Chaucery Blog

After ten years of loyal service my ADI Microscan 5V+ 17" CRT monitor was getting a bit dim, so I looked around for a replacement. I eventually settled on the Philips 190B6CB 19" LCD monitor for the a variety of reasons.

CRT vs LCD

LCD monitors have seen such a drastic reduction in price over the last few years that they have leapt ahead of CRTs in desirability. Their lower power usage, small size and reduction in eye-strain made them my first choice. A growing number of LCD monitors now offer the digital interface DVI in addition to the old analogue VGA connector, and I thought it was worth paying extra for this feature. In theory they should make for clearer images. In my experiments I found that a 2m DVI cable produced images indistinguishable from a 2m analogue cable, but that a 4m analogue cable was decidedly blurrier.

As an aside, the DVI cable was not included with my monitor, and I found it difficult to find a reasonably-priced one in the shops. There are three varients of DVI: DVI-A is analogue, DVI-D is digital, and DVI-I is the combination of both. If you look at the cables ends, you can see that you can convert a DVI-I cable into a DVI-D cable by breaking off the analogue pins. However, there is some odd pricing in shops, because DVI-D is aimed at people buying expensive home-cinema systems who wouldn't bat an eyelid at outragous cable prices, so DVI-D prices range from double to ten times that of DVI-I cables, despite being simpler.

When I first connected my DVI-D cable, after using the included VGA cable for a day, I found that it produced awful flickering when watching tv using my DVB-T PCI card. To fix this I had to change the ATI display driver advanced settings, to get rid of default ticks next to "Reduce DVI frequency on high-resolution displays" and "alternate DVI operational mode".

Philips LCD vs other LCD

The only other LCD monitor I've used for any length of time is my brother's 17" BenQ FP767-Ver2. I chose the Philips over another BenQ because it has green and amber power lights instead of the BenQ's excessively bright blue LED. In addition, this particular model has a perfect panel 1 year warranty, which ensures that I'll not have to put up with any dodgy pixels for a whole year, and it is the first monitor I've ever owned with adjustable height.

I was rather disappointed with the lack of a printed manual. As well, the electronic manual was poor, in that it doesn't explain fully the monitor's features, such as why to use the DVI interface, what the USB port is useful for, how to plug in the USB and audio cables, and what "stand-alone audio for efficient net conferencing", as mentioned on the box, actually means.

Black Philips LCD vs other colours

The monitor box has a TCO'03 logo, and mentions that my black monitor fails it. Most manufacturers wouldn't mention that sort of information, but I didn't know what TCO'03 meant. It's a Swedish ergonomics standard, and my monitor fails because

The display frame must not be too black or too white. This is to avoid contrast with the display surface. Nor may it give rise to disturbing reflections.

I guess that's not too serious.

In summary, after only a few days of use, I already feel that this LCD monitor has proven its worth, and I can't imagine living without it.

Posted by James at 10:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

There are a variety of ways of creating Flash applications. A free, open source solution that has been gaining popularity is OpenLaszlo. It uses Java to compile javascript and XML source files into Flash - enough buzzwords to interest even the most jaded programmer.

After installing Laszlo, the first thing I noticed was how developer-focused the system is. To compile and run your Laszlo source you just need to naviagate to it in a browser, where it appears in a Laszlo frame along with all the essential links to docs and resources that you could need. I used vim to edit the source, then just refreshed the browser whenever I made a change. It was a bit slow to compile even my very small program, but I don't know whether this increases much for larger programs.

The included documentation and tutorials were great, with the exception that a few new features, such as drawing, were only described in the tips section of the Laszlo web site.

For a very few features, such as SOAP, the running Laszlo code must interact with a server-based java servlet. However, mostly you can just do a solo (ie. flash only) deployment. The server is still required for compilation and development.

For my first Laszlo program I created the television sizer. I spent a while putting together horrendous, but working, code. After a few days I got a better idea of how things were meant to work, and easily fixed my earlier efforts. So, while it was a bit of a jump from languages such as PHP, Perl, Python and ASP, it was only a small jump. The use of tags for everything made it feel like Cold Fusion, though much simpler and, as you'd expect, more graphically focused.

It's difficult to imagine it scaling well, but then how big would anyone want a flash application. Overall, it's been well worth learning, and might come in handy one of these days.

Posted by James at 10:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

When I started looking at wide-screen televisions, I wanted to know what size I would need to give me the same size picture as I get currently on my standard set with standard size programs. Since my calculator has taken to telling lies in its dotage, I built this flash application to do the hard work for me. Just enter the tv size (which denotes the length of the diagonal), and play with the buttons below.

Posted by James at 12:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

On August 24th I switched my clock-radio from local radio to internet streaming audio. The experiment has been a roaring success, and two weeks of real-world use has allowed me to refine the system.

Hardware modifications

The initial hardware setup was somewhat jury-rigged as a minimal change to my existing setup. However, this involved the audio input for the transmitter being routed through the hifi amplifer, with the amplifier switched to a particular output. Thus, every night I had to remember to leave the amplifier turned on, and switched in the correct manner. I also had to remember to plug-in the powerpack for the transmitter.

For long-term use, a much better solution would be one involving no user input. As such, I have rerouted the transmitter input directly from the PC, via a splitter which also sends the audio to the amplifer. The net result is that it works with the amplifer turned off, and thus no user interaction is needed.

Linux

I made a half-hearted attempt to get the software side of things working in Mandriva Linux using /proc/acpi and the alarm command, but I quickly got stuck. Whilst it doesn't look as easy as in Windows XP, it does seem that it should be possible. I may try again one day, but not with any urgency.

Audio program choice

It's only after trying to wake up to various programs that you can determine which are soporific and which really grab your attention. I set up a different BBC Radio program each day, and discovered that factual / documentary (though not news) style programs were great at putting me back to sleep. Quizzes and panel games seemed to get me the most alert, with news somewhere in between, perhaps depending on the stories of the day.

Posted by James at 1:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

For no reason that I can discern, when viewing the following html source in Mozilla Firefox 1.0.6.

<html>
 <body>
  <table>
   <tr>
    <td colspan = "2">hello</td>
   </tr>
  </table>
 </body>
</html>


it gets confused with the space next to the colspan, and displays it as:

<html>
 <body>
  <table>
   <tr>
    <td colspan =" 2">hello</td>
   </tr>
  </table>
 </body>
</html>

which to any perfectionist programmer could be quite an annoyance. Especially if that section of the page is being dynamically generated by a PHP script, and they waste many minutes trying to track a fault in their code when it turns out to be a browser quirk...

Update 12 Sep 2005: This is fixed in Firefox 1.5 beta 1.

Posted by James at 1:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)