Schinckel.net

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.

Whenever someone asked why I left 2046, I always gave them some vague answer. It was easier.

So began 2046, the new film written and directed by Kar Wai Wong. It continually amazes me when I watch a subtitled film, particularly at the cinema, how quickly you begin to ‘hear’ the actors saying the words in English. Films that draw you in, like 2046, with it complex, interwoven relationships between reality and the text the main character writes, quickly become as easy to follow (in the dialog sense, not necessarily the plot sense!) as a film in your native language. And 2046 was certainly a film that you had to work to follow. Beginning in (what we later find to be) the fictional world (/place/time?) of 2046, we see a Japanese man, on a train, counting incessantly. This quickly returns to when Chow, the main character and journalist/writer, was preparing to leave Singapore. The bulk of the story takes place in the hotel in Hong Kong where Chow lives throughout the second half of the 1960s. The film focusses on his relationships with several women. The first woman we learn about is LuLu, also known as Mimi, a girl he knew in Singapore, who has apparently forgotten him. After she is murdered, he wants to move into her room, 2046, in a (small?) hotel; but it is unavailable, and he moves into 2047 instead. He comes to like that room, and stays there, and has relationships with Bai, and Wang Jing Wen, the eldest daughter of the hotelier. I won’t say any more about the plot, other than it’s worth it.

Do you know what people did in the old days when the had a secret? The used to climb a mountain, find a tree, and cut a hole in it. They, they would whisper their secret into the hole, and fill it with mud. That way, no-one would ever find out their secret.

Films like this are thought provoking. When you walk out of the cinema wanting to talk about the film, and what it’s really about, you know the little over 2 hours you spent there was worth it. Jaq was of the opinion that the film is about unrequited love: loving what you can’t have. Jing Wen loves Tak, but is not allowed by her father to be with him; Chow loves Jing Wen, but she does not love him, she only loves Tak; Bai loves Chow, who does not love her. Do people love one another more if they are not loved back?

(Bai) - Can I borrow you tonight? (Chow) - I promised myself there was one thing I would never lend someone else.

What is it that Chow has vowed never to lend? He doesn’t say, and that to me is the key to films like this. I interpreted it that Chow never wanted to lend someone “false hope”; Jaq interpreted it that we would never lend his love. Leaving something to the imagination, while still providing a framework to make an interpolation means that people take from a film according to what they put in, and are capable of thinking. All of the women in 2046 are stunning beauties. When some of them ‘become’ androids, apparently they are airbrushed: I didn’t notice. The (near) flawlessness of their faces (and bottoms, which get quite a lot of screen time) mean that they could be inhuman. Apparently, each of the actors only speaks in their language, yet they all understand one another. I did notice there were several languages (Chinese, apparently both Cantonese and Mandarin, Japanese, and Cambodian - or something else), but I think that only adds depth and magic to the film. I didn’t realise until reading another review (post-watching) that some of the characters (Chow, and Su Lizhen #1) are in his previous film, In the Mood for Love. That might be next on the DVD list. Verdict: I love it.

I saw a great ad on TV tonight. It had a female cyclist walking her bike along ready to cross the railway tracks, and then cut to two young boys walking/playing along a section of track. The boys played with a ball, and then it cut back to the cyclist, as the lights started to flash, and she stopped at the crossing. The boys’ ball bounced ahead of one of them, and he ran to get it, the other heard the train coming, and moved off the track. The train was shown going right up to the boy, and then some Computer Graphics virtually made him turn to dust as the train would have hit him. The cyclist waited until the train had crossed, and then proceeded to cross the tracks, not seeing the train on the other set of tracks, coming from the other direction. The same CGI effect was used as she was hit by the train. I’d record and post the ad here, if I had a digital video recorder… The power of these ads was quite impressive. I catch the train, and I have to cross the track every morning and night. (There is an underpass at the other station I get off at). Whilst there is only one metro train track - the trains need to wait at a larger station if one of them is a little late - there is a second line, for interstate freight and passenger transport. It surprises me how often I see a kid get off the train, jump down onto the track and walk off along the track. And the thing about it is that doing that isn’t any quicker. I have seen kids do that, and leave the tracks at the crossing, at the same time I arrive there. I guess it’s just a need to do the wrong thing, but most of the time they are by themselves! The other morning I saw a kid walking along the track towards the station - I didn’t see from how far he walked along the rails, but it must have been a significant distance, as there are no houses or roads near where he came from. I can sort of understand someone getting off the train knowing there will be no train for at least 10 minutes (due to the single track), but unless the morning kid saw a train go past, he could not know how long it would be before the next train arrived. The one from 5 minutes ago could be late, and he might not realise in time…it scares the hell out of me. Not for my safety, but for the fact I would be the person who witnessed the accident. I would have to live with the consequences of a stupid kid being hit by a train in front of me…maybe I’m being selfish, but I don’t care. I actually have a fear of being hit by a train. I’m not sure why, but every time I walk across the track, I think that I will get my foot caught in the line, and not be able to move in time. I also don’t take my wallet out of my pocket until I am in the train, as I see myself dropping it, or my train ticket down the gap between the train and the platform. This means that at Adelaide Railway Station, I go through the gates, taking my wallet out, and putting my ticket into the machine. I then put my wallet away before I get to my train, and board the train, and then take my wallet out again. I think I’m crazy.

I had thought that renaming a track from one user of a shared iTunes library (where the files are shared, but each has her own library file, with ratings/play counts, etc) would cause iTunes to not be able to find it for the other users. But, I renamed “Tom’s Dinner” to “Tom’s Diner” (Suzanne Vega), and switched over to the other user, thinking I’d have to do the old Find Track trick, but iTunes was smart enough to realise that the track it needed had changed name…and updated the library automatically.

Livin’ Thing • Greatest Hits • Electric Light Orchestra

I have one feature I’d like to see in iTunes - the ability to mark tracks as ‘identical’, and have them belonging to two (or more) albums, but sharing the rating, play count, and even disk space. That would be cool. Especially since I have lots of tracks in this situation.

The following function/script will dump the data from a RealPlayer stream to disk as a WAV file. Put it into your ~/.profile, or make a shell script out of it.

    function realdump
    {
        if test -f $1 ; then
            realdump `cat $1`
        else
            export temp=${1/#*\//}
            export filename=${temp/.*/.wav}
            ~/bin/mplayer -cache 128 -vc dummy -vo null -ao pcm -aofile $filename $1
        fi
        if test $_# -gt 1 ; then
            shift
            realdump $*
        fi
        
    }

It creates a file with the same basename (the filename minus the extension), with an extension of .wav; there is no checking to see if the file exists already, and old file will be overwritten. The argument to realdump can be either the URLs of the streams, or the name of a file with the URLs of the streams in it. It should handle files with multiple entries, so you can concatenate a series of .ram files, and it should download each of them in turn. Ensure they have different filenames, not just different directories!

The BBC has a heap of stuff available on their website as part of the Beethoven Experience, but I found my copy of RealPlayer had expired. I’d rather dump the data to disk and listen to it later (on my iPod, probably). But, the only ways I could find to do this didn’t work with the software I had. Specifically:

    mplayer -dumpstream rtsp://rmv8.bbc.net.uk/radio3/classical/pizarro/sonata01.rm

fails, as does using VLC. I’m downloading newer versions of both of these, but I’m not that hopeful. Mplayer seems to not want to access network protocols, VLC cannot decode. Nor can it just dump to disk, without interpreting the data.

I now have the code to check the library XML file and see if there are missing tracks (ie, the files are not where they are expected to be). This code is quite slow, but simple to follow. (It took around 2 min to run). I also have the code that gets a list of the files in the library directory. It must be simple to combine this information, and work out which ones are:

1. Files that are ‘new’: they only exist on disk, not in the library. Chances are they were added by another user.
2. Files that have become detached: there is a file and a library location, but they don’t quite match up. This is probably because the users have ‘Keep Library Arranged’ turned on, and one of them has made a change to a track name, artist or album; or made a change to the compilation flag.

The trick will be having the list of files, and removing items from the list that have been located in the library. This will leave list that just need to be sorted into alpha and beta above.

    import os
    import urllib
        
    library = os.path.expanduser('~')+'/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music Library.xml'
    startpath = '/Volumes/Media/Music'
    def greppy(library)
        data = open(library).readlines()
        tracks = {}
        this_track = 0
        for line in data:
            if line.count('<key>Track ID'):
                this_track = line.split('integer>')[1][:-2]
            elif line.count('<key>Location</key>'):
                tracks[this_track] = urllib.url2pathname(
                         line.split('string>')[1][16:-2]).replace(
                         '&#38;','&')
        
    findstr = "find "+startpath+"-type f -not -name .aacgained -not -name ._* -not -name .DS_Store | sort"
    treedata = os.popen(findstr).readlines()
        
    data = greppy(library)
        
    missing = {}
    surplus = treedata[:]
        
    for i in data:
        try:
            surplus.remove(urllib.urlopen(data[i]).url[7:]+'\n')
        except IOError:
            missing[i] = data[i]
        except ValueError:
            pass

This leaves two data structures of interest: missing, a dictionary with the ‘missing tracks’ from iTunes, and surplus, a list with files that do not have an associated iTunes library entry. Note: I’ve turned off comments, as this post seems to get a lot of comment spam.