Schinckel.net

Why is it that when I’m on time, or early, the train is late; but when I’m running late, the train is on time - or early? I had to run to catch it again. I’m so unfit. For someone who used to play or ref 12-odd games of touch per week, I’ve lost heaps of fitness. What is up with the 2 girls who catch the train from Lynton to Torrens Park? It’s a 15 minute walk!! Do yourselves a favour, save some money & walk. And get some better sunglasses. A week or so ago we had some rain - it seems to have cleared up a bit now - and I got off at Mile End, as I was on the later train and didn’t have time for a coffee in town. The underpass had a bit over an inch of water in it, and there was no other way off the platform. I had wet feet that day. As I catch the train I have ample time to ponder, and passing through the Keswick railyards fills me with sadness. I see dozens of old rail-cars. Do they still work? Is there some sort of rotation happening, or are they no longer used? Have we passed through the golden age of rail? Will governments see the long term benefits of having a comprehensive rail network? Or will rail fade, as they close down station after station? What would be required for TransAdelaide to re-open the stations like Millswood & Clapham? How would they know there was a demand for these shut-down stations, if they aren’t operated? Maybe lots of people would use the train from these zones, but don’t because it’s too far to walk to Lynton or Torrens Park. Was it really such a drain on resources to have these stations open at all? Surely their costs to upkeep would be insignificant compared to the overall costs of the rail network.

The weekend before last, as I sat in bed on Saturday, I saw one of those promos about Madagascar. One where they show how they made it, and have a series of interviews with the cast and crew. After watching that, I wanted to see the film. I wish now I hadn’t seen the promo film, as it pretty much used all of the jokes in the movie. Except the Poo Flinging ones, but there were only two of them. It wasn’t an especially bad film, but once they got to the island, it sort of went nowhere (except for the occasional good bit). The first half-hour was fantastic, but they couldn’t keep going for long enough, and I tired of it well before the end. And the end was pretty poor, too. Alex should have eaten something. Kids should be shown more about what the real world is like. I’m not going to write any more - it wasn’t a thought-provoking film, and it should have been more fun than it was. Wait for it to come on TV.

You wouldn’t steal someone’s car, so don’t steal Music/Movies.

I heard an interesting thought on the similarities between piracy of copyright material and theft.

No, I wouldn’t steal some guy’s Ferrari if it were left on the street, but if I were able to make an exact duplicate, without doing any damage to it, then I would. And what’s more, I was never going to buy a Ferrari in the first place. They haven’t lost a sale from me…

At lunch on Sunday, I had to do my usual trick of re-fixing Ray & Joan’s digital set-top box. Not that anyone had stuffed it up or anything, but it must have been reset at some stage, and all of the ’extra’ channels, which are just duplicates of the first, had reappeared. This in itself was a simple, 2 minute job, but it gave me an idea of a possible business venture. Setting up people’s entertainment units & systems, and teaching them how to use them. I often have to do similar tasks at both my parents’, and Jaq’s parents’ houses. Most of the time it’s reconnecting hardware, but sometimes it’s optimising settings. I wonder how much I could charge Joe and Jane Average to do this, and show them exactly how to use their stuff. I could do DVD/TV/STB installations, PC usage, and even digital cameras. Another thing I could do would be CD library -> MP3 conversion, and DVD -> AVI/MPEG conversion (for Xbmc, PVR, etc setups). I’m even thinking of a name: GeekGuys. www.geekguys.com.au - I’ll have to do a search and see what similar services are available.

You too can make science, by participating in the MIT weblog survey. Go on, you know you want to…

There are a couple of instances of scripts out there that automatically apply abbr and acronym tags to pages, but I wanted to be able to do the same in ecto. This is also the first time I wrote a plugin script for ecto, and I wanted to do it in python. Please note that this here script is untested until I get onto my Mac and test the hell out of it. The script works, with the caveat listed in TODO.

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    #! /usr/bin/env python
    
    'A script for ecto that adds abbr and acronym tags to the text'
        
    TODO = '''
    Fix it so that acronyms without a space either side (for example,
    that finish a sentence) work.
        
    Lookup on the internet for a list of acronyms/abbreviations?
    '''
        
    acronyms={'WYSIWYG':'What You See Is What You Get',
              'DOM':'Document Object Model'}
    abbrs={'XHTML':'eXtensible HyperText Markup Language',
           'NSLU2':'[Linksys] Network Storage Link (USB) 2.0'}
        
    # Add more values to your hearts content…
    
    # get input data - depends on implementation.  For ecto:
    import sys
    data = open(sys.argv[1]).read()
        
    # replace only the first instance of each acronym/abbreviation
    for each in acronyms:
        data.replace(' '+each+' ', '<acronym title="'+acronyms[each]+'">'+each+'</acronym>',1)
    for each in abbrs:
        data.replace(' '+each+' ', '<abbr title="'+abbrs[each]+'">'+each+'</abbr>',1)
        
    #return data to ecto
    open(sys.argv[1],'w').write(data)

Note: Comments turned off: too much Spam on this entry.

I know I fixed the Search box in my sidebar, but it’s broken again. I’ll work on fixing it. Do’h! Update: it isn’t broken, just not working how I’d like. It treats all entries as though they are surrounded by double-quotes, for example, searching for Connections Blogsome returns no hits, even though there are posts that have both of these words in them. Whoops! Searching for that will now bring up this post, since those two words now appear in that order. Swapping the order of those words and searching will not find any posts…unless I wrote Blgsme Cnnectins somewhere, with the * replaced by o… Update 2: Now it seems to work. I did put a request in on the forum - I wonder if they fixed it…that was quick!

During a family gathering today, I remembered that there were some rumours about a Puma or Panther (or several) living in the Grampians Mountains in western Victoria. I wound up others at the lunch with my belief in the urban (rural?) myth, and provided quick corroborating evidence in the form of several web pages. But do I believe in it? Anyone could come up with evidence to support any point of view, if they wanted, just by googling. I was able to quickly find about four sites that were all quite well written, and the only info I found that was anti-Pumas was so poorly written, and so badly thought out that I might start believing in the Puma just for that sake:

Personly, i bleive after being in the grampians just yesterday, and 3 days befor there are NO puma’s in the grampians. All evedence suppporting the matter should be ditched as it is a hoax. They might have used to be there, YES, but now i think not. I understand that people may have seen them, but to me… “seeing is bleiveing” not today. i saw 0.0 puma’s, no sheeps up trees, or foot prints. they are no longer living in the grampians! mabey somewere elese, only god knows! CYA L8R

Liam: you are a tool, and you should be taken out and shot. Let’s examine your argument in detail (ignoring, for the time, you clear lack of spelling ability).

1. You were in the Grampians ‘yesterday’ (9/6/05). Good for you. Somehow this makes you an expert as to the existence or otherwise of big cats in the whole mountain range. Did you visit every square kilometre? Did you take your rock that keeps Pumas away?
2. All evidence (I do know how to spell, most of the time. I also know how to use the ‘Shift’ key on the keyboard. Capital letters are often used at the start of sentences, as well as in places where you want to emphasise a point. But I digress.) should be ditched. Why is this exactly? What evidence (See, I still know how to spell!) have you got that the evidence (Still!) is a hoax?
3. Technically, the evidence itself could not be a hoax, but false. The story could be a hoax, but evidence does not have the property in itself to be a hoax or otherwise. Only true, or false. (Or partially true, or undetermined).
4. Okay, now we come to it. You did not see a Puma yesterday. Or any sheep up trees. Or foot prints. Got some news for you, buddy, the Grampians are a big place. I visited them several times, and never saw a Puma either. Or sheep up a tree. I did see a koala up a tree though. Although, not on the last time I visited. Does that mean that there are no koalas there anymore? Or does it just mean that there might be koalas, but I didn’t see any?
5. Oh, and the plural of sheep is sheep. Funny little word isn’t it.

Reading some of the other posts on that page, and there are a lot of them, makes me start to believe in the story. I think I want to believe (not just to prove Liam a tosser), and a couple of the posts/comments are fairly well thought out, and believable. There are a lot of other pages, too, that give plenty of evidence supporting the Puma theory. I think the best one is from the Bulletin.

In the rugged Geranium Springs Valley in the Grampians, sheep carcasses were found on a narrow ledge, 300 metres above the valley floor. Mutilated animal carcasses were also found on the valley floor. Droppings recovered from the valley were identified by a leading US big cat expert as matching puma faeces. Within a hidden rock shelter on Mount Bepcha in the Grampians, many animal remains - ranging from large cattle bones to those of freshwater tortoises - were found. Researchers also took casts of two large carnivore prints, later judged by US experts as matching those of a puma.

Apparently these three quotes are all from a report by Dr John Henry, a 1970s Science lecturer from Deakin University, and now Professor of Education. This report is fairly conclusive, and quite detailed, by all accounts. Tim Winton wrote a book based on this rural ‘myth’. I’ve not read any Winton, and I’ve been meaning to. Perhaps I will.

My Movie and TV collection on my media server is starting to look good, but heaps of the movies and programs start with a black frame. By default, this is the Poster Frame when the movie is previewed on a computer. Quicktime Pro has the ability to set the Poster Frame, but cannot just add this information to the file, it must re-save the file. With even the smallest of my files (The Simpsons episodes), these files are in excess of 100Mb, which takes a long time to re-save. Particularly over a network, and with the NSLU2 using a USB Drive. I want a way of just telling the movie file that it needs to use a particular frame as it’s Poster Frame, and not have to go through the whole rigamarole of re-encoding the movie. I don’t mind if it runs on Win32 or MacOS, as long as it does the job quickly and easily. Even if it’s a CLI program that requires the frame number: I’m sure I could come up with a way to find that out…

For the uninitiated, Tripod are an Australian 3-piece band who compose and perform ‘comedy’ songs. Probably their biggest claim to fame is the Tripod Song In An Hour segment they used to do on Breakfast with Adam & Wil on Triple J. The hosts used to come up with a series of (unrelated) topics that the boys from Tripod then had to make a song about in one hour, and perform it at the end. The always managed to pull through and usually the songs were quite amusing. Jaq and I received some free tickets to see their live act Self Saucing Tripod, part of the _Adelaide Cabaret _(Cabarette) Festival., and went and saw them on their last performance, last Thursday night. Our seats were either excellent or woeful, we thought as we went into the Dunstan Playhouse: right up the front on Table 4. We managed to get there early, were first into the place, just to make sure we had the seats facing the stage, not with out backs to it. Lucky we did so, as the people in second place were the others on our table… Being right up the front was actually great! You could see the boys in great detail, and we didn’t get picked on at all. The only qualm I would say I had was that it wasn’t really possible to see more than one of the trio at a time - we were so close we needed to turn our heads (slightly) to see the others. Apparently Tripod have quite a following - lots of the girls audience were wearing t-shirts, and I’m sure they sold a lot more in the foyer afterwards.

We like your aura.  We hope you’ll see us outside afterwards and by a T-Shirt.   Or a CD.    Or a T-Shirt and a CD.     Or a…

Having only heard them on the radio (and only a few times, to be honest. I listen to Classic FM, not the Youth Network…), and seen one song on Video Hits - which they played incidentally - I sort-of knew what to expect, but I didn’t realise just how talented they were. Ignoring the fact they are comedians, they are fine musicians. Three part harmony, better ‘beat-box’ than Joel Turner and the Modern Day Poets, a talented guitar player (and another one who is alright…), and a trumpeter. Many of their songs start with lovely guitar playing, layered vocal harmonies, and kicker jokes. Which brings me to the biggest beef I had. I understand that many of the songs are designed to be interrupted, but it seemed to me that they only had two songs of any reasonable length. I wonder if writing biting social and political satire into songs is just so damn hard that they cannot do it for more than a couple of measures at a time. Do they run out of material, or is it a conscious decision to fit more songs into the show? Don’t get me wrong, I was not unhappy at all as I left the theatre, but it left me wondering: what would real songs from them sound like? They made a joke that the only reason they were still around today was:

Scod: Because of a rich aunt. Who used to pump money into the act, and asked for nothing in return. Yon: Except that I had to go around there every weekend and smear vegemite on her … Scod & Gatesy: Aaargh! Yon: …toast. Yon: And then I fucked her.

I wonder if that was true. Not necessarily about fucking the aunt, but if they would have made it as a _real _band. Their two songs that went on for a longer time were both pure genius. One of them you may have heard: Make You Happy (The Xbox Song) is a sweet, balladic song about a guy and how much he loves his girl, and he’ll come to bed as soon as he finishes the next level. I think lots of people know how both characters in this song feel. The other one was, I thought, even better. The Hotdog Man is a happy (Frente-like?) song about aHotdog man, and how he loves his job, his customers and his family, but leads onto his darker side. I’ll not go into any more detail, like many comedy songs, listening to it the first time is the best. Which leads me onto another thing. Hearing many of these songs the first time is great, but they tend to have a short shelf-life. I can still listen to older music, over and over again. I don’t know that I’ll ever tire of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, or Paul Kelly’s From St. Kilda To Kings Cross, but shorter comedic works are a bit less lasting. (Pardon the pun). It will be interesting to see where Tripod are in ten years, and if anyone listens to their music. Regards, f you get the chance, run, don’t walk to see them. As comedic bands go, they are without peer. Except for maybe Kevin Bloody Wilson.