Blast from the (computing) past

When I was up in Ohio on vacation last week, my mom presented me with a cardboard box she found while cleaning out the basement. Score!

The Atari 800XL was my first computer, given to me by my parents as a Christmas present in the early 80s. That, combined with seeing the movie “WarGames“, is what steered me into computers and eventually, my career. This particular 800XL isn’t my original unit. I sold that one and “upgraded” to this one, which had the RAMBO XL memory upgrade to a whopping 256k (from the original 64k). So technically it’s my second computer. 😉

The cardboard box also contained my two 1050 floppy drives, a KoalaPad (no stylus), and an ICD P:R: Connection. I also had a 256k ICD MIO but sadly that was missing. I used to run a BBS on all of this hardware and with the 256k internally on the computer and the 256k external RAMDisk I was able to load the entire thing into memory to minimize floppy disk access. The 1050s were not the quietest drives and since the whole setup was in my bedroom, I could get woken up in the middle of the night when someone on the BBS saved a message board post and the disk drive would grind to life.

I managed to get the Atari hooked up to a Sony LCD HDTV in my home office:

Seeing and using the Atari again, compared to my Eee, really drives home how far computing has come in the past 25 years. Wow.

Now if my mom could only find the other box filled with game cartridges and disks …

“WALL-E” is great!

We took my daughter to see Disney Pixar’s latest animated feature, WALL-E, tonight, and it was great. For a film with only a few characters and almost no dialog, it tells a story anyone can follow and understand. It’s not as cartoonish or cutesy as Pixar’s previous fare but will still reach out to all ages (there were several over-55 couples in the theater we went to).

For a box with tank treads and a pair of binoculars stuck on top, WALL-E himself is amazingly expressive. EVE was obviously designed by someone (Jobs?) at Apple with her smooth, white, iPhone-ish appearance (in other nods to Apple, WALL-E’s boot-up sound is the same one used on the Mac, an iPod video makes a cameo, and according to IMDB the voice of AUTO was done by MacInTalk, Apple’s text-to-speech program). My personal favorite was MO, the little cleaning robot who is just trying to keep the Axiom clean despite WALL-E tracking dirt everywhere.

There are plenty of sci-fi references in the film for the older crowd. AUTO, the Axiom star cruiser’s auto-pilot has a HAL-like red eye; Sigourney Weaver is the Axiom’s computer voice; “Also sprach Zarathustra” (also known as the theme from “2001: A Space Odyssey“) is used at one point. I’m sure there were others I missed but there was a lot to take in with just a single viewing.

Oh, and the magic hat/rabbit short at the beginning was hilarious too.

Two thumbs way up … I highly recommend it.

Fix for local radar image in Galleon’s weather app

A few weeks ago, the Local Radar screen in Galleon‘s weather application started showing “N/A” instead of the image from weather.com. Galleon has been dormant, development-wise, for a while. It was updated late last year with some bug fixes and HD support by s2kdave and jtkohl, but has lapsed into the realm of unsupported (but really useful) applications.

s2kdave pointed me in the right direction as to which piece of the code contained the URLs for the local radar image (WeatherData.java). I’m not really a java programmer, but I can code, so I decided to take a look and see if I could figure out the problem. It took me a while, but the fix ended up being rather simple.

In the determineLocalRadar function there are two try blocks. The first section grabs the weather page for the user’s specified ZIP code:

GetMethod get = new GetMethod("http://www.weather.com/weather/map/" + mZip);

It then parses through that HTML looking for the following strings:

String REGEX = "var mapNURL = \"(.*)\";";

or

REGEX = "src=\"/maps/local/local(.*)\"";

This was used to detemine the URL of the web page containing the local radar image. The second try block then grabbed that page:

get = new GetMethod("http://www.weather.com"+ radarurl);

and parsed it for the URL of the image itself:

String REGEX = "NAME=\"mapImg\" SRC=\"([^\"]*)\"";

What I found is that the first web page (the ZIP code-specific one) now contained the local radar image, so there was no need for the first try block anymore (the one creating the radarurl variable). I removed the block and re-compiled the code.

It worked! I tested with three different area codes in Galleon and the proper local radar image was retrieved each time. Of course, I can’t stop weather.com from changing their layout again, but this should work for now.

You can download my new weather.jar file and place it in the apps directory where Galleon is installed. I also posted about my fix on the TiVo Community Forum here.

Vista SP1 “reliability” update

Microsoft has released “a reliability and performance update for Windows Vista SP1-based computers.” According to the KB article, the update specifically addresses a problem with e-mail clients and ZoneAlarm, so maybe it will fix my Vista woes (no mention of a VPN fix, though).

I’ve downloaded and applied the patch, but I’m in no rush to attempt running ZoneAlarm again just yet.

Road Trip 2008: Day 10

And so it ends …

We got up early and hit the road, driving through the morning fog in the northern Georgia hills.

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Driving through Georgia and Florida takes forever, but we finally made it home shortly before 6pm. Vacation is over!

vacation-756454Final wrap-up:

According to my Garmin StreetPilot c340, we covered about 3,000 miles, crossing 12 states, spending about 53 hours in the car (over 2 full days!) on our 10-day road trip. 😀

Looking at my receipts, the cheapest gas was $3.88/gal at a station in Virginia, and the most expensive was $4.19/gal at a fill-up in northern Ohio. My best tank averaged 27mpg (the stretch from Ohio to northern Tennessee) and the worst was 23mpg (Tennessee to Atlanta … going up and down all those mountains!).

Whew. Vacation was fun, but it’s good to be home …

Road Trip 2008: Day 9

This morning we packed up the car and then checked out of our hotel to start our last day in Ohio. Then it was over to St. Victor’s in Richfield for my niece’s baptism.

Immediately after mass, we bid friends and family farewell and hit the long road home. About 90 minutes down I-71, we stopped at a rest area near Mansfield, OH to fill up the tank and change out of our church clothes into more comfortable traveling clothes. As we were getting ready to leave, I heard someone call my name across the parking lot. I turned around to find one of my college roommates and his wife and kids who we hadn’t seen in years! They live in Detroit but were heading to Mansfield to see family and our paths crossed at that rest stop for just a few minutes. Talk about a small world … what are the chances?

We stopped again around 4pm just outside of Cincinnati for an early dinner where we met (on purpose this time) another friend from college we hadn’t seen in a while, along with her husband and 2 year-old son.

Our next stop was about 90 minutes later outside of Lexington, KY where we found a Graeter’s ice cream place for dessert. This was another favorite of ours when we lived in the Cincinnati area … yummy.

More marathon driving through the rest of Kentucky and the hills of Tennesee. I saw a lot of cool lightning in the clouds over the mountains. We finally made it to our hotel in Dalton, GA just after midnight. It was a long day of driving and we still have another 9 hours ahead of us tomorrow.

Road Trip 2008: Day 8

It was a late night last night after the fireworks show, but I managed to meet up early with my siblings. We headed downtown to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum.

img_1908-791938I had never gone to the museum while I lived in Cleveland … it was one of those things I figured I would get around to eventually. The exhibits were really cool, way too much to describe in a single blog post. My favorite things were the original hand-written lyrics sheets: it was neat to see the scratch-outs as the songwriter tried to find the perfect words. Did you know, for example, that Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire” was originally titled “Jolene” and had a totally different refrain? Some other personal favorites of mine included the piano that Ian Hunter composed “Cleveland Rocks” on, different early rejection letters to U2, and the Talking Heads memorabilia in the New Wave section.
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After finishing up at the museum, we headed past Progressive Field (formerly The Jake, or Jacobs Field) over the river to the Great Lakes Brewery for lunch, along with a quick trip across the street to the West Side Market. Mmmm … beer. 😉

After some more shopping it was back to the hotel for dinner and packing. It’s back on the road tomorrow afternoon as we head back to Florida.

Road Trip 2008: Day 7

Happy Independence Day!

The rain moved out as forecast and today was beautiful … low 80s and sunny. In the early afternoon we gathered at my sister’s and brother-in-law’s place for a family photo. We couldn’t find a local studio that could accommodate our large group (12 people) at a convenient time so we decided to do it ourselves in the backyard. It only took 4 or 5 timed shots with my mom’s Nikon SLR to get the perfect picture of all of us.

We gathered again, later in the evening, at Clague Park in Westlake for fireworks. We had a picnic lunch sitting around on blankets and lawn chairs as the sun set. Of course, we had to have some fun with sparklers while waiting:

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The big show was fantastic! It had to have been about 40 minutes and the grand finale was tremendous. I was able to get some cool shots with the “Fireworks” mode on my Canon PowerShot SD600, like this one:

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Road Trip 2008: Day 6

Today we spent a relaxing day with family.

We went to breakfast at First Watch with my brother before he headed to work then headed over to my sister’s place to meet my new niece (the major reason for this road trip). We were planning on taking the girls to the Cleveland Zoo, but the chilly temperatures and constant rain changed our plans for us. At the mall we had some photos taken of the two cousins together before meeting my mom for a late lunch and then doing some shopping. On the way back to our hotel, we swung past Mapleside Farms, home of the Johnny Appleseed festival in the fall and a favorite hangout of ours when we lived in the area (apples fresh off the tree are wonderful).

Later that evening I picked up my other sister and her boyfriend, who had just flown in from Chicago, at the airport. The three of us had a really late dinner (10:30pm) at the Cheesecake Factory. I tried the chipotle chicken pasta (I usually get the orange chicken or crusted romano chicken), which was spicy and delicious, and finished the meal off with a slice of Kahlua coffee cheesecake, also fantastic.

The rain is supposed to be gone for tomorrow’s July 4th celebrations, so hopefully fireworks are still in order.

Road Trip 2008: Day 5

Today was our last major day of driving for a while.

We left Cheyney around 8am and in short order were on the Philadelphia turnpike (I-76) heading west through the beautiful, mountainous Pennsylvania countryside. Having grown up in flat Florida, my daughter was amazed at the mountain views out her window as we passed through the Allegheny Mountains, including three tunnels.

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We passed into Ohio as I-76 merged into I-80 and finally arrived in the Cleveland area around 3pm. We had a late lunch at Red Robin (a favorite of ours that we can’t get in Florida … that might have been worth the approximately 1,500 miles we’ve driven since last Friday to get here 🙂 ) and then finally checked into our hotel. We made it! Whew!