admin-blog – Page 28 – funwithstuff — a blog by iain anderson

For the first time, Hazel just sat up on her own. She’s been able to stay sitting up if we put her that way for some time, but this is a first for her. Woohoo!

A quick note: if a child can stay sitting up, they’re ready to face forward in a child seat in a car. The child seat instructions all say “from 8kg”, but that’s just a guideline, according to the Queensland Ambulance’s child seat fitter. She much prefers sitting forwards, so far, and it’s great we didn’t have to wait a couple of months (she’s about 6.5kg) first.

Additional: in her bath this evening, Hazel stood up. She grabbed the edge for stability, then used her legs to stand. A good day. 🙂

From The Onion in 2004: Hulk movie come out last year. It success. It big popcorn movie with heart. So why no one want make Hulk 2? It make Hulk mad!

More fine work from The Onion.

The state of hardware stores in Australia is a bit sad. I do understand that this isn’t the most technologically switched on of industries, but when only the largest (yes, Bunnings) can actually provide the combination of a) the phone number of a local store and b) someone who knows what they’re talking about, I’m disappointed.

Mitre 10, apparently “fixing hardware”, got a few things right. Unfortunately, the guy I got on the phone didn’t listen and didn’t know squat.

Home Hardware don’t provide phone numbers of local stores. Screw them.

True Value Paddington don’t answer their phone. Oh well.

Bunnings took a while to answer and three goes to get me to the right person, but at least he knew what he was talking about, gave honest advice and had something worthwhile in stock.

Not buying hardware yet? Good for you. This is apparently what being a home-owning dad comes down to sometimes.

If you care about fonts or movies, watch Trajan is the movie font.

External Hard Drive Data Rates

Just a quick post on comparative speeds of various ports. The received (incorrect) wisdom in much of the PC world is that USB2 is faster than FireWire, because 480 Mbps is faster than 400 Mbps. However, potential maximum speed isn’t the whole story. Because USB is a host-controlled bus, the CPU has to manage the data transfer while FireWire manages itself. Some good transfer rate/CPU requirements are found on this page.

Data for a Western Digital My Book Studio 500GB external drive with FW800, eSATA and USB connections; FW400 speeds are taken using a 9-pin (FW800) to 6-pin (FW400) cable:

USB2 averaged 29.0 MB/sec (15.0% CPU)
FW400 averaged 37.9 MB/sec (2.1% CPU)
FW800 averaged 61.5 MB/sec (3.7% CPU)

These numbers were (apparently) taken on a PC and historically USB2 has not been great on the Mac. Not sure if it has improved recently, but USB is always the poorest performer on a Mac. Probably more important is that you can daisy-chain one FireWire drive from another, so a single FireWire port can take as many drives as you care to throw at it. USB drives can’t do this, so you’ll need some powered hubs to connect many drives.

DV/HDV has lower data rate requirements than any of these ports should provide (~4MB/sec), but your minimum speed can never drop below the rate the video is arriving or you’ll get dropped frames and likely an aborted capture. On the flipside is that some people report dropped frame problems with some Canon cameras and FW800 drives. I’ve had no issues capturing from my HV20 to my My Book Studio 1GB through FW800, but your mileage could vary.

So, my first submission to Threadless is up for critiquing. If you like it, please say so. If you think it could be improved, please say so.

I’ll be counting on you all if/when this goes forth into the main “maybe could be made into a t-shirt” competition.

If you were a committed blogger, would you write a farewell post, to be published in the event of your death? Read Andrew Olmsted’s Final Post, published posthumously.

Start thinking about design by reading the first chapter of The Design of Future Things by Don Norman, author of The Psychology (later Design) of Everyday Things. Executive executive summary of that earlier book: if you push on a door that should have been pulled, don’t blame yourself; the door was poorly designed.

Something sounds familiar. Airporty.