Blog
Okay, now I miss London
Dave Cross just posted a link to the Programme for Opentech 2008 in July in London. While I've long missed all the awesome bands I've been missing in London, this is one of those events I really would love to go to.
There's really cool stuff like the stuff the mySociety guys going on over there. Hackers hacking government to make democracy work better.
I really enjoyed some of the random conferences I went to in London.
London Perl Workshop had really inspirational talks on people doing seriously awesome stuff in Perl.
Sadly defunct NTK put on a really impressive day called XCOM2002 showcasing people doing weird and cool shit with computers.
I'd love to start something like this here in Sydney. London, at the time, had NTK, which gave enormous amounts of publicity to really interesting geek stuff going on, which helped in getting the word out. Not sure there's the critical mass here, but there are certainly loads of people doing really interesting things.
Not sure how to get stuff going. I've certainly never made it to a Dorkbot here, so I'm as bad as everyone else.
Perhaps we need an NTK for Sydney? Who's up for starting one? I'd only be interested if there's some helpers. For geeks who didn't live in London between 1997 and 2006 (i.e., most of you) NTK (Need To Know) was a sarcastic weekly, purposely low-tech newsletter about what was happening in and around London. By and for geeks, particularly the charismatic Dave Green and Danny O'Brien. Wikipedia article.
14 May 2008 23:04 [category: /geek] #
Giant CRX City Pro: a year on
About a year ago, I blogged about my shiny new bike, a Giant CRX City Pro. I was very excited about the hub gears on it. A Mark Jones found my post and asked me about it, so I figure I should share my response for anyone else considering buying it.
Glad you asked because I wouldn't recommend it!
The bike itself, frame, wheels, everything but the gearing is brilliant. A mate bought the (somewhat cheaper) deraileur version and is wildly happy with it. It's a really zippy geometry, really wants to go.
The big problem is the Nexus internal hub. It's a real pain in the arse. I was won over by the idea of zero maintenance gearing, but that just hasn't panned out.
To fix a puncture, you need a spanner and end up covered with grease getting the wheel off and on. It takes ages, and you'll get it wrong the first three or four times you do it, causing further problems. Chain tensioning isn't exactly easy, either.
What's more, a couple of weeks ago one of the anti-rotation washers (the yellow one in this picture as described here by the late, great Sheldon Brown) had one of the lugs break off, which meant the axle rotates. Taking it into the shop tomorrow.
So while I was after a much reduced maintenance bike, it really hasn't turned out that way. I managed to seriously screw things up the first few times I had punctures, requiring shop visits to sort it out and show me the right way. What's more, you need to carry a spanner and end up covered in grease.
Longest ride I've been on? Dunno, not that far, maybe 50kms. It's my commuter bike, so it normally only does 10km a day. If you're thinking of touring with it, be aware that the lowest gear isn't all that low, so loaded up and going up mountains wouldn't be good.
If I were buying again, I'd buy the derailleur version of the bike. For the price and the quality of the bike, it's an amazing deal. I might spend the difference in price on a hub dynamo and light set.
14 May 2008 14:27 [category: /me] #
Socceroos calendar
Since the FFA seems too clueless to provide this, I've created a Google Calendar with all upcoming Socceroos matches. I watch the football news about our team pretty closely, so I should be able to keep it updated. Times are in Sydney time, though your calendar app should be able to translate that for you.
Google calendars can also be imported into other apps. XML, ICAL HTML.
14 Feb 2008 13:01 [category: /me] #
HD MythTV via PS3
Jeremy, shamelessly pimping for his work has suggested using a PS3 as my MythTV front-end as an alternative to building my own front-end. Advantages being it could be slightly cheaper (depends on hardware choices), Blu-Ray drive thrown in, and it's got some pretty awesome hardware. I'd add that I'd get a PS3 as a significant advantage.
It's a very tempting idea, and one I'll think about quite seriously. Current MythTV support seems a bit patchy, but it also seems to be improving pretty quickly. Games consoles are a natural platform for this kind of hardware: it's already designed for the lounge room, it's got all the hardware you need already, and geeks wouldn't complain about a shiny new games console in the lounge room.
I might see how I go with SD and the new telly for a while and keep an eye on progress of MythTV with the PS3. If I decide I want HD, it's a very good option.
14 Feb 2008 11:53 [category: /geek] #
HD MythTV responses
I've had quite a bit of response to yesterday's post about HD MythTV. Thanks for the input folks, you've pretty much answered all my doubts!
Cafuego told me he's having no trouble recording two HD streams over an NFS share on 100 meg ethernet, so local SATA shouldn't have any trouble. That's about what I'd expect too, though commercial flagging crunches the drive a lot. Spread between two drives with the new Storage Groups feature, I reckon it'll be fine.
Dave wrote to tell me he's happily watching HD on an AMD64 3000+ CPU and an Nvidia GPU. He points out that XvMC acceleration of MPEG decoding is important, which is the same as I've found with my silent SD front-end. One thing I've been wondering about is whether Australia's DVB-t solely uses MPEG or whether one of the other standards is also in use. The Wikipedia page mentions use of the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC codecs, though I suspect that's a very new thing and not used here.
Dave also points out that [wife] "Rozie never seems to get around to watching half the stuff she schedules", but that's pretty much the point of a PVR for me. Record everything that might, possibly be interested, but don't get too upset if it expires off unwatched. The occasional night you spend in wanting to blob out with lots of telly makes it worthwhile. The approach becomes "what's the telly got for me" rather than the old style "what's on telly".
Matt chimed in with some great info about the Panasonic LCDs I'm looking at. "I helped my parents pick out the 700A a couple months ago, and they (and I, when I'm around) have been really, really happy with it. The picture is extraordinary, and the signal processing (noise reduction, motion comp.) it does on the (crappy) foxtel and (sometimes crappy) free-to-air signals is amazing. Better than far, far more expensive 42 and 50 inch plasmas I've seen." Glad to hear it and that's been my impression from various forums and reviews around the traps. Not so sure about the motion compensation and noise reduction which seems to be the main difference between the 70A and 700A. Will have to check it out in a shop, side-by-side, I think.
Matt also suggest looking at Via Mini-ITX options which "are fanless and feature a DVI port". My SD front-end is an ME6000 and it's brilliant. Absolutely silent, which is ideal for the lounge room. The problem is, the newer EPIA boards that might have the grunt for HD look great, but I haven't been able to definitively confirm that the free drivers support the new chipsets, or that there's enough grunt for a 1080i stream. Anyone able to shed any light there?
TimC had some suggestions about fixing the green tinges on the old CRT. The green tinge appeared after we moved, and could well be due to proximity to speakers. He's suggested trying some degaussing or magnet actions. I might give it a go just out of curiosity, but the other half has agreed to an LCD so I'll still go down that path ;)
Craig described his VDR/Xbox running XBMC setup which sounds quite cool, but it wouldn't be up to HD and XBMC doesn't integrate with MythTV particularly. His comment about HD broadcasting in general rings pretty true though: "personally, i think that unless your TV is fantastic then you just aren't going to notice any difference between HD and SD except that the former takes up a *LOT* more disk space." I'm inclined to agree there, particularly if you haven't got a 1080i/p screen. 768 lines of resolution is certainly more than SD's 480, but it's not really that much.
I think I'll take his advice and see whether I care enough to upgrade from SD rather than dive straight into it. I suspect the improvement in quality won't be all that important, and the improvement just from having a bigger, better telly will be enough. For now, anyway.
So thanks for the responses folks. Most enlightening!
14 Feb 2008 10:29 [category: /geek] #
JavaScript email address validation part 3
Continuing on my my odyssey to find a decent JavaScript regular expression for email address validation, I've come up with something I'm happy with.
I started with Rob Eberhardt's crack at it here, but added some more characters that are allowed in the first bit (before the @).
^([0-9a-zA-Z]([-.+':#;<>\w]*[0-9a-zA-Z])*@([0-9a-zA-Z][-\w]*[0-9a-zA-Z]\.)+[a-zA-Z]{2,})$
My test for it is here.
14 Jan 2008 11:47 [category: /geek] #
JavaScript email address validation part 2
A few people have responded to yesterday's post about validating email addresses in JavaScript pointing out that it's very very wrong. For starters, Skud points out that .info addresses won't work. Howie points out .mobi and further, .museum being valid domains.
Stephen Thorne was most scathing, and has very good points to say.
For a start, ' is valid in email addresses, but not at the beginning or the end, O'Brian@example.com. That's just a simple real-world case and ignores the perfectly valid myname@[59.167.98.48], email addresses with doublequotes and spaces, the myriad ways of escaping, etc. RFC821 has a full grammar for email addresses.
The best possible way to validate an email address is to ask the MX for that domain if you can deliver mail there. Can't be done in javascript without ajax of course, but it's probably the best way. You do the "HELO/MAIL FROM: <>/RCPT TO: $username" handshake with the mx, and if it doesnt' reject you, you know it's at least partway valid.
Otherwise, your best bet is to check that it contains an @ and is more than 4 characters. Anything in between will reject valid email addresses.
I suppose what this results in is that you want 1 or more characters left of the @, then three or more characters to the right, with at least one period. The right-hand side you can constrain a bit more, since the acceptable characters for domains are easily defined.
And yes, myname@[59.167.98.48] is a valid SMTP addressee, but I'm not sure I'd call it an email address in the modern sense any more than I'd expect bang paths.
I'll work up a regex implementing what I outlined above shortly, though I've got a higher-priority project for today so it'll probably be tomorrow. Thanks for the feedback!
PS: RFC2821 supersedes 821.
PPS: Both Skud and Stephen wanted a way to comment on my blog. I don't have the time nor energy to spend 45 minutes de-spamming my blog, which is why I put a "contact me" link on it, which points to my mail form.
Be sure to see this followup.
