Simon Rules!

OK, I admit this is a silly joke (WWW upside down is MMM, yawn) and that it has very little to do with my post, but I like to add some humour into my blog. Not happy? Whatever.

Recently I upgraded my MacBook Pro to Lion, and amongst other things, Apple turned the default scroll direction completely upside down. Dragging up on the touchpad (or mouse) moves the page contents up, just as it does on an iPad. Previously the scroll direction followed the scroll bar, which moves in an opposite direction to the content. Since I’m a heavy user of a tablet, I found it quite nice and kept the setting. However, now I’m completely screwed at work, because I’m always scrolling pages in the wrong direction now. Bah!

Last month I went on a track day organised by my work where we all got to ride with instructors on a road course (a race track with left and right corners for you Nascar fans). After just 8 miles, my car started to sputter. I stopped the car in the paddock, and although it looked fine, it was clearly unhappy and sounded like it was running on three cylinders. At the time of “the incident” as it has since been called, I was accelerating down the long straight behind a Nissan GT-R and overall having a great time. Fast-forward to the paddock, and I wished I had filled up with 100 octane.

However, this isn’t the worst thing. The worst is that this happened almost two weeks ago, but the Mitsubishi dealership only just got the cylinder head off to see what the problem is. I don’t understand how a dealership that sells and works on these cars as its primary purpose can take almost two weeks to remove a cylinder head. It’s so frustrating not to know how much something is going to cost or when you’re going to get your vehicle back. Luckily I cycle to work every day. However, I’ve got a further two track days coming up (one in September, another in November), so I need my car back fairly soon!

Currently I’m told that some valves are damaged, the head is warped, one cylinder is scored and there is damage to the short block. Wow. And when it happened, the car didn’t shudder and barely made a noise. It still ran, although on three cylinders.

Thanks to a great friend, I spent the remainder of the day learning how to take corners in a Lotus Elise, a very nice track car. So my hat is off to him. And now I’m hooked.

My car’s number:

Happier days:

The “competition” (well, not really, since it wasn’t a race):

My car will return stronger than ever. In the meantime, here are more photos.

In September 2010, I left Colorado after ten years of living there. I moved to Mountain View in California to work for Google, a dream of mine always being to work at a tech company in Silicon Valley.

One of the last things I did before leaving Colorado was to finish my back garden. It was bittersweet, because a lot of weekends were spent getting it done, a lot of weeds were pulled, and a lot of money was spent – and after all was said and done, someone else is enjoying it. Not only that, but thanks to the rotten economy, the house isn’t exactly a big money earner in the rental department. Quite the opposite. I even took a week off to finish the deck, which I made by hand. It was certainly a learning experience.

I decided to take an entire week off work, but instead of doing the sensible thing and playing on the PS3 the entire time, I finished my deck. Now it’s done, I only have the rest of the back garden to worry about. Hmm.

Steps:

First railing done:

The best tool ever – nail gun:

The finished article – although the fascia and lattice still need to be attached:

A year ago I gave myself a goal to stop making interest payments on credit cards. I have to admit that it never really dawned on me that making interest payments on credit cards is like paying more for every single product you buy on it.

Something else occurred to me – people tend to use credit cards to buy stuff that they can’t afford at the current time, and then make payments on it later. This is fine if you really need something immediately and you know that in the long run, you will be paying more for the product through interest payments. However, a lot of people use them to live beyond their means in the hope that tomorrow they’ll be making more money. This cycle continues, because when they make more money their credit limits go up, and they live further beyond their means.

However, credit limits exist for a reason. They don’t allow you to live infinitely beyond your means, because some people just can’t stop themselves from spending. They allow you to spend a dollar/pound/yen amount over your means, literally your means plus some fixed amount. However, you end up paying back more than you originally spent because of interest, so over time you are effectively living below your means!

Imagine you decided to have a really frugal year and you put all your extra money in a savings account. When the year is up, you continue using your credit card as normal for purchases, but you pay off your card every month using your savings account, thus accruing no interest. Everything you save on interest goes back into this savings account. You can spend within your means plus the contents of your savings account. Your savings account doesn’t empty because instead of a portion of your salary going to credit card payments (including interest), it gets paid into your savings account. Essentially you have become your own lender, and as a result, you don’t make any interest payments! Not only that, but the bank will actually pay you interest because of the money in your account. As a result, after one frugal year, you have more spending power than the person on the credit card. You also maintain good credit scores because of the constant use and good payments of your credit card.

So why don’t all people do this? Because people prefer to live for now and not for next year. Because credit card companies advertise that taking on debt is good (just look at MasterCard). Because credit card companies feed off hard times by increasing their interest rates when people are struggling to pay. Credit cards are seen as the normal way to spend, when in fact they should really only be used as tools to access money you already have, and for strict emergencies.

The same is true of mortgages – imagine that your parents are wealthy enough to buy you a house, on the one condition that you save to do the same for your kids. As a result, no one in the family (as long as the chain is not broken) ever has to make interest payments on a mortgage! The family through generations can even share an account to put surplus money into, so that if one generation hits hard times, the chain will not be broken. This is actually not a big secret – wealthy families have been doing this for many generations, and it’s the lack of interest payments that helps keep them wealthy.

I was on a plane not too long ago and someone took a look at my third generation iPod and said “oh my god, that’s so retro, where did you get it”. “Er… 2003,” I replied.

That led me to think about things that get better over time, like classic cars and good wine. Then I thought I would draw up a list of comparisons between the iPod 3rd gen and the iPod Touch. Bear in mind that this list consists of things that make a great music player (and it is fairly lighthearted).

I own both, but rarely use my iPod Touch because I don’t like it. Don’t get me wrong, the Touch is a great portable web browser, calendar, email client and games platform, but it’s a mediocre music player at best. For one thing, there’s no way to turn off the screen lock. You have a dedicated on/off button, but you still have to slide something across the screen to bring up all the music controls (I’m reminded all the time about the double-tap on the button to bring up the music controls, but this is only about 75% reliable, and doesn’t let you switch album or artist). Also, there’s a bug in the playlist system where if you have a playlist with live updating turned on in iTunes, the songs will appear in reverse order in the Touch but not in any other iPod. Turning off this feature will cause the songs to be sorted correctly.

Apple, please focus on sound quality with the next iPod. Since the first generation iPod, sound quality has remained virtually the same. Where is my 24-bit DAC, virtual surround and high-impedance output stage?

Enlarge this picture and take a good look. Isn’t this miniature village fantastic?

It’s really detailed… and it should be, since it’s a real life full-size town. It’s actually a real photo of Ouray, Colorado, and here’s the original:

I Photoshopped the image to simulate a type of lens called a “tilt-shift”, where the image plane is not parallel with the lens plane. This causes certain parts of the image to appear out of focus. When taking a picture like this, focus is set at infinity, so everything at distance in the image is in perfect focus. If this was really a miniature, everything would be very close to the camera, so only part of the image would normally be in focus. Also, miniatures tend to look brighter and more colourful when compared to weathered, washed-out buildings and cars.

I followed a great tutorial on how to do the effect. Also, here’s the lens that lets you take these photos without any messing around.

I’ve finally upgraded to a “proper” SLR camera after outgrowing my tiny Rebel XT.

It’s the Canon 7D, and it goes perfectly with my 24-105 “L” lens. Once the workload at the office starts to ease up in December, I’d like to take a wider variety of photos for my portfolio. I’m especially interested in live bands, so if you need some photos taken for free, please let me know. I’ve been working silly hours since I got the camera and I’ve had almost zero opportunities to take any interesting pictures. However, I did manage to sneak this one in. If you can tell me where this was taken, I’ll be impressed!

In a break from writing about my life, I thought I’d give some Android developers out there a hand with a problem. Google don’t yet support the building of Android on OS 10.6 (Snow Leopard), but I managed to get it working. To do this, you’ll need to do four things:

1. Install Rosetta
2. Install JDK 1.5
3. Install OS 10.4 support for XCode
4. Change some gcc headers

First, install Rosetta from your Snow Leopard installation DVD. This allows you to run flex from the command line. Without this, a file in libwebcore won’t be generated correctly and you’ll get an error about a missing lex() symbol.

Second, install JDK 1.5. I found a guide online to do this. Instead of using update 4 as mentioned in the article, download the 1.5 JDK update 5 from apple.com: http://support.apple.com/downloads/Java_for_Mac…. Update: after doing this, change the current SDK version by using the Java Preferences utility in Applications->Utilities.

Third, download the XCode 3 package from Apple and install support for building for the OS 10.4 target.

Finally, you need to add symlinks from some OS 10.4 gcc includes to the 10.6 ones. This is fairly easy to figure out when building, but the ones I changed were all in /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.4u.sdk/usr/include and are as follows:

• emmintrin.h -> /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.6.sdk/usr/lib/gcc/i686-apple-darwin10/4.2.1/include/emmintrin.h
• float.h -> /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.6.sdk/usr/lib/gcc/i686-apple-darwin10/4.2.1/include/float.h
• mm_malloc.h -> /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.6.sdk/usr/lib/gcc/i686-apple-darwin10/4.2.1/include/mm_malloc.h
• mmintrin.h -> /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.6.sdk/usr/lib/gcc/i686-apple-darwin10/4.2.1/include/mmintrin.h
• stdarg.h -> /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.6.sdk/System/Library/Frameworks/Kernel.framework/Versions/A/Headers/stdarg.h
• xmmintrin.h -> /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.6.sdk/usr/lib/gcc/i686-apple-darwin10/4.2.1/include/xmmintrin.h

If you are building Android, then I am fairly certain I don’t need to tell you how to make symlinks.

Enjoy!

Update: in order to build the kernel, you’ll need to grab a copy of the elf.h header from Linux and copy it to /usr/local/include on your Mac. Comment out the #include <features.h>, otherwise you’ll get a compilation error.

Also, the following patches may be required on a 64 bit system:

• https://review.source.android.com/11845
• https://review.source.android.com/11846
• https://review.source.android.com/12597

Some garden (yard) progress this weekend – despite a week of sun, and then an entire weekend of rain and thunderstorms. We were almost thwarted by the landscaping company delivering 7 tonnes of the wrong kind of rock (4-8″ river cobble as opposed to 2″ decorative rock). They scooped it all away and delivered the right stuff in less than 24 hours, which was good. Here’s the wrong rock – click any of the pictures for larger versions:

Here is the right rock in place:

And here’s the border between the rock and rubber mulch:

This area currently only has a weeping crabapple – people have said “oh my god, what’s wrong with that tree?” many times! We’re going to cover it with rubber mulch for now to stop the weeds growing, but eventually this area will have a pool.

Finally, here’s the deck so far with Amber pulling weeds around it. I need to put the stairs on before I can finish the trim, which is a darker shade of composite wood (Trex).