Entries Tagged as ''

Update to Divx Mobile to 0.90.

The Divx Mobile has been updated from 0.89 to .090 for Sybmain and others as well.

The install failed on the update, but uninstalling the current divx player and then installing the new one seemed to work just fine.

Go here to download... (you will need to sign up first however)

Still trying to find a change log… will update if this post if I do.

Free Flash Components…

I am a lazy programmer at times… why reinvent the wheel when it already is going around for you. In that vein I was put on to this site to do some things with flash and google maps…

Advanced Flash Components

and today they have this little bonus…

“We’ve just set it up so that everything marked AS 2.0 on the site is free! That’s right, as in zip, zero, nada. Same great components, same great support, now at zero cost. This is our biggest giveaway ever ($310) and we would appreciate your help spreading the word. You can help us out by telling your friends, posting links, posting blogs, etc. (Or, you could just grab what you want and run like a cougar.) Free components include: Flow List, Media List, Tooltip, IMG Loop, FLV Player, Map, MP3 Player, IMG Gallery, IMG Thumbnail Gallery, FLV Gallery, FLV List Gallery, IMG Loader Blur, IMG Loader Pixelate, IMG Loader Tint

So head on over and save yourself a whole pile of work…

The Opera

Last night, still tired from the move mind you my lovely wife obtained tickets to the Opera Carmen. Not just your average tickets either, these were uber good tickets. So here is how yesterday afternoon went. Finish work at 5, drive home (40 min in traffic), find suit good shoes etc. get dressed, drink one glass of wine turn around head all the way back to park basically in the same car park I had just left an hour and a bit earlier.

Now I will stop myself here to say one little thing. I don’t like Opera, never have, never will. I have a huge collection of 80’s cd’s at home and that is my taste, my wife she likes Opera and there in lies the rub.

Anyway back to the Opera….. Now see I am all dressed in my finery for the evening along with most of the audience as well. The suits are out, the pearls are on and the shoes have been shined. Now come the first part of the Opera I don’t get. The lights go out. Now what is the point in wearing all your best clothes so that you walk in sit down and crush them only to have the lights go out! You could be wearing your tracksuits and slippers and be a damned lot more comfortable for all the good it will do. So now Carmen is in French. Great I think, all I have to do is remember my 2 years of high school French from 1983 and 1984 and I will be able to enjoy this. Nope, didn’t not happen, all I could manage to pick out were words for love, death and freedom. I think there is something subliminal going on inside my head.

Now for those of you that haven’t been to the opera they have surtitles so you can follow what is going on. This would be great if they actually said what the words were. People sing and sing and three words appear above the stage, then people sing some more. So I have no idea what is going on.

This production of Carmen looked very good and in the opening scenes they even had a donkey on stage. Although I must admit the donkey looked as excited to be there as I did. But as the lead female hit some of the higher notes it was amusing to watch his ears move around, which provided some 20 minutes of amusement to me.

Then a quick scene change and more singing etc. The band strikes up some song that is vaguely familiar and the donkey back stage has undergone one of the most impressive costume changes in history, for now it is a huge black horse with a dude singing about killing bulls. At this point I quickly reread the plot and find that yes indeed it has something to do with bulls as well and am thinking cool they will bring out a bull for the final act.

Now of course at this point the silly man who is the lead character has fallen for the woman and she says if he gives up his army job and goes with her, he will be free and all that stuff. What was the dude thinking! I am married and have to go to the Opera what kind of freedom does he think he will get.

Lights out Act 2 is over and thus begins the rush for the bar and the toilets. You rush to the bar to get two over priced drinks only to lose half of them on your suit whilst trying to get out of the crowd. Then just as you are feeling like ordering another drink time is up and it is back to it.

This is now the one thing I find amusing at Opera. After the intermission the clapping is louder, the laughter is stronger and the audience is general more relaxed. Why, that is easy cause you have 20 minutes to get to the bar, order, pay and down your drink.  I of course managed to get a headstart on most of the crowd, getting in a couple of cold glasses of Sav Blanc at the bar before the performance started.

So during the intermission the donkey has had a costume change again back to the donkey look. But it stage presence is limited to a walk on walk off roll. Pity it was doing so well. There is more singing, more singing and more singing. Did I mention the singing…. Oh the singing.

Finally Act 4 is here and I wait for the inevitable death scene. But wait…where is the bull. There is no bull. So far I have seen a chicken, a horse and a donkey (which may well have been the horse anyway) and yet despite all the talk of bull fighting there is no bull. Then suddenly it is over. 20 minutes of saying I will kill you if you don’t love me and then he kills her, go figure.

And that’s it. The stage and house lights come on, everyone claps for ages. The horse comes out and does a bow (now that is clever and the crowd clap loudly), but where is the donkey. No clapping for the donkey, no crowd adulation either for its great performance. Thus confirming my theory that the donkey and the horse were the same actor.

Then the curtain falls and we leave. We were most probably in the light for less than an hour all dressed up in our finery just to sit for 2.5 hours in the dark. Now I have to finish unpacking the house, but in light of last night unpacking is suddenly looking a lot more exciting and I can wear my slippers!

Flash lite 3.1 Announced…

Great news… Flash 3.1 has been announced ( sybmian-freak.com)

Much better browsability than FL3

– Support for h.264 codec

– Flash 9 content will play in FL3.1 as long as it is published as AS2. AS3 engine is not ported to FL3 yet.

……

Does this mean the end of the FLV format…. If I can publish an h264 video, that will now play on mobile, web and be my vodcast file.. why would I need flv???

Just have to wait for new firmware to test this little beauty. And thus the main problem with flash on the mobile platform is the increased fragmentation of the market.

Since Nokia started releasing firmware updates to the Flash player (mainly with including Flash 3 on certain devices) understanding the deployment in the market place will and has become increasingly difficult.

Getting a user to know what version of firmware they have is a whole extra level beyond just saying if you have an n95 then you can run this app.

I think the next year or so may be a difficult time for a lot of developers and users and Adobe move towards a much more unified flash based architecture.

The Open Inspection….

So as the move progresses and up to a week of dial up access looms before the new ADSL is connected the final parts of the move are coming together.

Today we had the open inspection on this current house.  This is one of those traumas that I always want to both avoid and be present for.  Firstly to have people traipsing through your house is bad, so you want to be out having a nice breakfast for example (which the real estate company should pay for!).  Yet on the other hand you have that nagging thought “Did I leave something valuable out that someone will pocket.”

Luckily I actually have nothing that anyone would want to steal and most things bar the kitchen and the computer are at the new house already. That aside, the decision was made to be here during the inspection. I had to try and track down the dial up numbers for my current ISP anyway before the move so sitting down for half an hour on the computer was a relaxing thing to do.

So the only thing left to ponder was the ethics of the property inspection. “hmm looks nice”, is what some people said, does one at this point do the classic “Tom Cruise cough… bullshit”, or not. Do you really tell prospective tenants that they are being shafted on the big fat rent increase, that the shower sprays water all over the bathroom and that the heating is terrible. Of course you don’t. Why, that is easy an agent from the real estate company is present and they have your 4 weeks bond they can screw you over.

Perhaps agents should step out and prospective tenants and new tenants should get together over a few cold ales to discuss the pros and cons of any given house. This might even things up for the rental market in Australia. A bit of truth in marketing would not do any harm to the property market in my belief?

Finally, to Jacob’s parents (name changed to protect the innocent) until the house and everything in it is yours don’t let your snotty kid climb all over the furniture and up to things like the exercise bike. Or we will come over to your house (which may well be this one) and climb over everything as well, only to be fair that is.

Coming and Going… Train Images

Actually I am not a train spotter but these two photos worked out very well I thought, but all I can tell you is that it is the train the went past as I was walking back to the car after getting India takeaway 🙂

Click on Images for bigger version as well.

Coming

And it true Nokia nerd fashion, they are fully geotagged as well.

Google Map Link

Latitude: S 37° 54′ 19.25″
Longitude: E 145° 2′ 21.36″
Altitude: 37

And whats wrong with this letter…

Ah the joys of house moving continue….  up to the wait 5 hours for someone to turn the phone on… (wow was that fun… well at least I was at work and my beloved had that tiresome task).  But the move continues forward.  Once again we have been graced with more moving letters… this one in beautiful engrish deserves to be shared…

All the typo’s misspellings and bad grammar are the original authors… ( and for once not mine)

Dear occupant:

Attention you may move out from your recent place soon, give a clean and
wonderful house to the new occupant or back to your agent is very necessary.
Do you find you have no idea to clean the carpet?

Do you find it is difficult to clean your greasy kitchen?

Do you find you can not turn your bathroom sparkling?

Do you find you even don’t have time to waste on your house cleaning?

Do you worry about you can not get your entire bond back from your agent?

If you have any problem which I mentioned above, please do not hesitate to
contact us on **********. What are we providing is the best service and the
reasonable price.

There are the referenced prices below:

Carpet clean:

From $40(25M*M) plus $1/I M*M

House clean:
One room house: $120(1 bedroom, I bathroom, I kitchen)

Plus $20/room, $30/barthroom

If the condition is extremely awful, the price should be discussible.

Call us you can get a free evaluation service then you can decide you accept
the service or not. Tax invoice available.

Ok what is wrong with this sign

Ok, this is one of my pet hates…. Acutally I don’t hate pets, I used to have a cat and loved it very much. But Automatic Teller Machine Machines is just silly. The sign should just read ATM’s that would fix the problem and not irritate me.

The really annoying thing is that I am sure that the sign has been there all along but I had never noticed it. Of course I have now noticed it and it will bug me every time I go to Southgate for lunch.

I may just have to get a can of white spray paint and fix this sign.

Update to Nokia PC Phone…

** Update ** (23 April 08)

For the life of me I can not get this to work :-)…. I have tried all sorts of updates, deletes, reboots e.t.c and still no joy…. I will be going back to the old version for a while me thinks….

…….

Via Nokia betalabs…

what is a bit strange is the release date is 15 April in the change log, but the software only came out today…

http://betalabs.nokia.com/blog/

Version 1.2.2204

Released:

15 April, 2008

Summary:

This is the fourth public Nokia PC Phone Beta release.

Fixes:
– Significant performance improvements; the first time you connect you phone is slowish (PC Phone does a
“full sync” with your phone), though
– General stability issues corrected
– In call and SMS logs dates were shown as “today” although they actually were “yesterday”.
– Get Connected Wizard now warns about incompatible phones and connectivity methods (does not
tell that S60 3.0 phones are not fully compatible, though)
– Most of sorting and search problems fixed
– Problems with national characters in contacs fixed
– Some times PC Phone mixed certain phone number fields in contacts
– PC Phone installer does not install add-on for Internet Expoler other than 7.x
– Problems with multiline note in contacts corrected
– Phone numbers in Contact details were sometimes mixed (i.e. home number was seen as work number)
– Special characters in contact text fields caused prblems; fixed
– Web page phone number recognition has been improved (covers more phone number writing styles)
– IE7: phone numbers in Contacts tab are not any more “painted” for click-to-call
– “Recognize phone numbers” setting in Firefox is now saved (i.e. the setting is not lost when Firefox is restarted)
– In certain situations incoming call/SMS number was not mapped to name; corrected
– The telephone number of a contact was not seen in contact details with some phones; fixed
– A telephone number in contacts can be in format +44(12)345678 – i.e. parenthesis (and also other delimites) are
allowed
New features:
– Call log entry can be deleted
– Browser “refresh” button initiates full (and slow) sync with phone
– Added new “doing something” indicators
– When answering a call with SMS the caller number is editable (in some cases the phone drops
leading “0” or international prefix)
– SMSes sent with PC Phone and S40 phones are now saved in PC Phone

Known issues:

IMPORTANT NOTE: always use “Get Connected Wizard” at least once with S60 phones:
the small application needed is installed from there. Instructions:
– do not connect USB cable
– start Nokia PC Phone view in your browser
– click the “Not connected” button at the upper right corner of Nokia PC Phone screen
– follow the instructions; remember to accept the application installation with your phone
– When the phone is connected the first time, syncronization may be slow
– Vista support is only preliminary
– Disconnect/reconnect cable with certain older phone models does not work reliable
– Support for Series 60 phones is preliminary (only Series 60 3.0 Feature Pack 1 phones with are USB supported)
– Updating/installing Nokia PC Suite will cause one Nokia PC Phone to crash. This is harmless, though.
After rebooting the PC (needed after PC Suite installation) everything works fine.
This was verified with Nokia PC Suite version 6.85.14.1
– IE7: click to Add contacts and SMS has issues with opening PC Phone window & focus handling
– Random interoperability problems with PC Suite (either PC Suite or PC Phone cannot connect to phone)
– Some phones do not allow phone number with international prefix (+NN) when making a local call;
the +NN must be manually removed when dialing out

Nokia Music store for Australia. (and why I wont use it)

http://www.nokia.com/A4136001?newsid=1211401

All music on the Nokia Music Store can be purchased through a variety of payment options, including credit cards and pre-paid vouchers.
Individual tracks will cost 1.70 Australian dollars per track and albums from 17.00 Australian dollars. The Nokia Music Store will also offer a monthly subscription for PC users to stream an unlimited number of full length tracks for 10.00 Australian dollars per month.
Check out Nokia Music Store http://music.nokia.com.au

and wait for the annoyance factor..

“Nokia Music does not currently support the Mozilla Firefox browser on your operating system”

Sorry but that alone is a dead end app. I don’t use IE, if a company can not support Firefox I really will not use their product. A Nokia smart phone is a high end device, Firefox is more often than not used in the developer community by high end users…. way to go nokia… not.