Archive - Mar 2007

Big news:

Don't set any critical automated admin tasks, e.g. cron jobs for backups, to run between 1am and 1.59am on a Sunday. Because when the clocks go forward, they skip that entire hour.

Presumably you don't want to set any that you don't want to be run twice either. Because that is what would happen when the clocks shift back to 'winter' time.

I realised this when my podcast catcher didn't run overnight. It was scheduled for 1am. There was no 1am last night.

And yes, I only realised this morning that the clocks had changed. I normally get a call from my mother reminding me. Didn't get one this year. She must think I know what I'm doing by now. How wrong could she be?

Battlestar Galactica has some of the best space combat SFX anywhere. There is a free game based upon BSG, that captures the feel of that space combat amazingly well.

I've been providing the voice for one of the characters which appears in the demo. I'm not going to tell you who. Download the demo when it comes out in, I hope, a few weeks, and try and guess.

Here are some in-game graphics.

For about the last six-months I've been having some minor problems with pain, of one sort or another, in my feet. It turns out I probably have Ligamentous laxity. This isn't as severe a condition as Hypermobility (double-jointedness). This was proving a problem for me as the long bones in my feet aren't locking together properly to support my weight.

The advice I was given was to try some sport shoe inserts.

Bruce Adam in now on-line at BruceAdam.co.uk. Bruce is the President of Dunfermline Dramatic Society, amongst many other luminary activities. My first involvement with DDS was working back-stage on his One-Act play 'When I Snap My Fingers'.

I so want one of these! The processing power that is driving this display must sound like a jet.

Sprang for a decent USB audio interface for recording. The sound card inside my laptop couldn't be persuaded not to keep adding it's own noise to the signal. This is nothing unusual according to Mike and Steve as they talked about it in episode 14 of PodHoles.

However none of the sites I could find could tell me if the USB devices I was looking at would be recognised by Ubuntu Linux. I finally took the plunge and ordered a Tapco Link.USB from Thomann.de. I figured that if it didn't work I'd just return it.

Thankfully I didn't need to worry. Simply insert the USB cable provided, complete with it's protective ferrite core, and a lovely little window popped up in the corner of the screen.

Clicking the button allows you to set USB Audio as your default audio source. However, if like me you are using Audacity, you need to do a little more. I use the OSS driver in Audacity, not ALSA. This will probably apply to ALSA, but it might not. You need to tell Audacity to use the alternate Audio interface. In this case, /dev/dsp1.

I'm using a hand compiled version of Audacity 1.3.2-beta, so the dialog screen probably looks a little different if you are still using the 1.2 stable version.

Getting into a short Larval Stage as I study the GTD methodology and begin implementing it.

I get these occasionally from one of our vendors. I love the footnote that they add:
This information is only being sent to licenced users of [CENSORED] software. It is commercially sensitive and is intended as information and guidance for our customers only. Neither the document (nor the information it contains) should be passed to any third parties. Any breaches of this trust may result in future information not being made available.
They make a mistake that could potentially have significant implications for their customers and we aren't allowed to bitch about it publicly. You gotta love proprietary software.

Actually, no, you don't: GNU Enterprise.

NBC’s HEROES: Company Man - Written by: Michael L. Wentz
‘Company Man,’ the episode of “HEROES” that premiered….(Monday Feb 26), was simply the best one hour of television I have ever seen — and that’s saying a lot. I grew up in a sci-fi obsessed TV household, so from a very young age I have watched just about every hour of [...] [The Jumble]

I was gob smacked at this episode. Heroes is just getting better and better with each new episode. It is even nudging Lost out of the top spot in my most anticipated of new episodes each week.