Dan East

I just finished watching The War, a seven part World War II documentary by Ken Burns.  It originally aired on PBS in 2007.  I watched the entire series, all 14 hours worth, over the course of two days.  I have a couple comments on the series, which is why I’m going to the trouble to “review” it here.

I’ll start by saying that I enjoyed the series, and thought it was well done.  I learned a lot, and there were many touching, poignant moments.  But there are a couple things about it that troubled me.

First, and most important to me, is that it was a very negative series. Specifically, it seemed to dwell on every poor military decision, social issue, and horror of war (all as presented from the US side) that it possibly could.  In comparison very little negative was presented about the Axis powers, particularly things like the bombing campaign the Nazis waged against the British citizens, the Holocaust, the atrocities the Japanese committed against the Chinese, etc.   The series would point out US losses of a specific campaign, but not quote the enemy losses, which were of similar number. The series simply concentrated on the false starts, the failures, the tribulations of the US military, and added as a footnote that in each case victory eventually went to the Allies.  Great detail was presented about the firebombing of Dresden and Japanese cities, but not the numbers of civilians that died as a result of the Axis powers. Foremost, the series spent a great deal of time covering the segregation of African Americans in the US military.  In fact, if I were asked “what was the dominant theme of the series” then I would have to answer it was the segregation of African American and Japanese American troops during the war.  That topic was discussed in detail in several episodes, and was mentioned time and time again throughout.  I understand that was the state of society in the US at the point in time, and thus of course it was reflected in the military as well, but WW2 was a milestone and a turning point regarding segregation in general.  By the end of the war African Americans were involved in direct combat alongside white troops, and the Japanese Americans had proven their valor, loyalty and allegiance to the United States time and time again, and had the most decorated regiment in the entire US military. Yet all in all the US was demonized in each of these areas – clearly the balance was toward the negative in all cases.

The second issue that bothered me, and perhaps it was more evident because I watched the series almost straight through, was that some specific footage was reused to represent entirely different things. This led me to question how much of the various footage throughout the entire series was actually from the battles or even the whole theater of war that was being discussed. As an example, the footage of two young girls sitting on a bench in a tent was used for refugees in Italy early on, and then again much later for the Philippines. Clearly the footage was misrepresented in one case or the other (or possibly both). Another example of obviously technically incorrect footage was a scene showing large German artillery firing, followed by the explosions supposedly resulting from said artillery. In one case, immediately after the firing of artillery, footage was shown of an obvious demolition of a water tower, with soldiers standing and watching the explosion.  Again, this served to make me wonder how much of the series was simply a hodgepodge of WW2 footage pieced together that appeared to show the topics as narrated. That discredited what I was seeing from being authoritative and accurate to almost a sort of fiction.

All in all I enjoyed the series, but now I feel like I need to watch an actual historic documentary that portrays a balanced, neutral, objective perspective of the war and its various facets.  This series left me with the impression of a subtle anti-American agenda, and now I feel my overall impression of the war is slightly skewed as a result.

A viral video has been floating around the various video sites for a couple years now.  Usually it’s entitled something like “Lucky Train Inspector”.  Of course none of the posts cite any sources of any kind, and most descriptions refer to the person in the video as a Railway Inspector, although in some he is simply referred to as a drunk.  It does appear he (supposedly) works for the railroad, because he seems to inspect a switch, and he is wearing a hard-hat that falls off part way through the video.  I assumed this video was a fake from the first time I saw it for a number of reasons, and I’ve taken the time to definitely prove that this video is indeed a fake.  Read on for the details.

What happens in this 32 second video is a man is squatting down in the middle of a railroad track looking at something, then suddenly he stands up and leaps backwards off the track, just barely moving out of the way before a high-speed train shoots down the track he was just on.  He trips and falls onto another track just a couple feet away, and of course a second train suddenly appears on that track moving in the opposite direction.  He manages to stand up and jump off of that track in the nick of time, and as he stumbles towards the track he started out on, the first train ends, and he falls safely onto the now empty track.

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Here are my top 15 video games of all time. This list is a little different, in that it is comprised of games that I grew up with.  Thus these games were, to me, revolutionary when they came onto the scene. So I have a special appreciation for each of these games because they were all standouts in their respective eras.  My list only takes us up to 1998. Since then I’ve not had a lot of time for gaming, and when I do, I usually dust off old favorites instead of trying something new. Part of that is because the most advanced game console we have is the Wii, and I don’t even have a decent PC gaming rig, so I don’t really have the hardware to play any of the most recent games.

1. Spider Fighter (Atari 2600) A very good “space invader” type shooter game. You’re on bottom shooting upward, bad guys fly around above you. It had a few twists to the gameplay to make things a little more interesting, and things got really, really fast as the levels progressed. Read the rest of this entry »

I recently evaluated the HTC Touch Vogue (US Cellular branded CDMA phone) for a few weeks. I tried my best to get this phone to a state so I could use it as my primary phone, and I just about succeeded. However, in the end, the hardware simply had too many handicaps conspiring against it.

As with all devices, there are two distinct components that combine to produce the overall functionality and user experience of the device: hardware and software. As far as the software goes, I tried pretty much everything available. I experimented with Google’s Android, but eventually ended up with the most cutting edge version of Windows Mobile available – 6.5 running HTC’s TouchFlo shell in place of the default Windows home screen. Of course Windows 6.5 isn’t officially available for this device (nor is Android for that matter), but obviously it can be done. I found a good commercial 3rd party SIP (onscreen keyboard) that worked really well, and if it weren’t for that the device would have been a complete non-starter. Typing with a stylus is a ridiculous notion in this day and age.

So as I’ve already mentioned, the hardware was the ultimate reason for doing away with the device. In some ways it was simply inadequate, while in others it was poorly designed. Here are the specific hardware deficiencies I encountered.

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Unfortunately I’m becoming something of an expert on repairing or reviving electronic devices that have been submerged in liquids.  Here’s a short list of what me, my wife, my 4 kids and our cats have been able to soak:

• Kyocera Phenom – Ranch Dressing
• Nintendo DS – Sprite
• Motorola Razr – Cat pee
• iPod Touch – Washing machine
• Motorola Razr – Dr. Pepper
• Samsung Cell Phone – Washing machine
• FRS radio – Toilet
• Blackberry Curve -Toilet

And those are just the ones I can remember off the top of my head.  And yes, all those devices lived to tell the tale.

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Minor update: I now use swig for my C++ / Lua binding, and I like it much better.

I’ve been using the Lua programming language for several years now as an embedded scripting language in a game engine.  In order to bind C++ classes into the Lua environment I use a 3rd-party library called tolua.

Recently I kept running into a bug with a new class interfaced via tolua that would manifest differently between Release and Debug builds.  The symptom was apparent corruption of other unrelated objects within Lua.  The specific situation was accessing a member of a class that was also a class.  Here’s an example to make things clearer:

class B {
int n;
};
class A {
B b;
};
//create an object a of type A
A a;


Then in lua when accessing the nested class the bug would be triggered:

a.b.n=5

tolua passes instances of C++ classes into lua using simple user data, which is basically just a pointer.  To reduce memory overhead there is no metadata passed into lua – just the pointer.  So whenever an C++ object is accessed in lua, tolua has to look the pointer up in a table or list in order to determine what the object’s type is.  This is a design flaw, because memory pointers are not necessarily unique to a specific class.  Specifically, the first member variable in a C++ class has the same pointer as its parent class.  In the above example, &a and &a.b will have the exact same memory address, even though they are two different objects of different types! So the limitation is that, for two classes interfaced via tolua, one cannot be the very first member variable of the other.

The workaround is straightforward – either rearrange the order of member variables in your class so the interfaced nested class is no longer first, or place a dummy variable in front of it.  If you do not have the flexibility to modify the class you are exporting then you may be in trouble – this would require fixing the design flaw in tolua itself.

I’m posting this in the hopes that it will keep someone else from wasting their time.

It appears the CAPTCHA used to keep spam comments out of my blog was broken, which prevented any commenting at all.  Oops.  Well, that explains the total dearth of comments for the last several months.

Well, a matter of minutes ago, while sitting here reading the news at my desk on my computer, I heard a loud “POP” sound, like a firecracker going off.  It was pretty loud – enough to make me jump.  A foot away from my arm was a Duracell 9V battery, and apparently one of the cells in it exploded.  It warped the top where the connectors are, and popped the bottom loose.  I felt it immediately and it was room temperature.  It was not connected to anything or touching anything – it was simply laying on its side on my desk.  Then less than two minutes later another cell exploded.  I’ve got my Blackberry sitting here video recording the battery in case a third cell explodes.  So far its up to 11 minutes and no third POP.

This is really disconcerting.  I could understand if the terminals were shorted, and the battery got really hot causing it to rupture.  But this thing was just sitting there, disconnected, not touching anything.  It’s been on my desk like that for weeks – I don’t even know if it has been used or not.  The fact that two different cells exploded within minutes of each other is very odd.  I wonder if the barometric pressure is falling, causing pressure inside the battery to stress the sealed cell and pop it open.  Right now the pressure is 29.88.  I just consulted a history chart.  The pressure was 30.18 24 hours ago, and it has been dropping steadily.  However that can’t be the cause, because the barometric pressure was even lower than that 5 days ago on December the 1st.

This  reminds me that a couple months ago I found another 9V battery on my desk (I don’t remember the brand) that also had also spontaneously exploded at some point, without being connected to anything.

Well, my Blackberry has been recording for 30 minutes now and no third explosion.  So maybe the fireworks are over for tonight.

My son and daughter both got new DS Lites for Christmas. We purchased Nerf Armor for them both, knowing that they would be heavily used and dropped often. Well, around two months ago, my son dropped his DS, while it was open, onto solid concrete. One quick glance at it was all it took to get that sinking feeling in my stomach – the top LCD panel was toast. A crack ran diagonally from one corner to the other, and only a sliver of screen at the bottom actually rendered pixels. The Nerf Armor didn’t save it, but the fact that the screen was open when it was dropped was probably the main reason it was damaged.

So I began searching for replacement LCD panels. Having done quite a bit of electronic repairs in the past, I decided I would try swapping out the panels myself. I found some at various online retailers for $40-$50, but most were out of stock, and all were priced too high. By the time I would pay shipping and buy the special screwdriver required to open a NDS Lite, I would have had $70 in parts just to attempt a repair on a $129 product. So my son made due with only the bottom screen for a few weeks (hopefully that served as a good lesson in being extra careful with expensive electronic devices). I eventually started looking for LCD panels again, and found one for sale on eBay for $4.98. Yes, you read right. $4.98 USD, with $10 shipping from Hong Kong. I read through the user’s feedback, and it was good, however I learned the shipping would take around two weeks, and that buyers received no communication from the seller at all. So a couple clicks of the mouse, and less than 10 days later the new LCD panel arrived (didn’t receive one single email from the seller as expected).

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For those of you looking for the actual R7000 repair, I get to that at the very bottom of this blog. No, the power cord was not the repair.

I am the proud owner of a KLH R7000 tuner / receiver. It is a 600 watt receiver with Dolby Digital / DTS / Dolby Pro Logic II surround sound decoding, and a plethora of video and audio inputs and outputs. It has composite, super and even component video inputs and outputs, to allow easy switching of various video sources without having to resort to an A/B switch.

The reason I’m a proud owner of this receiver isn’t because I am in possession of this low-end, budget piece of hardware. It’s because it didn’t cost me a cent. Well, actually, it cost me $1.95, but I’ll get to that later. This receiver gets good reviews – when it works. It sold for as low as $99 at Best Buy (based on my googling), and has very good audio qualities for the price. The problem is they seem to die pretty quickly – usually in a matter of several months. So how did I happen across one of these receivers? Well, one day I was hauling off the trash (around here we have refuse centers where we take our trash and recyclables) and happened to notice a pristine-looking tuner / receiver in one of the trash bins. The power cord had been cut off, but besides that, it looked brand new. I snagged it up and took it home, where it sat for a good month before I finally decided to check the thing out.

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