The Soundtrack of my Office

Listening to music while you work is tough. You can't just listen to top 40 songs... they cause you to spend too many cycles actually listening to the music. You need something a bit more unobtrusive. Something in the background, mellow... but not too easy, we're not trying to buy a new shirt or riding an elevator here.

Here's a list of SHOUTcasts or MP3/MOD archives that I like to listen to while working:

• Groove Salad at SomaFM
• Washington University aminet mod archive (huge)
• Kosmic Free Music Foundation (KFMF)

I'll update this as I think of more... later

Canadian Music Creators Coalition

The Barenaked Ladies, Avril Lavigne, Billy Talent and many more understand that what matters most to them is the fans. Without the fans, they are nothing. Well, they formed the Canadian Music Creators Coalition to speak out against the labels for suing the fans in the name of the artists when the artists don't want to sue in the first place.

They have even published their first white paper!

If you don't like to read, you can watch Steven Page from the Barenaked Ladies on Canada AM.

Down with DRM. It's about time.

Are you ready for a Revolution?

As the release of the Nintendo Revolution gets closer, ads and possible game ideas are popping up. This is certainly going to be a very interesting game console with almost endless possibilities!

Check out this ad, Star Wars anybody?

I really wish it was high def though... that would clinch it for me.

My Golf Record

I've been using a free handicap tracker for the last year. It's not great, but it was free. Located over at the Canadian Golf Guide, it kept track of your last 20 rounds, which is required for calculating your handicap.

However, this morning I found a new site that offers pretty much the same functionality, but has more features for free. Surf on over to My Golf Record and check out their expansive site. Obviously there are growing pains on this new site and you might see the odd ad for Taylor Made, Ping or Nike, but it gets what you need done.

The only additional calculator that they don't offer is a Course Handicap calculator. This should be integrated and included for free. At the moment, I'm stuck having to surf on over to the USGA Course Handicap Calculator. I'm not complaining much, at least I don't have to do it by hand!

Oh, one more thing. Make sure that when you are entering your scores into your handicap tracker that you use the USGA Equitable Score Control. Basically it saves you from trashing your handicap on those disaster holes you have every once in a while.

Your intrepid golfer... Lennox

Canadian Football Cleats

Summer is in the air. The grass is greening up, thunderstorms threaten, and Ultimate discs are dusted off and thrown again for the first time. It's time to break out your dirty old cleats!

That is, until you notice a big rip down one side and fondly remember that last fall you were stuck with wet feet and swore that you would purchase a new pair as soon as you got home. So, now it's spring and you've got to buy some new cleats. Where do you turn?

Well, it's summer, so it should be really easy to head to your local sports store and buy some football or soccer cleats. Browsing through the shoes, you realize that the last pair that you had were football cleats, and you really liked the cleat pattern. Soccer cleats? Not so much. You see, here lies the difference. Soccer cleats are made for ball control, kicking and lateral movements. Football cleats are made for grip. In Ultimate, we don't need to kick a ball, so there are lots of people who want the extra grip that soccer shoes can't provide (wouldn't want your cleats to dig in when you are trying to kick, would you?).

So, you're trying to find a pair of football cleats, at a reasonable price (you still need to save some money for Advil, sport tape and new sport socks... might I recommend Thorlos?). You find 4 pairs of football cleats at the local sports stores, $40-$70. All bottom of the line from Adidas or Nike. What can you do now?

See, the problem is that A) in Canada we don't support football well in the school system, so we don't get a lot of football cleats and B) football is a fall sport, it's now springtime, there are none in stock. So where does a Canadian Ultimate player turn for cheap football cleats?

GAIA Ultimate offers a great pair of shoes made for Ultimate players. Unfortunately, they retail for $130 CDN. Another source might be Niketown, and if you can find a pair of Nike Speed TDs you'll end up forking out $130. You can call up New Balance and get them to order a pair of 890s or 790s. It'll take 3 weeks to order them and will cost you north of $100 per. Even UnderArmor is coming out with their own line of football cleats, but they won't be here until June. Adidas and Reebok have football cleats that we can't get here in Canada yet, only in the USA.

So, why don't you just get them from the States? eBay and Eastbay are great places to look for cleats. FootLocker, Champs, etc. are all the same company, so you could try there as well. Quite often you can find a pair on sale, and if you do, tag on $30 shipping to get them across the border.

The point here is that for well under local retail prices you can get a pair of football cleats, shipped up from the states into Canada. Why can't we get these from a Canadian supplier? Is the market really that thin?

I just finished completing a deal with an eBay Store where I got two pairs of cleats for under $100. Wouldn't it make sense for Canadian retailers to stock cheaper football cleats?

Off to play with my new cleats...

Bad Website Design 101: NCAA Sports

So today was the first day of March Madness down in The States. We catch a bit of the buzz up in our office by running an office pool for fun. We really don't know much about the colleges, so really it's a crap shoot.

Considering that it's an office pool, we like to keep up on the scores throughout the day. One of the more ingenious ways of doing this over the last couple of years has been the MMOD -- March Madness On Demand. The NCAA Sports website has live video feeds to watch the games. "Great," you think.

Let's step back a bit here. The NCAA loves to show these games on TV. The more the merrier. In fact they often have play-in games before the 64 team showdown so that teams that are on the bubble can play their way into the tournament. These games happen a couple days before the tourney and are great for increasing the TV revenue for the NCAA and CBS.

So, back to the topic at hand. We now have this online video feed that we can all watch in our cubicles or from our desks at home so that we can watch games that are out of market. Super! Well, not really. You see, I logged in 10 minutes into the first game ... registered ... and then was directed to the "Lobby".

I had to wait in a "waiting line" to get a video feed... I was number 108,193!!

I understand that you can't just stream an infinite number of video feeds. I understand that it all costs money. What I don't understand is their preparation for this. Last year they had tonnes of people try and watch the feeds. They knew that it would be popular again this year. So why not get the servers in line to take on the onslaught of requests?? Since I didn't wait in line I assume that they are still showing ads on these feeds, so they are a source of revenue as well. I know there are a whole bunch of ads on the actual screen.

To top it all off, as you waited in line half of the screen was devoted to telling you that if you were a VIP you'd be number 1. Ok. I bite. How do I become a VIP?? That seemed impossible. There was no obvious way of becoming a VIP. There were no links and no information on where to go or how much.

I never actually closed the window while I waited in line. It told me that if I closed the window I would lose my place in line. That's understandable, so I kept it open. Eventually, after about 45 minutes or so the "Lobby" window gave me an internal server error. Last time I checked I had made it up to position 98,540. Oh well, I really didn't want to give the NCAA revenue anyway. :(

That my friends is bad website design.

So you bought a new hard drive?

If you bought a new hard drive to match your new motherboard, or if you bought a new motherboard to match that fancy new UDMA133 hard drive you've had for a while ... are you getting the most out of it?

I was wondering that today as I was trying to resolve an issue that I've had for a couple of days after replacing my motherboard. Here's the scoop: I had just replaced my motherboard and Windows XP recognized all of the new components on the mobo. After a quick reboot so that XP was started fresh with all of the new drivers, I noticed that my mouse cursor was laggy and if I was watching a video or something, it was pausing for a split second every two seconds or so. Initially I thought it was a conflict between cards in the system (I only have a network card and video card) so I moved the network card to a new PCI slot. No change.

I was reading somewhere that it might be due to conflicting priorities between my anti-virus software and my network card. It was recommended to reinstall the anti-virus so that it could insert itself freshly into the system. No change.

So I decided to run the full system test from the guys over at PC PitStop to see if anything turned up. Oddly enough, my hard drive performance was terrible! Uncached speed was 3 mb/s!

So I started to look into the problem on the Microsoft website and found out that on the advanced tab of the Primary IDE controller, even though it was trying to use DMA if possible, it was running in PIO Only. Incredibly, I wasn't using any of the new controller specs at all and was relying on transfer speeds that may date back 12 years. Based on the suggestion of others on the net, I tried to change the setting. That didn't work, XP had flagged the controller as being able to run only in PIO mode. It's a possibility that 6 or more CRC errors were found while running in DMA mode, and Windows started to downgrade the UDMA Mode(s).

So, the suggestion was to remove the controller and let Windows reinstall the driver. I did that and after two reboots I was back up and running. I checked the properties again and I was running in UDMA Mode 2. The mouse was smooth on the screen too, and my system was A LOT faster to boot. But, now my question was: How do I get my IDE transfer speed up from 33 MB/s to 133 MB/s???

The search took me to pcguide.com which pointed to the culprit: 40-wire IDE cables that I've been using for 10 years. They are only capable of 33 mb/s! To achieve higher speeds, engineers added a grounding wire between each wire so that the signals could be more reliable with less interference. These cables were optional in UDMA modes 0, 1 and 2, which is why I've been stuck at mode 2. So, I bought some new cables and an eager to try them out.

I would suggest that if you are running a computer built in the last 5 years that you seriously look into whether or not you are running with 80 wire IDE cables. If not, check to see what your hardware is capable of and check to see if your IDE Controllers are running at their max. I bet that they aren't and you could use a $10 upgrade to 80-wire IDE cables! How many times have you been sitting there waiting for your hard drives to catch up? Well, not anymore!

Time to pull apart the box and get up to speed (so to say).

NHL 2005-06 ... It's already getting old

You know what? I'm a fan of implementing rules to make a game better. So far, each NHL game is much more dynamic than the game that we saw two years ago. Now, even a two goal lead doesn't mean much anymore. Games are higher scoring, penalties are up, and there are more power plays. The shootout gives fans an ending to every game and there's not as much icing of the puck anymore (when you ice the puck, you can't change lines, so you don't get a break anyway).

Does this mean that the games are better though? In my opinion no. Sure, the league is "cracking" down on all of the hooking, interference and holding. But for the last couple of weeks I have seen more penalties called when there was no infraction than I've seen legit calls! The players are crashing the net and effectively blocking out the goalies, or taking them out of the play for rebounders. As soon as any defender touches the jersey of an opponent above the waist it's called as a hook, and I even saw the other night a Leaf defender dive to swat at a puck near the blue line and the ref called a penalty on the closest standing Islander. It's crazy.

Now, this begs the question: Are the refs at fault for calling bad calls because they've got a quota to meet, or has the league actually changed the rules so that if a guy loses his balance around you, YOU get a penalty? I just wonder when the fans are going to start to get annoyed at all of the crease violations that result in goals or injuries to their goalies. I wonder how many games are going to be decided by bad calls? When will the fans wake up and see not a better game, but a game that is decided by what the referee is imagining?

I hope it's soon, I'm getting tired of watching the crap on the ice.

GDI+ Widen Bug

So when developing our very graphic intensive GDI+ mapping product, I ran into this problem back in July 2004. If you have a GraphicsPath with two lines, all the same point (in this case at 100,100) and you try to run a widen on the path, GDI+ throws an out of memory exception. Not cool.

Essentially you have a point, and you want to widen the point to create a "circle". However, because the Pen is drawn like a highlighter and the widen call creates a path that outlines the shape created by the pen, it seems that the code to widen doesn't work nicely in this scenario.

Here is the C# code:

GraphicsPath gp = new GraphicsPath();
gp.AddLines(new Point[]{new Point(100,100),new Point(100,100), new Point(100, 100)});
gp.Widen(new Pen(Color.Black, 1F));

I have run into a lot of similar issues with GDI+. Hidden bugs that only show up under intensive graphic manipulation. I hope someone at Microsoft is listening because it's exceedingly difficult to create enterprise applications with GDI+.