On my desk...

On my desk...
Originally uploaded by k.blueice

I noticed how reflective the iPhone really is the other day when I put it down on my desk... so I thought I'd take a photo of it. I really don't like taking still life photos that much, so I don't really do it that often. Usually I don't really like how they turn out, but am reasonably happy with this one. It also reminded quite a lot of one of my friend's photos which I really liked.

So how is the iPhone? I've had it for quite a while... its damn good. In fact, to not clutter the internet with more of the same, Thomo has already summed it up pretty damn well.

What else is going on? Not much, hanging out at home for a while (I'm on holiday!), playing with Mia, catching up on some sleep, trying to avoid reading Bloomberg, and going snowboarding this week, so it better start snowing tomorrow, because it's a bit lacking at the moment. The forcast is for a white Christmas which will be fun :)

You know things are not going well...

... when you have to fire up a packet sniffer.

Yep, long, tedious day.

But Ethereal, or WireShark as it is now known, has come quite a way since I last had to use it. At least that made the day somewhat less unpleasant.

So I have these two little databases...

... in these databases are some tables, database A contains table A..a and database B contains table B..b, the schemas for A..a and B..b are identical. The data stored in them is sequential, that is, table A..a contains the first half of the data and table B..b contains the second half of the data. Sound familiar? Probably does, this is a fairly common archive arrangement, you put all that data from each month / year / decade / whatever into a new db to keep the size manageable... yeah yeah, not ideal, but hey, these things are everywhere.

So now I want to run queries across the full depth of A..a and B..b in one go - don't ask why, I just want to ok? (hint: no clean logical way to decided which db will contain the data you want) Create a view you say, a union all kind of arrangement? Take advantage of the fact that both tables are nicely indexed? Nice idea, but no. Might work on small tables with a few gb in each one... but what if they have a few hundred gb? You better have a monstrous tempdb even to do something simple like:
set rowcount 100;
select * from AB_view;

So, what do you do? Surely there has to be some better way than freeing up a mega amount of space and bcp'ing the data out of one table, putting it into the other one, then re-indexing, that will take a considerable amount of time. I want to be able to just grab hold of the table objects in the db and tell them to join together "vertically". I'm sure there's many reasons why doing that isn't practical, but I don't care... at all.

Databases suck sometimes... And don't even bother asking me about DBArtisan... Surely there must be a good DB query tool out there somewhere that is light weight and, well, works? Someone could make a crap load of money if they built one...

Its hard to do anything without a monitor.

A few weeks ago my funky 256mb graphics card stopped working. Not pleased. Luckily I still had an old 128mb one lying around, so a quick swap and computer was back to life... several weeks pass by... and few days ago my trusty 17 inch LCD monitor stopped working too. Bugger, I don't have a spare monitor lying around. Luckily the computer in the lounge room is hooked up the the huge wide screen TV... hmm wide screen...

So, feeling in need of new toys anyway (especially after phone call to a certain sneakygeek, yes, you know you are to blame), its off to Akihabara. And a short time later after browsing though a couple of department store sized computer shops I now have a nice new 22 inch wide screen monitor. Oh and a funky new 512mb graphics card to add to the fun.

Oblivion looks good at 1680x1050. Next up? I think its time to replace the ten year old IBM, home brew improved, LED encrusted keyboard...

It's Asimo!

I saw Asimo today!

It (he? she?) lives in Miraikan which is the National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation in Tokyo (Odaiba to be exact). He came out for a ten minute demonstration. I don't know why, but I expected him to be bigger, and to be sort of "clompy" when he walks. But he's actually silent when he's walking. After walking around a little bit and doing some funky arm waving and such, he decided to go for a little jog... well more like a full on sprint. Now that was amazing. While he's running both his feet actually leave the ground at the same time, just like a real person. Considering he's now 7 years old, its pretty damn impressive.




The rest of Miraikan is also really cool. It is just like the Power House Museum in Sydney, not as big but it is much more interactive, and a whole heap cheaper (only $5 for an adult). Apart from robots they also have a lot of other interesting science stuff ranging from info about KEK and other particle accelerators, through to biology, chemistry, deep sea exploration and general technology. And the huge globe made out of LCD panels with a rotating image of the earth is awesome. All in all a very cool place. We will be going back.

Pretty (annoying) blue cables

Ive seen plenty of weird network problems. But this one is just to stupid:

Sometimes my network connection stops working, it shows up as "media disconnected" in windows. Try all sorts of things, eventually give up and reboot, problem still there. Eventually grab another blue cable out of the pile and plug one end into the computer and the other into the wall, and "voila!" everything is working.

So now I just think, OK, dodgy cable, no problem, move along. But wait...
a week or so later, same problem again! Now this time I went and got a brand new, still in the wrapper cable from the cupboard (you know, one that came with some piece of previously purchased hardware), plug it in, and away we go again. Nice, two dodgy cables, bit of bad luck there.

So fast forward another week, and after pulling nonfunctional computer apart (yes, my graphics card toasted itself, lucky there was an old one in aforementioned cupboard), network problem again! WTF!

This time I don't bother getting another cable, just grab one of the previous two, both still hiding conveniently under the desk, and plug it it... it works.

Why do my network cables just stop and start working like this? It does not make much sense...

I need a new "WTF" tag.

Photosynth has made progress

This is something I've been keeping an eye on for quite a long time now... one of the coolest imaging projects going at the moment (in my opinion anyway, but hey, your reading my blog).
So if you feel the need to heat up your graphics card a bit, then...
Main page is:
http://labs.live.com/photosynth/
Something worth looking at while your there:
http://labs.live.com/photosynth/bbc/

I cant wait until we can start creating our own scenes.

I obviously need a new camera.

Q: How do you know you need to upgrade your camera?
A: When a full resolution pic still isn't wide enough to go across the desktop without "stretching".

Damn 3840 x 1024 desktop resolution, I knew there had to be a drawback to having three monitors on my desk.

heh.

How fast is a fast internet connection?

So after a week of being offline, I have now got an internet connection again. w00t!

Being that I work in IT, and rely on my internet connection a lot, ive always had good fast connections. Before I left .au I was using iinet's supposed 22mb connection, shame it only had connection speeds of about 1.5mb, but hey, I thought it was still pretty snappy... until now that is!

Now I'm in Tokyo ive got a 100mb (up and down!) connection! with no download limits, how nice.

So, sitting here at my desk, with a sensational view out over the bay (more on this later...), with a blindingly fast internet connection, life is pretty sweet!

heh.