Major BroadBand Improvements

Looks like ICASA is finally doing something about the apalling state of broadband access in SA. More details are available on myADSL, but here are the highlights:

No more 3Gb cap. There will be a cap, still to be determined, but using local bandwidth will not count towards the it, and you will be able to top-up or pay per excess bandwidth used, rather than having to buy extra accounts.

No monthly access charges. Currently you pay an installation fee (once off), then monthly line rental and access fees. The plan is to scrap the access fee, so that you just pay for the monthly line rental (which is way cheaper than the access fees). But there will be a once-off initial access fee, so we'll just have to hope that it's a reasonable amount.

Other issues: contention ratios are to be made public, and there will be no port prioritization (i.e. no bandwidth shaping). They're also going to look at local loop unbundling, and allowing other network operators access to the international cable link.

Well, these are the recommendations - I'll believe it when I see it, but hopefully they'll be put into practice, and soon!

Rapid Serial Visual Presentation

This is quite a cool solution to the problem of reading a lot of text on small displays like cellphones or PDAs. The idea is that the text is shown one word at a time, with each word replacing the previous word, so your display really only needs to be one word big. It's described in a Mobile Magazine article by Mark Frauenfelder, and there's an online demo.

I thought it would be really disconcerting, and for the first couple of seconds it is - you're consciously reading the word out loud in your head (if you know what I mean), and trying to remember the context. But pretty soon you get used to it, although after a little bit more my eyes got really tired - you don't need to move your eyes across a page, but somehow they jump around a lot, as though you're so used to moving your eyes that you do it whether you need to or not.

The demo only uses short quotes, unfortunately - I'd like to see how well it works with a longer piece of text that you need to remember more context for - just something simple like a blog entry, and then for something more complicated. I suspect that comprehension might decrease in those kind of situations. Of course, I'm just guessing; they are putting a lot of research into in (links are in the article mentioned above).

But wouldn't it be cool to be able to easily read text on a pda or cellphone?

Home Affairs Department Woes

Maybe, for my own safety, I shouldn't complain, given the recent reports of fraud, corruption, and murder in the Department of Home Affairs, but they really are slooooow.

I'm trying to apply for my UK passport (amongst other reasons, I want to get one before they bring in the biometric requirements; otherwise I'd probably have to go up to Joburg to apply in person, which would be annoying, since I'm in Cape Town).

To do this, I need three documents: my dad's birth certificate, my birth certificate, and my parents' marriage certificate. Now I had my birth certificate and my parents' marriage certificate, but they need the full unabridged version. I thought that this would be easy - I can just get the unabridged version from the Dept of Home Affairs. I thought getting my dad's full birth certificate would be difficult, since I'd have to get it from the UK equivalent.


I had it totally back to front. I ordered my dad's birth certificate via the UK government website, paid by credit card, and it was delivered to my door two weeks later.

Compare that simple process to trying to get my own birth certificate (which, two months later, I still don't have). You can download the application forms off the web, but you have to go into your local DHA office to submit them and pay the fee. At least they are open on Saturday mornings, and the queues weren't too bad. But they say it takes 6 to 8 weeks to get the certificates, and they won't send them to you, you have to come in and collect them. Nor will they notify you when they're ready for collection - you have to phone them to find out.

So after 6 weeks, I phoned, and after a couple of days I managed to get someone to answer the phone - to my surprise, the birth certificate was ready for collection! The marriage certificate was printed, but not signed yet. So after another week, I went to pick them up. Or tried to, at least. After waiting in the queue while she chatted to the previous person, she looked all over for about 20 minutes before telling me she couldn't find them (and didn't know how to look it up on the computer, either). I asked what to do next, since it would be pointless phoning again since they'd just tell me it was ready, like they had before - her response was to come in on Monday and speak to someone else. Yeah, like I don't have a job to go to! Eventually I spoke to the supervisor, who was really helpful, checked up on the computer, and told me that she didn't know why I had been told the birth certificate was ready, since it and the marriage certificate had been printed but not checked yet. She also gave me the number of someone higher up in the hieararchy to phone.

So a week later, I phoned this person, who was also quite helpful (for what it was worth). She told me that the birth certificate had been printed 10 days after I submitted the application, but still wasn't checked! The marriage certificate also was still waiting to be checked. She said she'd look into it, and get back to me. A week later, I phoned her again - she was still looking, she said, for the printed birth certificate and both application forms, but she would definitely get back to me. Almost a week later again, and I haven't heard from her.

I know they're busy, and I know they're understaffed - but this is ridiculous!

Table Mountain

Yesterday I went to see "A Lot Like Love" ... it was good, and I enjoyed the movie itself (athough the storyline wasn't quite what I was expecting), but what really reminded why I don't go to movies so much is how irritating the people where. A group sitting right behind me were talking loudly throughout the movie, on purpose, and not even about the movie. And they (and others) don't worry about getting calls on their cellphone ... some people at least switched their phones to silent, some didn't; but a lot of people got calls. And they don't even go out of the movie theatre to talk - they just stand in the corner at the back, where you can still hear them. And the sheer number of people who just wander in and out throughout the movie, for who knows what reason ... and then you get the people who don't want to talk on their cellphone, but sit and sms throughout the movie - but cellphone screens are so bright that you can see this little square of light even if you're rows and rows away. So while I'd rather just get the dvd and watch at home, some movies you have to see on the big screen (like War of the Worlds), and some I don't want to wait until they come out on dvd (like A Lot Like Love).

Anyway, on to the point. Last week I went up Table Mountain for my birthday, and it was really nice. I didn't feel like riding up to the lower cable station (heights don't bother me, in general, unless I'm on the bike), so I thought I'd do the whole tourist thing and do the Cape Town Topless Bus Tour, which tours around the Waterfront, Cape Town centre, the cable station, Camp's Bay, and Seapoint.

Surprisingly, it was quite fun :-) I took a bunch of photos, of things that I used to see all the time in the city center, but I never really go there these days. And they mentioned things that I used to know, but hadn't really realized; like the fact that the foreshore used to be the sea, and that all that is actually reclaimed land. The waterfront, the international convention center, the Arabella Sheraton, all that is on reclaimed land - and land that was still underwater until something like 1930.

I really recommend the tour to tourists (and locals, if you don't mind spending R90 to see your own city). Like the advertising says, it really is a good way to see the city, and it made me decide that I definitely want to do the London topless bus tour when I get there.

Table Mountain itself was pretty impressive - I haven't been up since I was little kid, and they've made vast improvements since then. The wait for the cable car wasn't too long, although it was off-season - but there were quite a lot of people! You'd think you'd get some peace and quiet on the top of a mountain, but no such luck.

The cable car itself is way better than it used to be - the floor revolves so that you get to see the entire panorama, not just the bit you can see out of the window you happen to be next to. The trip takes about 3 minutes, and while that does make it pretty efficient I kinda think that for R110 they could slow it down a bit and make it more worthwhile ... not that I cared, I went for free on a birthday ticket :-) And speaking of efficiency trade-offs, the car takes 80-odd people, but most of them don't get to stand next to the window (although they can still see out, above and around the other people), which seems rather a pity.

They're not terribly jacked up as a tourist attraction, though; although it wasn't peak season, so I guess that might account for some of it. They have pay-per-view binoculars, but nowhere do they say what they cost or what coins they accept, which is kinda useless (although some of them were broken, so you could use them free). The views are absolutely awesome, and they've done a good job of making little walking trails around the top of the mountain - although they don't correspond to the trails on the little map they give you. I would have done the trip out to McClear's Beacon, the tallest point of the mountain, but it's a 45 minute walk each way and I didn't want to do it by myself.

The low point was the so-called restaurant - I figured they'd be expensive, but thought I'd treat myself to a nice lunch. According to their website, "the self-service restaurant has an extensive hot and cold buffet". Um, no. Extensive isn't quite the right word - there was a choice of chips, burger, cheese burger, hot dog, or chicken & chips. Or a salad. Or some really crummy looking cheese sandwiches. Although, maybe they meant "expensive", instead - a small plate of chips was R18, the sandwiches were R18, and the burgers were R20-odd. Which isn't bad, a Woolworth's sandwich or a Steer's burger would cost you that much, but they look a lot better than these did .... and to drink, they're charging R9 for a tin of Coke, which is still better than the R12 for a little cup of fruit juice (looked about 200ml) or R7 for Coke/Fanta/whatever.

But still, I'd recommend going - just take a picnic lunch with you! The point is to see the mountain and the view, and that is definitely worth it - just take a look at some of these photos I took:

The view of Table Mountain, over the Castle of Good Hope

The view of the Upper Cable Station, from the Lower Cable Station

The view of Camp's Bay, from the top of the mountain

The view from the other side of the mountain, Table Bay.

The view of Lion's Head from above, with Robben Island in the background.

Call of Cthulhu Webzen

This has to be one of the strangest and yet coolest things I've come across on the web: Tales of the Plush Cthulhu.

I've never been much into the Cthulhu mythos - if I read it properly, I get freaked out, so I tend to just kinda skim over it, so I end up not really knowing what's going on. But one of these days I'm going to make a determined effort to read all the old Cthulhu books again ... and get myself a plush Cthulhu and a plush Shoggoth ;-)

Movies, Books, and Birthdays

I went to see War of the Worlds the other day, and was pretty impressed. It's been a really long time since I read the book, but I think it was a fairly liberal interpretation of the basic story.... but that didn't really matter, because it was a really good movie. Not least because Tom Cruise was in it ;-) Sure, there were a lot of plot holes, and some of it just plain didn't sense, but you get so caught up in it that mostly only think of all that afterwards. And watching it a day or two after the London bombings gave it an extra poignancy, especially the scene with the train that comes past, on fire ... The sound was really excellent as well, with lots of bass on the sound effects so that they rumble through you, and your seat practically moves.

I don't generally go to the movies much (it's a pain carrying a bike jacket and helmet around with you), but I really should go more often. I've missed a couple of movies that I wanted to see - Hitch, The Wedding Date - and there are a couple coming up that I want to see - Hitchhiker's Guide, A Lot Like Love.

There are a quite a few books I want to buy too - at least going to a movie is cheaper than buying a book, although a book you get to read over and over :-) Here's a short list of the books I'd go and buy today if I didn't feel guilty about spending about R1000 on books:

• Thud - Terry Pratchett (Only coming out October, but still ...)
• Where's My Moo Cow - Terry Pratchett (See above ...)
  
• Ash - Mary Gentle (I've read it a couple of times, but would really like to own it)
• Kushiel's Chosen (And Kushiel's Dart, the prequel - I've read it, but ages ago)
• Science of Discworld 3 - Darwin's Watch - Ian Stewart, Jack Cohen, Terry Pratchett
• Earth, Air, Fire, and Custard - Tom Holt
• Booty Nomad (This one I'm not so sure about - the back cover looked good, though)

and there are tons more; don't ever let me loose in a bookshop without a budget :-)

I might buy myself one or two as a birthday present, seeing as my birthday's coming up on Saturday. I generally try to do something interesting on my birthday, although last year I ended up not taking leave and spending the day at work as usual (and actually had a great time, probably because more because of than in spite of); this year, I have a great plan. The Table Mountain Cable Car is celebrating their birthday this year (I think it's 30 years, or something), and if you go on your birthday you get a free return ticket. So since my birthday's on a Saturday, I thought I'd take advantage and go up Table Mountain. I haven't been up since I was a little kid, so it should be fun. I just hope the weather holds out - it's been really sunny and nice for a while now, so we're due for some rain, seeing as how it is actually winter. My backup plan was to go and see A Lot Like Love, if the weather's bad, but that's only coming out on the 22nd, so I need a new bad-weather-backup-birthday-plan.

Can't email apps!

I often e-mail myself stuff, via my gmail account. I send off the email at work, and then download it at home.

Today I tried to e-mail myself the original Space Quest demo. And gmail wouldn't let me! It said that "for security reasons" I'm not allowed to send executables. Which seems rather high-handed. And the interesting part is that it was in a zip file ... and I had renamed the .exe to something else. So gmail actually scans inside archives, and scans the actual files, not just the filenames!

Maybe it's standard - I tried to send it from a different webmail account, and the same thing happened (although I didn't try the renaming trick). But dammit! If I want to email myself something, I don't see why I can't! Especially when it's not something that could possibly be executed accidentally or automatically.

Grrr. And it would be the one day I left my flashdrive at home.

Strings in .Net 2.0

I still haven't got around to installing Beta2 - I've been too busy getting a new laptop screen, partitioning my drive, reinstalling windows, deciding I needed win98 as well, repartitioning, installing 98, reinstalling XP, trying to get them to co-exist, deciding I don't need 98 after all, repartitioning, and reinstalling XP - but once I've reinstalled the dell-specific drivers I'll get right to it (can you believe, even the modem won't work with just the normal XP install?)

But it does look as though 2.0 has a lot of cool features, way more than just the couple of things that were mentioned at DevDays (although those were more than enough to make me happy). I've recently been doing some complicated forms-based stuff, and partial classes would really have been good there; but what I found today (off the dotnet.org.za main feed) was the new string handling options.

For ages I've been trying to convince colleagues that things like ToUpper() are horribly slow and should be avoided. Now it's easier to do this. Microsoft have acknowledged that "Sometimes strings should be allowed to vary according to the user's culture (for display data), but for most strings internal to an application, such as XML tags, user names, file paths, and system objects, the interpretation should be consistent throughout all cultures", which makes perfect sense. So they've introduced a StringComparison parameter to most string methods, such as:

String.Compare(protocol, "ftp", StringComparsion.Ordinal)

This not only makes it a lot faster, since it works on a byte comparison, but prevents the internal behaviour of your app changing unpredictably based on the current culture. These ordinal comparisons can be case sensitive or insensitive, and, the coolest part, .Equals() and == have been defined to use them by default. On the other hand, String.Compare() uses current culture semantics by default, so I guess it's better to explicity use the StringComparison to make sure that it works the way you intend. Especially since it's not particularly consistent: String.ToUpper and Char.ToUpper are both current culture, but IndexOf(string) is current culture while IndexOf(char) is ordinal.

ToUpper() (and ToLower()) still use the current culture, and while you can use ToUpperInvariant(), it's recommended that you just use String.Compare with StringComparison.OrdinalIgnoreCase instead.

This also affects Collections: amongst other changes, sort and compare methods now take a StringComparison parameter as well. Read the article yourself for the full details :-)

string.LastIndexOf

Okay, here's one that had me stuck for a while this morning, until I realized what was going on.

String.LastIndexOf(char, index) just didn't seem to be finding the char in the string, even though it was clearly there. It just didn't work.

So I tried String.IndexOf, and that worked ....

and then it came to me in a flash of memory: I've seen this before :-) LastIndexOf actually works in reverse, so the index is the first position you want to start the search from, not the first position in the string - i.e. if you want to search the entire string, index will be string.length-1, not 0. It's obvious once you realise it, but the docs don't mention it, so I thought I'd mention it here as a heads-up.

And maybe I'll remember it next time ....

Digital Camcorder, anyone?

A couple of days ago I bought myself a Samsung D305 digital camcorder - partly as an early birthday present for myself, partly out of sheer boredom :-) Well, not actually - I've been thinking of getting one for a while, and had been looking at the d305 for a couple of weeks, but I had planned to wait until my birthday to actually buy it, but I was so bored on Friday that I decided I would go and pick one up on my way home from work.

First, though, I checked that I could return it if I wasn't happy with the quality, because no matter how many reviews you read you don't really know what the movies and photos will look like until you try it out. Lucky I did, because I will be returning it.

So here's a quick review along with the reasons why it isn't for me. The d305 is pretty much the same as the d103, except that it comes with a couple of extra accessories (most importantly, an 8mb memory stick), has 20x zoom instead of 16, and can handle SD and MMC cards as well as memory sticks. It uses USB to transfer data (movies or stills) from the card to a PC, and a firewire cable to transfer movies and stills from the miniDV tape to the PC (a note to those in SA: the camera is about R500 cheaper from Incredible Connection than Game; the miniDV tapes are about R40 cheaper from Photo Connection than Incredible Connection). It doesn't come with a firewire cable, but does come with a USB cable - which impressed me, until I realized that they deliberately used a non-standard connector and that's why they supply the cable.

The camera itself is pretty cool - it's small, compact, and lightweight. The important buttons are easy to reach while you're filming (assuming you're right handed), the lcd is small but clear and the viewfinder is basically the lcd in miniature (and has a little focus adjustment knob so that you can focus the viewfinder). I found it the rocker switch for the menu a little bit awkward to use, but you get used to it as you go along. I did find it annoying that you have to open the lcd to do some things, like switch between menu and tape - in fact, this is something that I would think should be easy to do while filming, but you really do need two hands to do it. It's really easy to play from the miniDV tape onto a PC - plug in the colour coded cables, press play, and there you go.

I was fairly impressed with the video quality - there are a lot of options, like setting the exposure and white balance, but even just with everything on auto you get a pretty good picture. I filmed inside, at night, with normal 60watt lights, and the video was pretty clear, and I was quite impressed with it, considering. The night mode feature is ... I wouldn't say useless, but it isn't very useful. It's probably better than nothing, but does give everything a greenish-greyish tinge. The quality of the video looks really good on the lcd, less good on a TV, but not too bad; for ordinary home videos, it should be fine, especially when filming outside. You can take still pictures on the tape (it essentially records 7 seconds of the same image), but I didn't really assess the quality of these. Equally, I didn't download videos onto my PC via the firewire cable, as I couldn't borrow one easily and the question became academic anyway when I looked at the quality of the stills.

This is where it fell down. Video and stills can be recorded on the memory card, but both are pretty bad. Video requires a codec not supplied on the CD, which seems pretty slack. Night stills are really awful, which is understandable considering the lack of a flash. Video is pretty bad, night or day (very choppy), and day photos are just not good enough for me. I guess they're not bad, and if you're used to cellphone photos they might seem fine, but they are terribly jaggy, as if they've used a very high jpg compression (even in super-fine mode). In fact, they look a lot better when reduced to 320 x 240, which now that I mention it, kinda makes sense - they say that the camcorder can be used as a webcam, in which the res is 320x240 at 6fps, so it's as if the resolution of the digital camera side is actually 320x240 but they resize it up to 640x480, thus reducing the quality. I really don't want to have to carry around a video camera and a stills camera, so for me it's important that the stills photos are reasonable - not studio quality, at all, but even your holiday photos should be reasonablly good.

It's odd - my cellphone camera, camcorder, and digital camera can all take 640x480 stills, but the quality varies dramatically. The cellphone pictures are kinda blurry (it seems more of a focus problem), the digital camera is okay, and the camcorder is jaggy. But if you look at the specs, you can't predict that they'll be different, or how. I know very little about cameras and lenses, but it seems that there are other factors which should be listed on the specs apart from just the resolution. If I decide to try to find another camcorder in the hopes that it will have better quality stills, what do I look at? How would I know? I can't buy one of each model, take it home, try it out, take it back ... :-)