James McParlane's Blog

V8 Supercars – Last Race Of 2006 And The Last Time This Version Of Our Award Winning Flash and AJAX Application Will be Running

Posted on December 10, 2006 by James McParlane

Our multiple award winning broadband Flash/AJAX application is being retired after 3 and half years of service.

Its normally restricted to BigPond users, but its been opened up for the last race of the year.

A free pass link has been placed on the V8 Supercars home page (click on the “V8 SUPERCARS LIVE NOW” banner IE6/7 only). The application uses Flash, windows media player and lots of AJAX.

This is a last chance to see the most advanced car racing web application in action. Hey so I’m biased 🙂

RACE 3 – The last race of the day and year will be broadcast live in an hour. Sunday 3:25pm Sydney Time, which is Saturday 11:25pm EST USA

It does not work with FireFox or Safari. Its being completely rewritten for next year and plan is to remedy this – but we may lose some of telemetry synchronisation functions because of issues with Windows Media player under these browsers.

What will remain next year is the the Windows Media Center version (Also available as the The ‘lite’ web version). Like the above ‘broadband’ version it will synchronise the telemetry and live timing feeds and in-car video stream, but it will also synchronise the live TV footage via Media Center’s PVR functionality. This last feature is experimental and there is a secret key 0n the rem0te t0 enable it. Happy hunting.

Posted in Coolhunting, Flash, Massive, Web2.0 | 2 Comments

Why The Chinese Government Must Ban All Of Wikipedia

Posted on November 21, 2006 by James McParlane

After being unblocked, the Chinese Government has re-blocked all of Wikipedia.

With the goal of Wikipedia being to provide free access to the sum of all human knowledge, China had a choice of either blocking everything or just blocking what it does not like.

Its one thing to block sets of seemingly random sites, but with Wikipedia its different.

Wikipedia is comprehensive and its content is deeply interlinked. Censorship can be detected by the hole it makes. If China just blocked what it didn’t like it would take some simple analysis from a web-crawler from behind the great firewall to see the scissor marks and work out what has been censored.

And that in itself would generate some interesting conversation. conversation that I’m sure Beijing would rather didn’t happen.

Posted in Politics, Rants | Leave a comment

Found Some More Old Nanotech Music

Posted on November 12, 2006 by James McParlane

Managed to hunt down some old techno tracks I made in the early 90’s.

A.T.O.T.M.O.G (1993).mp3

Go! (Very Silly)_Smurfs On Horse Tranquilisers (1992).mp3

Posted in Coolhunting, Nostalgia for Misspent Youth | Leave a comment

How I Listen To Podcasts

Posted on November 11, 2006 by James McParlane

In response to this post “Podcasts are boring (Hot tips to hold attention)” by Leisa Reichelt.

This is how I consume Podcasts.

I use an iPod mini and iTunes on an old G4 attached to a 50W Honner keyboard amplifier.

I have a smart playlist (AAA Podcasts) that includes all Podcasts that

Are not ‘unchecked’
Have not been ‘played
Sorted in order of download such that the oldest are at the top.

I listen to then in iTunes when at home and in the iPod while walking.

I consume them like I consume radio. If I zone in and out while listening I don’t really care. If they interest me, then they get my attention, just like a good radio show would.

When I sync my iPod it automatically removes the ones i have listened to. If I want to skip one I just ‘check’ it. If I want to skip one on the iPod I fast forward to the end and listen to the last few seconds – this marking it as ‘played’.

iTunes and the iPod remember where I am up to in a podcast. If I listen to on for 57 seconds on my iPod, and then connect it to my G4 and continue listening in iTunes, it plays from the 57th second.

Same work if I listen in iTunes and sync again and continue listening via the iPod.

Its the single most useful feature I can think of. I would not use another mp3 player/portable combination that did not provide that feature.

Posted in My Hardware, Web0.0 | Leave a comment

2006 – So Far Its All About People and AttentionRank

Posted on November 10, 2006 by James McParlane

EgoSurf

egoSurf finds your blogs ranking in google

Actually it doesn’t have to be your blog, and it ain’t just google.

Simple. You enter your name and your blogs web address. We search google and find links to your blog. We calculate your ego ranking.

We show you where your blogs appear in the search engines. Did we mention that we can search in Yahoo, MSN, del.icio.us and Technorati too? Got more than one blog or site? No problem, we can look for lots.

Paul Montgomery’s TinFinger

“Where Tinfinger hopes to expand the Memeorandum concept beyond tech and politics, we hope it will effectively become a “category killer” for Wikipedia by focussing particularly on humans. Wikipedia is to the Encyclopedia Britannica as Tinfinger will be to Who’s Who”

Posted in AttentionRank, Web2.0 | 1 Comment

like.com – Now This Is Exactly What Is Wrong With The World Today

Posted on November 10, 2006 by James McParlane

I find like.com rather a rather appalling application of cutting edge computer science.

I’m probably nothing like the target market but I find myself disgusted at people bragging about the ocean-boiling computing power required to allow people to purchase yet more trinkets that they don’t need.

If anything the world needs technology to allow us to buy less garbage – not more.

The only reason I would use this site would be to make sure that whatever I purchased had not been trussed on some dubious ‘star’ who’s only claim to fame is that they are famous for being famous and according to the gossip mags, have more problems and bad habits than average. The only reason these people seem to exist is to make me feel better about myself.

If this site allowed me to guarantee that what I was about to purchase had not previously been sullied by one of those plague potatoes then I would gladly preach its usefulness.

For now this site goes into my “now this is exactly what is wrong with the world today” bin.

Posted in Rants, Web2.0 | Leave a comment

And Old Bug In Windows CRT – time() Is Affected By Timezone Change

Posted on November 8, 2006 by James McParlane

The standard C run-time (CRT) time() function for windows is documented thus

“The time function returns the number of seconds elapsed since midnight (00:00:00), January 1, 1970, coordinated universal time, according to the system clock. The return value is stored in the location given by timer. This parameter may be NULL, in which case the return value is not stored.”

So you would think that UTC is immune from local timezone information.

In windows its not.

time_t ltime;

t = time(&ltime);

t = 1163025749
The time in Reykjavik,ICELAND is (10:42pm) Wednesday

Change timezone

t = time(&ltime);

t = 1163007749
The time in Reykjavik,ICELAND is (5:42pm) Wednesday

To be immune from timezone changes during execution of your application you need to call _tzset() before you call time()

While trolling through the documentation I found this foreboding Y2Kish gem.

“In Visual C++ 2005, time is a wrapper for _time64 and time_t is, by default, equivalent to __time64_t. If you need to force the compiler to interpret time_t as the old 32-bit time_t, you can define _USE_32BIT_TIME_T. This is not recommended because your application may fail after January 18, 2038; the use of this macro is not allowed on 64-bit platforms.”

Posted in C# | 1 Comment

JavaScript Demo-Scene

Posted on November 6, 2006 by James McParlane

And here is a JavaScript triangle demo from someone that has far to much time on their hands.

I think someone should start a JavaScript demo-scene and something tells me that this is clever enough to be the official launch.

Most JavaScript ‘demos’ I have been just that – demonstrations – either of frameworks or coding tricks. I don’t count the some of the ray-tracer demos of past eligible. I’m not sure why, maybe because its just a port of an algorithm.

For some reason this particular demo makes me wave my hands in the air and declare the JavaScript demo scene officially exists.

Let the fun begin!

Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments

WiBro

Posted on November 6, 2006 by James McParlane

It’s not Kiwi for Wireless, its a Korean Wireless broadband standard.

WiBro aka “High Speed Downlink Packet Access” (HSDPA). Imaging getting 100Mb while driving in a car.

From Wikipedia

“The First phase of HSDPA has been specified in 3GPP release 5. Phase one introduces new basic functions and is aimed to achieve peak data rates of 14.4 Mbps. Newly introduced are the High Speed Downlink Shared Channels (HS-DSCH), the adaptive modulation QPSK and 16QAM and the High Speed Medium Access protocol (MAC-hs) in the Node-B.

The Second phase of HSDPA is currently being specified in 3GPP release 6 and is aimed to achieve data rates of up to 28.8 Mbps. It will introduce antenna array technologies such as beamforming and Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO). Beam forming can be described as focusing the transmitted power of an antenna in a beam towards the users direction. Knowing that the limiting resources are the transmission power of the base station sector, one can understand that beam forming is a means of increasing this power. MIMO uses multiple antennas at the sending and receiving side.

After HSDPA the roadmap leads to HSOPA, known also as LTE (Long Term Evolution). It aims to achieve data rates of up 100 Mbps for downlink and 50 Mpbs for uplink using OFDMA modulation.”

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment