Best blog entery of the year

Here is a list of my favourite blog ententes I wrote this year: 
-Sonic VS Mario
Game carts VS Opical Media(today)
My vecation 
 Why I don't have cable Part III(or II?) [I can't find part 1]
Fix-it-felex for flash!
Qoute from the above: "Quick note, I actually do talk like("Pie, Pie!") when playing video games. "
a-liitle-thought-about-ascept-ratios.html
initrd and initramfs
The elemanation of mail delverly
All about Santa  << I think this is my personal forvoit entry of the year. Since I love the querkey imingitivy way it was written.
I wrote this entry as well and it is one of my fovoirts.

10 cool things I did this year:
-Sevied for 72ish-hours without power!
-I was best man for Jimmy Vemmer(photos are on Facebook) and the blog entery is here:
link
- My vecation which you can read about here 
- My Birthday party at which we played 4-way chesss
- Watching movies and documentiers with my parents(it's fun!)
- I made some major changes to my site, if you read my blog you can see what changed. I had to get to paid hosting to get it working but it was worth it.
-My temp Job at Solinst Cananda. Not just was it fun, chelling and rewarding(monitaly and with what I learned as a programmer) but I made a new friend.
- I also worked on project with Shawn Robinson of Thesportsdsahboard.com, project which I can't talk about yet....
-Those little moments that don't mean much at the time but add up to become something wonderful. Like watching TV, playing vidoe games or reading mangas.
I think my new-years resulstion for 2013, was to see my freinds more, I have done this to an extent  but I'd like to see them more in the new year. I'd also like to expand and meet more people, I will do this by having people over who I may not know that well but would like to get to know more. I would like too work on my lifeskills as well, do the londery more and learn to cook.
Other things tbat happend this year:
-The removal of pennies. 

Can you believe it's almost 2014 already. Wow, when I was 8, I thought 2014 was a long time in the future and we would have flying cars and stuff. It's amazing to be hear and look back and what the future truly is.

Things happening in the near year:
- I'm running a series of Myst Online events, which I started this December. I will continue to run them in the new year.
-I should be able to tell you about that project with Shawn some time in the new year.(other then it exists)  
- I will be working on some hacks for Robosapin(1), he has been sitting in the basement for too long.
- It is Prime Minster Steven Happer last full year, as the re-election is napping in 2015. (cheer if you don't like Happer very much)
- Those stupid stories of death in 2012 will look even more stupid, thoug funny enough, Decemeber 21st is now a day of bad luck since, that's when that ice storm hit.
- Things will come out with a 2014 copyright... ok so I'm scrapping the bottem of the barreal here. Have a happy near year!

The elemanation of mail delverly

The Canadian government wants to stop delivering mail door to door by 2019. Instead people can get their mail for a centralized location. Here are a list of reasons why I think this is a bad idea:

• A lot of really good people will loose jobs, adding to our already bad employment rate.
• It will be more difficult for the old and disabled to get their mail. 
• It will be more difficult for people to get the mail in hevrly populated areas.
• It is better for the environment to car pool or take the bus then it is to take an individual car to work. Similarly it is better for the environment to pool mail togeahter like they do rather then have severl diffrent people drive to pick it up. 
• If your mailbox is not in walking distance you may not get the mail right away, you might "put it off" and miss an import message. 
• Having all the mail in the same place might make snooping through someone elses mail more tempting. To stop this they might introduce a key but this can lead to the inconvenience of loosing your key.
• Central mail boxes will have to be built and this will take space that could be used for something more useful like houses, office buildings or parks.

To end this post off, I would like to list all of the things we still get by physical mail:

•  Physical goods bought online(though yes an expesive company like UPS is an alturative and they may contiune to deliver to your door.) 
• Junk mail(did I say all the items on this list would be positve things) 
• Cristmass presents(speaking of which I can't wait till Christmas too bad it will be a rather long wait :))
• Legal stuff 
• Bills(though you can have these sent to you online).
• Letter from uh... older people(sorry) 
• Other stuff 

So as you can see the phyiscal mail is not as useful as it once was but it still in use for many things.

All about Santa

Updated Dec 1st, 2019

HO HO HO! I thought for fun I would right a FAQ about Santa is if he were a real person:

Q: If Santa exists, then shouldn't everyone believe in him when they see the extra presents under the tree? 

A: Santa uses memory alteration to make it seem to adults like he does not exist. He had to start this years ago since parents got concerned about a stranger giving their children presents.


Q: How does he get around the world in one night? 

A: The answer to this is "hidden in plain sight"! Clones! How else does he appear it several different malls at the same time! They is at least one Santa per city. The Santa tracker does not know this and tracks only one of him, who is the "main" one and checks up on the others. All the reindeer are also clones as well. He also uses advanced technology to alter the flow of time.

Lastly, for the children they open all their presents on Christmas eve(or other times), there are a different group of Santas. 

Q: Don't clones degrade over time? 

A: Yes they are reconstituted into the main Santa when done for the season.

Q: How does he live so long? 

A: He is an alien and he lives a lot longer than most people, typically 1000 years. When he is actually old, he will probably ask his son or daughter to take over for him. He looks old too humans but he is about 30 for his species.

Q: Why do some of the presents appear to come from retail stores and why only Christens and why only children? 

A: Even with advanced technology, the demand for toys is just too great, so he had to make some hard choices about who he would serve. (he will not elaborate on this). The nody and nice thing serves the same purpose.

Q: But how does he know who is nody and nice and Christen? 

A: The AI in his slay scans the time stream and tells him. It's not always right(so you get odd cases) but it passed a sort of Criminal Background Check for AIs(it's a thing Aliens invented)  and never will misuse this data.

Q: Why does he do this? 

A: He has monitored us for years and fallen in love with the good side of humanity.


Q: Wikipedia says he does not exist! 

A: First of all that's not a question, second of all their wrong on all sorts of stuff now aren't they.

Q: How do the reindeer fly? 

A:  They don't, the slay uses Anti-gravity. The slay also generates the time manipulation and this tech is extremely dangerous in the wrong hands, so he lied and said it was reindeer to keep people off the scent.

Q: What do the governments think about him? Do they know about him? 

A: Those that can remember he exists, love him, he promised not to get involved in political airfares.
  
Q: Why can't people see his workshop? 

A:  Because it's on his home planet, it was said to be at the north poll to keep us off the scent. (again so people don't get alien tech) .Santa uses Warp Travel to reach earth and deliver the goods.

Q: I'm a scientist one of the things you said here is unscientific and contradicts our current fundamental understanding of the universe, how do you explain this? 

A: Your understanding of the universe must be wrong then!

Q: How do you remember this? 

A:  Santa has decided that my blog is small enough that I can publish this information, he needs it as a backup in case he accidentally Mind Wipes himself.(remember the clones reconstitute themselves) 

Q: What about the elves? 

A:  Another kind of alien

Q: Didn't Santa once come around with a devel? 

A:  Parents started that rumour to make misbehaving children behave better

Q: What about people who don't have chimneys? 

A: He can teleport inside a house but this does cause the clones to degrade more rapidly so he prefers to go down the chimney if he can.

Q: Do any clones ever die? 

A: If they do, it never caused a problem and they reconstitute into the "main one" when this happens. 

Q: Why doesn't he work out much? 

A: Coca Cola popularised the 'large' Santa we know today, he loved it and stuck with it. He makes himself look like that each year via Physical Holograms, he is very fit. 

Q: If all the Santas are clones, how come some of them have look or act different? 

A: He likes to be diverse


Q: Does he prefer Santa or Father Christmas? (what they call him in the UK)

A:  He is one of those "just don't call me something rude" guys.

Q: How come Santa did not get me this or that? 

A: I don't know, ask him, not me!

Q: What about....? 

A: Do what I did and make it up ;)

A liitle thought about ascept ratios.

Older video modes had a 16:10(close to 16:9 but slightly taller) accept ratio. This was useful for text displays "back in the day", as you could type in very long DOS commands without the text wrapping. 16:9 was probally not used since the extra bit of vertical space could be useful.  VGA and higher introced 4:3 video modes, this was useful for graphics, since text on a page is topically more horizontal then viricitacle.We then went back to 16:9 as movies and TV shows started using that format. TVs started showing up in that format and around that time games starting using it as well. So now people who want to do a lot of multimedia of 16:9 computer monitors. Some people may have a 16:10 monitor and once again this is done to give more vertical space. Hmm... intersting.

EDIT: There is also a 5:4 ratio which was intorduced some time in the 90s but never cought on, probably cause a lot of programs where coded for 4:3. Lastly there are some rare 15:9 monitors out there.There are also "8:5" monitors which are 16:10 monitors where the ratio has been reduced.

Website update: Nov 21

Hello:
 Tonight I'm going too "Silicon Halton & Haltech Demo Night 2"(which is an event put on by some none-profit organizations where companies can show off their tech products). I often go because it's a great place to give out my some business cards. I've been busy this morning "fixing up" my website, so that if perspective employers take a look everything will work. For those of you who want to know whats new here is a list:

• I got emailed today about a security update for Drupal(the back-end) so I've updated to the latest version. You shouldn't notice anyhitng unless you try and hack the site :).  [back-end update]
• I also corrected an issue that only showed up in the live site after yesterdays profomance update. [Hotfix]
• Lastly I've hidden my YouTube comments and subscriptions form the public on my channel. This way employers and the public won't judge me based on my YouTube viewing habits*. This is important as my site does link too my YouTube channel. 

* Not that I watch anything outrageous on YouTube, I am just trying to prevent people from getting the wrong inprestion of me at a glance. One very good example is sometimes you find a video that has an interesting title, you watch and the guys makes some racist remarks, stop watching it on principal and it still shows up as having "watched" it even though you didn't watch all the way through.  This could be inturptied the wrong way. Another example is political videos, I only share my political views with close freinds and I differently don't want employers not hiring me because of my political views.

Website update

I've changed my website, in the past I had all the Drupal profomance enhancements disabled as they create staabilty issue on weeker severs, since my site is now on a paid platform with 24/7 support and since it's now stable, I've enabled them. They work fine on my local machine but please let me know if there are any issue on the site. Thanks.

initrd and initramfs -- what are they?

NOTE: The post is written for computer professionals and I will use terms as such without defining them. If you don't know what a term means, you may look it up on Wikipedia.

A while ago I installed Linux on my Proforma 6400, there is a special bootear that runs in Mac OS(since old Macs are really only meant to run Mac OS). The booter has trouble booting Linux in it's normal form since it hasn't been updated since the 2000 or 2001 and Linux has. They introduced a new boot process involving the initrd. What is the initrd -- read on too find out.

Initrd is a ram-disk which simplifies that amount of boot code in the kenerl. Before it's introduction the kernel had to know about every type of hard disk(i.e. PATA or SCSCII) and how to boot from it. If you had RAID, it had to know this and the RAID configuration. (There are lots of different configurations if you have more then 2 disks in the RAID).

With initrd, the kerenal only needs to know how to boot a ram disk, the ram disk then takes care of the rest. It also will take care of things such as disk encryption. Code separation is not the only advantage, the ram disk is actually dynamically generated when you install Linux so, whats in it the image depends on your configuration. This will reduce the size of the kernel. The ram disk will aslo be very small if  configuration is very simple.

Ofcouse there is another boot disk for installastion, this appears to be a much older practis since my Linux boot loader does support it -- what it does not expect is having too load another boot disk after the install is done.

In case you wanted to know the processes of booting the installed Linux on an old Mac is a bit complicated since you have to boot the install after installing, go into recovery mode and grab the new initrd file the OS generated after install. (apparently the installer for Linux Mint PowerPC actually does this for you)

You never have to worry about this on a PC since Grub automatically updates the augments too point too the new initrd(actually initramfs) every time you get a new kernel. The initrds and  initramfs, have to be run with a kernel of the same version number.

Three final points, firstly what is initramfs? initramfs is a replacement of initrd but the kenerel still boots the same way, initramfs is just more powerful.

My second final point is the fact that initrd has a built in recovery mode in it, so if for some reason your hard disk dies or acts up(and you don't have RAID) you can still boot a minimal OS and check out what's going. (The kernel itself will freeze if it can't boot).

Lastly initrd would seem nice and small but I believe it takes up around 20 MB of ram which can be a lot on an older machine. You will need it loaded into memory plus the kernel and it's often compressed so you need a bit more RAM for that and don't forget the memory used by your devecies it's small but does count for something. In fact this is the problem I ran into on my Mac when it only had ~ 32 MB of ram and I had to upgrade it to it's max(get ready for this...) of 128 MB of ram.(+ 8 MB on-board).

I think this is one of the reasons for Linux dropping support for 386 processes(I littly mean 386 processes, you need a 486 or newer to run Linux now) with new kernels, since a 386 topically doesn't have the memory to hold initramfs.

Website update(and other stuff):

Here is what's new:

• Backend changes that you won't be able to see. 
• Fixed some outdated information I forgot to update when my contract ended. 
• Deleted a blog entery that I forget to finish.   

You may have noticed a decline in posts here, this is because I prefer to make short little comments on Facebook. I feel rather bad about this but it's a lot easier to write a quick little note on FB then a blog entery. Also more people comment and "like" my stuff on Facebook so it seems like more people read it and that makes is seem more "worthwhile" . Now I could double-post everything on here as well but... well I'm not gennelly  lazy but in this case... it's a bit of a hassle, plus you have to make sure that if you edit one, you edit, the other.

Now having said that, I would like too get back to the blog enteris, so I'll try and put some more stuff up in coming weeks.

On another topic check out the Youtube vidio I made:

EDIT:
Quick note, I actually do talk like("Pie, Pie!") when playing video games.

Website update:

I forget about the daily digest of IP address for the longest time but the dygest where NOT working until Thursday when I fixed them. The infomation in the dygests is not that useful. Also I updated the Durpal backend. Sorry about the lat blog entery I shold have deleted it.

NOTE: I dident' really proofread this post. Just wrote it fast.

Best man and websiten

As most of you know I am the best man for my friend Jimmy Veermer. I am getting excited because the wedding is next week and I went to the stage party yesterday. We had a good time and played some shuffle board and watched some movies. ( there where also snacks).

Secondly I have made the following changes to my website:
- Ip tracking should now work again( there was a glitch)
- I am now looking for' Do Not Track' headers and will only check if those IP are spammers. I'm not on a new spam list I will not listen to them further.

Job

Next week I will start a new job with Ssolinst (http://www.solinst.com/).

-Jamie

Wow! lot of taffice at once!

I just got over 30 emails from the IP logging script on my website. All of them are from the same IP address. I did not expect to get this much traffic, unforhcently it's a spammer reboot, so I've blocked the address. Beacuase of this insedent and because I have taken less interest over who is visiting my site, I have now switched over to an IP log file with automatic 'daily digest' emails. I wrote the scripts written for I figured someday I would get more traffic and want less emails :).

Trip photos

Not all my friends have Facebook so I put my photos of my trip here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/67721497@N05/

My vecation

So I just got back from a vacation out in Victoria BC to calibrate my Nana's 90th* birthday. Most of the family had left except for my sibling and his feachancay Miranda who unforchantly could not make it. This is my rant on what we did:

* She's doing very well at 90! 

Thursday - Most of the day was spent on the plane, the flight alone took 6 hours not to machine, the boarding and getting to the airport. I played Sonic Colors(which was named by Americans) for the Nintendo DS most of the time. It's alwsome and even though the DS is not as powerful as the Wii the game is just as good as the Wii version. This is accomplished by making the DS version 2D(closer too 2D sonic on the genesis then modern sonic) this allows the game to take advantage of the consoles abillites(or lake there of). I arrived in Nann's retirement home at 9:00 or 10:00PM PST which too meat felt much latter EST.

Friday - I was very tried on Friday from the long flight and timezone shift. Nann's retirement home is setup like a hotel, with lobbies, a bar, a hot tub room(apparently) and a large dinnering room where the severs dress up and the food is wonderful. I ate breakfast there and we meat one of Nanna's friends Brain, who is a nice guy, who I would best describe as a thinker. I don't think he gets too see family often and so he would come up to Nanna's apartment and just sit back and get the feeling of being with his family again through having us in the room. We walked around the apartment on Friday. They have a lovely Japaneses garden, I will put some pics on Facebook latter on. There is also a "Tin man" like from the Wizard Of Oz, he looks like this:

   Friday afternoon I setup Skype on Nanna's computer and we had a conference with family at home.

 
Saturday - Nann's birthday was this day, we opened presents, my parents got her a large owl wind chime. My sister got hear a book of "Poirot" mysterious and a nice letter explaining his absence. He had bought the book at Georgetown's own "White Rabbit Books". My present was a letter and updating her digital picture frame which had been packed away when she had moved apartments. I will also be printing and mailing my best picture of her and her friends at the party.

In the evening some of Nanna's friends came over and we went into a private dinning room for supper. For supper we had a raither unique sallide(in a bowl of parmasane cheese), followed by a chicken dinner and birthday cake. Nanna blew out the candles three times like this:

1. Normal blowing out of the candles with Happy Birthday song. 
2. Re-blowing out of the candles because one of the guests was out of the room for the first blowing.(Happy Birthday was song again) 
3. Finally blowing for I forgot to take a picture of Nanna the first too times.

The picture looked like this:

Sunday - I watched a couple of episodes of Stargate and Star Trek and helped fix up Nanna's computer, even though at her age, she hardly uses it. I also transferred my photos to the photo frame. On Sunday or Monday we went down to see some photos in Brian's album from a crause he was on. Also every Sunday they have a brunch buffa, and they have pancakes with cream, sussage, cake, bacon, egg "McMuffins" and pork. So I stuffed myself on that day.

Monday - I fished setting up Nanna's computer, watched more TV and packed for Tuesday. I also wrote out instructions for Nanna on how to use her computer, since she has not used it in over a year and has forgotten how.

Tuesday - We had our final meal in the dinning room and then left for home. We took two flights, one directly after the other. Both flights where delayed a bit, the first because of a lightning warning and the second because of the fog in Toronto.

Photos will be up when I get the chance too sort them out. 

My website(jamiemarchant.info) has been updated:

My website(jamiemarchant.info) has been updated:

• The chess club sample is now being hosted on my paid service rather than the free once(which now puts bad looking adds on my site), this was a lot of work as I had to copy the DB over.
• I cleaned up the sample code 

Site updat.

I've made some chagnes to my website: 

• The docxigen documentation for CyanWorlds.com Engine can be found here: http://jamiemarchant.info/CWE_doc/
• blog.jamiemarchant.info will take you hear, meaning my blog is much easeir to find :)

In other news:

• Not all site changes will be announced hear(if I feel they don't interest you, they may not be announced) 
• The next sample has been delayed due to problems getting things "in the right place" for Eclipse and do to work on other projects. In fact I'm not getting anywhere fast on this so I will get back to it later.

Site updates

Site updates:

•  Resume changes
•  Spelling corrections in PHP samples
•  New C++ sample coming soon

jamiemarchant.info updates!

jamiemarchant.info has been updated, here is what has changed:

• Fixed a bug that caused warnings in Internet Explorer 8 and 9. 
• Tested site in all major browsers
• My resume now gives more details about my last employment
• Behind the sceens changes. 
• Fixed a bug with the crazy clicking game not displaying anything on the summery page. 

 

Site update

My site has been updadated(http://www.jamiemarchant.info), this update includes:

• New contact page(here) 
• Also I am done testing and will update linked(and other sites) saying the site is up.

I'm getting fed up with free web hosts and thinking about subscribing too a paid service. 

Web stuff update.

Check out a new Youtube vidio here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6PEbaiE3rg!

Also my website(http://jamiemarchant.blg.lt/) is back up. The drupal portion has moved to a new host but the samples are on the old host(so their both used and for convince). Check it out!

I think it will be stabler now since I decressed the sesson time form 21 days(default) too 30 minutes.

EDIT: Spoke slightly too soon, it just went down again. However, the web host is under a denial of service attack, so this could be the problem. 

Site updated

I have changed the version of Druapl I am using on my website. This version has some backed bug fixes-es. Please make sure everything is still working(even though I did a minimum amount of this on my test sever). Also my new test server is running Fordoa 18, so I have now have newer Dev tools.

EDIT: Incase your don't have it bookmarked(ok I don't expect you too), the UR L is: http://jamiemarchant.blg.lt/public_html/drupal7/

Site update

My site has been updated, check out the Crazy Clicking Game JavaScript sample! http://jamiemarchant.blg.lt/public_html/drupal7/?q=node/23. Also I have corrected a style error that came from one of the samples. I am now useing my desktop as dev machine.

Update to my webiste

My website has been updated:

• You will find that my email is now marchaja@sheridancollege.ca since james.marchant@sheridan.on.ca is now longer redirecting to the correct place.(the IT department has not been very helpful fixing this) 
• I have a no blog entry which is a rant which you may or may not find interesting, check it out: http://jamiemarchant.blogspot.ca/2013/03/why-i-dont-have-cable-part-iiior-ii.html
• I have been adding some IP address to a deny list.

Why I don't have cable Part III(or II?)

I finally got a Shaw cable flyer with every channel you get if you subscribe to Shaw cable. You get 225 channels, but how many of those do you actually "need". Well I can't speak for you, but I can tell you how many of them I need.

• Global - aviable for free over the air!(meaning with an Antenna)
• CBC -OTA! Love CBC! Great chennl! And not owned by any cable network,  too!
• CTV -OTA
• CityTV -OTA
•  CBS - available for free over the air, I don't get it consistently,these days but if we invested in a new Antenna we probably could and this investment would be less then a couple of years of cable.
• CTV two - this station is available for free OTA but I'm not sure if the signal is strong enough for me too pick up from Barrie. I have not got it so far but I did a bit back in the analog days(at that time it was something like the New VR). A while ago I looked it up online, it's nothing special.
• NBC - This might be OTA, I know we don't get it but I don't think, it's annything speceil(not special enough to pay for cable) 
• PBS- I want, this! WNED is part of PBS, but sadly it's hard to get in Georgetown, always has been. The right Antenna would probably pick it up no sweat.
• Fox - sadly we lost this when we switched to digital and the OTA signal is not pointed at Toronto, however I don't remember anything good on it anyways. The New CW is a good replacement most of the time annways. 
• RDI - this a french CBC news network but I don't speak any French, enough said, next! 
• Shaw Direct weather network and The Weather Network - I don't really care for a channel that broadcasts nothing but weather and I have TWN's WeatherEye on my PC, so I can get the weather anytime on my PC(which is most of the time). If I'm on the go, I also have a few weather apps on my Android tablet.(wow that's a bit better then cable issen't it). These apps are FREE! 
• SRC - anuther french CBC channel, next! (might be the one we have OTA)
• BCLEG - No clue what this one is, oddly does not show up on a Google search. 
• Shaw) Direct - don't know what this is, pair-pear-view? Channel listing? If it is PPV that would be nice, but not wort buying cable just for that. Besids the Halton Hills Public Libary has a tun of good movies and TV shows. 
• CKWS - not shure what this, is, their website is http://www.ckwstv.com/, it does not look like I am missing much. It apppears to be a news network, the do strream the news live online which is cool!
• CTS - OTA but out of range, when I did get back in the anolog days, they really diden't have that much interesting stuff on. 
• Something with a V and small letters I can't read - no comment
• AMI audio - Free stream online! The "bandwidth" to "download" it will cost us something but problly not enough to worry about. 
• TVA - French!
• MCTV - apprently this is CTV form northern Candia, I fail to see whats unique about this over the "normal" CTV and why would I want to pay for it. 
• ABC - anouther station which we need a better Antanna for. 
• CHIN AM - this RADIO STATION is aviable for FREE Over The Air and I have a clock radio,so why do I need this on my TV?
• APTN - Aboriginal Peoples Television Network, cool that it exits but I don't think it's "for me". 
• CHCH -WOW! this Chanel broadcasts NEWS and MOVIES, ALL DAY 7 days a week! It must be a premium cable channel but interestingly enough it's OTA from Hamilton. They current digital channel is on VHF 11 which is hard to recive on most antannes, if not imposiblle(you need good rabbit ears). When they where first experimenting with digital they had a stronger UHF(18?) and they analog signal was not too bad. They are awhere of the problem and are working on a solution.It is not owned by a big cable company, while a lot of the other stations are.
• CHEX - this is a local station from Peterborough, Ontario, it mainly re-brodcats CBC stuff, so I don't see why you would want this AND cbc. If you live in Peterborough, Ontario, apparently it broadcasts in Analog(if you have not swiched to digital yet) 
• CJBN - a local chennel owned by Shaw), it seems to broadcast shows available OTA, so there is no need for this channel.
• ONMI 1 and ONMI 2 - OTA and one of them has very good Balloywood movies. 
• TFO - another french channel. Didn't TVP broadcast they feed on Sundays nights back in the 90s?(someone else without cable confirm this)
• TVO - CERMETIAL FREE OTA TV! (it's paid for by donations) and they have a lot of great programs. It's also not owned by a big cable company, maybe that lest one on the list not to bee. 
•  epac - I think this was anouther french one. 
• CP24 - local Toronto news. I'm not really interested in news from Toronto. I get all that I need from CBC local news at 11:55 PM. 
• Global HD - OTA, Global HD and SD are sub-channels OTA.
• CBC HD - actually the ONLY CBC channel being broadcast OTA IS HD! There is only so much room in a cable pipe for all these channels to be HD 1080i but there IS enough room OTA. Oddly enough CBC is only broadcasting at 720P. If you don't have an HDTV your ATSC converter box will downscale the image to 480i latter-boxed. 
• CTV HD - again the only OTA brodcast is HD.
• CityTV HD - same as the above 
• ABCHD - same 
• Fox HD - well what I said before about Fox is true but if I did get it, it would be HD. 
• NBC HD - same as the other HD channels in this section. 
• PBS HD - same 
• CNN HD - Don't need HD full-day news. 
• TVA HD - I think I said I don't want TVA, so I don't need the HD vertion, thank you. 
• Nat Go WILD - I Heard of this a while ago. It's all sorts of "action packed" National Geographic, and by "action packed" I mean like liones eating other animals and volcanoes and expansionists. Now I like explosions as much as the next guy but I don't think this is my "cup of tea".
• 3D - I think the whole 3D thing is a gimic.(which I admit a fall for every time but a gamic still the same)
• Space HD - I've seen space SD  a bit when I went to my grandparents house and I have to admit, it's pity good! On the other hand Dr.Who and Stargate are available for free at my local library and I like Trek enough that eventually  I will buy the other seasons I need to complete my collection(hay! There expensive!), so it's not that "needed" is it?
• Naninal Geographic HD - what happened to discovery channel, I like that one, mainly because of Myth Busters. Anyways it does not sound like a bad channel but I don't think it's worth the price of cable alone(or with space) 
• Show Case HD - hmm.. interesting, not sure what kind of shows this channel has, so I can't really use it aganst cable. 
• News - I have enough news at my fingertips online(which I know you pay for but my counter-argument is you don't 'need' cable AND Internet), I am also not a big news guy when so much of the TV news is sad. 
• Kids - I think where getting into the "extras" section, anyways, I'm not that interested in kids shows these days, although I would probably watch a "classic" Scobby-Do if it where on but mainly for nistaulga(we used to watch it at my grand-presents house on Teletoon). I also like Bugs Bunny(does anyone remember when it was on Saturday night on Global?)
• Sports- I'm not a sports guy, even though I worked on a sports website.
• Acctully specialty channles
• 40 Galixy Chanels - I don't know what this is. 
• History channel - not for me 
• Comedy - Last time I saw it, I was not too impressed with it, a lot of the programs they had on where "not my style" 
• W network - is this a channel for women? Odd concept, annways I have no interest in this. 
• Action channel - I hate to change aurguments here but I think I have better things to do with my life then watch action movies all day.
  (and those are avaible in east and west verities, if you really need that for some odd reason) 
• Show Case SD - Ok, I allready have the HD vertion, why do I need the SD vertion 
• TVTropiles - A Shaw exesive which I don't really care about.
• Lifetime - Anouther one which I'm not too sure what it is. 
• The Shopping Channel - From what I've seen on Dragon's Den, enterpenels can sometimes get a good deal, selling they stuff through the shopping channel. I think it's a neat concept but is not interesting to me at the moment, maybe after I get a full-time job. 
• CMT - This could be Cuntry Music Televistion but thats not for me. 
• barvo - fashion chenel? Whatever it is I'm not interested in buying cable to get it. 
• marclei(so small) - no comment 
• speed - not instersted in raceing(assuming that's what this is) 
• Go whild SD - I have HD, why do I need this? Why cann't they get me SD or HD whatever I need. 
• slice - apprently this is acctully a chanel aimed at wionen, next 
• Mtv -I've heard of MTV, music? not instrested, next 
• food channel - you know this channel would be interesting too have. I would watch it if I was board and had nothing else too do.
• MUCH - I don't muhc like much music eaither, no pun inteded but it's a good idea :) 
• GSN - the games chenel, who comes up with these things. If that poker(I did not look at the site), then I'm not really intrested but I know a lot of bars of movies play this all day long.(I don't really go to bars in real life)
• spark - channel for teens, not intrested, next 
• Nanantial geographic SD - yah you know how I feel about this. 
• HGTV- not interesting too me but my Mom loves this one.(She watched it a bit at my granpents's). Since this is my blog I'm going to not let this influence me but even if there where a facter I don't think it's worth it to get cable just for this channel.
• A&E - art and entertainment, it was on once "back in the day" and asked what A&E stood for. Anyways not for me.
• Space SD - well I already ranted on that.
• TCM  - uh classical music, cool! I actually have nothing positive or negative to say about this one.
• OWN - apprently Ophra Wihph orhowever you spell it, now has her own channel, who knew? anyways this is of no interest to me.
• OLN - A realatiy TV channel. You know I might be able to get into this if I where borad. Apprently relativy TV is the resault of a writers strick in the 90's(or was it early 2000's) 
• Bite - Blue Caller TV, odd but not my thing
• E - I think this is related too E-talk, I don't really like that show. Next. [btw Global is now owned by Shaw) and they also put on E-talk so, yah there is a connection]
• AMI -Looks kind of interesting
• GraceTV - cable Christine programming. Not interested.
• GameTV - I don't like this any more then the other gameing chennel 
• MovieTime - CHCH annyone, once they change back to UHF off-course.
• TLC - A documenty channel, not sure if it's interesting or not. 
• Discovry chennel - I would not mind having this channel, espessly for Myth Busters but is it worth paying for cable, yet, I don't think so. 
• Spike - I once saw this at my grandparents appointment, it TV just for guys. Most of it is not my thing except for the occinstal eposode of Star Trek: TNG 
• 40 channels of cemerial free readio: Ok that's not a bad gig, actually. To bad I'm not a music person. 
• PPV TALC - Dossen't sound to instersting 
• CHOOS RADIO - after the 40 channels of cermetial free radio, I don't think I need another station.

So I hope you know understand why I don't have cable(apart from the fact that my parsents won't buy it eaither). If nothing else this was something to rant about and a good use of something that would otherwise be junk mail.

Not that anyone reads my resume every time I change it but I did make some minor correctrs to it on my website: http://jamiemarchant.blg.lt/public_html/drupal7/?q=node/15. The are spacing and font issues that have been fixed.

Website

I have made some large 'behind the seans' changes to my website, pleas check it out and see if they are any issues. Thank you.

Site updated!

I have update my website. I have added this sample: http://jamiemarchant.blg.lt/public_html/drupal7/?q=node/22. while on the samples page, don't forget to check out my C# sample.

Site updade

Site updated:

• The old site URL redirection site has been taken down
• My resume has been updated(see if you can spot the differences :)) 
• Site tittle and header have been updated 
• The mobile site, which I had not tested enough now ACTULLY works 
• A few small behind the sceens changes 

My site is http://jamiemarchant.blg.lt/, in-case you forgot the URL.

EDIT: There was a bug with the resume, but I fixed it. Also the new resume should be smaller in file size.

Consalting work

Hi:
 Today I did some IT support and consulting work for a guy in Acton. The work was worth $50. I may have future jobs of this sorts in the future! .One of the task was getting a site to function correct, on one of the guys computers, I had to put IE into comparability mode. Also someone visited my site from an IP address in
Codero.
-Jamie Marchant

I have updated my website:

• A mobile phone friendly version of the site is now available. Just visit the site as usually through your phone. A reminder that the URL  is: http://jamiemarchant.blg.lt/public_html/drupal7/#! 

Future planes:

• Google Analytic(or something similar) may be added in the future(I am having problems withe module at the moment.

Site update

My website(http://jamiemarchant.blg.lt) has been updated. Updateds include:

• Backend security update 
• Minor backed changes which will make it easeir to adminastor 
• Deleted a theme I was not using.

Two things:

1. The IP tracking emails are now going to my Gmail since they are taking a while and I think the Spam filters might be taking time to "processes" it. Gmail seems to worked and worked with the old site. Does this mean Gmail has worse Spam protection ? No, it just means it recoanizing messages like "76.69.4.57 has connected to you blg.it site" to be legit. By the way, I don't get too much mail this way because my site is very low traffic at the moment, mainly spammers and bots :(.
2. Try out my Clip Reader at http://clipreader.codeplex.com/ and let me know what needs improvement, if enough people "like" it, I will bring it out of beta 

Thank you
-Jamie Marchant 

Website updatates, the following has been updated:

•  Logo is now a Gif, for compitablity with IE 6 -- I wish I did not have to do this sort of thing :( 
• Session sample has been updated, bug has been fixed. 

Sheridan email and Office 365

Attention all Sheridan Alumni who read my blog:

If you use your Sheridan email, you probably noticed a message a while back stateting that your web-mail we soon be replaced with Outlook 365, which is currently being run in palely. Setting up Outlook 365 is not as easy as it looks and took me several hours over several days to final figure out, espessly in Thunderbird which they don't support. I had given up on it but when it went down a few days ago, I decided to take another poke at it now that it's back up.

For Thunderbird, create a new account and enter your email, you need to use manually settings as Thunderbird will automatically detect the Webmail POP servewer not the new fancy outlook sever. Here is a visual guide, showing you where to find the main settings you need: https://it.sheridancollege.ca/selfhelp/email/student-alumni/o365server-settings.html. I'm not sure if all Alumni/Students have the same setting here or not, so make sure you check out the setting in your actual outlook.

Here are the tricky parts:
a)  If outlook asks for TLS then select "STARTTLS" but if it asks for "SSL" select "SSL/TSL" and if your setting are like mine you will have to use one for incoming and one for outgoing mail.
b) This is the part that I was stuck on, your user name is NOT your email OR your Acass Sheridan user name(last name and a few characters of your fist name). It's "<Acass Sheridan username>@sheridancollege.ca.

I hope this helps some sort out there problems, the IT department did not help me that much(in fact they told me my user-name WAS my Acass Sheridan user-name). If you want to get your mail with some other program you can get help here:
https://it.sheridancollege.ca/selfhelp/email/index.html#students.

P.S. To their credit they did remind me of this link though :).

Site news

Google is working on re-indexing my website and soon all references to the old site will be removed. The links to the old site are dead links now, so hopefully it will be removed soon. The thing about Google is, it's a lot harder to get them to automatically remove a link then it is too get them too automatically "index" you.

An IP address from Microsoft visited my site, I have not applied to any jobs at MS, so I think it's a spider from Bing(the Microsoft search engine), I can't find my search yet on Bing but it may have been disorganized or toke to long to load for what Bing would like. Even though this service supposedly supports Drupal, it's still prity slow.

Lastly a couple of points: the site is sometimes a bit slow to load, please give it time to do so. Also don't worry about any errors talking about the server being busy, just wait a bit and then refresh the page. Please let me know if the problem prosists too a point where you can't load the page at all.

Game Cartridges Vs Optical Media(Today) 

If I made a game console today that used cartridges how well would it hold up VS optical media, lets find out:

Carts: 

•  Can hold software and game specif hardware(Example the Super_FX chip used in Star Fox) [+5 points] - note to menchine lock-on technogly(Wikiepida link)
•  Can save on the cartridge. In the past, this was a good and bad thing as it elemenate the need for a memory card or hard disk. On the flip side, if a game gives you 3 save slots, you can only lend it too 2 other people unless you are 100% done with it and allow your friend to erase your save data. However today, it would be a useful way to bring you game and data to a friends place, so that they can use all of the things you have unlocked(think of a fighting or racing game) [+ 5 points]
• Echo-friendly -- not sure but I would assume that since a cartridge could be the size of an SD card -- that less plastic would be used, I'm not sure about the board in the plastic nore the manurfatureing echo-cost so I will have to raward 5 points to this IF my theory is true.[+ 5 points?] 
• No loading times [+ 10 points] 

DVDs/Blue-rays: 

• Cost less to make[+ 2 points]
• Very easy to damge[-5 points]

NOTE: 
In today's market  "flash memory" holds around the same amount of data as a CD if note more, so the size is not a factor in this modern discussion .

Cartridges win!!! So as you can see I think carts are better then CDs for game consoles. What do you think? Leave a comment in the comments section. 


EDITED: Thanks Gordon King for reminding me of a big point I missed.

Updates to my site(now: http://jamiemarchant.blg.lt) have been made:

• Everything form the old site has been moved to know new one!(the old one will temporally redirect to the new one)
• My resume has been updated(see if you can spot or deduce the change)
• IP address tracking emails now go to my Sheridan Email 

Please test my site, http://www.squirrel-host.com/ is supposed to support Drupal 7 but I want to see this for myself.

My site is down again, this is probably because Druapal 7 is not officially supported by the service. However I have moved my site to another provider who apparently does support Druapl 7. Please check out the site at its new location:   http://jamiemarchant.blg.lt, I will be making the old site redirect to the new one in the next couple of days.(after I know the new site is "stable enough". Part of the site(the samples) will remain so that the site has enough traffic to remain "online" for people who I have already sent it too. Please not if you don't find the site at all they did say it would take a full 12-hours to populate the web.

Sonic Vs Mario!

I've been playing a lot of Sonic The Hedgehog on Wii lately so I thought I would do a VS on it. Brought too you by "Blast Processing" -- which This source says is DMA, a feacuter found in every new PC sold today.


Mario games: 

•  Game altering gimmicks such as the FLUDD( from Super_Mario_Sunshine ) and ghost sucking vacuum( Luigi's Mansion) actually enhance gameplay(not allays true for some sonic games)(+ 10 points) 
• Have more levels(+ 2 points) 
• Are better platfomrs(+ 5 points) 

Sonic games: 

• Fast and furries levels(+ 10 points) 
• Usually have better music(+ 10 points) 
• Voice acting (+ 2 points) 
• Was on CD first(0 points, just interesting too note)

 Crossing points: 

• Both games have week story lines 

Bottom line: 
 
Sonic wins but that does not mean that Mario games are "bad", I just like Sonic more.

Website update

New website update:

• Druapal back-end security update applied. My defence has increased by + 1!

New cliprader

A new version of my clip reader is available at:http://clipreader.codeplex.com/. Please check it out and test it, (it's in Beta),  I will declare it stable when enough people test it and know it too be working.

Website update!

My website(http://jamie-marchant-professional.comoj.com) has been updated. Here is what's new:
-Added a link to my YouTube channel
-Disclaimer on the recreation page.