I just sold my Linksys WRT54G router on Marktplaats (a hugely popular second hand marketplace here in The Netherlands). It had been gathering dust or a few months, and I didn’t think it deserved that after being my ‘lifeline’ for years. This router has been my single favorite piece of equipment ever. I love the way it looks, I love how it never ever failed on me, I love the simple setup, it’s hackability (although I never did load any of the alternate firmwares out there).

I feel silly for feeling bad. Guess it’s quite a feat for a small plastic box to get me all sentimental. But now that wireless-n is here, and my provider-supplied modem/router finally supports WAP encryption, there’s no need for me to hang on to it. I hope it makes the buyer happy. Sigh…

I use three computers, and it looks like I’ll soon be adding a laptop into the mix as well. Google Browser Sync has been an essential tool for me for a long time now. It has kept my Firefox installs in sync, and has allowed be to continue working on other machines seamlessly. I was quite surprised to find it has been pulled by Google (see http://www.google.com/tools/firefox/browsersync/).

On that page, Google points to a few alternatives, like Mozilla Weave. While that project looks promising, I find myself reluctant to install 0.1 ‘early prototype’ that has only part of the functionality that GBS had. Foxmarks is a perfectly good extension, but it syncs bookmarks only.

Does anyone know of a tool that securely syncs (at least) browser bookmarks, browsing history and saved passwords? If there isn’t one, I hope someone will pick up the code (released on Google Code).

Dear Movie Industry,

I love movies. I go to the cinema nearly every week, buy and watch lots of DVDs and occasionally catch a flick on TV. I also love high definition video, and now that the ‘format war’ is finally settled I’m looking into buying a Blu-Ray disc player. My problem is however that I own hundreds of movies on ’standard resolution’ DVDs. I’m afraid these will look poor by comparison, and will eventually have to be replaced.

Can you please clarify if, upon buying my DVD copy of a movie I…:

1. … paid exclusively for the disc.
2. … paid for the right to own (a copy of) and watch the movie.
3. … paid for both, and if so, in what proportion.

If options two or three apply, I’d like to know how I can get my DVDs replaced by Blu-Ray discs. Do I have to mail them to you? I searched the web, but could not find any information about this. Since I already paid a license fee for the copyright-protected materials, I imagine a disc replacement policy of some sort must be in place, right? I assume my loyalty as a customer is to be rewarded by offering me these new HD discs for (nearly) free (option 2) or at a discount (option 3)?

Might I suggest you start some sort of database that keeps track of these things, so that I will be able to easily order new copies of my movies when the next distribution format sees the light of day? Whether it be a holographic cube, a Quad-HD disc or some sort for downloadable format, I’d very much like to know that my purchases are safe from becoming technically obsolete. I’m convinced I’ll love my favorite movies long after Blu-Ray is dead and gone.

Thank you in advance for your reply,

Roy Tanck

P.S. I’m posting this on my weblog because my local Dutch copyright organization does not offer a contact form on their website. Also, I’m afraid this will affect customers in other countries as well.

As an old school web designer, I consider myself to have a firm grasp of what pixels are all about. Back in the early 1990’s I used to optimize the hell out of tiny graphics, manually editing colour palettes and using things like Floyd-Steinberg dithering. Maybe this is why I don’t understand the hype about upscaling DVD players like this one.

The thing with bitmap images (such as video frames) is that you can never add detail to them through image processing. If you downscale them, you lose information, but if you enlarge them you also lose a little bit of sharpness (in all but a few cases which involve ‘nearest neighbor’ scaling). Other types of processing, like sharpening, noise reduction, etc can make an image look a little better, but it wil never add detail that wasn’t originally recorded by the camera.

So why do people spend $3000 on a DVD player that output your 720*576 pixel DVDs upscaled to Full HD (1920*1080 pixels)? Is it the 1080p sticker on the box? In fact, every HD television set will upscale SD (standard definition) content in order to display it full-screen. They might not filter out noise or anything, but if the DVD was properly mastered, there probably wasn’t much to filter in the first place.

If HD is a big thing for you, I recommend getting a Blu-Ray player. Those play DVDs over HDMI. But although most of them use some sort of upscaling, they will only output true HD when playing Sony’s new disc format.

OK, i admit it. I’m probably the only person bothered by this. In the age of broadband where mobile phones browse the web at high speed, I’m probably a dinosaur for trying to keep movie file sizes down. But still. There still are people out there who browse the web at 56 kilobits per second, waiting for minutes while a web page full of graphics is transferred to their computer by two analog modems shouting bits at each other.

That’s one reason why I decided to see if re-writing my WP-Cumulus Flash movie in Actionscript 3 would yield a smaller file. Unfortunately, the outcome was not all I had hoped it to be.

Cleaning my cloud

AS3 is a far more efficient language than its predecessor, and I was hoping for a speed gain as well. Because I wanted a drop-in replacement for the old movie, I created a new movie with exactly the same features. Because AS3 is very much a different language, 90% of the code had to be rewritten to fit the new syntax. I switched to the new event handler thingy, used Sprites instead of heavier MovieClips, and cleaned up the code a bit.

Differences

When I compiled the movie I noticed a small drop in the size of the compiled actionscript code (from 2800 to 2300 bytes). This may be due to the fact that I dropped two 3rd party classes, and did some cleaning. But when I looked further down the size report, I found that the font I embedded was now taking up nearly 50% more space. The very same 484 glyphs were now adding over 27 kB to the swf file, instead of the 18 they were before.

What the font?

After a bit of testing I found out that this was due to the transition from Flash 7 to Flash 9. AS3 requires movies to target player version 9. Version 8 introduced a few new ways of anti-aliasing text, and apparently this requires the characters to be stored a little differently. As far as I can tell, setting a movie’s publish settings to version 8 or higher will cause a significant increase in file size if you’re using embedded fonts.

Speed

As for improved playback speed, I can’t really be sure. I ran both movies on my E6600 based Vista PC, and it seemed that the old AS2 version caused around 25% processor load. With the new movie it was 24%. Not a substantial drop, and well within the margin of error of my way of testing. The AS3 movie needs around 6.6 MB of memory, whereas the old one used 6.2. This surprised me a little, because Sprites were intended to safe memory over MovieClips, and I’m using lots of them.

So?

I’m now contemplating whether I should release the new movie as part of the next WP-Cumulus release.

Pro:
+ Optimized code
+ Minor speed improvement?
+ Better mouse exit detection (a new feature in AS3)
+ Easier to maintain
+ It’s done, and I like AS3 so far

Con:
- Larger file size
- Requires player version 9

Player 9 has been out for quite a while now, and even a Linux version is available. My stats tell me that well over 98% of my website’s visitors are using version 9. Still, the old movie does exactly the same thing the new one does. What do you think?

Ziggo is a new cable company here in The Netherlands, that was formed when three major television providers (including mine) recently merged. They introduced their new philosophy in what is probably the worst-recieved TV commercial of the year, so they rubbed me the wrong way even before I had to contact their support desk today. If it wasn’t already clear, this is going to be one of my ‘incompetent companies’ posts…

The commercial

Ziggo is trying very hard to convince us customers that they’re new. We of course know that it’s the same people who worked at the three independent companies before, and who managed to frequently make the weekly top three of worst support helpdesks that a Dutch consumer TV show compiles.

In the commercial, an elderly man is introduced. While the voice over says “Hello, I’m Ziggo. I’m new here”, the man is shown wandering through the city, admiring everyday life as if it’s completely new to him. Quite frankly, this makes the man (and Ziggo) look like an imbecil. The ad then goes on to promise “we’re going to listen very well to what you want”. Yeah right. So now I have a moron listening to me? And why didn’t they do that before the merger? I’m offended on so many levels by this commercial I can’t even begin to explain why.

In practice

I bought a decoder box a two weeks ago, and as part of that deal I was supposed to get a bunch of channels for free for three months. I mailed in the registration card, and was just really starting to enjoy DHTV. This morning however, all of the channels were replaced by a message telling me that the trial period had ended.

When I dialed their support number and went through several menus, a recording told me that the wait would be longer than ten minutes, and that I’d better call back later. By then I had been asked to enter my zip code twice(!). I had actually tried contacting them once before and given up, but I wanted to get my cable box working again before the big football match tonight, so I decided to wait. So much for listening to me.

Five(!!) minutes later, a representative informed how he could help me. I’m pretty sure I heard him yawn just before he spoke. I explained to him what was wrong, and he started typing my details into a computer system. He asked me what channel package I’d like, and I told him I wanted ‘Z1′, one of two packages offered by Ziggo (yes, the other one is called ‘Z2′). I was quite shocked to hear him ask “what is this Z1 you speak of?”. Apparently, having two options was a bit much for this particular support person.

When he tried to re-enable my account the system crashed, and we had to start over. The representative by now was sighing and mumbling as we entered the details again. I was then told to leave the set-top box on for 48 hours, so that the settings could be sent to it. Less than three hours later, all the basic channels were restored. If I remember correctly, I was supposed to get a few more channels for free for at least wo more months, but I’m not going to risk calling them again until tomorrow, after the Dutch teams defeats France ;).

Objectively speaking I was helped reasonably well. Signal was restored pretty quickly, and the wait wasn’t all that bad. But it’s ‘how’ I was helped. By an employee who could not care less, who neglected to apologize on behalf of Ziggo for causing the issue, did not explain anything, and who was unfamiliar with his own company’s offerings.

Adjusting the commercial to reflect reality…

Here’s how I feel the TV ad should look. Three men in gray suits that have been stitched together struggle to walk through the city. They’ve all got their fingers in their ears. The voice over starts talking: “Hi, we’re Ziggo. We’ve been here for so long we’ve pretty much lost interest…”. You get the picture.

So here’s to you, WordPress. May you continue to evolve the way you did!

I’ve been connected to my LAN through the air for a couple of years now, and I’ve had some pretty mixed experiences. My Linksys WRT54G router is a marvel, and has yet to fail me. The adapters I’ve used with my PC however have for the must part not been able to keep up. And, as I realized today, they all happen to be made by Sitecom.

Until today I had a Sitecom WL-107 PCI WLAN adapter installed in my work PC. It worked OK, especially with a bigger aftermarket antenna. I also needed an external USB adapter, to use with other machines. The first one I used was one of those external little boxes, the WL-107. I only used it for testing occasionally, but it used to get really hot and after about 15 minutes of connectivity it needed to rest for half an hour or so. I then bought a WL-172 dongle type adapter, which had similar problems. And then this week, the PCI card failed on me as well.

I had been having trouble with my PC disconnecting occasionally, and refusing to reconnect, or at really slow speeds. This was getting increasingly worse, until yesterday it became unbearable. Luckily I happen to have two separate wireless routers (my modem also has wireless, but it is usually disabled), so I could test whether switching routers had any effect. It didn’t. So I tried the WL-172 dongle with both routers, and it worked well, for the usual 15 minutes or so. This meant my WL-107 was the culprit. The last of my three Sitecom devices to finally also disappoint me.

Because I desperately needed to get some work done, I got in my car and got the most expensive PCI WLAN adapter in stock at my local computer store, a Linksys WMP300N. It’s got a really fancy antenna and I can definitely feel a little speed improvement. So far so good.

My guess is that these kinds of problems are not exclusive to Sitecom. There are lots of cheap brands that sell almost identical products, like Conceptronic, Sweex, Eminent, Digitus, etc. The list goes on and on, and these are just the ones available here in The Netherlands. For WiFi stuff it seems the best thing is to stay away from these brands and buy A-brand stuff. It really isn’t worth the trouble.

I’ve just uploaded a new version of WP-Cumulus. Version 1.03 attemps to fix compatibility issues, adds a widget, speed control and several other little things. See here for the changelog.

Update
With the help of Mujahid (and several others), I’ve been able to track down the cause of the “it kills my blog” error. I turns out I was closing PHP’s output buffer once too often, which PHP version 5.2 and newer does not like very much. All should be well for these users with version 1.04. Can’t tell you how relieved I am.

I’ve been getting a lot of questions about my WP-Cumulus WordPress plugin. Many people have asked my whether they can use the Flash movie in their own projects, and how to go about it. Well, here’s how.

When you download the plugin you’ll find it consists of three files. The first, wp-cumulus.php is the actual WordPress plugin. It hooks into WordPress, adds the options panel to the backend, and replaces the [WP-CUMULUS ] tag with the Flash movie. You’ll also find SWFObject, which is used to embed the Flash movie into your page (future version might not use this, as it appears to cause problems for some people).

If you’re looking to repurpose the Flash movie, all you’ll need is the ‘tagcloud.swf’ file. Here’s what you’ll need to know in order to use it.

1. The movie requires Flash Player 7 or better.
2. It contains only Latin characters, I’ve posted some other unicode ranges on the plugin’s release page.
3. The movie is set to fill the available Stage size but keep it’s aspect ratio (Flash’s default scaling behavior). It is square, so if you embed it at 800*500 the sphere will be exactly the same size as when you embed at 500*800. With 150px of empty space on two sides.
4. Landscape aspect ratios work best because text is oriented horizontally.

Flashvars

The movie gets the tags information through ‘flashvars’. See here for more info on flashvars. SWFObject implements flashvars a little differently (see here). The actionscript code inside the movie looks for the flashvars in the root timeline, so if you’re planning on loading the movie inside another Flash movie, just pass the vars to that movie.

The flashvar used to pass the tags info is called “tagcloud”, and contains XML data describing the tags. If it is not passed the movie will look for a file called “tagcloud.xml” in the current path and parse that instead. This was used for testing, but might also prove useful if you’re using the movie outside WordPress.

The XML layout used is:
<tags>
  <a href="http://www.roytanck.com/tag1" style="font-size:9pt;" >Tag name<a>
  <a href="http://www.roytanck.com/tag2" style="font-size:12pt;" >Tag two<a>
  ...
</tags>


The other attributes used in WordPress’ default tag cloud output are not used. The style attribute is searched for numbers using a very crude mechanism. You can simply use

style="12.4"

In order to set the font size to 12.4.

To prevent problems with character encoding, the WordPress plugin passes the tags urlencoded, but your project might not need this. It should work either way.

The text color is also passed as a flashvar called “tcolor” and should be a string in the ‘0xff0000′ format (the example would set the text color to red).

Example

The following will render a tag cloud with two red tags and a transparent background at 600 by 400 pixels. As always with SWFObject, it will replace a div (here called ‘flashcontent’) in your page. This is the Javascript part only.

<script type="text/javascript">
var so = new SWFObject("tagcloud.swf", "tagcloud", "600", "400", "7", "#336699");
so.addParam("wmode", "transparent");
so.addVariable("tcolor", "0xff0000");
so.addVariable("tagcloud", "<tags><a href='http://www.roytanck.com/tag1' style='9'>Tag name</a><a href='http://www.roytanck.com/tag2' style='12'>Tag two</a></tags>");
so.write("flashcontent");
</script>


Download example files here (24kB).

That’s all there is to it. Of course, this movie was created to fit the needs of the WP-Cumulus plugin. Chances are the way scaling is handled (for instance) does not fit your needs. If this is the case, you can contact me about whipping up a custom version. In case you were wondering, I’m not planning to release the source file for the Flash movie. Sorry about that. It’s really quite complex, and I’m already getting tons of support requests for this plugin.