Classic Shell causing problems with Windows 8

The Lenovo X220 Core i7 notebook my kid has would not let him login as a standard user.  After some fruitless searches about Windows All user install agent, I decided to uninstall Classic Shell.  After a reboot, his account was now able to be logged in.  I had installed Classic Shell to make the Windows 8 look more like standard Windows with a Start Button.  Oh well, back to plain new Windows 8.

How blind are our energy analysts?

I came upon an article last week that indicated that the significance of the Nexen takeover by CNOOC was China's access to fracking technology.  This morning, I decided to try to find that article.  I couldn't, but I found these:

• A Chinese article confirms this deal will help unlock China's vast shale oil reserves
• The Council of Canadians opposes the deal for environmental and indigenous heritage reasons
• This BusinessWeek article stresses that technology was the most important asset CNOOC bought.  Technology that includes deep water drilling
• The deal was put throught despite CSIS concerns about Chinese espionage
• This article highlights the deep water technology

Having seen my homeland's economy hollowed out by short sighted business leaders (such as those who run Acer, Asus and other Taiwanese companies).  They were pivotal in developing China's IT industry by shifting production to China from Taiwan.  It is rather sad that Canada is following in the same path.  How the heck would there ever be a need for the Northern Gateway pipeline if China can now develop, with western know-how, their vast shale oil reserves?  What of the geopolitical fallout for America in the western Pacific if energy poor democracies such as Korea and Japan are beholden to the People's Republic of China (PRC)?  Is that why the PRC has been so brazen (along with the misguided Kuomingtang-led Taiwan) in the Senkaku Islands dispute with Japan?

When will we learn?

Mischa Elman

My first ever Mischa Elman CDs arrived yesterday from Passionato.  This 2 CD set only cost me about $6.  Wow.  You can't get bargains like that on iTunes!

His version of the Gossec Gavotte from Suzuki Violin School Book 1 is something else!  Very charming.  There is also the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto, Lalo's Symphonie espagnole and the Khachaturian Concerto.  It's crazy how cheap classical music is these days.  Elman died in 1967, but he didn't record for the big record companies it would seem.  He was about 12 years older than Heifetz and Milstein (a couple of other great Jewish violinists from Russia).

Spectrum 2013

I took my grade 9 class to Spectrum 2013 on Thursday morning.  On Friday night, I returned with my kids.  I also met a former Walter Murray student who told me about the cheap TI MSP430 microcontroller.  I had mentioned I was considering Arduino, but it was still expensive.  He said the MSP430 promoted "proper C programming".  Arduino uses its own version of C.  Interesting!

Mendelssohn Violin Concerto

The Mendelssohn Violin Concerto was one of the first violin concerti I bought on CD (way back when I was in high school). I think the others I ordered from Templar Records in London were the Brahms Violin Concerto (Anne-Sophie Mutter) and the Beethoven Violin Concerto (Itzhak Perlman). I bought this EuroArts DVD from Presto Classical last year when it was half price and I was watching it tonight in preparation for the SSO concert on Saturday, January 19.  Frank-Michael Erben, the concert master of the Gewandhaus Orchestra is the soloist.  Interestingly, the first soloist of the concerto was Ferdinand David, then the concert master of the Gewandhaus Orchestra during Mendelssohn's time.

My first CD of this concerto was with Uto Ughi and the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Georges Prêtre.

When I first got this CD from Templar Records in London, I just listened to the Mendelssohn concerto and ignored the Bruch.  Of course, when I actually finally got around to listening to Bruch's first violin concerto, I was entranced and it is, to me, the most beautiful of all violin concertos!

Anyways, it is good to be able to hear the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto live played by the Gewandhaus Orchestra's concert master.  It is, after all, a very listenable masterpiece!  Mendelssohn was even more precocious than Mozart as a prodigy.  I've heard the Brahms Violin Concerto played by Miriam Fried and the Calgary Philharmonic back in the 1980s as well as with Itzhak Perlman and the TSO back in 1998 (during Easter break!).  Pinchas Zukerman was conducting the TSO that evening and the Mendelssohn Reformation Symphony was on the second half of the program.

More piano this year?

We have a Mason and Hamlin Model A grand piano that doesn't get played very much.  It was purchased in May 2008 and I hope it will get played more this year.  Maybe, someday, someone will play Beethoven Opus 109 on it!

Maybe the kid in the picture will play late Beethoven on this piano some day!

Shell Science Lab Challenge Regional Finalist

Just when I thought I was not in the running, today just before noon, I got an e-mail telling me that I was a regional finalist for the Shell Science Lab Challenge.  I will have to make a short video about the science facilities at my school and submit it for the next round.

The joy of this happy news was tempered by last Friday's tragedy.  I saw this article posted in the staff room and those heroes epitomise Bunyan's famous quote:

You have never really lived until you have done something for someone who can never repay you.

God bless them and their families.

God keep our land ...

Today, I found a little booklet in the supermailbox:

It was a King James version Gospel of John and Book of Romans from Bearing Precious Seeds Canada.  The Bible Society isn't allowed to distribute New Testaments and Psalms at citizenship ceremonies anymore and I don't think the Gideons give out Bibles to grade 5 students anymore.  So, it was kind of refreshing to see this new effort to plant God's seed.  Interestingly, I was feeling kind of empty today.  Perhaps, it was because of some minor disappointments (don't think my application for the Shell Science Challenge is going anywhere and I'm waiting to see if I'll get a paper published in the Science Teacher).  I was also looking for my Delphi Informant CD.  I had tried to find it last week when I was working on the RSS feed submitter.  Well, I found it today!  I was also reading the first chapter of Joel Osteen's Christmas book.  Well, when one door closes, there is always another that will open!

Dinu Lipatti and Clara Haskil

December is the month when both of these Romanian born pianists died.  Lipatti succumbed to leukemia on 1950 December 2 at the age of 33.  Haskil died from a fall at the Brussels train station on 1960 December 7 just shy of her 66th birthday.  They are two of the supreme pianists from the 20th century.

Argh! MS Word special characters and RSS

This is a possible solution, but it's in Java.  Did a Google search:

how to replace apostrophe from word to plain text

Should also set the character encoding to UTF-8.  Have to add this to my Delphi program and see if it will fix some problems!

These MS 'smart quotes' are a real pain.  I simply looked for any character out of the certain ASCII range and replaced it with a space, but this is amateurish.
http://www.garfieldtech.com/blog/stupid-quotes
http://www.dwheeler.com/essays/quotes-in-html.html
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html

Finally found a quick fix!

The other issue was sizing the image properly.  The programming logic was correct, but the program wasn't always getting the right dimensions from the internal TWebrowser component I had in my program.  It always  seemed to lag behind.  I finally figured out that you had to wait for the image to load completely before proceeding with the image size calculations!  That took me several hours until it dawned on me what the problem was!

This uses the pause routine found here

Xibo Digital Signage

Xibo is a free, open source computer program for digital signage.  Here is an example of it in action:

There is an RSS feed on the left for the announcements, the top right corner is for pictures and video and the bottom right corner plays RSS feeds from news sites.  This was running on Windows XP Pro on a Pentium Dual Core computer with 2 gig of memory.  The clock on the top left is from Greenwich Mean Time and set to the local time zone. A bit sluggish at times.

Delphi is my favorite tool for Windows Programming

I've always been drawn to Pascal and preferred it's syntax to the terseness of C.  I learned the basics of Turbo Pascal in an afternoon (after experience with Turing, BASIC and FORTRAN).  For Windows programming, I've always found Delphi to be the best tool available - especially if you aren't a C++ expert.  Delphi combines the power of C++ with the ease of Visual Basic.  I only stopped using Delphi for grade 12 computer science because Delphi 5 (1999) wouldn't run on Vista or Windows 7 and I switched to Java because it was free.  Delphi would have cost the school $100/license.  I never really got into Java (it's a huge language) and now I'll be switching to Python which has a syntax that I prefer.  Some of the programs I use a lot are written in Delphi:  WinGrab and Integrade Pro.

Before the social media craze, I thought RSS feeds would be a great way to publicise school events.  I wrote a Delphi 7 program to update RSS feeds 5 years ago.  It took me about 45 minutes to figure out how to call the Windows API to do FTP tasks with Delphi.  Unfortunately, this never caught on with the school.

However, when I setup Xibo digital signage at school last year, it required an RSS feed as the source of the announcements.  Consequently, I modified the program to suit the needs of this new task.

Recently, I learned how to add images to RSS feeds.  I've been doing this manually and had to figure out how to scale the images properly to maintain the proper aspect ratio.  Today, I figured out how to add this feature to my Delphi program.  I also tried to clean it up a bit so it could be more easily adapted for use at other schools.  I was amazed that you could import an ActiveX control which lets you access the image properties from the browser.  Once I had the height and width of the image, it was easy to scale the image for the RSS feed.  One page I Googled had a typo, but I figured it out by looking at the Delphi generated Pascal file (650,000 lines of code!) for the ActiveX control.  A different page didn't have the typo (I found this 2nd).

I'm glad Delphi is still around.  It's kind of expensive, but educators can have a copy for $100 (RAD Studio Pro even comes with RAD PHP, and C++). Here's a nice site called Delphi for Fun.  I think it's fun too!  It allows a non-expert like me to solve practical programming problems with relative ease!  Delphi Basics is a great reference as one is working with Delphi.

Great Pianists Speak for Themselves

I was browsing the books in the basement when I saw a gem I bought at U of T years ago for $3.99:  Great Pianists Speak for Themselves Volume 2 by Elyse Mach.

I think I had borrowed volume 1 from the library when I lived in Calgary (and worked at the downtown branch for minimum wage).  I found it very interesting reading.  A few of my favorites are missing though:  Maurizio Pollini and Krystian Zimerman stand out for me.  However, in this volume, Murray Perahia, Zoltán Kocsis and Leon Fleisher were featured.  I happened to find a the Dover reprint of both volumes called Great Contemporary Pianists Speak for Themselve on Amazon.ca and it arrived last Friday along with the BBC Rigoletto DVD. They lowered the price on me by about $4!  DARN.  I hope my kids read it sometime.  I think I like the pianists in volume 2 more than volume 1 (although Claudio Arrau and Alfred Brendel are artists I like too).  It's interesting to read Kocsis discovered as a teenager he had no piano technique!  I've been listening a lot to his DVD of Beethoven Opus 111 while exercising and just for pure enjoyment.  I'm now listening to another gem I dug out of the basement--Angela Hewitt's CBC disk of Bach piano concertos with the CBC Vancouver Orchestra recorded 25 years ago!

Argh!  Windows 8 Pro is giving problems on my AMD 6 core.  For some reason, I was trying to run Windows Media Player - it wouldn't start.  I checked the shortcut and saw it pointed to the 64-bit version.  I tried the 32-bit version and it ran.  Windows 8 may boot fast, but it still takes a while for everything to startup.  It is faster than Windows 7 though (but I've not had the setup for more than a year yet, so who knows?

Rigoletto

My DVD of Rigoletto arrived on St Andrew's Day (November 30).  I had seen this rather provocative David McVicar Royal Opera House Covent Garden production on PBS a few years ago.  I watched the first act and part of the second act on Saturday morning.  My older son was interested in this kind of art form and my younger son kept on saying "I want music singing" (Beethoven's 9th).  It occurred to me that opera must be really expensive to put together and they are usually over 2 hours long!  Quite an experience in live music.  I have a DVD of Bizet's Carmen as well from the DG 111 box.  I think the kids will like that one too!

Saskatoon Housing Bubble

I read a great article this past summer in Canadian Moneysaver while I was at the library.  The article was about the impending real estate bubble burst in Canada.  The second of four in the series is found here (well worth keeping it).  I decided to analyse Saskatoon data today.  It was harder than I thought to find data.  I don't know where this blog gets its data.  Using the following sources:

• SRAR Average house prices from 2001-2011
• CHMC Saskatoon rental prices 1992-2011

 I plotted this graph for 2001-2011 (download the spreadsheet here):

The divergence between rental costs and home prices is not sustainable and indicates a real estate bubble.  Best to wait for the prices to burst before getting into this market!

I was trying to get more data, but couldn't find it.  Remax had a RE/MAX 25 Years of Real Estate Report published in January 2007, but it is no longer available!  Too bad.