View and convert Visual Foxpro .fpt files

Foxpro (.dbf) databases store memo fields in an separate file with the .fpt extension. I've been using DBF Explorer to poke around in a .dbf database recently but all of the memo fields were left blank. Luckily I've come across a nifty little perl script which will convert .dbf AND .fpt (in situ no less) files into .csv or apparently .json. You can find dbf2csv free at Burton Systems Software. The license even states that the script is "uncopyrighted". Easy as pi!

Netgear GS108v2: The Immortal Switch

We have a couple of Netgear ProSafe 8 Port Gigabit Switch model GS108v2 around the office. These things fail so often it's not even funny. Luckily I've discovered something I would guess Netgear would rather I forget. The device comes with a lifetime warranty on the hardware. The really interesting piece here, though, is that if the device was purchased prior to 11/09 an RMA doesn't require a proof of purchase. What's that you say? They're still available on Amazon? That's right - $60 USD will buy a gigabit switch with a warranty that will last until 2037! Though, by 2037 we'll likely be on 1000GbaseT or some such, but still - thanks Netgear!

Pro am tip of the day

If you walk in to the workplace someone asks you "Are you here to fix the internet?" the correct answer is simply "Yes".

Avería: The average font

I recently read about Avería on BoingBoing. This font was generatively produced by averaging some 725 different fonts using a purpose developed algorithm. Yesterday while randomly browsing the Open Font Library I was pleasantly surprised to find a copy of Avería! It's available in seven different weights in truetype format. I'm unfamiliar with the license, but the details are available and I'm guessing it's pretty permissive. I think this may be the beige of typefaces.

Writing a .iso to a USB drive in Linux

I've recently been attempting to test the lastest LTS release of Ubuntu: 12.04 Precise Pangolin on a touchscreen laptop recently retired from active service in my agency. I grabbed my .iso and tried first with UNetbootin, only to be dumped rather unceremoniously to a (initramfs) prompt with BusyBox.

After failing in my first attempt I decided to try some advice I found here: simply umount /dev/sdc1 (or whatever) then cat diskimage.iso > /dev/sdc1. While this did appear to create a good disk, I was unable to boot it at all.

Then after reading the bootable USB creation instructions on the Ubuntu page I decided to try the Mac methodology since I've used dd for this purpose before and I see no reason why this wouldn't work on Linux. Strangely though, it did not.

The eventual solution I found was to rename the .iso to .img and use usb-imagewriter from the ubuntu repositories. *shrugs*

Laptop S-video in Black & White

One of my media computers is connected to one of our TVs via s-video -> RCA. This has proven to be a right fine solution and even though it's a rather old machine (P4, 512Mb RAM) it's proven sufficiently powerful to play 720p content over the network. Unfortunately for some reason outside my control it recently began only displaying video in black and white on the s-video port. I did some preliminary research on Google and found all kinds of weird and incorrect answers.

In the end it turns out the video output had been set for PAL color instead of NTSC. The actual fix for this will vary by graphics chipset so I won't go into much detail here, but just in case someone else is wondering why their s-video output switches to black and white: check the color encoding!

HTML5 Benchmarks

I've been looking at HTML5 benchmarking sites this morning and thought I'd post them all together:

• Asteroids Benchmark
  
• Paintball Testdrive
  
• Impact HTML5 Benchmark
  
• HTML5 Compatibility Test
  
• Canvas vs. HTML vs. Flash vs. SVG
  
  

This last one in the list is particularly interesting as it not only provides a direct comparison of these different animation techniques but also has configurable CGI parameters to change many of the variables involved. Fun!