There's the need for cleaning up. Too much junk lying around. Begs the question of what to do with it. Sort, trash some, organize the rest. That and getting rid of old stuff that just piles around.

I've fallen asleep and I don't want to move. I want to move on, yet finish whatever I'm doing, knowing that in the end it's useless anyway.

That doesn't sound like it will end very well.

Now once I play a game, I generally don't feel like playing it a second time. For the few titles that I like, cheat modes are what saves it.

A good example is Doom, be it 1, 2 or 3, or Duke Nukem. Completing the game once is ok, but what I really like is just having a fun relaxed time without too much hassle. In that case, enter

 *** curr_category=[[raw locals().get('curr_category', 'NOT-SET2')]] permalink_url=[[raw locals().get('permalink_url', 'NOT-SET')]] rel_permalink_url=[[raw locals().get('rel_permalink_url', 'NOT-SET')]] 

 *** curr_category=[[raw locals().get('curr_category', 'NOT-SET2')]] permalink_url=[[raw locals().get('permalink_url', 'NOT-SET')]] rel_permalink_url=[[raw locals().get('rel_permalink_url', 'NOT-SET')]] 

especially when you remove the building time constraint. Funny thing, it also speeds up the computer. Remove the fog of war and have fun looking at what the computer is doing. Then get infinite supplies and look at the computer exhausting its strategy. Fun times :-)

Similar is Warhammer 40k: Dark Crusade, which I picked up a few years ago (coincidently I'd never thought of ever getting a game with such a loosy name if it hadn't come bundled for free with a graphics card upgrade... and even like that the CD sat alone on a shelf for a while before I looked it up and realized I would actually like it.) Anyway, disable the construction times, infinite resources, is that it? No that one was a tad different as I had lots of fun looking at the lua code, modifying it and especially changing the stats of the players in the game files. Hey it's a game and I get to code something too, now that's what I call fun.

blah blah do you understand? blah blah". Just nod and something will happen. Figuring what do to later is left as an exercise to the reader (me) -- (and I'm still partly like that; the world lacks good man pages, vim for config files and a good backup tool.)

Anyway, sometimes mid-90's I was working for this startup in France and the whole point was to develop on BeOS. I was fresh from the university and happy like a puppy with a new toy. So here it goes again and "blah blah Be Headquarters blah blah one week". Next thing I know I'm landing in SFO and find my way to a hotel in Menlo Park, a block down on El Camino from Be's Headquarters. That's all cool with me. Oh and my English sucked so much that I had trouble ordering a freaking pizza on my own at night -- I tried a McDonald's next and resolved this by using my broken Spanish with better results, although I regretted the food later.

Anyway I report to Be's Headquarters in the morning, still wondering what I came in for. Somebody introduces me to the hobbit-based BeBox. That looks cool. Except the system is infantile so you program on this box next to it. Looks like a random beige PC. Guy boots it: "Hey it's SCO Linux, always heard of it, never seen it." "Have you ever used a Unix system before?" "Sure, I use Slackware Linux at home." "OK the goal of this week is to... err was to introduce you to Unix. Let's find something else to do now."

I do however learn that I'm "cross-compiling". vi, make, tar to flopyy, untar on the other side, printf debugging.

So anyway, I keep busy for the rest of the week, meeting BeOS team members. Cool bunch. Broken English and introvertism doesn't help for introduction though. Can't remember any of them. Bunch of ex-Apple guys. Someone is proud to have been part of the Newton team, I try not to laugh to loud. Highlight of the week is when David Ramsey, my host, takes me to Fry's and later to a shooting range.

Later on I'm back in France and they shipped me a hobbit BeBox, serial number 00001 or something, and the same SCO Linux PC. I am so eager to start the stuff that I dig under the desk to plug the PC, turn on the power button and... I'm blinded by a flash. Cough cough, bad smell. Well turns out the cheap power supply was still on 110V and it was not an auto-switch. We get a new power supply and luckily the board hadn't been damaged.

That made Droulers from BeEurope laugh out loud.

Later all the boxes I received had a post-it that said "220V" :-)

I don't quite remember kids shows that much. OK I remember watching stuff like Capitan Futuro (capitaine flamme), Candy, Calimero and japanese 4-force and mega-robots clones. It was already borderline when I was a kid, but those are painful to even try to watch today. Really painful.

I'm not sure what happened. Too fast.

Crying. She might have slipped on the wet boards. I pick her up. She becomes all floppy. Unexpected. I lie her on the floor. Playing? Unconscious? Seconds pass. 2? 5? She's back online now. I comfort her. Basics tests pass.

She's all fine now. I'm not. I was dead scared on the spot.

Since I had also recorded some video of my track sessions, I decided to write a little piece of software to generate an overlay to put on top of my video.

At first I thought I'd do a plugin for Sony Vegas Platinium, the software I use to edit the track video. The only thing I found was how to create "generator plugins", which sounded fine. Finding the SDK and the information for it was moderately easy. However the plugin architecture uses a deprecated feature of DirectX. It's hard to find the relevant SDK bits (TODO: fish some links and update this). In the end I kind of made it work but then I never managed to get the generator receive a proper time field, and it was all in COM under my old Visual Studio 2005. I guess I could have used GDI+ to render the graphics or something and then generate the bitmap for the generator but it all sounded like more work than I was willing to put in it.

So I gave up and decided to write a standalone piece of software that would generate a movie file, and then use Vegas to overlay it. I considered both Java and C# and in both case I had a hard time finding a good library to generate movies -- you'd think MS would support a managed version of Windows Media Framework but no... Moving on, I finally found a simple managed wrapper on top of the AVI file API that does the job and used that.

It's in C# using C# Express and .Net 3.5, so anyone with Windows can reuse it. There's no DirectX or WMF used, so I'd hope it would work under wine for other platforms.

Bottom line is that after spending most of my time finding the right tools and libs, I did quickly get something working:

The projects lives at http://trackvideo.googlecode.com .

It's quite primitive yet, I need to add things like a preview, some docs on the internals, there are things to refactor in the code, etc. I also need to make it more configurable since right now most things are hard-coded in the source. Oh and I need to have a fancier output. But at least it's a good foundation.

Let's be clear: my goal is to make something that's good for me out of the box, yet reasonably configurable by others. And contributions will be welcome.

Trackmaster is quite easy to use: simply create some split points using a maps overview (so make sure to do that when you have a fast network available, e.g. in advance at home over WiFi). Then you start it and it starts recording as soon as the first split point is reached.

Since I did not have a good mount for the phone, I just kept in my pocket. Worked fine.

There's a lot of data to look at and export after the fact:

Lap Top Speed (mph) Avg Speed (mph) Dist. (mi.) Time Session 2: 1 83.33 57.12 2.80 2:48.768 2 87.25 56.14 2.81 2:56.300 3 83.33 56.35 2.81 2:55.109 4 78.29 55.13 2.82 2:57.440 Session 3: 1 73.81 51.11 2.84 3:10.768 2 88.92 58.16 2.86 2:49.042 3 95.35 61.41 2.82 2:38.859 4 97.87 63.08 2.91 2:36.553 5 97.87 62.48 2.89 2:38.652 6 102.67 59.31 2.87 2:45.343 Session 4: 1 81.08 51.25 2.80 3:10.088 2 86.12 60.44 2.80 2:40.272 3 87.24 61.21 2.79 2:37.079 4 86.40 57.85 2.81 2:45.685 5 95.94 60.41 2.82 2:39.584 Session 5: 1 94.23 54.89 2.79 2:56.366 2 99.93 61.79 2.79 2:37.853 3 99.88 61.85 2.83 2:39.735 4 101.30 60.57 2.84 2:42.864 5 101.34 61.63 2.83 2:39.595 6 91.94 62.30 2.83 2:37.489 7 88.36 60.04 2.85 2:43.987 Session 6: 1 93.67 58.58 2.80 2:44.766 2 97.58 58.47 5.02 5:24.291 3 101.22 60.45 2.84 2:41.633 4 103.45 64.41 2.84 2:34.172

The list of participants was on the smaller side -- around 30 total with 15 in the novice group.

My dedicated instructor was Mike Meier, driving a black Prelude. That was nice since we had comparable cars although of course he had better mods and most important, he really knows how to drive. He was giving me plenty of feedback and tips on getting the right line. I had a great time with him and I hope to meet him again next time.

In preparation to the track day, I had changed my brake pads and brake fluid (Axxis Ultimate and ATE Typ200) with the help from http://www.xperformance.com and that worked wonder. However I can now feel when I reach the limit of the tires (the default Michelin MXM4 that came with the Civic) so next time I'll try to upgrade that -- which is good since I need new tires anyway now :-)

Here are the pictures that Dito Milian from GotBlueMilk took at the event:

This time I borrowed a Canon SX200 IS from Eugenia. I recorded a couple of sessions and extracted these 3 laps. Lap times are 2:38, 2:36 and 2:38 respectively:

Here are a few more images I took, first of the paddock:

The novice group is having a download meeting after a session:

Believe it or not, there is a playground! It doesn't seem to be used much:

.

The start line:

Turn 5, also named the corkscrew and turn 10:

Let's be honest: I love Amazon, first because they have a web site that does not suck and that is full of useful features. Once you've used them, all other e-commerce sites look disappointing.

The next best thing is when I became a prime customer. Sure, prime is not free, but if you factor the shipping price you'd pay, it all makes sense. Sometimes an item price will be a bit more expensive than elsewhere, but the resulting price after shipping and handling might be better on Amazon. And you get it in two days. No brainer.

There's something cool also about getting a UPS truck deliver stuff to you in the middle of a forest where there is no postal service delivery. It's faster than going to the nearest town -- although the DoItBest hardware store of Dallas, PA is nothing to be ashamed of and can be quite competitive.

So anyway, I thought for the fun I'd put here a selection of my reviews. It's quite a wide range.

KeyTronic 104 Key PS2 keyboard

This is a KeyTronic full-size PC keyboard. It's one of the best things you can attach to a computer.

If you do a lot of typing, that's the kind of keyboard you need: it has a nice feeling, the spacing and the layout is just fine, and contrary to laptop-like keyboards there's some real depth to the keys.

Contrary to some modern keyboards, like the Microsoft "ergonomic" one, all the keys work the same, even the space bar. You won't have a key that feels different or gets stuck because of bad plastic. They have all a similar pressure and feedback and all make a wonderful noise when pressed. You can type lightly or literally pound on it and it will work the same.

Note that this series of KeyTronic keyboards is a quite noisy. That's part of the product. If you want a silent keyboard, move along. It's not as noisy as the old IBM pounding-metal keyboards from the 80's or 90's, though.

It's durable too. My last KeyTronic lasted 10+ years before one of the keys started acting up from time to time. There's supposedly a lifetime warranty on it, but let's face it, after 10 years or so it's cheaper to get a brand new one than get the membrane replaced. It's also trivial to open it and service it yourself, if you're so inclined.

Tool House 770002 52 Piece Metric and Fractional Bit Tip and Socket Wrench Set

That's a nice thing to keep around for a great cheap price.

The case is convenient but it doesn't qualify of "durable". One of the closing tabs of the case broke when I tried to open it the very first time. It comes with a tiny piece of foam inside, which keeps everything in place, yet still when I hold the case vertically things tend to shift and move inside. Mere details -- you're not buying this for the case, are you? The case is just here to help put it away and avoid loosing all these pieces :-)

The two ratchets are nice and feel sturdy enough. The yellow screwdriver is quite narrow and lacks grip. There's a nice number of sockets, covering a whole lot of ranges. The sockets are good fits and I have yet to break or ruin one.

Overall it's nice to have this around, handy and at that price you don't have to be too careful.

Fiskars Chopping Axe 23.5-Inch #7857

This is a rather good axe and it's nice to use. I used it as a felling axe to clear some paths in the forest.

I used it to replace a very very old steel-head axe with a hickory handle (the head kept coming off and I don't have the tools to hang it again.) Being new it was nice and sharp, didn't get stuck too much. It was a bit shorter than I expected -- my old axe was a 25- or 26-inch, so 24 seemed a tad short whereas 28-inch seemed too long. Going from a hickory handle to synthetic, the feeling is not the same when it hits, it gave a much harsher feeling in my arms. It was also a tad lighter than my old axe. Fine, I had to adjust a bit, I got over it and the result is that I cut some hard old wood faster than before and it was a lot of fun.

Motorola T9500XLR 25-Mile 2-Way Radio Pair

I got these radios to keep a safety contact when I'm nearby in the forest, with hills and of course lots of trees in between. The effective range was about 2 miles in this condition, which was good enough for me. The radios are light to carry, they come with a handy belt clip. There's a dock for easy recharging. Using it was rather easy and intuitive, although the menu key that has several functions seem a bit confusing at first -- just adjust all settings with the manual in hand and then don't touch them again :-)

I'm not sure how long the battery lasts: I've used it for whole mornings or whole afternoons mostly sitting there on standby with maybe a few minutes worth of chat and it took several days like this for the battery indicator to get down to 2/3rd. It's a NiMH battery so it *will* have aging issues after a few years but by the time they start loosing their charge it will be more economical to simply buy a new set than replace the batteries.

I do give it 4-star instead of 5 just because of the "iVox" hands-free feature: I just couldn't get it to work and the manual is not too helpful on that one. I kept setting the mode on, then later when I'd try to use it nothing would happen and I'd realize the iVox mode had gone off in between. I'm dubious of the utility of that mode anyway, so it doesn't really matter.

If there's one feature I miss: I wish the radio would also display the current time. Like that I could skip carrying a watch. But then most people probably don't care about that :-)

Sony MDR-NC40 Noise Canceling Headphone

Overall these are good headphones. I use them when I travel, mostly to cancel airplane noise. If you've never used cancellation headphones, they are great to remove constant background noise, so in a plane that means you can better listen to your music/movie without having to put the volume insanely high. Note that noise cancellation does not cancel voice chatter, so don't even try to use this in an office -- in this case you want over-the-ear cups for good isolation.

They fold easily but folding the whole thing in the accompanying case takes a bit of practice and patience at first. It's a tight squeeze but I now manage to store my iPod nano in the case too. It then stores easily and it is pretty light to carry around.

Otherwise they are OK comfort-wise, just a tiny bit tighter on the ear than my older Sony noise canceling headphones. Sound-wise, the bass is a bit too much boosted even for my taste; a bit of equalization on the iPod fixes that easily.

Panasonic BL-C131A Network Camera Wireless 802.11

Overall this is a good camera. Setting it up with my wifi was trivial. Price is a bit steep but you get a quality product with good support, for once. I found a few limitations, your mileage may vary:

MIU Connoisseur Corkscrew

This is a really good "rabbit" like wine opener. If you've never used one, you'll be impressed the first time you use it. Not only is it faster but it is also more reliable and it's hard to break a cork with such an opener, even an old cork. That's a gift that will keep on being appreciated.

Price is really good and quality is on par. I generally use it once a week and I have no problem with the corkscrew. The screw itself is replaceable and I have yet to use the replacement after several years of use. The foil cutter broke after several months, but that can be easily replaced -- or just use a knife to remove the foil, as it is customary to do.

Sleep Better 3-Inch Visco Elastic Memory Foam Mattress

We have this on our queen bed, which mattress was good but now feels a bit too hard to our aging backs and has saggy spots. This foam topper fixes both issues, as is to be expected. The 3-inch is a good size and it's a pleasure to sleep -- or more appropriately "to sink" -- in it every night. At 2.5 lb/ft^3, the density is medium, which is good enough.

The foam arrived rolled in a big box. It was not as compressed as I thought -- some reviews make you think it's compressed in a dark hole and then will expand to fill your whole house... it's not that dramatic!

However the smell of new foam toppers is a known issue -- all foams I've seen do that anyway, it's not just that one. The original smell is not only nauseating, it gives me immediate headaches. I can't stress that enough: you must let the mattress air and expand in a *ventilated* non-living area for at least 2 or 3 days before using it. Don't rush it -- in case of doubt, let it air one more day rather than be deceived by the chemical smell, as it will be nauseating at first. Put it somewhere out of sight in a ventilated area, such as in the basement or the garage. If after 3 days you can stick your nose on it and not feel the urge to run away fast, then you can consider moving it in the bedroom.

After a month or so of use, there's still a slight curious smell the first time I'd get in bed, but nothing dramatic. It's such a pleasure to fall asleep and wake up on that thing, it's totally worth it.

So instead I found an old axe and used it to clear the old trees fallen on the paths. By old axe I mean in good condition yet 2 generations behind; and although the head was of really good quality it kept coming off the handle. A practical ax expert would just tell you you have to know how to hang your own handle to the ax head.

Although that sounded attractive for about a microsecond or two, I just got myself a brand new Fiskars Chopping Axe which was really so much more efficient yet shorter and lighter. I got the 23.5-inch one, which is the closest to the old 25-inch one I had been using. It's a tad short, but the only other choice is a 28-inch, which is really too long.

I also had some fun with the Craftsman Lawn Mower 917.288700 and did some maintenance on it, simple stuff like changing the oil and all the oil/gas/air filters.

The older Craftsman Tractor 917.256544 was out of commission but after removing the mower and adding a new battery that now makes a working tractor and I can attach it to my dumping cart.

The other thing I did was explore the 250 or so acres of forest, trying to match the deed description (in perch and rod units, no less) and I ended up with some nice tracks on Google Earth.

My main tool was mostly MyTracks, to record the tracks and upload them to Google Earth but eventually I also ended up writing my own Android Bearing app to compute the compass bearing between two marked points.

It's the first time I actually play with a GPS. On one hand it was nice as it actually worked fairly well it the medium-dense forest; on the other hand the precision wasn't that impressive -- the GPS generally indicated 8 or 16 meters for accuracy but it did not update fast enough when walking. Also the integrated compass on the phone was incredibly noisy with the reading typically fluctuating -/+ 10 degrees.

Finally I got quite a lot more done, including many many hours spent reading the vast content of TV Tropes, working on my Android apps ([Bearing|] obviously, but Timeriffic, Brighteriffic and Flashlight got translated to French too and had many other improvements, without even mentionning Nerdkill) and much more.

Overall what made the biggest difference was having a real 24-hour almost-instant internet connection instead of a 33K modem line. In that regard, I must say the ARC booster antenna was incredibly good when combined with the aging Kyocera KPC650. Bandwidth ranged from 70/40 KB/s (down/up) down to 3 KB/s (in rain at night, it's really that weather sensitive) with a typical average speed of 15 KB/s when I was generally getting no signal at all without the booster antenna. I guess being in the middle of a forest, behind a hill and out of the official zone coverage doesn't help :-) The signal strength indicator was around -100 dBm without the antenna and up to -80 dBm with it.

It dried. Eventually it stopped completely.

That's OK, it will come back later. It is coming back. Slowly.

The music never stopped. It was actually louder, which is why you could not hear it.

I'd like to say it won't happen anymore. Unfortunately I know it will. Because there are things I cannot cope with. There are events that I simply fear. I cannot cope with loss. Yet it is bound to happen, for all beings are mortal.

I wrote about it in 1993, yet nobody could understand. Me neither. They thought it was poetic when it was a cry for help. Luckily deep wasn't that deep. Sink in 1993. Sink in 1994. Sink in 1995. Sink and bounce. Analyze and reinvent yourself. 2000 arrived. It was the sunny tomorrow I was looking for.

But this is different. 1995 was personal. My universe was changing. Everything else was stable, which helped.

The next crisis will be dramatic. It's not about me anymore.

What will I do? I don't know. How will I react? Externally I won't react. External watchers will not understand -- they never do.

Maybe Tigger would know. I sure don't.

Turns out Fractint development kind of stopped at Fracting version 20.0, one that is said to "even work under Win95". Outch :-)

However the DOS version still rocks. It runs very nicely under XP in DOS mode without any tweaks and finds lots of interesting VESA modes to use, so I ended up using 1280x1024 mostly.

In a matter of minutes I got myself re-acquainted with the interface and generated these images:

Click on the images to view the full album and larger versions.

Fractint is unique in that it can compute in a variety of precisions, ranging from integer to floating point but also the one called "arbitrary precision". Think zooms in the range of 10^100 or, as you will see below, 10^240. 20 years ago the speed was simply ridiculous.

This is called "deepzooming", and you can view many deep zoom examples here.

Deepzooming at the top of the Mandelbrot set has already been done, for example in this page from Bengt MÃ¥nsson. To put things in perspective, the most inner zoom I computed took me 3h30 at 1280x1024 whereas the page above reports 800 hours at 640x480 on a 90 MHz Pentium.

All of this starts when zooming at the tip of Mandelbrot, near -2,0.

There are a bunch of converging "nodes". One would think the intersection of two nodes is empty. Nothing exciting to see here?

Yet by zooming at the intersection between 2 nodes, it eventually splits in 4, then 8, 16, etc...

And there's yet-another Mandelbrot in there:

Laps alone (open passing, end of day):

Typical speed in and out of turns (in the 2:40 case):

Red lines: 3rd=75, 4th=90

 *** curr_category=[[raw locals().get('curr_category', 'NOT-SET2')]] permalink_url=[[raw locals().get('permalink_url', 'NOT-SET')]] rel_permalink_url=[[raw locals().get('rel_permalink_url', 'NOT-SET')]] 

A few days ago this happened again. In the past, the problem would happen for a while and suddenly the mobo might start booting, so annoyed I unplugged my cell phone to go read my mails somewhere else and... oh wait it just booted!

Huh? Backup! OK the cell phone is one of these smart cell phone and I had plugged to the USB to charge it (incidentally the USB has power even when the PC is stopped.)

I tried a couple of times and this is definitive: having the phone plugged into USB simply locks up the BIOS. At boot it will stop after printing the CPU and before starting to detect the drives.

A flagrant test is to boot the PC without the phone plugged, enter the BIOS setup and plug the phone: it locks up instantly. Remove the phone and the setup works again.

Anyhow, I found an Abit AN8 forum page that describes exactly this behavior. Granted the page is for the Abit AN8-SLI motherboard, not the ASUS M2N-E but the description is right on and I take it's not just a coincidence.

Right now I'm more feeling in the "down" part of the tide.

Too much clutter. On my desk, in my mind. Need to clean it. Annoying but nothing new.

I'll reuse plan A. Worked the last N-1 times: Make a list. Bullet points. Draw a line. Everything below the line is trashed. Act on the rest. Get some exercise, some sleep and reboot. Restart cycle every two years.

There's a plan B too. For serious and drastic times. I used it in '95 and it was painful. Let's not do it again.

The only non-trivial projects that got completed in that time frame are rig3 and asqare.

The numbers may vary and the ranking might chance slightly but overall that's a pretty constant search pattern on my site except for one unusual entry.

Amusing, isn't it?

That looked like a foot-long piece of solid, maybe wood or similar.

And it landed. On the hood.

And bounced back. On the windshield.

And finally bounced back somewhere else.

The whole thing lasted 2 seconds and now I need a new windshield and 5 days of body shop on the hood.

I guess it could have been worse. But, damn, that windshield was barely 4 month old!

Thinking about it later, my reaction had been to do absolutely nothing and in fact it was the right one -- there was traffic all around me, there was no escape pattern to avoid it.