TexasSwede

According to an article at boingboing.com, Paramount is dropping the sound in the new Indiana Jones movie, in order to trace where pirate copies are coming from.

While at the cinema yesterday, I read a notice posted by the box office that Paramount has intentionally silenced bits of the soundtrack of _Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull_ in order to deter and track piracy. The notice acknowledged that the momentary silences were annoying but that it was out of their control. Basically it said, please don't bug the manager if the sound drops out, unless it lasts more than a minute.

Repeat after vowe: DRM is bad for the customer

As many of you may know, I am originally from Sweden. A small, neutral country in northern Europe, who have not been in war since 1814. Sweden have been having a fairly strong defence force, at least until about 10 years ago, when budget cuts been reducing it to basically non-existant... Sweden always had a conscript army, like most European countries. All males must serve for about a year around the time they turn 20, and I served 11 months in the Air Force. There are pros and cons to this system, of course. The pros are that you have a huge army trained, and can call it up in case of war. The cons are that you need to pull the men out of their regular jobs every few years for additional training/repeat training. Due to budget cuts, that has not been done on a larger scale for the last 20 years or so.

Anyway, the mobilisation is supposed to take 72 hours. To protect the mobilisation, as well as important locations and object (bridge, air fields, TV towers/buildings and other infratructure sensitive to early attacks and/or sabotage), a volonteer unit called the Home Guard was established in 1940.

I joined a youth company in the Home Guard when I was 15, and served there for 13 years, until I moved to the US. Yes, we could join at age 15. The first year we did basic stuff: marching, erecting tents, recon, operating radios, target practice with bolt action rifles, using map and compass, etc. At age 16 we started learing assault techniques, ambushes, and combat skills, still with bolt action rifles. At age 17 we got full automatic weapons (sub-machine guns and assualt rifles). I spent many weekends out in the field on manouvers, while other kids at school were out partying or having fun. I did not expect any thanks, I did it because I cared about my country and was willing to make sacrifices to protect it. People were actually sometimes making fun of us.

Later, after my miltary service, I transferred to a regular unit of the Home Guard, and continued my training. We actually got paid, the same amount as a conscript soldier. That meant about 5 dollar a day back in 1991/92, for each 8 hours of service. A weekend manouver counted as 4 or 6 hours... So nobody did this for the money.

Last spring, I went to a Nascar race here in Texas. I went to watch a movie about the US Air Force with my son, and a female soldier came in and wished us welcome. She asked "is anybody here in the service or a former service man/woman". A couple of people raised their hand, and I did too, even if I did not serve with the US military. I thought she was just going to see how many were military/ex-military. She then said "Thank you for your service" to each of us. That was amazing. In 13 years, nobody in Sweden said a word of thanks. Here in the US, people respect your soldiers in a way you should be proud of. You may not support the war, but I feel the soldiers are supported and rightly so. I have to admit, I was choking up when I was standing there. I think I actually teared, it was a very emotional moment for me.

On my mother's side of the family, I have a long tradition of soldiers. My mom was from Germany, and grew up during WWII. She was 19 when the war ended, and she had to run from her hometown to avoid the advancing Red Army troops. My grandfather, who also served in WWI, became a POW with the Russians after he served on the Eastern front.

My uncle, Karl-Heinz (whom I am named after) served as a glider pilot in the Luftwaffe, taking part in the airborne invasion of Crete in 1941. Later in the war, when Germany was pretty much out of fuel, he was assigned to a anti-aircraft regiment who was part of the Luftwaffe. On February 26, 1945 he was shot through the left lung. On March 10 he arrived to a hospital ship in Denmark, but on March 16, he died from his wounds and infections. My mother also lost a sister a year later, due to Diphteria.

My aunt in Germany married a veteran from the French Foreign Legion. He served for 9 years (1951-59) in several parachute regiments, in Indochina (Vietnam) and North Africa. He jumped over Dien Bien Phu and was a POW for 2 years.

No matter what politics you support, and what you think about the government, you have to respect the soldiers doing the fighting.

So, for all the soldiers, in all countries: Thank you for your service to your country.
 

The other day I saw a posting in comp.groupware.lotus-notes.programmer, where the poster said that he have been defending Lotus Notes from people that dislike it and want to get rid of it.  I asked what problems the users had, and this is the response:

This is the only application we have in Notes - we do use notes mail -
but it is the application that is giving Notes a bad name.
It is the result of a extremely bad design and implementation of an
application 12 years ago in Notes 4.5.

The application - a customer order configurator - was created by
someone else in a branch of the
company which sold us off so the designer/programmer is no longer
available to us..

This has been compounded by massive changes over the last 6

years. I have added 2 new databases  (6 databases now) and possibly

140,000 lines of code to the application over the last 6 years. However
this has been hampered by the original bad design.

 This results in users getting annoyed rather frequently.

So basically, one badly written application, probably developed by someone that was not a programmer or did not understand Lotus Notes, then patched over 12 years is giving Notes a bad name... What can be done about things like this? There are some (old) best practices out there, but perhaps it would be a good idea to write some new ones.

The other day I was writing some code where I had to check a value against a list of potential values. I was importing a file as XML, and checking a number of transactions, each in their own node. If the Trans-ID tag had one of several values, the whole node was supposed to be discarded and not used.
I am sure many already use this method, but hopefully someone will learn something new.
In my example below, I am reading a field in a Notes document instead of data from an XML file, but the principle is the same:

tranType = Ucase(doc.GetItemValue("txn-type"))
If Instr("PD;DR;RP;NSFNF;RD;CRT;RCT;VCK;TPD;RCK;", tranType & ";") Then

End If

What I do is to use Instr() to check a string (the first argument) for the presence of a particular string (the second argument). To make sure I don't get any false matches, I add a semicolon to the end of the tranType as well as use the same character to separate the values in the first argument.

The Instr() function returns the position of the string found (1 or higher if found, 0 if not found). Since 0 is "False" and everything else is "True", if the tranType string is found, a value greater than 0 is returned, which is considered "True".

I am in the market for a car stereo (a.k.a head unit). I have been looking around, and I have a  alternatives. But I am always looking for the best choice, so I decided to ask for help.

Here are my requirements/wish list:

• Play MP3 from CD (other formats a bonus), support for ID3
• AUX in to connect my (non iPod) MP3-player (Cowon A2)
• Bonus: USB input for Flash drive/portable harddisk
• BlueTooth so I can use it as speaker phone
• Bonus: BT syncronisation of address book, to facilitate caller ID and outgoing calls from stereo
• Good sound (just using stock speakers for now, may get better speakers later)
• Easy to use interface, nice/easy to read display
• Bonus: support for text (some radio stations display artist and title of song)
• Bonus: ready for HD radio

I been looking at the following:

Sony MEX-BT2600 ($138 at Amazon, $169 at Best Buy), no USB.

Pioneer Car DEHP7000BT ($220 at Amazon, $289 at Best Buy, $325 at CarToys and Fry's), has USB.

Listening to the two in the store, the Sony sounded like it had a little bit clearer/better sound, but it is hard to tell in a busy store, when you don't know how the signal is being received.

Any other suggestions? They must be available on the US market... The vehicle I will put it in is a 2007 Ford Taurus SEL. The budget is somewhat limited, I been getting quoted between 60 and 120 dollar for the mounting kit, and 50-70 dollar for installation. So I am hoping to not go too far over 250 dollar for the head unit.

UPDATE: Since only YellowBleeders can comment here, if you have any thoughts or suggestions, feel free to mail them to me at TexasSwede@gmail.com.