Category: Uncategorized

After several failed attempts, I finally managed to get the X-Plane 9 demo installed on my PC. It survived about 12 minutes on my computer before I deleted it. The program (game?) looked great and I really wanted to spend some time with it but the experience was too frustrating for me to stick with it.

What did they do wrong?

• First, their installer is a super-small download but it’s just a download manager that pulls the rest of the game from their website. This would normally be fine, except their download manager doesn’t support resume! Twice I killed it because I wanted to reboot my computer, not realizing that it was starting the 1.4GB+ download over from the top. If you’re gonna have a download manager, have a download manager. Otherwise I might as well just download a zip.
• Dialogs pause the game and fill the screen almost at random with “buy this game” and “helpful hint” messages. It’s obnoxious. And in a flight sim, where the slightest movement can send your plane off course, it impedes your ability to control your aircraft. There’s no reason for these to pause the game or fill the screen, they could just as easily be little notification pop-ups in the corner.
• The demo only lets you run the program for 10 minutes before locking you out. I’ve never played a flight sim that took less than 10 minutes to master. It usually takes hours. Instead of limiting you by time they should limit you in range or available aircraft.
• There’s no guided experience. They simply drop you into an aircraft and tell you (literally), “brakes are b and throttle is F1/F2.” That’s hardly enough to get you familiar with what the game has to offer. They should take a page from FSX and have a series of in-game tutorials in their demo.
• If you stray outside what the demo has downloaded there’s no obvious way to get back. It comes with these “scenarios” pre-installed but when I went to try them out I started getting errors about the terrain not being available. I wanted to go back to the original location they started me at but I couldn’t figure out how. When you’re trying to sell a product to a consumer you need to contain the experience to the best you have to offer.

Posting here for my reference, but others may find this useful.

2800bps, avi encoding:

mencoder.exe %1  -oac lavc -ovc lavc -lavcopts abitrate=128:vbitrate=2800:acodec=mp3:abitrate=128 -ffourcc DX50 -o %2

2800bps, two-pass avi encoding:

mencoder.exe %1  -oac lavc -ovc lavc -lavcopts vbitrate=2800:vpass=1:acodec=mp3:abitrate=128 -ffourcc DX50 -o %2
mencoder.exe %1  -oac lavc -ovc lavc -lavcopts vbitrate=2800:vpass=2:acodec=mp3:abitrate=128 -ffourcc DX50 -o %2

Putting a dog under anesthesia just to clean their teeth has never sat well with me, thus, I’ve never taken my dog into the dentist for a teeth cleaning.  Ever since he was a puppy I would routinely stick my fingers in his mouth to get him used to me checking out his teeth, and it’s paid off on a few occasions.  Like today, when I decided to try and remove the plaque from his teeth myself.

• Pin them down between your legs on the floor in area with plenty of light.
• Keep the dog’s mouth open with a rawhide chew.  Wedge it behind their back teeth so they can’t close their mouth [on you].
• Use a dental scaler, not a dental pick.  Dental picks are sharp and if you slip (you will, since you’re an amateur at this) you might stick your dog.
• Removing the plaque requires a fair bit of force.  Start by focusing on one small area and scrape it in one direction until you start to scar the plaque and you can see if beginning to lift up.  Then apply pressure to the weakened spot and try and dislodge the chunk of plaque sideways.  I found the majority of my dog’s plaque spots dislodged in small chunks.
• Apply pressure to the plaque in a direction that’s safe, so if/when the dental scaler slips it goes in a direction that won’t hurt your dog.  I always applied pressure on his upper teeth downwards, and his lower teeth upwards.

Good luck!

Pictures: http://picasaweb.google.com/robert.w.rose/DogPlaqueRemoval#

8lbs 2oz

It was a huge day for everyone at SpaceX yesterday, we successfully launched our first Falcon 9 to orbit!

• CNN: SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launches. Nominal shutdown and orbit was almost exactly 250 km… Telemetry showed essentially a bullseye: 126;0.2% on perigee and 126;1% on apogee.
• SpaceX: Video highlights at SpaceX.com
• MSNBC: SpaceX fans and foes speak out. …fans were effusive in their praise, while others were in the “damn with faint praise” category
• Economist: Feathering the Falcon’s Nest. The launch on June 4th of a Falcon 9 rocket… is a turning point in the development of private space flight. Though the industry’s coming of age is still some way in the future, this launch marks, if you like, its transition from childhood to adolescence.
• Popular Mechanics: Minute-by-Minute Lessons From Falcon 9’s First Flight. [Recycling after an abort] was in fact one of the most impressive things about the launch, because almost any other vehicle would have had to detank after such an abort and cycle for at least 24 hours.

I used to live in area serviced by Qwest.  I thought their tech support was bad, but I’ve come to appreciate them more, because their tech support people actually listen to what you’re saying.  With Verizon, you might as well be reading off their communication script yourself because anything not on that script is either rebuffed or just flatly ignored.

I just finished watching The Vaccine War, a Frontline investigation into the benefits and risks of early vaccination.

I didn’t feel like it was completely fair to parents who decided to not apply all of the recommended vaccines to their children. My wife and I fall into this group, but our reasons were different than those given by the parents selected for the program. The majority of parents interviewed either had some conspiracy theory reason for not vaccinating, or simply believed that vaccination in general was unnecessary because these diseases had been eradicated. We actually were unaware of many of these conspiracy theories surrounding early childhood vaccines at the time we made our decision, and we are (and were) very aware these diseases have not been eradicated because we in fact have relatives who suffered from some of them.

Our reasons for not supplying our child with certain vaccines (I hope) were a bit more nuanced:

• We felt the vaccine was too new and had not undergone sufficient testing yet, and/or
• The disease the vaccine prevents is rarely deadly, or requires transmission through a means we doubt our child will engage in anytime soon

I’ll leave the reader to figure out which vaccines we declined.

Herd immunity was an important aspect of our decision making process. But I am concerned that by immunizing ourselves to all of these common (and rarely deadly) diseases we may be leaving ourselves open to being susceptible to some new disease that would otherwise not be possible. So in fact, we could be doing the herd a disservice by vaccinating too large a population. Perhaps this is completely unfounded, but I give Methicillin-resistant staph bacteria as an example of human intervention creating a far more serious health concern than the concern it was originally trying to address.

In the last several years we’ve engaged with many health professions on this topic both for our children and ourselves, not just with vaccinations but also with preventative medication. In my opinion, the medical establishment needs to perform longer term studies, have detailed information readily available for patients, and not discriminate against them because of their decisions.

Adobe scraps work to bring Flash apps to iPhone

Good. I don’t want Flash on my iPhone or iPad. I like the web better without flashing ads, high CPU utilization and long page-loading times.

Apple is doing the right thing.

This iPad app Captain’s Log turns your iPad into a StarTrek tablet. Awesome!

Too bad you can’t download it anymore, Paramount Pictures forced the author to take it down.

Folks, this is SLAPP in action. Write your representatives, tell them to support HR 4354.