making dvds from video files

Lest I forget again, DeVeDe did a decent job of putting an flv file that I had downloaded onto a DVD for playback on any TV and it's apt-gettable on ubuntu.

A fun shell idiom.

To find what's in filea that isn't in fileb, I have always done

cat filea fileb fileb | sort | uniq -u

similar things give you union, intersection, symetric difference etc. Recently I shortened it to

cat filea fileb{,} | sort | uniq -u

which I thought was good fun.

Quality reporting from the Indo

From this article on ESRI models of the economy (my emphasis added):

"It would be wrong to call that a forecast. It is more of an assumption, because migration is so hard to predict."
With employment officially defined as more than one hour's work a week, the numbers on the live register could reach 500,000 on these forecasts.

1021 Kanji characters

Yay! I just got to character number 1021 - half way - in the super book Remembering the Kanji. I can write all of these characters from memory. Actually my success rate is 89.8% but that's fine, it's remaining stable as I add more characters. Striving for 100% success would be far more work for only 10% more reward. The tricky characters will eventually stick.

You can see from the progress graph that certain periods have been more productive than others - 600 in the first 4 weeks, 16 weeks for the next 400! What a difference having kids around makes. I accelerated again recently and hope to finish in about 3 months, although the last 2 weeks were pretty poor due to everyone around in my house being ill in a variety of sticky, gooey ways!

It would have been a lot harder without kanji.koohii.com for stories when I couldn't think of good ones myself and Anki for making efficient learning just a matter of sitting down every night and clicking the buttons. Also thanks to the inspiring and entertaining Khatzumoto-san at All Japanese All the Time for documenting that it can be done and that it's a worthwhile step along the road to Japanese proficiency.

Now to try get in another few characters before Seán - asleep on the couch beside me - wakes up!

Infantile coprophagia and numerical synthaesia

I watched a very interesting documentary a few years back when Google video first started. It was about a Daniel Tammet, a semi-autistic savant who learned to speak icelandic in a week, could memorise thousand of items and perform incredible calculations. He "suffered" from synthaesia - a condition where the senses interfere with each other. Some people can "see" sounds or "smell" colours etc. Daniel Tammet could see numbers, they had particular shapes and colours and it was consistent - a week later, the same number would have the same shape and colour.

So what's that got to do with infantile coprophagia? The participants shall remain nameless to protect them but a couple of weeks ago (let the record show that it was Tue March 25th 2009) my youngest child was left alone briefly with a nappy loaded full of my eldest child's poo. When my wife returned, she found that not only had he tucked in to a tasty treat and was smiling a joyous brown smile but he had decorated the floor, the toys, the books and anything else he could get to.

So while I have no reason to believe that he will be an autistic savant, he does know what number 2 tastes like...

Notes from lidl trip

Mostly for my records so I can remember to buy it again:

1. Twinner smoked peppered salamai. V nice.
2. Smoked peppered salmon. V nice. (peppered brie from Aldi, also v. nice but I know that without making notes).
3. Grafenwalder beer. Meh.

The powers of oneechan

"Oneechan" (お姉ちゃん) means "big sister" in Japanese and Ríona now understands that she is a big sister. Many things can be explained by this. Her ability to walk along the edge of a wall or to climb up something or to eat by herself are all because she is "Oneechan"

As usual though, she doesn't think this means what we think she thinks it means. Yesterday, watching Bambi, we got to the scene where he fights the dogs and saves his girlfriend. Ríona announced "お姉ちゃんですからね" - "that's because he's a big sister". Not much you can do but agree.

Recipe: Penne ala Irish Breakfast

I hesitate to call this a recipe, it's just something I did for the first time today without much thought for what would be "right" but it was pretty cool. I probably would have added a rasher if I'd had one.

Ingredients:

• pasta (I used penne because that's what I had).
• 4 sausages - 160g (Dunnes' Simply Better or whatever you like yourself).
• white pudding 50g (again Simply Better)
• 3 cloves of garlic
• 2 dried chillies with the seeds removed (I might use 1 next time)
• 1 tin of chopped tomatoes (Lidl I think, not that it matters very much)

Method:

• Start the pasta cooking.
• Fry the sausages in some oil (I used olive oil for no particular reason) until they are mostly browned. You don't have to worry too much because they're going to cook some more later.
• Take them out and slice them into circles about .5cm long - maybe 10 or 12 slices per sausage.
• Slice the garlic and fry it and the chillies in the pan for about 30s or a minute. I just let them fry in the little bit of oil that was in the pan from cooking the sausages.
• Put in the tin of tomatoes and stir it up.
• Put back in the sausages and stir it up.
• Mash in the white pudding - you want it to break up into little grains and be spread all through the sauce.
• Leave it cook some more, stirring now and then to make sure it's not sticking to the bottom of the pan. About 5 minutes of cooking seemed to do the trick for me.
• Pour it on the pasta and eat it.

That's a nice spicy, tomatoey way of getting all the vitamins and goodness contained in an Irish breakfast. Maybe it should have a fried egg on top but I was never one for fancy presentation.

That's my daughter

Shortly before we went to Japan, we go some family photos taken - it would be unfair to Seán to only have nice baby photos of Ríona. The studio had various props, wicker baskets, dolls, chairs etc. At one point between poses, I heard Ríona crying. I turned around to find her with her head stuck in some railings. They were part of one the props, a little stand-alone fence that would be waist-high to a 6 year-old - something to lean on or whatever. Poor Ríona, I couldn't help laughing, especially when the photographer said, in a puzzled voice, "I've had that for 25 years and no one has ever done that".

Regrettably I am not a cruel enough father to take a photo before popping her head out from the bars, I actually didn't think of it at the time, I wish I had. I do plan to bring this up at her wedding though.

Japan - smoking

One afternoon I was flicking around TV looking for a cartoon or something to occupy Ríona for a few minutes. I found a cartoon, so we watched that for a few minutes. It wasn't by any means a toddler's cartoon, it was called "Gunlock (SaiYuki)" (there seem to be several seasons and variants of this anime, I have no idea which one I was watching). It's a retelling of Journey to the West (aka "Monkey Magic") with more modern characters, some guns etc. Although it wasn't a toddler's cartoon, it held Ríona's attention for while I got something else done. She seems to like any kind of cartoon at least for a few minutes.

The cartoon had some violence ("Daddy, boy fell over") but what really surprised me was that one of the main characters was smoking. He wasn't even a bad guy. I was just really shocked to see someone smoking in a kids show at 2pm.

It was actually pretty uncomfortable in Japan on several occasions, restaurants still have smoking sections, usually as big or bigger than the non-smoking sections and we sometimes had to settle for a seat in the smoking area.　We even found one that didn't have a non-smoking section at all!

What's really odd though is that it's not like smoking is entirely acceptable in Japan either. In lots of places, smoking on the street is illegal and some streets had designated smoking areas. And in true Japanese style, people obeyed these rules. I saw plenty of smokers at the smoking areas and I can't remember seeing anyone smoking in the "wrong" part of the street.

Still it's better than China. A few years ago I was in Beijing airport and I went into a restaurant. "Smoking or non-smoking?". "Non-smoking", I said. "Sit anywhere you like", said the waitress. I was sleepless and jet-lagged at the time so I didn't notice how stupid this was. For a while I was the only customer but soon some more tables filled up, including a guy smoking right beside me. It was only then that I understood my conversation with the waitress. The question was purely cosmetic - probably just for foreigners - there was no non-smoking area in this restaurant, or certainly none that the waitress was willing to enforce. I wonder if I had lit up a cigarette would I have been told to put it out because my table was non-smoking?

The snot hoover.

We arrived in Japan on Tuesday morning. All of us had colds, sniffles and coughs. Ríona had had hers for a week or two already.

On Friday, Midori decided it was time to get her checked out and brought her to a Japanese doctor. The doctor gave her antibiotics, cough syrup and aspirin. Japanese medical clinics all seem to include their own dispensary which is very handy but I wonder about the conflict of interests in terms of prescribing expensive drugs and also little things like aspirin, (maybe it's all regulated, I dunno).

The most exciting thing about the whole trip (and the bit I regret missing) was the doctor's use of a small vacuum cleaner to suck all the snots out of Ríona nose! You get to see what comes out in a glass jar too. Apparently she was not bothered by it at all.

So if that wasn't nasty enough, the doctor also told Midori that she should repeat the procedure herself. "How?", I asked, "by sucking her nose?". Apparently, yes, by sucking her nose, while giving her a bath for example. Just in case you haven't already run through the details in your head, you suck, nothing happens, you suck harder, nothing happens, harder some more... pop a torrent of hot, green snot shoots into your mouth, hitting you straight in the tonsils. Did you just gag? I know I did when I first thought about it. I imagine in real life that my mouth full of snot would quickly be followed by me puking up my own daughter's nose. Maybe if you're into live fish, sea-urchins' gonads and rancid soy-beans then it's nothing special.

Might be a good idea for Jackass...

Get a SIP phone to work with openwrt on a linksys WRT54GL

Update: I've changed this to put the siproxd.pid file in /tmp which avoids touching the flash memory for the pid file and also avoids the need to mkdir and chmod (which I typoed BTW) and thus allow siproxd to come back up automatically after a reboot.

I bought a WRT54GL today and get openwrt running on it with no hassle. More importantly I got my SIP router thing (a Linksys SPA3102) to work behind it (initially the SIP router was in front of it which is inconvenient in many ways).

To get the SIP thingy working (and also SIP clients on PCs in my home network) I just installed siproxd with

ipkg install siproxd vi /etc/siproxd.conf

The editing of the config file (like most of useful stuff in this post) comes from this page. I changed the following four entries

if_inbound = br-lan if_outbound = eth0.1 registration_file = /tmp/siproxd_registrations pid_file = /tmp/siproxd.pid

the first two were the only ones that required any "figuring out". Then I started siproxd and set it to start at boot time too

/etc/init.d/siproxd enable /etc/init.d/siproxd start

After setting up the openwrt box, I just set the outbound proxy for my SIP router and other clients to be my openwrt box and that was that.

Is the govt's Lisbon study legal?

The govt survey into why Lisbon didn't pass is out. I haven't yet tried to find the original and I wonder what questions were on the survey. I assume it was along the lines of

If you voted "no", was it because you thought Lisbon would bring a) abortion, b) EU army, c) corporation tax harmonisation?

The point being to uncover why "no" voters voted that way.

There could equally have been a survey that went along these lines

If you voted "yes", was it because you thought Lisbon a) would help fight climate change b) necessary for Croatia's entry to the EU c) would give national parliaments to ability to stop bad EU laws?

but no such survey exists.

Is it legal for this government to spend public money on a survey whose sole purpose is to help turn "no" voters into "yes" voters without also spending or providing money for a similar survey to investigate the misunderstandings of "yes" voters and correct them.

Mamma chin chin all gone.

Bathing Seán while Ríona is around always results in the following conversation, although tonight it got a bit surreal. "chin chin" is Japanese (and maybe Chinese) for "penis" by the way.

Ríona: [seeing Seán naked] chin chin! chin chin!
Dad: yes, baba's chin chin
Ríona: My chin chin?
Dad: no, you don't have a chin chin
Ríona: my chin chin all gone
Dad: yes
Ríona: mamma chin chin?
Dad: no mamma has no chin chin
Ríona: Mamma chin chin all gone
Dad: yes
Ríona: An pan man chin chin?
Dad: ehhh.. you'll have to ask mamma about that.

The end is nigh.

I was at a kiddies' playground at the weekend and I overheard one dad say to his angelic 3-year-old daughter, "now play normally, I don't want to hear you talking about taking anybody out". WTF is the world coming to?

I kept an eye out when she was near Ríona but didn't get close enough to check for the mark. I should probably have got her name so I could make sure I was on her side when the apocalypse comes!