Category: technology

I’ve a big fan of Yamaha DVD and sound projector equipment. Generally I find Yamaha gear performs as well as much more expensive systems. Most hifi-mags agree. A while back I purchased the Yamaha s540 DVD player as it had some nice features and was supposedly easily hackable to be region free. Well it is but the instructions on many hack sites simply don’t cut it, as I found out last night. You need to follow these steps.

1. Switch on the player
2. Open the disk tray by pressing stop on the yamaha remote control
3. Press on-screen which should show the current region setting of the player
4. Press 99990 on the remote control. Repeat this until your TV shows the player has shown to region 0. (I had to repeat this 5 times before it worked. It took quite a while to figure out I had to repeat the code multiple times :))
5. Hit enter/ok on the remote. This will close the tray
6. Open the tray again and insert the DVD you wish to play

I’ve posted this as it was bloody painful finding this out and it took a few hours of digging to find out entering the code generally requires multiple attempts.

I’m struggling under the weight of my new found fame courtesy of the reg. Yes the witty person (sarcastic git) who responded to the reg’s poll to find America’s CTO was me.
My email is reproduced below.

“As you don’t provide Al Gore as a candidate to reinvent the internet, Siegfried and Roy are the only sensible option. Another alternative is a virtual CTO representing a hive mind of random editors. If only the IETF made RFCs available as anonymous wikis! They SHOULD do this.
Or a reality TV show where each of the candidates has to respond to various IT challenges like formatting a table correctly in Word or improving BGP. It’s a serious position so the selection process should be rigorous”

As an email subscriber to numerous IETF mailing lists I think my suggestion may not improve the efficiency of the organisation but it might give implementors who DELIBERATELY misinterpret the specifications for commercial advantage an excuse. They could simply claim “MUST” used to be “MAYBE”. Which leads me to mememoir.org which seeks to remove unattributable modifications which pollute the wikisphere. Neat idea. There’s an uneasy tension between preserving anonymity to protect well meaning truth promoters from pressure groups (for legal reasons I can’t think of any off hand) and protecting commercial puppets who use a public encyclopaedia as a platform for spreading rumours & FUD. (again for legal reasons, examples escape me)
Anyway, I’m off to sign autographs.

When Google launched their Chrome browser all those days ago I was wondering when plugins were going to start appearing. Jonathan will testify that I’m plugin obsessed with plugins for delicious, source code inspection, continuous build management and pretty much anything that might be useful. I really wanted Chrome to have delicious support like firefox but then I remembered it supports webkit.
You can go to the delicious bookmarklets page and add the delicious link to the chrome bookmarks bar. It’s not as nice as the firefox search interface but, hey, it’s a start.
I quite like chrome. It’s minimalist and even with the process/tab overhead it performs quite well.

The idea that Microsoft organised a so-called “blind taste test” of Vista under the pretence it was for an experimental new OS called Mojave is laughable. HotHardware carries the story here. The idea that a “10 minute live demo” of Vista compared against other OSes indicates that Vista is somehow underrated and misperceived is a bit, well, silly. Vista isn’t terrible but it is flawed in its memory demands, security features, performance of its UI, application compatibility, and a few other aspects. There are no perfect OSes and I doubt a Vista upgrade is a terminal condition 🙂 However, the Mojave experiment is a marketing gimmick rather than a serious attempt to resolve Vista issues. We’ve seen quite a few of these gimmicks from Microsoft in recent months. These include the Live Search cashback deal and the use of Apple’s iPod range as prizes in another LiveSearch promotion in Australia. It’s attention grabbing but I’d like to see innovation, engineering and design in the spotlight. It’s noticeable that Ballmer is happy to rubbish competitors products (e.g. the MacBook Air) in a way that Bill Gates rarely did. Gates talked up his own products whereas Ballmer is happy to take potshots at others. It’s a personality difference but it’s not like they’re selling beans here. OSes and Search Engines are complex products where the user is buying compatability, usability, performance, functionality, reliability, sophistication etc. These goals rest on great engineering & design, accepting that great marketing helps in spreading the message.