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Ever Lost A Day Sleeping?

You ever waking up feeling like you slept through an entire day into the next? That’s what happened to me this past Sunday. I went to bed on Saturday around 5 or 6am. Well, you could technically call that going to bed on Sunday morning. Anyway when I woke up, it felt like I’ve slept for ages, but when I looked at my clock, it was only 3pm. The day was sorta dreary, mostly cloudy. I was thinking to myself… did I sleep through Sunday… no way…

Anyway, I didn’t think much of it. I was planning to go into work that day anyway to finish up some stuff. When I exited my garage, I noticed that someone’s trash can was out. Do note, garbage collection is on Tuesday and so garbage cans usually come out on Monday. I was like WTF…

Then I remembered, it couldn’t have been Monday. I had browsed through the hot deal forums before leaving for work and even remarked there weren’t that many new deals since last night. When I got to Building 40 and having no cars in the garage confirmed that it was indeed Sunday. I could’ve looked at my cell phone, but that didn’t dawn upon me till later. I don’t think I really ever believed it was Monday. Well… maybe for a split second.

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Lamp and Static Electricity – Part 2

So my previous blog entry generated quite some buzz, mostly about my facial hair. But Xyon and I discussed it for some time and it might have to do with induction, because there is a metallic bar the runs below the lamp underneath the desk. I’ve taken a picture to show it in more detail:

lamp and glass desk

As you can see, nothing is really touching the lamp and the lamp sits firmly on the glass desk. The only metallic parts of the desk is the frame and the keyboard tray. The electric cord is insulated and connects directly into a surge protector below. We thought maybe the static electricity jumped from the metallic bar below, through the glass, and into the lamp.

On Howstuffworks, they have an article on How do touch-sensitive lamps work? They suggest 3 methods on how touch sensitive lamps work:

  • Temperature
  • Resistance
  • Radio reception

However, none of those methods really explain how static electricity turned it on. I’m really tempted to take apart my lamp now to figure out what’s going on.

Update: I knew there was a few things I forgot to mention.

The trick isn’t limited to just my keyboard tray. I can touch any metallic part of the desk (such as the the legs) with static electricity and it has the same effects on the lamp. However, touching the glass doesn’t have any effects. I guess the static electricity in that case never leaves me.

I also found out it was less painful to use my toe/feet to transfer the static electricity. It didn’t really hurt my fingers/hands, but I definitely felt something strong when using my fingers. Maybe the skin on my toes are just thicker or maybe my nerves down there aren’t as sensitive, but I hardly feel anything when using my feet.

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Non-working Videos

If any of my videos/music/animations weren’t playing for you on my blog or gallery today, it was due to a recent change that I had made to combat hot-linking which has caused about 12GB of data transfer in the past 30 days. Baidu.com (a big Chinese search engine) apparently linked directly to an mp3 I have in one of my old blog posts: 永恆的記憶, and it almost reached 30,000 requests. My statistics show that ~12GB of data was transferred during the last 30 days and that mp3 was responsible for 98% of it.

I found out some interesting things.

First, my regex for my RewriteCond in my .htaccess file was incorrect:
!^http://(.*\.)?krunk4ever.com(/.*)?$

which I realized now that any URL that included “krunk4ever.com/” as part of the URL would pass right through.

I fixed my regex so now that krunk4ever.com has to be the domain:
!^http://([^/]*\.)?krunk4ever.com(/.*)?$

Next I was looking through my access logs and it appears that when you embed a media file (such as an mp3 or video), the referring URL is null and the agent is actually the media player, in which case, it was showing up as WMP11 mostly.

I’ve always allowed direct loading (as in copying and pasting the link into the browser), but decided to prevent cases like these. I went ahead and also blocked referring URLs that were null/empty.

Xyon pointed out to me earlier today that my videos weren’t playing, but if he clicked the “Download Movie” link, it’d work.

Of course! The purpose of blocking the null/empty referring URL was to prevent embed media files that link to my site. It would make sense any embedded media on my site would hit the same problem. Therefore, I’ve fixed the access rights again so that only that particular file will be blocked when referring URL is null/empty. All others should be fine.

If you haven’t seen the static electricity video (which was broken earlier today), do get a chance to see magic!

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Turning On/Off Lamp With Static Electricity

So while sitting at my desk rubbing my feet against the rubber chair mat, I noticed I was building up static electricity. What’s even cooler is that when I touch my keyboard tray, it actually turns off my lamp. If I do it again, it turns the lamp back on. My lamp is one of those touch sensor type lamps where it turns on/off just by touching it. However, I never knew electricity could flow through glass like that as I have a glass table. There are metallic parts, but the laptop itself isn’t touch anything metallic.

Here’s my little video demonstration (high and low resolutions respectively):

Turning Lamp On and Off With Static Electricity - Large Turning Lamp On and Off With Static Electricity - Small

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Reindexing Media Center Library

So after building my new file server (yes, I know I’ve been promising you a blog entry on that), I had to remap my Vista Media Center to look for videos in a different location. However, for some reason, deleting existing “watched folders” was problematic for Media Center. It would leave random folders inside “My Videos” and other areas, which was annoying. I had unlinked my music share because I didn’t really listen to music on my media center, but none of the music would disappear from “My Music”.

When I open “My Videos”, I would see Local Disk (C:) and \\KrunkFS\Public because I used to have C:\Public\Unwatched and \\KrunkFS\Public\Music linked.

I tried searching the web, but I’ve found people hitting this problem, but never a solution. However, I have on advantage that others don’t, I work at Microsoft. Sending a email to the Media Center team was a simple as locating what their distribution list alias is.

My email:

I was wondering if there’s a way to reset the Windows Vista Media Center library. This past weekend, I moved some folders around and removed it from the watched folders list. However, remnants of the previously watched folders still exist. What’s funkier is that now Local Disk (C:) is being shown in “My Videos” when C:\Public\Videos was removed from my library setup.

Another example would be the music I was storing in \\server\Public\Music which was mapped to Z:\. Removing that folder from the watch list now brings up a \\server\Public in “My Videos”.

I tried rebooting or leaving Media Center on for a couple hours hoping it’ll clear the cache, but that didn’t work.

I wasn’t able to find anything remotely sounding to what I wanted in the settings/tasks area.

I was wondering if there’s something I’m missing or if there’s another way to force it to reset or completely reindex the library.

Thanks in advance.

It turns out that Media Center and WMP11 (Windows Media Player) share the same library and if I had searched for how to fix library problems in WMP11, I would’ve found the solution.

Someone pointed me to this KB article: You cannot view, add, or delete items in the library in Windows Media Player 11, which gives directions on how to reset the library. It mentions that the library has entered a corrupted state and you’ll probably have to delete the entire library.

I had no problem with doing that as I just wanted to reset the library completely and do a re-index.

The instructions are:

  1. Exit Windows Media Player.
  2. For Windows XP:
    Click Start, click Run, type %userprofile%\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Media Player, and then click OK.
    For Windows Vista:
    Click Start, click Run, type %LOCALAPPDATA%\Microsoft\Media Player, and then click OK.
  3. Select all the files in the folder, and then click Delete on the File menu.
    Note You do not have to delete the folders that are in this folder.
  4. Restart Windows Media Player.
    Note Windows Media Player automatically rebuilds the database.

After deleting all the files, Media Center’s library was completely reset. I readded the folders I wanted and everything has worked fine since.

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Penny Items @ Best Buy

So earlier this week, Best Buy was getting rid of their movie promotional toys: Harley Davidson 1:18 Scale Motorcycle, Dinosaur Model, Peter Pan Lunch Box – One Cent Each at Best Buy – Available for In Store Pick-Up. They were a penny each and I thought why not. Opt for in-store pickup to save further on shipping.

Got myself a dinosaur model and 4 beanie babies (Patrick and Gary from Spongebob Squarepants):
penny items - dinosaur, patrick, and gary

One of the Patrick dolls is a bit dirty, but I’m not complaining.

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Detective Conan – New Opening Song

Add another thing to make music I like: speak really fast, pause, and repeat. I generally don’t like rap, where singers appear to be just speaking, but if you speak with some sort of melody, I actually quite like that in fact.

Beginning with episode 457 of Detective Conan, they have a new OP: Opening: kumo ni notte 雲に乗って.

The song’s actually called 雲に乗って (Kumo ni Notte) by 三枝夕夏 IN db (U-ka saegusa IN db). The title of the song translates to Riding a Cloud. The name of the song brought up images of 孫悟空 (Sun Wu Kong / Son Goku) from 西遊記 (Journey to the West) as he rides his cloud with his stick. You can also watch the music video: 雲に乗って – 三枝夕夏 IN db. When the singer begins to sing really fast, her voice somewhat reminds me of Ran’s voice, maybe that’s why I liked it so much. After watching the music video, I found the singer to be extremely cute!

I’d like to introduce you to a new site: Stage6

While searching for videos related to the song/band, I ended up on this site. I’ve been here before, but it wasn’t until this time, I’ve actually made a quick search keyword for it: s6. This site is rather awesome. It’s basically like YouTube, and you might’ve heard about Universal suing DivX/Stage6 and then a counter-sue. However unlike YouTube which uses the crappy flash based video codec (flv), DivX uses their own DivX codec for streaming and the quality is awesome and the file size is small. The videos appear to stream just as fast as YouTube, but with much higher quality. Maybe as users find out about this site, the bandwidth will decrease.

However, to watch videos on Stage6, you do have to download and install a plug-in. It was rather fast and works in both IE7 and Firefox. It probably works in other browsers too, but I haven’t played with any other yet. Also, another feature of Stage6 is the fact they allow you to download the video onto your computer, which is pretty awesome. You can do it with YouTube also, but you have to do it in a very round-about way.

However I was able to find high quality versions of the PV:

Did I mention how cute the singer in this band is yet? Enjoy!

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Sitemap

So a few days ago, I was playing with my robots.txt and started to do some research. While reading the Wikipedia entry, I noticed that I could provide a Sitemap, which apparently Google, Yahoo!, and MSN would read. A sitemap is basically a list of all your pages so search engine bots don’t have to slowly crawl to find every page. For some reason, both Yahoo! and MSN/Live has problems indexing my HD-Trailers.net site, so I thought maybe a sitemap would help. Google also has a problem indexing my Gallery as it’s slowly increases about 100 pages a week, while still missing 2000+.

So a quick search revealed that both WordPress and Gallery had automatic sitemap generators:

Installing the plug-in/module was rather simple and enabling either was just a few clicks. After the sitemaps were generated, I used the Google Sitemap Validator to see if there were any problems. Apparently the WordPress plug-in issues a priority of 1 instead of 1.0 which the validator didn’t like. I began looking at the code to see where I could fix it, but it seemed lke more hassle as they had some weird calculation converting ints to strings and vice versa. I ended up just setting the homepage to 0.9 in the control, thinking 0.9 isn’t that much different than 1.0.

Now I had to create a site index for my main HD-Trailers.net page. The protocol documentations were pretty helpful and given that I already had 3 sitemaps as reference guides, I whipped up some code to create the sitemap for the main page.

Reading on, it turns out that robots.txt has to be in the root directory and it only supports 1 sitemap per robots.txt. So given that there’s both a blog sitemap and the main page sitemap, I needed to merge the sitemaps into one, which wasn’t too difficult of a task.

However, I found out later that there’s also this sitemap index format which I could’ve used to point to multiple sitemaps instead of merging them. Maybe I’ll change that later. For now, it should do its job fine.

After your sitemaps are ready, you can submit them to Google and Yahoo!. I couldn’t find one for MSN/Live, but maybe they’ll be able to pick it up from my robots.txt.