chuma.org

Month: April 2005

  • Info board status

    Well Sandy loved my infoboard idea, so I’m slowly moving ahead with it. I’ve been trying hard to get 802.11b drivers running on RedHat 6.2, but it’s just not flying. I’m going to have to try and upgrade the little laptop to RedHat 8.0 so I get a 2.4 kernel, and then things should be good to go. (Hope I can manage that on 16MB of RAM!)

    In the meantime, I’ve been taking the scripts I used to use to send weather and news headlines to my cell phone and making them output a simple HTML page instead. The plan is for the laptop to display this page using Links 2, a lightweight browser that supports graphics, tables, and JavaScript, and also can display using SVGAlib. It also makes testing a snap as I can run Links in a window on my Linux box and set the resolution.

    Here’s what the page looks like so far. It won’t refresh. Yeah, I know it’s really simple, but it should do the job. Plus I’ve still got some room on the 800×600 screen, not quite sure what else to put on there.

    Instead of scraping web pages, I’m reading RSS feeds (from rssweather.com and cbc.ca) and writing out simple HTML. The CBC Top Stories link to the CBC website (which Links actually displays pretty well), which is nice. The clock is JavaScript. The GO Transit status is a lynx/sed one-liner that scrapes the page, since GO Transit’s website is still in the STONE AGE.

  • still blogging sculpture garden

    Oh crap. It’s a sandbox. What a stupid thing to put in the middle of downtown Toronto… doesn’t everyone know that sandboxes are filled with pet crap and, well, just dirty in general?

    For those who don’t know, right across the path from the garden is the patio of an expensive French restaurant. I’m sure they’ll be thrilled!

  • sculpture garden construction day 3

    I saw workers building this over lunch yesterday, snapped the photo this morning. We’re getting a jungle gym! Hooray!

    It was hilarious to watch the workers because there were three fortysomething construction-types, wearing safety vests, hardhats, etc, assembling brightly-coloured metal bits into what looks like a playground fixture, while looking as surly as possible.

  • Sculpture Garden construction, day 2

    Hrmmm….

  • The urge to be a geek

    You might remember a long time ago I started to make a digital picture frame out of an old laptop I had. It was basicially finished except for the external stand or hanging hardware. However since I’ve worked on it we’ve moved twice and the hardware is still sitting in a box in the closet.

    Lately I’ve been thinking about it again, and pressing it into service in another way: as a digital “info-board” for the ground floor of our house, where we often find ourselves wondering:

    1. What’s the weather forecast?
    2. What’s the phone number for (friend/relative/business)?
    3. Anything else that might be useful

    Assuming that my hardware hasn’t died after being in storage for so long, the same system should be up for the task. The one major thing that’s changed is that I’m no longer using a crappy RangeLAN2 network, but I’ve graduated to full 802.11b. Also I’d have to figure out how to display the above information. I was using an SVGAlib-based image viewer before, since the hardware only has 16MB of RAM to speak of. There is a half-decent web browser called links that will use SVGAlib. I could whip up a portal that would show basic information on the screen using links…

  • Season four of 24 in a nutshell – wow, Wesley gets all pissed off about 24, thus turning me off from ever picking it up. At least I still have Alias to escape with, which is FINALLY turning this craphole of a season around! ABC was all like “Yeah, best season EVAR!” but of course it was just marketing bravado. Dear writers: glad you finally got a clue that people just want to know about RAMBALDI, and want to see Sloane tortured by Jack over and over again. Well, that’s my dream at least.

  • I wonder what’s going into the sculpture garden?

    It’s going to be pretty big, that’s for sure…

    Toronto Sculpture Garden

  • Dear FedEx: I love you.

    So what’s been going on around the house lately?

    The garage door opener stopped working. Well, to be more specific, the safety sensors that detect something obstructing the door stopped working. This may have had something to do with the combination of:

    • They weren’t installed correctly in the first place: they are mounted on the floor instead of on the track, and the brackets are bolted directly to the concrete instead of on a wooden block as the instruction state.
    • We cleaned out the garage on the weekend and used the hose to wash it out. The sensors probably got splashed in the process. Strangely, it didn’t stop working until the next evening.

    So anyways, a flurry of inquiries, store-checking and phone calls ensue to get it fixed. Sure, I could get a guy out who could install new sensors, but no one is home during weekdays, and it was going to be over $120 plus tax for that. No frickin’ way. I’m not incredibly cheap but I don’t like being ripped off, and when I knew that this was a 15-minute job and some guy with a van and a tool belt is going to charge me $65 for the privilege, no way.

    After checking every Home Depot and calling every garage door place around (none of which will sell me this part directly), I ended up calling the manufacturer, Chamberlain, to order it. Well they were very frickin’ friendly, the part was reasonably priced, and 2-day air shipping for $8 sealed the deal.

    FedEx blew my socks off this morning when it got delivered THE NEXT DAY, ie. about 45 minutes ago. I was expecting Monday or Tuesday, given the usual customs hang-ups between us and “them”. Sweet. “Frickin’ Sweet!” as Peter Gryphon would say. I even sent those Chamberlain folks a nice thank-you note because, well, good CSRs are the unsung heroes of any company, and I got helped good dammit. Credit where credit is due.

  • OMG I finally found this again!

    A looooong time ago I was browsing the IMDB randomly and came across an entry for a director – except it wasn’t a director, but rather a pseudonym that was used when a film had been hacked by the producer/studio/whoever so badly that the director refused to be credited for the final product.

    However, I forgot where the entry was.

    Ever since then I’ve been searching for it, mostly so I could prove it to Sandy. And I just stumbled across it again, so now I’m linking to it, dammit!

    The pseudonym is Alan Smithee.

    However, after the film An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn was made in 1997, the Director’s Guild decided that the name had been exposed and overused. It was replaced by Thomas Lee. The IMDB doesn’t have a direct page for this name though.

    So there. I’m going to do my chores now.

  • by the numbers

    • Number of couriers I helped at the office today: 2
    • Number of drivers who almost nailed me in the GO parking lot: 1
    • Number of flyers for real estate brokers in the mail today: 5
    • Number of postcards from my sister: 1 (yay!)