Captain EO, a Quick Review

I was at Disneyland on Sunday and saw the return of Captain EO. This was the first day with full weekend crowds since it opened (as Saturday was rainy, the park was likely not as busy as it would normally be on a Saturday). I was there around 10:30 in the morning and the wait was about the same as I'd read about during the week on MiceChat's forums: I had to wait a few minutes in the queue, pretty much right under the new sign. We were then let in to the main queue area, and I was able to find a spot to stand at the bottom of the steps near the theater door.

There was a several minute wait for the pre-show video to start. Some of it seemed familiar. It was nice, and the Kodak ad wasn't nearly as drawn out as it was for Honey, I Shrunk the Audience!

When we were let into the theater, several announcements were made reminding people to move all the way to the end of the row as the auditorium was going to be full. I was seated a few rows back, near the exit side of the row.

The show itself was great. I did see some ghosting in the 3D picture, but it might have just been me as I was noticing the picture didn't seem quite right for MuppetVision 3D and It's Tough to be a Bug that afternoon as well. I was too young to remember the starfield effect, but having had it pointed out in advance, I did miss the lasers when EO's ship is under attack in space, since there's no visual effect to go with the sound. It seems like of the three missing original effects (the third being smoke), the lasers would have been the easiest to reinstall in the theater. This might be heretical to say, but if they're not going to reinstall the lasers, I wonder if the visual effect should be added to the film itself.

The motion floor was interesting. I don't know if it can move at an angle or just uniform up and down; if so it would have been nice to angle the floor to synchronize with the movements of the ship before it lands, to give the audience the feeling of turning as well. The movement of the floor during the musical numbers sometimes worked and seem to fit but sometimes felt unnecessary, like it was added just because they could.

Got a cheer from the audience when EO first comes on screen -- before we even saw his face.

At the end of the show, the cast member referred to our 3D glasses as "safety goggles", which is what they were referred to as for HISTA. The signs at the receptacle bins also referred to them that way. The glasses are HISTA yellow; the original EO glasses were purple. MuppetVision glasses are purple, it seems like it would be simple enough to swap the EO and MuppetVision glasses for the extra bit of authenticity at EO, but the color of the glasses is a pretty minor thing.

Here's hoping that, at least in Anaheim, Wayne Szalinski has shrunk his last audience.

TRENDnet modems with AT&T DSL

I recently got a new DSL modem, a TRENDnet TEW-435BRM. I had trouble getting it to work; the automatic configuration wasn't working. I searched around and saw lots of people having problems getting TRENDnet routers to work on AT&T DSL as well. After playing around with settings for a while, I did get it to work, so I thought I'd post here in case it might help others in the future.

The following settings work for me:

• VPI: 0
• VCI: 35
• DSL Modulation: ADSL2
• Connection method: Login, PPPoE
• DSL Duplexing Method: LLC-BASED
• Login name and password are my AT&T/Yahoo credentials
• Connect Behavior: Keep Alive (Reconnect immediately)
• IP Address: Automatic
• DNS: Automatic

The GIGO Buffer

I've contemplated doing this for a while, and after a conversation at work this past week, I've decided to actually implement it.

Presenting, a GIGO (Garbage In, Garbage Out) Buffer. Implemented in Python, and won't work on Windows (because really, that whole OS is basically a giant GIGO buffer).

#!/usr/bin/env python

class GIGO_Buffer:
 """
 Implementation of a Garbage In, Garbage Out buffer.
 """

 def push(self, element):
   """
   Push data into the buffer.
  
   @param element: Data to add to the buffer.
   """
   return

 def pop(self, len):
   """
   Pop data from the buffer.
  
   @param len: Number of bytes of data to pop from the buffer.
   @returns len bytes of data from the buffer.
   """
   data = open('/dev/urandom', 'r')
   rval = data.read(len)
   data.close()
   return rval

More Bad Ideas from the Airline Industry

Here's why this is a bad idea:

First, for at least the short term, checking in will take longer as people argue with the agents about the fee. Plus, there will be confusion about who pays the fee and who doesn't. Sure, they lay it out pretty clearly on their web site, but do we really expect all their front line agents to know all the details? And we know customers don't read.

Second, it will make security lines longer as more people who might have otherwise checked a bag now try to bring it through as a carry on to avoid paying the fee. People like me who would check through their liquid stuff will now have to have it as one more thing to pull out of the back and place in a separate bin along with my shoes, laptop, and sweater/coat.

Third, boarding will take longer while people try to find room for all that stuff they didn't check. People trying to stuff it in the overhead bin, figure out how to get it under their seat, and finally having to check it through anyway.

The ultra-low-cost carriers like Ryanair, Allegiant, and the late, unmissed Skybus can get away with this because their fares are so low that I actually buy the argument that they're simply operating on an a la carte model where you pay for the services you want. I have a harder time buying that argument from American, where we won't be seeing the fares going down (and most people won't notice if they keep the fares lower by doing this in lieu of simply raising fares) and their fares aren't and won't be substantially different from their competitors.

We'll Miss You

1946-2008

Leopard: The Cat is Out of the Bag

Yeah, yeah. That's not original at all.

Rawr.

So I've had Leopard running on my G5 for a few hours, and here are some thoughts.

Before I installed Leopard, I used Carbon Copy Cloner to clone my system onto an external FireWire hard drive that will ultimately become my Time Machine backup drive. This turned out to be a good thing, as the installation turned out to be a bit of a hairy experience. I initially attempted to do an Archive and Install, however during the process I got a message that installation had failed. I tried again, this time doing an Erase and Install, and got the same error. I dug out my original Power Mac G5 DVD and ran the Apple Hardware Test. Sure enough, it reported problems with memory. I pulled the two 512MB modules I had added a while back, reverting to the original 512MB of RAM. These modules were warranty replacements for my original pair which had gone bad, and I didn't really want to have to replace them again. Sure enough, this time the install succeeded. After the system was up and running, I put the extra memory modules back in and so far no problems.

During the install process, there was the option to copy my information over from an external hard drive; a feature I had used before when I replaced my iBook with a PowerBook, only this time I would be using just the hard drive rather than a Mac in FireWire target disk mode. The copy took a while, but when it was done I was up and running again, just the same as if I had done an Archive and Install -- except that the Previous System was tucked away on another disk rather than on the same disk. The only hitch was that it had trouble copying over the software for my Microsoft keyboard; I was able to grab that off of their web site and reinstall it without much difficulty.

Once I got things up and running, things seemed to work fine. I did have to update the Xiph QuickTime Components to get Ogg files to play properly in iTunes. One time Firefox got suck behind the other windows; quitting and relaunching fixed that. Chax doesn't work yet; while I no longer need it to get tabbed chats in iChat, I do miss having the buddy list automatically resize itself to be just long enough to show all my online contacts like Adium does. I'd use Adium for everything, except that I do use the video feature, and now expect to use screen sharing as well.

Thanks to a post on the InsanelyMac forum, I found the new nebula background that is used on the login screen. It's DefaultDesktop.jpg in /System/Library/CoreServices. I wanted to use it as my desktop, so I opened up the Desktop & Screen Saver preferences panel and dragged it into the little graphic well. Why Apple didn't just put it in with the other default desktop pictures, I'm not sure.

I like the look of the new dock. Until now, I'd always kept the dock set to hide unless I moved the mouse to the bottom of the screen. Which probably made sense back when I was using a 17" CRT (at probably 1034x768) like when I first installed Mac OS X 10.0. Since I'm now using a 21" LCD at 1600x1200, I think I can give up that little bit of space at the bottom. I'm not sure about the Stacks thing but I think I can get used to it. In the past, I've kept a copy of my Applications and user home folder in my dock for easy access. I'd right click on Applications to pick an application, and usually just click the home folder to open it in a Finder window. It seems to be taking a bit longer to find applications in the grid view than it did as a menu, since instead of just finding it vertically, I have to search both the right row and column in the grid. On the other hand, not having to scroll ought to be nice, so it balances out. I do prefer the grid view to the fan view; having the list curve off to the side seems rather useless.

I'm not wild about the new folder icon; I prefer the older ones. The new ones remind me of the rather ugly ones used in the default Fedora 7 desktop. Did someone decide that the 3D folder icons--which date back to the Copland project and ultimately appeared in Mac OS 8--have gone out of style?

I also saw some complaints about the transparent menu bar, but that doesn't seem to be bothering me. It seems pretty smart: Against a dark background, it is less transparent so it maintains good contrast with the black text.

I'm not wild about having document icons be previews. I usually turn this off in Konqueror. I normally use the column view, so all the icons are pretty small and they all look about the same. I'd much rather have a Word document icon for .docs, an Adobe Reader document icon for .pdfs, and so on, and use Quick Look to get a preview.

I'll wrap this post up with this thought: How come I haven't seen any Leopard Lolcats yet? Too obvious?

San Diego Fires

Just for anyone who might be concerned about me, my area of San Diego thus far isn't very badly affected. Some smoke in the air but that's it.

Taro Chips

I knew taro chips are tasty, but apparently they also have great taste in television:

HDTV

After stumbling across Pirates of the Caribbean last night on ABC, I realized that ABC is one of the channels I get an over the air HDTV signal from, so I switched from my cable input to that. And I have to say, HDTV looks a lot better.

As an aside, I've also been rather impressed by the side-by-side comparisons of DVD versus BluRay at stores like Best Buy and Circuit City. But I'm planning to wait until there's a clear winner in the BluRay versus HD-DVD format war (or players that can handle both formats become cheap) before moving from DVD to a new format.

Done Voting? Good. Pay More for Gas.

Sigh.

Guess all those conspiracy theorists that were saying gas prices were down just for the elections were true. They're already going up.

Where's my hydrogen-hybrid RX-8?