Nvu 1.0

Nvu is a relatively easy and compact web authoring package for Windows, Linux and Mac OSX operating systems and it's free.

I've been using it since v0.93 but it's now been released as the official version 1.0 package. While not without some serious bugs/idiosyncrasies up to and including the last v1.0RC4 release it soon became my favourite HTML/CSS editor of choice. Fingers crossed this v1.0 release has finally ironed out all the bugs. If you're looking for a small, uncluttered, but fully featured web editor, then this is the one.

Live8

The contents of this post may upset a few people, tough. If you don't like alternative points of view to your own, leave now.

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I'm old enough and ugly enough to know that anything we do (or even our great leaders) will matter not a jot for the future of Africa. Help for Africa can only come from within Africa, nowhere else.

I switched off from Bob Geldof's rantings a long time ago but I've never seen him take the bull by the horns and publicly humiliate the Pope, who must take the biggest slice of blame for the Aids crisis (apocalypse) that will surely blight Africa for generations upon generations to come whether their debt is wiped out or not. No, he and Bono like to have their grinning photos taken with the "cool" world figures like the aforementioned Pope and Mandela etc while giving the politicos a hard time.

Most politicians are a waste of space but they're voted in to look after the interests of their own country first, second and third. That's life, deal with it. If you can't then feck off to Africa and help them on the ground. March on f*cking Edinburgh? F*ck off! If people die while demonstrating I'll blame Geldof for their deaths, needless, senseless deaths, just like those in Africa.

Do I give to charity? Occasionally, who doesn't? Most recently the Asian Tsuanmi killed a mind boggling amount of people in a few minutes. I contributed some money for aid relief. Did it make any difference? Most likely not, during this very week (6 months after the event) I saw a news report where most of the people who lost everything were living in "temporary" camps under polythene. Who's to blame for that - Bush, Blair G8? No, their own government. Should we march on Edinburgh to sort it out? No. Should the affected march on their own capital city? Yes.

Stop listening to an old, Irish tramp with more money than you or I, and get on with making your own little part of the world a better place to live. If you want to do something for Africa, buy a crate of condoms and post it to those who still have a chance before the Pope's death warrant gets to them first.

Demon 2Mbps Upgrade

A few months after I decided to stay with Demon as my Broadband provider and they've finally announced free upgrades for everyone up to the maximum of 2Mbps downstream.

No restrictions of any kind on download limits, connection time etc. Nice. For the HomeOffice users, like me, a static IP address, 2Mbps downstream (BT's checker says it should be OK), Electronic Fax and Dialup Companion all for £24.99 a month. Happy days.

Site Updates

This is just a quick test to check if I've correctly implemented the Blogger Hack to facilitate expandable post summaries.

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This text should have been hidden from you on the front page. I've also switched the RSS feed to short summaries to force you to visit this site :-) and rejigged the Google adsense adverts a bit. Nothing major.

Farce

You really couldn't make it up but it will take a long time before the dust settles on what happened at the United States Formula One Grand Prix. All the usual suspects were and are being blamed. It's all The FIA/ Ferrari/ Ecclestone/ Mosley/ Schumacher's fault go the arguments. No it's not, the blame lies squarely with Michelin, no-one else.

The FIA have taken the unusual step of publishing correspondence between themselves and Michelin regarding their inadequate tyres. Makes for fascinating reading. Michelin failed to deliver suitable product pure and simple. If the tyres couldn't go flat out then the answer was simple, back off into turn 12. No chicane, the driver uses his skill to push the car as fast as it will go for the entire race, if it happens to be slower than the opposition, tough.

I can just imagine the arrogant shrugs of the Michelin representatives as they laid out their plans. I've dealt with a number of French companies in my time and without exception they've been an absolute nightmare to deal with. The first time a French Engineer shrugged his shoulders at me, looked at the floor and screwed his nose up I nearly burst out laughing. The second time I felt like sticking my fork in his f*cking eye. My boss and me have since come to an understanding, we don't take projects involving the French.

I wonder how our great leader felt when faced with the epitome of French arrogance, the politically dead Chirac? Plastic cutlery wouldn't save him from me. Just looked at that face, could you ever tyre (couldn't resist) of slapping it? What on earth have the French got to be so arrogant about?

Telly Quest 4

Lewis sent me some good information on a comparison of a top end LCD screen versus a Plasma panel. I've been deliberately steering clear of actually looking at these things in the shops as it'll just make me fret. You can read the other posts and comments on this subject be searching the blog for "Telly Quest"

I had a nose around a "Tweeter" store here (Houston) yesterday, and saw what I expected to be the screen of my dreams. It was one of the new 45" LCD "Aquos" ones by Sharp, offering a true 1920 x 1080 resolution, so able to deal with the 1080p high def signal. Sad to say this thing wasn't what I had hoped it would be, and the reason I thought that was because it was mounted on a wall with a number of other screens all showing the same video from the same signal.

They were displaying a football (real football, what the sales guy called soccer) game on them, and it was not a high def signal. Some of the screens were LCD, and some plasma, and in a variety of sizes. All these screens were big branded high end products, and the viewing area was lit just like the average living room would be with the blinds shut. No strong direct lights on the screens, no bright fluorescent lighting in that area of he shop. It was a great opportunity to get a direct comparison of the two technologies, and it turns out that a football game makes a good test image for viewing. You get sharply contrasting colours between the strips and the pitch/advertising boards etc, bursts of fast moving action, and then slow close ups with plenty of detail. To properly compare things you would need to see some dark scenes too, but on the whole a football game is a good place to start.

Firstly in many ways the image quality was pretty consistent on all the screens, nice and sharp, with clear edging etc, but the thing I noticed most was the colour. On the plasma screens things were really rich and vibrant, in comparison the LCD looked washed out. I commented on this to the salesman, and suggested that the LCD screen could do with better setting up. He explained that with the LCD screens you don't get as much configuration as you do with the plasma's, and that this was about as good as you could get. I know from experience that most plasma screens come with a boggling amount of configuration options, and took him at his word on the LCD's.

To be fair all these screens were most likely just plugged in as delivered, so the output I saw was probably a bit of a lottery, and in spite of what the salesman said, I am sure things could have been improved somewhat with a bit of tweaking. Additionally on some of the plasma screens the contrast and brilliance were clearly too high with unnatural looking colours. But there were eight or so screens all fairly close together, and you could easily pick out the LCD's from a distance.

I had always read about the contrast performance not being as good with LCD, but until I saw a load of them all together I didn't really appreciate what an impact it would have. On the plus side the salesman was telling me they had sold a dozen or so Sharp LCD TV's, and nobody had been in touch regards dead pixels. Similarly I am on my fourth laptop, and haven't experienced one so far. I suspect that if I hadn't seen the screen in that setting, I would have thought it was excellent, ignorance being bliss and all that. But now that I have I don't think I would be as quick to trade my plasma in as I might have been before.

Reach out and Touch

Picked up a pair of 3D Stereo LCD shutter glasses (Elsa Revelators) from eBay for the princely sum of £5. These were all the rage about 5 years ago but never really took off. Part of the reason was poor support from the games of the time, poor drivers and limited hardware support. Allied to the fact that many people found their use promoted nausea and blurred vision it's not really surprising they failed.

Nvidia now have better support with dedicated Stereo drivers so I thought I'd take the plunge and snap up a bargain for a looksee. I should receive them next week and I'll write further on them then.

My Quadro FX1000 has a dedicated Stereo port on the back next to the twin DVI-D ports and as the card supports very high refresh rates (the use of stereo effectively halves the monitor refresh rate so you really need a minimum of 120hz) it should ease the problems of flickering images that dogged their use five years ago.

As I don't really play games as such my interest will be seeing how they work with the realtime architectural walkthroughs I've been creating with Blender recently. I'm currently working on a much more complete demo of the software's capabilities and hope to post it soon. Blender can output Anaglyph Stereo (red/blue glasses) realtime games but after about 30 seconds of use I was close to throwing up, very unsettling. The stereo effect was limited to say the least so I've struck that off my list of options.

Category: 3D

Health Update 39

Suffered a really bad attack last weekend, one of the worst I've had in a long time. Woke up on Saturday morning feeling very tired and slept on and off all day. By Saturday night I was very down and feeling really ill. Sunday I slept all day and never got up until about 9:00pm, no weekend and back to work totally exhausted.

Had a call with the Doctor on Monday to get the results of the latest set of blood tests. This round was to investigate a poor set of results previously that suggested I was borderline Glucose Intolerant (precursor to diabetes). Thankfully the full Glucose Fast test came back perfect. I suppose I should be thankful but I was feeling so bad I never raised a smile.

It is clear that the NHS are no nearer helping me than they were 18 months ago when ME/CFS was first diagnosed. To date I have had zero treatment, drugs, dietary advice, exercise etc, nothing, nada, zilch. I've asked to be referred to a Consultant privately.

Changes

In preparation for a new design (don't hold your breath) I've changed the title of this blog. I never really liked the old name (All about ME) as it was very easy to confuse it with the pretentious pish that so many personal blogs tend to be.

I rarely talk about ME anyway so it's for the better that I refocus with a new title, strapline and template. The content will not change and without a hint of irony more pretentious pish is predicted. The strapline will be Digital Air - For life in a digital world... how crap is that? Bwahaha, I don't care, it's mine all mine "WORSHIP HIM WORSHIP HIM".

Dual Screens

With the arrival of the new workstation a few weeks ago I've been enjoying the benefit of a dual screen setup so it's probably time for a quick overview.

In the picture above you can see my main screen which is a Sony FW900 24" Widescreen CRT and a Dell E173FP 17" LCD to the left. The Dell is their bottom of the range 17" panel that came with the workstation package. The Sony is running at 1920x1200@85Hz and the Dell is at 1280x1024 supplied by a Nvidia Quadro FX1400 graphics card using analogue connections (two DVI-15pin D-sub converters off the card).

This is the first LCD screen I've spent any time with apart from various laptop screens and all I can say is that I'm very impressed with the picture. This is the bottom end of 17" screens with only one analogue 15pin D-sub connection but the colour presentation of the image is very good indeed. I've ran a few tests on the response time of the screen by playing a few fast moving DVD scenes but the panel handled them well enough considering it's cost. Viewing angles are OK but not great. There is a slight colour variation from top to bottom unless you're viewing it from the screen sweet spot. As this panel has no height adjustment I've had to angle it slightly to get a reasonable colour balance when viewing from top to bottom.

I generally use the LCD for Outlook 2003, Windows Explorer, Acrobat etc and leave the main screen for ProEngineer. Unfortunately the version of ProE I'm running doesn't support dual screens so I can't spread the menus across to the 17" panel and even worse it won't support hardware acceleration on the main screen. The workaround is to switch back to "Single Display" before starting ProE. Once ProE is up and running you can then go into "Dual Display" mode in the "Display Properties" and ProE will run happily in accelerated mode. Bit of an arse but I only need to do it once a day (unless ProE crashes). The newer version, ProE Wildfire, does support Dual Screens.

There are various options available in the display drivers depending on how you want to run your screens. I run with "Dual View" which allows the screens to operate at their own resolutions and refresh rates. I keep the windows task bar locked to the main screen and extend the desktop over the two screens. You can then configure the applications for which display you want them to run on. Very neat. You can move the position of the second screen in software by dragging it to the left or right of the main screen. Also, if the screens are of two differing sizes, as mine are, you can juggle the second screen up or down to align the top or bottom of the two screens. Personally I have the smaller second screen placed midway between the top and bottom the larger screen. This means your mouse cursor doesn't accidentally move to the second screen when you try to hit the "Start" button or a menubar along the top of an application. Neat touch.

Can't say it makes me more productive bit it comes in very handy in everyday use. The ability to open a pdf drawing on the LCD while modelling in ProE is a godsend and I'd really miss the second screen if I had to go back to a single display workstation.

If (when) I get a TFT panel for my home setup I think I'd lean towards a larger 20" screen (1600x1200), now that I've experienced the setup at work. The extra screen real-estate is very handy. Secondly, any screen I purchase would have to have height adjustment, this is very important to get the optimum viewing angle to the screen. If you want your screens to seamlessly merge side by side they need to be at 90 degrees to the desk otherwise you'll have a varying gap between the bezels.

Dell have a very tempting offer on a 20" Widescreen panel at £369.30 including VAT and delivery. Hmmm be still my beating heart, that is a very good deal.

Blender 2.37a

Blender has been updated to 2.37a to correct a couple of critical bugs. You can read the change log and download it from Blender3D.org. All this bug fixing is in preparation for the open source movie project codenamed Orange. Sounds very interesting and as it's open source all the digital files used to create the short film will be released and available for download.

I've experienced some problems with Blender 2.37 myself which have been tracked down to some incompatibilities with Nvidia's latest drivers running under OpenGL. I've fixed it by switching to a custom setting for 3D Studio Max which seems to have sorted the problem. Fingers crossed.

Category: 3D

Pigs Do Fly

There have been rumours flying around for weeks that Pink Floyd were to play at the London leg of the Live8 charity gigs and that it would be the real Pink Floyd with Roger Waters back were he belongs, showing fat d*ve how it should be done. If it's true, and it's now being reported as fact, it's a hell of a coup for the organisers.

The 4 man Floyd (Roger Waters, Rick Wright, Nick Mason and fat d*ve) will easily be the biggest headliners of all the Live8 concerts across the globe and will ensure a worldwide audience measured in the billions to see them playing together again for the first time in 24 years. To be honest the line up was looking pretty weak considering the magnitude of the whole event but next to raising John Lennon and George Harrison from the grave to reform The Beatles this is about as much as Geldof could have hoped for.

At last Bob Geldof will have a bigger ego on stage than his own for Roger Waters cometh. What odds he'll have a fight with fat d*ve on stage? Canny wait.

X-Cad

A company is planning to giveaway 100,000 seats of a new 3D CAD package for Mechanical Design.

A powerful parametric, solid-modeling 3D CAD program called X-CAD will be made available for free when and if 100,000 people register by August 1, 2005 at www.x-cad.net. In addition to enabling users to create precise 3D mechanical designs equal to well-known mid-range solid modeling brands, X-CAD provides an easy-to-use Windows® interface, integrated Help menus and tutorials, and real-time collaboration with other users wherever they are located.

I've checked it out and it appears to be all above board (reported in the mainstream CAD press) with the real company behind the deal rumoured to be Alibre who have a well respected background in affordable 2D and 3D software packages.

Category: 3D

Empathy

At such a tender age this kid is demonstrating he has already learned the two fundamental truths of life.

1. Life isn't fair.
2. You're surrounded by complete arseholes (particularly at work).

Yes, it's been a bad day.

Like Minds

I'm glad to see that the Computer Press are of the same opinion as me.

Apple's announcement that they are to switch their entire range of computers over to Intel processors is all well and good but it's bound to have an immediate effect to their hardware sales between now and when the first Intel machines roll off the lines this time next year.

Personally, I want a Mac mini for various reasons such as gaining experience in the OSX operating system, the bundled software, the sheer loveliness of the design etc. If, as I suspect, Apple will be forced to cut prices to keep sales ticking over then I'll be first in line for a bargain. However, if I was a hardline Mac user then you'd have to think long and hard about shelling out for an, effectively, obsolete PowerPC based machine.

Even if Apple don't resort to discounting prices on their existing range the impact on second hand prices will be noticeable when the new computers launch. Something to keep an eye on methinks.

Be Afraid...

... very afraid. Who's the big bad wolf? Davros, The Master... who? BBC1 7:00pm 11th June, be there or be forever behind the sofa.

The Fat Lady

The man they call, quite literally, Roger Waters is planning to release a new album in September. Unfortunately it's not a new Rock magnum opus but instead the opera, "Ca Ira" he's been working on for something like 16 years (like I keep telling the boss you can't hurry genius).

The blurb's all there in a typically rudimentary press release on his, Sony controlled, website. Will I buy it? Of course, it is Roger Waters after all. If he could write and record classics like The Dark Side of the Moon, The Wall and his solo masterpiece, Amused to Death in months then just think what he could achieve with 16 years to play with.

Hopefully with this elitist nonsense out of the way he'll concentrate on his new Rock album for release next year with a little world tour to round it all off nicely before launching the stage version of The Wall on Broadway.

I'm Loving it

So Lesley's addiction to eBay and Greenwich Denby Pottery shows no signs of abating and who can blame her when there are such bargains around to be had.

I've just picked up an ATI FireGL8800 graphics card for a grand total of £24, bargain. The plan is to upgrade the Workstation supplied by my work for when I'm working from home. Over the past few weeks I've, on average, worked from home once or twice a week.

The Workstation in question is owned by my work but it's unlikely to ever be returned due to it's age and our current set up. Still, it's a fair machine and runs ProEngineer well, it's just the graphics card that's holding it back hence the purchase.

Currently it has a Quadro2 Pro Elsa Gloria III with 64Mb running on AGPx2. The new card has 128Mb running on AGPx4 (equivalent of a Quadro4). Not cutting edge (about 3 years old now) but still a step up from the Elsa Gloria III. Should allow for sharper, clearer graphics at a higher resolution (and dual screens :). The Workstation is a Dual PIII 1Ghz with 1Gb Rambus memory and twin 18Gb SCSI Hard Drives. Nice machine to have around.

Category: 3D

Look into my eyes, the eyes

I'm reliably informed that "Hairy Mary" will undergo the door challenge and leave the BB house as I exclusively(tm) revealed last week, within seconds of seeing her, as the first person to get the heave ho.

Tomorrow's winning lottery numbers will be 27, 43, 8, 18, 17, 22.

I thank you.