Entries from Simon Butcher

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.

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.

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.

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.

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…

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!

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.