Movie Comments

From the trailers, the movie Men Who Stare at Goats looked great. Shelly and I went to see it last night, and while there were some funny moments, overall it was pretty pointless. I would say that they didn't really pick an angle and go with it hard. Was it a comedy, a comment on U.S. policy, or a tour of mental illness? If it had picked any of those and run with it, then it could have succeeded. As it was, the movie seemed to just play around at our expense. The acting was ok, but could not save the movie.

The movie Sublime was great. It is a frightening look at the fear of hospitals and the fear of getting old. Tom Cavanaugh is really good in this, and shows he has a lot of depth above and beyond his role in the TV show Ed. The movie is scary, twisted, graphically stimulating, and has something to say---all qualities I like in a movie.

Frustrating VLC Repeat Icons

I get what "no repeat" looks like:




Which one of these is "repeat one" and which one is "repeat all?"

BlueAnt Z9i Not So Good

My Plantronics Explorer 220 has no noise reduction and people cannot hear me in my car. I got a BlueAnt Z9i to try and solve this problem. It seems to solve it, but I have some major gripes with the Z9i:

1. It does not sit reliably in my ear.
2. It has an annoying high-pitched whine all the time.
3. It does not put out sufficient volume with my Blackberry Curve.

Back it goes. Wish I knew which Bluetooth headset would work.

Update on Current Projects

Google Voice / Gizmo / ATA

Well, I finally got a VOIP phone line working at home! It's a wired phone connected to an ATA connected to my home LAN and routed through the Linux firewall.

The trick was doing port forwarding both on the SIP and RTP ports. I had the SIP port forwarded to my ATA, but not the RTP port. This resulted in not hearing the audio from the other person for outgoing calls. If you enable port forwarding on both ports, you do NOT need NAT traversal using a STUN server.

So more details are:

1. A Google Voice phone number that has my Gizmo SIP number as one of the phones configured.
2. Incoming calls to my Google Voice number go to my Gizmo SIP number.
3. At home, I have an ATA that registers with the Gizmo SIP server.
4. Outgoing calls go through Gizmo and are 1.9 cents per minute.

This all allows other non-technical people to use this phone without extra weirdness. If calls are initiated through Google Voice online, they're free.

Right now I am holding back on using this as our main phone. I want to get more time on it before I declare it ready for prime time.

Contact Us Page for ClassySassyCards.com

Finally got this page done for Shelly. It's working great now. This is another add-on for the monolithic PHP script that is her web site.

Slide Scanning

I want to get back this project. I have some bad scans I want to redo. Turns out on the Canon Canoscan 5600, you want the slides to be oriented so they read properly from INSIDE the scanner (the "this side to screen", date, or logo goes UP) and the tall dimension should go parallel to the scanner's tall dimension. If the orientation is wrong, you get a lot of the image cut off. Also, if the slide is wider left to right, the top of the image goes to the left to make the resulting scan have the top up. I want to figure out how to get the scanner to prevent washed-out scans even if the slide is a little light.

The application failed to initialize properly (0xc0000034)

Well, the terrible Adobe Acrobat Reader partial install issue reared its ugly head for me again recently. Not sure how this happens, but during an automated upgrade, Acrobat Reader got into a state where every time I'd try to start it I would get "The application failed to initialize properly (0xc0000034)". Uninstall/Reinstall and the same issue occurs. At the recommendation of some web forum somewhere on another topic, I checked into Filemon, part of Sysinternals. I started this up, then tried to start Acrobat Reader. After it failed to start, I checked the log in Filemon and found that I was missing MSVCP80.DLL. Weird. Maybe it was that Visual Studio 2005 uninstall I had recently done... Anyhow, looking for this DLL brought me to dll-files.com. Normally I avoid non-MS sites to get files such as this one, but I downloaded it anyway and did a virus check on it. Seemed clean, so I was able to doubleclick on the event in Filemon to get to the location Acrobat Reader wanted the DLL and place it in there. This fixed the problem, thereby allowing Acrobat Reader to start. It immediately wanted to do another upgrade and even a repair I think. Now all seems well.

Haiku

Here's a haiku I thought of after I saw a man who had climbed up a tree to read:

Reading in an oak
He asks much of ancient limbs;
The tree shares gladly

Searching Source Code

The search built into Windows XP (see screenshot) was hopeless at finding stuff in source code files it doesn't know about (.vhd for example). For example, I look in a source code folder for all files containing text I know is in multiple files and it comes back with nothing.

Reading online tells me that it tries to weed out meaningless results by not looking in file types it doesn't know about. Then there was some help online about how you could go in the registry and change information about each of the filetypes you want to be able to search in, and then maybe this search would find stuff. That sucks.

Also, there's a chance of using the command line "FIND" utility, but the output from that is horrible. Why can't I have something useful like grep? Anyhow, this prompted me to try Windows Search 4 and then Google Desktop. Both suffer the same issue as the built-in Windows search, they don't search in unknown file types. *@$!@$()!$&!

I just want a utility like grep for Windows. I guess I'll have to go hunting some more.