Author: shun

Animal Instincts

Even animals have feelings. Unfortunately I can’t say the same about some humans.

Last night I accidentally discovered a mother cat with two tiny kittens by our front door. Fearing that I might harm her babies, the mother instinctively hissed at me continuously and refused to abandon her kittens. I opened the door to take a closer look at the kittens (must be around 5 weeks old), one kitten followed the mother and dashed towards the garage (back of the house).

What happened to the other kitten?

I looked around the front lawn and found her hiding in a ditch used to collect the water hose. Thinking she’s trapped, I tried to grab her with my right hand, but of course, animals don’t need pathetic human’s help. At 5 weeks old, she leaped upwards, with her claws barely hanging on to the side of the relatively deep ditch, and helped herself out of the hole in a hurry (but unusually calm manner). As my eyes followed her “escape” towards the garage, I realized that her mother and sibling had not abandoned her after all. They were waiting anxiously for me to disappear so that they could return to find their kin.

Even animals, cats in this case, have the instinct to stay behind to make sure their troubled kin would be fine, I wonder why some humans run the opposite direction as soon as they smell trouble with their friends or relatives. Worse, Grace and I are disappointed there are those who would do all they can to STOP others from helping those in need.

What kind of sick human nature is that?

Stupid human beings.

Nosy Neighbors

Neighbors are moving in. Or so it seems.

Neighbors are moving in. Or so it seems.

Our house is getting ever more popular with all the cats in the neighborhood. Almost every other day, we find a new cat at our back porch, staring through the sliding screen into hour house. Obviously they are not interested in me or Grace — they want to know who their new catty neighbors are.

Our two cats are not too thrilled about the inquisitive neighbors though. Usually Baobao just hisses and walks away with puffy hair. Mesmerized, one black cat in particular, even tilts her head as she gazes at Baobao’s unprovoked irritation. The word’s out, there are two female cats with questionable personalities in the hood.

MythTV — Part I — Struggle Begins

My battle with MythTV installation and configuration.

In light of my newfound cable service, I decided to put one of my spare Dell boxes to work in doing a home-grown TiVo. So a few days ago, I ordered a Hauppauge WinTV-PVR 150 capture card to give it a shot. It’s a relatively new card with decent performance for the price (after a Buy.com 10% off coupon — roughly $85).

I spent most of the weekend tinkering with Mythtv running on Fedora (Core 3). I got most of the information from Jarod Wilson’s site (excellent documentation). But last night at 3AM, I finally gave in to Mythtv and called it a defeat (for now).

There are a few problems concerning my set up; one of them being that Fedora Core 3 is not particularly happy about the onboard Crystal sound card (it worked in Core 2 though). Topping that off, WinTV-PVR 150 seems a bit too new to get a stable driver. I spent a lot of time just getting the module to load into the Kernel during my first install. It turned out that the latest Linux Kernel doesn’t like the module. I had to roll back to the older 2.6.11-1.27FC3smp to get the damn thing to just load.

Then there’s the problem with the IR transmitter and receiver. Apparently lirc 0.7.0 doesn’t support PVR 150. Though I’d installed the new lirc 0.7.1 (which supposedly does support PVR 150), the receiver still did not produce any output despite hours of Googling and trying out new settings.

Frustrated, I finally completely erased the setup and started fresh again on Sunday. But this time, something happened to the partitions which Kernel 2.6.11-1.27FC3smp didn’t like and freaks out at boot. Does it have anything to do with the fact that I installed VMWare 4.5.2 (thanks, Kyung!) prior to the reboot? Speaking of VMWare, it runs beautifully smooth under Fedora Core 3 with Windows 2000 on it. Very very nice.

In the coming few days, I might give it a shot again. Last night just right after I gave up, I found a clip from Systm that demonstrated a clean install using KnoppMyth — a ONE disc install wonder. The only problem, again, is that its lirc driver is still at 0.7.0 and won’t like my PVR 150 card. But on KnoppMyth’s discussion forum, someone posted a patch that’s claimed to have made it work. Hopefully it’ll finally work so I can finall grow fat and old on Simpsons episodes.

Stupid MythTV… Stupid PVR 150 card… Stupid Fedora Core 3 and its new Kernel…

Landscape Photography Done Right

Now that everything has gone digital, it’s only a matter of time before someone records all the beauty that nature has to offer in large format digital photography. The tradition that Ansel Adams started as the first national park photography employed by the U.S. government continues digitally.

Now that everything has gone digital, it’s only a matter of time before someone records all the beauty that nature has to offer in large format digital photography. The tradition that Ansel Adams started as the first photographer for national parks employed by the U.S. government continues digitally.

Gigapxl Project is a project that that employs a panoramic camera to take pictures of landscapes. It takes pictures with FOUR BILLION pixels that produces uncompressed files about 24GB in size per image. Some laptops don’t even have hard drives that big!

How Search Engines Are Related

I have been noticing that search results were almost never too different from one search engine to another. But this chart pretty much clears up my suspicions once and for all. Published by Bruce Clay, Inc, an Internet business consultant, the chart maps out relations each search engine has with one another.

Is it me or is the Internet ruled by only two giants. Even Microsoft’s MSN receives results from someone else.

Search engine relation screenshot

Gahoo!Yoogle

A site that compares search results of Yahoo and Google side by side in two split windows.

I read about this a while ago but had no place to bookmark it (wasn’t worth the clutter of my already-messy bookmarks). So I am just going to blog it here and hopefully someday I will find it useful (or that someone else will).

GahooYoogle is a search engine that basically just plugs your keywords into both Google and Yahoo and returns the results side by side in a split window. It’s actually a pretty cool tool if you use both search engines frequently. But seriously, who uses Yahoo these days anyway?

GahooYoogle logo

My only complaint is, the name is just too damn confusing to be recalled easily…

Google Housing Map

This is an amazing housing map that combines Google Maps and Craigslist housing.

Google housing map screenshot If I were to give star ratings to all my best finds on the web, this one would be ranked way up there. HousingMaps is an ingenious idea that combines the power of Google Maps, arguably the most powerful free mapping system on the web, and Craigslist. It even takes on the characteristics of simplicity of both sites.

This is something waiting to be commercialized sooner or later. Damn it, it’s just so cool!

Steve Jobs NeXT Demo

DrunkenBlog posted this cool presentation Steve Jobs did years ago when he was still running NeXT. A cool presentation with some great technologies. But It’s still no Mac!

DrunkenBlog posted a video of Steve Jobs demoing NeXT.

Steve Jobs demoing NeXT

Click to download the video (50MB)

To be frank, NeXT was butt ugly. But some of its technologies and innovations were quite impressive its day. DrunkenBlog posted another article about striking similarities in some of the apps under OSX and NeXT. I guess when being good just wasn’t enough, you just gotta ride on the cool kid to bring out the edge.

Has anyone noticed what was wrong with the video? Somehow Steve just didn’t quite look himself in that grown-up-wannabe attire. Maybe that was why NeXT didn’t do too well — he tried too hard being someone he wasn’t. He’s meant to be a rebel.

Video courtesy of OpenStep.se.

Using Screen Saver as Desktop Image

Not sure if this kind of thing is available on Microsoft Windows. But damn this is a great gimmick to show your friends.

This “trick” puts whatever you have on your Screen Saver as the desktop image. While it’s not all that useful, it’s a pretty cool trick to show your geeky friends. Sorry, Mac OSX only.

1. Open “Terminal” (Applications –> Utilities –> Terminal)
2. Type in exactly (no spaces or new lines):

1
2
3
/System/Library/Frameworks/ScreenSaver.framework/
Resources/ScreenSaverEngine.app/Contents/MacOS/
ScreenSaverEngine -background

3. Press “Return”; watch the magic
4. To stop it, press: “ctrl” + “c” keys (in that order) within the Terminal

Cool huh?!

References from this Mac Dev Center article.

Tabbed Browsing in IE6

You don’t have to wait till IE 7 in Longhorn (scheduled to release in 2007). You can do it right now with your very own IE6, bug ridden, hacker’s-browser-of-choice browser! Yoohoo!

Windows Dev Center released an article on Using Tabbed Browsing in Internet Explorer 6.

Tabbed IE6 browser screenshot

So for those of you insisting on using IE6 instead of the ever-more-popular FireFox, even you guys can enjoy tabs in one single window while surfing your favorite websites. No more waiting till 2007 when Microsoft releases their Next Generation IE7 in their next major upgrade of Windows (code name “Longhorn”). –> Some screen shots of Longhorn