blogz0r ___ v57

There doesn’t appear to be a great deal of information about the current poor Freeview reception across the West and North Yorkshire regions, so I thought I’d collate some of what I’ve found from various resources here and hope it turns up for any Google searches folk may do while struggling to get any World Cup coverage!

Since the 14th April 2010, work has been carried out on the Elmley Moor transmitter (based near Huddersfield) to upgrade the mast for the infamous Digital Switchover. This work was initially scheduled to last ‘up to’ 2 months, and be completed before the World Cup. In the meantime, a secondary mast was being used for all transmissions. Sadly, this completion schedule has now been put back to ‘late August’ due to some vague reason, possibly inclement weather? Who knows.

What can you do if you’re getting poor reception? I’d suggest some things NOT to do first – don’t have your aerial changed. I’ve heard of aerial fitters charging extortionate prices (500 pounds upwards) to swap an older aerial for a new one. If your current Freeview setup worked pre-April 20th, it’ll work again once the main mast is operational again.

• Swap to Freesat – if you’re lucky enough to already have a satellite dish and a Freeview receiver built into your TV, connecting the two up is easy enough. If you’re in this position, however, why are you still struggling with Freeview?
• See if any channels you can’t pick up are on analogue. This will obviously only work for BBC1, 2, ITV, CH4 and CH5, but if you’re like me and can’t view any BBC channels, its better than nothing.
• If you have one lying around, try a standalone aerial. I have an old two-pronged aerial I used for a TV in an old house that appears to be able to pick up all BBC channels, but none of the ones I can receive from my rooftop aerial. I don’t know why (maybe it’s pointing at a different transmitter), but it seems to work. I have to get up to change channels, but it does mean BBC WC games aren’t missed. Don’t buy an aerial though as there’s no guarantee whatsoever this will help you.
• Watch live TV on an internet service like TVCatchup. You have to sign up, but it seems to be pretty good.
• Wait it out.

For any other information, I’ve found this article at UK Free TV to be very helpful. I’d suggest asking on their forums specific technical questions as their admin appear to be very knowledgeable.

If you have anything to add, comment on this article. I’m not technical in the nuances of TV broadcast so if I’ve got anything wrong or am being misleading, let me know!

I upgraded to Ubuntu 8.10 the other day, and all of a sudden I couldn’t get any sound from Flash player 10 within Firefox. After checking my player version I was being informed I was on version 9… odd, since I upgraded to 10 a few weeks ago when it came out for Linux. On looking in my plugins folder  (~/.mozilla/plugins) I found another copy of libflashplayer.so in there, so deleted it, reloaded the Adobe plugin detection page and lo and behold, version 10,0,12,36 is back up and I have sound again in the browser.

Sweet.

I’ve been pissing about with Papervision (V2 Great White), the 3D library for AS3. It’s very cool, and I can’t believe it’s taken me so long to pick it up and have a play around.

Anyway, I got Cube Runner on my iPod and decided to recreate it in Flash. My version isn’t exactly “finished” but as an exercise in controlling 3D space, it was a good one. It has some collision bugs, and some of the physics aren’t quite as polished as the iPhone version but whatever… I just wanted to see if I could do something similar with what Papervision offers.

I want to try and finish it over the next few days and get the following things done:

• Work out how to add more distance on the camera’s perspective, as the cubes tend to start too close to the viewport. They’re being added with a z position of 0 at the moment, but it looks like anything less than 0 makes them disappear off screen… maybe zoom out and let the cubes scale up?
• Improve the collision detection slightly – I’m using hitTestObject() to evaluate collisions at the moment but I don’t think my implementation is too hot.
• The fonts don’t work under Linux (only I’m bothered about that mind).

Instructions: Use the mouse to move the ship left and right and avoid the evil cubes!

If you’re doing any .Net ADO work with an Excel sheet, and want to explicitly enable or disable automatic handling of the first row of the sheet being set as a heading by the data handler, you have to set HDR=YES or NO in the connection string’s ‘Extended Properties’. OK, you may say, but what I ran into the other day was the following helpful message as soon as those properties were added to my connection string:

“Could not find installable ISAM”.

Huh? What’s happened? Dave’s started banging his head against a brick wall, that’s what.

It turns out that the formatting of the connection string has to be quite strict (read: stick random linebreaks in) to get it to work, so here is how I managed to get the damn thing working again:

OleDbConnection connString = new OleDbConnection(@"Provider=Microsoft.Jet.OLEDB.4.0;" +
 "Data Source=c:\somefile.xls;" +
 "Extended Properties=" + (char)34 + "Excel 8.0;HDR=Yes;" + (char)34);

Hope that helps some poor sucker scouring the web who’s run into the same issue.

If you’re finding that MOUSE_OVER or ROLL_OVER MouseEvents are being fired on animated movieclips at a rate of knots (for example a button or movie element that animates on rollover), and have ensured that mouseChildren is off for the clip – take a look to see if you turned on cacheAsBitmap for the element and try setting it to false…

I can only assume that the internally cached bitmap is interrupting the mouse events when it’s being redrawn, but why exactly is beyond me. This first example will exhibit the weirdness – mouse over the edges of the squares to see.

So there you are.

I’m sick of always losing the bloody URL for Microsoft’s MSXML documentation (I swear it keeps moving), so I’m posting here for my own reference.

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms764730.aspx

New none-boring blog post coming soon

I’ve hacked a quick jQuery extension to allow you to overload the toggle method to allow more than 2 toggle events. It’s not exactly rocket science but I need to be able to give an element three toggle states and the built in version only allows two.

Simple state extra toggles separated by commas like normal:

jQuery.fn.extend({
toggle: function() {
var a = arguments;
return this.click(function(e) {
if (this.lastToggle == undefined || this.lastToggle+1 >= a.length) {
this.lastToggle = 0;
} else {
this.lastToggle++;
}
// Make sure that clicks stop
e.preventDefault();
// and execute the function
return a[this.lastToggle].apply( this, [e] ) || false;
});
}
});

jquery.multiple_toggle.js

UPDATE: Multiple toggle states are now supported natively in jQuery 1.2.6.

I’ve been doing a spot of work that requires version control, so we’ve been using Subversion. It’s great, but if you’re anal like me then you may not like the .svn files that litter your working directories after you’re finished. Rather than doing a full SVN export, I cobbled together a VB script to delete them all in one fell swoop. Might help someone else on a random Google search. so posting it here. Sorry for being boring.


OPTION EXPLICIT
Dim FSO, Folder, SubFolder, LogFile, DeletedCount
DeletedCount = 0
If MsgBox ("This will delete ALL of your subversion folders for this repository. Are you sure?", vbYesNo) = vbYes Then
Set FSO = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
Set LogFile = FSO.CreateTextFile("./svn-cleanup.txt")
DoSvnDelete ("./")
MsgBox(DeletedCount & " .svn file(s) were deleted. See log file for rundown.")
Set FSO = Nothing
End If
Sub DoSVNDelete (Path)
If FSO.FolderExists (Path) Then
Set Folder = FSO.GetFolder(Path)
If Folder.SubFolders.Count > 0 Then
For Each SubFolder In Folder.SubFolders
If SubFolder.Name = ".svn" Then
LogFile.WriteLine ("Deleted: " & Path & "\" & SubFolder.Name)
SubFolder.Delete
DeletedCount = DeletedCount + 1
Else
DoSVNDelete (SubFolder)
End If
Next
End If
End If
End Sub


Download the VBS file here.