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A Festivus for the rest of us
Another year, another free box of chocolates from the suppliers at work. This year I managed to fly my parents over from down under for Christmas in the snow (albeit unintentionally). Could there be any more snow and ice?
Now that they're here, I intend to prove my theory that there's a Belgian Beer for everyone, and my ultimate goal is to get my Mum (who doesn't drink alcohol aside from the rare glass of wine) to admit that's the case.
I wish you all the best for 2011!
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New monitors
Following on from the new computer, two-thirds (or possibly one-half) of my monitors have arrived, finally! Backordering can be painful sometimes. They're two 20.1" Hewlett-Packard LP2065 monitors S-IPS panels; all part of my evil plan.
With a native resolution of 1600×1200, that should help with my desktop real estate issues (effectively 3200×1200). The anti-theft feature is a nice idea, but I really appreciate the dual dual-link DVI connectivity.
I have a bit of saving to do before this is done…
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London
Following a successful long weekend last year, we returned to London again for another long weekend of shopping, vegetating, and a little bit of sight-seeing.
Here is a tiny selection of photos from what we got up to. I'm glad I took my DSLR.
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New computer
I've been holding back from buying a new PC for quite some time now. Actually, it's been years. My main PC has been a Toshiba Satellite M70 (1.6GHz Pentium M, 2GiB RAM, 60GB HDD, surprisingly good speakers, and an annoying DVD drive which cannot be flashed with RPC-1 firmware). It's a great little laptop, even today, and aside from the low-end GPU and slow HDD, it runs really well.
This poor thing has travelled the world with me, but it's about time I upgraded. For several projects I've been needing a lot more processing grunt, RAM, local storage, and (eventually) desktop real estate. Today most of the stuff has arrived, and it's taken so long because I've been very picky about what I wanted in the build. It's been a long time since I've built a PC, and a few people have asked me to show them the build…
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San Francisco
I'm in the states for work for two weeks and was encouraged strongly by our financial director to take a trip over the weekend. I decided to head to San Francisco, despite people thinking I'm mad (the office is in Greenville, South Carolina).
Maybe it is a bit mad to travel ≅4000km for a weekend city trip, but it's nothing compared to travelling between Brussels and Melbourne! I flew to San Francisco immediately after work on Friday, via the hilariously named George Bush Intercontinental Airport (presumably because “International” just isn't enough). Well, maybe a bit before “after work” since I… err… snuck out to catch my flight…
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3GP to WebM encoding
☹Yesterday I blogged about jumping off the Atomium. In that post, I included a video for you to see, using the relatively new WebM video standard. It took me five hours of piss-farting around to get that video on there.
To save myself some frustration in the future, I thought I'd take some (more) time to note down the eventual combination used to re-encode the video. Maybe it will be useful to you too.
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Jumping off the Atomium
![The Atomium [Copyright © www.atomium.be - SABAM 2010 - Simon Butcher]](/uploads/2010/08/29/Atomium.thumb.jpeg)
The Atomium, once a temporary structure left over from the Expo 58 World's Fair and now a Belgian landmark. Standing at ≅100-metres tall, its height is as imposing as its shininess, especially following the recent renovation.
Today I jumped off the thing.
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Benespection
After a bit of time off work recently (a long weekend to recover from financial year close), I couldn't help myself and caved in and bought a TV. For years I've been saving my money and not really buying anything, but with this whole “global recession” thing not really shifting, it's time to push some money back into the economy. Things are pretty cheap for the time being, too. Well, and the move into a bigger apartment may have had something to do with it.
I like my movies, and we're sitting several metres away from the screen, so after lots of debating I opted for a Samsung UE55C6700 (55" LED “smart-TV” with no 3D junk) which arrived this time last week which will go nicely with the Pioneer VSX-920-K we picked up for dirt-cheap last week. I'm heading back over there to watch some movies on it now, but in the meantime you can enjoy a brief bit of benespection.
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The Move
A and I decided to move in together a little over a month ago, and having found a place we have spent most of this month moving in. After a bit of convincing, A agreed to an apartment in the area of the Marolles (where I was living), and we found a huge ≅150m² loft-style apartment right on the edge of the district, purely by accident.
Moving only a few blocks from my old apartment seems a bit odd, but I think I might miss my old ≅75m² place overlooking Place Rouppe… a bit…
I've added a few photos here of my side of the move, as I haven't really got much to say at this point.
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Benespection: Doo Town special
Visiting Port Arthur in Tasmania? Stop off in Doo Town (Eaglehawk Neck), in part to check out their blowhole. We visited on a whim (and because we were amused by the Navigon's pronunciation of “blaew-hole”), but soon discovered the real reason to visit is probably to see a tiny town with a healthy sense of rivalry and humour…
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Christmas and so forth
Christmas is very fast approaching, and Brussels is becoming decidedly cold again. It's that time of the year when most people in the office are mentally on holidays, whilst still being physically present, so trying to get things done tends to grind along at snail's pace.
If you think you're cold, we've recently had the windows replaced at the office. Late-Autumn/Early-Winter is clearly not the first choice when deciding on when to replace office windows, and I can tell you: it's pretty cold for those who just sit at their desk most of the day. Brrrr!
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ARCserve agent for Linux on any distribution
✇Like it or lump it, our hands are tied at work to continue using ARCserve as our back-up software. It's horrible, but the alternatives are also horrible in their own ways. It's become a case of “better the devil you know” and to keep our auditors happy we need to use the ARCserve backup agent on our Linux boxen now too.
That's all good and well if you're running major “corporate friendly” distributions like Red Hat or SuSE, but for the rest of you: Computer Associates will tell you that it won't work at all and you're just going to have to reinstall your server with something “not used by kids in their parents' basements”.
Them's fightin' words!
Continue reading "ARCserve agent for Linux on any distribution"...
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London
It's coming up to six years of living in Belgium, the perfect launch-pad for travel around Western Europe due to the number of European institutions based here, and yet despite promising myself to travel while I'm here I haven't really done much.
One of those glaringly obvious places to go is London, being just under an hour's flight away (and with the time-zone difference you land a few minutes before you take off), or just over two-hours on the Eurostar high-speed train. What excuse could I have for not going yet?
This long weekend I've finally managed to go (following a lot of encouragement from A), so here are a few photos and stories of the visit.
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Benespection
Things have been pretty busy, and despite these benespection posts taking a little time to prepare it's easier than summoning the effort to start ranting about things. Here are a handful of things “benespected” (am I taking that too far now?) over the last few months.
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IPv6 is coming
It's taken its sweet time getting here, but IPv6 is quickly becoming not only a reality, but a technical necessity. After debates at work with the network administrators over whether it's really needed (they don't think so), I figured it's time to take my own (little) stand on the Internet and prove it's not the scary step into the big unknown that people think it is.
My involvement with IPv6 goes back to 2002, after participating in the experimental 6bone network. As ISPs are still very slow to take up IPv6 support, I've ran a dual-stack IPv6 network with Internet connectivity through the free Hurricane Electric Tunnel Broker service on and off since. For those of you not willing to play too much, an alternative has popped up known as Teredo which essentially does the same thing, and support is built into Windows Vista (or you can do it under Linux using Miredo, which has proven to work well on our proxy servers at work).
But this isn't enough.
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DSO Framer vs. Edraw Office Viewer
Just a quick one: Anyone out there that needs to embed Microsoft Office into their application somehow can do so using a sample OCX available from Microsoft called DSO Framer (KB311765) as a starting point. The sample does everything you need it to out of the box, but the biggest trick is to make sure you're closing each office instantiation cleanly.
It also allows you to play with disabling menus, toggling read-only, and redirecting other functions, and can be quite powerful. At the time of writing, it still works for the up-coming Office 2010, but I would recommend you avoid embedding office in future unless you're unable to argue the point with your managers. While it works with Office 2007, it's a bit flakey, so I suspect Microsoft will ditch it at some point, but you can always download it here (468KiB ZIP).
Importantly, it's free. Do not spend your money on Edraw Office Viewer as it's the same thing, only with renamed symbols and a hefty price tag! Go for the public domain version.
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Benespection
❄Work has been hell since returning from holidays, and it looks like it's only going to get worse. I hope you enjoyed the tiny selection of photos taken while there enjoying the sun and the relaxation.
I have hundreds of photos to sift through now, but I think I presented the most interesting photo of each day.
I don't have much to post lately. Sorry folks.
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Brazil: Day 13
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Brazil: Day 12
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Brazil: Day 11
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