The Blog of Lucien Stals

We found a big bug in the Hospitals Helipad web cam…

I had grand plans of making home movies of the kids using my Nokia (whatever model number it is. Why isn’t the model number written on things?), and editing them on the laptop.

Recording the movies works fine.

The bluetooth connection between the phone and laptop works well to get the clips onto the laptop.

But for the life of me I can’t find a way to convert the 3gp files the phone makes into something I can edit in iMovie

The laptop just arrived

It found it’s way back from North Melbourne. A little foot sore, I’m sure, but at least it found it’s way home.

I must have a twisted angel looking over my shoulder.

As if the Saga of the Earbuds wasn’t enough, I am now trying to unravel what has happened to my new laptop. Just over a week ago, I ordered my new laptop. Instead of ordering it directly from the apple shop online, I got it through a company that handled most of our tech purchasing requirements for work. We have a good relationship with them. They are throwing in the three year extended warranty for free. It’s a good deal.

Last Thursday I was informed it had arrived at the shop. They shipped it Friday morning. By Friday afternoon, it hadn’t arrived. They said they would look into it.

Now it’s Monday and I called to find out where my laptop was.

I’m told it was delivered to a warehouse in North Melbourne at 8.52 this morning. Why a warehouse in North Melbourne instead of to me at work? Nobody seems quite sure. The courier company says there was construction work going on and they couldn’t deliver to my place of work. The people who work on the loading bay at the hospital say the building work finished a year ago and the couriers must be smoking something. And can they please have some of it.

Some guy called “Kevin” signed for it. Nobody seemed to know who Kevin was. He doesn’t work here at the hospital, nor does he work for the warehouse. Oh, hang on, he’s a courier for *another* company who ships things back and forth between the warehouse and the hospital.

Now I have to wait until 12.30 for the next scheduled delivery from the warehouse, and I can tell you my laptop had better be on that truck. (a detail I have not been able to confirm)

The thing is, just two weeks ago, the same company who is supplying my laptop sent us new RAM for our desktop computers (2Gig, and Dreamweaver CS3 still runs like a pig). It was sent by courier and was delivered directly to reception in the department where I work. The same address I asked for the laptop to be delivered to. So why is my laptop doing the grand tour of Melbourne courier companies and warehouses?

Why me?

Remind me: how good was that deal?

I’m still waiting for my new Laptop to arrive, but after installing Leopard on my old G4 iBook, I’ve been pretty happy.

I have been impressed with how reliable it is running. From past experiences with Windows upgrades, I was expecting Leopard to run slow. It seems in Windows land that each OS upgrade is engineered to force a hardware upgrade as well. Want those cool new features? Go buy and faster computer with more RAM and a super dooper graphics card.

But my old G4 iBook with a 1.2ghz (single core, Power PC) CPU and 768 meg RAM seems to handle Leopard in it’s stride.

I had given up using WebDav protocol for uploading file to Blackboard. For some reason, and I suspect Bb is at fault here, file transfers were abominably slow, and it was guaranteed that Finder would hang, forcing a system reboot, when I unmounted the Bb share. Under Leopard, the speed is no better, but it doesn’t crash Finder anymore. I still have to suffer the speed, but it’s bearable since I know it wont result in a reboot of my machine.

Something about Leopard I’m not so sure about is the screen capture. I’m used to doing screen captures for lecture slides using Shift>Apple>4. the same key combo still work, but I noticed the screen shot included the new Leopard “feature” of the horrendously big drop shadow behind every window.

Perhaps I’m unhappy about because it’s not what I expected. Perhaps I’ll learn to love it. But for right now, I wish that when I took a screen shot, it just took the picture of what I selected instead of including the shadow around it.

On a related note, does anyone know of a way of changing the preferences on the drop shadow itself? I don’t mind a discrete little drop shadow, but the Leopards shadow drives me nuts.

I know it’s Friday, and beer-O-clock is only a few hours away, but I just saw this…

http://foamee.com/howto

This is going to make the next MTUB meeting just a little bit more interesting

Funny thing is that I’ve seriously gone off Facebook recently. It just gets more and more commercial each day. But I keep coming back to Twitter, which if anything is even more narcissistic that Face book. Maybe that says something about me I don’t want to know.

I’m off to go stick my head in some sand. Pass the mirror, will you?

I’m struggling to make ColdFusion safe from sql injection.

There is a handy <cfqueryparam> tag that’s seems to work well for any non-text types so you can force something to be an int, for example, by using some code like…

<cfquery datasouce="myDatabase" name="myQuery">
    select
        *
    from
        table_name
    where
        id = <cfqueryparam cfsqltype="cf_sql_integer" value="#form.id#">
</cfquery>

But how do you stop people from inserting malicious sql in a text field?

So far, I haven’t found a way to do this as a built in function for ColdFusion. Looks like I’m going to have to implement something myself.

Does anyone know a ready made ColdFusion solution? Being a CF newbie is working against me here

After much angsting, I bit the bullet and went for the most expensive option. I have ordered a new MacBookPro. It will arrive some time next week, I believe.

I have also installed OS X 10.5 on my old G4 iBook. This was mildly troublesome. The upgrade option seemed to work at first, but once the machine stared up, Finder refused to launch. Finder is Macs version of Explorer on Windows. And if Finder (or Explorer) isn’t working, you don’t have a computer

So I resorted to the “Erase, Install” option. This worked a treat. Fortunately I had thought to backup my home directory before starting, and I have been able to recover all my data and settings (with thanks to a .Mac account as well for saving my address book).

I’m still missing some apps, which I’ll have to re-install, but I’m a happy camper so far. And for a tired old iBook (1.2Ghz single core Power PC + 768mb RAM), it runs very well under Leopard.

Once my new machine arrives, I should be able to simply migrate everything.

Happy days

BTW, I’m fond of simple editing programs like TextMate or Smultron for quick jobs. If I can code the solution in less time than a full blown IDE can launch, then it’s a good thing. But having downloaded and installed Xcode 3 to edit some Java, I think I have fallen in love. Soooo nice. So much attention to simple little things like the focus on code blocks greying out the rest of the code. The code hints don’t seem as smart as those in Eclipse, but I’m definitely going to give Xcode a good trial. I may have found my new favorite editor.