Primordial Ooze

Many of you may recall that my family purchased a Bearded Dragon for my son’s Birthday in January. We named him Cricket since that’s what he eats. Perhaps I’ll name my next child “Formula” or “Gerber”.  Leave it to Kids to come up with interesting names.

We’ve had him like 7 months now and ion the past month he’s gotten very sick. He’s stopped eating food and has become very week. The pet store people have been giving me advice on getting  his energy up since last summer but Cricket is simply deteriorating.

When we bought Cricket, I was never under the illusion that my kids would care for him. I always considered this my responsibility and not theirs. I simply feel as if they are not old enough. However, I saw this as an opportunity to teach them about responsibility and to have them understand what it takes to care for a living thing. Well, it looks like I demonstrated how not to take care of a living thing since I didn’t do such a good job.

I feel bad. I’m sure there is more I could have done for him to avoid this. Read more, been more diligent in tracking his food intake, perhaps even keeping a Cricket journal.

Well, things are bad now and yesterday we brought Cricket to a vet. The first thing that became clear to me is that pet store owners, while they seem knowledgeable, don’t know jack shit about caring for a sick animal. I think they are good at maintaining healthy animals, but none of their advice came close to the advice I got from the vet. Of course, you say, the vet is a doctor.

Indeed.

So, not I have calcium drops and some liquified hay for herbivores. I need to feed this to Cricket via a syringe. I fed this to him at 6am, my wife will do it around noon, and Ill do it again before he goes to sleep.

I have a follow-up appointment next Wednesday. I am fully determined to get cricket healthy again and have him grow up to be a nice, big, happy Lizard.

If you are still reading this far and if you want to send Cricket a get-well wish, please post a comment to this blog as I’m sure he’ll appreciate it. After all, he’s not talking to me anymore.

By Nick at 9:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

Lots of interesting Pluto news in the past week. Not only is Pluto suing the IAU, it has to sit at the little planets table:

(Credit: Steve Breen)

More here.

By Nick at 7:57 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Hey, it’s Friday night. That’s my excuse. Another funny youtube gem.

By Nick at 11:21 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

This is getting kind of old, but since I laughed again while watching it tonight, I thought I’d pass it along. Youtube is just HOURS of fun. You can browse for videos for hours and hours.

A friend of mine wants me to help him get some DVD footage of his band onto Youtube. I’ll probably upload one of my home movies and post it here, just so I can see the whole process. I wonder how crappy the video quality will be… from high-definition to low-res youtube crud!

By Nick at 10:36 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Pluto is not a real planet anymore, it’s a Dwarf Planet. From the San Francisco chronicle:

(08-24) 08:21 PDT -- Pluto was shafted by the world's astronomers today, demoted to the lowly status of "dwarf planet" and leaving the solar system with its original eight true planets plus countless other objects that must now be called "small solar system bodies." After more than two years of controversy that started when astronomer Mike Brown of Caltech announced his team had discovered a "10th planet" and was finding many more far out in the icy region billions of miles beyond the sun where comets are born, the International Astronomical Union voted a set of rules defining just what a planet is and what it's not.
(Link)

Now I have to break it to my kids. I actually think this news will depress them.

Things you probably haven’t though of:

• How does the family of the late Clyde Tombough, who discovered the planet Pluto, feel about this?
• What about the folks at the Lowell Observatory say, since it was there that Pluto was discovered.
• The fancy way to describe the discovery is the first Trans-Neptuniun object. Bleh.

By Nick at 12:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

A friend of mine at work pointed me to a really cool (and quickly reviewed) history of GUI interfaces from the Mac System 1 until Windows Vista / Mac OS X 10.5.

Check it out.

By Nick at 7:55 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Last night I fell asleep on the couch a little after 10pm and didn’t wake up until 6am. I set my alarm clock for 5am so my last hour of sleep was interrupted a few times while I smashed on the snooze button a few times.

I was tired.

Last week, we got our little girl from Korea. The first few days with her kept my wife and  awake as she adjusted to the other side of the world, but our little girl soon fell into a nice groove and began to sleep through the night.

This weekend, my wife and I through a birthday party for my second oldest (no longer the middle), Antonio. The party went really well and I’d like to thank anyone reading this who came to celebrate the occasion with us.

That night was a bit rough. Our Serafina had a bit of a cold and was up all night. When morning came, my wife and I were faced with two kids running around the house screaming about my son’s new Nintendo DS Lite (it’s awesome). My youngest son was obsessed with some Floam and wanted more than his share as he constructed his little super bug. Then we had the yard to clean up. Oh man, it was a disaster area.

We rented an Italian ice cart, which is like the best thing you can get for a party. The kids get all sugared up and the adults find they’re finishing off more of these than they care to admit. Well, the little paper cups were in some very hard-to-find places.

We also had a big inflatable water slide which I had to re-inflate, clean off and dry before folding. Beer, soda, and water bottles were everywhere. My deck was a mess. Toys and remnants of last night’s epic light-saber battle were all over the place. By the way, the light saber battle may make it on Youtube if I can get my act together. It was cool.

Our cleaning efforts were interrupted by a trip to Bertucci’s in Melville to celebrate my cousin’s daughter’s first birthday.

In the end, I had to call and cancel our D&D engagement for the evening. Lisa and I simply had too much cleanup to do. we wound up finishing after 8pm. Serafina was still feverish and we knew it would be a long night with her up (it was).

I feel better rested now. I have my coffee and I’m ready to get to work.

By Nick at 7:47 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

About two weeks ago, the space shuttle Discovery took off at Cape Canaveral (as usual) on mission STS-114. Here is a spectacular pictures from that launch:

For more pictures, see the STS-114 page on William G. Hartenstein's Photography Site.

(Courtesy the ASLI mailing list)

By Nick at 5:18 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

My friends Rob and Pete are discussing the pros and cons of the Google Reader. Rob expressed a liking for Google Reader and Pete said “No thanks, I’ll stick to NewsGator.”

I use NewsGator for my company’s internal blogs since it’s a client-based aggregator which runs on my machine which has physical network access to those feeds. for everything else, I use Bloglines.

Bloglines, like the Google Reader, is a server-based aggregator. Server-based aggregators are nice since they keep you synchronized between work and home without requiring a company-synchronized laptop or VPN connection. Also, Bloglines supports my mobile device so I can read my blogs while on the can or the train.

I’ve tried Google Reader before and I must admit that I feel the same way Pete does. I don’t think it’s ready for prime time. Like Pete, I never felt fully empowered to manipulate my feeds and entries the way I wanted to.

Bloglines works by breaking down your blogs much like NewsGator. To the left is a listing of your blogs and blog folders. When you click on a blog, it’s entries are presented in the right pane. The act of blog-clicking also marks all of the recent entries as read. This makes reading blogs quick and easy. You can undo this if you find you don’t have time to finish the unread entries.

Personally, I wish I could tell Bloglines to show me at most 10 items per click. More than a few times I’ve “avoided” a busy blog because I knew I wouldn’t have time to read all gazillion entries at once. This delay exasperates the problem since the next time I sit down, there might be double gazillion entries.

You can organize your entries into folders and clicking on that folder will consolidate all of the entries into a single list of unread items on the right. Notice below how my “friends” folder is highlighted and entries consolidated from multiple blogs are seen on the right:

I’ve written about Bloglines many times before. For a while, they seemed to stop development on it. That seems to have changed, recently, as a stream of new features have been showing up steadily over the past few months.

I encourage anyone who prefers the server-based aggregator model to try Bloglines.

By Nick at 8:22 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

What really scared me was this blurb,

“95 percent of Americans questioned in the poll were able to remember the month and the day of the attacks…”
(Link)

What about the remaining 5%? The day and month of 9/11?!

Speechless.

By Nick at 10:21 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I connected by MacBook’s MiniDVI to my HDTV’s DVI port via the Apple Mini-DVI to DVI adapter ($19.99). The results were about what I expected:

The quality of the display is nothing like a real computer CRT or LCD display; the pixels are fuzzier. This reduction in quality is not very apparent when viewing the QuickTime movie you see depicted here but is very evident when you look at the UI elements such as text and the QuickTime movie’s media controls.

When I run my HDTV in 1280x720 (720p), via the DVI port you see in the above image, the display was solid and only a little fuzzy. When I bumped the screen size to 1920x1080 (1080i) the display had more information but the image quality suffered and the 60Hz refresh rate nearly put me into a coma.

I use the component cables to interface directly with my camcorders component out ports. The quality of the image is outstanding since my camera shoots interlaced video and the CRT-based HDTV’s electron gun’s scanning motion is adept at reproducing a clear image for the human eye via persistence of vision.

In fact, if I upgrade to a more “modern” HDTV such as a flat panel or a plasma, my camcorder’s component out won’t look as good because the non-CRT devices cannot properly duplicate the electron gun scanning behavior. Videos will thus have the annoying “horizontal jaggies” you see with interlaced movies.

A few years ago, I tried to connect my PC laptop to my computer but the VGA output on the laptop needed a special converter to attach into my HDTV’s DVI port. I gave up as the device seemed expensive.

In a few days, I’m going to post a more detailed account on my experiences with my HD camcorder.

By Nick at 10:29 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Compliments, the ASLI. You just need to shake your head.

The heart-stopping moments when Neil Armstrong took his first tentative steps onto another world are defining images of the 20th century: grainy, fuzzy, unforgettable.

But just 37 years after Apollo 11, it is feared the magnetic tapes that recorded the first moon walk - beamed to the world via three tracking stations, including Parkes's famous "Dish" - have gone missing at NASA's Goddard Space Centre in Maryland.

A desperate search has begun amid concerns the tapes will disintegrate to dust before they can be found.

It is not widely known that the Apollo 11 television broadcast from the moon was a high-quality transmission, far sharper than the blurry version relayed instantly to the world on that July day in 1969.

Link

By Nick at 7:33 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

From my astronomy club, from the Australian Antartic Division, here is an article talking about these rare and colorful clouds found only in the most extreme cold cold environments:

These so-called nacreous clouds were situated high in the stratosphere, some 20km above the ground, and reveal very cold temperatures in the rarefied atmosphere.

Photographs taken by Renae Baker, a meteorological officer with the Australian Bureau of Meteorology at Mawson, on July 25 show delicate colours produced when the fading light at sunset passed through tiny water-ice crystals blown along on a strong jet of stratospheric air.

"Spectacular is an understatement. The clouds were such a special and welcoming sight now that the sun has just started to return near the end of winter. I am keeping my eyes towards the celestial dome and camera at the ready in the hope of some more."

"Our weather balloon measured temperatures down to -87ºC in the vicinity of the cloud layer. That's about as cold as the lowest temperatures ever recorded on the surface of the Earth. Amazingly, the winds at this height were blowing at nearly 230 kilometres per hour," Ms Baker said.

Clouds this spectacular are seldom seen.

You can find an entire photo gallery here:

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By Nick at 8:11 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I’ve written about media codecs before. In fact, almost a year ago to the day I wrote about Apple’s then new H.264 implementation in QuickTime. I took a break from video shooting and editing in the past six months because my Canon GL2 DV camera’s firewire port broke as you may recall from recent posts.

On the way home from work, I was trying to get some recent video footage onto my PDA. I have a PocketPC device running Windows Mobile 2003 Second Edition.

This device can shoot video with the built-in camera and that video is encoded with the MPEG-4 codec. I figure MPEG-4 is a good place to start. Unfortunately video files I created using the MPEG-4 codec did not play on my device. The “Album” application would not even show them. Believe me, I tried every bit rate I could think of, every combination of audio settings, frame rate, key frames, and resolution. Nada.

By the way, I was transferring all of the filers via Bluetooth which seemed pretty peppy and more t han adequate for the 1–2MB files I was transferring.

Oh, yeh, back to my story. I was unsuccessful on the train so I came home and pouted. Internally, of course, externally I had to get ready for our new addition coming tomorrow night. Ah, I’m so distracted.

Focus!

So, I figure I would look into a way to encode WMV files on my Mac. I Googled for it and viola! Microsoft has a solution called Flip4Mac. It’s a set of codecs for QuickTime allowing OS X to encode WMV and play WMV within QuickTime itself. This is exactly what I needed!

Strangely, although the Flip4Mac WMV components are a free download from Microsoft a company called Telestream, Inc. developed it and sells a Pro version. The Pro version seems to allow IMPORT of WMV files into QuickTime so you can export to QuickTime native. I don’t need that conversion so the free version is fine for me!

(You’ll see how silly I am when you read on below.)

The WMV Compressor

The compressor itself is well-integrated into QuickTime. It showed up as a simple conversion like any other:

The options panel was very detailed and provided a lot of versatility. You can choose between WMV 9 Standard and Advanced. You are warned that videos encoded with “Advanced” won’t play on the Mac and they don’t (I tried). They also don’t play on my Pocket PC so I stuck with the “Standard” codec.

The rest of the settings, variable bit rate, full quality, 636kbits/second, a wide 320x180 aspect, and a full 29.97 frames per second rounded up the rest of the options. I tried many other encoding presets and bit rates and these settings seemed to work. So I tried them:

The export procedure took a few minutes.

The only problem is that the colors on the video spoiled after 10–12 seconds. The screen got a green tinge that only got worse.

I tried the advanced dialog and inserted key frames every 1.0 seconds instead of the default of 5. Still, the video soon turned greener like a Martian.

Perhaps the “2–pass” VBR algorithm was crap. So, I switched to the single pass algorithm. Encoding was much quicker. Sure enough,  that was the problem. The flip4mac web site says there is an issue with the 2–pass VBR algorithm. Who would have thought that second pass was there just to add green to your movie.

The resulting file looked great on my PocketPC! But it was 23MB! That’s too big. Plus, the video wasn’t anti-aliased properly. The video almost looked like it was interlaced. My source video was 1080i, which is 1920x1080 pixels and interlaced. Still, all of those artifacts should go away at 320x180.

I moved the quality slider from 100 to 80. Perhaps I was too ambitious at 100. The results were pretty dramatic. The file size was a mere 3.8MB which was perfect. However, I still saw interlacing artifacts. I thought setting the “Input Type” to “Interlaced – Upper Field First” in this dialog:

However, that did nothing. I then tried to force the source video to “display” non-interlaced by going to movie properties, and setting the “Single Field” and “De-interlace” check boxes. Now, these seem like “display preferences” and not settings which would affect the encoding. Just one more minute and I’ll find out…

That seemed to work. I didn’t see any quick-motion interlacing artifacts. However, the edges of objects still seem to contrasty, almost as if the down-sampling is a nearest-neighbor algorithm instead of a pixel average. At this point, I’ve exhausted all of my options. How can I get the video to look better?

Just when you thought I was almost there; things get worse.

The next problem I encountered was that the encoder was stopping at 30 seconds! It looks like the “free” version is really a “trial” version. There are like 4 upgrades, from $29 to $179 and I have no idea which one would best suit me. I think I’ll need to enter a support call at some point since the feature lists for each version are too vague for me to make a decision.

And so ends a night of fun and excitement.

By Nick at 12:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

My Sound Blaster Audigy ZS 2 (that’s a mouthful) sort of gave out the other night. I resisted the urge to go and replace it and tried to figure out what was going on. The device appeared in the Hardware Manager, but it appeared as a standard “Audio Device” or whatever is says about crap it can’t talk to.

I searched my drive for the existing drivers and I found some of the files here:

C:\Program Files\Creative\SBAudigy2ZS\Program\WDM

However, the driver installation sai that a critical file was missing. Crap. So, I download the new driver install from Creative.com. I start the installation and it craps out saying that my card is not detected.

Undeterred, I notice that tha installation program has an “extraction” phase before the installer proper begins. I checkd my temp directory to see if driver files were extracted. Nope. I then pointed WinZIP at the installer and viola, a full set of drivers was contained in the installer exe.

I extracted these drivers, pointed the “new hardware wizard” at them and I’m back in business.

It will take a long time before I’m this adept with my Mac. So much to learn.

By Nick at 10:42 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

For all of your Battlestar Galactica fans out there,  you may find it amusing to know that the cast and crew are now filiming for next season.. er have been for a little while now:

To catch up on things: we're currently filming episodes 10 & 11, our mid-season cliffhanger episodes, after which we're going to take a four week hiatus from shooting, then resume production on the remaining eight.
(Link)

This is one of the best shows on TV and I’m anxiously waiting for the fall season.

My other addiction is Smallville and I hear the next season will be the finale. I can’t wait for that. I must admit that I was a bit weary of all the negative energy of last season. I hope Clark finally gets into that damn costume and starts kicking some ass.

By Nick at 6:43 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)