Ben's Daily Thoughts

Sceptre X20G LCD Burnout

2006-02-13T08:56:00.000-08:00

I bought a Sceptre X20G NagaII LCD screen in August. It was a great deal; only $430, Composite video in, VGA in, DVI in, Audio hub, USB hub. It almost seemed too good to be true, and it was.

The reason why there seem to be so few bad reviews of this screen seems to be due to who it is being sold by. I bought mine from uBid, however, I noticed that it was also for sale from TigerDirect. There are several complaints on the internet that TigerDirect does not publish bad reviews for products. I know this from personal experience as I myself attempted to publish a bad review for the Sceptre X20G there.

The problems started before the screen even arrived. The first time I turned it on it would power down after a random amount of time between 5 minutes and a fraction of a second. Clearly a defective LCD screen. I had to pay shipping to send the screen back to Sceptre in California and they sent me a replacement.

The replacement was great, although I noticed that the back of the screen seemed a little hot. This new screen lasted from September 2005 until February 2006, a mere 4 months, and then it sucombed to the same problem as the original screen. Now I'm waiting for my third screen to arrive in the hope that I'll be able to make it last longer that 4 months by directing a desk fan to help dissipate the heat from the back of the screen.

My advice; if it seems too good to be true then it usually is. If I could do it all again I would have paid $200 extra and bought a 20 inch Viewsonic instead.

Diskless xBox

2005-10-29T10:52:00.000-07:00

It's been 7 loooong days but I have finally got my xBox to boot Gentoo Linux as a diskless thin client using Etherboot. The only problem which remains is that there's a problem with my kernel which means that interrupt 1 is being allocated to something and causes the USB initialization to fail. I don't think that this problem should be too difficult to solve, since it has been done before in the past, and I'm just hoping that one of the xbox linux kernel hackers points me in the right direction so that I can fix it.

I'm planning on using the xBox as a dual booting regular xBox games console and also as a mythTV frontend.

Have you installed mythfrontend on an xBox?

Current Reading List

2005-09-07T07:17:00.000-07:00

Currently I'm reading "Programming with POSIX Threads" by David Butenhof. I have had the book for a few years and, as is often the case, had previously merely referenced small sections of the book for solving pThreads problems. I decided that I really needed to read this book from cover to cover to more fully understand the subject matter.

Do you know of any good technical books which you'd recommend?

GIMP Animated GIF

2005-08-13T19:20:00.000-07:00

I was just wondering if there was a good animated GIF generation tool for Linux, particularly Gnome, and thought that there was a possibility that GIMP may provide a means to animate GIF images. Sure enough, GIMP does allow you to create animated GIF images through its multi layer capabilities.

As long as you adhere to open file standards I have found that, over the past 3 years, I've had less trouble with all our home PCs running Linux that I had during the decade previous to that when they were running MS Windows. If you want an application you just search the gentoo repository and download it for free, then periodically you run a one line command to upgrade all the applications on your PC in one, system wide, upgrade. It's so easy. I can't imagine ever running any closed source applications, on our home PCs at least, ever again. The only applications which are problematic are Firefox plugins for Java and Macromedia Flash since they're not Free Open Source Software but still essential for interaction with a few web sites.

I can't understand why anyone uses Flash since it would be entirely possible to accomplish the same effects using Javascript and animated GIF images and the content download would be only slightly larger, even less so if the web server compressed the content on the fly. Perhaps I'm just becomming too spoiled by broadband.

Why do firms marry themselves to closed standards?

Spiky Flip Flops

2005-08-13T05:34:00.000-07:00

My wife bought me some of those spiky flip flops which are supposed to massage the soles of your feet. They are fantastic. The coolest thing is that after you've been wearing and walking around in them for a while, if you take them off then the carpet feels like you're walking on air.

I wonder if you could use the same technique for other things. Perhaps if you have a headache you could wear an incredibly uncomfortable hat for ten minutes so that when you take it off you find that the pain of the headache has been completely removed.

What do you think, should I start making a prototype?

Started Studying Ruby

2005-08-12T19:58:00.000-07:00

I've started learning Ruby today, my copy of "Agile Web Development With Rails" arrived yesterday and it really is amazing. I don't think I'll ever write another line of PHP. I only hope that the mod_ruby Apache module continues to develop so that Ruby web applications may be able to execute using the minimum of web server resources. I'm still working 9-5 in C++ but I should be able to learn RoR at home.

Very exciting!

I even had a couple of people ask me how they could go about learning Ruby and subsequently Ruby on Rails. My answer is here at Ben's Questions and Answers.

XBox still broken

2005-08-07T20:53:00.000-07:00

well, the xBox is still broken. I got it second hand for $50 and it worked fine for about 6 months and then died. I thought that it may have been the power supply so ordered a new, refurbished, one but it didn't solve the problem. I was getting 3.3V on the power switch pins so I decided to order a new motherboard. I was planning on upgrading the xBox RAM to 128MB anyway so it seemed to all be working out for the best.

The only problem is, and note that I said "seemed" above, that it's been a coupl of weeks and no motherboard has arrived. They are out of stock but they haven't bothered to respond to my emails asking for a status. I'm a bit annoyed, but unfortunately they are the only option that I have found other than buying another xBox off ebay and modding it myself. You have to solder the RAM chips onto the board though so I'm not sure if that's going to be within my soldering skills. I guess I'll just wait... once the xbox 360 comes out the old xbox, classic perhaps, will probably go down to a price of $99 so time is on my side if I don't get too impatient.

Have you ever done any surface mount chip soldering?

So Tired...

2005-08-03T23:03:00.000-07:00

I just finished some work which I had to complete before tomorrow morning and I'm totally exhausted. I only got 6 hours of sleep last night and I'm going to have to do some catching up over then coming days.

Evelyn now knows what you mean when you say "Where's your..." and she understands where her tummy is, her tongue, her ears, her mouth, her feet, her toes, her knees, her nose, and her eyes. I can't understand any of her babbling yet, however, Ellen is convinced that she said "More Cracker" at dinner time and "One More" at story time. It's amazing how she's progressing. It all seems to have happened suddenly, one week she's a baby and the next she's a little person.

When did your child start talking?

Bad Day...

2005-08-02T07:25:00.000-07:00

Have you ever had a bad day?

Have you ever woken up to the smell of dog crap to find that your Great Dane had had violent diarrhea? Fortunately he sleeps in a dog crate, so the mess was contained, however, that also meant that the dog was covered in dog crap as he couldn't get away from it.

Once I'd cleaned the dog, his crate, and washed all his bedding I was just hanging all the bedding to try and a bird sitting above crapped on my head.

Nice.

I just hope that the day doesn't get any worse.

WL-HDD 2.5

2005-07-30T11:42:00.000-07:00

The WL-HDD is now up and running. I got a 30GB drive from Hitachi which was thinner than my existing free 4GB drive that had been gathering dust in a drawer for the past couple of years.

I'm VERY happy with the device and was even able to use it at work the other day. One of our servers needed to be backed up and it only had USB1.1 so the ability of the WL-HDD to act as a DHCP server and share itself through Samba was a lifesaver. I tested out the throughput and backed up 3.5GB of data through the WL-HDD's 802.11g WiFi connection the night before and was very happy with the throughput as it took only about 45 minutes (I wasn't timing it so YMMV, I'd say three quarters of an hour as a stab in the dark guess).

Anyway, it's a very nice device. Tiny, silent, good value for money and full of features. Where else can you get a 2.5" external hard drive with USB, 10/100 Ethernet and 802.11g?

To MBA or Not to MBA

2005-07-30T11:18:00.000-07:00

I've been trying to decide if I should get an MBA. I'm a Computer Programmer by trade. On the one hand, the MBA is expensive both in terms of time and money while, on the other hand, an MBA may be an expense which I cannot afford not attain given the line of work which I am in.

I'm sure that I could find the time, if I really wanted to, during the next couple of years to achieve an MBA qualification, and that would stand me in good stead for my future career progression. The question really is; "Do I want to?".

I'm generally self taught. I was frustrated during my Computer Science BSc as I felt that I was merely spinning my wheels, as it were, to get a piece of paper while I had been programming for many many years before hand, since it's the family business. With hind sight I could see that the BSc was not intended to teach me how to program computers, rather, it was intended to teach me how to teach myself. I have noticed that this appears not to always be the case with degreee programmes, however, that's a rant for a different day.

Amazon has loads, literally thousands, of books about business. I could easilly discover the required texts for some MBA courses and teach myself the subject matter. Unfortunately this would prevent me from benefitting from a side effect of attending a formal MBA programme, i.e. social networking.

What do you think?

Funniest Blog

2005-07-27T22:04:00.000-07:00

This guy has the funniest blog:

http://sylloge.typepad.com/questions/

RoR? Wow!

2005-07-27T21:28:00.000-07:00

Someone at work showed me Ruby on Rails, RoR, the other day. Initially I wasn't all that impressed, sure it was sort of cool but RoR hardly seemed revolutionary.

Well...

I just had a chance to watch the various demo movies in detail and I'm amazed. RoR is going to change the world. I've programmed in Perl, C, C++, C#, Pascal, Delphi, VB, PHP, Java, JSP, Modula2, Ada, Scheme, Lisp, Prolog, Postcript and probably others that I don't even recall, however, RoR is nothing but amazing. Using RoR I would be able to reduce my Web application development time by 90 percent.

Have you discovered RoR yet?

Here's the definitive book at Amazon:

WL-HDD

2005-07-23T08:13:00.000-07:00

The WL-HDD 2.5" WiFi external hard disk drive NAS contraption is designed for slimline 2.5" hard drives. I thought I'd be able to get by with the really old free drive that I have had for years, however, this is not to be; it's too thick to fit.

Darn. I'm ordering a new drive now, let's see what the best value for money is...

Yeeeuugh!

2005-07-23T08:03:00.000-07:00

Have you ever been cleaning up dog poop from your back garden and knew that there was some somewhere around a particular location but just couldn't find it until you felt something sqishy under one of your feet?

Well, we have a Great Dane. Yeeeuuugh!

WL-HDD

2005-07-22T14:11:00.000-07:00

My WL-HDD arrived yesterday, I'm impressed. It's a 2.5" external hard drive NAS with both 10/100 ethernet and 802.11g WiFi. You can get your own one from amazon here.

Stop Numa Numa-ing

2005-07-22T09:43:00.000-07:00

I introduced my wife to the numa numa phenomenon last weekend. We played it about 10 times and I thought that that was the end of it. Unfortunately it seems that she's got our 14 month old daughter hooked on it. She, the 14 month old, even does the arm waving.

I'd prefer that she was hooked on the teletubbies, since they have more than a single 2 minute portfolio. However, she IS hooked on the teletubbies and that's not much better. Immediatly upon my walking through the front door after work she points at the TV and starts squealing.

Oh well... it could be worse... she could have the climbing skill of a Chimpanze... what a minute... she does!

BitTorrent TV

2005-07-20T07:10:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking about BitTorrent TV for many months now, on and off, not continously. The critical thing about BitTorrent TV is that it has to reach a critical mass before really good programmes will become available on the format.

The concept of BitTorrent TV is an alternative to the traditional big media controlled airwaves without commercials and routed over the internet using the BitTorrent distributed file sharing tool. Since the distribution methodology uses shared network infrastructure it become very inexpensive to syndicate a show through RSS and subsequently to distribute it through BitTorrent. This reduced cost will offset the reduction in commercial revenue caused by consumers skipping commercials. Rather than overt commercials BitTorrent TV will rely on sponsorship. There will be no need for DRM.

The formats which lend themselves to this lower budget medium are obvious:

Reality
Instructional (e.g. cooking, mechanics, schooling)
News (direct from the sources)
Music (as an advertisement for live concerts)
Children's (e.g. story telling, the wiggles, as an advertisment for live shows or merchendise)
Exercise
etc.

Once the BitTorrent format viewer numbers reach a critical mass then drama shows, supported through sponsorship and product placement, would begin to enter the market also.

MythTV already has a BitTorrent plugin so that you can watch your BitTorrent TV shows on your living room TV and listen to your BitTorrent radio shows, AKA podcast shows, on your living room stereo. BitTorrent TV does not mean that you'll be limited to sitting in front of your PC, thanks to mythTV's Torrentocracy plugin.

This is the start of something significant.

BitTorrent TV - it's coming soon

2005-07-19T07:15:00.000-07:00

Coming soon? It's already here. albeit on a low scale. One of the reasons why I decided to pay for extended basic cable TV is the TechTV channel. Since computers are one of my hobbies, as well as being my job, I found TechTV to be very interesting and entertaining. Some time ago G4 merged with TechTV and it went south, fast. G4, as it's now known, became simply a channel about computer games. Not that there's anything wrong with that, however, it's of no interest to me or any of my friends who used to watch TechTV.

Leo and Patrick formed their own pod casting site called The World In Tech, TWIT, and recently Kevin Rose went out on his own with a BitTorrent TV show called Systm available at:

http://systm.org

It looks like my prediction of BitTorrent TV is coming true. I need to get moving and put some of my own content out there. I have been trying to imagine the ultimate high value, and low cost, subject matter and I think I have it now; children's storytelling.

I used to make up bedtime stories for my younger brother and sister. They used to think that the stories were great and it took hardly any effort on my part to think up a ten minute story on the fly. I'd even let them choose the characters along the way. This would be perfect for a BitTorrent TV show; it's short duration, little to no advanced preperation, no budget required for production. In short, it's perfect.

Numa Numa

2005-07-17T10:03:00.000-07:00

I just showed Ellen the Numa Numa dance swf. She thought it was pretty funny, however, I don't know how we managed to be out of the loop when it hit the news, perhaps we were out of the country. I certainly remember the song being on the radio. Evelyn loved it and started singing along as best a 14 month old can. I've got a long day of lazyness planned so I had better get going...

BTW, I did do my cardio yesterday. I didn't go on the 2 hour road bike ride that I had intended, but I did 10 minutes of intervals on the stationary bike and then walking around the Mall with Ellen and Evelyn for a couple of hours.

First Workout Done

2005-07-15T06:25:00.000-07:00

I almost cheated and didn't bother even doing my first workout this morning. My Mother in Law and my Wife's Grandmother had stayed the night and I was running a little late. Luckilly the workout Blog did its job and kept me honest. Here's the details of the workout:

First Arm Workout

The conclusion is that I really would like to get a set of powerblocks, if only they weren't so expensive, and I also need to increase the weight and decrease the reps on the triceps extensions next time.

I had an interesting conversation about cicadas and locusts and discovered that some people believe that they are one and the same creature:

Cicada versus Locust

The DVD burner was delivered yesterday so I hope to try it out this weekend. The goal is to run MythTV on the xBox, however, fate is conspiring against me. The power supply went out on the xBox so I'm waiting for a replacement to arrive, hopefully it will fix the problem otherwise I may have to see if I can find a new xBox on eBay.

Today it's raining, which is a welcome change to the recent 34C humid Texas weather, today it's only 25C. The only problem is that when it rains here it's generally a thunder storm, and the dog is terrified of thunder.

Mowing in Darkness

2005-07-14T08:18:00.000-07:00

I managed to mow the lawn last night, mostly in complete darkness. I managed to actually not miss anything, amazingly, and the grass looks very nice. Obviously I couldn't do the edging, however, that's really only and "every other mow" deal.

I have been thinking more about writing a book. I had decided to write a book on Object Oriented design patterns, and I still plan to do so, however, now I'd also like to write a book on Object Oriented software development lifecycles. I'd like to showcase the entire development process of a Free Open Source Software, FOSS, product and cover the various Open Source tools available for each stage of the project lifecycle.

Excercise Lack of Progress

2005-07-13T06:40:00.000-07:00

Well, I haven't been exercising, however, I did discover that the office at work does have showering and changing facilities. I've been searching for them for 7 years and finally someone asked the custodian if the rumor was true. Indeed the fabled locker room does exist, so now I have no excuse not to cycle the 8 miles into work.

I also decided that I need to formalise my exercise goals and chart my progress, so I'm going to start another blog for the progress part. As far as the goals go here they are:

1) Be able to perform 100 pushups consecutively at a 1 per second cadence.
Why? Because this is a goal which I have half heartedly strived for for years and to accomplish it would bring me great pride in myself
When? December 13th 2005

2) Bring my resting heart rate down to 50 bpm.
Why? Because I am not happy with my reduced level of fitness as I become more sedantry and how it will effect my ability to provide for my family during the years to come
When? July 13th 2006

The exercise plan will resemble the body for life exercise plan with alternating aerobic and weight training days. I will also add additional VO2 max and Lactate Threshold extension training at least one day per week. I will perform the exercise routine in the morning before work. I will adjust my diet to include more calories, in 40 30 30 ratios, and I'll also include a daily multi-vitamin.

xBox dies

2005-07-11T06:31:00.000-07:00

Well, I tried to turn the xBox on last Saturday and silence. Nothing happened. So much for going ahead with the plan to instal Linux on it and use it as a MythTV diskless workstation. After taking the machine to pieces and meticulously testing various components with the volt meter I established that it was well and truely messed up so I ordered a new power supply. I'm quite glad that I found someone selling power supplies since the alternative would have been to buy another xBox.

On the learning Spanish front I'm still trying to finish watching the "Shogun" DVDs, since my plan is to read both the Spanish and English copies of "Shogun" in parallel and Ellen thought that it would be nice for me to be able to become familiar with the story in advance as it's going to take me several years to get through the book at the rate which I'm going. Who knows, by the end of it I may know Spanish and Japanese. I hadn't considered that possibility!

Blog efficiency

2005-07-05T06:49:00.000-07:00

I streamlined my blogging process a little more. Ben's Questions and Answers is a Blog that I created where I answer peoples' questions for free. Keeping track of the questions that I have been asked, since they arrive in irregularly spaced waves, is a challenge for my already busy brain. Consequently I started using Yahoo's Notepad this morning and have started a list of unanswered questions. Nothing fancy, but it should do the job.

SAIS Riyadh

2005-06-29T08:20:00.000-07:00

I finally joined the Saudi Arabian International School Yahoo Group the other day. I am already a member of the UK Yahoo Group for the SAIS British Section but thought that since I now live in the US it might be interesting to join the US group also.

I sent a note introducing myself to the US Yahoo Group ad sent a note the the UK Yahoo Group trying to shame them into increasing their activity level, the UK Group has been silent for quite a while!

Here's a little plug:

Click to join britishschoolsais

So if you went to SAIS Riyadh British Section you are one of a select exclusive few, so get in touch and share what you've been up to.

Zipit Sourceforge

2005-06-28T14:44:00.000-07:00

I suggested to the Zipit Wireless Yahoo group allow me to set up a Sourceforge project. So far the consensus is that we should concentrate the group's effort into creating howto documents and only then expand into sf.

I saw google's global map application today and it's quite amazing. I love the way you can zoom in, then add geographic contour info, and then change the viewing angle into a 3/4 view rather than the traditional overhead view.

Optimising blog postings

2005-04-27T21:31:00.000-07:00

I've finally set up my various blogs to accept email
submissions, of which this is the first...

Let's see if it works!

Yep - looks good!

Ben's Questions and Answers for free

2005-04-26T13:50:00.000-07:00

I've submitted Ben's Questions and Answers to Google and Yahoo search engines so hopefully I'll start getting some additional traffic so I can help more people with their various questions.

The idea is to see if simply answering questions for free is a viable business model, free support, i.e. free question answering, in virtually any subject, support financed by very low key text based ads.

http://bensqanda.blogspot.com

Blog Statistics

2005-04-22T12:54:00.000-07:00

I just implemented StatCounter (http://my.statcounter.com) on Ben's Questions and Answers (http://bensqanda.blogspot.com), wow it's nice!

Gotta get my priorities right

2005-04-22T06:02:00.000-07:00

Having just returned from the UK I realise that the American way of life which I have adopted has some dangerous drawbacks. Fortunately I've been lucky to not have been too badly effected, however, I know that it's only a matter of time unless I change some of my habits pronto.

What am I talking about?

In the UK; people walk. In the DFW area of the US; people drive. That unhealthy ethic permeates all areas of my life in the US. Since coming to the US I eat fast food, I drink sugar rich soft drinks, I drive instead of walking, I watch TV. I certainly used to do these things before coming to the US, but never to the extent that I do now. There have been exceptions to this rule, but they were very much exceptions. For example, my wife and I entered the Body For Life (BFL) Challenge a few years ago. BFL was great, but it was difficult to incorporate into my life, since exercise in particular is something which you really have to strive to make time for compared to the UK where I'd often walk a couple of miles to and from work.

I very much want to get back to the fitness level which I once had. I expect that many people who know me already regard me as being quite fit, however, I used to have a resting pulse of about 43 and now it's about 59. Frankly I'm amazed that I've retained even that level of fitness! When I go riding on my mountian bike, albeit infrequently now, it's just not fun anymore. Where I used to power around Grapevine Lake's North Shore, taking 2 foot dropoffs with ease while overtaking tens of slower riders, now I have trouble pacing myself and tend to bonk within minutes.

I need to come up with a plan...

"I just love it when a plan comes together"

2005-04-20T08:42:00.000-07:00

I spent a couple of minutes this morning reorganising my blog. "Ben's Daily Thoughts" was not really being used for my daily thoughts. Instead I've been using it as a catchall for my useful links and technical information so I renamed it to "Ben's Information Station" available at http://bensinformationstation.blogspot.com. Then I recreated "Ben's Daily Thoughts" in it's new format for daily thoughts and daily thoughts only.

I also set up a new blog titled "Ben's Questions and Answers", avalable at http://bensqanda.blogspot.com, which will be a blog where I record the various interesting questions that I get asked together with their respective answers as I see fit.

"Hello World" as it were

2005-04-20T07:52:00.000-07:00

Today I woke up and decided that http://bensdailythoughts.blogspot.com was not actually being used for my daily thoughts. Consequently I changed its name to http://bensinformationstation.blogspot.com to reflect its purpose as a repository for all the snippets of information that I'd otherwise forget.