Smithology

With the finale of Season 5 of Doctor Who upon us, I thought I’d share a little project I did a few weeks back. Since being at work, I’ve switched my desktop to Ubuntu Linux and discovered a TimeTunnel screensaver in the settings.

By default the screensaver shows the xscreensaver logo floating in the tunnel because apparently the author was unable to get permission from the BBC to distribute images of the Doctor, the Tardis and the Doctor Who logo which would normally appear.

However, on further investigation I found that the author has made allowance for any images to be shown floating in the tunnel so I knew immediately that I had to make my own face float out of the tunnel.

First I had to make three xpm images. Generally you just fire up any image editor and edit up a photo of your head and any other objects you want in the tunnel. I decided on a coffee cup seeing as the screensaver would be at work, it would provide a hint as to my whereabouts should someone come to my desk.

I’m not a photoshop expert (actually I used Acorn on the Mac) so the cutting out of my face and hair is a little rough on the edges. The procedure I used was to get the select tool to draw the boundary of my face and hair and then used the ‘invert selection’ menu item, then with the eraser tool, i could make the background transparent without erasing my face (since the selection was inverted). I saved my work as PNG with transparency enabled.

On linux I used the convert command that comes with ImageMagick to get an xpm: it’s simply ‘convert face.png face.xpm’

Finally I had to muck around a bit with xscreensaver in Ubuntu. First uninstall gnome-screensaver. Then install xscreensaver. Xscreensaver is the original package that has the ability to customise the screensaver parameters. Under the screensaver setup screen, select TimeTunnel and then click ‘Advanced’. In the advanced settings you can specify the command. I changed mine to be ‘timetunnel -head /pathto/face.xpm -tardis /pathto/coffeecup.xpm -logo /pathto/coffeecup.xpm’

And here’s the result (the music is usually hummed by my coworker when he walks past but I haven’t got a recording of that)

Uncategorized doctor who, scifi, tech

I watched the finale of Misfits (season 1) last night and it had me in stitches. I started watching of curiosity when it was mentioned on Fulltime Casual as being about incredibly unlikable people who get superpowers and somehow you just have to watch the next episode.

Some things that drew me into this show were the choice of characters, the setting, the great acting and the black humour. So many shows are about rich people doing expensive things and being out of this world. Misfits was different because it was about teenagers gone wrong doing community service. They drink, they smoke, they have no life ambition, they’re selfish and shallow and then in a freak storm they are somehow given super powers.

I liked the way the show explored each character through the episodes: There’s Kelly with the almost unintelligible accent and bad attitude – thinking everyone’s out to get her, Alisha the play girl who wants to be bad with the boys, Curtis the more straight guy who ended up on probation for possession of cocaine (which was really because his girlfriend had it), Simon the social misfit – incredibly repressed and introverted who spies on everyone and films them with his phone and Nathan: the star of the show, an insensitive, potty mouthed, overly extroverted, loudmouth prick who can’t take anyone or anything seriously.

Of these characters, Nathan and Kelly hold much of the humorous moments and their acting is just perfect. Kelly’s facial expressions, body language and look are so believable. Likewise, Nathan’s ridiculous swagger, excruciatingly insincere facial expressions and over-the-top teasing had me spilling my beer from laughter.

Apart from the comedy, the show explores some other interesting territory: there’s a Butterfly Effect like episode about time travel, an episode that makes us think about ageing and loneliness and a kind of Midas’ Curse story around Alisha. There are also many other characters that briefly come into the story and are also brilliant.

The overall themes of the show are relational: the experience of loneliness and not fitting in and how we find others and find comfort in relationships. Maybe it’s about how relationships are formed through us being exposed to each others flaws but still finding acceptance.

A word of warning though, this is not a show for people who don’t like swearing and lots of other nastiness including lots of sexual crassness. Nathan especially knows no limits when it comes to how far into the gutter he’ll go – it seems he has engaged the best part of his obviously high intelligence and creative energy to just getting under peoples skin and hitting them where it hurts the most or just grossing them out – anything to get a reaction.

Season 1 was just aired in Australia on the ABC and season 2 is apparently airing in the UK later in the year.

Misfits on Wikipedia

Misfits Official Site

Uncategorized comedy, super heros, tv

As many who’ve visited my house know, I have a PC connected to my TV which I use to record and play TV like a video recorder. It’s similar to the PVRs and TiVos that are becoming popular now but because it’s a PC running linux I can do more with it (not that I ever have the time or motivation)

As well as being plugged into the TV, this media centre PC is plugged into my stereo. Once upon a time, I had all of my mp3s on there and could play them using the TV remote however I found the interface too cumbersome. I wanted to be able to use it like I use iTunes. I also like to log music I listen to on http://last.fm/ which is a musical social networking site but the linux music player that comes with mythtv (the software that runs the media centre stuff) is hard to get working with the last.fm scrobbler (which uploads your playlists to the site).

I found the solution last night: airfoil. It’s a piece of software that I can run on my Mac that plugs into iTunes on my Mac and sends the music to my linux PC. The PC is running a thing called airfoilspeakers which receives the connection from airfoil and plays the music through the speakers of the PC. This way I get better quality sound through my slightly nicer stereo (it’s cheap but does the job), scrobbling to last.fm and the convenience of iTunes. Because I run it on the laptop and I usually have the laptop within a short distance of whatever I’m doing (so I can obsessively check twitter) I don’t have far to go to get the music going.

As with all things linux, there was some mucking about so I recommend checking the help site if you’re going to try this at home.

My last.fm page

Uncategorized linux, music, tech

I got to visit a courier centre for work this week which was pretty interesting. I was there to observe the operations in preparation for a similar project later in the year. It was fascinating to see the system at work.

The purpose of the centre is to sort all the boxes from trucks coming in from interstate and regional centres and route them into other trucks which then take them to the regional centres and interstate for delivery. The first step is unloading all the boxes onto the conveyor system: The men in the picture are standing at the back of a truck that is being unloaded and the boxes then travel towards the viewer.

The boxes then whiz around a bit while all the “induct” lanes merge together and then get weighed and scanned:

Once they are scanned, the system knows where they are supposed to go and as they travel along a big sorting conveyor, the system pushes them off at various positions as they reach their exit lanes:

Finally they end up on a conveyor at the end of the lane where they go onto another truck to be driven away.

It was very cool to see this system in action running hundreds of boxes a minute for hours at a time for each shift. I have to confess that I did see a few boxes getting crunched but on the other hand, there were some pretty crazy things that people were asking this company to ship: some very flimsy cartons with stray bits of string hanging off them waiting to snag on corners and split open. Also crazy shaped things, rolly polly things – it’s a daily challenge for these guys to keep everything on track and unfortunately the occasional egg gets cracked.

My advice for anyone wanting their package to survive a courier trip is to remember that the box is going to be processed in several centres like this and needs to have lots of padding inside and needs to be a nice square shape with flat sides and nothing hanging off it. Don’t use too much tape as the PE cells that detect the boxes can be thrown off by shiny surfaces and the same goes for transparent plastic wrapping. The safest thing to do is just put it in a big clean and new square box, put some good quality tape or staple it and make sure you’ve padded it enough to survive a drop from say 2m high.

Uncategorized photos, work

I took the Pentax for a wander around the backyard the other day and uploaded the results to Flickr. It’s nice to see some tropical plants in my garden again! (The Sale house just had fruit trees which aren’t nearly as interesting to look at)

More on Flickr

Uncategorized photos

I finished Isaac Asimov’s Second Foundation last night and it was great. It made reading the first two books (which I admit didn’t rock my world very hard) worthwhile and was a great culmination of the trilogy. I can see why these books are held in such high esteem. In this last book, Asimov finally starts to have some fun with the story, writes some really nice personal story lines -stories that are carried on the personalities of the characters as well as the plot. He does some nice fake outs and keeps you involved right until the end then leaves you reeling with the discoveries of the last couple of pages.

There are also, not one but two! strong female characters which goes to show that science fiction is not traditionally a boys club but also appealed to those new plucky post-world war II girls.

Second Foundation on LibraryThing

Second Foundation on Wikipedia (wikipedia is basically all spoilers by the way)

Uncategorized asimov, books, scifi

I’ve never really gotten into Star Trek. I think I subscribe to that thing where you’re either a Star Wars person or a Star Trek person and I’m very much Star Wars oriented. I like my space men to be wisecracking cowboys (or laserbrains) and my space ships to need a bit of percussive maintenance to achieve hyperspace.

But there was one year where I got into star trek because I got involved with a group of franciscan brothers and discovered their dark secret: the franciscan religious order in the anglican church is little more than a front for a science fiction appreciation society. They pretend it’s about a calling from God but really what they’re doing is searching for Spock.

Ok, I’m exaggerating for humourous affect (and I hope any of my franciscan friends reading this will laugh with me) but it is a fact that around 2003/2004 I used to wander on down to the friary on a Sunday night, say a quick round of Sunday night prayers and finish just in time for TV1’s scifi Sunday back to back Star Gate, Voyager and Deep Space 9.

So I’ve started working my way through all the Star Trek movies starting with Wrath of Kahn (because who would voluntarily watch the first one?) and I’m now halfway through The Search for Spock which, so far, is not as bad as people say.

But as I watch these films, I can’t help thinking of the franciscan brothers – especially when Sarek turns up in his brown robe. Come to think of it, the vulcans and franciscan’s would get along just fine I think.

Live long and prosper.

Uncategorized scifi, star trek

After the brainstorming session a couple of weeks ago, I managed to obtain a membership at the local DVD store and perused the science fiction section with Sol. The haul was pretty disappointing, the science fiction section was the smallest I’ve ever seen, but we got a hold of Short Circuit and brought it home for a spin.

The verdict? Sol absolutely loved it, he laughed all the way through and then when it finished he wanted to watch it again and again the next morning. He really got off on the slap-stick comedy: every time Johnny 5 bumped into something or knocked something over he fell off his chair laughing. He also cracked up over the lines of dialogue that Johnny ripped off the TV.

There were a few bits that he didn’t like: the scene where Stephanie has a confrontation with her ex-boyfriend and ends up being knocked to the ground and of course the scene near the end involving a helicopter with a big missile on it. He also wanted to know why Crosby said “Holy Shit!!” in the scene where he decides Johnny really is alive.

Personally I enjoyed the opening credits: both the visuals and the music are great. The design of Johnny 5 is really well realised and while distinctly eighties is still believable. The wikipedia page tells me it was done by Syd Mead who also did work on Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Bladerunner, TRON, 2010, Aliens, Time Cop and Johnny Mnemonic.

What if it goes out and melts down a bus load of nuns? How would you like to write the headline on that one?

Uncategorized fatherhood, movies, scifi

I’ve been thinking a bit more about Asimov’s writing style and why it feels dated. Some of the giveaways are the assumptions about user interfaces and electronics: closing contacts and turning great big dials. Where we would say “screen” or “display”, he says “visiplate”. He even describes a machine for calculating one’s position in the galaxy by aligning patterns of stars but in doing so reveals the analog and interactive nature of this process – one that we can’t relate to today where you just type in a few parameters on the machine and click the ‘go’ button.

Other giveaways are sociological: the virtual absence of women and for the few female characters, an assumption of gendered roles.

But there are subtle stylistic giveaways that are more felt than anything: the way the action is relatively subdued and violence is very tame, the dialogue heaviness and the “staginess” of it. The bulk of the books are taken up by dialog, often between two people at a time in a kind of staged area like an office or space ship cabin. When the characters are talking they are totally focussed on the task of communication, occasionally one might take out a pipe or cigar but never are they doing much else. In most science fiction you read today, the authors go to great lengths to avoid these scenarios – when the characters talk they are always doing something at the time that’s either somehow underscoring the emotion of the moment, like having a verbal confrontation whilst trying to fix an engine, or moving the plot forward like talking about a planet whilst configuring the ship’s computer for the FTL jump that will take them there.

Having said that, I feel like Asimov’s style actually changes as I read through the books, moving from abstract and intellectual story lines to more personal and active exposition.

Uncategorized asimov, books, scifi

I’m not a confrontational person by nature but that doesn’t mean that I don’t get angry, hopping mad, furious, filled with the insatiable hell rage of a thousand angry demons on a Monday without coffee, etc… For example, the property manager of the house we’re currently renting treats us with such contempt and disdain that just the thought of her is making me want to smash something right now.

The first thing was signing the lease. She was in a very bad mood and told us she was not happy about giving us the lease and even less happy that the landlord had insisted on twelve months rather than six because she was hoping to kick us out after six months. We should have walked away then but we needed somewhere to live and that was the only property we’d found in the area so we stuck with it thinking we wouldn’t see her again.

However, the next time our rent was due, after paying it, we received three SMSs and two messages on the answering machine insisting that we had breached our lease contract and were in arrears blah blah for not paying. When we cleared up later that the rent had indeed been paid the day before, she blamed her coworker for not telling her even though the transaction was documented in their books. No apology was received for the harassment.

Again this week, we received SMSs and phone calls accusing us of breaching our contract on the day before the rent was due. The phone call with my wife did not end amicably and fearing a conflagration, I fronted the agent with the cheque and grunted at her lecture about how she doesn’t like phoning us but it’s what will happen if we’re late with the rent (all delivered in a bossy school headmaster tone). And I’m not expecting any acknowledgement of how she actually has the date wrong even though we have a signed lease document that tells us the date we need to pay.

So now we’re at the point where all correspondence is having to be written so that we have documentation of it all when we take our case to the RTA or whatever has to happen when this all inevitably disintegrates in the next few months. And I don’t know what will happen when we have an inspection but I’m not looking forward to it (I’m considering videoing it so we can have evidence of her demeanor)

We can only conclude that this woman is used to being able to bully and intimidate her tenants and probably didn’t want to rent the house to us because we don’t fit the demographic that she likes to lord it over and kick in the guts as much as she likes.

Uncategorized life, renting