Jul 162009
 

I received a notice from Rogers Cable in the mail this morning, about their decision to shuffle some channels about in the cable lineup. The notice is a little confusing: two stations are moved from channels 61 and 69 to 95 and 96, but does this mean that they are becoming digital-only stations? 95-96 do exist as analog cable channels, but Rogers never used these high channel numbers in the analog lineup, so I am not sure. I am concerned because I am not a fan of proliferating set-top boxes and remotes, so I remain a happy analog cable customer for now… but I fear that the beginning of the end is near, and set-top boxes will soon be inevitable.

But I am even more concerned about another change: the station on channel 64, WPBS from Watertown, is altogether being removed from the lineup, to be replaced by a PBS channel from Detroit. Rogers has done this in the past, replacing US network channels that were coming to us from Watertown with their Detroit equivalents, and I can’t say that we are better off with that change. However, WPBS is special: it has many supporters, even many volunteers in the Ottawa area, and the channel has been serving the Ottawa valley faithfully for many decades.

Rogers claims that they’re doing what they’re doing in response to customer demand. Forgive my French but… piss off, will ya? Months ago I phoned Rogers about a simple problem, namely that the audio on several analog channels (including music channels) is missing either the left or the right channel (yes, I checked, it’s not my equipment.) You’d think that a company concerned about their customers would fix such a simple and embarrassing technical issue. But they didn’t. So I can perhaps be forgiven if I call their sad little excuse a flat out, unadulterated, shameless lie.

 Posted by at 10:43 pm
Jul 162009
 

Forty years ago this morning, Apollo 11 was launched: Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were on their way to land at Mare Tranquilitatis, in the most significant journey in human history to this date.

The scary part is that this year also marks the 37th anniversary of the last trip to the Moon, indeed the last voyage by a human being beyond low Earth orbit.

I was only 6 when Armstrong and Aldrin landed on the Moon, and I had no doubt in my mind that by the time I turn 46, there would be people on the Moon, on Mars, possibly on select satellites of Jupiter and Saturn, perhaps even on their way to the stars.

Now that I am 46, I am doubtful that I will live long enough to see another human fly beyond low Earth orbit. This is not a pleasant thought. Perhaps I’ll be lucky enough to live another 40 years in good physical and mental health, and get a chance to be proven wrong.

Until then, I keep dwelling on the irony of the fact that nowadays, most of the documentaries you can find on manned deep space missions and exploration of the Moon are aired on the History Channel.

 Posted by at 1:00 pm
Jul 152009
 

When I heard yesterday that the government of Canada was about to impose visa requirements for Czech and Mexican citizens visiting Canada, my first thought was to wonder just how inept Harper’s government really is: imposing a visa requirement smack in the middle of the summer tourist season, with no warning and no preparation, is just plain stupid, it will inconvenience tens of thousands of legitimate visitors, and will cost the Canadian tourism industry millions of dollars.

But today, there are comments from the immigration minister that the Canadian immigration system is in need of a serious revision. What a wonderful country we live in, with all those rocket scientists working for the government who figured this out. But if this ever so clever minister of ours actually knows this, then why the visa requirements? Why not spend his efforts instead on these supposedly much needed revisions of the immigration system itself?

Ah, I got it. Now that the whole thing is on the national news, which wouldn’t have happened without seriously pissing off the Czechs and the Mexicans, he can claim urgency, and perhaps even get credit in the end for a decisive solution. That the urgency is a result of his own ineptness, I guess he hopes it will be quickly forgotten.

 Posted by at 3:09 am
Jul 142009
 

I have to thank a fellow blogger (ouch, does that make me a blogger, too? I still can’t stand this word, but I suppose it’s now inevitably part of the English vocabulary) for an excellent post that helped me out: during the install of VISTA SP2 on my laptop, the machine failed with the error code 0xC0190001 associated with explorer.exe. The first thing I did was to try Google, and the first Google hit I found was the above-mentioned blog entry, advising me to reboot into Safe Mode, allow Windows to do its thing and reboot again, and presto: VISTA is back, with SP2 properly (I hope) installed, and I saved myself a significant amount of unpleasantness associated with a system reinstall.

Or maybe I’ll have to reinstall something in the end… because although SP2 came up just fine, for some reason I lost the Aero desktop altogether, and I am back to a standard Windows 2000 style theme, the Aero theme nowhere to be found. Curious. Good thing that laptop is not mission critical, except when I am traveling, which I am not planning to do anytime soon.

Ah. Stupid service pack upgrade disabled the Themes service. It also monkeyed with one of the VMWare services, but now that I started everything that needed starting, things seem to be working fine.

 Posted by at 7:56 pm
Jul 132009
 

I have this hard drive. Two hard drives, actually, two out of many, these two being distinguished by the fact that at one time or another, they’ve been used in my old Fujitsu laptop.

The original drive was a 40 GB drive, which I replaced with an 80 GB drive years ago. I’ve since used the 40 GB drive in an external enclosure as a backup drive. I have several other drives of varying sizes in similar/identical enclosures.

Then there is the 80 GB drive, which has been the drive in this laptop for the last couple of years. But now that I no longer use this laptop myself, I figured I’d set it up for my wife. And since she doesn’t need an 80 GB drive, and the 40 GB drive was proving to be rather small for my backup needs, I decided to swap the drives back.

But then, the 80 GB drive that I took out of the laptop refused to function properly in the external enclosure. It was recognized alright, but no data could be read off it, not even the partition table. Same behavior on several computers running different operating systems (various Windows versions and Linux.)

Oops, I said, and swapped the drives back. Lo and behold, the 80 GB drive was again working fine, inside the laptop. But when I put the 40 GB drive back into the enclosure, I was in for a surprise: it was no longer working!

What the… I swapped the drives back and forth, they were both working fine in the laptop, but not working in the enclosure. Perhaps the enclosure is faulty? A logical thought, except that when I swapped enclosures using one of my several other backup drives, the enclosure was working just fine… but neither the 40 GB nor the 80 GB drive works in any of the three enclosures that I tested them with so far. Yet they both work fine in the laptop.

I must say I am stumped. I’ve never encountered a problem like this. Why would a drive work fine in a laptop but not in an external enclosure? Why would another drive, which used to work fine in the enclosure, fail after it has been inside a laptop (with, I should hasten to add, no operating system booted, so it’s not like there was a chance for a virus to affect the drive or anything like.) Modern drives do have persistent memory, but surely there are no persistent settings that would affect a drive like this? In any case, the 40 GB drive used to live in this laptop for years, and worked fine afterwards in the enclosure for years. But now, after it has been in the laptop again, it fails in the enclosure. Why?

Weird.

And I am supposed to be an expert at this.

 Posted by at 11:22 pm
Jul 122009
 

Discovery Canada advertises its lineup of programs for next week. On several occasions now they announced the following:

Destroyed in Seconds… right after How It’s Made.”

I could be wrong but I don’t think that the humor was intentional.

 Posted by at 12:24 am
Jul 112009
 

Hah! I just happened upon the blog site of my favorite British writer, actor, and tall person: John Cleese.

I especially enjoyed the video interview with him made shortly before last year’s American presidential elections.

 Posted by at 2:32 am
Jul 092009
 

Ever since I first read about the Peter principle, named after the late Canadian psychologist Laurence J. Peter, it always made sense to me: promoting people based on their competence likely lands them in jobs that exceed their competence level, lowering the overall effectiveness of the organization.

Now we have proof: a new paper on ArXiv (which works fine today, thankfully) shows the results of a computer simulation demonstrating a rapid decrease in efficiency as a result of a competence-based promotion system.

 Posted by at 4:07 pm
Jul 092009
 

The big news on Canadian news channels today comes in the form of a question: did Prime Minister Harper eat his communion wafer?

Harper, who’s not a Catholic, accepted a communion wafer anyway during the funeral service of the late Roméo Leblanc. Unfortunately, the camera cut away before he was seen actually eating it. So people are upset: not treating the body of Christ with the proper respect is a grave insult to Catholics, it appears.

As to why actually eating something that symbolizes the body of Christ is not a grave insult, well, I suppose people have pondered this question ever since Roman times. And here, I thought we live in the bleeping twenty-first century…

 Posted by at 2:46 am
Jul 082009
 

The premier Internet physics and astronomy preprint archive, ArXiv, seems to be having some serious problems tonight. I used the catchup interface to check for new papers, only to find messages like this:

Problem displaying entry for arXiv:0907.1079

Apparently all new papers are unavailable, and many older papers, too… I checked briefly and found papers dating back to last October that appear to have vanished. Including some half a dozen or so papers of my own.

I sure hope they keep backups!

 Posted by at 3:00 am
Jul 042009
 

The CBC is tinkering with Radio 2 again. After the devastation last year, they may have made some tentative steps in the right direction for a change. VERY small steps, to be sure.

But there are also some bad news: Jurgen Gothe is no longer on Radio 2 anymore. I admit I didn’t listen much to his Sunday program Farrago this past year, as the time slot was just too inconvenient. But, I still shake my head in disbelief at the CBC’s decision last year to cancel Disc Drive, arguably one of the best damn radio shows ever made.

So I’ve been reading some comments on the CBC Web site. There is near universal condemnation of Radio 2’s management: nearly all who posted comments believe that Radio 2 lost its direction, that taxpayer money is wasted on a radio station that is sounding ever more like commercial radio, that the station got rid of its knowledgeable hosts, and that its choice of music is just awful.

I think one big misunderstanding is the notion the listeners of the old Radio 2 only wanted classical music. That’s nonsense. Jurgen’s program was great not because it was classical, but because it had the right mix of classical, jazz, folk, and yes, even pop music. This eclecticism is now lost, and they cannot bring it back easily because the hosts who made it possible are gone, too.

Here are two comments, in particular, that I rather agree with, typos notwithstanding:

“Separating the genres works for people who only like clasical [sic!] or only like pop or only like jazz but a very large part of the population quite like an eclectic mix. It is possible to like both Beethoven and Michael Jackson, De Bussy [sic!] and Salsa.”

“Now that Jurgen has totally left the CBC, when will some bright adventure capitalist start up a private subscription radio or Internet station with Jurgen Goth, Danielle Charboneau, Rick Phillips et al. My subscription is ready.”

What can I say. My subscription is ready, too. Where do I sign up?

 Posted by at 2:34 pm
Jul 022009
 

Long before there was a commercial Internet, there were dial-up service providers, bulletin board systems, and the like. At one time, the largest among these was CompuServe, offering a comprehensive range of services including hundreds (if not thousands) of forums, online chat, downloads, and games. Indeed there was a time when no self-respecting computer company existed without a support forum on CompuServe.

I became a CompuServe subscriber in 1991 I believe. Soon after, I discovered a wonderful game hosted by CompuServe: Richard Bartle’s original Multi-User Dungeon, running under the name British Legends. Ten years ago, CompuServe discontinued British Legends using the bogus excuse that the game is not Y2K compatible; I have been running a faithfully ported version of this game on my server ever since.

But the CompuServe service remained. Under the brand name CompuServe Classic, the original service stayed in operation in all these years. Its value was greatly diminished, but it was still usable as a reliable international dial-up Internet service provider (indeed, this is the reason why I kept my CompuServe subscription active.) That is, until now.

A few months ago, they sent out an e-mail informing users that the Classic service will be discontinued on June 30.

Out of curiosity, I tried logging on to CompuServe moments ago. Yes, the old text-based services were still available until recently. But today, this is what I am greeted with:

$ telnet gateway.compuserve.com
Trying 209.154.35.102...
Connected to gateway.compuserve.com.
Escape character is '^]'.

User ID: 70674,3414

?? LOGSTU - System BHC is temporarily unavailable

Well, what can I say? So long, and thanks for all the fun.

 Posted by at 1:41 pm
Jul 022009
 

There is something positively charming about the random nature of the Internet.

I am watching a British comedy, One Foot in the Grave, on Vision TV (as to why a supposedly religious channel is broadcasting somewhat risqué British comedies in the first place, now that’s a question for another day, but I am certainly glad that they do.) At one point, the story features an old Citroen that appears in a trash dumpster in front of the protagonist’s house. The car has a license plate: MOJ459P.

On a whim, I entered this license plate number into Google. Surprisingly, there was a hit: http://www.convergence.cx/. For no discernible reason, the page features nothing else but the mushroom cloud of a nuclear explosion, and an immortal quote from Charles Babbage, pondering the sanity of members of Parliament who were wondering if his machine could give correct answers if given wrong data.

And it is a weird Web site. The page contains an invisible link to a host-side script that barfs back a series of random generated e-mail addresses. Or, I should say, almost random generated; among a bunch of bogus addresses, the e-mail addresses associated with the registration information of the IP number from which I perform the query also appear. What this means, I have no idea. The site doesn’t seem malicious, but then what is it? The top-level domain .cx is the country code for Christmas Island, but the site itself is registered as a “Convergence Organisation Object”, in London, the United Kingdom, since 2001. I have no idea what it is. Curious.

 Posted by at 1:16 am
Jun 292009
 

I was watching the noon local newscast and learned that the Wakefield steam train, a popular tourist attraction nearby, is back in service, after it has been shut down in the middle of its track Saturday due to an electrical fault in its engine that could not be repaired right away.

Wait a minute. Steam train? Electric fault?

 Posted by at 4:10 pm
Jun 272009
 

I recently read a review of Weinberg’s wonderful new book, Cosmology, a 2009 sequel of sorts to his 1972 classic, Gravitation and Cosmology. The reviewer mentioned two other books, that of Mukhanov and that of Dodelson, as books worth having. Mukhanov’s Physical Foundations of Cosmology was already on my bookshelf (and, like the reviewer, I also consider it worth having) but not Dodelson’s book… so I decided to buy it.

I was not disappointed: it is an excellent cosmology book. In particular, it offers a very thorough introduction to the quantitative aspects of physical cosmology.

However… although the book was published only six years ago, it feels surprisingly dated. Through no fault of the author, to be clear: it’s just that cosmology has made tremendous progress in a few short years. I can think of two things in particular: results from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), first released in 2005, providing precision maps of the cosmic microwave background, allowing accurate detection of the so-called acoustic peaks; and ever improving large scale galaxy surveys, notably the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), providing spectra for many hundreds of thousands of galaxies, yielding 3D density maps of the deep cosmos that can be used to test models of structure formation.

The results speak for themselves. For instance, Dodelson’s book gives 12.6 ± 1.1 billion years as the age of the Universe… in contrast, the latest WMAP result is 13.73 ± 0.12 billion years, a tenfold improvement in the accuracy of the estimate. I guess it’s not an enviable task to write a book for a field that is changing as rapidly as Modern Cosmology… which also happens to be the title of Dodelson’s book.

 Posted by at 3:04 am
Jun 252009
 

A few days ago, I upgraded to Skype 4.

I use Skype for overseas telephone calls a lot. I also call a few people occasionally using Skype-to-Skype. And, every once in a while, I use it to chat with people.

I have heard bad things about Skype 4 so I was not in a hurry to upgrade. But when, the other day, the software notified me that a major upgrade is available, I decided to give it a try.

Wish I didn’t.

The installation completed successfully, and Skype worked fine, but… well, it’s best if I just quote a few sentences from Skype’s own Web site where the new version was announced:

  • Skype 4.0 should certainly participate in the worst software redesign conquest.
  • Worst interface ever created for Skype and i’ve been using it ever since the 1st beta. Please dump this garbage
  • Skype 4.0 has an extreme ugly layout.
  • The UI of version 4 is a terrible disappointment. No matter how I tweak, it still consumes more screen real-estate than version 3 did.
  • Who are you people and what were you thinking when you released this kludge.
  • ABSOLUTELY TERRIBLE INTERFACE
  • Skype 4.0.x is PAINFUL and FRUSTRATING TO USE.
  • I think this is the ‘vista’ of skype releases.
  • What where you thinking. Did you guys outsource? This version has all the hallmarks of a design by committee.
  • I truly do not like the new 4.0 version! I’ve tried it for a week, hoping to get used to it, and i’m just left cursing. I am reverting because…

I share these sentiments. This morning, I gave up and downgraded to the 3.8 version. Which is working fine, as always.

 Posted by at 1:39 pm
Jun 242009
 

I found this gem of a sentence on the Web site of the Embassy of the Islamic Republic of Iran here in Ottawa:

“The Islamic Republic of Iran will register acts of all these states whose records are filled with support for terrorism, pro-colonialist policies for colonizing the oppressed nations, support for the despotic regimes, arming some with weapons of mass destruction and support for anarchy in all parts of the world as disdainful behavior and stipulates that they can not cast doubt on the excellent democratic election held recently in the Islamic Republic of Iran by no means advising them to change their miscalculated approach vis-à-vis the developments having taken place in Iran because designers of the chess game are closely monitoring their behavior and calculating them in the future relations.”

This sentence reminds me of Soviet-era propaganda leaflets. I wonder if the Islamic Republic of Iran has hired propagandists from the former Soviet Union who were left unemployed after 1991.

Anyhow, what exactly are they saying here? Something is wrong with this sentence. They say that,

The Islamic Republic of Iran

  • will register, as disdainful behavior,
    • acts of all these states whose records are filled with
      • support for terrorism,
      • pro-colonialist policies for colonizing the oppressed nations,
      • support for the despotic regimes, arming some with weapons of mass destruction and
      • support for anarchy in all parts of the world
  • and

  • stipulates that they can not cast doubt on the excellent democratic election held recently in the Islamic Republic of Iran

by no means advising them to change their miscalculated approach vis-à-vis the developments having taken place in Iran

because

designers of the chess game are closely monitoring their behavior and calculating them in the future relations.

Hmmm… they seem to be telling us that despite all the bad things they say about our disdainful behavior, they are NOT advising us to change our miscalculated approach. The reason for this surprising advice has to do with the designers of the game of chess. Okay, I know that chess may have arrived in Europe from India by way of Persia, but what do the long dead inventors of one of the world’s most popular games have to do with the reelection of Ahmedinejad?

Maybe they are trying to confuse us intentionally, in order to deflect our attention away from a study that suggests that the election was seriously rigged. They really shouldn’t bother. This study says that the election was likely rigged because the final two digits of provincial results show unlikely statistics. But unlikely is not the same as impossible, and unless they can quantify how much more likely this outcome is in a rigged election, the study means nothing; after all, 1-2-3-4-5-6 is as likely to win in a random 6/49 lottery draw as any other number combination, and if they pick these numbers next week, it does not prove fraud by the lottery corporation. For that claim, one would also have to quantify the increased likelihood that a fraudulent draw is more likely to produce the 1-2-3-4-5-6 result when compared to a truly random draw.

 Posted by at 1:27 pm
Jun 232009
 

I’ve been using Skype since last year. Initially, I resisted, but then there were to strong reasons to use it: one, regular phone line quality has been steadily going down the drain as long distance companies increasingly began to use VoIP, and two, I was doing a bit of traveling, and Skype is a heck of a lot cheaper than hotel phones.

I’ve had Skype version 3 installed, and by and large, I was happy. I’ve been using Skype a lot to call Europe, for instance, and it worked most of the time at least as reliably as the good old phone company.

However, lately I had some call quality problems and Skype’s advice was to upgrade. So, when the other day, the software informed me that a new version is available to install, I accepted it. The new version installed just fine, and it is working fine… I can’t really tell if it actually delivers improved sound quality, but I have no reason to doubt Skype.

What the new version doesn’t deliver is an improved user interface. Simply put, the version 4 UI is not pretty. “Compact Mode” is not really compact anymore, you just get multiple windows. In regular mode, the Skype window is just huge. And, it’s ugly. For manual dial, it has an unpleasant looking, overly large dial pad. For other modes, the interface is equally unappealing, with large unused areas.

What were these people thinking? Seriously, it feels like I went back 5-10 years in time in terms of UI quality. If Skype 3 was like Windows XP, Skype 4 is more like Windows 95. I’m seriously contemplating uninstalling Skype and reinstalling version 3. I’m just not sure if it’s worth the hassle.

 Posted by at 11:23 pm
Jun 202009
 

Earlier this year, Michael Ignatieff replaced Stephane Dion as the head of the Liberal Party. This was supposed to change things: no more wimpy compromises, finally a charismatic (some even said scary) leader at the head of the official opposition who’ll surely fire Harper’s bumbling government soon.

Well, he didn’t. Ignatieff looks a great deal less scary today. And I can’t say that I agree with him. An all time record of a deficit, the incompetence of the minister handling the Chalk River affair, and a proposed crime bill that would seriously compromise our Internet privacy are just some of the issues that I have with Harper’s government and why I’d like to see him go.

The silver lining to this cloud is that we continue to enjoy the benefits of a minority government, which is far less likely to do harm than a government commanding a majority.

 Posted by at 3:44 am