It’s great that I can legally download ABC shows that I missed directly from their website (e.g. Sunday’s first so-so episode of East of Everything). However the video resolution seems quite low, at 320 x 180. Can’t we at least get a download that’s bigger than a postage stamp? For comparison purposes, on a 4:3 CRT TV, a 45 minute XviD at 624 x 352 is completely watchable, and has a file size of 360 Mb (versus 188 Mb for the ABC video at 55 minutes long). So, for around twice the file size, it becomes significantly less blurry and more pleasant to watch, and therefore more useful. Isn’t it at least worth giving the option of the bigger download, for people that aren’t watching on a small screen portable device, like an iPod or mobile phone? Hopefully ABC playback (which is now in a by-invitation beta phase) will offer much higher resolutions. However, downloading an hour-long video is far preferable to watching it in a browser using flash, in my personal opinion – although I can see that the ABC might be concerned that this could cannibalise sales of DVDs through ABC stores.
Category Archives: pov
I vote holiday!
Just back from a week’s holiday blissing-out in Tonga, on a postcard-perfect tropical island surrounded by coral.
Fortunately this meant I missed the end of the Australian Election (yay!), and got to vote early (highly recommended – much calmer and less fuss than doing it on polling day) so as to satisfy Australia’s compulsory voting requirement (and avoid the fine if you don’t vote).
Our flight to Tonga was delayed by 3 hours, as an 83-year-old on the plane’s inbound flight had died half way through the flight, so a number of ambulances and police cars pulled up at the gate when it arrived and the passengers were not able to leave until the paperwork had been processed. This meant we arrived in Tonga at about 1 AM, and got a boat to the island in the middle of the night, and arrived at about 2 AM.
Our fale (Tongan word for hut or house) was great; it used a traditional design largely open to the tropical air (good) and the mosquitoes (bad). Lots of space and privacy though. Map of Fafa island. There was no Internet, no phones in the room, no newspapers, no radio, no TV … love it! And the food was superb – there was fresh delicious seafood every day – especially lobster and fish – all locally caught daily from the surrounding ocean, and often cooked in coconut milk and served with rice. I gained about 2 kilos in a week!
I have to confess to being a total wuss when it comes to deep water and big sharks (I should never have watched Jaws, or Open Water). However, I deeply enjoy snorkeling coral reefs, and seeing smallish sharks in the wild. So when Rebecca saw a 1-metre Blacktip reef shark attacking a school of small fish a few metres out from the shoreline, I just had to go in and see if I could watch it up close. So put my mask and fins on, and swam out about five metres and stopped in the middle of the school of fish. The water was cloudy from all the sand stirred up in the water from the waves on the shore, so I spent about three minutes carefully looking to the left, looking to the right, looking straight ahead, before concluding that it wasn’t there any more, and swimming back in. I stood up and yelled “It’s not here any more – sorry, no shark!”… And then I noticed that Rebecca was wildly pointing and hopping up and down with frustration, and she told me that just after I had swam out, the shark had done a big circuit around me, and then had stopped dead in the water a few metres behind me with its dorsal fin sticking out of the water, and had just studied me for a few minutes as I was looking around, and had then swam off when I started turning around to swim in. And who says sharks don’t possess a sense of irony?
Then on the daytime flight back to Sydney, we had a great view of the North Minerva Reef. I forgot to take a photo: sorry! However, this reef looks fantastic, and also rather out-of-place. It’s roughly 500 kilometres of open Pacific Ocean away from the nearest land, surrounded by pure deep blue ocean, and then in the middle of the open ocean there’s this circular reef all by itself, with no land or islands anywhere to be seen. The quality of the diving and snorkeling must be amazing – with that much distance to the nearest land the visibility would be stunning, and there would be no pollution, and hopefully few enough visitors to keep it pristine. The pilot described it thus: “The Minerva Reefs are a great place for yachties to be when the weather is good. However, you really want to avoid it when the weather turns bad”. Sounds interesting – if I ever get a chance to go there, I think I’ll have to do it!
Mac ads, Spider-man 3, APEC annoyances
- Most of the Mac ads are a bit so-so, with the counsellor and the confirm-or-deny one probably being the best. But they are just begging for a comic response like this.
- Saw Spiderman 3 on Monday. Primary plot themes: forgiveness; wrestling with your internal demons; everyone has a choice; being self-absorbed; revenge; father-child relationship. I enjoyed it, but thought Spiderman 2 was a better film, with its central plot theme of balancing personal life versus the greater good. Oh, and Monday night is my new cinema night – we were 2 of only 8 people in a 420 seat theatre – love it!
- As part of the APEC summit in September:
- large parts of Sydney’s CBD will be sealed off (causing traffic gridlock)
- the mobile phone coverage in the city may be partially jammed (apparently to stop people bombing George Bush via text message)
- three inner-city train stations will be closed
- the police have just been given extraordinary stop-and-search powers and the power to incarcerate “suspicious” people without charge until the conference is over (yet another strike against due-process)
- and no doubt people protesting globalisation will be tempted to run amuck like lunatics smashing windows and burning things
… Gee, I can hardly wait! Some local politicians have been heard to question why APEC even needs to be held in Sydney at all – couldn’t it be in Canberra instead? I’m inclined to agree; the whole reason Canberra even exists is because 100 years ago, Sydney and Melbourne squabbled like little children over which of them should be the nation’s capital – and the compromise solution was that nobody should be happy, and that a new artificial capital city should be build, at significant taxpayer expense, in the middle of nowhere, half-way between the two cities, thus pissing off everyone equally (seriously – you can’t make stuff like this up). Now, if there are any benefits to my tax dollars subsidising an artificial capital in the middle of nowhere, surely hosting conferences that nobody normal wants should be one of those benefits? If not, then I just have to ask: what the hell is the point of Canberra? … Thus far, the one and only redeeming factor to APEC is that Friday the 7th September has been declared a public holiday – Yay!
Email bug wastes 4 days
Jeez, I hate software sometimes. At the start of Wednesday morning last week, Outlook 2000 ate my email, and it took me until the end of Saturday afternoon (4 frustrating days) to recover most of it.
The bug:
- Specifically, there is a data corruption bug: when you reach around 2 gigabytes of data, Outlook will corrupt its PST mail store file, so that it can no longer read it (which is what happened last Wednesday morning). There is a tool though for repairing corruption in that file, which is shipped with Outlook. However, it dies with a cryptic 8-digit error code when you try to repair one of these 2-gigabyte files. So, not only does Outlook reproducibly corrupt its data (thus making all email, notes, calendar items, to-do items, etc in that file inaccessible), there is simply no way to recover the data using the tools that the product ships with.
- Microsoft are aware of the problem, and they have a “solution” of sorts: chop off the end of the file using a tool (thus losing any data contained in the removed portion), run the recovery tool again, and try to recover your data. They claim that you can just cut off 25 to 50 megabytes, but this is incorrect – and the reason it is incorrect is that the repair process significant increases the file size, which can easily cause the recovered file to exceed 2 gigabytes, thus causing the recovery tool to fail again. By a process of trial and error (and each attempt took around 3 hours of non-stop hard-disk thrashing to succeed or fail), I was able to find that trimming 355 megabytes of mail (thus deleting around 17% of my data) would make the tool run successfully, whilst just avoiding the 2-gigabyte limit.
So, what do we learn about software in general from this? For me, these were the most important points:
- Test your software. First and foremost, this bug represents a failure to test (because I doubt anyone actually intended for data corruption to happen). The minimal test case for this would have been: Create a new email, attach a 100 MB file, save the draft email, and close the email item: Repeat 25 times; Close program, open program, verify that the program opens without errors. This test (verifying that you can read your own data) would have demonstrated data corruption, and it does not require sending any email, or talking to the network at all – so would have been a comparatively simple test to preform.
- Fix severe problems quickly. This problem existed in Outlook 97 through to Outlook 2002, which (from the list of office versions) meant it was in the latest-and-greatest editions of office from Dec 1996 through to Nov 2003 (i.e. 7 years). Seven years is way too long have a severe data corruption bug like this.
- Test your fixes. There is an update that is claimed to “prevent Outlook from allowing the .PST file to exceed the 2 GB maximum size”. Since I has this update installed at the time, all I can say is that the fix seems broken to me.
- Fix severe problems in multiple ways. Bugs happen: I’ve certainly made plenty of mistakes, including ones that lost data. For the most severe ones though, I try to make it a point to fix them in multiple ways, at every point where I have made a bad assumption, or where I could be checking the passed data obeys certain constraints. My personal record is fixing a logic bug in 4 different ways, although 3-way fixes are slightly more common, and 2-way fixes are fairly standard – and when you fix bugs thoroughly like this, you never see them again. It’s the same in aviation, where they use the Swiss Cheese model – which basically says that for any accident, there are usually many cumulative failures, and you need to fix all of them to stop the same mistake happening again. Now, this particular email bug was not one bug: rather, it was two (at the very least). The first bug is that corruption occurs. The second bug is that when corruption occurs, you cannot recover from it. Microsoft only attempted to fix the first bug (and failed). If they had attempted to fix the second bug (making data recovery work), and succeeded, it would have been much less of a problem. I even tried to recover the data in a virtual machine, running the free 60-day trial edition of Outlook 2007 (the latest version), which you can download from the Microsoft site. It didn’t work, and the recovery tool still failed to recover data. As a result, this bug (making data recovery work for oversized PST files) is still unfixed in the latest edition of office (and has been present for 10.5 years now, and counting).
- Automate the backup of your data. My last backup of email data was from May 2005. Backing up my data was on my TODO list, however that TODO list was stored in the very file that got corrupted (yay, irony!). I’ve come to the realisation that if it’s not automated, I probably won’t back up my data – and I suspect most people are the same. I’m currently planning to buy one of those small network-drive devices that runs Linux, install samba, and script it to once a day delete the oldest backups until there is 10 gig of free space, then make a copy of yesterday’s data, and then reach out across the network and rsync yesterday’s data remotely against the current data, and then share out all my data as read-only and password protected. This way, I should be able get back to a previous state from any day in the last 30 days; and even if I get a severe virus or accidentally try to delete my backup, it can’t be deleted or altered because it’s read-only.
- Proprietary data formats suck. If my email had been stored in mbox format, I would have able to open it another app, even when Outlook could not. If my notes were in text files, I would have been able to open them in a text editor. If my calendar items were in iCalendar format, I could have been able to import them into other calendaring software. As it was, the data was in a proprietary format, so none of these things were possible. However, because of the point below, it’s still not clear what to do about that:
- There still appears to be no email plus Personal Information manager open-source killer-app. Despite everything, there still seems to be no free email app that’s doing what Firefox did for web browsers, or what OpenOffice is doing now for word processing and spreadsheets: Provide a fully-featured, cross-platform, kick-arse implementation, that’s easy to switch to. There are many email clients, but none that seem suitable replacements. Mozilla Thunderbird for example is clear that “It is not a personal information manager” – which is fine, but not what I’m looking for (although having builds available for Windows, Mac and Linux is a definite plus, because I want the option to change platforms at any point, and bring all my data and favourite apps with me). However, I’m looking for email + calendaring + TODO task lists + notes, well integrated in one app, rather than 4 separate apps. The closest candidate seems to be Novell Evolution, which feature-wise seems closest, but which is limited in two regards: 1) It’s part of the GNOME desktop, thus philosophically tied somewhat to a single platform, and not officially available for Windows (there are people working on a Windows port, but builds happen on an ad-hoc basis, rather than being a first-class citizens with automated nightly builds like Firefox), and 2) there seems to be no mechanism for importing data from Outlook (originally requested, twice 5 years ago), which is a missed opportunity because Outlook is a pretty popular email client, and I’m sure a lot of people and corporations would switch to an open-source app if there was a compelling pathway for them to do so.
- If you run Outlook, check now that your PST file is significantly smaller than 2 gigabytes. If it’s getting close, take action now.