Initial MacOS X 10.7 Lion Notes

In System Preferences:

• To change the mouse scrolling behavior to how it use to behave in prior versions, uncheck "Move content in the direction of finger movement..." in the Mouse panel.  It might be worth leaving it checked if using a track pad or Magic Mouse.
• To always show scroll bars, change the "Show scroll bars" options in the General panel.  Unfortunately, there isn't a way to add scroll arrows.

In order to show harddrive/directory information (number of items and free disk space) in the Finder, toggle on "Show Status Bar" under the View menu.

The default location which Finder windows opens is now "All My Files".  To change it, look under the Finder preferences, and change the location listed under "New Finder windows show" in the General tab.  I have mine set to Applications, although I used to have it set to my home directory.

To install Java, launch any Java application from the Finder.  For example, Java Preferences under Applications/Utilities.

There are a bunch of new high quality voices in multiple languages when customizing the System Voice in the Speech System Preference panel.  They will auto download if selected and are quite large.  The foreign languages seem to be all high quality.  For U.S. English, Jill and Tom are the high quality ones.

After installing, it takes a long time (and lots of churning of the hard drive) to rebuild the Spotlight database.

Strange audio problem with Denon AVR-790 Receiver

I was watching a Blu-ray on my PS3 when my Denon AVR-790 receiver started making clicking noises and the audio stopped.  I tried switching to different input sources on the receiver (including the radio tuner) and still no audio output.  I went into the menu, and the option to generate test tones was missing.

After doing some research, I tried blowing into the headphone jack and audio started outputting from the speakers.  Evidently the receiver must have a very sensitive headphone jack and some dust must have caused it to think that headphones were plugged in.  Seems ok now.

The Invasion Begins

Today, the cicadas of Brood XIX started re-emerging in Nashville.  This is the brood that last emerged in 1998.

Extracting video with subtitles from an MKV file

Although Handbrake can convert MKV files and burn the subtitles into the video stream, it does not handle fancy SSA subtitles very well.  The only program that I've found that seems to render SSA subtitles very well is mplayer.  I used mplayer and x264 to convert by running the following:

mplayer -ass -nosound inputmovie.mkv -vo yuv4mpeg:file=>(x264 --demuxer y4m --qp 15 --bitrate 2500 --profile main --level 5.1 --preset slow  -o outputmovie.mp4 -)

 This also works:

mplayer -ass -nosound inputmovie.mkv -vo yuv4mpeg:file=>(x264 --demuxer y4m --crf 15 --profile main --level 5.1 --preset slow  -o outputmovie.mp4 -)

I used the Main H.264 profile with a high level instead of using the High H.264 profile since the High profile resulted in the video starting with a gray screen and other artifacts when viewing via Quicktime.

Firefox 4: Restoring Previous Session

Firefox 4 will automatically reload the tabs and windows from when you last quit if the "When Firefox starts" option is set to "Show my windows and tabs from last time".  Unfortunately, this means that it will always show your last session instead of a blank browser window.

In prior versions, it would only show the windows and tabs from last time if you quit and told it to save.  With Firefox 4, the previous session's state can be restored via History->Restore Previous Session.  Alternatively, the browser.showQuitWarning setting can be set to true in about:config to restore the Firefox 3.x behavior.

Open Frame Chrome Extension

With Google Chrome 10, the context menu to open a frame in a new tab was removed.  Luckily, there is an extension called "Open Frame" that adds it back.

The Great Nashville Flood of 2010

Luckily, my house didn't really take much damage during last weekend's big storm and flood.

I did discover a leak in my first floor bedroom, though.  There was some dampness on the ceiling and a little bubbling/blistering of paint along the top of one of the interior walls.  I poked a hole with a needle to let it drain.. It is kind of strange since I didn't see any leaks in the room upstairs.  Right now, I'm trying to find a roofer.  I think I'm going to replace the roof since it is a bit old (installed in 1996).

After hearing that one of my neighbor's crawl space had flooded, I decided to check mine out Tuesday morning.  At first I thought everything was fine since I only saw a few puddles on the vapor barrier (i.e. plastic sheets over the dirt).  But when I tried to crawl in so I could look further inside, I discovered about 2 inches of water beneath the vapor barrier.  Luckily, by Wednesday afternoon, all the water had been reabsorbed into the ground.

Here is a link to some pictures of the flooding:

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/05/flooding_in_tennessee.html

And here is a video:

New Job

After almost 14 years, Friday was my last day on the Wizorder (aka Horizon Clinicals) team.

Tomorrow, I officially join the StarPanel team.

Strange DD-WRT problem

While I was trying to see why the time in my router running DD-WRT was out of sync (a couple of minutes ahead), the WAN connection lost its DHCP lease.  The cable modem appeared to be alright from the status LEDs, but the router would not get an ip address even after releasing or renewing the lease.  I tried powering on and off both the router and cable modem and was able to briefly get a private ip to at least see the cable modem, but then even that lease was somehow lost.

Next, I tried restoring the router's configuration to "factory" defaults.  It still wasn't able to get a lease.  Finally, I tried reloading from a backup of the firmware settings, and then the router was finally able to get a DHCP lease.

I'm not sure, but it is quite possible that the problem was actually on the Comcast side and not with the router.  Until this incident, the router's uptime was over 30 days.

Also, I discovered a workaround for fixing the time drift.  On the Administration->Management page, I added this to cron:

0 1 0 0 0 /usr/sbin/ntpclient -c 1 -s -h 0.us.pool.ntp.org 

The Ballad of G.I. Joe

What do the members of G.I. Joe and Cobra do for fun?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkPEHM38_DA

From Funny or Die.

New cable modem and router

For a really long time, I was renting a Scientific-Atlanta Webstar DPX-100 cable modem from Comcast. The last couple of weeks, my cable connection has been flakey As it turns out, this cable modem was EOLed on 10/29/2008.  So, I decided to purchase a Motorola SURFboard eXtreme SB6120. 

I also decided to get a new router (Linksys 320N) since I was pretty sure that the new cable modem might saturate my old D-Link 704.  Since I read that the Linksys firmware was buggy, I carefully flashed it with DD-WRT, a 3rd party Linux based alternative firmware

Here are some speed tests:

Webstar DPX-100 with D-Link 704:
5 Mbps down/0.99 Mbps up/48 ms ping

Motorola 6120 with D-Link 704:
5 Mbps down/4 Mbps up/51 ms ping

Motorola 6120 with Linksys 320N with DD-WRT
19 Mbps down/4 Mbps up/52 ms ping

Moving to an off-campus building at work

On Friday, my entire group at work, with one exception, will be moving to a building off-campus.

Caught

I wasn't careful on my walk.
I was seen and had to talk.
Sunglasses, a hat, and a trench coat, I did not wear
Because I thought very little risk was there.
Unfortunately, that was not the case.
And now possibly discovered is my base.

Birthday

I actually had an enjoyable birthday this year. I thought I was going to Best Buy and found myself at Margot Cafe in East Nashville. Sneaky!

Day 3 Post-op

Vision from my left eye (which has a subconjunctival hemorrhage) seems sharper than my right eye. My eye lashes have a lot of crud from the Pred Forte.

The Pharaoh

I had my first encounter with the Pharaoh. He asked whether I had heard the good news. I said no. He said that the White House was plagiarizing his articles. And that he was running for president and that his running mate is going to be Jerry Rice.

Leaving Greece

Today I left Greece. George and Kristen took me to the airport in the morning. Unfortunately the flight was delayed about 1.5 hours. While I was waiting in the airport, I bought a Greek Easter bread to bring back.

Since I was going to have a 5 hour layover at JFK, I was originally planning on going into NYC. But, because of the delay, I didn't have time. I arrived in Nashville at around 9:30pm, where Osman picked me up and gave me a ride home.

Second to last day in Greece

I didn't do too much today. In the morning, we went to a grocery store to buy some food to bring back. I bought some halva, kinder eggs, and Nescafe (to make frappe).


At the Costco-like place we went to, some guy tried to get George to buy some stolen watches. He ended up giving him some loose change to get him to go away.

For lunch, we had octopus, octopus pasta, feta cheese, and salad.

Dinner was at a restaurant whose owner was a friend of George's father. We had salad, greens, calamari, lobster pasta, fruit, and some other desserts.


Afterwards, we went to a bar in town with some of George's friends.

Mykonos

Leonidas drove us to Rafina where we got on a Flying Cat at 7:15am to take us to Mykonos, a popular island in the Cyclades. We had to run to the boat because we were afraid that we were going to miss it.

We arrived at Mykonos at 10am, and called a taxi to take us into Hora, the main town on Mykonos. After walking around town a bit, we decided to rent a car so that we could visit some of the beaches.

Since it was the offseason, all the beaches (including the well known Super Paradise Beach) were pretty much empty.


After driving around the island to a bunch of empty beaches, we returned to Hora at around 3pm. There were had a lunch that consisted of Mykonian sausages and a seafood platter which had small fish, bigger fish chunks, fried calamari, grilled octopus, and shelled shrimp and crawfish.

We left Mykonos at 6:30 and arrived back in Rafina at around 9pm, were George's father was waiting to take us back home for dinner.

Second day on Hydra

For breakfast, I snacked on some chocolate-hazelnut filled croissants. After checking out of the hotel, we went to a cafe next to the hotel where I had a frappe and Kristen went to get a gyro.

While we were relaxing, I went to buy some revolutionary flags of Hydra that were used as a war flag during the Greek War of Independence. On it is the quote "I tan i epi tas" which means "with it or on it". This is an ancient Spartan motto which means that you should either come back with your shield victorious, or dead on it.

Since we had some free time to kill after buying tickets to a Flying Dolphin back to Athens, we visited the Historical Archives Museum of Hydra and then took a water taxi to a different part of the island for lunch. Lunch consisted of Greek salad, cold octopus, grilled calamari, zucchini balls, and fish.

At 3:25pm, we left Hydra to go back to Athens. For dinner at George's parent's house, we had goat with potatoes, Greek salad, feta cheese and some other type of cheese, and vegetables, plus dessert.