Month: January 2006

Home Made DVD Problem Resolved

After having some issues with burning DVDs using Apple’s iDVD dvd authoring software on Grace’s slower Mac, I decided to encode the project file on my laptop and see what happens. And it turns out that CPU speed DID matter in the case of dvd video encoding, at least in this one instance. Another cool thing I found out is that Apple’s iDVD can pull source files (raw video footage) over the network! All I had was the iDVD project file on my laptop, the rest of the source files (videos and music) were all on Grace’s Mac. It was way faster to encode the DVD on my Mac pulling source materials from Grace’s Mac over the network than encoding locally on her Mac!! WOW!

So the blue flickering is gone now. Copies will be made to anyone who wants one (namely, our moms and maybe friends of Grace).

Home Made DVD for Mom

After completing my last programming gig, I took a collection of Bryan’s video clips and made a DVD for our moms. I guess Grace’s Mac is way too old (and mine is seriously running out of space), it takes forever to compress the damn thing into the MPEG-2 format that consumer DVD players recognize. It took a whole day for the poor 400Mhz G4 with 700MB+ RAM to compress two dozen 1-2 minute clips (plus the menu… etc)!! But the result is wonderful. The images I used in the background of the main menu are all moving movie clips. Each of them loops as the image panes rotate through 8 different movie clips, complete with background music. And of course, the mirror reflections below them move as well!!

Thanks for Apple’s iLife suite, putting the clips and the dvd menu together took only less than an hour (it’s the rendering and compression that really killed the process).

DVD collection of Bryan's video clips

Unfortunately, something went wrong with the menu looping sequence. The first loop of the menu would flicker with a blue tint. And this only happens to the first loop of menu selection screens (including scene selections). My cousin’s boyfriend thinks it’s either that my DVD player is picky about the DVD-R I used or that Apple’s iDVD simply dislikes the DVD player… Both Googling and Apple’s iDVD support/discussion sites also didn’t provide any clues. I am compressing the DVD into disk image now. I will try burning again using a different burning software to see if that changes anything.

Blue screen flickers

Just to make the record complete (for anyone else who’s having similar issues and for trouble shooting’s sake), similar issue happened when I used iDVD 5 with the same burner in Panther (as well as Tiger). So it’s probably not the problem with the OS, iDVD apps or their preference files. It might have to do with how iDVD writes to the DVD on that first pass which the DVD burner is not happy about… Live and learn.

Accounting

I am taking an accounting class this quarter at UCSC. It made me realize one thing within the first 40 minutes of the class — ACCOUNTING SUCKS.

Jesus Christ… accounting is possibly the single most boring class I have ever taken in my life (maybe Algebra Trig in high school too… but that was because the teacher was boring; and I hated math). The instructor tried to make the class fun by staying lively and throwing a few lame jokes from time to time. And by repeating the same information over and over again (“Assets = Liabilities + Owner’s Equity” ), some things actually stuck to my head… But my goodness, I thought I was going to die from mental dehydration sitting in that class (a full house)…. And the fact that I was still recovering from food poisoning probably didn’t help either.

We went through the entire exercise of using T-Accounts to figure out the proper way of “crediting” and “debiting” (and it’s not the same as debit/credit cards!), generate general journal entries, posting journal entries to general ledger, then do a trial balance, and finally generate the four financial statements (income statement, statement of retained earnings, balance sheet and finally statement of cash flow).

I don’t know how I am going to survive the next nine classes (at 4 hours each). But I have a feeling merely having enough sleep prior to the class isn’t going to do the trick… And oh, she has three fricking exams! Argh…

Baby Signing

Bryan had the first class of his life on Wednesday! It was a baby sign language class where infants and young toddlers learn to use American Sign Language to express their [relatively] exact needs. Learning ASL has been on my “to-do” list since Freshman year at SCAD (having made friends with some hearing-disabled students). It looked like Bryan was going to accomplish something I never did until… until I heard stories of his first day in class…

Grace said Bryan basically slept through the first half of the class being that the class was held during his typical nap time. It was funny to hear that from Grace. I just hope this isn’t foreshadowing of what’s to come for the rest of his student life… 🙁

Hopefully Bryan will at least get to socialize a little more and even make some friends. But from what Grace told me, he had a lot of fun being around with other babies — Good, now I know he’ll be a geek who can socialize… ha!

It All Started with A Bad Slice of Costco Pizza

It started with a couple of slices of bad pizza from Costco.

My body woke up way before it should have in the wee morning hours. It was restless about something. It could be because my brain was still solving programming hurdles I encountered at 4AM. Regardless of the reason, my fingers and toes kept twitching, and the twitching kept me conscious and awake.

About 20 minutes later, with my flushed face buried in the toilet, pieces of pepperoni, mushroom, some of which already in liquid form, were violently pouring out of my throat along with some of that tomato sauce. I thought, “Is this what morning sickness is like for pregnant mothers?” This sucks.

I flushed the toilet, rinsed my mouth and went for a big glass of water.

Water has never tasted so awful prior to this incident. Somehow my taste buds objected to the idea of forcing myself drink two big glassful of water. But I had to so that I could keep puking to get rid of whatever my stomach was so adamant about trying to get rid of. Moto told me a story of his horror about similar experience. And his words became ever so vivid in my head…

About 15 minutes later, diarrhea set in. And then 10 minutes after that, another horrible episode of puking, except this time my stomach was so upset with the food that it literally tried to throw itself up because it ran out of stuff to get rid of (the strangest feeling in the world — throwing up with an absolutely empty stomach).

I probably shouldn’t eat any more meat while my body is still emotional about food just in general.

Flea Cleansing

Is “cleansing” even a politically correct word when used on fleas?

Alicia and Jason brought over their flea comb today.

Wawa was always going to be the easy cat to comb. It’s always been Baobao we haven’t been able to do anything about because of her infamous quick temper. From what I heard, Jason even thought he could hold Baobao with his hiking gloves while putting her over his shoulder. It was a good thing he didn’t try — he would’ve been ripped to shreds, like a piece of paper running through a shredding machine…. zheeeeeeeeeeeee…

Grace has been following Baobao around the house since A&J left. The idea was to tire her out until she falls into deep sleep. That usually gives us about 30 seconds to do whatever we want to do with her before she realizes someone’s messing with her fur and smacks us silly. Too bad there aren’t any safe seductives we can try on her… even for just 10 minutes…

So I guess this means Baobao’s just going to have to take more of those drops at the end of the month (maybe we’ll get another brand)… This cat is a jerk! Damn it….

Teething

Just when I lost part of my teeth, Bryan is growing new ones!

Bryan’s two bottom front teeth have been growing right under our noses (figuratively and literally speaking). Margaret was the one who spotted the new teeth looking from an angle Grace and I don’t normally look at Bryan. It sure is amazing to see the tiny teeth barely pushing out of the gum. I am surprised Bryan hasn’t been as fussy as other terrible stories we have heard about!

Knock on wood…

Windows Vista is Over Before It’s Even Started

Microsoft released a security patch for its still-in-beta next-generation operating system, Windows Vista, over the weekend.

Nuts. The OS is not even in the market yet, and already the company is busy patching the hell out of this baby. I can’t imagine how many more holes will be found once it’s out in the wild with millions of people poking around under its hood.

I say Microsoft should ditch Windows and annex one of those Linux flavors and go all out. Pretty much everyone else’s doing it…

via [MacDailyNews]

Small World

Chee-hoi called today and wanted to tell me something “weird”.

Brett, a college friend of Chee-hoi from Arizona whom he hasn’t spoken to for quite a number of years, called him just from out of the blue one day and congratulated him on his engagement to Fiona. Shocked, Chee-hoi asked how Brett knew about his engagement since he hasn’t told that many people about it. Jokingly (kinda), Brett told him that the news was all over the Internet. “Yeah, right. Whatever.” Chee-hoi replied. That’s when Brett mentioned “WiredAtom”!

Rock on!

Bryan Starts on Solid Food

Bryan has been showing interests on adult food for a little while now. A couple of days ago, we finally got him his first baby cereal to try on. And he loved it! But sometimes he thinks it’s too slow to eat by the spoonful and prefers to gulp on his milk bottle. But he’ll eventually get used to it. Ah~ It’s almost time for some cool bibs.

On a separate baby news… I got to “speak” to Laura ON THE PHONE today! Brian called and said Laura just had to speak to someone on the phone. She is so sweet and cute!

My Issues with Volusion’s Import Feature

After spending a few days fiddling with Volusion’s cumbersome interface, I took Skip’s advice and exported the “products” csv file into Microsoft Excel on my Mac. Mass editing 700+ products with a dozen of fields for each product using Excel is way faster than Volusion’s cluttered interface.

I wanted to be sure that once I edited the products, I could upload the csv back to Volusion’s server properly (with special charaters, return characters, double quotes and other unknowns, I just had to be sure). So I started testing with just one product (having deleted all the other products in the spreadsheet). But I kept on getting the same error (the kind of error message that doesn’t explain anything):

An error has occurred.
Please try your request again, or contact customer service for
assistance. Thank you.
Advanced Error Details:

Microsoft VBScript runtime error ‘800a0005’

Invalid procedure call or argument: ‘Left’

D:\DOMAINS\32670\WWWROOT\ADMIN\../../../ecommerce/
_v_3_1/admin/incfiles/db_import.asp, line 1515

Volusion's meaningless error message

I kept trying by editing the csv file with variations of changes in the fields. But it kept on failing! So I emailed the Volusion tech support (they do have a very responsive email support team!). After three emails of standard answers (try this; try that; go watch the import/export tutorial… etc.) with absolutely no trouble-shooting questions (browser type, version, Excel version, how was the file saved, operating system type… etc), I decided they were not gong to be much help since all they were doing was spoon feeding me scripts from a “support manual” they must have internally.

I started to look for answers. It turns out that Volusion does have a not-so-obvious fact about csv files — Macs not welcomed. Here’s the fine print from their manual:

2) [The CSV] File must be generated on a PC, Macintosh is not supported. The reason is that Macintosh uses a different set of characters for line breaks than a PC.

OUCH! (And notice the bad grammar… run-on sentence.)

It turns out the Mac uses a different return character that their script doesn’t recognize. They should put that fine print up front at the actual import/export pages. Or maybe their tech support should have known to ask what OS I was using! Argh!

But no worries, Microsoft Excel for the Mac has a “save as” feature that allows the user to save csv files for Windows (hence creating the right return characters). Why can’t Volusion include this information on their site rather than saying “Macs not welcome. Period.”? That shows their tech support team is either ignorant or just plain lazy to find the right solutions for clients (or both).

Saving CSV files on Mac for Windows

Once that’s done, everything works pretty flawlessly.

From this, I think Volusion has a few more things they need to improve upon:

  • This kind of OS-specific failure is pretty obvious. A warning should be posted for Mac users on the import/export pages.
  • Tech supports should be more proactive in asking questions to pinpoint problems rather than to assume what the client must be using. If the first tech support had asked me what OS I was using, even if he was just a manual-reading robot, he’d have given me the answer in that first reply.
  • They need to provide more meaningful feedbacks on error messages. Many systems do. Why can’t they?
  • Make their online manuals more useful. It’s been less than useful a lot of times when I tried to find something.
  • Don’t be lazy. Find solutions for your clients, even if they are just Mac users.

UPDATE 12/20/2007: After a friendly email exchange with Volusion’s marketing specialist, Michelle Greer, it appears that Volusion has updated their documentation to include the fix I’ve provided here. All in all, I believe Volusion has been very proactive in listening to customer feedbacks and resolving their shortcomings in the years I’ve used them. Kudos to the Volusion team.