God's canvas

This was a beautiful fall day (21°C).  Sun sets before 7 PM now.

This sunflower grew another flower on its stem and it is starting to blossom:

Scratch for the first time

Watching his brother playing with Scratch over the past few months, this lad made his first Scratch project today.  Note that he was left to himself to play around and figure it out.  He gave the cat a light sabre as his first project.  He didn't save it and is now working on a cat with a gun.

Problems with the new Core i5

This morning, I was trying to transfer data from the Phenom 9650 Windows 7 Pro computer to the Core i5 Windows 8 Pro computer.  I used a WD Passport USB 3.0 hard drive connected to the Phenom and it was transfering data at 39 Mb/s (using the PCI-E USB 3.0 card I installed in it - NEC chipset).  When I plugged in the WD Passport into the new Core i5 mainboard USB 3.0 port, it didn't show as a drive, but just showed up as a device in Devices and Printers.  I updated the Intel drivers and it still didn't work.  I updated the BIOS on the mainboard and it still didn't work.  I plugged the WD Passport into a USB 2.0 port on the mainboard and it was recognised as a drive.

When I was searching for a solution "Asus USB 3.0 driver" on Google, I was directed to a site that looked like it was from Asus (Driver Tuner).  I downloaded and installed it, but when I found out it wasn't from Asus, I uninstalled it and then did a Google search "DriverTuner malware" to check if it was malware - luckily, it wasn't!.

I also plugged in a Verbatim USB 3.0 hard drive into the Core i5 USB 3.0 port and it worked.  So, I plugged the Verbatim USB 3.0 hard drive into the Phenom 9650 USB 3.0 port to transfer the files again.  However, it was only transferring at USB 2.0 speeds of about 7 Mb/s.  Hmm....  Now, I think the Verbatim drive did operate at USB 3.0 speeds on the Phenom 9650 because I went to check on the progress of copying 50 gig of data and it was done.  So, I took the Verbatim drive and plugged it into the Core i5 to transfer the data to the new computer.  It is transferring at USB 3.0 speeds while simultaneously doing a Windows update for Office 2010.  It has peak transfer rates of 83 Mb/s and that would indicate the Asus USB 3.0 SpeedBoost is actually working!  Now these were the numbers Windows was reporting during the file transfer.  This site gives much higher number.  Anyways, it is clear that USB 3.0 is about 10x faster than USB 2.0.  I did a Google search "wd passport not recognised usb 3 asus" and found this as the second link.  It might be the fix!

These USB 3.0 issues are very annoying!  It's great when it works right though!

Next, I had to install the network printers.  I bought a 3 port HP parallel printer server from Kijiji a few years ago.  One of the problems is when you run the HP Install Network Printer utility, it won't work unless there is a printer driver already installed.  So, I install the needed printers to print to file, then I reinstall the printers with the HP utility and select the drivers already installed. Our house is wired with 9 ethernet ports, so we don't need to use wireless to connect to the internet.  I turn on the wireless router only when laptops or the tablets need it.

Core i5 with Windows 8 Pro

Getting this system running was quite a pain.  For some reason, the Coolermaster Power supply form Amazon.ca wouldn't power the board up.  I eventually used an old Ultra power supply from the AMD Phenom Quad Core 9850 and it worked with this Asus board.  I put the new Coolermaster power supply into the AMD Quad Core box and it worked with the old computer.  This set me back a few hours trying to figure it out.

I installed the Windows 8 Pro upgrade I got last year for $40 and downloaded all the updates.  We're good to go.

Putting together the Core i5

Some parts arrived from NCIX today.  The Asus mainboard, CPU and 2 Gig Seagate hard drive were ordered Sunday and arrived today.

I started out by cloning the 1 gig drive from my AMD 6-core computer onto the 2 Gig Seagate with ToDO Backup Free Edition.  I will be using the 1 Gig drive in the Core i5 which will become the main computer at home.  With Windows 7 and Windows 8, you can't clone partitions.  You need to clone the entire drive if you want to transfer from one hard drive to another.  I found this out the hard way.

Next, I started putting the Core i5 system together.

• The Asus mainboard was installed into the case, 
• The Core i5 4430 CPU was installed along with the CPU fan
• followed by 16 gig of  PNY DDR3 ram I bought last year.

I don't have the power supply yet (which was ordered from Amazon.ca).   That is set to arrive on Friday.  Then I'll install Windows 8 Pro in this computer.

The BSOD Mystery Solved?

The computer that is used the most in our home started to randomly BSOD (blue screen of death) about a couple of weeks ago.  It was a Phenom 9850 with 8 gig of DDR2 and Windows 7 Pro.  I think the random crashing started to happen after a Windows update was applied.  I thought it was some video card driver or a memory error.  Suspecting the video driver, I downloaded new drivers from AMD, but that didn't help.

Today, I thought maybe the Gigabyte mainboard was flaky so I swapped it with an identical one I had with another computer running Vista Ultimate Edition 32 bit (but with a Phenom 9650 CPU and 4 gig of Kingston DDR2).

When I popped the RAM from the Phenom 9850 box to swap into the Phenom 9650, I noticed that it was 2 sticks of Corsair, 1 stick of Crucial and 1 stick of GB Micro!  Hmm....  After swapping the hard drive for the two boxes, Windows 7 wouldn't boot.  I reset the BIOS and it still wouldn't boot.  I just left the 2 Corsair sticks in there and removed the two non-matching sticks and it would POST to the BIOS. If this didn't work, I would have checked the RAM with Memtest 86+ (I was pretty sure I checked the RAM for errors previously).  I had verified that the two sticks of Kingston were good with Memtest 86+ because I had bought them used from Kijiji a few weeks ago.

Then I thought I would take the 2 sticks of Kingston in the Vista box and put it into the Windows 7 Pro box.  That way I would have 2 sticks of Corsair (800 MHz) and 2 sticks of Kingston (667 MHz) in dual channel mode (8 gig total).  I put the Crucial and GB Micro sticks in the Vista box, but as single channel.  As I type this post, the Win7 Pro computer is not BSODing.  The Vista Ultimate computer is also working.

I had to activate both computers over the phone as the processor swap caused my Windows to 'deactivate'.  On the Windows 7 Pro machine, I had to reactivate Office 2010 (over the internet).  I suspect I will have to activate Office 2007 on the Vista Ultimate computer too.

Problem solved?  I hope so.  But, I've already ordered a Haswell Core i5 4430 CPU and Asus Mainboard from NCIX.  I'll be using 16 gig of DDR3 I bought last year when RAM was dirt cheap ($30 for 8 gig!).  So, about $550 later, I'll have a significant upgrade!  I haven't been using Intel CPUs at home for a long time because I was too cheap and settled for AMD instead.  This should be a significant performance boost!

First sunflower opens

This morning, the first blossom from my Russian mammoth sunflowers appeared. I'm not sure any others will get to that stage this year, so it was great to see the recent hot weather has expedited the late starters from this year.  This one was planted further from the house in a south facing direction and that has sped up its growth.  There is one more near the house that will probably blossom any day now.  I think I'll have two that will get to be mature enough so that I can harvest the seeds for next year's crop.

On August 25th, my son found the ring that was missing since Thanksgiving 2012.  He had actually found it earlier, but discarded it because it wasn't a part for his scooter!

Albert Milne Park

I don't think we came to this nice 'digger park' last year.  A couple of years ago, I believe we also came to Digger Park on a beautiful Labour Day.  It was the same again today!  There is a digger like this at Pike Lake that my kids discovered in June 2011.  On Labour Day 2011, we were riding our bikes to Cumberland Square Mall when we discovered Albert Milne Park with its two diggers.  A fun place for boys indeed.

Apple Harvest 2013

This year was a bountiful apple crop for both apple trees in our yard.  The Norland has produced a nice crop of sweet red apples almost every year.  It's apples are the shape of red delicious apples and the largest we had this year were the size of small red delicious apples.  Most of them were pretty small though.  They are great for eating and smoothies.  We bought our Norland at Westview Co-op about 9 years ago for about $40.

Norland apple tree

Our green apple tree, a Heyer 12 cultivar, finally had a nice crop of apples three years after being transplanted to make way for a blue spruce.  It was planted on Canada Day about 9 years ago too.  We bought it at Superstore for about $20. I think it's roots have finally recovered.  It had only a handful of apples last year.  Its fruit is quite sour, but it's great for cooking.

Heyer 12 apple tree

Heyer 12 apples

We made some apple crisp with the Heyer 12 apples tonight:

We didn't grow any snow peas this year, but the tallest Russian mammoth sunflower in the front is over 5 feet tall now.  Hopefully, the recent hot weather will mean we will have a harvest of sunflower seeds again this year.  The two sunflowers I planted in a pot in the back patio last year was a popular spot for a red wing blackbird this past spring - the two flowers were picked pretty clean.  The birds got most of our Saskatoon berries this year despite covering them with netting, so it's nice to have the Heyer 12 apples this year.

Russian Mammoth Sunflower

This geranium has been saved over the winter at Aden Bowman the last two winters and is blooming nicely.

Summer Music Festivals!

On our first day (July 28) in the Laurentians, my brother found a concert with the Gryphon Trio.  We went up to Mont Tremblant village and listened to the trio peform Mozart, Debussy and Ravel.  Afterwards, Alexandre Da Costa signed his latest CD for us.  James Parker and Alexandre Da Costa also took a photo with my two kids.  A nice concert from Festival Classiques des Hautes-Laurentides.

On August 8, we went to Stratford Summer Music to listen to 17 year old Jan Lisiecki.  He also gave us a photo op and signed our CDs for us!  He played a selection of Chopin Preludes and the Beethoven 3rd Piano Concerto with a string quintet (Annex String Quartet).  A very nice young man indeed.  He has grown musically and technically since I heard him in Saskatoon (fall 2011).

Summer Strings Experience 2013

This year, the Saskatoon Suzuki Strings Summer Strings Experience is being held at Cornerstone Church.  It is a very beautiful and well designed building.  More than I expected (past SSE's were held at the University of Saskatchewan Education Building).  Here's Noah's Ark on the second floor:

The ark is actually made of wood (you can't really tell from this photo).  Click here for some audio of the performances.

2013 Infographic

These are the things that have driven my worklife these last few years.  I prefer Open Source technologies and tools because they allow anyone to customise them and use them for free (freedom in creativity and free from cost).  I was told last week during the Earth Science 30 curriculum writing, "you have more knowledge than money?".  Sadly, with the commodities crash, that is truer than ever.  Some of the Open Source tools I use include

• LibreOffice (office suite)
• Audacity (audio editing tool)
• VLC Player (media player)
• Ubuntu Linux
• Inkscape (vector drawing program)
• Python (programming language)
• PHP (programming language)
• MySQL Database
• Xibo digital signage

I've also been drawn to Creative Commons as a way to use and share knowledge freely (as with one of my best ideas from last year - analysing sound with Audacity).  Think Python, the textbook I use in CS30 is a Creative Commons resource.

Quite a few of the tools listed above involve computer programming and this skill has allowed me to be more efficient in my work and has saved others time as well.  The entry and collection of activity points data is not as onerous now as student numbers are not needed and PHP scripts can glean whatever data one desires from a MySQL database. I also use free tools like the visual languages Scratch and SNAP and these languages have allowed me to offer an alternate stream of CS20.  I still use a commercial language, Delphi, for Windows programming because I like Pascal and was never a C++ programmer.

The economy and politics are important interests of mine.  The consequences of the inverted demographic pyramid in developed countries is a concern practically and theoretically.  I do not subscribe to 'right wing' or 'left wing' because they are not useful ideas and just lead to divisions.  I found Niall Ferguson's Reith Lectures from 2012 to be quite illuminating.  The injustice of my homeland, Taiwan, being treated as a pariah nation and the largely forgotten San Francisco Peace Treaty of 1951 which is the rule of law which governs Taiwan's status are causes which are close to my heart.

My mentor, Jerry Mitrovica, is respectful of ideas.  This comment from an online chat a few years back illustrates his wisdom:

12:48 Comment From duncan rutherford: When you and your colleagues hear about things like the iranian cleric who said that women dressing provocatively can cause earthquakes, do you find it funny, or is it frustrating?
12:54 Jerry Mitrovica: I do not think it is funny, nor do I feel frustrated. We live in a world informed by complex cultural issues, and the important thing is for scientists to push for their research results into the public domain. We have an important role in society - to provide information gained through rigorous scientific methods - that is part of the reason I agreed to do this online chat.

Finally, music is of paramount importance in my family. My two boys prefer the violin to piano, but their dad's favorite playlist is heavily slanted towards piano:

• Mozart Piano Concerto 25, KV 503 (espcially the last movement)
• Beethoven's last piano sonata, Opus 111
• Schumann's Fantasie, Opus 17
• Chopin's Barcorolle, Opus 60
• Brahms Intermezzo Opus 118, Nr 2
• Bruch Violin Concerto Nr 1

 These glories reenforce my belief in the divine, for how else could one explain Beethoven's last three piano sonatas? Some day, I hope to fully enjoy the hundreds of CDs I have and listen to some of my favorite artists live! We had just such an opportunity this past summer at Mont Tremblant and Stratford!  We got to listen to the Gryphon Trio and Jan Lisiecki during a couple of summer music festivals!.

Stratford Summer Music 2013

Festival Classique des Hautes-Laurentides

A look at free GIS software

In preparation for teaching Earth Science 30 next January, I started looking at GIS in education.  I started with a link from DLSE.  This activity used an ancient piece of software called Arc Voyager which doesn't let you save anything.  I then tried Arc GIS Explorer.  I was trying to find some data and found this page with free Saskatchewan data.  I signed up so I could download Saskatoon elevation data from GeoBase.  I was looking at some of the info that came with the zip file and read it was raster data.  So, I added this to Arc GIS Explorer and got this:

Not sure what use this is.  I am now going to try Falcon View which was a 200 Mbyte download.

Well, I installed Falcon View, but I had to browse to the install folder to see where the app was.  Ran the app and it didn't do anything. Well, not a good start for this open source product!  Since it makes a folder called Xplan, I went to the start menu and tried to run the shortcut from the start menu (Xplan folder).  I saw that the error on the splash screen was initialisation failed.  Hmmmm.

Earlier today, I took the PDF of Elbow basement topography and saved it as a JPG.  I then imported this JPG into LoggerPro for photo analysis.  Unfortunately, I couldn't zoom in on the photo.  I was trying to do a profile on the map and get the x data (distance along the profile).  Later on, I was going to add the elevation data manually.  No luck since I can't zoom in on the image!  I was thinking of using Adobe Illustrator (or maybe Inkscape), but I haven't tried that yet.

Géza Anda , MySQL and PHP

The past two years, I've remembered Géza Anda's passing on this blog.  I was so busy this year I forgot.  I've been listening to a lot of Ivan Moravec these days, but I pulled out some of my favorite Anda recordings again.  The Schumann Fantasie and Symphonic Etudes played by Anda are always interesting.  He can really rush things sometimes.  I think I should pull out the Mozart piano concerto set I was given last Christmas too.  I've been listening to Murray Perahia's set in my car.

Tonight, I figured out how to make receipts from a MySQL database.  It's nothing fancy.  I just used PHP to read the records from MySQL and then had it generate numbered receipts by using HTML tables to format them.  I also figured out how to use PHP to display an RSS feed on this page.  I really like open source.  My default office suite is LibreOffice.  Python, Inkscape and Audacity are among the other open source tools I use.  I used Audacity to analyse sound and I used it in my kid's grade 4 class to check who could play a violin note in tune.

Today, a student had trouble with a Powerpoint file generated from a Mac app (not Office Mac).  I had asked her to save it as PPTX, but that was not possible as she didn't have Office Mac.  I converted the slides to images and was about to insert an image library into Powerpoint 2010 when I remembered an online conversion service.  The Mac PPT wouldn't load into Powerpoint 2010 but it did load into LibreOffice 3.5 with glitches (funny how the open source product worked better huh?). I remembered a service I had used successfully before.  I did a Google search "z format conversion" and found Zamzar.  The offending PPT was uploaded to Zamzar and within a few minutes, I was sent an e-mail with a link to the converted file.  Voila, it worked!  The audio files were in M4A format.  I tried VLC Player to convert to MP3 without success.  Next I used Adobe Soundbooth to convert M4A to MP3 and it worked.  Finally, I use Audacity to edit her 3 converted MP3 audio clips together as the background music for the PPT.  I am more familiar with Audacity than SoundBooth (that's why I didn't edit and merge the clips from SoundBooth).

Piano Recital Day

Today was piano recital day for students of the Saskatoon Yamaha Music School.  In the afternoon, there were group lesson recitals and in the evening, there was a wide variety of music from private lesson students.  Their teacher played a Mozart fantasia to start off the evening recital.  It wasn't KV 475, but maybe it was KV 397.  I must admit I don't listen to very much solo Mozart.  Incidentally, we heard the Twinkle variations this morning on the radio (I think it was Janina Fialkowska's recording) on the way to the Forestry Farm Park.  The Ohio Buckeyes are starting to bloom there.

Ohio Buckeye, Forestry Farm Park

Ohio Buckeye Blossom

We have an Ohio Buckeye in our backyard and it blossomed for the first ime last year.  I admired the European Horse Chestnuts in Toronto when they bloomed in June.  They are a common street tree in southern Ontario.  I saw some beautiful specimens by the lake in Oakville last summer.  It's too cold to grow them in Saskatchewan, so I planted an Ohio Buckeye on 2008 August 30.

This year, I've been listening to several Ivan Moravec solo albums.  I got his Vox Chopin album from Passionato (now defunct it seems).  There is a Youtube that goes with this album.  Unfortunately, my CD had a pressing defect and I ordered another through Amazon.ca Marketplace.  I'm still immersed in this Chopin album after first hearing it in February.  Next I got the Vox double CD album of Chopin and Debussy.  I don't appreciate Debussy too much, but the Chopin is a favorite CD now.  Love the Polonaise Fantasie!  I've always liked Pollini's version, but this one has better, fuller sound.  I also got his double CD of Mozart concerti with Marriner.  Finally, a 4 CD piano recital box has recently arrived and I'm looking forward to a summer of Ivan Moravec's playing.