened again, so I decided “screw it”; I’ll install the Ubuntu desktop and see how it goes.

Ubuntu has a “live CD” that you can download. It comes as a .iso file that you can use a program such as Nero to burn a bootable CD.

The “live CD” is cool since you can boot from CD, and try out Ubuntu without any installing anything. This is a great way to test if it is going to work with your hardware.

So I booted my media box with the CD. The Ubuntu start-up menu came up and I selected the default option…

Bamm, the TV went all screwy (my media PC is plugged into my TV, I have no monitor attached to it). Mmm, not so good. I hit the reset switch and tried again. This time I noticed that there was an F4 menu option that let me select which VGA mode I wanted to boot up in. I set this to 640×480 and started the boot process again.

Hey presto after half a minute or so I had a nice (and very Mac like) desktop in front of me. Double clicked an example media file that was supplied and got a nice a video clip with sound, just like that.

The only problem was it was all in black and white ! Not deterred I decided to install Ubuntu anyway. So from the System|Administration menu I selected install Ubuntu.

After asking a bunch of questions: where to install to (I asked it to wipe my existing partitions) and what user name and password I wanted to use and my regional settings the install started.

Ten or so minutes later the install finished and I was prompted to remove the “live CD” and reboot. Up came my nice Ubuntu desktop but still in black and white :(

Luckily my media box is wired to my home network and the internet so I opened up Firefox (it comes installed) and started digging around on the web as to why everything was in black and white.

After about 20 minutes I had narrowed it down to the fact that something was incorrectly setup in my xorg.conf file. A little more digging around I made a guess (after seeing a sample configuration on the web) that the desktop was outputting in NTSC not PAL.

Adding

Option "TVType" "PAL"

To the Device section of my xorg.conf and rebooting everything came right!

So about 40 minutes for the total install. Not too bad since I have never used the OS before!

Serenity Rocks ! I got tickets to the preview show here in New Zealand and the film is awesome. I’m not sure how someone who has not seen the series will take it as they will miss a lot of the tie-ins to the series and they won’t empathise with the characters as strongly but I reckon the film will do well.

Cannot say more without spoiling the story but go watch it when it is released !

Watched King Kong last night. Its not LOTR but it is not bad.

I was really disappointed with the CG in the first 3rd of the movie. It included lots of floaty/cartoon animation especially with the human figures. However the CG in the later parts of the film was very good other then some very glaring green screen bits.

Kong was very well rendered and the animation was great.

The only other problems were the pace which was all wrong and the overuse of dramatic close ups.

Overall a good film.

Found these excellent texture maps (colour, bump, specular etc) of earth, moon, mars and venus. Very nice quality and free to use. Check out http://www.oera.net/How2/TextureMaps.htm.

Gonna have to do a space scene just for fun :)