Hoke’s Ramblings

Microsoft’s built-in calculator is fairly useful in it’s own simplistic way (don’t get me started on Google’s awesome calculator, which will even tell you how often once in a blue moon is). However, in scientific mode, the SQRT (square root) button disappears.

Thankfully, Microsoft have a knowledge-base article to tell you how to get around it (raise your number to the power of a half). A more elegant solution is to check ‘Inv’ and click ‘X^2′, but I digress…

I draw your attention to exhibit A, the ‘Applies to’ section: Top of the list is Microsoft Windows 3.0 Standard Edition.

Talk about apathy.

If you use Firefox, type about:mozilla in your address bar and see what you shows up. Your mileage may vary.

I’ve always enjoyed 3d modelling, but kind of lost my touch over the last several years. Then I heard Google had bought out (if you can’t beat ‘em, buy ‘em) this cool program called Sketchup. It’s hardly a full-blown modelling package, but once you figure out it’s numerous quirks, it’s remarkably easy to throw together a fairly involved 3d model of just about anything, but regular shaped things like houses are its specialty.

At the risk of furthering the onset of Big Brother, I’ve published the model of my house to the 3D Warehouse, with geolocation all set up. I’m hoping it will eventually make it to the ‘best of 3D warehouse’, at least for Jo’burg, anyway, and then it will show up automatically in Google Earth. Until then, however, click on the picture, or here to check it out, then select ‘View in Google Earth 4′ (if you have it). Then give me good ratings so I can get noticed!!

I’m astonished at GE’s terrain accuracy. My property only changes in height by about a metre or two from end to end, but Google Earth has the right gradient, and I only had to adjust the ‘altitude’ of my house by about half a metre to get the patio above ground. Amazing.

In the interests of fueling the Digital Revolution, I have become a Thawte Notary. This means I can verify that people actually are who they say they are, and get them points towards being able to be issued digital certificates with their full names on them.

It will probably be a real schlep, but once enough people can e-sign their documents, the less paperwork for everyone, and I can say I saved a tree or two.

The way it works is that anyone can sign up to get a Thawte Freemail certificate, but this is pretty much anonymous, besides being able to validate that something came from a particular email address. To get a full certificate you need to present yourself to at least three different notaries, who will stake their life (or at least a very substantial fine) on the fact that you are who you say you are.

Once you’ve got that, you can do all sorts of nifty geeky things like encrypt your email, digitally sign Word docs and even PDFs (if they’re set up right)

This Christmas was great, because it featured most of the ‘orginal’ gang from the ‘old days’ who had disappeared to far corners of the country and globe, subsequently returning with their offspring, swelling the numbers somewhat.

Such a large reunion obviously called for a group photo, but you know how it goes…you never quite get the perfect shot - someone’s looking away, wearing a cap…Lee-Roy!…etc etc

Enter Microsoft Reseach Lab’s Group Shot, a ridiculously easy to use program where you drag and drop all your ‘identical’ pictures, draw little boxes around the offending parties and then select their best side, so to speak.

When you’re done, click export and voila! The perfect group shot. I can’t believe how well this little gem works. If you want to play spot the difference, head on over to the Christmas Gallery.

In the age of bulk SMS’s and blogs, let me take this moment to wish one and all a Merry Christmas, and stupendous 2007, whilst I test out my spiffy new Logitech® Cordless Desktop® MX™ 3000 Laser - Thanks, Lina!

So, after almost a year away from the salty oceans, I got to join a bunch of workmates for a week of super-relaxed leisure diving at Sodwana Bay.

One of our crowd, Heidi, was doing her advanced course, and we all joined her on her deep dive. I must say, that’s the most relaxing time I’ve ever had underwater - it was magnificent! Perhaps there was a bit of narcedness involved, but I’m not complaining.

The only complaint is that at those depths, after fifteen minutes or so your dive computer starts spouting dire warnings of impending doom, so we had to cut it short.

A real pity, but the dive was definately worth it - warm, calm, and all the usual oddities you see at those depths, including an organic feather duster like the one I saw on my last deep dive in Sodwana, and now I have a witness, too! Pity Ed didn’t see it swimming, though.

We also had two stints on quad bikes, which was just as much fun as I remember having last time, if not more so. We did a one-hour tour the first day, and two days later, after recovering from the first ride, took a three hour, 50 km tour up to Lake Sibaya. What an awesome way to see such a beautiful location (if not the most eco-friendly).

On a techie note, Picasa2.5 supports geotagging via Google Earth. Click here for a KMZ file for Google Earth showing the location of some of our adventures, with included pics (about 200kB). For general pictures from the trip, look over here.

I know the whole world’s getting a bit tired of the all the rah-rah for Google, but besides being generally on the ball with good usable stuff, every now and then they pull something out of their hat that just makes your day.

For example… I have a colleague stuck in the sticks in Mexico who needed some touch-ups done on some UI screens he was working on. They were too big for our work server, so I suggested he mail them to my gmail account. Obviously no problems there. That’s not my point.
The mail comes through and I see all these images come to about 15 MB. Silently cursing to myself about what a dolt he is for not zipping these things, I click on the ‘download all’ button, expecting to say goodbye to a not insignificant portion of my remainging monthly ADSL cap.

Lo and behold, Gmail comes back with a neatly packaged zip file, less than 300kB in total, which I downloaded in a matter of seconds!

Thank you, Google

PS: for another good rah-rah blog I recommend Google Operating System (not affiliated with Google in any way).

Warning: sever techno-babble follows…

I found via Google Earth Blog that there’s a network link that will show you episode-by-episode break-downs of what’s been happening to the Fox-River fugitives each week.

As an exercise in on-the-fly unpacking and re-packing of zip files (because that’s all KMZ files are, really) - I decided to take that file, unpack it, go through the KML code and insert the appropriate timestamps so that you can use Google Earth’s funky new time-slider gizmo to scroll through the episodes and only show the placemarks for a particular time.

I won’t mention the usual cliches of too much time etc, and I’ll hear none of it from y’alls, either!

PS - major spoiler alerts, obviously, if you’re not current with the US/Canadian episode schedule.

Get the timestamped network link here

Note: if you just get some meaningless text, instead of launching GE, try pressing F5 or Ctrl-F5. Otherwise just get the direct link here (will not update automatically)

Now that I have ‘live’ internet at my fingertips, my web development hobby is slowly gaining momentum again.

Yesterday I threw together two little widgets, after reading this excellent tutorial on Screen-Scraping.

The first is something I’ve been wanting to do for a long time: Take the excellent TV guides from www.tvsite.co.za and put them into a mobile-friendly format, so I can get my guides on the go.

The URL for this is: http://www.hokemon.com/scripts/tv.php - The next day, or the week’s schedules are available as links at the bottom of that page.

And for my next trick: Get the upcoming movies releases right in your RSS aggregator! Nu Metro has a very extensive ‘forthcoming attractions’ page, which I took the liberty of adapting into an RSS feed.

Stick this link in your aggregator: http://www.hokemon.com/scripts/movies.php, or click the button to add it to your Google home page. If you want to limit the number of items to, say, five then append ‘?n=5‘ without the quotes.

To spare Nu Metro the hassle of being bombarded with requests, I only get the list once per day, and generate the feed locally the rest of the time. This should reduce their bandwidth (and mine!) and stop the mconsidering me a thorn in their side. Not that they should, ‘cos it’s free advertising for them, anyway.