Category: Tech

Categories
Anime, Manga, Etc Tech

East Asian Character Sets In iTunes For Windows

I have a lot of Japanese anime songs, JPop, JRock, and Canto Pop in my music collection. For a long time I’ve been annoyed by the fact that iTunes on my Windows XP box would only display the titles of Chinese and Japanese songs with those little boxes that mean it didn’t know wtf to do with it. After much googling to no avail and a fruitless search of the iTunes site, I stumbled upon the answer while installing a Japanese game. The game required the installation of support for East Asian character sets. Once I did this, the Japanese and Chinese song titles, etc., displayed correctly! Here is the procedure.

  1. Open the Start menu and click Control Panel
  2. In the Control Panel, switch to Classic View if you aren’t already in it. Then open Regional and Language Options.
  3. Click on the Languages tab and then click the empty check box next to Install files for East Asian languages.
  4. Click Apply. Now at this point or just after you click the check box, a message box will come up and tell you that installing the support will take about 230MB and you will also need to have your Windows XP installation CD handy.
  5. Just follow the installation instructions, and at the end of it all, you’re good to go!
Categories
Tech

Google Gadget Finished!

Many weeks ago, when Google announced their Google Gadget Contest, I was totally gung ho and spent many hours hammering out the beginnings of my gadget. Now quite spent and exhausted I’ve just submitted said gadget with a couple of hours to spare! Every time I mention it, my wife gives me this dirty look that says you should have finished that weeks ago. It is what it is. Anyway, for good or ill, it is done and I’ve placed my entry! Hopefully it’ll make it into the library of gadgets, afterwhich I’ll place a link here.

I don’t think my chances of winning are all that great, but I’m just happy to have finished a decent entry. I learned a lot putting it together and it’s a handsome, elegant little app, if I say so myself. Now that that’s over, I can turn my attention to costume building for Reactor and Halloween! So far I’ve learned that reading patterns is a lot harder than it looks.

Categories
Games and Sports Tech

Xbox 360, FFXI, and Belkin KVM USB Switch

I thought that connecting my Xbox 360 to my PC monitor to take advantage of HD graphics without plunking down a metric ton of money for HDTV was brilliant and frugal (as frugal as one gets with these kinds of toys at least). So in the interest of further brilliance, I thought, how cool would it be to use my PC’s snazzy new USB keyboard with the 360 through the use of a KVM switch. My old keyboard was pre-ps/2 style, so it had a giant plug which I later had to plug into ps/2 style adapter. The whole thing hung precariously off the back on my PC and of late was suspected of causing problems on occasion. So after about 10 years of service, I wanted to change everything over to usb and the keyboard I picked up was only $20 USD.

I’ve had pretty good luck with Belkin products and I figured since they’re sold at Apple stores too, they are probably of pretty good quality in general. So I gave little thought to buying a Belkin KVM switch (F1DK102 U 2-port). And the switch even has built in cables. I got it home and connected everything as instructed, ready to retire my compact keyboard from the PS2 setup at last. Well, the thing didn’t work as planned at all. The PC keyboard was not being recognized when I switched to the Xbox 360. I could plug it in directly and it worked, so that meant a problem with the switch.

Then last night I stumbled upon a solution. I disconnected the USB mouse from the switch and plugged it into the PC directly since I didn’t need the mouse for Final Fantasy XI at all, and I thought that maybe it was confusing the issue. Next after playing around with the switch and powering up the Xbox and switching back and forth, I figured it out. The Xbox 360 apparently scans its USB ports only on power up. Therefore, if a device is not recognized during this time, it doesn’t get support. So by manually switching the KVM to the 360 and then quickly powering up, before the KVM autoswitches back to the PC, the keyboard is recognized.

The thing that made this difficult is that the Belkin KVM will switch back to the PC if it doesn’t detect that the Xbox is on via a powered USB port. The delay is about 2 or 3 seconds, so I think this is manageable. Still, if I had known this would be a problem, I would have sought out a switch that this strictly manual. As for the Xbox 360 itself, if it would only check for new devices optionally after power up, like PCs and Macs can, that would also solve this problem.

I don’t know if moving the mouse from the switch had anything to do with any of this, but I’m going to leave it connected to the PC for now. I hope this entry will be of use to anyone who has had this problem. I reported the problem to Xbox Live support, just so that there’d be a record of it. Perhaps a future update to the Dashboard will address this issue.

Categories
Tech

Cold Dead PC

Yesterday, after what was apparently a long illness, my PC died… It was very inconvenient since I had work to do, but once again it was instructive and perhaps ultimately useful. For one thing it taught me that Windows is not very fault tolerant. Even in a crippled state, I could still boot Ubuntu, which helped me a great deal in diagnostics and research to fix the problem which ultimately turned out to be a faulty motherboard. I replaced the Mach Speed board with an ABit, which was the only one I could find at Microcenter which still supported the Athon XP 2800+ I’ve been using for almost two years now. Why stick with a now ancient CPU? Well, it just works and is quite good enough for what I do.

I realize now that my earlier rant against PC gaming was really the result of my failing motherboard. Nevertheless, I’m still glad I decided to do my Final Fantasy XI gaming on an Xbox 360 rather than stay on the PC. In the old days, I used games like Doom to benchmark my PC’s performance, but these days I have little patience for balky PCs when I want to play games. So today I’m catching up on work delayed by my PC’s temporary rigor mortis happy that having Ubuntu around as a spare has saved the day.

Categories
Tech

Zune Zune Zune!

Microsoft has confirmed that they are launching a music player under the Zune brand that will compete with Apple’s iPod. Already a lot of the hubbub on the internet is the usual anti-Microsoft rhetoric. But I don’t think people should be so quick to write of Microsoft’s chances of success so soon.

I would guess that in the first year, the primary victims of Microsoft’s direct entry into the market will be the companies currentle partnered with them under the Plays for Sure label. Some may see this as sad or a betrayal, but hey they’ve been working at it for years, and not a single one of them has made much of a dent in the iPod’s dominance of the digital player market which current stands at over 80%. So in Microsoft’s eyes, they’ve had their chance.
And, as I’m sure others have noted, for Microsoft it isn’t just about selling players or songs for 99 cents. It’s really about the future of the digital rights management (DRM) and media format they’ve championed on Windows. So far Apple has refused to license their DRM to 3rd parties, but if they did, there’s a chance that Microsoft’s current partners would abandon Windows media in favor of Apple. Without a player of their own, that would leave Microsoft in a bad position.

I think that if Microsoft can bring some real innovation to the game, it will be good for consumers all around. Open, direct competition between Apple and Microsoft should bring better players and software for all concerned as they fight for new customers. I’m not planning to abandon my iPod anytime soon. But I do look forward to the enhancements from Apple to the iPod and iTunes that a strong competitor is likely to inspire.

Categories
Games and Sports Tech

Xbox 360 First Impressions

As noted in a previous rant, I’d become totally frustrated with getting Final Fantasy XI to run stably on my PC. So I went out to Virgin yesterday and bought an Xbox 360, a copy of Final Fantasy XI for Xbox 360, and the VGA HD cable so that I could connect it to my PC monitor. Yesterday was a pretty hot and sticky day, which did not help my mood setting things up. Nevertheless, the setup was pretty painless, the only setup related hitch being that I’d forgotten my Microsoft Passport password which is needed to setup Xbox Live. The only other issue was due to my own oversight. In my haste, I didn’t give enough thought to the sound setup. My Samsung 730b monitor doesn’t have built in speakers. Luckily my cheapy Labtec speaker cables allowed me to plug in a splitter to share the speakers between the PC and the 360, so I can get sound. This isn’t a great solution though. What I really want is to find a good amplifier that I can plug both into.

Once the initial setup was complete, the next 3+ hours involved installing Final Fantasy XI. There’s no getting around this since the game is pretty big and then it has to be updated to the current version. So I had dinner and used my old monitor switch box to flip back to the PC. Once installed, I spent the next 2 or 3 hours running around San d’Oria before heading back across La Thiene to the Valkurm Dunes. That was enough to be impressed by the graphics and overall smoothness of play. Playing FFXI on the 360 is, for me at least, a much better experience than on my PC. So by that measure, I achieved my primary objective. The placement of the analog sticks on the wireless controller took some getting used to, but I was thrilled to be free of controller cords at last! And the Logitech USB keyboard that I used with my PS2 version of the game plugged easily into one of the two USB ports on the front of the 360, and with the exception of the Caps On light not working, works well.

Today, I’m going to check out the Xbox Live offerings and other goodies including running some of my old Xbox games. One last thing to note, in probably 6 hours of operation, this box definitely gets hot! It won’t burn your hand if you touch it, but you’ll definitely feel the heat. So this thing should definitely be placed in the open for maximum airflow or it’ll fry itself and anything around it! The Xbox 360 is quite literally, hot!

Categories
Tech

Geeks Still Not Sexy!

Not only are geeks still not sexy, now they are a threat to the IT industry, in UK at least. This is just the routine, almost periodic, article about the IT industry not being able to attract enough young people in the midst of the offshoring of IT jobs that gutted the industry in the US and apparently the UK as well. I think though, putting any of the blame on geeks and nerds having a bad image is just unfair. Afterall, during the tech boom in the US, geeks were just as geeky, yet lots of so-called “cool ” and “normal” people packed CS classes and worked in IT. Why? Because the jobs were plentiful and the money was good. Right now, geeks and nerds are still a despised class in the eyes of the “normals”, but the real killer for the IT industry was and is the offshoring of IT work which kills the entry level path needed to develop domestic talent.

Categories
Tech

Hooray for IE 7!

Microsoft released the final beta for Internet Explorer 7 today which brings it a big step closer to being released. It looks pretty good, and after 5 years of gathering dust and being the cracker’s (black hat hackers) dream, it’s way overdue. I’ll install it once the final release comes out, but IE 7 is not going to displace Firefox for daily use. The reason I’m happy IE 7 is coming out is because there are web applications I have to use that are IE only. So when I have to fire up IE, it won’t suck so much anymore! IE sucking less is teh win for everyone! So hooray for IE 7!

Categories
Tech

Still Got It…

I’ve still got it, ur, my hearing that is! After seeing the headlines for a couple of days, I finally took a look at the story going around about the ringtone that only teenagers can hear. I watched the story and later downloaded an mp3 of the tone. I was and am very pleased to say that even at my advanced age, relative to teenagers, I can hear it! So I guess years of attempted (and mostly failed) debauchery has not damaged me too much!

Categories
General Tech

Of Bird Poop And Broadband

Months ago I switched to Comcast cable for internet service because SBC DSL was just too unreliable in my neighborhood. But over that last several weeks I’d been seeing more outages. I didn’t think much of this because they were not as often as the old DSL had been. Then this morning, waking up not feeling too well, WillowBrow, who was also battling some nasty bug, tells me that the internet connection is out. She was already pretty pissed off for other reasons I won’t go into here.

I check the connection and do all of the usual things, power cycle, etc., and then call Comcast. Since I’m too sick for work anyway, I schedule a service call for the afternoon. I didn’t want to wait around doing nothing, so I checking the tv signal too. The standard cable channels looked fine, but the digital channels were suffering some heavy pixelation. After that it became clear to me that the problem was not on my end at all. Indeed, I’d been seeing more pixelation on all of the digital channels I usually watch, but had blamed it on TiVo bugs, sorry TiVo.
In the end, the technician found that too much bird poop on the ports in the cable box up the pole in back was a big part of the problem. So he took care of that and installed another device to import the signal and we were back in business, poop free.

Categories
Tech

Shiny New Slashdot!

Monday Monday and it looks like Slashdot has a shiny new look to it! Not only that, the new CSS based layout seems to load faster than the last one. This isn’t a radical redesign, but I like it. It makes me want to get all creative today. Looks aren’t everything, but with the tools available today, there just aren’t any excuses for crappy looking stuff. So I always work hard to make sure that my projects not only work, but look good too. It’s more fun that way anyway! 😀

Categories
Tech

Worldtime Widget

As promised (or threatened), I’ve bundled up my Worldtime WordPress widget.

Click here to download.

From the readme.txt file.

Description

Adds a sidebar widget to show current time and date of three places of your choice.

Installation Instructions

  • Unzip the archive and upload peworldtime.php to your WordPress plugins directory.
  • Browse to Plugins>Worldtime and click Activate.
  • Browse to Presentation>Sidebar Widgets
  • Drag the PE Worldtime widget to the sidebar location you want.
  • Click the Worldtime configure icon.
  • Fill in optional Title and then Place names and corresponding GMT offsets.
    (ex. Chicago is on CDT right now which has GMT offset -5)
  • Click the configure dialog X to close it then the Save changes button.

Note: The Worldtime widget only displays the times and dates each time the page is loaded. So you’ll have to turn off WordPress page caching on the pages that display this widget for visitors to see the correct time.

Categories
Tech

Hello Widgets!

After recovering from a pretty bad morning yesterday, I did the thing that comes naturally to me, I started writing code! I decided to widgetize my sidebar on the blog here. Setting up for the widget plugin was pretty easy and in the process I discovered some nasty stuff that was going on when my site was viewed in IE (it was my fault…). Next I decided to take a shot at building my own widget. I had always wanted to display the local time and date for a few select places around the globe. So first I wrote some PHP code to do what I wanted and then I used the Google Search widget as a template to create a widget that used the time code I’d written. After a few hiccups, I came up with the widget you see in the sidebar below the calendar. The widget shows the time in Chicago, Hong Kong, and Osaka which is a sister city of Chicago. I’ll package the widget code a little later for download so that anyone can use it. It isn’t a realtime flash clock, just good ol’ PHP. And the three places displayed are configurable.

Categories
Tech

Hello VBA! Make Nice!

Heh heh, I can’t speak Japanese very well, but I do know computer! One of the fun things about my job is all of the puzzles I get to solve. Right now I’m working on a project that has forced me to use VBA in order to create a very smart Excel spreadsheet. After the fun I’ve had with Python, it was a bit of a step backwards. But I’m very pleased that most of my guesses about how things should work, armed with a pretty good book, Office XP Development with VBA, are correct. The puzzle is nearly solved. The sweet thing about this is that the people using it won’t really have to do anything different than what they are doing right now! I love it when a plan comes together! 😀

Categories
Tech

Hump Day Python Fun

The middle of the week is usually kind of blah for me. But this Wednesday is different for a couple of reasons. One, its report card day, which I hope and expect to be full of good news. And two, I have and interesting project to work on in Python! I love using a variety of languages to build software, but this cannot be done in a vacuum. I usually need something interesting to work on which people need, otherwise it’s hard to get the proper focus. Now that I have a project that will force me to delve deeper into the language, I’m going to have some real fun now! Oh I am such a geek at heart, it’s amazing that I have any kids at all!