Randy’s random musings

This past weekend, I had the privilege of visiting another new country, together with Cathy and Ben. I counted the trip as an opportunity to finally put my old Canon HV20 high-def camcorder to some good use!

The combination of in-camera optical image stabilization with the ability of iMovie ‘09 to add stabilization during editing is pretty powerful: together with careful hand-held shooting, footage looks nearly as smooth as if it were shot from a tripod! (as I was in a hurry to get this posted, a few scenes are lacking iMovie’s stabilization)

Be sure to watch in HD!

Our Weekend in Basel – Highlights from Randy Oostdyk on Vimeo.

During a recent vacation in Turkey, we saw a quite a few interesting signs and placards. While we were grateful to have things translated into our language, small mistakes were sometimes quite entertaining.

Here are a few of our favorites:

Please don't pick the flowers much... thanks!

Okay, so my German (and Cathy’s) isn’t that great, but a little punctuation goes a long way. What they meant was “Please don’t pick the flowers. Much thanks!” What we misunderstood was: “Please don’t pick the flowers too much… thanks!”

Don't adventure your life...

This sign was posted as we left the security gate at the main entrance of our hotel. There was a large bazaar on the other side of the highway, and they had built tunnels under the road for pedestrians to cross safely. Still… Adventuring my life sounds like a lot of fun!

These next few were seen at the buffet at dinner-time:

Chicken: kind-of Chinese

So, I guess this chicken is only “sorta” Chinese? When eating, I prefer my chicken to be 100% Chinese, thank you very much!

Grilled Chickenspit? Yummy!

People who know me well would probably describe me as an adventurous eater, but seeing this sign gave me pause. Besides the obvious question of how they collect the spit from the chicken, I wondered how it would taste. I tried some, it was delicious!

This one is actually from our previous trip to Turkey, we spotted it in a waterfall park area:

Dangerous to strink to the border?

We never really did figure out what it was supposed to mean… Any hypotheses?

Since switching over to Macintosh computers completely over a year ago, I’ve noticed quite a few bugs in released products. Some have been more serious than others, but they’re always frustrating! Here are just a few that have bothered me for quite a while:

• Nested soft RAID in Disk Utility is glitchy (I’m definitely an edge case here–doubt there are many others running RAID 1+0 on their Macs)
• Using my Nokia cell phone as a Bluetooth modem is intermittent, at best (since Leopard was released)
• Leopard’s Activity Monitor doesn’t show “nice” processes, and the scheduler is wonky (also since Leopard was released)
• iChat connectivity problems while using a wireless connection (AKA “Airport”)

What’s frustrating is that these bugs have been around for so long, unaddressed. The overall polish of OS X is wonderful, and it’s really nice to have Unix at the guts, so I can dive just as deep as I like… I just wish they’d fix these issues. Here’s hoping that Snow Leopard will actually fix some of this stuff!

Recently, I had occasion to try to remedy an intermittent internet connection in Turkey… It ended up being more challenging than I had anticipated. There was a LAN with a remotely-located (around 100 meters away) proxy server, and it worked intermittently. A ping to the proxy server showed no problems, unless there was congestion on the network. A ping flood would show between 5 to 10 percent packet loss, which increased with the size of the packet.

Having established that the route to the proxy server was at fault, I investigated and learned that the cable from the switch to the proxy server was probably over 100 meters, and that at least a segment of that cable ran parallel with a high voltage power line.

Thinking about the old days of dial-up, and the necessity of reducing the connection speed depending on the line quality, I had the idea of trying to reduce the link speed from 100 Mb/s to 10 Mb/s. It shouldn’t have negatively impacted the internet connection, since it was only a 6 megabit ADSL connection. The problem was that the link speed was auto-negotiated by the switch at both ends, and there was no way to force the link speed slower than 100!

Linksys WRT54GL (loaded with Tomato firmware) to the rescue! Under advanced settings was an option to manually force the link speed down to 10. I installed the router in between the switches, and the problem was gone immediately!

I landed in Dusseldorf this morning, and I’m relaxing at my friend Ercan’s house now. I have a few days before I start work. Cathy and Ben will be joining me in a month or two, but until then, I’ll miss them tremendously.