The first day of the month I do a complete level 0 dump of my system. Today was the first
time I used pbzip2 instead
of bzip2. The result: parts of it are excellent. My own home directory (44 GB) was
dumped in less than 2 hours, far faster than before. But then I came in and saw the message
/: write failed, filesystem is full
Segmentation fault
Strange. Of course I wasn't dumping to the root file system. Further examination showed
that pbzip2 had SIGSEGVd while dumping the /home/var file system and
left a 756 MB core file in the root file system. It did it again for
the /src/FreeBSD hierarchy. Why? The size of the core file is one indication: when
I came in later, the pbzip2 process had exceeded 1 GB in size and was merrily
swapping away. Maybe it ran out of swap or process space.
Somebody called only “kimo” sent me a message a couple of days ago suggesting
somewhat laconically that I try another
parallel bzip2. I was going to write back “If it ain't broke, don't fix
it”. But it looks like pbzip2 is broke, so I need to follow up on this one.
I expected the lighting to be an issue, and it was. One of the things I wanted to do is to
illuminate some of the background, as shown in towards the right of the image. That was
done with the Mecablitz 58 AF-1 O digital flash, which didn't show itself from its best side. It
has remote control, of course—but only the Olympus remote control, which
requires the flash on the camera to fire. That works, but it's not what I want for this
shot. Still, I have a separate remote control which I bought a while back, which can
control any camera—but only when the transmitter is behind the receiver! In one case
I didn't want it that way, and it didn't work.
Still, I have another Mecablitz, the old 40 CT 4, and I can run that with a flash cable.
The receiver also has a cable connection, so all I needed was the cable. Did a bit of
digging and found a brand-new flash cable, still in its original packaging. Judging by the
label, I must have bought it about 20 years ago
at Hertie
in Bad Homburg vor der
Höhe:
Opened it up and—it was an extension lead, with a female connector at one end!
Reading the description, you'd have to speak French to recognize that: both in English and
German it just said “flash lead”. It's no use to me (it was only 1 metre long),
but I suppose it's too late to take it back now, especially since Hertie is closing down.
Finally just gave up on that one. I'll have to get a new cable some time. In the meantime,
there was enough to do. Mounted the flash on my old el-cheapo tripod (so it's not
completely useless) with the receiver pointing in the right direction; that's the
illumination in the panorama. The lighting was from the two studio flash units that I
bought last year, which proved to be rather difficult to handle in the confined space,
giving rise to one accident (second image):
Still, it's a start, and I should be able to refine the setup. Exposure is simpler than I
had feared: I need to adjust the remote flash to match the ones beside the camera, and then
set the flash exposure to the aperture and the external light to the shutter speed. Since
the camera's on a tripod, I can go as slow as I like.
Before the Olympus
E-510 goes, I wanted to finish a comparison that I started a month ago , and took photos at various sensitivities using both cameras, and also
Yvonne's Kodak M1093 IS camera
for the fun of it. The result? The
E-30's better, but not by much. Here's a 400x300 section of photos taken with the E-510 and
E-30 respectively, at 1600 ISO:
It brings home to me how difficult it is to get professional-looking results. But at least
it should now work for a while. All I need now is a dry day without wind.
Finally my c't delivery problems seem to
be over. Today I received issue 16, dated 20 July 2009, by surface
mail, about the time it used to take. Yes, they've added the country to the address, but
probably the real reason is that they've gone back to sending them from Switzerland:
This didn't happen with any of the issues I received since the problems started, so it
appears that it could be connected with the surface mail from Switzerland.
So, what do I do about long telephoto lenses? I've already established that cheap glass is really
cheap glass, and that it's not worth anything. The alternative is an expensive lens (and
B&H have a 1200 mm f/5.6 Canon lens for only $120,000) or a mirror. There are plenty of mirrors
around at prices I can easily afford, and from what I've heard the image quality is pretty
reasonable. But how do you focus the things? They don't have a diaphragm, so the depth of
field is even less than for other long telephotos. And a modern DSLR is not really suited
for manual focusing.
But now there's this “AF confirm sensor” stuff, a little chip and some contacts
that fake the feedback from an autofocus lens. I suspect this is only necessary because the
camera manufacturers didn't consider the issue: the autofocus sensors are entirely in the
camera, and all the lens needs to do is to adjust the focus. That doesn't happen in manual
focus lenses, even with this adaptor.
Still, they're not expensive, only about $20 by themselves, and when combined with a lens
adaptor they're only fractionally more expensive than without the adaptor. The cheapest I
have seen cost about $27 including postage. Spent a lot of time investigating what's on the
web, and came up with a summary that was out of date almost before I finished writing it. The lack of documentation in the
most cases leaves me wondering how many different kinds of chip are really out there, but
I've gradually come to the conclusion that there's only one, the Dandelion, which is now in its
fourth revision. And the revision is important: the fourth revision includes information
about focal length (important for image stabilization) and the ability to fine tune the
focus, and also the ability to specify a lens name for the EXIF data. Who offers them?
tagotech in
Singapore do, but only in the form of the naked chip PCB which needs to be stuck to an
adaptor, something I'd rather not do myself. The result? I still don't know what to do.
Finally got around to spraying the weeds, not before time. For some reason my Chinese
cabbage does not germinate well, and only 2 of the 6 I planted last time have come up.
Decided to plant them as seedlings and transplant when they're big enough, but ran out of
light after I had filled the tubes.
I seem to have spent most of the day surfing the web today, not an occupation I relish. But
there are things to buy, and the web seems the obvious way to do it.
It's time to buy new seeds and other plants for the spring. I have a membership with the
Diggers Club, and they've sent a catalogue
with all sorts of interesting things in it. I've made a list of what I want. But how do I
order them on the web site? Apparently I have to start again from scratch; all my
preparations are useless, because they have organized the web site completely differently.
The catalogue has an old-fashioned order form: a table with product number, description,
quantity and so on. Wouldn't it be nice to have the same thing on-line? If it's there,
it's well hidden. So instead of using the web as intended, I'll write an email with a list
of what I want. What a waste of a web site! It's not as if Diggers are out of line here,
of course.
Still more consideration of autofocus converters. I sent a message to big_is yesterday, asking for more details,
and by evening still didn't have a reply. They're $5 cheaper than RJ camera accessory store. But
if they don't communicate now, when they want to sell something, what will happen later?
Finished my planting and did a bit of weeding. I should have done more spraying yesterday:
then I would have been able to transplant
the Erysimums that have taken over the
east garden. But today it was raining, and who knows when I'll be able to continue.
Another c't magazine arrived today, issue 17,
dated 3 August 2009—only 2 days ago. Got confirmation from a
friend in Germany that he had only got his issue on Monday. It was apparently sent on
30 July 2009, clearly by airmail. Given that the surface mail is
working properly, that seems unnecessary.
As if that wasn't enough, there was also a note in the letterbox that I should pick up a
parcel from the post office (30 odd km away). Chris picked it up in the afternoon: two more issues
of c't, issue 13 (which I've been trying to get for over a month), and issue 14, which I've
been trying to tell them I no already have. That's 4 issues so far this week.
Some time after 28 February 2006 we bought a Sunbeam kitchen slicer,
after first deciding that it was no good. I didn't record when we changed our minds, but it
couldn't have been much later. We've been using it for slicing bread ever since, but lately
it's been labouring. Is that my bread, or is the slicer already wearing out? Recently
ALDI came up with a special offer, a slicer
for $69, and since we can always return the things, we bought one to try it out.
You can certainly tell that it's a cheap unit: the finish is pretty terrible, and the
thickness adjustment is very primitive compared to the Sunbeam (on the left). The Sunbeam
has a nice, large knob with clear distinction down to 1 mm, while the ALDI unit has a tiny
little scale (on the right of the adjusting knob), which is also out by 2 mm:
It also doesn't have a safety switch—a big plus in my book. But it works! It cuts
bread more cleanly than the Sunbeam, and certainly with less effort. Is that because the
Sunbeam is failing, because my bread is heavier than typical Australian bread, or because it
has the wrong kind of knife? We were concerned about the last point when we bought it: it's
much finer:
Found another spider under the fridge, this time very dead, but clearly
a Huntsman. Took some photos for
comparison with the spider I photographed last month:
It's difficult to recognize the features, but the features round the head look very
different. I get the feeling that these are not the same kind of spider. Still no idea
what the first one was.
Gradually, as spring approaches, we're doing more work in the garden. Finished spraying the
weeds by the fence to the SE paddock, and did a bit more pruning. We should transplant
the Erysimums soon.
The money for the sale of my camera was due today, and I went to look at my PayPal account. Sure enough, there it was: “eBay
Payment Received (Unique Transaction ID #6BS391477R976912N)”. All details looked
good:
All OK, right? Well, no. I left out one minor detail that turned everything on its head:
the real page looked like this.
See the difference? The one line: “Status: cancelled”.
That's horrible! How can the page be titled “eBay Payment Received” when it
hasn't been?
I'm not the only person who's confused. The winning bidder (whom I call buyer fred on those
pages) seems terminally confused:
look all im doing since last week was sending money from my bank to paypal so in my paypal account have money right?
Did you charge to my paypal account or my bank account because it seems that when i check my bank account you tried to
+get money there so that is why it was cancelled. because i have no money in my bank account. they are all being sent to
+paypal.
OK, he's new to eBay, so I prepared a reply
telling him what to do, tempered by my extremely
negative experience with PayPal in the past. They now have a phone number you can
call, so did that and spoke to Andy. It went something like this:
Grog
The display on the web site is extremely misleading.
Andy
The payment has been cancelled.
Grog
Yes, but then it shouldn't say “payment received”.
Andy
The payer didn't have enough money in his account.
Grog
I know that, but that's not the point.
Andy
Let me explain how this works.
Grog
I understand how this works. I'm complaining about the misleading info on the web site.
Andy
You should have received a mail message. Maybe it got lost.
Grog
I didn't receive a mail message, and I'm not talking about mail.
This went on for a while, and finally I asked to speak to a supervisor. I was connected to
somebody with the unlikely name Ty (and these people are all surprised when I ask how to
spell the name). She repeated exactly the same litany, and seemed absolutely incapable of
understanding that the page was misleading. In fact, I don't think she understood that I
was saying that the page was misleading, or even that she knew what “misleading”
meant.
The term “litany” is probably more appropriate than it seems. I suspect that
most of these people produce their responses from a script (“prayer book”),
which would also explain why you can't interrupt them: they'd lose their place. It's even
possible that PayPal actively discourages thought, since it can lead in the wrong direction.
The result is that most of these people fail the Turing Test.
Discussed the matter on IRC, where the general
opinion agreed with me—by no means a foregone conclusion on that channel.
Despite all the trouble that I've had with PayPal, they did one thing right: their
contact phone
number page requires you to log in. It then produces your registered phone number (in
E.164 format), the primary email ID you use
for PayPal, and a six-digit PIN valid for one hour. It also refers to an account
number which may be used to verify your identity.
This is so much better than what
the banks ask for (name, address, date of birth, etc). Firstly you can't even get a
PIN until you log in, and even if you forget to delete things at an Internet cafe, or
somebody sniffs your traffic, you still have to produce a bank account number to back it up.
Another postal pickup slip in the mailbox this morning. Yvonne picked it up—another two issues of c't
magazine, this time issues 10 and 11, apparently sent by surface mail on
29 May 2009. That's particularly strange, because I had already
received replacement copies some time ago, and also the original issues some time later.
Started writing a list of which issues I
received when, somewhat hampered by lack of records. That makes six issues that I
have received this week alone (16, 17, 12, 13, 10, 11).
In the evening, received another mail message from the Heise subscription department,
telling me—without further details—that the problem had been fixed and that I
should now be getting my magazine as normal. They're also giving me 10 free
issues—presumably in addition to the 9 duplicates I have already received. After
dealing with PayPal, it's like a breath of fresh air.
Finally got round to transplanting
the Erysimums (the purple bushes in the
“before” and “after” photos below). Problem: we have far too many,
and after moving all I could find place for, and bringing a few to Chris (who also got the
roses), things hardly look any different (run the cursor over an
image to compare it with its neighbour):
I'm also a little concerned about whether the Erysimums will survive transplantation. We've
had varied experience in the past: we've had transplanted bushes die on us, and yet all
these bushes were single twigs only a little over a year ago:
More thoughts on long telephoto lenses. Rokinon have an 800 mm f/8 mirror that, for some
reason, is currently being sold very cheaply, in this case for under $200 US. Decided that,
with the help of a Dandelion, it would be worth the trouble and ordered one. It's also being sent by
USPS First Class
International mail, which is surprisingly cheap. Especially in view of my experience
with deutscher Post, I'd be happier if I
had more details on the transit time than “varies by country”, but I've been
told that it's not too bad. We'll see. At least I get a tracking number.
Apple have released another security update, so
tried to install it, and once again ran into trouble. It's not clear why. My problems in
the past showed an extremely slow download rate followed by a complete abortion of the
transfer. This time I seem to have had three different problems. The transfer of the
security update started normally and ran at a reasonable speed, and then failed after a
little over 50%, producing an error window for about 3 seconds, just long enough for me to
look at the display and note it was there. Something about a network error. That's not
impossible, but I had no difficulty loading it from my FreeBSD system, and the installation went without further
problems. It could have been a network problem, but I see too many cases where the Apple
transfer fails and the FreeBSD transfer goes without a hitch. At the very least, the Apple
downloader should be more resilient.
Updating “QuickTime” was different: this seems to be a genuine issue with
Apple's software update. After multiple (successful) downloads, I got the same message each
time:
Potentially this could be data corruption, but not several times over.
The issues with updating “iTunes” were similar, but not the same. I didn't see
any error message for a direct attempt, just a red cross to the left of the icon, whatever
that may mean. Went off looking for a place to download it from the Web, and once again was
bitten by this stupidity that would only offer me a version for Microsoft. Callum Gibson
followed up on this and found that you could fool the web site by getting firefox to
pretend it was Safari, which enabled him to load an Apple version of the software.
He pointed me to the URL, which I was able to download with sensible tools in no time at all:
But when I came to install it, I had a number of problems. Firstly, I had rebooted the
machine after installing the security update. I haven't found a way to get Apple to
automatically mount NFS file systems where I want them, so I've written a little
script. And I haven't found a way to get Apple to run scripts automatically after reboot
(something like /etc/rc.local), so I run them manually. And this time I had
forgotten, so I get an error message:
No, this isn't because it's a directory, not a “folder”. I mounted the file system, verified that it was there,
and still got the same message. Apparently “Finder” doesn't check again:
if it wasn't there last time, it can't find it again. So I moved the file
to /var/tmp:
No idea what that meant. Corrupt file? file(1) tells me:
=== grog@boskoop (/dev/ttyp3) ~ 1 -> file /dereel/home/var/tmp/iTunes8.2.1.dmg /dereel/home/var/tmp/iTunes8.2.1.dmg: VAX COFF executable not stripped - version 376
That looks like corruption, doesn't it? FreeBSDfile(1) says the same thing. But it seems that this is “normal”:
Apple's file(1) doesn't even recognize its own files:
Compared md5 checksums with Callum, and discovered they were different. Downloaded
the file again, and the checksum was different again. And again it was a VAX COFF
executable. My best guess is that Apple puts some tracking information in everything that
you download, and that's what's changing the checksums.
So what's wrong with the file? Maybe it's a newer format than my version of Mac OS can
understand. Ultimately, though, I don't care: I don't use iTunes, and the only
reason to install it was to have the software update screen empty. So I'm giving up. I
just idly wonder whether this is the reason for the red cross on my direct installation
attempt.
c't: problem solved?
So far this week I've received 6 issues of c't
magazine. So what was in the letterbox this morning? A seventh, of course, issue 13
sent deutsche Post surface mail. That
should be the end of it, though, as far as I can see.
More problems with the sale of my Olympus E-510 today; it seems
that the buyer is pretty inexperienced in these matters. Certainly the problems we had
during the day suggest that many people are thoroughly confused by these web sites. By the
evening he had sent me three email messages, two of which were filtered out by Spamassassin,
but we still didn't have a conclusion.
More work on the Erysimums, and I've now
done as many as I want to do at the moment. I'm still rather concerned about how unhappy
they look after transplantation:
Pulled one last one out, took it over to Chris and planted it there, also removing most of
her roses. At home, planted
a “Captain Cook”
Callistemon in its place.
Still wondering why the ALDI kitchen slicer
worked so much better than the Sunbeam,
took the blades off to compare them—something that you need to do relatively
frequently to clean them. They're the same size, but not the same mount. By comparison,
the Sunbeam blade is the same mount as my old AEG slicer, whose blade fell from its
mountings some years ago.
The Sunbeam blade had a distinctly noticeable ridge on the blade, which clearly would
influence its ability to cut. Sharpened it in the electric knife sharpener, which seemed to
work quite well, and replaced it. We'll see tomorrow how well it works.
The ALDI slicer was a different matter. Put the blade back, tightened it up, and it was
completely off centre, wobbling about 5 mm. Took it off again to take another look, and the
entire mounting came with it:
It would seem easy enough to put it back together, but look at that strip of metal over the
central pin: that's an excuse for a bearing. Putting it together is difficult at best, and
I have to wonder how long such a primitive construction would last. It's a good thing that
ALDI takes their goods back with no questions asked; that's what they'll do this time, too.
Hopefully the Sunbeam is now OK.
It's getting cooler again—by the time we went to bed, the outside temperature was
barely over 0°. That shows off our horrible Fujitsu air conditioners from their worst side. After several hours running, with
the “thermostat” set at 30° (the maximum), we had the following situation in the
bedroom:
That's not because they can't heat any better, though the terrible insulation doesn't help
much. It's not trying, because it thinks it's warm enough. What a crock!
More fun with the camera sale today. My buyer finally had the money, but even with
PayPal's help he wasn't able to complete the
transaction. Decided to send him another request for money, and ran into new problems:
The trouble was, there was nothing wrong with the email address: buyer fred <msuser@msn.com>, just as the standards dictate. But PayPal
wants only the msuser@msn.com, and the message
doesn't tell you that.
The good news is that he got the message, and he was able to process it, so I now have my
money. And the display on the PayPal web site confirms my objections to their presentation.
Here the cancelled transaction, then the successful one:
Some details were different: apart from the not-so-obvious difference in the status, the
shipping address is now missing (why?), and the sum has changed—they've deducted fully
2.46% of the total sum for their service. That's more than many credit cards. I'll have to
reconsider offering PayPal for my other auctions, or asking a surcharge for it (handling
charge, I suppose).
To be fair, when I looked at the page again later, it had changed. It now contained the
following at the top:
That's good if you know you have to wait for it. But it should have been there immediately,
and it's the wrong way round: there should be something there saying “Not
OK to post” until it is.
And then Fred came back and asked me if there's a lens with the camera, after I had gone to
great lengths to make it clear that it was only a body.
That wasn't all: later in the day I received email asking me to rate my experience with
PayPal support. I filled it in as you'd expect; it's a pity they don't send you a copy of
the information, though. I should collect it somewhere.
I had been expecting it, but decided not to remove any plants. We'll see how well they
cope. The one I'm expecting to do worst is
the Chlorophytum, which looked like
this:
Tried out the Sunbeam slicer this morning:
success. So it was just the blade. I wonder how it got that blunt in just 3 years;
our previous one lasted 15 years without getting blunt, and they appear to be the same make.
Maybe it's the difference between a fine blade and the sawtooth one on the old slicer.
The weather was nice in the afternoon, and Chris suggested we went for a ride. It was my
first time in almost 5 months, and Chris jokingly asked if my
saddle had gone mouldy. Yes, it had:
We didn't get moving until after 4 pm, and it started getting quite cool, so we didn't stay
long. Still, it's a good thing that we finally got round to doing something. I wonder why
I ride so little.
Chris along for dinner, and of course more crazy cat photos:
More playing around with the Apple software update today (Why? Just curious, I suppose),
and managed to get both iTunes and QuickTime—and they both failed with
the same message:
I wonder how that can happen. Also installed a Safari update, which went without
incident, but it insisted on rebooting immediately—after installing a web
browser! Yes, it said so in advance (that's the meaning of the funny arrow-link symbol at
the left of the entries in the photo above), though I still don't understand why, but at
least Microsoft gives you the choice to defer it.
As it happened, I was using the scanner at the time, and the scanner doesn't play clean with
shutdown requests, so the shutdown was aborted. Who says that bugs never cancel each other
out?
Using the Avant Stellar keyboard brings back
to me why I stopped: the firmware is really broken. Today I once again had the situation
where I typed in Alt-Backspace (delete word backwards under Emacs), and the
keyboard added a Ctrl, shutting down my X session. Decided that this was a little
silly, and that I should remap the keys with xmodmap. Spent a good amount of time
with that, only to discover that you can't remap Caps_Lock with xmodmap on
this particular keyboard: it remains Caps_Lock even if you remap it. And you can't
just remap some keys with the keyboard firmware: the remapping gives them the same key
number as another key, so xmodmap can no longer differentiate between them. Ended up
using the keyboard remapping, but removing the “Terminate Server” function.
A bit more work in the garden. Now
the Erysimums are gone from the central
part of the garden, planted a few Alyssum
seeds there, and Yvonne continued with poppies
and Gypsophila. It was too cool to
really enjoy things, though, and didn't do much else except a bit of pruning.
There's yet another new TV channel on the air, “GO!”, operated by Channel 9 “MSN”. It's interesting to note
that the names of these new channels don't seem to have any relationship to the existing
ones, and they've done a very good job of hiding any information on the channel, helped by
the name, which just invites false positives. Even the Channel 9 web site search function
didn't find it.
To my surprise, we can receive it here. Spent some time reconfiguring MythTV to receive it, with the surprising result that it
just seemed to work, though pulling down the programme guide took forever (well, long enough
that I couldn't be bothered waiting).
I've been eyeing the Olympus ZUIKO DIGITAL ED 50mm F2.0
Macro lens for some time and waiting for a cheaper one to appear on the market. They
seem to be very popular: I see lots of (positive) reviews, but I've only ever seen one used
one on the market, and that was an ex-demonstration model. Today one came in on eBay Australia, and didn't even attract too much
attention—only from experienced bidders, it would seem. The first bid was less than 6
minutes before the end of the auction, another followed 40 seconds later, I put my bid in 1
minute and 17 seconds before the end—and somebody put in a higher bid 1 second
before the end of the auction. Still, it was lower than mine, so I got the lens for about
the same price as a used one in the USA, but with cheaper postage. That should be enough
for the while: I'll have 5 Olympus mount lenses and another 3 Pentax mount lenses that I can
use with the adapter.
Finally into town today for my blood test, this time at the alternative place, which proved
to be much quieter than the Base Hospitallast month, and was seen to in a matter of minutes. If I had arrived 5
minutes later, I probably wouldn't have had to wait at all. And then I discovered that I
didn't need to be fasting for the blood test! I could have done it any old time.
Then down to Curtis St to try out a new barber's shop, but was mightily put off by the
ambiance, and fortunately discovered in time that I didn't have any cash, so off to find an
ATM, and decided against returning.
Back at the car, discovered that the intermittent issues I've been having with the starter
motor are no longer intermittent: the starter no longer worked at all. Called Yvonne to come and pick me up, and off to finally post the E-510. Thank God that's
over.
Yvonne showed up and we tow-started the car, then off to John Stevens to get him to repair
it. But he was off sick, so we just left the car there and went home again, stopping at
Formosa Gardens to buy some
fertilizer and a few flowerpots.
Back home, wanted to plant some stuff in the pots, but the weather was too bad, and ended up
doing some reading, something I normally don't seem to find time for any more.
Partially against my better judgement, bought a grain mill attachment for the Kenwood mixer
on eBay in the evening. I'm still greatly
concerned about the reliability of the units, but they seem to be the most reliable I can
find in Australia, and I need something to replace the Bosch unit.
Mail from Tom Maynard today, explaining why so many eBay auctions receive bids only seconds before the end: they're placed automatically
by a “sniper”. He also pointed me to a couple, one completely free, and the
other with a limited free account that allows up to 5 bids a week. Excellent idea—I'm
surprised I didn't find out about this earlier.
There are issues, of course: because of the way they work, you have to divulge your eBay
user name and password to them, so there's the potential for abuse. There's no reason to
believe that any of these facilities are dishonest, but to be on the safe side, I think I'll
change my password each time I use them.
Another strange thing is one particular limitation of the version with the paying and free
accounts: with the free account, it places the bid 8 seconds before the end of the auction.
The paying one places it even closer, only 5 seconds before (but configurable).
Why? Less than 30 seconds before the end of an auction, almost nobody raises their final
bid. All you're left with are the bids that have been decided some time in advance. And in
case two are the same, it's the first that wins, in this case the free account. I
suspect that this detail hasn't been fully considered.
Quiet day somehow. Did some “cooking” (preparation of sourdough and kimchi) and some gardening (planted a lot of seeds in
preparation for the coming of spring), and that was about that.
The buyer of my E-510 body apparently wasn't expecting it to be only a body, and now he's looking for a lens he
can afford. He's sent me a couple of questions about auctions for lenses, all of which have
so far been unsuitable. I've written an introduction to what to expect.
A note in the letterbox this morning telling me that two of my eBay purchases had arrived. I also still hadn't heard
back from John Stevens about the fate of my car, so decided to go into Ballarat. John was
there, but still looking a lot the worse for wear. He had had trouble looking at the car
without the dongle for the ignition immobilizer, which I hadn't been able to fit under the
door of the office. It looks as if it might be related, so he's going to disable the
immobilizer. I can't see anybody stealing an 18 year old Mitsubishi Magna with 250,000 km
on the clock.
Back home and looked at my new toys. The ZUIKO DIGITAL ED 50mm F2.0
Macro is as I expected, but somehow it's not as much fun as the other lenses. After
all, I already have two other lenses that cover this focal length, and the real use is only
for macro photography. Like any further lens I'm likely to buy, including the 800 mm mirror
that hasn't arrived yet, it's not going to see as much use as the ones I already have.
The other toy was the M42 adaptor with
the dandelion chip. That wasn't so successful: it came without any
instructions, and following the instructions on the web, it just plain Didn't Work. Checked
the contacts, but they looked OK:
At least it gave me an opportunity to use the new lens. Wrote to the vendor, who confirmed
that I used it the way it was intended, and who suspects it might be because I'm using an
E-30, with which he doesn't have any experience. I doubt that, but it's certainly a
possibility. Now where's the E-510 when I need it?
More planting work in the afternoon. Discovered that the Lobelia punnets contained many
more plants than we had expected, a total of 14 plants. We only needed 6 for the pots, so
planted the rest in the garden. I wish I had a good feeling for what they look like.
Somehow all photos are so vague.
Yvonne went shopping today and came back with lots of things:
another eBay purchase (grain mill) and lots of
stuff from ALDI: a power usage meter, an
active antenna for TV, and a microwave oven for less than $50.
Initial playing around with the antenna suggests that it is completely non-functional: a
piece of wire does better. But that was connected to a radio, and I can well imagine that
some brain-damaged designer deliberately filters out the FM radio band. To be investigated.
The power meter is designed to be connected to the main power connection to
the house, making it completely useless for 3 phase connections. We don't have that, but an
examination of our switchboard suggests that I should take the warning seriously to only
have it installed by a qualified electrician. And I don't know if I want to rely on the
thing enough to do that.
The microwave oven was simpler: they're established technology, and this one seems as good
as any other. It has its differences in the user interface, of course, including
unnecessary keys (to set the clock, you press CLOCK then Cancel before
entering the (ugly 12 hour) time). But it does have a numeric keypad, unlike the Panasonic,
which cost nearly 5 times as much. I suspect it'll stay.
The grain mill was the most interesting: it is
obviously a Kenwood version of my Bosch grain mill, and some parts are identical. About the
only thing that differs are the connections for the housing and the scroll.
But this similarity made it very clear that the mill was anything but unused. The scroll
(right) is badly damaged, much more so than the 30-year old Bosch scroll on the left:
I won't be able to use that. Sent a message to the vendor, who called me back
apologetically in the evening: as I had guessed, he hadn't known. Now to see what a
replacement scroll will cost.
Had to play around with my new macro lens, of course. It's funny to have an f/2 lens on the
camera. Did some comparative shots to get a feeling for the depth of field. Some worked
out OK, like this Narcissus at
f/2 and f/4:
A comparison with the photo immediately after the
frost shows that the browning of the ends is new. If that's all the damage it took,
it'll be easy enough to bear.
I hadn't intended to go into town again so soon, but a number of things ganged up on me: I
ran out of carbon dioxide for the beer kegs, my 800 mm mirror lens arrived, and John Stevens
finally had my car ready. The first one would have been enough to go into town—I'd
die of thirst otherwise—but the third meant that Yvonne had to come with me. Over to pick her up, where they were breaking in a horse.
Why are they so bad? There are a number of reasons:
They're taken with the Nikon L1, a point-and-shoot camera. I've decided that I prefer a
viewfinder after all, something that I hadn't expected two years ago.
More important is the way you adjust zoom on a point-and-shoot camera, with two buttons
which increase or decrease the focal length. It's much more difficult to get exactly
the length you want, and you need a third hand to do it. Thus the incorrect framing in
both photos (and the others on my raw
photo page)
The arena is nice and cool in the summer, and the eucalyptus trees are pretty, but it
makes for a really terrible background for decent photos, and the shadows don't improve
anything either.
Into town, where the gas people (really fire extinguisher people) weren't there. Off to
pick up my car: there was nothing wrong with the starter motor. The problems were caused by
the immobilization device, which had decided not to pass anything through to the starter
motor relay. That's not the first time that we've had trouble with that thing;
7 years ago I had similar problems. The biggest nuisance
is that the brain-dead radio in the car forgot all its settings when the battery was
disconnected (to stop the security device from screaming), and there's no way to set the
frequencies directly: you have to search for them, and it only finds anything if the signal
strength is sufficient. And that's never the case with ABC Classic FM in Ballarat.
Picked up the lens, off to get my cylinder filled up—they were back by the time I got
there—and off to look for a new radio for the car. Despite price drops, they're still
more expensive than I can justify. I don't use the car enough, as is clear from the fact
that today was the first time I have I filled up the petrol tank since the end of May.
Back home and connected up the gas cylinder and observed carefully. I have a horrible
feeling that I have a gas leak somewhere. But how do I find out where? Cart the whole
thing off and put it in the bath?
Despite being the cheapest alternative (USPS First Class Mail), the lens arrived very quickly; it was only sent on 7 August 2008 US time, 6 days ago. That compares favourably with UPS. So do the prices: only about a third of what UPS (or more expensive USPS)
postage costs. I wonder why nobody uses it.
One reason could be the “tracking”, of course, which just plain Doesn't Work.
I've been trying to follow that shipment since it was shipped, but even after arrival it was
claiming that the packet hadn't been picked up yet:
The first result: it works, and there's no comparison with the horrible additional lens I tested in February.
But focusing was (as expected) a nightmare, even with Live View and 10x magnification. Even
with two tripods, there was a significant amount of camera shake, and the adjustment is far
too coarse; it really needs a fine adjuster. The results aren't impossibly bad, but it's
difficult to decide whether they're low contrast, shaken or just out of focus. Here full
frames taken with the mirror (left) with its dedicated 2x adaptor, giving a focal length of
1600 mm f/16, and the Hanimex 300 mm f/5.5 with 2x and 3x converters (giving 1800 mm f/33):
All the downloads failed with the same message, and it's repeatable. I can't believe that
this is corruption in the download, and there'd be a lot of noise if all these packages
really had corrupt checksums, so I've got to assume that it's a configuration problem with
the machine. But where? I really don't want to know, but in contrast to iTunes, I need
some of these updates. What a pain!
This isn't the first time I've seen things like this, but strangely I've never seen any
advice about how to avoid or handle it. Took the lid off the seed tray and put them
outside, where hopefully they won't be too unhappy.
The Ipomoea seeds looked different, as if
they were dying:
Cooking Indian food again today, a variant of alu
tikka from a Women's Weekly cookbook. Used the new grain mill for the first time.
As expected from the condition of the scroll, it didn't manage all of it. Left the output,
right what was left in the housing:
Chris along to help us eat the food this evening. She's not happy with the service, and
will make a comment in her diary that I poured red wine into her white wine glass. You read
it here first.
Somebody suggested that I try out Panorama
Maker 5 Pro (there's no non-Pro version) today. It's commercial
software, but it claims to do some things that hugin can't, including panoramas in two
dimensions.
This appears to be a misunderstanding on my part. I'm pretty sure that Hugin could always do multi-row
panoramas.
Downloaded it and ran into a brick wall: another codec overrun error message. It's fairly clear that something is
wrong with boskoop—but how do I fix it?
Presumably another effect of the bad weather was a power failure at 2:57, which lasted for 5 hours.
Somehow I had expected it to take that long. I can't imagine people out there in the dark
in this kind of weather. Still, it's annoying. 19th power outage this year.
More playing around with the new mirror lens today, and did some detail comparisons with the
Zuiko
DIGITΛL ED 70-300mm F4.0-5.6 telephoto. Result: it's not as good. It's a far cry from
the horrible supplementary lens that I
tested in February 2009, but I can get more
detail by blowing up the images taken at 300 mm with the Zuiko than taking photos native
with the Rokinon. Here Olympus left and Rokinon right, 25% of the width of the Rokinon
image:
The gap at the top of the blade is about 1mm thinner than at the bottom. That's not even
obvious when slicing bread, but when making thin slices
of celeriac it's very obvious. How did
that happen? The various parts of the slicer are screwed onto a frame, and I could add some
shims, but first I want to understand how it happened. It's unlikely that the guide got
bent: it's still completely flat.
A bit of beer keg maintenance: ran out of stout, and had to refill. Now I have no stout
left, and not much Groggy Ale, so it's high time to go to Melbourne and get some
ingredients. Also tested the gas lines and found the leak. No wonder they're difficult to
find; it was, as I half suspected, at a T piece, but it only leaked when the hoses were
hanging in a particular direction.
Anders Langworthy contacted me about the problems I've been having with my Avant Stellar keyboards. He confirms that they're not
atypical:
I have have used 5 or 6 different ones (a client loves them and has them all over the
office). I have experienced the “sticking on” problem. My recollection is
that it only occurred with certain keyboard/computer combinations and not others, but I
could be mistaken. The very annoying amnesia “I'm going to forget all my
programming” problem is ubiquitous, however. I have the reprogramming keystrokes
memorized to the point where it happens nearly subconsciously. And on occasion the
keyboards appear to choke and hard lock, requiring a power off. So, not perfect, but
better than the alternatives.
A pity, really. I wonder when somebody will come up with a real viable replacement for the
Omnikey keyboards.
Somehow spring is in the air. It's no warmer than it has been, but there's something that
suggests that it's going to warm up. Certainly the flowers are in on the act: the last
rosebud of autumn has held up through the winter (certainly helped by my decision not to
remove the bush), and today started a sort of half-hearted bloom:
As if to mark the point, Will Tatnell along to prepare to carry out the earthworks that we
planned at the end of autumn. More discussions, and off
into town to buy some gravel. On the way stopped off at a scrap yard
in Sebastopol looking for a
second-hand car radio. The cheapest (and nastiest) they had cost $50, and of course didn't
have the right connectors. They gave me the name of a radio company, Thomas, somewhere off
Sturt St. To be investigated at a later date.
Off to Melbourne today to do things I've been putting off for nearly 3 months, in the
process throwing Chris out of bed to borrow her mobile fridge. For some reason it's always
so much stress, and today I decided to take it easier, stopping off to take a few photos,
like this little creek just east
of Bannockburn:
In Melbourne, to Grain and Grape and
picked up some supplies, then decided that I should try some new shops before going to the
Queen Victoria Market. Off through the toll
tunnel, where the exit signs were so bad that I missed my exit and went as far as Toorak
Road before I could turn around and pay yet more toll to get to be about as far from my
destination as I was when I started. What a waste of time and money!
After 45 minutes I finally got to Minh
Phat in Nicholson St, Abbotsford and found a parking space. Big shop, lots of stuff, but not much of what
I needed. I don't think I'll come back soon: it's difficult to get to and difficult to find
parking.
Next I wanted to go way out to The Dutch Shop in
Blackburn, but by
this time it was 12:00, and the market closes at 14:00. Decided to go back to the market,
but passing through Johnston St I saw a number of Spanish restaurants, and thought that I
might find some Mexican food—one of the things I was looking for
was Masa harina that didn't fall
apart when you pressed the tortilla. Got out and took a look around and found the
Casa iberica which (fortunately) proved to be rather ineptly named: there was lots of South American
food there, in fact more than I have seen anywhere else. Got my tortillas, and also a
different brand of masa harina which they said would hold together better.
Amusingly, La Casa Iberica is also in my Foodie's guide, immediately above the entry for the
Dutch Shop.
By this time there was no hope of reaching the market before it closed. On to the La
Parisienne Pâté and spent far too much money on cheese
and foie gras, then on down Grattan
Street to where I lived 50 years ago. The house is still standing, but only just, and
they've removed the outside staircase under which I built my first chemistry laboratory:
Things look very different from the last time I was here, nearly 9 years ago. They've completely changed the front, and they've pulled down the
ivy that was round the back of the house:
Across the road to the University and had lunch on what used to be the sports ground when I
went to school there. Things have changed so much that I had difficulty working out where
the school used to be, but it must have been at the top of these stairs, to the left:
Back home and decided to try a new way, via
Werribee across the Brisbane Ranges and
through Stieglitz,
Meredith and Mount Mercer,
running into significant trouble with Melbourne traffic in the process. The map shows the
route I took, not quite the route I would take next time. The sun was low, and photos were
out of the question; in fact, the light was so strange that I had difficulty recognizing the
road from Meredith to Mount Mercer, and I missed the turnoff and ended up going 20 km out of
the way. Still, it's a viable alternative.
The original URL of the Google Map was
http://maps.google.com.au/maps?f=d&source=s_d&saddr=Bouverie+St&daddr=Bouverie+St+to:Pelham+St+to:Franklin+St+to:Franklin+St+to:Dudley+St+to:Dudley+St+to:-37.886235,144.688568+to:werribee+to:Ballan+Rd+to:Gilmores+Rd+to:Butchers+Rd+to:Meredith+Steiglitz+Rd+to:meredith+to:Kliens+Rd&geocode=FQ41v_0diPOjCA%3BFTAvv_0dh_KjCA%3BFaowv_0dK-CjCA%3BFV4Xv_0dCuqjCA%3BFdsSv_0djtujCA%3BFbITv_0dqsyjCA%3BFRsIv_0dMK-jCA%3B%3B%3BFXaQv_0ddgOcCA%3BFQhfvv0dbKWaCA%3BFaoxvv0dy6eYCA%3BFZ4Pvv0dRvuXCA%3B%3BFZXzvv0dN06RCA&hl=en&mra=dpe&mrcr=0&mrsp=7&sz=11&via=1,2,3,4,5,6,7,9,10,11&sll=-37.778856,144.935074&sspn=0.481386,0.989456&ie=UTF8&ll=-37.874853,144.493561&spn=0.961521,1.978912&z=10,
but by August 2024 Google Maps didn't want to know any more. It also no longer allows
that many stops.
Back home, and there was a new horse: Darah, who is finally
back from Chris' place. It seems that Yvonne and Chris had
been making bets how long it would take for me to notice, but in fact it was only a couple
of minutes. Does this mean I'll get to ride more?
While he was there, also moved the big table out of the “dining room” into the
garage. It was far too big for the narrow room, so we moved the old, ex-Mike Smith Memorial Room kitchen table in there, and hopefully I will
now have a bit more space for my photography:
My seed trays are germinating nicely, but sometimes I wonder if I've done the right thing.
On the one hand, last year our Ipomoeas
hardly germinated at all, and this year they're going fine:
Will Tatnell finally along today to do the earthworks we've been planning for over 3
months. He made pretty good progress, though his Bobcat was a little large for some of the
work, and we had to leave the smallest for some other solution. Still, things have changed
a lot, as Saturday's house photos will show:
It's becoming clearer all the time that getting good software for “Open Source”
systems is getting more and more difficult, especially in the multimedia arena. So it's
time to think about setting up a virtual machine server so that I can provide an environment
for programs I want to run. But which virtual machine system? I understand the principles
well, but I've never actually done it. Took the DVD from one of my copies of issue 17 of
c't and installed the Debian/Xen server they supplied, but it came with
almost no documentation (even the article referred to last year's article), and clearly they
wanted to install an environment that I didn't want to have, so instead decided to try the
NetBSD version, involving
downloading the latest ISO.
While I did that, did more investigation of the Apple software download problem. Why did I
get a different SHA1 checksum every time? At the time I thought it was some kind of
branding of the binaries, but then I noticed that Apple publish SHA1 checksums for the
binaries on their web site. And mine didn't match.
Tried the same load to my remote web site and got the correct checksum. With rsync I
was able to fix the data. Tried it with the NetBSD ISO on w3.lemis.com (external site) and dereel.lemis.com and
found:
The EOF was the same, and so was the modification time stamp. Clearly the corruption was in
detail. To save downloading the entire 200 MB again, decided to use rsync, which
should be more specific.
sent 108614 bytes received 292358 bytes 8623.05 bytes/sec
total size is 240371712 speedup is 599.47
The -c option for rsync is needed because the file size and modification
timestamp are the same, and without that option it wouldn't do anything. After that, the
checksums were correct. So by complaining about Apple I've been shooting the messenger; it
seems that just about every larger file that I've downloaded has been corrupted
somewhere. In this example, I've had nearly 300 kB of data downloaded to fix the binary.
How can that happen? TCP should catch this sort of thing. But that's the problem: the
satellite connection doesn't use TCP: instead, it uses BST between the
satellite modem and some point beyond the satellite link. And it looks as if the error
detection of this BST implementation isn't all that it's cracked up to be. Sent a message
off to Wideband support; I
wonder what they can do about it.
To confirm that this really was the issue, installed the latest Apple security update, which
installed without a problem. But downloading to w3 is an issue, because most
downloads nowadays seem to want a web browser with Java and Flash and irrelevant stuff. You
can't just point ftp (or wget if you're using Linux) at the URL and pull it
down: there's no obvious way to find the URL. Fired up wireshark on one file and
confirmed yes, indeed, there's a perfectly normal HTML request in there and struggling to
get out.
So, currently my workaround for this really serious bug is:
Run wireshark (or better, probably ngrep) to capture the HTTP request.
Run ftp to pull in the package locally.
Run ftp to pull in the package remotely on w3.
Run rsync -c to fix the breakage.
There are a couple of potential improvements: first, omit step 2 (step 4 will automatically
pull in the whole file) and secondly repeat step 4 until the SHA1 checksum matches (it has
done every time so far). What really gets me, though, is that currently just
about every file has data corruption. Apple was the only one that noticed.
After all this, installed NetBSD as planned.
It's as spartan as ever, and didn't even install any of the packages collection. Had plenty
of other stuff to do, so deferred it until later.
One of the things that I was able to do as a result was to test Panorama
Maker 5 Pro. It lived up to my fears. On startup, it automatically changed
directory to ~/Pictures, showing lots of icons for files which had been deleted, but
for which I had forgotten to remove the second (shadow?) file that Apple insists on putting
in the directory. The only choice I was give was to “Open Panorama”, which
suggests to me that there should already been an existing panorama. It showed the usual
too-small window with truncated file names, in the directory ~/Pictures. Tried
selecting “New Folder”, but
that really tried to create a new directory, or so it seemed. It put the
“folder”, with an absolute path name, in what must have been the current
directory. Clearly the directory name is wrong:
Clearly they don't want you to just specify the name of the directory you want: you have to
search for it, directory node for directory node. Did that and got this display:
That shows 26 of the 1630 entries in the directory Photos, conveniently truncating
some of the names. About the best thing that I can say about this is that they are
sorted—still better than the pain I had with Facebooklast month, where I had
to navigate the same directory tree unsorted.
OK, these programs must have some way of accessing files without going to all this pain.
Clearly I need help. And, of course, there's a Help tag at the top of the screen. I
clicked on it and was taken to the middle of the help text. After going to Home,
discovered that there's no tutorial (or it's so well hidden that I didn't find it). And the
description is horribly fragmented (probably intended for the tiny windows that GUI developers seem
to love), so I was continually changing page, not helped by the fact that the contents were
often barely related to the title. For example:
That again does into another window telling me how to select “Folders”,
“Favorite Folders”, Calendars, Activity History and Tags—all sorts of
things, just no files. But I don't want to “browse my system”! I just want
to select the files I want (they're called verandah-1.jpeg
to verandah-5.jpeg, so the wild card verandah-?.jpeg will select them all).
Why do I have to go through this rigmarole? It's also interesting to note that the
directory browser dhows only a subset of the entries in the directories: symlinked
directories, notably ~/Photos, are missing, so I couldn't even access my photos.
As we'll see, it does accept symlinked files. I suspect that this omission is due
to the lack of understanding of file systems which seems typical of the GUI generation.
Finally selected a file, and was immediately transported to this window:
The text is written in black on dark grey to make it easier to read, and there's no way to
return to the Browser window. In fact, I couldn't find any way to do anything useful. It
seems that the different shades of grey at top and bottom indicate whether you can select
the buttons or not, but the colours are so unusual that I'm sure I'm not the only person
who has difficulty deciding which are selectable and which are not. So I stopped the
“Application”.
For what it's worth, this problem isn't unique to Panorama Maker 5 Pro: hugin has it too, and so, it seems, do all
the “user friendly” GUI programs out there. It's one of the reasons why I
avoid using them. How do you fix this problem? I don't know how in this horrible
impoverished GUI world, so I used real tools, the way I did for hugin. I created a
new directory, ~/panorama, and linked in the files that I wanted:
=== grog@boskoop (/dev/ttyp4) ~ 1 -> mkdir panorama === grog@boskoop (/dev/ttyp4) ~ 2 -> cd panorama === grog@boskoop (/dev/ttyp4) ~/panorama 3 -> ln -s ~/Photos/20090815/verandah-?.jpeg . === grog@boskoop (/dev/ttyp4) ~/panorama 4 -> l total 10
-rw-r--r-- 2 grog 1001 2187855 Aug 15 13:43 verandah-1.jpeg
-rw-r--r-- 2 grog 1001 2156420 Aug 15 13:43 verandah-2.jpeg
-rw-r--r-- 2 grog 1001 2072975 Aug 15 13:44 verandah-3.jpeg
-rw-r--r-- 2 grog 1001 1943281 Aug 15 13:44 verandah-4.jpeg
-rw-r--r-- 2 grog 1001 1776191 Aug 15 13:44 verandah-5.jpeg
Then I restarted Panorama Maker 5 Pro, which promptly forgot any reference to a
directory and went back to the ~/Pictures directory. Fortunately that's right next
to the ~/panorama directory, so I was able to select it directly. It came up without
a listing, just thumbnails of the (symlinked) images in the directory:
It's a good thing I didn't have more files in the directory; apart from the difficulty of
navigating potentially thousands of files, it takes for ever. I found another
directory, ~/foo, with over 4000 entries, all symlinks to files on dereel.
Clearly this was some test I did a while ago. Selecting this directory takes several
minutes, all the time maxing out my puny CPU and displaying the reassuring text
“Ready” at bottom left. When, after 2½ minutes of CPU time and much more
elapsed time, it completed, it displayed photo thumbnails in what proves to be chronological
(and not reverse chronological!) order:
Look at the scroll bar on the right to get an idea of how much you need to look through.
Still, this is looking more promising. Back to the ~/panorama directory, it had
already selected the box “Auto-Select by Group”, so all I needed to do was to
press “Next” at bottom right. Nothing happened.
That's fairly typical for Apple: they love to do things without showing that they're doing
them. Presumably the Microsoft hourglass or the Apple twirling wheel are too negative. But
after a while I realised that this thing was really not doing anything. Messed around and
discovered that I first had to select one of the photos; then they all developed a tick box,
along with a red frame round the image I had selected:
Then I pressed “Next”, and it went off and did its thing, surprisingly quickly,
and produced an image which looked good. I told it to save the image to the
file q.jpeg. It went away, apparently did something, but there was no q.jpeg
in the directory. In fact, there was no q.jpeg anywhere. It had gone and save the
file as ../Pictures/q.jpeg.JPG!
On the other hand, the results were really quite good. The result had a single obvious
discontinuity in the top middle, but on the whole it looked pretty good. It didn't have the
duplicate cat, though that might be more luck than anything:
The poor quality of the Arcsoft image isn't the fault of Arcsoft: this is a demonstration
version, and it limits the size of the saved panorama to (in this case) 1678 x 583, while
the hugin panorama is 4522 x 1481. I see no reason to believe that the image quality
of the paid version of Arcsoft would be worse than that of hugin. Apart from that,
it wasn't quite as good as my manually created hugin image, though that's not a fair
comparison. A better comparison would be an automatically generated hugin panorama.
Went out and did that, and hugin showed itself from its worst side:
So what I ended up was an only partially automatically generated hugin panorama.
Here the Panorama Maker 5 Pro image left, the “automatically”
generated hugin image in the middle, and the manually generated hugin image at
the right.
Like hugin, Arcsoft loses the EXIF information; I still need to run exiftool
to copy that across. In summary, Arcsoft seems to do at least as well
as hugin:
It's much faster. It runs faster on my old Apple than hugin does on my new
AMD Phenom based machine.
The verticals at the edge of the image are vertical. With hugin they're usually
angled. Possibly there's a way to fix it, but I haven't found out how.
The ignorance of file system structures is really terrible. It makes it almost impossible
to find the files that it saves, and it's overly cumbersome for directories with more than
a few files in them. Even my normal Saturday photos would be a pain.
Even with this “modern” GUI interface, it's easier to use than hugin,
which requires lots of additional specifications before it goes off and does its thing.
The documentation is even worse than for hugin. Potentially I could have navigated
much better if there had just been a tutorial, for example.
It could be so much easier with just better structuring: wouldn't it be so much
easier to be able to write this?
$ cd ~/Photos/20090808 $ panorama verandah-panorama.jpeg verandah-?.jpeg
But that's “command line”! Oh horror! That's (apparently) too complicated
for the GUI generation.
In the middle of all that, anotherpower
failure—only one second long, but enough to confirm that the UPS on cvr2
is completely dead. Grrr.
So now we have our garden earthworks done, and there's plenty of follow-up work to do. In
principle we should have worked in the garden all day long. In fact, the weather was
terrible—yet again heavy winds and rain, also a bit of hail—so we stayed
in the house most of the day and didn't do much, though I did put most of my seedlings out
where hopefully they'll get sun without being blown away.
Finally got a reply to my mail to Diggers Club—16 days after I sent it, followed by four reminders. And of course, they're in the
Microsoft world, so he put the answer separate from my message and missed out some of the
questions. When are people going to become literate?
Pollo en adobo for dinner tonight,
mainly so that I could make some Mexican tortillas (which have nothing to do with Spanish tortillas). My previous attempts haven't been overly successful:
the tortillas tended to fall apart before I could bake them. I suspected an issue
with the ratio masa harina to
water, so I went off looking for recipes.
As usual, the recipes didn't agree on the quantities. One wanted two cups of masa and 1 1/3 of water; another wanted
2 cups (8 oz (227 g) or 250 g (8.8 oz)) of masa and 1½ cups (375 ml; this is an
Australian book, so the quantities correspond in this environment) of water. A third book
suggests 175 g masa and a “good” 250 ml water. About the only thing they
all agree on is that the dough should be pressed between two pieces of waxed paper.
So what did I do? I took 100 g of masa and 150 ml water and tried adding it until it
looked right. It didn't; I had to add a total of 175 ml water to 100 g masa before I
got anything like a dough.
The results were pretty much like last time: the dough was easy enough to press, but it
stuck to the waxed paper and fell apart while being peeled off. I was able to make a couple
by peeling off one side of the paper and putting that side in
the Comal, and peeling the other
off when it was a bit firmer. Made up for it with some of the pre-made tortillas I
had bought at the same time. They're much thicker than mine; that's probably part of my
problem. More experimentation needed.
Mail from Stephen Rothwell today, telling me that they're shutting down the AUUG web site
machine. I suppose they're going to replace it, but I'm amazed by the amount of secrecy
about the whole matter: I used to be one of the lead administrators of the box, and I'm the
only one to have ever physically accessed it; but now I
haven't been told of any plans to change it, or what they are. Still, I fear that they're
going ahead with this “AUUG Preservation Society” thing.
Photo day today, and after my net positive experience with Panorama
Maker 5 Pro, decided to try comparison panoramas made with hugin. It's a good thing I did: it seems
that my success yesterday was beginner's luck. Here's what Panorama Maker Pro made
of some of the panoramas. First, the verandah panorama that worked so well yesterday. For
some reason, it completely confused Panorama Maker Pro, which apparently ignored two
of the component images and showed off its specific features by putting the other three
images vertically:
For some reason it also changed the colour balance.
OK, that was “auto”, a good chance to try to tell it to do it horizontally, and
that worked. I've always known that the verandah panorama is a tricky one due to the depth
of field, though hugin would never have generated such complete nonsense. The one
from the north-east of the garden has never given hugin any problems, but it confused
the hell out of Panorama Maker Pro (second image):
Somehow it managed to get the photos in the wrong order, with the result that the house was
included twice. Maybe it didn't like the amount of overlap, but that should make things
easier, not harder. Went into the manual stitch mode, where it again ordered the photos in
the wrong sequence, conveniently omitting the names in the display:
I had named the files garden-ne-a.jpeg to garden-ne-g.jpeg, left to right, so
the one in the middle should in fact have been on the extreme right. The only way to find
out the names (shown here) was to position the mouse on the image and wait a second or so,
after which the EXIF data summary appears. To fix things, you drag the photos to where they
fit, a thing that takes forever on my old Apple.
After doing that and restitching, things look better, but not much:
Here's the opposite effect from the duplicate cat in the panorama I did yesterday. This
time Arcsoft has given me a duplicate lime tree. Here a detail from the hugin
panorama, and what Arcsoft made of it:
This is an order of magnitude worse than the duplicate cats. The duplicate cats occurred
because the cat had physically moved between the component photos. Here the lime tree
clearly hasn't moved: the software hasn't been able to recognize that the images are the
same. And the difference in angle must come from the software: these shots were taken from
a tripod with a pan head, not a ball head (which could have changed the angle).
It also made a mess of the panorama from the north, again including the house twice. Of the
four panoramas I take, it only got one right first time, the simplest one. When I started
taking photos this morning, I was seriously considering buying Panorama Maker Pro.
It's a good thing I did more tests; now I wouldn't use it if it were free.
The CD player (that's what I call it; it includes a tuner, and the manufacturer calls it a
“Micro HiFi System”) that I bought less than five months ago is showing typical signs of age: it frequently can't
recognize a CD when I put it in. That's a Sony,
too, a brand you'd expect to be more reliable. Still, it appears to have a one year
warranty (I declined to take up the offer of a 4 year extended warranty for only 135% of the
purchase price), so it'll have to be repaired.
In the meantime, put back my nine-year-old, flaky unit. Slowly and painfully. Why do so
many of these little things take so much effort? All I really needed to do was to move
antenna, loudspeakers and power to the other unit. What happened was:
I wanted to have both units connected at the same time. The power board was full, so I
had to go and find another. I had one elsewhere which wasn't full, so I could change
them around; but the other one had lots of battery chargers, all conveniently made just
a little too wide to fit next to each other. Fixed that by removing some; I don't need
them all connected all the time.
The new unit has a fixed power cord, while the old one had a pluggable one. After some
searching, found one of the right kind (figure 8 profile), but it had a US plug on it.
Found an adaptor, plugged it in, and it didn't work.
Went looking for the multimeter and confirmed that yes, there was no power on the figure
8. Found another cable, tried again, same result. It proved to be the adaptor that was
defective. I've never seen that before.
The antenna connection on the Sony is some strange proprietary thing, while the old unit
has a 75Ω socket. But whatever I used to have in there is now gone. I must have
had a piece of wire hanging out of it, but now the (female) connector is so damaged that
I couldn't get another one in. Went looking for a 75Ω extender into which to put
a piece of wire. And, of course, it was too thin, and even crimping the pin didn't
help, so I ended up having to solder it in.
Finally it worked, but what a pain to do something that should just be a simple changeover.
The swallows have decided not to build a nest on the light fitting after all; instead they
chose a place which I can't conveniently monitor from inside the house, so I just removed
it:
I suppose we'll see more reconstruction attempts. I'm reminded of Astérix et le domaine des dieux.
The “weather station” I bought from ALDI a few weeks ago has proved to be quite useful, but it's a stand-alone unit, and
I have to transfer things to the computer manually. That's clearly sub-optimal. What I
need is a unit with USB interface (well, preferably Ethernet, but they don't seem to exist),
preferably one that I can use with FreeBSD or
possibly Linux. Went out looking on the web and found a program called Wview, surprisingly
enough apparently written primarily for FreeBSD—but it's not in the Ports Collection.
And it runs a relatively limited number of weather stations, which also seem to be
excessively expensive.
Once this program had a web site http://www.wviewweather.com/, but it has gone
away. It's now available on Sourceforge, but it hasn't been updated since September 2016.
Looked on eBay and found only one model that has a USB connection. And of course none of the
vendors bother to say what the model number is. Much searching ensued, after which it
became apparent that it's a rebadged Fine Offset WH1081 (also known as
the Watson W8681). Even more searching found an archive of
what appears to be the USENET news group sci.weather, with an indication that
somebody has written code for wview to support the WH1081, that it runs under
NetBSD, and that it hasn't been committed yet.
No way to contact the author. Spent some time looking for a web-based USENET interface, but
it seems that any USENET interface today costs money.
Finally wrote a message to the other bloke in the thread, who had conveniently posted his
home page URL.
As a result, returned to installing NetBSD on one of my machines. Downloaded
the pkgsrc tarball, and of course it had errors in it. Another double load
and rsync. And then it occurred to me that each automatic fetch would also have the
same problem. This data corruption is really a royal pain.
Wideband support changed the
firmware in my satellite modem today, and sure enough, my data corruption problems went
away. So it seems that this version of firmware caused continual data corruption—and
nobody knew! It's amazing what people will put up with.
Mail from Dave Tyson today, confirming that the Fine Offset WH1081 weather
station will work with NetBSD, and sent me some
code he had written. That's standalone code; the driver for Wview was written by Steve Woodford, and he was
rather difficult to contact:
Aug 24 08:00:16 w3 postfix/smtp[18124]: ABFEB3BAC7: to=<steve@example.org>, relay=dungeon.example.org[81.187.219.212]:25, delay=4.6, delays=2/0.02/1.5/1.2, dsn=4.7.1, status=deferred (host dungeon.example.org[81.187.219.212] said: 450 4.7.1 <steve@example.org>: Recipient address rejected: Hmmm, I think you're running Windows. Chances are you're a spam-spewing zombie, but just in case you're not, you may try again MUCH later. Failing that, try using your ISP's email smart host. (in reply to RCPT TO command))
How did he get the impression that this was “Windows”? It was FreeBSD,
of course. Played around a bit and ended up sending it from Ozlabs, a Linux box.
Got a reply from Steve Woodford today, along with lots of code. It's all for NetBSD, and by chance I have just installed the latest
version of NetBSD (with the intention to use it as Dom0 for Xen), so the clear next thing to do would be to complete that
installation.
It seems to be years ago since I last had a NetBSD machine running—not exactly
something for an ex-NetBSD developer to be proud of. But that means I had quite a bit of
configuration to do to get it up and running the way I want, and in the meantime I'm running
close to my IP traffic limit for the month (at least for peak traffic, between 12:00 and
24:00), so had to defer until tomorrow.
Of course, another thing I need to run this weather station software is the corresponding
hardware. There are plenty of weather stations on the market, both “Buy It Now”
and auctions. Which do I buy? For some reason, the “Buy It Now” units came
with free shipping, something that people underestimate: I can return the unit if I don't
like it, and I get the purchase price refunded, but not shipping. So buying it cheaper is
offset by the $25 shipping I would lose if I returned it. The “Buy It Now”
units cost $129; decided that I could bid up to $91 on the auctions, making a total price of
$116.
And people continually bid higher! After the third one went for $106 (total of $131),
decided that the other bidders weren't quite rational, and bought one with “Buy It
Now”. Now to see when it arrives.
So was my problem making tortillas compounded by them being too thin? Tried again today
with the quantities suggested. I still needed a ratio of about 1.7:1 of water to masa
harina, but this time I made only 4 tortillas from 100 g masa, and pressed them
more carefully until they were just the width of the tortilladora.
The resultant tortillas were really easier to remove from the waxed paper, but not much. In
addition, the paper creases easily, leaving creases in the tortilla. Clearly I need to find
something better to press the tortillas in. That'll be my next step, once I've thought it
over.
More configuring kimchi today, adapting my FreeBSD method, in particular the ports infrastructure, with surprising success. The
biggest issue was the location of the source trees (/usr/ports
and /usr/pkgsrc) and the object trees (/usr/local and /usr/pkg). The
locations weren't hard-coded, but I haven't (yet) provided for changing it based
on uname.
The weather's still terrible, wind and rain, but we need to move ahead before spring catches
up with me. Planted some Acacia
myrtifolia between the parking area and the house; hopefully it will become a reasonable
windbreak. The seedlings are quite old—we brought them with us from Echunga, so they
could be 3 years old—but they're still in tubes. Used this new technique they're
talking about of planting them much deeper, burying the bottom of the stem in the ground.
We'll see how that turns out.
Into town today early to catch the ALDI specials, which start at 9:00 on Thursdays. We don't normally bother to be there at the
very beginning, but I was interested in the car radio they had on special (only $89), with
CD player (of course) and MP3 player using either SD cards or USB sticks. Last
time we tried to buy one, they were gone by 10:00 on Thursday.
Made it to ALDI at about 8:58, to find that they were already open, and that there were lots
of shoppers there. I hadn't needed to worry: they had dozens of them. Got one and
confirmed that the connector was different from the one on my Mitsubishi—this was
pretty much a foregone conclusion. It proves that Mitsubishi has used at least three
different proprietary connectors in the course of the last 20 years, while the radio has an
“ISO” connector. On to look for the radio shop that they told me about at the
scrap yard last week, and discovered that
it was John Thomas, the same people I love so much for their help with
the Kenwood Chef mixer. They said
the name “Thomas”, of course, but I hadn't associated it with car radios.
Tried to get an adaptor cable, and of course they didn't have one. Spoke with Darren, who
appears to be responsible for installations, and he told me that they normally just cut off
the cables from the radio and replaced them with a socket for the car—throw the
standard connector out and replace it with a non-standard connector! As a result, they had
the Mitsubishi connector in stock, but not an ISO connector. That does nothing to improve
my opinion of the company, and it is completely ridiculous in my case, with a brand-new,
standards compliant radio and an 18 year old car which hit the quarter of a million km mark
as I arrived at ALDI:
On to JB HiFi, where they would have changed
my CD player with a demonstration model—hopefully for the first time—but they
didn't have any. It would take 4 to 6 weeks to repair, because they send the things away,
but there's a chance of a repair shop
in Ballarat—but I have to find
that out myself. Also asked about mounting equipment for car radios. No dice.
On looking for the local JayCar outlet in
Bridge Mall, but they have closed up shop and moved way out of town, to Ring Road. It
doesn't sound like they're doing too well, and I don't know how many people would go that
far. At Strathfields they had some
connectors, but not for Mitsubishi; conceivably they could get them in. To Dick Smiths, where they had components to build your own
cable. But it wasn't clear that the clips were the right size, and I didn't really feel
like going down that path.
Then to talk to Peter O'Connell about my investment portfolio. Things are looking a lot
better than a few months ago, but the delay in funds transfer from the UK has cost me over
$50,000 so far, and there's still no end in sight.
Then out to Howitt Street to a place called Autobarn, and struck lucky: a connector for ISO to old-style Mitsubishi connectors,
just what I was looking for:
Yes, it had a second connector on it too, presumably for additional functions which my old
radio doesn't have, but the main connector is identical. Out to the car, put it in and it
powered up and worked, but there were no speakers. Still, a minor issue.
Back home and examined in more detail. Yes, the connector's the same, but the pinout is
different:
The image of the plug (right) is laterally inverted, so the pins should correspond. In
fact, only four pins do correspond. Went back looking at what I wrote about the
last time I worked on this cable, and though I mentioned
a fair amount, I didn't mention the details I needed today. I won't make that mistake
again. Set to to analyse the cables and wrote a HOWTO with the exact pinouts and what I needed to do to change them. It proved that
this cable was designed for a radio with four speakers, with the + connections on the main
connector and the - connections on the secondary connector. It's amazing that they should
do something like that; it's a gratuitous and completely unneccessary incompatibility. They
should have put the rear speaker connections on the secondary connection; that way they'd
have remained compatible both ways.
Still, the analysis worked well: after refitting the connectors, things worked first time, a
far cry from the pain I went through 7 years ago.
Next was getting used to the player. By ALDI standards the instructions are quite good, but
I still needed to understand how to store MP3 files on a SD card so that the player would
recognize them. The first issue was getting a file
system. FAT32, of course, and since I was
going to be using (or at least trying)
SDHC cards, decided to
use the Apple.
Aside: I've already complained about the use of the term format instead of “create a file
system”. But you don't format a memory card in the traditional manner. Maybe I
should accept this one; it's certainly less of a mouthful than “create a file
system”.
So how do you “format” an SD card under Apple? It seems reasonable to assume
that you'd use “Disk” “utility.app”, but there was nothing obvious
in the menus. “Help” drew a blank on “format”, and “new file
system” brought lots of false positives and nothing useful. Finally, with help on
IRC, I found it: “Erase”. Isn't that just what you want to do with a brand-new
data medium?
Created the file system and copied some MP3 files to a card. Does it understand directory
structures? What file names? Tried a bit of everything, with the result that the player
rejected the card silently, just moving on to the next input source. Tried again without
the subdirectories, and that seemed to work, even if the file has a long name. But it
doesn't try to interpret the name, which must be quite a pain with an 8 GB SDHC card: 30 CDs
worth of files (potentially 800) and no way to navigate. It does (continually) display the
contents of ID3 tags (Artist, “Album” and Title), so I suppose I'll need to work
on that.
Taking the photos of the cable and connectors reminded me of how difficult it is to hold
small objects like that. You'd think there would be lots of gadgets on the market, but I
haven't seen any of them. Ended up with makeshift tools, and it's obvious.
He's off on holiday to Birdsville on
Monday, and he wanted to get things chopped down before he left. He managed that, but left
behind a lot of branches which we had to cart off and burn—it seems that the fire
danger season is starting on 1 September 2009. That kept us busy much of
the afternoon, so much so that I didn't get any photos. There's not much left of the trees
now.
Checked the Sony Australia
web site to find who can repair my CD player. Result: 5 service centres in
the state, four of which are in Melbourne and the fifth
in Geelong. And then the text:
If an Authorised Service Centre is not found near your region, please call 1300 13 76 69 for
more locations
And yes, the sentence wasn't terminated. This is the web, after all, and not a printed
publication. Called up the number and spoke to
Heidi, who wanted all sorts of information, including model number,
purchase date, where I bought it and what was wrong with it before she divulged that
Greene's TV service, 149 Humffray St, North Ballarat could look at the thing. She also gave
me a reference number and told me that she would send email to Greene's.
Into town with Chris in the late afternoon, she to pick up her car and I to take in the CD
player. They hadn't seen the email, of course, but found it. The positive side is that
they took that as sufficient authorization to repair the unit under guarantee, and didn't
want to see the receipt. Clearly a good loophole for getting Sony equipment repaired after
the guarantee expires.
It seems that there's still something wrong with my phone. I went in to an Optus centre a while back, and they had no problems
contacting it. Today Yvonne tried and got the same message
as before: “the number you have called is not connected”.
What's the difference? The telephone network, I fear. I originally had the number with
Telstra, but changed it over to Optus
last year. I suspect that Telstra has messed things up
and not registered the changeover. It worked for Yvonne's phone, so this isn't an automatic
problem.
Had to wait some time for the rain to stop before I could take my garden photos. The
cathedral is a thing of the past. Here
the comparison with what it was like when we first started using it:
More playing around with getting music in MP3
format onto the SDHC card for my car radio. Despite earlier pain, I decided to use Apple's
iTunes to copy the music from CD:
I have a DVD drive on boskoop, the Apple. I don't have one on dereel,
because it's hidden where I can barely get at it.
iTunes looks up the metadata automatically and incorporates it in the resultant file.
I was hoping that if the car radio imposes any strange restrictions on the MP3 format,
it's more likely to accept the output of iTunes than of, say, grip, which
I might otherwise have used.
I'd have to install grip on dereel, and I expected less issues with
configuration with iTunes than with grip.
OK, fire up iTunes and look through the menus for “copy CD” or
“import CD”, presumably in the “Files” menu. Nothing. There's
“Copy” in the “Edit” menu, but it's not clear what it does; probably
copy text for some reason. “Store” looks promising, but none of it makes any
sense. “Turn on Genius”—maybe I need a genius to understand the
simplicity—or “Authorize computer”, whatever that means. It certainly
doesn't store anything. “Advanced” creates versions and subscribes to podcasts.
Nothing relating to copying CDs.
OK, if all else fails, read the manual. All else failed. I read the manual, all two pages
of it. It failed too. For once, I didn't need a too-small window and a scroll bar. The
introduction consists of a single window with no links to further documentation:
I'm sure that video tutorials are useful the first time around, but as the only
method of documentation? The big issue is that they're sequential, and it's difficult to
jump around. So I entered “copy cd” to the help and got a whole lot of
irrelevant information, the most important of which was apparently “Usage rights for
iTunes Store purchases”:
With a lot more effort, finally found Applespeak for “copy CD”:
it's Advanced/Create AAC
Version. I had already been warned in a c't article that Apple imports as AAC, and you then have to convert to MP3.
But this was a selection for which even “Help” doesn't bring anything useful:
To be fair, once you've found out what the method is, the help topics help with the
details. But it's the first step that's missing.
Apple lovers: before writing to me about the above, wait until tomorrow's entry.
Started copying a CD, which seemed to work. But where was it putting it? No information,
of course. I'm supposed to be locked in to iTunes, so why should I know the location
of the data? In my case, because I didn't want to have the pain of working out how to copy
the data to the SDHC card. I know how to do that: cp(1), a simple program that does
one thing, does it right, and has been around for 40 years. Went searching and found:
=== grog@boskoop (/dev/ttyp3) ~ 10 -> find . -mmin -5 ...
./Music/iTunes/iTunes Music
./Music/iTunes/iTunes Music/Philippe Herreweghe_ Collegium Vocale Gent
./Music/iTunes/iTunes Music/Philippe Herreweghe_ Collegium Vocale Gent/Bach_ Magnificat, Cantata #80
./Music/iTunes/iTunes Music/Philippe Herreweghe_ Collegium Vocale Gent/Bach_ Magnificat, Cantata #80/01 Bach_ Magnificat In D, BWV 243 - 1. Magnificat Anima Mea.m4a
./Music/iTunes/iTunes Music Library.xml
So the data is being stored in files with path names like “Music/iTunes/iTunes
Music/Philippe Herreweghe_ Collegium Vocale Gent/Bach_ Magnificat, Cantata #80/01 Bach_
Magnificat In D, BWV 243 - 1. Magnificat Anima Mea.m4a”, replete with no less than 19
spaces. More importantly, it's stored in a hierarchy with the performer first and the work
second, which makes no sense to me. But then, iTunes considers
Bach's Magnificat to be a song.
Things went from bad to worse when I later copied further CDs, including more
by Philippe Herreweghe:
=== grog@boskoop (/dev/ttyp2) ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music 20 -> l drwxr-xr-x 3 grog 1000 102 Aug 30 08:29 Barbara Schlick, Catherine Patriasz; Philippe Herreweghe_ Collegium Vocale Ghent
drwxr-xr-x 3 grog 1000 102 Aug 29 16:55 Philippe Herreweghe_ Collegium Vocale Gent
drwxr-xr-x 4 grog 1000 136 Aug 29 19:40 Trevor Pinnock_ The English Concert
All these are works by
Bach, but you'd have to
know it. You'd also have to look carefully to realise that the first two entries refer to
the same performers.
Anyway, I had my AAC files, and I needed to find a way to convert them to MP3. More
searching, during which I found something that the author of the c't article
apparently didn't know: you can import directly to MP3. There's no import option:
instead, you have to go to “Preferences” and set a format there, every time you
want to change it.
So finally I had my MP3 files and copied them to disk. Conveniently, Diane Saunders rang at
this point. She was on her way from
Meadows to visit us for
a few days, but had got her car bogged down on the side of the road while turning
near Rokewood, so I had to go down to
tow her out—just what I needed to try out the MP3s.
They worked fine. Sort of. The player recognized the ID3 tags and displayed names
like BACH| and some other weirdnesses, and truncated the name of the first movement
(“Magnificat anima mea dominum”) as MA MEA. My guess here is that this
is a collaboration with the Gracenote database, which has done away with the Dominum, and the implementers, who seem to
have truncated the title to the last 6 characters; that could have been iTunes, of
course.
More seriously, though, the tracks were out of sequence. Confirmed that I hadn't
accidentally selected this brain-dead “Shuffle” function: it had really assigned
numbers to the files out of sequence. I suspected that maybe it was just ignoring the names
and reading the directory entries in sequence. Back home, tried to take a look at the
directory to confirm the sequence of the entries in the directory. How? hexdump is
your friend:
That's a bit sparse, of course; I only need the text on the right. Read the man page, only
to find that hexdump doesn't have that format. It did state, however, relating to
the -C option:
Calling the command hd implies this option.
Checked that and found a typical Apple implementation:
=== grog@boskoop (/dev/ttyp5) ~ 11 -> hd /Volumes/MP3-8G bash: hd: command not found
That still wasn't all. With another CD, I was presented with the question:
Another of these silly too-small dialogue boxes. This one shows the stupidity from
its best side: there's no way to enlarge it. Are these entries the same or different? How
can I tell? What's the point of the question in the first place?
More playing around with CDs and MP3 today. First was to find out the cause of the
out-of-sequence playing. It proves that ls -lf works on FAT-32 file systems too, and
it confirmed that the information in the directory was out of sequence, but in the same
sequence that the player played the tracks.
=== grog@boskoop (/dev/ttyp1) ~ 10 -> ls -lf /Volumes/MP3-8G/ total 109
-rwxrwxrwx 1 grog grog 3619764 Aug 29 17:17 01 Bach_ Magnificat In D, BWV 243 - 1. Magnificat Anima Mea.mp3
-rwxrwxrwx 1 grog grog 4724779 Aug 29 17:34 14 Bach_ Cantata #80, BWV 80, _Ein Feste Burg Ist Unser Gott_ - 2. Alles, Was Von Gott Geboren.mp3
-rwxrwxrwx 1 grog grog 5941042 Aug 29 17:33 13 Bach_ Cantata #80, BWV 80, _Ein Feste Burg Ist Unser Gott_ - 1. Ein Feste Burg Ist Unser Gott.mp3
So it ignores the file names and goes only by directory order. But how did this happen?
The directory was empty when I started, so it can't be re-use of empty directory entries.
Yesterday I said that cp does things well, but in this case it seems to be ignoring
the sequence of arguments presented to it. I'm deliberately leaving these messy names in
the page—aren't they ugly?
=== grog@boskoop (/dev/ttyp2) ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music/Philippe Herreweghe_ Collegium Vocale Gent/Bach_ Magnificat, Cantata #80 26 -> cp -v * /Volumes/MP3-8G/ 01 Bach_ Magnificat In D, BWV 243 - 1. Magnificat Anima Mea.mp3 -> /Volumes/MP3-8G/01 Bach_ Magnificat In D, BWV 243 - 1. Magnificat Anima Mea.mp3
20 Bach_ Cantata #80, BWV 80, _Ein Feste Burg Ist Unser Gott_ - 8. Das Wort Sie Sollen Lassen Stahn.mp3 -> /Volumes/MP3-8G/20 Bach_ Cantata #80, BWV 80, _Ein Feste Burg Ist Unser Gott_ - 8. Das Wort Sie Sollen Lassen Stahn.mp3
19 Bach_ Cantata #80, BWV 80, _Ein Feste Burg Ist Unser Gott_ - 7. Wie Selig Sind Doch Die.mp3 -> /Volumes/MP3-8G/19 Bach_ Cantata #80, BWV 80, _Ein Feste Burg Ist Unser Gott_ - 7. Wie Selig Sind Doch Die.mp3
The * in the invocation of cp expands to a sorted list of file names
in the directory; but it chooses another sequence. Why? This seems to be a problem that
exists with FreeBSD as well. I need to follow
it up. In the meantime, there are obvious workarounds. After deleting all files on the
card, tried:
=== grog@boskoop (/dev/ttyp2) ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music/Philippe Herreweghe_ Collegium Vocale Gent/Bach_ Magnificat, Cantata #80 27 -> for i in *; do echo cp -v \'$i\' /Volumes/MP3-8G/; done | sh
The quotes around $i are necessary because of these hundreds of spaces they put in
the file names.
That wrote in the correct sequence. Put it in the player and yes, it worked, also in the
correct sequence. But there was an empty track between each real track. Back in the house,
found:
=== grog@boskoop (/dev/ttyp1) ~ 22 -> ls -fal /Volumes/MP3-8G/ total 110
drwxrwxrwx 1 grog grog 4096 Aug 30 11:59 .Trashes
-rwxrwxrwx 1 grog grog 4096 Aug 27 17:38 ._.Trashes
-rwxrwxrwx 1 grog grog 3619764 Aug 30 11:24 01 Bach_ Magnificat In D, BWV 243 - 1. Magnificat Anima Mea.mp3
-rwxrwxrwx 1 grog grog 4096 Aug 30 11:24 ._01 Bach_ Magnificat In D, BWV 243 - 1. Magnificat Anima Mea.mp3
These are some Apple auxiliary information, and cp creates them even when the names
don't match. I'll have to remove them afterwards, or maybe just copy the card with a real
BSD box.
Also did some more CD copying and realised that there is, indeed, a simpler way to import
CDs with iTunes: I had been mislead by
the help headings and had chosen “New to iTunes”, in the expectation of a
tutorial, when in fact I should have chosen “The iTunes Jukebox”, which offers
“Import CDs”, just what I was looking for.
But it didn't work. According to the instructions, there should be a box labeled
“Import CD” at the bottom of the screen. There wasn't. It took me some time to
realize that the window was far larger than the screen. How did that happen?
How could that happen? How do you resize a window on an Apple? You click on the
bottom right-hand corner and drag to the approximate size you want. But how do you get to
that corner? I don't know. I don't think you can if the window is so much larger than the
screen: unlike with X, you can't push the top of a window off the top of the display; in
fact, I don't know how to move a window at all without positioning on the title bar.
Solved the problem by temporarily increasing the resolution of the display, which was enough
to show the bottom corner. But it kept coming back to this size; clearly I wasn't
overwriting some default, but the Preferences didn't show me any option. I was told to
use Window → Zoom, which might work in the general case, but
in iTunes it just switches to a compressed representation of the window. I still
don't know how to resize it.
Once I got the thing at a size I could use, yes, “Import CDs”. It does pretty
much exactly the same thing as Advanced → Create MP3 Version, which begs
the question what's “advanced” about the operation. In the meantime, other
problems became apparent: the Gracenote database is horribly inaccurate and inconsistent, and in conjunction with it, iTunes
copies CDs into individual directories with strange names (some of Händel's Opus 3 Concerti
Grossi are stored in Håndel - Concerti Grossi, Op. 9 Nos. 1 - 4 (Vol. 28 of Händel
Masterworks)_), and Bach's B Minor mass got split between the two directories
Barbara Schlick, Catherine Patriasz; Philippe Herreweghe_ Collegium Vocale Ghent/Bach_
Mass In B Minor, BWV 232 [Disc 1] and Compilations/Bach_ Mass In B Minor [Disc
2], when in fact it should really be stored in one directory with a sensible name.
In the end, decided that the best thing to do would be to store the information
on dereel, where I could back things up, and create a separate directory hierarchy
with sensible names. That worked some of the time, and I now have a
directory Bach_JS/BWV232 with links to the entries in the two directories. But
that's a lot of work.
That meant putting in a symlink "Music/iTunes/iTunes Music"
→ /dereel/home/Music/iTunes, something that iTunes point blank refuses to
follow. More work is needed to find out what to do there; in the meantime, rsync was
my friend.
While messing around, read more about this “Genius” thing, and read the
startling information:
Genius makes playlists from songs in your library that go great together with just one
click.
What does that mean? I've already established that, say, Bach's second Brandenburg Concerto
consists of three “songs”, and
I suppose the term “library” is clear enough, but what does “go great
together with just one click” mean? At the very best, it's near-English, but you have
to have prior experience with this kind of terminology to be able to translate it into
English.
Decided to try anyway, and it first asked for an email and password—and refused my
password because it contained characters it doesn't like. More stupidity. When I changed
it (probably to something like stupidity), it wanted my credit card information!
You'd have to be a moron to do that, not a genius.
That should have been more like 30 kB/s. Went through with mtr to find the
interesting information that the packet loss was not on the satellite link (first hop
here):
The packet drop rate at the first hop (satellite modem) is clearly yet another indication of
how broken it is, but all hops from 5 onwards showed similar levels of packet loss, so I'd
consider them representative. Sent email to support and got a reply relatively quickly,
blaming IPStar. I'm beginning to wonder where the real issue is; we have three hops with
good connectivity but no reverse DNS though the last two belong to networknoc.com,
and things don't go downhill until Wideband gets involved. To be observed.
Diane brought her dogs with her, which requires a certain amount of coordination: they're
not used to cats, and so we're doing a lot of hide-and-seek. Today Roxy was locked in the
bedroom and got bored, so she chewed open some of Di's Vitamin D pills and swallowed about
50 of them. After a phone consultation with the vet, forced some salt water down her
throat, and she vomited the lot out, including her breakfast. What a mess! But she seems
no worse for the experience.
Another day spent playing with MP3 conversions. Got lots of stuff converted, but not much
else to say. This effort originally started simply because my new car radio includes an MP3
player, nothing that I had particularly intended. But the investigations have proved to be
a can of worms. How can anybody put up with the level of disorganization supplied by
the combination of iTunes and Gracenote? Certainly nobody with a primary interest in
classical music can. And yet the iPod is a best seller. Call me old-fashioned, but with the best will in the world, I really
can't understand why.
One of the reasons for this activity was as a trial run to converting my CD collection
(about 2000 CDs) to MP3 for ease of access and searching, With iTunes
and Gracenote I would get neither. Spent some time doing lots of manual
rearrangement of the files so that I can actually use them, greatly hampered by
these horrible path names with spaces in them. Yes, people will probably tell
me that I shouldn't be using old-fashioned tools, but if iTunes and friends are the
alternative, I can even put up with this vomit-making stuff. But I'll need to do some
serious thinking before I can convert my entire CD collection.
Yvonne into town with Diane today to look for some new pills
for Diane, unfortunately in vain; somehow, despite contacting her doctor in Adelaide, they
weren't prepared to give them to her without written authority. What a police state we live
in!
My weather station has arrived, so spent some time looking at porting wview release 5 to NetBSD, something that apparently hasn't been done
before. It's not in pkgsrc, and the instructions are pretty unclear. Spent some
time porting radlib, not made any
simpler by the fact—probably typical—that the installation directory (and thus
also the -I include directory) defaults to /usr/local, even for NetBSD, where
the default is /usr/pkg. Also discovered that the “standard” union for
semctl arguments is missing in NetBSD:
/*
* semctl's arg parameter structure
*/
union semun {
int val; /* value for SETVAL */
struct semid_ds *buf; /* buffer for IPC_STAT & IPC_SET */
unsigned short *array; /* array for GETALL & SETALL */
};
After fixing that, got things sorted out, but ran into further problems with wview.
Porting it is only the first part; after that I have to incorporated Steve Woodford's
patches, written for version 4 of wview, and test them. I can see I'll be using the
Microsoft software for a while.
Yvonne then returned with the weather station, and I spent some time putting that together,
not helped by the fact that it is mounted on a two-part pipe, where one piece needs to fit
into the other, and the other part had been partially crushed and needed to be straightened
out. Apart from that, and the excessive lengths of interconnecting cable, it seems to be
functional. Very poor contrast on the display, difficult-to-read instructions, and no
non-destructive way of reading out the maxima and minima. I'll leave it running in parallel
with the ALDI station for a week or two.
Indian food in the evening, and tried making chapatis with the tortilladora. Not an outright success: the first
one stuck to the waxed paper in a way that tortillas never did. Tried oiling them,
which worked well, but somehow they were still too thick—maybe the tortilladora
is the wrong implement for chapatis. But at least I got results the first time.
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