I'll just do it as a Movable Type blog, I think.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 07:37 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Installed the new version to a clean directory... twice... and it's working again, or at least not giving any errors. Of course, there are no files there either, but that's a relatively minor detail.

It also comes with some new themes, which while being prettier, use a different size for the images, so all the old images get rescaled in the browser and end up looking like crap. It still has the old theme, only it has changed too, so it ends up looking like crap anyway.

I'll post the new videos, or some of them, since I've spent the hour I'd planned on using to upload the new files beating my head against a wall instead. Then I'll upload the old files. Then I'll upload some more new files. Or something.

Update: Or not. This new release looks like a major downgrade. Bah. And bah again.

Update: One of the things that is particularly broken about the new version of Broadcast Machine is that instead of showing my lovingly handcrafted images on the individual torrent pages, it embeds the file. Yes, it takes your avi file - or your mp3 or zip or whatever it might be, but it assumes it's an avi - and sticks it right there on the web page. Of course, that only works in Internet Explorer 6; other browsers have quite an entertaining variety of ways of not working when they encounter this particular... trick.

Unfortunately, but unsurprisingly, their web site seems to have crashed, so I can't visit their forums to ask what drugs they were on when they decided that this was a good idea.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:04 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Because I never considered the possibility that a popular subtitle editing program would have a major bug relating to one of the most common subtitle file formats that could lead to the deletion of words or entire lines of dialogue without any warning.

Grrr.

I am now editing the subtitles for episode 4 in Wordpad.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:31 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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The next telco sales rep who tells me that we have to connect to them using ATM because they are selling a business grade product is going to get a punch in the snoot.

But he did it via email.

Sneaky weasels, these sales reps.

But for crying out loud, it's 2006! ATM is a 1970's solution to a 1960's problem. The increases in speed of computer networking mean that the QoS features built into ATM are now effectively redundant, and at the same time, enormously expensive.

Just. Go. Away.

Dammit.

This Wikipedia article provides a good overview of the issues. What it comes down to is that I can get at least three times as much bandwidth over ethernet for the same price, even though I am buying the ethernet from one of the most expensive players and the ATM from one of the cheapest.

Update: Here's a Wired article from ten years ago explaining the problems, only with more personal details. Of course, it's Wired, so half of it is crap, but it's still useful for perspective.

Basically, it's another example of Worse is Better.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:47 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Don't give me that "guaranteed delivery" crap. Yes, ethernet is best-effort, but it's a hell of a lot cheaper than ATM. If I can do a gig of ethernet for half the price of your OC-3, I know whose packets are going to end up on the computer room floor. If you're out of bandwidth, you're out of bandwidth.

(And I'm informed that Australia is out of bandwidth. As far as I can tell, all the major telcos here are being run by idiots. Which is no change at all from 1995 when I first started dealing with them. No wonder Telstra's shares are in the toilet.)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:36 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Update: Except, possibly, for these guys. Maybe.

Update: I was wondering why I hadn't run into the Kano Technologies iSCSI products before. Answer: They were launched today. The only reason I found them was that I was looking for eSATA storage at the time.

Update: Yay! Kano don't suck. They're not what I'd call cheap, but once you've bought the system, you're free to buy your own drives and slot them in. When you've seen the markups other vendors charge on standard disk drives, you realise that this is a huge win.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:39 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:39 AM | Comments (7) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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All I was trying to accomplish today was to convert the opening credits of Hand Maid May into a good-quality AVI file. I have at least a dozen programs that purport to do this, but not one of them produced respectable results. Two of them crashed repeatedly, and one would not even recognise the straight-off-the-DVD MPEG-2 file.

To the rescue: VirtualDubMod. I use VirtualDub for all my AVI editing, because while it is not even slightly fancy, it actually does what you tell it to. But it only handles AVI files. VirtualDubMod is a modified version of VirtualDub (which makes sense) that can also cope with Ogg and Matroska and MPEG files. What is not immediately obvious (because it doesn't show up anywhere) is that it can just as easily read the VOB files you find on a DVD.

A little bit of tweaking of the DivX 6.11 codec (never needed to de-interlace the video before) and viola! There are still some compression artifacts, so I'm going to have one more shot at it and then upload whichever version looks best.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:35 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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And then the article suddenly careers off the cliff into the Great Homeopathic Swamp:

That there is something more to water than hydrogen and oxygen is something many researchers welcome. But Rustum Roy, a materials scientist at Pennsylvania State University in University Park goes further. He thinks it is time for a radical overhaul of the scientific view of water - one which, he believes, has been dominated by chemistry for too long. [Oy. — Ed.] "It's absurd to say that chemical composition dictates everything," he says. "Take carbon, for example - the same atoms can give you graphite or diamond."

In a review paper published in Materials Research Innovations in December, Roy and a team of collaborators called for a re-examination of the case against the most controversial of all claims made for water: that it has a "memory".

The physical nature of water is quite straightforward: It does not have a memory. This has been verified experimentally so often that only the very deeply stupid and outright frauds suggest otherwise.

The idea that water can retain some kind of imprint of compounds dissolved in it has long been cited as a possible mechanism for homeopathy

which claims to treat ailments using solutions of certain compounds.

Some homeopathic remedies are so dilute they no longer contain a single molecule of the original compound -

- prompting many scientists to dismiss homeopathic effects as imaginary.

What has prompted all competent and honest scientists to dismiss homeopathic effects as imaginary is that it doesn't do anything. It's been tested. It doesn't do anything. Yes, all physical, chemical and biological theory tells us that it won't do anything, but that pales beside the experimental evidence for it not doing anything.

Roy believes that by taking homeopathy seriously scientists may find out more about water's fundamental properties.

The present editors of New Scientist, though, are merely an irresponsible bunch of scoundrels in it for the money.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:40 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:32 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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