ReelChaos Blog

Totally forgot about references.

noreply@blogger.com (Monarch) — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 23:56:00 +0000


    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            Program p = new Program();

            string s = null;

            EventHandler<EventArgs> closure = null;
            
            closure =
                (o, e) =>
                {
                    Console.WriteLine(s);
                    p.provemattwrong -= closure;
                };

            p.provemattwrong += closure;
            s = "FUCK";

            p.provemattwrong(p, EventArgs.Empty);
            
        }
        public event EventHandler<EventArgs> provemattwrong;
    }

Needless to say I didn't prove Matt wrong because I forgot that C#'s Refereces reference a Pointer are not Pointers to the object themselves. I feel like a moron.

Comment on Sound Weapons.

noreply@blogger.com (Monarch) — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 18:20:00 +0000

On the topic of Civil Disobedience

So this happened: http://gizmodo.com/5369190/lrad-sound-cannon-used-on-pittsburgh-g20-protesters

I have this to say to protesters: Next time carry one of these Large Parabolic Reflectors available many places and here:
http://scientificsonline.com/product.asp?pn=3053875&cm_mmc=Mercent-_-Google-_-NULL-_-3053875&mr:trackingCode=656F1735-DB81-DE11-8C0A-000423C27502&mr:referralID=NA&bhcd2=1254161937

Good luck.

Pen-Cam time lapse commute

noreply@blogger.com (Monarch) — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 04:16:00 +0000

I purchased a pen-cam from ebay the other day, and it finally came. It's been a while since my last post but I thought I'd share this time lapse video I took of my 41 minute commute home in 4 min. I've posted it in Vimeo.com since I still boycott youtube.

Pen Cam Hung On Dashbord 40Min commute in 4Min from Max Fridberg on Vimeo.

I found my inspiration

noreply@blogger.com (Monarch) — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 19:00:00 +0000

Here are two commercials that inspired me greatly when I was a child:
(I'm still trying to find the Qwest cafe jukebox having every song one one)

Just go through this one answering yes to everything... Except that door thing (but I'm sure you can buy that somewhere.)

Isn't it amazing how utterly underwhelming all these things are now, but when I was a kid i just dreamed of them.

Ala' Filesharing :-)

Alice and Bob

noreply@blogger.com (Monarch) — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 21:12:00 +0000

Just wanted to have a nice private conversation... Until the police stepped in.
http://www.websequencediagrams.com is cool
Here's my source:

note over Alice,Bob: Want to have a secure conversation
note over Bob,Frank: Roommates
Police->Alice: Taps Alice's line
Bob->Police: Pays off
activate Bob
Police->Bob: Informant
deactivate Bob
Bob->Alice: Stabs
note over Alice: Dies
Alice->Bob: Falls Down onto
Bob->Frank: Asks to borrow shovel
Frank->Bob: Lends shovel
Bob->Alice: Buries Body
Alice->Alice: Decomposes
Frank->Police: Calls the Authorities
Police->Bob: Arrest

Tech Retardation

noreply@blogger.com (Monarch) — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 02:23:00 +0000

I would first off like to state that I am not "into" recycling. I do not believe in purchasing a canvas bag because I think that I'd always leave it at home. The only time my consumer waste makes it into the recycling bin is when the trash is too full for it, or when there is a large stack of it and it is convenient. I just wanted to get the truth out there so that after reading this post you will have no questions as to what kind of "Eco" person I am.

All that being said there is something that I noticed as "Massive Waste" that I felt it important to bring to light. I view the tech industry to be highly wasteful. "How's that? Besides the obvious." you say?

When looking up one of my old laptops on HP's website I found a listing for 3 dozen different laptops with greatly varying features, in processor as well as in motherboard. "Where's the waste? I'm sure that HP came out with those models in a economical fashion as possible" you say. The waste and the harm of having multiple models occurs in the very notion of having "multiple models." While I do realize that some tech creations are radically different in price because the actually cost more to manufacture, what about the thousands of artificial costs created by just separating product into groups.

Just look at the processors alone dozens and dozens of different grouping of different speed processors. Each processor grouping and speed step is priced out differently in order to maximize profit. It is not a giant leap to think that Intel has processors designed years into the future. If Intel for example was to publish its latest off the bench processors as ready to use imaging how many processors thousands of ton's of processors sitting in landfills four years from now would be saved.

Right now, technology is created with the mentality "Tech for profit's sake," could you imagine if a radical shift of principal to "Tech for tech's sake" occurred. This shift of principal is highly idealist, not just idealist but altogether impossible since profit drives the creation of the next and great processor. I recognize this idealist disconnect; however that does not mean that these tech companies in order to be "Eco Responsible" could not implore some of this "tech for tech's sake" principal.

How? I do not have that many great ideas on this front. However I do think that instead of an upper level manager asking an engineer by asking him "what do you think the next marginal upgrade to this product which makes us money?" That manager should be asking "What will be our next great product?"

Think about that shift in manufacturing principals next time you decide between the 8400 and the 9650 video cards or the 500gb hard drive and the 1.5TB hard drive, or the next thing you buy.

Also part of me wrote this because I want tomorrows processor today!

List Net Apps

noreply@blogger.com (Monarch) — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 15:51:00 +0000

Lets say that you want a list of network apps running in windows at a given time. I have written a simple script in Powershell to handle this:

function global:get-netapps
{
$myfile = (& netstat -abno )
$mymatches = $myfile -match "\[(?.*\.exe)\]`$"
$results = ""
foreach ($line in $mymatches)
{
if ($results.Contains($line.Replace('[','').Replace(']','')) -eq 0)
{
$results += $line.Replace('[','').Replace(']','') + "`n"
}
}
$results

}
Set-Alias lsnetapps get-netapps -Scope "global"

just run: get-netapps or lsnetapps

Simple JS Progressbar

noreply@blogger.com (Monarch) — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 04:49:00 +0000

So I thought I'd create a simple JavaScript progress bar/ percent bar to keep track of my progress on various things, its not complete for main use but it wouldn't take more than a minute to modify the code to be used on anyone's page, so if you are looking for a quick progress bar that is ie7 ff2 compatible (I didn't care to test on any other browser).

Take a look

Screen Productivity

noreply@blogger.com (Monarch) — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 23:58:00 +0000

* The Following does not necessarily apply to code (as I do like nice wide code lines)*

So I was wondering why my girlfriend has been using her tablet-pc in wide screen mode instead of collapsing it to portrait. Not just wide screen mode but collapsing the power point presentations she studies off of to 1/4 of the screen. This seemed an odd behavior to myself who has at any given time made it a point to take up as much screen real estate as possible for the task I am on. So i asked her (this post is a retrospective on that conversation)...

Why do newspapers still use Column Typography? And what do those narrow columns have to do with your screens real estate. Well as it turns out your eyes get tired of moving back and forth over too long a line. Also if a line is too long, as your eyes scan the line and move to the next, it is more challenging for them to find the correct next line (don't you just hate when a large list of information is not alternate-highlighted). This effect impacts the amount you take back from the viewing area in question. The same concept in perspective is why I have always chosen to sit toward the back edge of a theater, so that my eyes are not constantly scanning the action on the screen and that the screen is confined to a particular viewing area. This allows one to "take in" all of the information simultaneously.

It has a lot to do with character recognition: Pretend you are zoomed in seeing a farmer walking through a "folded corn husk" phenomena. As you zoom out you see plainly that he's standing in a crop circle. When you read a word like "board" your brain processes the "b" first and then the "d", the "oar" is filled in by you brain as you read rapidly. The "oar" does not even need to be complete. When you read "b[]ard" quickly and move on to the next word you don't even feel the letter "o" changed to "[]" affecting your speedy read.

The spacing matters because the horizontal span of the word has to be small in your visual field in order for you to recognize these letters ("oar") as a character group and preform a rapid recognition of that word ("b" + "d" + "oar"), if the horizontal span is too long (i.e. the letters/spacing is too big: " b o a r d ") you are forced to sound out the word letter by letter or at very least group character recognition is slowed.

The moral of this story is that if you are trying to take in a large bit of information quickly shrink that pdf window down to a readable scale (small book print, or whatever your eyes are good with) and don't rely on your full screen 17 laptop let you soak it in quickly.
So let come the time of smaller fonts (but not too small), higher resolutions (but not to high), higher dpi screens (way way higher!), and tiny screens (but not too tiny)!

A little further proof:

noreply@blogger.com (Monarch) — Sat, 17 May 2008 15:45:00 +0000

This will my homage to Usenet.
Background:
NZB files are like Torrent files in that they outline where you can get the files you are looking for usually alt.binaries.something.
A Usenet client connects to a server which a user pays for e.g. (giganews.com), it then requests from the server the files which were outlined in the .nzb file. It downloads it pretty fast (800KB/s in my case) which means a typical 800mb documentary can be had in around 20 minutes! What downloads is lots of .rar .r01 .rNN, as well as .par2 files.
Par2 files are parity files which will allow a .rNN file to be repaired or regenerated depending on how complete your download is.
Now I download a lot... So I like it all to be extracted and dumped into a folder when extracted.
My simple scripts to automate this:
Repair all:

for i in *.par2; do par2repair $i; done

Remove all:

rm *.PAR2
rm *.par2
rm *.nzb
rm *.r*
rm *sample*

Move all:

for i in *.avi; do mkdir ${i/.avi*}; mv ${i/.avi*}* ${i/.avi*}/; done

Irritation Roundup

noreply@blogger.com (Monarch) — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 21:30:00 +0000

Other titles for this blog post include but are not limited to:

Qualitative review of top Operating Systems, My way of showing that I heart Server 2008, Another way to review Operating Systems, Post your own Operating System Review, How I learned to stop worrying and love Microsoft.

Okay now for the post:

Recently I built myself a "Hackintosh" and even as I'm writing this the spellchecker is prompting me to change it to Mackintosh. A post on how it was built will follow. This means that I now have all the major OS's running all around me: Vista, Leopard, XP, and Server 2008. Because of this I realized that this "qualified" me to write an operating system review in which I compare benchmarks and other highly quantitative figures till I'm blue in the face and you're bored of reading this post. On the topic of reading this post, I didn't think anyone read my blog until a few comments appeared on some of my older posts… well this post should take care of that. Anyhow, I decided not to review these OS's quantitatively but rather qualitatively. By that I mean how irritating these operating systems are.

Notes: These images reflect my opinion; if you don't agree please feel free to make your own review with the templates posted toward the bottom. The red line depicts my "developer" opinion of irritation on the operating system, and the black line a more user centric opinion.

Windows Vista
– It's been pooped on a lot by everyone…but I still use it

Leopard Mac OS 10.5 – It is user friendly but irritates like all the rest

Ubuntu Feisty Fawn – I have the most amount of fun running this and I get the least amount done

Windows Server 2008 –Wow, just wow

The truth is that on all operating system there is a "getting used to it" period, a "wow" period and an "I hate this" period. It comes down to the fact that all operating systems have their quirks and you just get used to them… Except Windows ME – whata peacea junk. Oh... and you start swearing by them (os's) and become an annoying forum troll who's only purpose is to keep osnews.com in business (j/k I love osnews).

Well there you have it, as I am sure this review will become the new standard in testing operating systems on users below are the templates, I would love to see your graphs and comments linked in the comment section.

Ribbon Interface

noreply@blogger.com (Monarch) — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 15:56:00 +0000

It's not just for Microsoft anymore. My family has been doing a lot of griping at M$ Office 2008 (which all get told to me) mostly they don't like the ribbon. Personally i like the ribbon a whole lot, I think it is a jump to a more intuitive interface, and if GIMP had a ribbon interface I would use it more than Photoshop. So take a look at this screenshot from the GIMP UI brainstorm blog.
GIMP UI brainstorm: intuitive appearance…

Mio c220 PMP

noreply@blogger.com (Monarch) — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 22:02:00 +0000

So I was looking for a Personal Media Player (PMP) to take with me on my cruize and had narrowed it down to the RAmos V80 2GB and the JXD 951 2GB players from MP4Nation.NET
Then it hit me... for X-MAS I was given a GPS... and on the back of that GPS... it said Windows CE Core 5 :-)

A great unlocking tutorial: http://computerbits.wordpress.com/

And now I have a media player:
PS. If you don't own a PMP or a C220 do have a look at the two PMP's I was going to purchase, as they are inexpensive and amazing.

Simple DIV Table

noreply@blogger.com (Monarch) — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 15:43:00 +0000

I have created a simple example of a table generated strictly with div's and css. Unlike the css table tag, it is difficult to make one stretch dynamically with the width. This page (source) also illustrates some of the web-design techniques i had picked up.

Take a look: posts/divtabletest.htm

(Made old school.... notepad.exe)

MKV Sucks

noreply@blogger.com (Monarch) — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 21:53:00 +0000

Like its friends AVI, OGM and MP4, MKV is a Media Container. It can contain multiple video tracks (All using different video CODECS (XVID/DIVX, X264/AVC etc.)) and multiple audio tracks (All using different audio CODECS (MP3, AAC, AC3 etc.)). Many video publishers online choose to publish video in .MKV format because the video tools are well developed. MKV has a dark side though… It's Slower, Choppy-er, Bigger and downright annoying for anything high-def.

After scanning the forums I have found (FOR UBUNTU/LINUX) a quick conversion from MKV to MP4 that unlike all the other forums does not require RECODING the video.

Credit goes to ubuntuforums.org's hansa56. (Thanks hansa56, I just didn't think that it should be left in a forum)

Assume we have a file "File.mkv" that has these two tracks

Audio Track encoded as ac3
Video Track encoded as h264/AVC

First install the needed applications

$ sudo apt-get install mkvtoolnix gpac hexedit mplayer

And download the neroAacEnc from http://www.nero.com/eng/nero-aac-codec.html Unpack to the a linux directory, chmod +x on the neroaacenc file and copy that file to the same directory as your video

Then you have to find out what Tracks have been encoded into the file

$ mkvinfo-text File.mkv

Then using that info we can tell mkvextract to DEMUX the video from the audio

$ mkvextract tracks File.mkv 1:audio.ac3 2:video.h264

Apparently you have to change one byte inside the video.h264 file

$ hexedit video.h264

Move your cursor in the first line to where they bytes read "67 64 00 33" and change the "33" to "29" (Ctrl-s to save, Ctrl-z to exit)

To convert the audio to AAC format

$ mkfifo audiodump.wav

$ ./neroAacEnc -ignorelength -q 0.20 -if audiodump.wav -of audio.m4a & mplayer audio.ac3 -vc null -vo null -ao pcm:fast

Finally Re-MUX the video with the audio

$ MP4Box -add video.h264 -add audio.m4a File.mp4

All with no conversions… just a bunch of remuxing…

Untraceable Propaganda

noreply@blogger.com (Monarch) — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 16:33:00 +0000

So recently I saw the movie Untraceable. Let me say I have never seen a more prolific "Enforce the NET, Piracy is bad" propaganda Movie. It didn't even go about saying these things subtly. Be warned that this movie IS a large piece of propaganda and will likely be used to spread fear and pass legislation to alleviate that fear. I was highly surprised at how many people in the theater (80%) did not pick up on the propaganda in this movie, many of them left with comments containing "... the out of control Internet". Now i do not want to get into a technical debate (especially over such a inflammatory/inaccurate movie) but, yes if the government so wanted the killers website would be down in a matter of seconds if you want a technical explanation just look-up how DNS works. I only wish there was a way to keep a website up so that no-one could shut it down

[Major Spoilers]

Below is a list of scenes in the movie that I could pick out which were utterly over-the-top in their message in chronological order (the messages below may seem subtle, watch the movie to find out just how not subtle it is):

In the beginning of the movie the agent catches a guy who runs a download mp3 website... but of course the website steals information and credit info.
"Email from a friend of a friend" First person was caught trying to get cheap tickets. [Subtle message][Mild creepiness] Message: Do not buy tickets from anyone other than trusted authorities.
Dropping the body off in the trunk of a pro Net Neutrality congressman [Subtle message] [Highly creepy] Message: Ha-ha you'll never catch me because the net's so unregulated.
If you did nothing wrong you've got nothing to loose by letting us in... we can always come back with a warrant (Agent talking to a Gay movie downloader)
"(Cop)You like movies huh?... (Downloader)yea who doesn't...(Cop) me... burn your own copies?... you know that's illegal... (Federal copy-write notice appears) cant say they didn't warn you." Then later the cop says "Still felt good arresting him"
The kid gets a "Copy of a game" from a friend to put on her computer... game turns up to be a Trojan. [Subtle message - don't pirate software or else]
The email that gets the guy interested in some train-cars (Murderer ends up getting him)... [Subtle message - Its not safe to buy from people online]
"Any American who visits the site is an accomplice to murder" (Stated to TV cameras) - an insane mentality "Stockholm syndrome" when you start to accept the same rationale as your attacker... its not his fault that he's committing the murder, its the people who visit the site "No one thinks they did anything wrong, why should they they were only visiting a website... when did the world go so fucking insane"
The killer used a prepaid cell phone -[Subtle message - there should be a paper trail for everything]
The killer hacks agents onstar, then when he kidnaps her he disables it so the agents cant track it (Agents whine about how they could have tracked her if only her onstar was on) - [Subtle message - if only everyone could be tracked]

I suggest that everyone see/obtain (in the usual way) this movie to see just how much of an insult it is to everyone on the internet.

Don't Break that CFL

noreply@blogger.com (Monarch) — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 03:57:00 +0000

Okay seriously don't break that spirally bulb or else

Stole JR's Idea

noreply@blogger.com (Monarch) — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 17:34:00 +0000

And added myself to Technorati Technorati Profile

Excel Formatting

noreply@blogger.com (Monarch) — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 03:43:00 +0000

You probably didn't expect to see an Excel tip on this blog but this one is just so useful I had to share it with the whole world (or the two of you who read this blog).

Let's say you have a simple spreadsheet for party invitations like so:

And you would like to conditionally format the person column based on another column.

So let's say if a person is coming to the party their name should be green. All you do is select cells a2:a5 go to conditional formatting in the home ribbon and select new rule, then select use a formula and type in:

Select the color, and this is what you get when you hit ok:

Those of you that are "fluent" in Excel will laugh at me and say duh, oh well.

On File Indexing

noreply@blogger.com (Monarch) — Sun, 11 Nov 2007 23:23:00 +0000

So let's say you have a hard drive with files, none of which you particularly care about so you don't take the time/money/effort to back them up. Yet you would like to know what's on the drive in case it ever crashes and you need to re-acquire those files. Do you pony up for file indexing software and deal with its quirks. Spend a weekend writing indexing software that spits out a list or a database file. Or do you rely on handy dandy old school DIR. I being lazy and needing simple file-keep-track-of software just went with dir. Here's the one liner that will spit out all the files of a particular drive that you are in to a text file. Eh its no "ls" but it'll do. Hmm now just setup a bat file to do this periodically, and you've got yourself an indexing system.

dir /b /s /n > filename_2007_11_10.txt

Oh, and in case you wanted to format that drive to Fat32 so it would be compatible with media player appliances. Windows will only format fat32 for 32 GB hard drives now.

Cool app of the week: Fat32 Formatter

Pumpkin Carving

noreply@blogger.com (Monarch) — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 05:59:00 +0000

My company was having a pumpkin carve-off and I wanted a pattern that was unique to my inner geek.

Thanks to my girlfriend and her "Hands of a surgeon" for carving this one. For those of you that don't recognize it and don't watch Dr. Who, it's a light house. For all that that do watch the good Dr, it is a Dalek pumpkin.

I'm submitting it here as if just posting it on my blog wasn't geeky enough.

Holy Privacy Laws Batman

noreply@blogger.com (Monarch) — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 22:49:00 +0000

Looks like that favorite company that you'd love to trust has gotten around to mapping the greater Chicago-Land Region. I knew it! At last proof that I did see a car with multiple lenses mounted on a sphere driving around downtown. But wow, I never ever expected them to make it out to the boonies where I commute from. I'm just glad they didn't catch me home in the driveway. So to Google I have these three things to say: 1. Good job on getting such a large area up in such a short time. 2. I would like to unsubscribe from your invasiveness. 3. We're moving soon so HA! (You'll never take us alive, and so forth).

The technology behind this is cool though: http://gearthblog.com/blog/archives/2007/05/technology_behind_go.html

Blogging

noreply@blogger.com (Monarch) — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 19:08:00 +0000

So I'm actually quite new at this whole blogging thing, but I have made some observations which i have compacted into a nice presentation for the office. There is a bonus slide at the end where I try to explain that I am a 3D Fan-Boy. HERE

Emotionally Engaging Software

noreply@blogger.com (Monarch) — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 05:08:00 +0000

This news article got me wondering if there is such a thing as emotionally engaging software (besides video games).

The article: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21102202/

My conversation with my girlfriend:

Me: I love his quote "… If we can design things that are somewhat emotionally engaging, it doesn't have to be as reliable"

Her: True, like R2D2

This is funny to me because she got me an R2D2 for my birthday; it's now sitting in my office. The problem is that sometimes he's not so "Voice-Activated" he doesn't process all the commands well, yet in the manual they describe this as "misbehaving." So if a piece of hardware can pull this "emotionally engaging" thing off, I have to ask could a piece of software? I mean I know people get really engaged by some games like Second Life, Warcraft, etc, but how about other pieces of software. Could you stand it if your next word processor is not as reliable if it is emotionally engaging? (since Microsoft already tried that) What software could stand to be more Emotionally Engaging?

MSSQL Parameters

noreply@blogger.com (Monarch) — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 16:25:00 +0000

When I was working on a quick store procedure with optional parameters and preferred not to have to write dozens of if's in TSQL I came upon this page that made my life a little easier (a fairly simple trick, but I thought I'd share):

http://www.dreamincode.net/forums/index.php?s=5f25c46f1fe8351df7ce06b67b58dfeb&showtopic=32431&pid=250875&st=0&#entry250875

Excerpt:

ALTER PROCEDURE dbo.YourProcedureName
@value1 CHAR(100) = NULL,
@value2 CHAR(100) = NULL,
@value3 CHAR(100) = NULL,
@value4 CHAR(100) = NULL
AS
SELECT
column1,
column2,
column3,
column4
FROM
Table_Name
WHERE
((@value1 IS NULL) OR (column1 = @value1))
AND ((@value2 IS NULL) OR (column2 = @value2))
AND ((@value3 IS NULL) OR (column3 = @value3))
AND ((@value4 IS NULL) OR (column4 = @value4))