Keef's Musings

Down Under 2

2008-11-03T17:03:59Z

Some more musings on our holiday to Australia...

Coins - The one and two dollar coins appear to be made out of the same metal, yet the two dollar coin is much smaller than the one dollar. Strange, though I prefer them to our huge two pound coins.
Transit lanes - Great idea. Basically a lane where you have to have at least a certain number of people in your vehicle to use. Only problem I see is how to police the system as I don't see an easy way to count people automatically. It's probably easy enough to tell if people are in the front two seats with a thermal imaging camera, but the back row(s) of seats would be more difficult.
Breath tests - Whilst over there, we did two breath tests. One I did before I was allowed to climb the Sydney Harbour Bridge and the other Katherine did as a random roadside test whilst driving through the Blue Mountains. On both occasions we scored a blood alcohol level of zero, but the interesting thing is the equipment they used. Rather than blowing through a tube to collect a sample like in the UK, you simply speak into a nozzle (we were asked to count to ten) until the machine beeps. It saves having to sterilise a new tube for everyone (the whole team doing the bridge climb used the same tester) and is a lot quicker and easier.
Internet cafés - Cheap and plentiful. Handy for checking email, facebook, etc. and we were able to check in online for our return flights. Oddly, most doubled as travel centres rather than as cafes. One launderette I noticed was offering internet use while you wash your clothes.
ISPs - we obviously didn't pay for an internet connection on holiday, but I noticed in all the promotions that you pay for a fixed download allowance, rather than the (reasonably) "unlimited" subscription model followed over here. I suspect that we're going to go down the same route sooner or later as the ISPs in the UK are straining under the ever increasing load and I'm sure would love to be able to charge more for their services.

Down Under

2008-10-27T15:18:12Z

We got back from Australia a couple of days ago. I have to say I've had the time of my life in and around Sydney. Rather than write up the entire holiday like I attempted with New Zealand a couple of years ago, I'll instead list a few highlights and other interesting things that I did or noticed. So, in no particular order...

Sydney harbour is just gorgeous. We took so many photos of the area - some of which I'll stick online soon, though I doubt they'll do justice to the place.
We stayed in an area called Manly, just a half hour ferry ride away from the centre of the city. It's a lovely laid back beach town and we were renting a nice apartment in a building overlooking the beach. Bondi beach was just a tourist hole in comparison. When we arrived, the three day Manly Jazz festival was just starting and on the second day, the local rugby league team won the Premiership by battering Melbourne 40-0, leaving a lot of very happy people around!
The temporarily very favourable Australian dollar to British pound exchange rate made the prices of things rather reasonable.
The Sydney Harbour Bridge climb is a great experience. If you do it, make sure you do the longer Discovery Climb. It was just great clambering around on catwalks under the roadway with just a metal grating and a cable attached to your waist between you and the waters far below. The views from the top were spectacular - it was a great shame I wasn't allowed to take my camera up there.
The Blue Mountains were equally spectacular, though more touristy than I had expected. The busiest area around Katoomba was utterly rammed with coachloads of people, and the Three Sisters which are meant to be the highlight aren't actually that impressive when you compare it with the views at the lookouts around Blackheath. Climbing out to Panorama Lookout along a jumble of rocks and gravel with a huge drop on either side is well worth it.
We attended a wedding in the bandstand in Balmoral beach which was lovely.
We hired a car for the last week of our trip. It had an automatic gearbox which was really weird to get used to (and seemed to burn fuel at an incredible rate). My left foot kept lifting for the clutch. It wasn't helped by the windscreen wiper and indicator controls being swapped around from the usual places.
Public transport - Very cheap if you buy a weekly season ticket and you can get more or less anywhere easily. The ferry is the best way to travel!
E-tags - These are a tag you put in your car which you top up with credit and automatically pays tolls on motorways, bridges and tunnels when you pass through a gate that detects the tag. The problem was that the hire car wasn't fitted with one, and some of the toll roads don't accept cash meaning we had to avoid certain roads (thankfully we were given a list of which roads to avoid). Surely it would have been easier for the hire company to just fit a tag to the car and charge us at the end of the hire period?
Beers - small and expensive. Where's a proper pint when you need one?
Wines - lovely and cheap.
Supermarkets - they don't sell any booze at all. You have to go to a bottle shop to get a bottle of wine to go with your meal and it's always wrapped in a brown paper bag as though the country is ashamed of drinking alcohol. This is far from what I expected from the typical Australian beer swilling stereotype.
Taronga Zoo - Wow, what a location overlooking the harbour. Easy to get to on the ferry too. Difficult to find your way around though, as nearly every path seems to lead back round to the central food area and signposts appear to contradict the map you're given with your ticket.
The Sydney Opera House is one of those rare buildings that just looks amazing from any angle.
Television - Seems to be way ahead of British TV in some aspects. We had several High Definition channels available to us (though oddly half the channels were duplicated at least twice on the TV we had). Some of the channels seemed to be showing US dramas the day after they are on in the US. For example, we saw several episodes of season five of House M.D. in HD which won't be on in the UK for months and will be standard definition when shown (at least on terrestrial TV).
The Sam Neill TV adverts saying you should eat lean red meat three to four times a week and that eating red meat is the reason our brains have developed to the size they are. That would never have been shown in the UK. The vegetarian society would have had it banned before it even got off the drawing board. I like the Aussie attitude to this!
Flights - I hate long haul flights. I can't sleep, and we were sat near business class so the look of those comfy chairs made my horrible hard uncomfortable chair feel even worse. On the way back we had to check out of our apartment by 10am, then do stuff all day, get to the airport in the evening, endure a fourteen hour flight to Dubai, hang around there for a few hours, then another flight to Gatwick, followed by waiting around for an hour for a train home. In total I was awake for 43½ hours.
The flight to Australia was even worse, because the airline had booked more babies on the flights than there were bassinets available (basically a cot which attaches to the wall). Despite checking in online a whole day before the flight, we were forced to share one, meaning there were several screaming babies on the flight that were really tired and unable to sleep properly - and causing the other passengers to lose sleep also. To deprive an adult of sleep for a whole day is bad enough, but to do this to a baby is basically nothing short of child abuse - the airline shouldn't have done this and will be receiving a strongly worded letter of complaint!!!
Hiking - We did plenty of long walks, and carrying our baby in the sling or pushing him in the pram just makes it even more exercise, meaning I managed to lose half a stone in weight in three weeks without even trying. WIN!
Food - The Australians seem to like all of my favourite foods. Lots of meat, pies, meat pies, burgers, barbecue, etc. I was also introduced to the lunchtime delight of toasted ham and cheese croissants, which should be sold over here immediately! Also Kangaroo is nice to eat and they claim it's more environmentally friendly as they do not require loads of grazing land, nor do they produce as much methane as cows do (which I'm sure is carbon neutral anyway given that it comes from grass that only grew in the previous few weeks, and methane breaks down into water and carbon dioxide fairly quickly in our oxygen rich atmosphere, but that's another discussion).
Weather - A couple of days of rain, but mostly blue skies and temperatures in the high twenties. We used a lot of sun screen!

I'm sure I'll think of more things to add to this list in the coming days.

Buggy

2008-09-29T13:43:23Z

We're off to Australia for a well earned holiday in a few days. One thing we realised is that we needed a new buggy for our son as the one we already have is very good, but too heavy and bulky for an airport. The other option would be to carry him in the Baby Bjorn sling but doing that every day for three weeks solid would get pretty uncomfortable and tiring.

So, off we went to the big Mothercare supermarket in Weybridge to spend our money. We wanted a buggy as light as possible, that folded up as small as possible. Being in the UK it also had to have a rain cover. The place was quite busy, but we were able to try out all the buggies in our own time, wheeling them around and folding them up, etc. After fiddling around with everything that was on offer, we settled with a Maclaren Triumph which seemed to meet all our requirements (in charcoal grey, not the eye bleeding bright pink which comes up on the site by default).

Then we went to the till to go and buy it, but the woman claimed she wasn't trained on buggies and couldn't help us. The other staff were all helping other customers. We waited around for a while, gave up and went to the Argos next door to see if they had it (they didn't), and went back. This time a different woman was serving who just went into the back and got one for us. We paid, shoved it in the car and headed home. Job done.

Why did the first woman refuse to help us? It seems daft. We knew exactly which buggy we wanted - we weren't asking her for advice on what to buy, we just said "We'd like to buy that one please". The only thing I can think of is that she wasn't trained for lifting stuff from the store room (despite the whole thing weighing only 6kg including packaging).

Now we need to work out how to pack all of his baby stuff into ½ a normal personal baggage allowance for the flights (luckily, the pram itself won't be counted as part of that). Then we need to find out definitively what we need to do about baby food. Neither the airline or airport websites are particularly helpful on this subject so I guess we'll have to phone them. We can't take all his food ready made because 24+ hours out of a fridge is too long to remain sterile, so do we take baby bottles full of sterilised water (which are bigger than 100ml and could be confiscated) and add the powder when he feeds s we do at home, or are we forced to buy lots of those expensive little ready made cartons of baby milk?

Nation - Terry Pratchett

2008-09-24T13:14:33Z

The first surprise for me in reading this book is that when I looked at the map in the opening pages, it didn't look much like Discworld. In fact, it was a slightly alternate looking map of Earth. "Huh?", thinks I.

Without spoiling the book, it makes total sense that it's set on Earth and not Discworld as one of the major themes is exploring the question of whether gods exist - of course they do on Discworld, which would make the whole story moot.

However, the book reads like Discworld, with similar structure and devices. Terry Pratchett has not changed his writing style much lately (except that his last few books have used chapters) and this book is no exception.

Overall, this is a tale that'll make you think, but has little that hasn't been explored a hundred times elsewhere.

Vista 64 and missing DVD drives

2008-08-20T14:53:08Z

Yesterday I noticed something very strange when I booted my PC. The DVD drive wasn't visible in My Computer. I quickly looked in the Device Manager to see that it was listed with the yellow icon showing something was wrong. Upon further inspection it told me that it was unable to start the drive because of a "Code 10". Helpful.

Rebooting the PC showed that the drive was visible from the BIOS and I was successfully able to boot from it. Also the drive was working fine from my Linux partition, so I was convinced there was no hardware problem. Why on earth was Vista having a problem with it?

A brief web search revealed I wasn't alone in this problem and that it's been there since XP and hasn't been properly fixed. The suggestion repeated over and over was to delete a few registry keys and reboot. I won't repeat the exact details here as it's well documented elsewhere, but if you're interested, see this Microsoft support page.

However, this fix didn't work for me. I tried uninstalling the drive in Device Manager and letting it try to redetect it - it didn't. I tried scanning for new hardware, updating the motherboard drivers for my PC (turns out I'd missed one of Nvidia's rare Nforce driver updates back in March). All the usual stuff you would do to fix this kind of problem, but didn't get anywhere.

Eventually I stumbled upon a fix on the web which involved deleting INFCACHE.1 from C:\windows\inf and rebooting, letting Windows rebuild the file. You'll need to set the security properties for the file so you have full control to delete it, but it did the trick. One reboot later and the DVD drive was back in working order.

Portal TFV map pack

2008-07-01T18:28:30Z

I finished this fan made map pack for Portal last night and found it surprisingly good for an unofficial addon. It's based upon the 2D flash Portal game by the same team.

It features some rather cunning (though more difficult) level design which makes you think beyond what the original game asks of you. It's about as long as the original game too, so you certainly get your money's worth which isn't bad for a freebie. It doesn't quite flow as well as the original game, with spikes in the difficulty here and there, though it's quite a feat to have produced such a high quality experience without Valve's resources.

Worth checking out if you have the PC version of this game.

Linux Wireless Problems Solved?

2008-07-01T18:25:09Z

...for me at least. Looks like my wireless card (Abit Airpace PCIe) is finally getting native support. Woohoo!!! No more flaky NDISWrapper.

http://madwifi.org/ticket/1192

I shall report on its effectiveness when I get the chance.

Blog update

2008-06-16T16:04:48Z

I've done a bit of much needed housekeeping on my blog. The changes are as follows...

I've added a comments RSS feed. The link is in the sidebar to the right, just below the blog feed. Movable Type's template system is rather nice for authoring this kind of thing easily. Credit to Emiliano Bruni who posted up some code to do the job.
I've brightened up the look - might do this again soon as I'm not totally in love with it.
After much moaning, I've fixed the name of one of my regular commenters!

Enjoy!

Who's the Daddy?

2008-06-12T12:47:17Z

I'm back in work after a couple of weeks' paternity leave and it's about time I updated my blog. Paternity leave has been the quickest two weeks of my life I think. Being a parent is hard work (even without the endless stream of family visitors) and time just flies by without you really noticing.

Anyway, onto the formal announcement...

Our son Isaac was born on 27th May weighing 7lb 7oz (just under 3.4 kilograms).

Thanks to all of you who have sent messages, cards and presents wishing us well. There are some photos on Katherine's facebook - just one on mine. I'll stick some more up when I get some time to myself at home in front of the PC!

GTA IV - Initial Impressions

2008-04-30T12:53:42Z

My eagerly awaited copy of GTA IV arrived at work yesterday. I'd ordered the special edition which comes in a huge cardboard box containing a metal lockable deposit box. Inside this is a fabric Rockstar bag, a Rockstar keyring, two keys for the deposit box, a CD of music from the game, a nice art book and of course the game itself.

My introduction to GTA was the third game on PS2. I loved it at the time. The first game I'd ever encountered where I could choose between ploughing through missions or just playing in the world. Simply getting in a car and caning it around the city was fun. I played it until I finished the main campaign missions, with the climactic battle at the dam.

Vice City had me equally hooked, though I haven't finished it by a long shot (and most probably never will). Towards the end of my playthrough some of the missions just got too hard and annoying for me to continue with it, but I played enough to open up the entire world (including a great moment where you take over the mansion in the middle island) and had some great times.

San Andreas was where it all went wrong for me. The main character didn't come across as interesting or likable to me. In fact none of characters did it for me - they were just a bunch of one dimensional gangsta rap stereotypes. The "Yo homies" style of dialogue was just laughable for all the wrong reasons. It was as though they were trying too hard to be "down with the kids". Also, the PS2 version I played had a really poor framerate. I didn't bother playing past about 6%.

Back to the last night... On a busy evening of cycling home from work in heavy rain and visiting a mortgage advisor who likes to talk (a LOT), I managed get a couple of hours of gameplay in on GTA IV.

I was worried the game may be overhyped (Halo 3), but so far this game is a massive return to form for me. The title sequence is incredibly slick and very quickly you meet some fun and interesting characters. Without spoiling anything I've done a few missions, been bowling on a date with a slightly creepy woman and generally just pootled around the world taking in the sights. It hasn't been particularly violent so far either (though that won't stop the Daily Mail/Jack Thompson brigade from asserting otherwise). The only fighting I've had to do is to protect Niko's cousin from debt collectors.

The attention to detail is incredible, right down to the interference in the car radio when your mobile phone is about to ring.

The only problem I've had so far is that dialogue is sometimes drowned out by background noise or music. It's probably just a bug in the 5.1 sound mix (other games have had similar problems for me which have been patched), but I've turned on subtitles for now which neatly solves the problem, with the additional bonus of automatically translating to English when characters speak in another language.

Back on two wheels

2008-04-23T12:51:42Z

I've not done any cycling since the charity bike ride last June. Since then my bike had festered in the shed with a flat back tyre and a dodgy crank bearing. At the time I was driving to work (much too far to cycle) and didn't have the motivation to get the bike fixed up.

In February this year, we had a break in. Both of our bikes were stolen from the shed. Katherine quickly got a new bike from Halfords through the insurance company, but I decided to hold out as my workplace had recently started doing a ride2work scheme through Evans Cycles. The scheme means you pay for your bike out of your pre-tax pay if you promise to use it to get to work, thus saving around 50% on the price. I applied for a voucher in February and it took until last week (mid April) to arrive. A two month wait is frankly ridiculous, but asking around a few people it would appear this is normal.

Anyway, I headed down to the bike shop and after a quick test ride I settled on a Specialized Pitch Comp FSR. It improves over my old bike (a Saracen Vice - no longer produced) in pretty much every way. It's much lighter, has hydraulic disk brakes (brilliant in the rain!), and the suspension is a lot more advanced - it can be adjusted from rock hard for road use, to really soft for offroad. It feels much better when pedalling as it doesn't waste all your energy compressing the suspension rather than propelling the bike forward.

I was able to take the bike with me straight away as they had one in stock. I rode back home from the bike shop (about four miles) which took me about half an hour. Since then I've ridden to work and back all week (2.2 hilly miles each way) and done a few laps of Surrey Research Park (0.6 miles) in my lunch hours.

I hope to get rid of my beer belly soon!!!

Childbirth Pseudoscience

2008-04-09T15:21:54Z

We've attended a number of antenatal classes lately. One major focus of these is the labour process, explaining methods of relaxing and how to help manage pain. We were taught breathing exercises, focussing on breathing out (similar to coping techniques for an asthma attack). Various active labour positions were shown to us, as the TV sterotype of lying on your back with legs akimbo is pretty much the worst position for childbirth.

One major benefit of these classes is that it gave me the sense that I have an active and beneficial role to play, rather than just sitting there like a lemon for hours holding Katherine's hand saying muttering vague sympathies and wondering if the bloke's role should be to pace up and down the corridor smoking cigars...

I digress. So far, the advice given is all good common sense stuff that's well backed up physiologically.

However, some other advice about pain relief made my sceptical eyebrow raise. The teacher at the NCT (National Childbirth Trust) class recommended arnica tablets as a pain relief (though the NHS classes made no mention of this). I didn't think any more of it until Katherine bought some on a shopping trip with a friend. They turn out to be a homeopathic remedy (i.e. sugar pills). All the research I can find shows them to be nothing more than placebos as would be expected if you think about it (for example - http://archsurg.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/full/133/11/1187). Now you might think that a placebo has a strong effect (and indeed it is), but at over £5 for a small tub of tablets it's just a plain rip off. I may as well give Katherine some mints.

Another method of pain relief that is on potentially dodgy scientific ground is TENS, which consists of a small machine with four electrodes on wires that are placed on particular places on your back. The machine sends pulses at certain frequencies that are said to "block" your pain transmitting nerves (though why this has no effect on other nerves with jobs such as motor or temperature sensing I have no idea). This was recommended by both the NCT and the NHS.

The research into the effectiveness of TENS for childbirth seems inconclusive. I'm not sure I quite believe the pain blocking theory of operation, but perhaps a better theory is that TENS performs a bit of neurological slight of hand. The tingling sensation could be enough to distract the brain. The human brain can only process so much information at once, so the pain is felt less strongly.

It is (to me) quite surprising given how much TENS was emphasised by the teachers as a good therapy (especially by the NHS who really should know better about clinical trials). However, neither therapy seems to do any harm, which is why I think they're both recommended. I guess a few good placebos are better than nothing.

I think it mostly comes down to the fact that childbirth is not a very predictable or controlled process. It's different for everyone, lasts wildly varying lengths of time, different people have different pain thresholds, etc. Bascially, there are far too many differences to make a good control group for a double blind trial into obstetric pain relief with good methodology. You can't even test the same person through two labours with and without the pain relief because so many other factors will be different that the results would be meaningless.

Child Car Seats

2008-04-07T13:57:00Z

Our impending parenthood looms closer and closer, so we've started to buy a lot of gear in preparation. Most of it has been fairly simple to choose, clothes (in neutral colours as we don't know the gender of the baby), stuff to wash the baby with, sleeping bags, etc.

One thing we've had to do a bit more research on is the car seat.

My first instinct was to look at these integrated travel systems where you have a car seat which easily plugs in and out of the car and onto a matching pram base. However, once we looked into this, it seems that it's a far from ideal solution.

With these systems it seems there are far more cons than pros. I'll list a few here that came up in our research.

Advantages:

Convenience - it's easy to transfer baby from the car to the pram and vice versa without waking him/her up.

...and that's about it.

Disadvantages:

The car seat section is going to be very small (known as a Group 0+), which means the baby will out grow it in just nine months. After that you have to buy a new larger seat which won't fit onto the pram anyway. We're not planning on having child No. 2 straight away, so this type of seat would then be useless up in the loft for a while.
The small seats are said to be uncomfortable for babies on long journeys as the baby will be curved into a V shape for a long period.
Poorer safety compared with a dedicated car child seat (particularly side impact protection).
Clips holding the car seat to the pram are another thing that can break.

So in the end we decided that a dedicated car seat was the thing for us. After reading loads of reviews and going to see the different models in a few shops, we settled upon a Britax First Class Si Ultra, which is a Group 0-1 seat that will last the baby from birth until approximately four years. The website even has a guide to whether it will fit in your car or not (ours is too old to have an ISOFIX system so we needed to check before buying). We got it from halfords.com which included a 10% discount.

Now we just need to research prams and cots...

Windows Media Sharing + Xbox 360

2008-04-05T10:44:06Z

After my failure to get iPlayer content working on my 360 (as detailed in my last post), I tried another route, as suggested by IainB in the comments.

I had already activated Media Sharing in the Vista network control panel, so I simply turned both machines on and went to the Media blade, selected video, then pressed X to change source and selected my PC, which appeared on the list straight away. Then all the video content shared on my PC appeared in a list.

However, the 360 still wasn't able to play the iPlayer video content. After hitting play, the screen faded blank for a second, and then a blade appeared with saying it couldn't play the content with a hex error number (which I forget at the moment). It was able to view some images from my PC, though the connection kept dropping, which is odd, because the wireless network has previously been totally solid - copying data between our two PCs works flawlessly. I haven't tried playing music over the network yet.

I also discovered that you can plug a digital camera into the 360 via a USB cable, and it can display a slideshow of the images on the camera straight away. A really nice feature!!!

Windows Media Center + Xbox 360

2008-04-01T12:29:33Z

We missed an episode of Torchwood last week, so I decided to give the BBC's iPlayer a go. I installed the software from the website easily enough and it told me to restart Firefox before it would work. Fair enough, thinks I, so I restart the browser and navigate to the iPlayer download page and select Torchwood. I select the download option and it then bizarrely launches an instance of Internet Explorer to do the job.

Now why on Earth would it do this? I've seem a few websites that are totally IE dependent (anything hosted on Sharepoint for example), but the iPlayer installer specifically mentioned restarting Firefox so it makes no sense in this case.

Despite this WTF, it downloaded the program fairly quickly. I play the first few seconds of it in Windows Media Player to check it's OK, but really what I wanted to do was to watch the program on our 32" HD screen in the living room, sat on the comfy sofa, etc, rather than watching on a 20" PC monitor on a hard chair in a small office. Well, I have an Xbox 360 which can play back media so I thought it should be a doddle to get the two machines talking over our wireless network. How wrong I was...

Firstly, I booted up the 360 and went to its Media Center (Note to Microsoft, it's spelt "Centre" in the UK). It provided me with an eight digit number to type into Windows Media Center on my PC. I have Vista Home Premium 64 on my PC, which includes Windows Media Center. I launch this program and follow the instructions to add a "Media Extender" which apparently the 360 is from the point of view of the PC. I enter the number and wait...

By this point, the 360 says it's downloading something, but after a minute or two it claims the connection was broken. The PC says the same thing. I try again with the same result.

After a bit of thought, I recall seeing a Media Sharing option in the Vista Control panel, so I switch this on (it's able to see the 360 on the network with no problems), but the 360 isn't able to see my PC.

I go through the whole Media Extender setup again and this time it seems to succeed. The PC did complain that my wireless network wasn't going to be fast enough to stream video (surely 54Mbps is quick enough, even if shared across two devices). The 360 now has a Media Center UI on screen, identical to the one in Vista.

However, all is not well. Navigating this screen results in a huge lag of a few seconds for each button press (though the background is animating smoothly). The PC is able to navigate without any problems, even when connected to the 360. I eventually get into the videos section and see that the Torchwood episode is indeed there. I click play and it says it doesn't know how to play it despite it being a Windows Media format file.

At this point, we just give up and watch the episode in the office on my PC. The image quality of iPlayer content isn't bad at all. It's a bit fuzzier than broadcast digital TV, but my PC seems to do a much better job of smoothing out DCT macroblocks than my TV does (perhaps the difference between MPEG2 and WMV). Also, it was a good episode!

So... Why was this process so difficult? Why did it fail when I tried to play the video on the 360? Why was there so much lag navigating the Media Center UI on the 360? Would it not have been a lot simpler for the 360 to present a shared drive to the network that I can copy videos/music/etc onto and then simply play them locally?

Answers on a postcard (or preferably in the comments box).