How much rain is 60mm?

Posted on November 17, 2010 by Les

It’s one of those things that invariably has me ranting at the radio. “We had a severe weather event; over 60mm of rain in abitrary town today” says the correspondent.

The problem I have with this is, how did they measure it? 60mm is a linear measurement. When you ‘re talking about a liquid it has no meaning whatsoever without knowing over which area the height of rain has fallen.

For example, let’s say I have a nice square bucket that has a base area of 100 sq. centimetres. Now let’s say I have a perfect cloud that only rains over this bucket. It rains for an hour and the height of the rainwater in the bucket after that time is 1cm. Now I know that 100 cubic centimetres of rain has fallen. Yes! no ambiguity. “It rained over Les’s bucket today and 100 cubic centimetres fell in 1 hour”. You see, I know exactly what happened. This is news. This, is information.

In reality of course it’s harder than that. What the weather folks actually mean is that “60mm of rain was recorded on average amongst our standard sized rain gauges over the approximate geographical area I shall conveniently refer to as Cornwall”.

Now, we can’t expect broadcasters to explain what the size of the gauges used are of course, but just one more piece of information I feel would remove any ambiguity and also give the listener or viewer something to grab hold of, something they can visualize and relate to. They should normalise the measurements so that the figure can be given in terms of mm per sq. metre. That’s it. That would help me (as I write this, the tv guys just said “30mm fell this morning” and another “60mm this afternoon” grrrr). I think it would help others too.

If you’re told that “we had rain over small town today of 60mm per square metre” then you can visualise that and think “Yep, that’s a lot”.

The eagle-eyed among you may be thinking that they may as well just say “over x,000 litres of rain fell” but few people I think knows what a litre of fluid looks like (be honest, that drinks bottle you’re visualising now you can’t remember whether it was one litre or two). On the other hand most of us can visualise a square of a given size and a height.

Is it me?

Posted in Grumpy old man, Rant | Leave a comment

The Government didn’t have children, YOU DID

Posted on October 7, 2010 by Les

Should be going to bed but am incensed at what I’ve just heard on Question Time. A Woman actually said “It is the Government’s job to educate our children”.

No madam, it is not. It is absolutely, NOT. It is YOUR job. Governments do not reproduce. The Government did not impregnate you. If you have been fortunate enough to decide on parenthood and succeed then you must accept that the responsibility for education your child is yours and yours alone. You are very fortunate to live in a country that provides free state schooling and because of this you and your offspring benefit from the privileged attention of trained and passionate professionals whose services few among us could otherwise afford. School is a place that fills in the gaps and broadens the scope of knowledge accessible to our children hopefully so that each generation has a wider knowledge of the world and greater access to it without being constricted by the cultural, emotional and financial limitations of their parents.

Your attitude is symptomatic of a wide ranging perception among parents today that the education of their children has little to do with them. So many seem happy to abdicate responsbility for their children to the education system. They could not be more wrong.

If your 5 year old begins school and cannot recognise and take a stab at writing his own name, it is you who has failed him. The School has not yet had a chance to fail. If you do not read books with your child, count things with your child, question and converse with him then you are failing him. You are are failing to equip him to take advantage of the opportunity that school offers. How often do you think your child can possibly be heard read in a class of 30 with one Teacher and a Teaching Assistant if you’re lucky? Do the maths (I assume you can) it’s not difficult. Your child will learn to read but he will waste time at school learning to read when he could be reading to learn. When is the last comment in your child’s home reading record that you share with School? yesterday? two days ago? a week? a month? If it’s not a few times a week (come on, it takes 10 minutes) then I say again, it is you who are failing your child, not the School.

Our education system is not perfect, far from it. But it doesn’t have to be. It is better than most. It provides you with free childcare from 9 to 3 5 days a week. It provides peace of mind that your child is with friends and in a safe place. For goodness sake, they even adopt a legal responsibility for your child during these times “In Loco Parentis“.

Come on people, wake up and smell the roses. They’re your kids. They deserve your time. Not one of them asked to be here. They are your creation, your legacy, your responsibility. Your Pupils.

Posted in Economy, Education, Life, Parenting, Politics, Rant | Leave a comment

Sex in the title will get your attention

Posted on September 18, 2010 by Les

As I neared the end of a unusually long swim last night I noticed that the later lengths, though I was tiring, were technically better, easier and much slower than earlier lengths. As more lengths were covered it got easier to carry on a little longer.

It struck me later as I drove home that the difference between the beginning and the end of a swim like this is a metaphor for the differences in sex from your twenties to your forties. The early efforts are technically poor, too fast to be sustainable, poorly timed and not terribly satisfactory. The later ones slower, longer lasting and vastly more satisfying. No comments about the strokes are shorter at the end of the length for both exercises, please.

I’d like to thank my wife for making it possible for me to make this observation. She taught me to swim a few years ago and still goes to bed each night with me despite the risk of sex with a 40 something. When you look like I do you learn to be grateful.

Posted in Life, Silliness | Leave a comment

Transfer DVD to iPhone or iPod Touch

Posted on August 28, 2010 by Les

I’m fortunate to have at my disposal a few iPhones that are broken in the GSM radio department so no good for making calls. WiFi works though as do all the other functions. Preparing for a long drive from Gloucestershire to Disneyland Paris and back recently I wanted to make sure that the kids’ favourite DVD movies were available on the iPhones. I thought it would be useful to list the software and process I’ve used since it’s all free and very easy. The result is typically an hour and a half movie on approx 200 to 300 mb so that’s a good number of movies on an 8GB device.

The results are also pretty impressive when the iphone is plugged into a modest hotel room tv via an apple component cable or projected via the super portable, focus free Microvision SHOWWX laser projector.

First, I decrypt the DVD using DVD Decrypter. Be sure to select the File mode of operation and it fills a folder discname/video_ts with various .ifo .bup and .vob files. These are the raw dvd files so can easily run to 4GB for single layer movies.

I used to use Videora but its advertising supported model, while reasonable, is implemented in a very clunky way and though the results are good and pretty fast it’s a PITA process.  So, recently I’ve downloaded Handbrake which is a self contained native windows app (also available on mac & Linux) and is open source. This works a treat and when told the folder mentioned above will detect the main title in the folder then you just choose the iPhone presets and away it goes.

30 to 40 minutes later you have the .m4v file which is mp4 format and can be dragged into iTunes and synced with the iphone easily.

Posted in iTunes, Media, Microvision SHOWWX | Leave a comment

Successful RAID 0 data recovery success from dell system

Posted on August 28, 2010 by Les

I recently had cause to recover data from a Dell PC that used a hardware RAID controller and had two 250 GB SATA drives configured as RAID 0.  RAID 0 is data striping. It works at the block level so, assuming your NTFS block size is set to 128KB and you have a file that is 256KB in size it will store one block on one physical drive and the other block on the other physical drive. Total capacity is 500GB.

Unfortunately, something which most non-technical consumers will not understand is that RAID 0 does not offer any data redundancy or protection whatsoever. What it does (presumably offer) is some speed advantage since any given amount of data can be written, for the most part to two physical drives at the same time and indeed read from two drives at the same time. In theory anyway, this is a great performance advantage, doubling or at least nearly doubling the speed at which data can be stored and read back.

The thing is, it also DOUBLES your chances of disastrous data loss.  If either drive dies and cannot be accessed then the other one is also useless as it only contains half of your data. Think of it this way. Every hard drive you have is a lottery ticket. It has a certain probability of being bad or of being bad at some point in the future just like a lottery ticket has a given chance of winning. If you want to double your chances of winning the lottery, the only way to do it is to buy two tickets. If you buy two identical drives, each expected to fail within say 1 million operations (this is a hypothetical number for illustration) then by having two acting as one you now have 2 in a million chance of failure. 2 in a million is the same as 1 in 500,000 so you just halved the time before you can expect to lose your stuff! Twice as fast, maybe. Twice as likely for any failure to result in total failure, definitely.

RAID 1 on the other hand required two identical drives and transparently copies every operation from one drive to the other. When the 256KB file I mentioned above is saved, it is written entirely to disc1 and the hardware RAID controller then writes the same data to the second drive. Your PC operating system gets on with it’s stuff after the first write so this second one, if you are using a hardware RAID controller is “free” in terms of a performance hit. Hopefully you can see though that the maximum read and write rate you are going to get here is the one you get with a single drive. On the up side though, you have a real-time, bang up to date copy (save the power off scenario while a write to a specific file is going on) of all data. When one of the drives fail, as it surely will, you simply use the other one on its own and your data is safe while you get another drive and get setup again then copy all your data across. using the drive examples above you should again see that you now have two drives each with a 1 in a million failure chance. For the failure to be catastrophic you would require them to both fail at the same time or very close together. So you’re approximate chances of failure are now 1 in 2 million. That’s four times the reliability of the RAID0 configuration.

Anyway, I’m really writing this post so I don’t forget the tools I used to recover data from what turned out to be a RAID0 striped configuration with a damaged Master Boot Record on the first disc in the pair.

I used File Scavenger with RAID option from Quetek corporation. What a marvellous bit of software, reasonably priced and on the first night I was trying to sort this out I made use of their webchat technical support which was awesome.

Before I realised the drives had been RAIDed (the second one showed up as empty when I plugged it in as a slave on my own machine) I ran the restore and it found a million or so files which gave me hope that all was well. Moreso, as I restored some of the images it found, they appeared to work too. Long story short, it turned out that my initial tests were only of images smaller than the block size used on the drives and so images below 128KB (they were thumbnails) were looking good. It was only after I saw larger images with stripes missing or truncated that I contacted Quetek and they told me the drives were probably RAID0.

Armed with that knowledge I was able to take a guess at the raid settings within File Scavenger and after a couple of false starts I suddenly got lots of files with proper folder names (rather than “Unknown”) a wide variety of sizes and following a test restore where files of several megabytes were ok, I was confident that all was well.

The machine that I was doing the restore on only had enough power connectors for one extra SATA drive so restoring from both drives wasn’t an option. This is where File Scavenger came in useful again. It allowed me to make an image of each of the drives (fortunately I had 600GB+ free on my system drive) and then it allowed me to select those images to work with instead of physical drives. Thus, I was able to disconnect the drives for the duration of the restore and they only went back in the original system when I was certain that I had a good backup of each and had successfully got all the data back.

It did take a while, the restore went on for about 18 hours all-told but I was then able to copy all the “Documents and Settings” to an external drive, ignoring all the apps and windows files.

The next challenge was then setting up the failed system to use the drives (they had passed deep testing, I believe the changes to the partition records had been a software or unfortunate keystroke upon dell booting). I just could not get windows xp pro to recognise the drives. I’d told the Dell RAID bios to create them as a RAID1 pair but windows setup would just blue screen every time. I had an original windows XP pro disc and the XP serial that came with the machine so thought I was good to go.

The problem turned out to be the lack of SATA drivers on the XP disc. You know that point at bootup where windows says “press F6 to load additional storage drivers”? well, that’s the bit I needed but I did not have the drivers nor a floppy drive.

The answer turned out to be simple thanks to another bit of software that is free!. First, get the drivers from the dell website. I got these and extracted then to a folder. I then installed the wonderful nlite. This software lets you start with a standard windows disc (XP,vista) produce an ISO of it, add in extra drivers you wish microsoft had included, pre-fill the windows serial and answers to lots of other setup questions and finally, to burn the lot to a new disc that you can now use to boot into setup. It was a learning curve that lasted a few hours but once all these bits came together, the process was actually very easy.

Software used:

File scavenger from Quetek corp.

NLite

Posted in Data Recovery, Good service | 1 Comment

Google docs a useful alternative to surveymonkey

Posted on August 18, 2010 by Les

I found this after following a link to a survey that I noticed was done with google docs (forms) and looked great! A google later found this useful blog post.

Posted in Bookmarks, Google | Leave a comment

I’ve told you a million times don’t exaggerate

Posted on June 16, 2010 by Les

“I’m at the leisure centre. My windscreen is smashed!” says my Wife down the phone.

“Crikey. Ok, I’ll bring my car to you and the boys, I’ll drive yours home”

“Oh, it’s OK. I think it’s alright to drive”

“No, too risky. I’ll drive it.” (imagining no windscreen makes for bad drive home for wife+3 boys)

So I proceed to drive into Cirencester, collect my youngest boys from Grandma & Grampy’s where they’d been spoilt for a couple of hours following their swim lesson.

“What are you doing here Dad?”

“I’m taking you down to Mum and you are all going home in my car because Mummy’s car has a smashed windscreen”

“Like when she parked in Waitrose and the back window was smashed?”

“Yes, exactly like that. Mummy’s very unlucky sometimes. ”

We arrive at the leisure centre and I exchange car keys with the wife.

“I’m sure I could have driven it you know” she repeats.

I go to the front of her car to survey the “Smashed” windscreen.

It’s still there. I mean, the glass. There is glass where I expected a hole. There is no hole.

What there is is a classic stone chip and a substantial crack along two thirds of the width. It’s a chip. A chip and a crack (no jokes about female golfers, please).

“That’s not smashed! That’s cracked. You could have driven it home!”

“I did try to tell you that”

“Yeah, but you said SMASHED. That’s what you said. Not cracked, SMASHED.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“But, But, never mind. See you at home”.

Posted in Dear diary | Leave a comment

Football

Posted on May 24, 2010 by Les

I have just watched some of the England vs Mexico “World Cup Warm Up”. Don’t worry though, I haven’t bought a white van stuck a cheesy cross on it and started reading The Sun. No, it’s simply the case that Sky Plus is recording the football and some other garbage for my Wife so for the few minutes of slobbing on the couch that I could bear, I did watch it.

Why am I recording this loathsome dross? Because, my 7 year-old Son is desperate to play football, to understand football, to partake of the playground football chatter etc. I did the same when I was his age. I distinctly remember a substantial collection of dog-eared cards featuring the likes of Ray Clemence and Kevin Keegan. No doubt I succumbed to the same peer pressure as my Son feels now. He just wants to belong and though he’s a keen and useful Rugby player, Rugby just doesn’t have the same “Opiate of The Masses” appeal.

Despite the cards though, I went only once to a football match. England vs Switzerland under 21s at Wembley. It cost the princely sum of £5 for the coach trip from Runcorn with Palacefields County Primary. I remember we had a great day. Wembley was the biggest place I’d ever seen but wandering round it (9 years old and we were told “Don’t wander off, straight to the toilet and back”! It fair gives my parental heart palpitations just recalling it). Well, of course we did not do as we were told which is why me and a friend whose name and face have long been supplanted in my memory banks by years of pointless trivia almost missed the coach. Can you imagine that? These days those Teachers would (unfairly) be publicly named and shamed. I presume the Teachers were frantic and very stressed out wondering where we were but I don’t recall any sign of that. Worryingly, I’m not even sure they knew were were missing until we weren’t.

Now, you may notice here that I don’t have much to say about the football which may seem a bit odd given it was at Wembley after all. Well, I did watch some but frankly from where we were sat the players may well have been Subbuteo (I had to look that word up, never had cause to write it before) figures and the ball but the merest speck of white. It was noisy. People were shouting endlessely about nothing. And so many of them. There were more people that I considered might exist on the whole planet at that time. I couldn’t share a joke with your mate because I couldn’t hear anything other than The Noise and I couldn’t join in with The Noise because it did seem to be just Noise; not words.  Being a self concious and nervous 9 year old the prospect of gently lurching in random directions and screaming very loudly “eeerer  aaahh sh olellee eeyyer” was frankly more terrifying than risking someone noticing that I wasn’t joining in.

It’s not as if you could even mime like in assembly when you knew the words but didn’t want to sing. Hellish. Truly hellish. And to think, some people grow up, work hard and spend some of their hard-earned to go and be in that crowd. You have my sympathies. I can’t imagine how awful the rest of your days must be that a saturday at a football stadium can be seen as a good thing.

Anyway, I digress. The thing is, despite my opinion on football I recognise that I am quite possibly the weird one and so accept that my Son may well find some joy in”The Beautiful Game” that I cannot. So, for that reason, I shall at least ensure he has the opportunity to witness professional football so he can join in with the rest of the mob. With any luck when we watch it back we can at least turn the sound down.

Strange after all these years that the TV coverage features the identical sound track to every game as the one they were playing at Wembley all those years ago. The Noise. Perhaps this is simply what you get when you put enough people who can’t form sentences in one place and the average IQ becomes the dominant force.

If you think this post is just whining from a miserable old bastard who doesn’t see much point having quite so many people on the planet doing pointless things you are, quite probably, right. A discourse on the recursive nature of musing on pointlessness which is, in itself, pointless is reserved for a later (pointless) post.

Posted in Dear diary, Grumpy old man, Rant | Leave a comment

You abstained – Shame on you

Posted on May 7, 2010 by Les

So, did you vote in the General Election?

If you were eligible, physically and mentally able to vote and you didn’t then please shut up now. Do not complain that your welfare is too low. Do not complain that your public sector salary is too low or your taxes too high. Don’t phone in to radio shows, appear on tv shows or write that “Dear BBC…” letter. Don’t Don’t Don’t.

When you threw away the opportunity to cast your vote, you threw away the right to moan, groan and complain. Just continue with whatever selfish past-time floats your boat and leave democracy to the rest of us. You just abstained from society.

Let’s hope a future government lowers tax allowances for abstainers. Anyone abstaining will pay the price for the duration of the government they didn’t TRY to choose and I’m sure this will spur them into action for the next election.

Posted in Politics | Leave a comment

Things to do with a microvision showwx

Posted on April 23, 2010 by Les

So, I took delivery of a Microvision ShowWX today. Yes, it’s every bit as good as Microvision’s site makes out.

I’ve tried it from an iPod and iPhone which both worked a treat though annoyingly of course, without jailbreaking the iPhone only the iPod video functions actually output a picture. Such a silly limitation from Apple this one. It makes photo slideshow/video workarounds for presentations necessary that really shouldn’t be.

Anyway, I’ve come up with the following ideas so far, none of which I’m likely to have time to pursue but part of the fun is thinking these things up. I’ll edit this post as things occur.

  • Fasten it under the seat of your bike and project an enormous red triangle or other graphic or message onto the road behind you so approaching motorists get that extra clue… anamorphic translations on the image (read all about anamorphosis) could come in useful as at some point the image would appear to stand upright from the driver’s POV. (for some drivers/road positions anyway).
  • Combined with an iPhone 3GS – or indeed any computer/camera combination, though the iPhone+SHOWWX is a particularly elegant duo – it should be possible to display an image and film it on the camera simultaneously. With someone moving an arm/finger around  it should be possible to produce an effective “interactive whiteboard” type result.
  • Shadow puppetry light source. Presumably because of the laser light source and scanning motion and lack of focussing lenses, when the image is obscured by a hand the shadow cast is pin sharp. No penumbral shadows at all regardless of distance from projection surface. Combined with some creative images to start with and shadow puppetry skills, shadow puppetry could take a leap appearing to interact with full color environments.
  • Head up displays for cars etc. Easy one to try for myself to check it won’t dazzle passers by but you could easily I suspect project messages/footage onto the back windscreen (or on a strip of thin paper beneath it) and have a clearly readable image displayed at night. There are already many HUD apps for the iPhone. Projected via this thing you could have a HUD across your whole windscreen!
  • Freaking out kids at Halloween. Movie running on a loop, projects ghostly images onto the wall/door/gate etc. Could be particularly useful combined with an anamorphic image to make the ghost look like it’s coming from a hole in the ground etc.
  • In fact, its portability combined with a tripod and an app to apply anamorphic translations to images could be used to project onto the floor enabling the artistically challenged (like me) to cheat by projecting onto the pavement then doing a paint-by-numbers type job on it. Yes, it’s possible I’m becoming slightly obsessed by anamorphosis.
  • 3D mapping. The methods are nothing new. Shine  a laser in a line while rotating the subject, capture the line deviations in a camera set at an angle an infer the subject’s profile from the way the line is warped. The SHOWWX essentially puts a laser in everyone’s hand at a fraction of the cost of usual solutions. Just project a picture with only one vertical line on it. Or, project a grid and do the same thing using a camera to record the deformation of the grid and thereby infer the contours of the subject.
  • I wonder if it’s possible to get photo sensitive paints/inks that once exposed for a given time keep their arrived-at colour without recourse to developing chemicals? What a great way to do murals. Line up the image, black out the room, coat the wall, turn on the projector and leave for a while, allow it to cure and you have a “painted” mural.
  • My kids have each got those glow in the dark wall hangings where you ‘paint’ on them using a light pen and they persists for a while. Great fun. I think I’l try projecting a line image tonight in a blacked out room and see whether the showwx puts enough light onto these things to leave an image.
  • I wonder if a reflective dome on the floor and the showwx from above could give a home-made planetarium?
  • Christmas message? shine it from inside to a window.

So many ideas, so little time… ah well. Am quite looking forward to the dead of night so I can try this thing in the garden and see just how big an image is actually visible on the side of the house. Also aiming to try it in the lounge tonight where I have an empty wall and see just how well it stacks up when the movie is 8 feet wide!

Posted in Development, iPhone, Microvision SHOWWX, Programming, Silliness | 1 Comment