Total Conversion

Picked up Lord of the Rings Extended, Star Wars Collection & Harry Potter Collection on Blu Ray from Amazon.co.uk . 35 Disks in Total. Family voted and started watching Fellowship of the Rings tonight at 8:30pm. Epic in many senses of the word. Particularly proud of 2 daughters who still love the movies after twice annual viewing marathons of the DVD's. Tonight was first time on BluRay ;) BTW, shipped from UK to South Africa it was half the price of buying it locally, even after paying UPS + Customs Duty.

WinFF 1.4 pre-release has been uploaded to http://code.google.com/p/winff/downloads/list for Windows and https://launchpad.net/~paul-climbing/+archive for Ubuntu/Debian. We are pushing for a stable release in time for the next Debian release and then polishing it further in time for the next Ubuntu LTS. http://code.google.com/p/winff/downloads/list

Depeche Mode fans, check this treasure. 'Alan Wilder Collected' film all 4 parts live now! » The official Recoil Alan Wilder Blog http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3_0zGw3gj8

So my day job includes doing some work on MS Exchange 2010.  I'm a stats guy and like digging in the log files to get details on the systems I work with. I was asked to pull some stats out of Exchange and went straight into the Message Tracking logs. By the unwritten laws of loggiles you will get a ton of information, some of which you don't need.  I identified the fields important to me and wrote this python script to parse a folder full of log files into a summarised set of .csv files that you can process further. In my test case, I copy the log files from 4 production servers into a dev box and then run the script there.  This way there is a minimal performance / disk impact to the production users. I am *NOT* a python programmer so make fun of the code if you wish, I won't be offended.  This script is basically a product of much googling and reading of docs.python.org. # parse Exchange 2010 MessageTracker Log Files # (c) Ian Stoffberg # 0) make fo...

Picked up a cherished cd from my high school years. The Secret Policeman's Other Ball. About $5 at a local flea market. I hope my brother still has his. I see it selling for $129 on Amazon. I have the dvd set as well. I can highly recommend it. Acoustic Sting, Phil Collins, Donovan, Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton & Bob Geldof. 11 tracks at just over 40 minutes. Interesting history linked to the cd. Highly recommended. http://www.amazon.com/Secret-Policemans-Other-Various-Artists/dp/B0000032V3 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_Policeman's_Other_Ball http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001GP5TMM/ref=pd_lpo_k2_dp_sr_1?pf_rd_p=1278548962&pf_rd_s=lpo-top-stripe-1&pf_rd_t=201&pf_rd_i=B0000032V3&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_r=0FZPV75N0R4PKM2BPBYG Also picked up Prodigy's Fat of the Land and Portishead's Dummy for similar prices. Come to Cape Town people and I hope you're just as lucky! http://www.amazon.com/Secret-Policemans-Other-Various-A...

How did I get to 43 years old without realising that "Moon over Bourbon Street" by Sting is about a vampire? Confession and realisation documented on my blog if you are bored. http://istoff.blogspot.com

Long winded titles aside, it was quite a humbling and interesting little moment from my day that lead to this post.              I am not sure if I need to engage the tag at this point, but I've decided to blog this without getting all my thoughts in order.  A little brainstorm is in order as I really don't think I should spend any more time thinking about this without committing some of my thoughts to the web. Probably about 23 years ago, by my reckoning, Sting released his second solo album "Nothing like the Sun".  An evolution of his previous "Dream of the Blue Turtles" and an album I thoroughly enjoyed listening to many times over.  Some of the songs had really interesting lyrics and easily had me reading them over and over trying to "get" the message behind them.  Songs about Pinochet & Noah & human emotion were easily decoded and understood while some you just appreciated them because you enjoyed listening and singi...

Not a big believer in the whole Groupon type system before. I joined Dealify here in South Africa and bought a pair of sunglasses at a good discount. I got the voucher a few days ago and I was wondering what the hell to do with it? Do I present it at the store or mail to somebody or what? I was still pondering the question today when the sunglasses were delivered by overnight courier. I guess that answers the question.

Modern Warfare 3, Battlefield 3, Uncharted 3, Forza 4, FIFA12. I'm going to get serious carpal tunnel.

If, like me, you still listen to and love Depeche Mode. Give this a listen, http://soundcloud.com/dominatrix-1/ Remixes (downloadable) of modern and classic mode tracks. Even some obscure songs get the treatment. This guy has serious skills. I've been listening to so many versions of Mode remixes over the years that it takes a lot to get my attention and stay in my playlists. These tracks seem permanently embedded into my players both at work and at home. http://soundcloud.com/dominatrix-1/

So I'm deep into Catching Fire, book 2 of the Hunger Games series. The individual story takes on a broader scale as her story starts to impact on the people around her. It's wonderfully told and evolves at the perfect pace to keep you drawn in. Hard to put down each night. Reading on the Android tablet is a dream. I've been using the Kindle Reader mostly, but can highly recommend Zinio, CoolReader & Aldiko as well. Not 100% settled on a PDF reader yet, but I'll get there.

At the risk of spamming everybody, I am reading The Hunger Games on my ASUS Transformer Tablet. Didn't expect to like it as much as I have. Totally drawn into the story. Suzanne Collins will probably be getting my money for the sequels as well. Its fantasy told in a way that makes you experience the main character's thoughts and experiences and draws you headlong into the story. Hope it ends well.

Doing some bugfixing on WinFF. Windows 7 version works fine, but broken under Ubuntu Oneiric. Found bugs open on upstreams, so will start trying to isolate the behaviour issues and provide feedback to the upstream developers. Classic example of why Free Software is good. I have a problem, I help others fix it and my stuff works too ;) I confess I initially blamed Unity / Ubuntu first (bad habit), but it seems the issues could be GTK or Free Pascal / Lazarus related.

In celebration of Walking Dead Season 2 & Halloween Month. Meet istoff-Zombie

Just installed FIFA12 and before I can play it wants to install a 3.3GB updated??? Welcome to the future, EA Sports. What did you sell me, the beta??

Just watched Coldplay perform live in Cape Town. Chris Martin joked that the reason they took so long to come here (12 years) was that the SA Government took so long to approve the VISA. Lightly veiled barb over the Dalai Lama saga, I guess. Was the first time I took my kids to a rock concert. They enjoyed the music and their dad's lack of rhythm.

Just watched Archbishop Tutu slam our government. Never felt more empathy with him than now. Tutu is a lifelong ANC supporter. For him to declare that the ANC Government does not represent him, is like Nelson Mandela saying the same. It is absolutely monumental and important speech in our democracy. These comments are in the following context: The SA government has dragged its heels in allowing the Dalai Lama to visit South Africa to participate in Tutu's 80'th birthday. It's a non-political visit, but our government is so deep in trade with China that they had no intention of approving the VISA. After living for years in Apartheid South Africa, for our new government to behave in this way is morally reprehensible to every South African. Bring on the vote.

10 days left to buy your Humble Indie Bundle. http://www.humblebundle.com/ I got mine yesterday. http://www.humblebundle.com/

Why do I want this SOOOO bad ? http://www.vesalia.de/e_chameleon.htm http://www.vesalia.de/?V02b0f1359504316775a5f56520a514e01101f0954414752050140090a1e31115579633a223c6373744e03263f2a2a73661560131e7c7523376b79722d676f2777554243444a06680358594f065b470c79640d3157054e057b3330625f5549095b76693c5d2c627d67685263656b7#overview

I made up an looping slideshow with 24 slides. Each one has a recording of myself saying something inane or screaming at one of the 20 colleagues in the open plan office I share. I have set the slides to loop repeatedly. Each slide has a duration of 35 minutes, so tomorrow, my voice will ring out unexpectedly in the office while I take the day off. I have disconnected keyboard/mouse/monitor and I hope security isn't freaked out during the night while they make their patrols.

So this girl at work says my blog is boring and geeky.  I guess I'll take half of that as a compliment.  I'm taking tomorrow off work, but, since I work in an open plan, I thought I'd leave them something to comfort them while I'm away. I made up an auto-running powerpoint slideshow with 24 slides.  Each one has a recording of myself saying something inane or screaming at one of them.  I have set the slides to loop repeatedly.  Each slide has a duration of 35 minutes, so at various intervals tomorrow, my voice will ring out unexpectedly in the office. I unplugged keyboard, mouse and switched off monitor.  As I sit here typing this blog post, that looping presentation is running.  Any security guards walking by might be tempted to unlock the office and look in, but I doubt they will know what the hell is going on. The possibility of playing creaking horror sound efforts to freak out colleagues just came to mind.  Save that for later. Will p...

One more reason I love my android tablet. I copied some training dvd's I have onto my Apache server into a folder named training. I then browsed to the folders and see the different dvd file layouts. I can browse them and watch the videos. Each one has a different structure and layout. Using a mixture of .mov, flv and wmv video, some with html navigation. Everything plays and launches beautifully from the Android Browser. On the IPAD2, only the .mov files play properly. Will probably have to re-encode all the other videos so my wife can access them. What a pain! Navigation is also a pain due to the lack of a back button on the ipad. Its such a mission to get it running smoothly I'm tempted to just not bother. Oh, and that's not all. When selecting a video to watch, Android pops up an option to play via upnp to my TV. So I can watch it on tv and multitask on the bloody device at the same time. It works so much better than the IPAD in this use case its like com...

Just went to Cnn.com to look for Wall Street protest news. Can't even find the word WALL on main page. I've been noticing this media bias for years, but this is just ridiculous.

Just got the eeePad Transformer keyboard dock. batterylife := batterylife + hours(8);

So a lazy friend of mind decided to rebuild his media server and didn't want to do it alone.  Foolishly, I agreed to help.  I've been down this road before and could have predicted the outcome. The plan was he wanted to install Ubuntu Server to be a streaming media platform for his family and also to his new Asus eeePad Transformer Honeycomb Tablet.  All good and well.  A good enough reason to blow an evening, I thought.  I had been planning to upgrade an old Fedora 12 box, so I told him I would do the same install with him and we could share the learning experience together.  I always figured I could reinstall Fedora or CentOS again a few days later, if I didn't want to stick with the Ubuntu Server.  Considering that it would be running in headless, GUI-less mode, I figured the Ubuntu box wouldn't get on my nerves too much. Naturally, R chickened out at the end and I ended up doing the install on my lonesome.  Thankfully, I had anticipated th...

streamed 1080p mkv over wifi to eeepad transformer tablet to plex client. 6 second buffer at start. works great. also tested upnp. mediatomb on served,upnpplay rockplayer on tablet. didnt test hd yet

Agreed to wipe the O/S on one of my Fedora Servers to help a friend. He wanted me to walk him through a Ubuntu Server setup so I thought I would wipe an older Fedora12 box and do an install while he does his. I just finished installing & configuring Plex ( www.plexapp.com ) & Mediatomb on Natty Server. 4 hours later everything working. Some minor lessons learned along the way. Sadly, he chickened out and I'm stuck with an Ubuntu Server I'll probably wipe. http://www.plexapp.com

None of this is cast in stone.  In fact, I can pretty much guarantee that this will change before the next release.  I have been implementing some changes to WinFF that I felt would get me into the swing of developing.  I am learning a lot of lessons during this process, but feel excited enough about it that I wanted to share. Current Released Version This is a screen from the current development version.  It needs much more testing and quality control before release and the list contains a ton more info that the average user needs to see regarding file info, but its useful to have on during the development cycle. The key new features I am excited about is the enhanced queue display in the file list with all the extra detail and the ability for each queue item to have different conversion settings.  This has bugged me for a while and in the spirit of "fixing it yourself" I spent the last few evenings on this. I hope the many users of WinFF enjoy the ne...

Android port for Lazarus incoming! http://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/Android_Interface#Compiling_the_example_LCL-Android_Appl Finally something that will let me write Android apps with my fave dev tool! http://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/Android_Interface#Compiling_the_example_LCL-Android_Appl

Started hacking on WinFF again. It's been too long. www.winff.org if you've never used it before. http://www.winff.org

Just donated to adblock on chrome. feels good.

Just installed Ubuntu 11.04 and experiencing Unity for the first time. My head hurts. I can't imagine what it must be like for new users. Is this the future? I feel like I'm playing a complex strategy game without following the tutorials first. I can't imagine what can be done to remedy this. At 1900x1200 it looks absolutely dire. I just wanted to check out the latest mythbuntu, but realising why I stuck with Fedora 14 so long. I'm planning an F15 install on my laptop and dreading what Gnome3 is going to be like. Seems like XCFE / KDE4 will become my default from now on. Thankfully the one Mint box I still have in the family remains a sane choice I can recommend to others.

Rage HD from ID Software free on IOS this week. Will be borrowing wife's IPAD while she's sleeping.

Bloody excel boffins. I can't draw to save my life. This guy draws using a spreadsheet. Aaargh! Microsoft Excel Drawing http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WvHXDepqAQ

So my kids were playing Singstar on PS3 hooked up to my PC monitor. Using Android Splashtop I was able to connect to my desktop and opened VLC's capture screen. Saw the kids making faces as they sang into the monitor. Wife & I had a great laugh. Now I'm wondering if it isn't a little "big brother" creepy instead? A totally unplanned for use of my beloved droid. Won't do it again, PROMISE!

On Android, long clicking on a url, brings up a Share Link option. When used in combination with JDownloaderRC, its an awesome way to download links you encounter in your feeds on your backend server running JDownloader.

So how do I easily share my blog posts on G+. Is inserting the link acceptable? http://istoff.blogspot.com

Another visitor.  Stay awhile, stay forever! I couldn't resist. I had to try hooking up the Playstation 3 Controller to my Asus eee Pad Transformer Tablet.  The Asus is running the latest Honeycomb 3.2 via the Prime Custom Rom. Without much fuss, I now have various emulators running on my 32" TV using a Bluetooth Sixaxis controller to play.  I tested a few roms using Gensoid and Snesoid, but my fave's are currently the Amiga Emulator UAE4Droid and Frodo, the Commodore 64 emulator. The latter is the clue to the opening line of this blog post.  +1 to you if you get the reference. It all works relatively painlessly once its setup, but keybindings per emulator can get tricky.  I have DOSBox as well, but I guess the fastest way to have all this stuff setup is using a keyboard dock to help you debug it and then you should be fine.  Its a bit fiddly using the onscreen keyboards and toggling various modes, but its not impossible.  It might be dauntin...

I can't believe we haven't had this before.  One of the things you can do very easily on a Linux box is to integrate your documents or config folders into a Version Control System.  For the uninitiated, a VCS is typically used by programmers to track changes to programs and allow snapshots or releases / versions to be made.  Its not really designed for document folders, but it has the side effect of tracking changes over time to your documents.  It can be done seamlessly on a scheduled basis without much intervention on your part.  At any point you can revert back in time to previous versions of a file in order to recover changes you might have lost.  Its a very handy technique which requires quite a bit of skill to get working seamlessly.  Once you use it, you realise how powerful and convenient this can be. In OSX Lion, Apple has wrapped this functionality in a fantastic GUI for your documents.  I was working on a document that went through ma...

Hooked up my Android Tablet to PS3 Controller over Bluetooth yesterday. Fired up Impossible Mission C64 using the Frodo Emulator. Geekness, Greatness, Goodness...

dad was a lifelong arsenal fan. he would have liked this image. it's from the cover of the funeral leaflet for the service tomorrow. originally a number 8 shirt belonging to Nasri.

Funeral for my dad tomorrow. Arrangements sorted, speeches written and rewritten. hoping for good weather and a fantastic send off.

If you haven't bought the Humble Indie Bundle 3 yet, you're missing out! http://go.madmimi.com/redirects/f239845ee6488f9e4a45d0ea9beaf610?pa=4674112866 http://go.madmimi.com/redirects/f239845ee6488f9e4a45d0ea9beaf610?pa=4674112866

If you have a rooted Android device, highly recommend the following. Use CIFSMANAGER to map remote shares (samba or windows) to folders on your sdcard. Then browse via your filemanager or mediaplayer to play your video content wirelessly. For the mediaplayer, recommend Rock Player & Moboplayer and lately have tried Dice Player which is the only one that plays some of my mkv's with ac3 sound. Without rooting, ES File Manager will also try to stream remote shares while browsing, but its not as seamless an option. When this works, its nice to think you have a multi-terabyte internal sdcard in your Android Device!

So I needed to do some photo editing on OSX. Needed to do some detailed masking of backgrounds out of an image. I turned to the GIMP on OSX. Weird. 9 out of 10 people would have gone for Photoshop.

Just upgraded to Lion today.  Not bad for $29 that I can use on multiple computers.  Installation is easy and brings some more tablet style functionality to the desktop.  Not sure if I will change my workflow to use these new features. So far so good.  Had to upgrade my NX Client to connect to my Fedora machines & just started upgrading Virtualbox now. Oh, 1 minor thing. My Gimp stopped working.  Causes X11 to crash in a loop. Might have to boot a Linux VM just to do some graphics work.

Just had a day of sympathies & best wishes from family, friends and all of you. Drawing strength from all of this. Had a ton of family over for supper. The chances are slim, but somewhere some irish blood must have been infiltrated into this southern tip of Africa because we always have a good time when we mourn. Very little tears, lots of stories and laughter. Celebrate Life! (There, I did it. I quoted Rick Springfield. Boss fans can kill me later)

Just got back from the hospital. My dad passed away this morning. At 81 years old, he lived in Apartheid ruled South Africa for most of his life. In 1994 he proudly voted for the first time for a free South Africa and was able to live through the rebirth of our rainbow nation. Last year he saw England play Algeria in Cape Town during the Soccer World Cup in Cape Town, fulfilling a lifelong dream ( it was a crap match, though...). At any rate, he had heart bypass surgery in 1991 and cheated death for the next 20 years, for which I will always be grateful. RIP Dad, at least you got to see Arsenal having some glory with Tony Adams, Dennis Bergkamp & Thierry Henry. We will miss you.

Why do i like "Want you gone" and "still alive" by Jonathan Coulton so much? Does the satisfaction gained when i beat Portal 1 & 2 make the songs better? Can't stop singing and hhumming them.

Steam is going to bankrupt me. Sturmovik for $5. Sigh.

Just picked up fieldrunners hd on tablet. Its 1230am. Will i play a bit or go sleep?

Second post following immediately after. Just picked up Splashtop HD & X-Plane for my Asus Transformer Honeycomb Tab. All this proprietary software is going to give me a terribly bad conscience.

Wanted to make my first post a memorable one. Failed. No wait. Here's an honest to God original quote. "It's easy to get lost in thought if you don't go there often." - Me. Really. made it up 30 years ago, but didn't patent it. Who knew you could try and protect your quotes as IP? Anyway. I KNOW I said it first!

What can I say?  Father's day tradition of annoying the wife and spending continued for one more year. I picked up an ASUS eeePad Transformer 32GB Wireless model and I'm loving it.  It shipped with Android 3.0 Honeycomb as standard, but after switching it on and connecting to WIFI, it detected an update which it proceeded to download in the background without any prompting. While this was happening I decided to research how to Root the thing and naturally turned to XDA Developers. I found that the rooting required a (micro) sd card to perform which went relatively smoothly.  I then installed the Prime Custom ROM also from XDA Developers. The Prime ROM has all the ASUS OEM Apps installed and appears to be largely identical, but of course has additional capabilities due to it being rooted.  My main reason for rooting any android device is to run the CIFS filesystem in the kernel, which allows me to mount Windows (or Linux / OSX) shares on the sdcard.  What t...

I just took delivery of some new stuff from Amazon.co.uk Depeche Mode - Live in Barcelona BluRay Depeche Mode - Personal Jesus Remixes Depeche Mode - Remixes 2 80-11 (3 CD) Delivered amazingly quickly from the UK. I have left the cd's sealed and downloaded them from the Net instead.  Want to keep them in good condition.  Does this make me a criminal?  I'm never going to sell them or redistribute. So far I'm loving the newer mixes.  I have heard most of the older ones before and for some of the songs, I have other mixes I prefer so its a mixed result.  The Personal Jesus ones are all new and suitably Epic.  Can't believe it can still sound so good after all this time. All in all, a must have for fans and a nice compilation (the 3 cd's) if you want to remind yourself about a band that continues to evolve and improve. Suggest www.depechemode.com for more info.

So, in what must be one of the slowest playthroughs of a game ever, I finished Portal 2.  No spoilers.  Great game.  EPIC ending song just like in original Portal. There is nothing else like these 2 games... Its an experience worth having just because it isn't like every other game you've ever played. I love the fact that my boxed retail copy activates a Steam copy for OSX as well.  Well done Valve. 9/10 Oh, and one last thing. Doesn't Wheatley sound awfully like Chris Martin?

So I broke down and bought my wife the iPad 2 upon its launch here in South Africa.  I bought it for a couple of reasons. 1) She loves her existing Apple kit.  Macbook / iPhone and iTunes make a comfortable environment she has mastered to the point that I am not needed for most of her work & play. 2) I didn't like the hardware spec of the original iPad, mainly due to the lack of camera's for skype.  It just seemed a wasted opportunity. 3) The price *IS* right.  It's way cheaper than the nearest competitor which is the 7" Samsung Galaxy Tab over here.  In fact, the entry level iPad is about 40% cheaper.  That's a huge difference. From what I've heard, the 10" Samsung hasn't been priced, but I ended up playing with it for a few hours.  I'm not sure if it was running the final software build, but it was running Honeycomb.  Compared to the 7" tab, it didn't have the Samsung specific software and bundled apps, but I had market acces...

For the longest time, I have been getting an error when trying to run Steam on OSX.  As soon as I launched Steam, it would attempt to download patches and then fail miserably. I have followed many guides and attempted many fixes and this problem just wouldn't go away.  So, being a "read the manual if all else fails", I decided to check the support site at www.steampowered.com The solution to the problem was trivially easy.  Firstly, the error message was grossly inaccurate.  Steam complained that I needed to be online in order to update.  I clearly WAS online, but the actual problem was that the folder Steam was trying to update was write protected. Turns out that I was executing the read only copy of the file in the mounted STEAM.DMG file. Aaaargh.  How could I be so stupid.  Well, i was launching steam using Spotlight.  So I would hit Command-Space and then type in S,T,E and and it was defaulting the installation folder instead of the App...

Congrats are due to Apple for the launch of the iPad 2.  Finally a device to tempt me away from Android.  Unfortunately, it's let down by a shockingly "last generation" screen and average hardware.  I was most impressed by the software and grudgingly concede that they are WAY ahead on the software front with the Apple created software like iWork, iMovie & Garageband. I think ultimately that's the only thing that would make me want to try it out.  Fantastic software.  I've spent a lot of time with a Samsung Galaxy Tab 7" and an  iPad 1.  If I had to choose only 1 device on the proverbial desert island, it would have to be the Android 1.  Compared to the iPad 2, I would probably plonk for the Apple. However, its still Q1 of 2011 and I expect that within 3 months we'll have an even larger choice of devices with equal or better hardware.  I find it hilarious that people can watch the iPad 2 video and thing its a major advance.   I th...