Dr John Hawkins

Welcome to my bit of the Maison de Stuff, home to a huge load of pictures, and my daily blog.

My email address is as above - I've put it in an image in a vein attempt to reduce the amount of spam I get.

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Recent Entries:

Not So Hard
RSS-o-matic
Roll Your Own
Making a Television
Bloody PDA

Not So Hard

Actually, an RSS aggregator is not that hard to write at all, it would seem.
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RSS-o-matic

I've added an RSS Feed to this blog as well now. It was a lot easier second time around! What I could do with now is a nice simple perl or ASP script that lets me collect these, as well as the message board, and perhaps some other feeds together in one place somwhere on the site...
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Roll Your Own

Last night Simon and Kevin from work came over for dinner. As I had been eating almost exclusively Italian and Japanese food for the past few weeks, I thought I'd break from convention and cook Mexican. So we had fajitas, which were very nice. It occurred to me what a running theme this is in food from all countries. The idea of having some kind of pancake, or other rollable sheet and a selection of different things in little dishes that you can put inside. So, in Mexico there are Fajitas. In Chinese food, there's the famous crispy duck pancakes, where one variety of pancakes used are made from rice flour. Alternatively some Chinese dishes come with lettuce leaves to wrap things up in. In Japan there is temaki sushi - which means something along the lines of "DIY" sushi. Rather than having everything prepared for you, an assortment of ingredients along with the nori (seaweed sheets) and vinegared rice are put in front of you and you can roll your own. In Britain we tend to use pancakes mainly as a dessert, but I remember as a child having my Mum serve them (on Jif Lemon day) much the same way as fajitas or temaki sushi. Again, pancakes with an assortment of different fillings - sugar, oranges, lemons and so on, and importantly you rolled your own. I'm sure equivalents must also exist in Middle Eastern food, perhaps with pitta bread - some kind of variation on the Mezze theme, and also in Indian food, involving chapati. It really appeals to me that all around the world people have independently come up with the same basic idea. I often think when I encounter these kind of recurring cultural themes that it must be indicative of something deep within our collective subconcious, perhaps some hint at a higher meaning or purpose in all of our lives. Or maybe it's just a fun way to eat.
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Making a Television

It always seems to be that I have the greatest enthusiasm for new projects when I don't have any time for them. This is a perfect example - I have decided I want to make a television. OK well that's not strictly true, I'm not going to be doing any soldering or fiddling about with any electronics. It's all in software. Over a year ago now I bought a Hauppauge WinTV Nova-T card. With all the scope for bells and whistles Digital TV offers I was looking forward to a great entertainment system. Sadly, it never quite materialised. As always seems to be the case (especially where TV cards are concerned), the software really badly lets down the hardware, and despite numerous requests Hauppauge have consistently refused to release an API for Windows. Odd, as with better software (which the open source community would no doubt develop for free given a chance) they'd be sure to sell more of their cards. Then I stumbled across the Linux DVB driver. So, under Linux the card could be programmed. Great I thought! It was far from easy to install, but I got there in the end. Given this API, surely someone must have already written a lovely little app that does everything I want. Not so. There's VDR which goes some of the way, but won't actually work with my particular type of card (it needs one of the "full featured" cards). I find it quite odd that given this API no-one has already written a decent Digital TV viewer under linux, especially given that there are freely available MPEG-2 video and audio decoders (libmpeg2 and libmad). So it looks like I'll have to write it all myself. Unfortunately I find Linux extremely awkward to develop for so it is a bit of an uphill struggle, and, as always seems to be the case, I don't really have the time.
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Bloody PDA

Well, the reason I haven't posted here for a while is largely the fault of my PDA. I'd written two entries using that (one on a plane, and one on a train), and thought I would post those before anything else so that the entries didn't get all out of order. However, to my slight frustration I have discovered there's (apparently) no way of getting the files off my PDA onto the PC. I can back up all of the PDA's internal memory to a CompactFlash card, which I can then bung into my PC, and see a load of files. However, they seem to be encrypted or something, oddly - or at least there's no readable text in any of them. Chie seems to think the only way of getting the files off is via the USB cable, which she's very kindly ordered for me. Although I don't wish to sound like I'm doubting her, it would be nice to have a second opinion. If the data written to the CompactFlash card can only ever be read by the PDA itself (which has it's own internal memory anyway), I'm not quite sure what the point is. I've asked for help in various newsgroups and spent ages searching the web but don't seem to be able to get anywhere. My advice? The next time you're considering buying a bit of technology, and people whine on to you about it being cheaper in Japan, just ignore them.
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