In the past, I set up the 2 webcams to point inside before going on vacation and left a light on so I could spy on the kitty. Then, I’d logon through remote desktop, and use VLC to watch and show off.

This time, I was looking for a more serious toy. One that I could eventually use in my next home for security purposes (don’t have to worry too much about that when living in a condo full of retirees who love to people-watch So I started poking around. There are many small freeware apps that just grab an image from 1 camera and broadcast it over the web.

Then you have the more advanced software packages marketed for enterprise that contain a whole set of features: face tracking, record-on-motion-detection, able to view cameras remotely, etc. They’re rather expensive and if they do provide a free version, it’s extremely limited. What’s there for geeks who like to play around with stuff?

Well, I found iSpy, a rather full featured software package. It takes in multiple inputs: Ip cameras, webcams and capture cards; it does motion-detection recordings; and it’s rather fast, simple and unobtrusive. The catch? They want you to pay $8 a month to get remote access to your cameras through their service. Yes, instead of just running an HTTP server on your machine, they somehow bounce the camera feed off their servers to make a buck. Gaaaaah, why can’t life just be  perfect?

So I have to go and write a webserver now

The next prompt was to confirm my e-mail address, which was presented in all-caps. Although most e-mail systems aren’t case sensitive, displaying an e-mail in all-caps conveys that you’re a total idiot when it comes to computers.

After that, you have to go through selecting 5 predefined security questions. My favorite: The first  name of my grandfather, and you’d understand why if you’re Greek: the first-born child usually bears the name of his grandfather.

Theoretically, these questions are additional passwords. They are very weak passwords, because they consist of answers to stupid questions that can easily be guessed by somebody who knows the slightest thing about you, let alone an ex-girlfriend looking for revenge. Even if they were strong passwords, they’d contribute nothing more to security than a password that meets proper length and complexity requirements. Sadly, I’ve seen a fair share of banking web sites that won’t enforce proper password complexity and length requirements. But they have security questions!

The reasoning for this? A widespread incorrect understanding of multi-factor authentication.

The final prompt in this process was a “thank you for helping us protect your account”! Very funny indeed, but thanks for warning me about your lack of computer security expertise.

A good nerd comeback that won’t go away

But this year I am going to do things a little differently. I will take resolutions will share them, and will hold myself accountable to them.

Weight Loss

Just over 4 years ago, I decided to lose all that weight I had. Now many people who didn’t know me back then won’t know that I used to be really really big. So I shed about 100 pounds, in a little less than one year, and kept it off for two years. The problem is that the weight has started to creep up on me again, and it needs to go.

Weight loss is a little tricky, because it doesn’t quite subscribe to the traditional S.M.A.R.T. goals idea – that is, goals that you take should be specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and timely. Setting to lose X amount of pounds by D date isn’t very likely to be a successful goal. Instead people should completely forget about losing weight and instead focus on making the necessary lifestyle changes, and weight loss will come with it. I won’t go into the details in this post, but I’d highly recommend Dr. Phil’s Weight Loss book. I don’t want to give this guy more advertising than he already has, but honestly this is how I got started.

Building My Finances

As an engineer, I have not gotten much exposure to the financial world, but I do know enough about it to notice that it’s pretty hopping! I’m starting to feel increasingly lonely, tapping code on my keyboard, investigating bug reports, and attending meetings, while some others are getting filthy rich on the stock market. Don’t get me wrong, I love my job. It pays very well. I just feel as if I’m staying home on a Saturday night while my neighbors are having a huge party with lots of hot chicks next door!

Enough with the analogies, it’s time to move! I’ve got some tools to get started: a Fidelity account thanks to my employer, and I’ve recently been watching Nightly Business Report religiously.

Yes, just two for now. Let’s see how I do :p

• New background image, courtesy of Dotter. Dotter generates a polka dot background picture based on colours you specify.
• New CSS to make things look more web 2.0-ish.
• You need to solve a CAPTCHA to post a comment, so spammers can’t pollute the comment moderation queue.

Let me know what you think of the new design, and most importantly, if you find display bugs.

Happy holidays and happy new year.

Edit: Here’s how the old theme looked like, for archival purposes:

One such tool is DVRMSToolbox. Unlike other tools, it actually works on Windows 7, but it’s essentially a mish-mash of executables, with documentation for Windows Vista that’s hard to follow and to make matters worse, a web forum with loads of “me too, I can’t get this working either, please help” kind of replies instead of working solutions. I was able to get something working, though I could not figure how on earth to get it to work with .wtv files (it’s built for Vista which uses .dvr-ms files). Another issue I ran into is that it works on the recordings as they come in, which grinds the system down to a halt (even on a quad-core).

Fortunately, I was able to poke around and take a look at the package and figure out what’s going on, and how to write batch scripts to accomplish things, and wrote a nice batch file which I can trigger through the built-in Windows Scheduler at 4 am when I am sleeping and the system is idle:

@echo off
set mediafolder=%1
set wtvconverter=%systemdrive%\windows\ehome\wtvconverter.exe
set dvrmstool=%systemdrive%\Program Files (x86)\DVRMSToolbox\DVRMStoMPEG.exe

echo Usage: runcomskip.cmd [path/to/media/folder]
if mediafolder=="" goto:eof
for /r %mediafolder% %%a in (*.wtv) do call:do_conversion "%%a"
goto:eof

:do_conversion
rem do conversion here args = %~1 ...
set wtvfile=%~1
set dvrmsfile=%wtvfile%.dvr-ms
set mpegfile=%dvrmsfile%.mpeg
echo *** Begin processing file %~1 ***
echo Converting to dvr-ms %dvrmsfile%
%wtvconverter% "%wtvfile%" "%dvrmsfile%"
echo Running comskip and converting to mpeg %mpegfile%
"%dvrmstool%" /if="%dvrmsfile%" /of="%mpegfile%" /p=32 /act="converttompgwocommercials"
rem Rename the wtv file so we don't attempt to re-convert it if we run the script again.
rem I'll be changing this to delete the file when I'm sure my script works 100% of the time.
rename "%wtvfile%" "%wtvfile%.old"
echo *** End processing file %~1 ***

goto:eof

(to use, copy this into a text file and save it as runcomskip.cmd)

I’m using the WTV to DVR-MS converter that ships with Windows to convert the files to the older DVR-MS format. There are no tools (that I know of) that will work with WTV. Once the file has been converted, DVRMStoMPEG will run Comskip, a freeware tool included with DVRMSToolbox to find commercials in the video, and will output the stripped video to MPEG. I ouptut MPEG since it’s a lot  more portable than DVR-MS and WTV, and AFAIK there’s no transcoding involved, all it should be doing is changing the container. I’m a bit wary of deleting the original files just yet. I want to make sure that the tools work right before running it on my recordings. I rename it so that the same files don’t get processed twice. The next step is to find a good batch encoder for archival purposes before my 1 TB DVR disk fills up. Right now I’m thinking of writing a simple cmd line encoder using the Expression SDK.

The Device

The HTC HD7 is a nice phone overall. I love the size of the screen on it, and its slimness: it fits better in my pocket than my older, tiny-screen HTC Touch. The 5 MP camera is totally amazing, and the LEDs do a good job as a flash, or even as a flashlight. It would be nice if they’d have a Super AMOLED screen instead of an LCD. A few disappointments, however, it uses a micro-usb instead of a standard mini-usb to sync so I have to buy new cables, and I wish the battery could hold more power.

The Carrier

In the process, I switched from Sprint to T-Mobile because Sprint doesn’t yet have WP7 devices yet, and I’ve really had enough of my HTC Touch. I’m a quite disappointed at the coverage, and the data speed. Indeed, in spite of being practically non-existent outside North America, CDMA is a much, much better cell phone system!

WP7

Finally, let’s get to Windows Phone 7. Overall I think they’ve done a great job, and my assessment is that it’s at least the equivalent, or better than the iPhone, give or take a few features. And if the rumored “January update” is true (I don’t know, I don’t work on the WP7 team), WP7 really can kick some serious iPhone ass! Sure, I think Android is way ahead in the game, but if they keep a fast-paced update release schedule, and does a good job supporting developers as well as device makers, I think WP7 has lots of potential.

• The phone has a new UI. It works great after maybe 1-2 hours at the most of getting used to it. Perhaps a more complete setup wizard that does more than setup Hotmail would be nice.
• I like the way the facebook/outlook/contacts/hotmail/gmail contacts sync together in the people hub. They need to include Twitter, and Ideally have an API that social netwok sites themselves can maintain.
• It would be nice if calendar services like Google Calendar and Facebook’s events could also appear in the phone’s calendar.
• The folder list in Outlook e-mail gets the job done, but looks very, very, very bland.
• The marketplace is getting very crowded. That’s a good thing, but that will require at least organizing alphabetically.
• The lock screen and password input is really nice. If you’ve used Windows Mobile, you know what I mean!
• Internet Explorer sucks, but it’s way better than the one that shipped with Windows Mobile.
• No ability to map the address of a Facebook event, not even on the Facebook application.
• Bing search is quirky. Often, it will say Bing is not available after a long, long wait, even if I have a data and/or WiFi connection going on. If I try it a second later, the search results will show up quickly as expected.
• IE has Google search as default, due to the carrier customizing it. Why the hell do we allow this? BING is the proper search engine now :p

So, I Binged, Googled… nothing. So I started playing around, and I came up with something:

The live TV buffer is stored along with your TV recordings in the Recorded TV folder, which by default should be C:\Users\Public\Recorded TV. In that directory, there’s a hidden folder called TempRec\TempSBE. To see it, you must enable hidden folders. In that folder, there are a bunch of files with weird (GUID) file names with DBF extension. Use the date of the file to figure out which file is the one you want…

Copy that file somewhere else (you don’t want to muck with this folder-it’s probably hidden for a reason). Rename it with a WTV extension. Windows Media Player should be able to play it now. I tried with VLC and MPC, they both won’t play it. Using the built in converter to convert that file to DVRMS will also fail. I suspect this isn’t a true .WTV file and as such isn’t very portable.

Fortunately, you can use Microsoft Expression Encoder to make it into a WMV! Expression Encoder is the former Windows Media Encoder and the free version will do the job just fine. Once it installs, launch it, select “Transcoding Project”. Use File > Import and browse to the WTV file, set the desired WMV settings on the right pane, and when you’re done, select File > Encode.

You should now get the pause buffer in a nice small WMV file The default output location for Expression Encoder is “Expression\Expression Encoder” in your documents folder.

Again, I found this on my own, so of course this method is probably NOT supported by Microsoft.

So here’s the route to work:

bikeroute

So I made it, the only big surprise is how I was exhausted climbing the hill west of 405, and a strong southerly wind, which should both help me on the way back

I believe the cop saw that (or maybe he just wasn’t impressed with my loud techno blasting though the sunroof), pulled over to the shoulder and got behind me for like a mile on 405, I didn’t get stopped. Should I actually be looking out for these transit police like I do for the WaSPs?