Alden Bates' Weblog

You know, I swear back in the early days of the internet if you wanted something like, oh, a program to convert a midi file into a wav file, you could just go look on your favourite FTP site and download a tiny DOS program which would do it. Does anyone else remember those days? Now it seems like all the programs on offer for doing this require you to fork out $25. WTF?

I wanted to convert a midi file to a wav file, so I took the following steps:

1. Downloaded one of the many shareware midi2wav converters.
2. Ran the installer.
3. Ran up the software.
4. Discovered that pressing ENTER in the software would quit out of it without prompting "Are you sure you want to quit?"
5. Restarted the software, attempted the conversion, got a cryptic error.
6. Figuring the previous attempt had locked some audio drivers, rebooted the PC.
7. Reran the program - discovered that the cryptic error actually meant the target directory I'd specified didn't exist. Converted the file.
8. Played the resulting output file, to discover that the shareware software had produced a 1 minute long, completely silent wav file.
9. Uninstalled the software.

Is this is how software works these days? You download it, install it, and hope it works and doesn't deposit any spyware on your PC? Man.

I got the midi file converted in the end, thanks to a page which gave instructions on converting midi files to wav files using Winamp.

This release adds in a MTPAEntryLink tag, which is a paging-aware version of the standard MTEntryLink tag - you can use it to link to the Monthly or Category archive page which an entry appears on. It assumes you're not using the MTPASettings tag to alter the number of items per page, and that the items are in reverse chronological order. I might add an argument later to allow for forward ordering as well. This tag was requested by Blogosfere.

According to the MT wiki MT4 plugin compatability list, PagedArchives is compatible with Movable Type 4* - hopefully nothing in this release breaks that. I haven't downloaded the version 4 beta to look at yet.

You can download this plugin on the Paged Archives page.

* Though it would have been nice if it was listed in the "rendered obsolete" section.

I happened upon the Kinja page for this weblog (they haven't updated the URL, despite the 301 redirect, but that's not uncommon - Technorati have it listed twice) and noticed that Kinja pages seem to have a list of links along the top to subjects related to the blog they're indexing. The list of links for mine reads:
search - yahoo - conservative - featured - google - gossip - media - new york - open source - security

From what I can gather from Kinja's help pages, these are tags applied by site users, so it appears someone there thinks my weblog is New York related... Maybe it's because I've written about Moby a couple of times? And what does "featured" mean?

Most of the others I can see, but "conservative"? I hardly ever write about political stuff! #drwhochat, an IRC channel I've hung around in forever, has a rule about no political discussion because they never end well, and that's a rule I've brought over to here, because I really like avoiding flame wars.

That's a very confusing listing.

Edit: I contacted Kinja and they've corrected the URL on the listing - cool! Thanks, guys! :)

Jesus versus Doctor Who

And, lo, the people rejoiced, and the Doctor said unto them "Fantastic!"

Go Fast! appears to be an American product, though this can seems to have been imported from Australia. It contains Australian Honey ("The best honey for optimum taste" - my inner Kiwi is making a face right now), taurine, ginseng, vitamin B6, vitamin B12, ginkgo biloba, guarana, riboflavin, niacin, and milk thistle herb ("provides good kidney and liver health"). Quite what the cumulative effects of these ingredients is likely to be, I'm not sure. It sounds like a mad scientist's idea of how to make an energy drink. It also describes itself as "The athlete's energy drink" (Note that in general caffeine plus exercise is not recommended).

It tastes... very tangy. There's a definite hint of honey there, but the main flavour is very harsh and sharp, not unlike Red Bull, and with the same lingering aftertaste (albeit still with a hint of honey).

Today TSV 47 went online, and there's a substantial bias towards the books this issue, with an article on the making of Just War, an interview with David Bishop on his novel Who Killed Kennedy, and an article on items cut from the DisContinuity Guide, as well as the already-online Not So New Adventures article on Transit. There are articles touching on other topics, such as Paul Scoones' piece on the aborted Doctor Who: The Motion Picture.

There's also another installment of Tardis Tales and one of my favourite of the TSV comic strips, a post-War Games second Doctor adventure named Hyperborea, written by David Ronayne and drawn by Peter Adamson. Speaking of which, David's letter says he was situated in Ulaan Baatar, Outer Mongolia - what was up with that?! There's also a letter from one Alden Bates writing about the rumour that the Doctor would reveal in the Paul McGann TV Movie that he was half-human. As it turns out, sometimes rumours can be true... These days, that letter would have needed a spoiler warning on it. :)

Next issue: lots and lots about the TV Movie!
See also: write-ups by Paul and Jamas!
Previously: TSV 46

This time on Doctor Who, things take a turn for the better! Spoilers ahead:

I was walking back to work from a shop this afternoon when a random passerby asked "Are you into feijoas?" and opened his bag to show off a plastic bag full of them. At that point I was starting to wonder if I'd stepped into a bizarre Twilight Zone where fejoas were illegal street drugs and was going to ask if they were pure. Instead I opted to say "Uh, no thanks" and walk on before he started pushing oranges or something. Surreal!

• I attended the Conspiracy II convention yesterday. The convention is on all Queen's birthday weekend. Among the panels I went to were A History of New Zealand Science Fiction Comics: 1928-2007 and ESP 101. The first was very interesting, as I didn't know a hell of a lot about comics in NZ, outside those which appeared in the Listener and TSV. The latter turned out to be a practical workshop, where we rolled dice and attempted to use pendulums to detect coins hidden under books, and the contents of tin cans. I found I have no ESP ability whatsoever.
• LiveJournal, last week, purged a whole pile of journals reported by a Neo-Nazi group for being paedophiles - many weren't and users were unhappy. Go figure.
• Kiwi DW fanzine Reverse the Polarity is turning their web site into a blog. I got RTP issue 24 in the mail recently, and it was great!
• As you may have noticed, the Tetrap picture on my weblog has changed. The new one was inspired by a similar image on the layout of a blog I saw on Blog Explosion (Write on Track, I think).

So, back when I watched Lost in Space on NZ TV, they would only ever seem to play season 2. This meant that I missed out on one of the more famous moments - the season 3 episode "The Great Vegetable Rebellion", which features the infamous carrot man. Legend has it Guy Williams and June Lockhart were unable to keep a straight face while filming this episode.

After watching the first two seasons on DVD, I was fair anticipating this event and...

Yeah.

They did what they could with what they had, I guess. :)

[Previously: WOTW Potato, General Vishishnou, Turdy, Thing, and, of course, another great Lost in Space moment...]