London 2012 Olympic Logo

Yippee! The Olympic logo has been launched. If you squint really hard, and drink brandy for fun, it look slike it says "2012" with a weird umlaut on the third character. Maybe just a typo heh...

Personally, my kid couldve done it with a crayon, while attempting to impart his artist skills and fashion a tree. But we keep getting told that the designers need to share their thoughts with us, so we can see the inner meaning of the logo.

Or, as Ken Livingstone said (him of London mayor fame, him who is paying for this shindig) "i didnt actually get a boner looking at it" (ok, those arent his exact words, but that is kinda what he said.

The truth is, he shouldve got a boner looking at it. It looks uncannily like Lisa Simpson giving a blowjob. Maybe that is the hidden meaning the designers wanted to impress upon us. Sex is exercise. Either way, a recent poll showed that we dont like the logo, we think it is pants, and, by the way, did I mention WE PAID FOR IT OUT OF OUR TAX MONEY. Four Hundred Thousand Pounds. At the current exchange rate (and the US debt) that is about 17 bazillion US dollars, or 49 google canadian dollars.

Unfortunately, we cant blame Canada for this one, we can only blame ourselves. If I actually had a choice, the goatse version woudve done better. They just forgot to draw the lubricant we need to use when the council tax goes up, traffic comes to a standstill and shops start charging ludicrous prices for everyday items. All because some chaps want to run around in circles, fast, and others feel like throwing a spear or a hammer.

I thought that as a society we had progressed past this. Gimme the non-competitive olympics. That way the lone chap from some long forgotten african dictatorship who goes to the olympics all by himself, and in the opening ceremony is the only twat that carries his own flag will get a chance for a medal.

4 Iconic Tech Toys that deserve to be owned and loved

I've had a fascination with techie toys for most of my adult life. My name is Warren and I like gadgets. However, meagre wages dictate that certain things are not to be owned from new. As such, they go on my wishlist.

Sometimes, the items I want go out of production before my wishlist and $bankaccount have agreed on favourable terms. What follows is my list of items that are still on my wishlist, but probably wont be mine, ever. If they do, they will make it into my little computer museum. I will get a boner.

1) Empeg - I cant really say it any better than wiki, this item really was so hot you just had to own one, but the price tag was stratospheric. Some died and as spares arent available it means most units that come up for sale are snapped up by empeg owners, and used as spare parts. Even with the state of current car-pc systems, something that just slots into a single din unt is very desirable. The active developer community behind this item gives it longevity.

2) Apple emate 300 - once again there is a lot of info on wiki about this very popular item. What use does it have in this day and age? Well, something that takes very little energy, is still handy for quick notes etc and is available cheaply always scores highly in my books. This little cutey is right up there with the best..

3) I-Opener - this internet appliance was a little Jeckyll and Hyde when it came out. Marketed as a dumb internet appliance it could be easily hacked to run windows 98, with networking, sound and usb. What better way to quickly set up a second pc in the kids bedroom for web surfing duties?? The price was attractive too, but was only available on contract in the USA. The UK was left behind. Donations accepted :-)


4) Abacus PDA watch (by Fossil) - ok, this here little watch is actually an (almost) fully functioning palm computer. Where this concept shines is in the developer community. Third party applications extend this watch to a point where you seldom need anything else on you. Plus, you can change the watch faces with a lovely utility, giving you almost endless watch displays. I would love to see this watch integrated with the time telling systems over at TokyoFlash , hehehe

There we have it, a few lovely little items which will surely brighten up my birthdays:-). The astute reader will notice a common trend in these devices (besides the fact that they all use electricity)...each one of these is easily hackable to perform functions never intended by the original manufacturer. And on that note I would like to end this post...A certain exec once said "Developers, Developers, Developers" and then threw a chair (unconfirmed rumour). I would like to add, when designing a product, think of its expected lifetime, then once that lifetime is up, open up the sdk, grab the developer community and let them extend your product, and then take that feedback and learn from it.

Sexual Abuse and two-faced women

Here I was, nothing much to do, so went channel hopping on our (meagre) selection of channels on offer. Joy of joys, Big Brother 2007 seems to have started (my sarcasm cup runneth over forthwith). This excuse for a tv program seems to have reached a new low this year, what with 11 women and one ex-boyband bloke all sharing a few bog rolls. If I was him I would find the nearest rope and hang myself.

Either way, the swimming pool was the setting. The bloke in shorts seems to be getting some lady attention and he found the urge to make a move and mission out of there, post haste. Around 8 women chased him, trapped him in the corner and were trying to pull his shorts off. All the time he was saying "no, no , no...no no"

It was all rather funny. Everyone was giggling. The didnt succeed though and he escaped with his pants intact.

And then my cogs went into action. Imagine the scene, Big Brother 2007, alternate-reality edition. 11 blokes and one woman (ex-girlband)..she wants to go for an innocent swim but the blokes wont leave her alone, they chase her into a corner and try to pull her costume off. She keeps saying "no, no, no...no no" but they persist.

Yes, now you know where the travesty lies. In this day and age we all strive for equal opportunity, equal representation and gender neutrality. In actual fact, things are far from equal. The males still get all the stick, and women still get liberties and the benefit of the doubt. The first scene was "innocent enough" yet the alternate-reality edition wouldve seen police arrive and not one of the blokes involved would be able to work in the public eye again.

Apparently, it is not possible for a woman to sexually abuse a man, even in 2007. Even if there are 11 of you against one man. And even if you do it on live tv. While he keeps saying "no, no no...no no" in protest.

Common AV Connectors Explained

This is gonna be a half-rant / half-tutorial post.

Look behind your modern tv and you will see a plethora of connections, some familiar and others that will make you say "wtf???!!!111oneoneone!!". I'm going to try simplify this for you, by ranking them in order of display quality, lobbing a picture for reference and an explanation of when they would be commonly used.

So, bingo, let's start

Worst to best ranking, with some ties.

1) RF - you should be familiar with this one already, RF=Radio Frequency,, and it is what you plug your aerial into. In the states this would be an f-connector with a screw thread, most of the rest of the world uses a push fit connector , with the socket having a female receptacle. As it says, this is for radio frequency, and will not give the best picture quality, at all. Ever. Stay Away From This if you have others options.
It looks like this


2) Composite - (NOTE: DONT CONFUSE WITH COMPONENT) composte is normally coloured yellow, the jack and the socket is yellow, it is a two wire system, one being signal and the other is a ground/shield wire. This is so common on most equipment that if you havent seen one yet you probably own a guide dog. It is better than RF, but not by much. All info has to get modulated into a single wire, and this causes loss of clarity and colour. As above, avoid if you have better options. Here is the guilty party

3) Svideo - (I am gonna say this once only, if you EVER, DARE, IN MY PRESENCE, to call this super-vhs and super-video I will use this on you. Repeatedly. Sure, some vhs machines did have svideo connectors, and they were super-vhs machines, BUT THE CONNECTOR IS CALLED SVIDEO. kappish? Svideo is a 4 wire system, 2 ground, a luminance and a chrominance wire. This is better than composite, at least everything isnt squashed into one wire anymore, and for the most part people can get along with svideo on normal sd crt tv's quite fine. The connector is keyed and can only be inserted one way correctly, but this hasnt stopped people from squashing it in wrong and mashing the pins. This wont help your picture quality, by the way.
A stunning example is here, dressed in black

4) RGB (red, green, blue...like magic) - Ok, we are onto the better stuff now. RGB has seperate wires for the three colours, and then normally a h-sync wire (horizontal sync) and a v-sync (vertical sync) (or sometimes only a c-sync, composite sync). Guess what, this is what your average old computer monitor uses in the vga connections. On a tv, the frequency is much lower, so they cant be swopped willy-nilly, and rgb shouldnt be interchanged with vga, but the concept can be likened to brothers. Most of the time rgb is implemented on a scart connector. Yes, I said scart connector. It is a connector, not a signal type. SCART can carry composite, or rgb, or svideo +audio and syncing/switcing/voltages, or combinations thereof. Picture here

5) Component (sometimes called YPrPb) - this is some good stuff here. Can carry hi-def signals, 3 seperate rca style jacks, colour coded so you cant really mess things up. One red, one green, one blue. No, they dont carry red green and blue data. Use these if you got 'em and nothing better spare..

6) vga - an analog connector - like your computer monitor uses, this is a 15 pin d-sub port, carrying rgb and sync signals. plug your computer into this jack if it is your lowest common connector

7) dvi/hdmi - very similar jacks...all digital and used for modern equipment, hi-def cable/satellite boxes, computers, xbox 360/ps3 etcetera. the hdmi port differs from dvi in that it carries the same data as a dvi port and in addition can carry audio. You can buy dvi-->hdmi cables pretty cheaply. Dont bother about super duper high quality cables, the picture will look the same...the only diff is the more expense cables may have better connectors, better strain relief and perhaps more robust shielding.

Ok, hope that helps clarify the waters a bit, and heed the super-vhs warning. I rarely kid aroudn when I got fresh batteries :-)

Dealing with the csup.txt whql mda requirement

Microsoft slipped a very quiet reference to a file, csup.txt, into the mda2007 requirements. In fact, I only found reference to this file in ONE powerpoint slide.

Either way, the actual requirements are simple enough, the file should contain the "born on" date for the machine, so microsoft can use this for reference to check which windows critical updates should be installed. And if you jump through the hoop nicely, you may receive you mda money.

The file needs to contain the current date. Something like echo %date% > c:\windows\csup.txt should be ok, isnt it? Nope, date must be in american format.

So, if you DONT live in the states, and your machines regional settings arent in U.S. format, you will have to conjure up some magic. I searche donline and found some routines for batch files, and modified them a bit, and this works for me

----begin batch-----

rem get the day, date and month in a format we can work with
@For /F "tokens=1,2,3 delims=/ " %%A in ('Date /t') do @(
Set Day=%%A
Set Month=%%B
Set Year=%%C
)

@echo DAY = %Day%
@echo Month = %Month%
@echo Year = %Year%
rem this line reformats it to american date format, as required by ms
rem and then creates c:\windows\csup.txt using this information for whql
echo %month%-%day%-%year% > c:\windows\csup.txt

-----end batch------

first sections uses the date command to put the date into variables, %day%, %month% and %year%, we can then echo these variables in any format into csup.txt, as shown by the last line. This works great for me for grabbing UK date and reformatting as U.S, please experiment for your area to get the variables correct.

The Confusing Popularity of MySpace

OK, lets get it out of the way. MySpace is huge, MySpace is popular, and MySpace is a word in common usage (hereafter referred to as myspace because typing those two capital letters is winding me up)

I bumped into someone recently, and I guess she knew how much I loved mobile phones, because she didnt ask for my phone number, she wanted my "myspace". Much as I wouldve loved to oblige, she obviously was not aware of how much I dont "get" myspace.

Long-winded explanation follows.

Many Many moons ago, yea, Al Gore he made the net, and it was good, the pipes were flowing, and then they made geocities.com. And it was good. And the people they flocked and opened up pages using the geocities page wizard, and suddenly everybody had a presence. I would wager that this almost kick-started the "homepage" phenomenon.

Goecities was where everybody (initially) planted their first internet seed, you didnt NEED to know html as they had a site-designer. you could have geocities.com/mynutsandI for no fee whatsoever. If fate hadnt conspired otherwise, the lady in question shouldve asked me for my geocities address.

So, I have now drawn a parallel between myspace and geocities, and I belive they are (were?) very much the same thing.
But some difference in implementation exist.
#1) myspace is made out to be cool, glamorous and beautiful people go there to write about themselves (actually, they pay others to write for them, and probably wouldnt recognise their own page layout if they had to pick from 10 samples)
#2) with myspace you can message each other (status: horribly broken I have been told)

So, where did geocities go wrong? My opinion is probably it was too early. The critical mass of users who would find this service handy hadnt bought computers yet, and once they had myspace was there to give them something they needed.
And the html (or whatever myspace uses) which they provide to users is so ugly that it is almost a comptetition to see who can get a page that doesnt flash black and white @ 10hz with links that shoot left by 10pixels when you hover over them.

They have taken geocities, and made it into web2.0. Launched an almost broken product and harnessed the users to make it work, deftly side-stepping the "large corporate" attitude many sites have, branding myspace as "cutesy and cuddly" at the same time, and sticking good looking woman there. And if you want to see their profiles, you have to sign up too.

All in all, a job well done. Take something that exists already (geocities) and relaunch it. Yeah, you can tell how impressed I am.

Needless to say, I'm not on myspace. And you are not getting my geocities address:-)

Dealing with the hoodie phenomenon, effectively

A long time ago in a far away place there once lived a man called Jack The Ripper. Mr Jack wasn't such a nice bloke, he had these urges to kill and maim prostitutes. And he was never found. I'm not sure if he was the first, but he was definitely one of the first modern day serial killers.

For a few months olde London was thrown into panic as night time came about. People would be petrified that they would be Jack's next victim, and the most petrified of them all were the prostitutes. Nobody wanted to be near the prostitutes, and the prostitutes themselves kinda had a going out of business sale on.

So, last night I was at the pub and saw many hoodies running around, proving to themselves that Darwin's theory isnt working correctly. And it struck me...we dont need regulation, or Brussels, or Tony Blair to sort this out, heck, we dont even need any police.

Let's get Jack back.

But tweak him for the modern society, reprogram him to hoodie mode. Let him loose on modern London, with some modern weapons, and have him target hoodies for a couple of months.

I would be willing to wager sales of hoodies would plummet like Tony Blair's popularity. I would also wager that the next time I see a hoodie in my life it would be worn by the Grim Reaper, and not some Romford snot-nose.

They would all be cowering in fear, hiding in mommy's basement lest others point to them and cry "HIM!! He used to wear a HOODIE!!! RUN"

Now, who's going to vote for me? :-)