Girl Without Pearl Earrings

 I painted this in October. Only now I have time to make the animated gif and upload the pictures.

Online Tools

1.  https://samltool.io/
2. SAMLtool.com
3. encoder / decoder
4. https://www.liquid-technologies.com/online-json-schema-validator
5. https://jsonschemalint.com/
6. Pine Tools for images: Lighten image online (pinetools.com)

The Sorry State of Youtube

 I uploaded a few dog videos shot over the last few months. To my surprise, when I looked at my list of videos today I found that a number of them were tagged with copyright claims. They are:

1. my dog sleeping and dreaming

2. school kids singing

3. my son playing a keyboard.

In each case, Youtube says there is copyright infringement of songs. However, videos of me playing piano or guitar did not invoke such treatment. Maybe my playing is so bad that even the AI could not tell what I was doing.

The most infuriating thing is that the dog video is silent. Even with my audio volume turned to 100% I could hardly hear any music - if any, the music was probably from a neighbor. It's like searching for the cosmic background noise! You be the judge:

RIP HMQEII

 

Happy Platinum Jubilee

 

David

 

童年记忆 - #1

 

The place where I grew up had been wiped out from the Earth in the name of progress. It now only exists in people's memories. This is my version.

Westpac Payment Bugs

The New Payment Platform (NPP) has been Australia's answer to real time low value payment solution for several years. Westpac being one of the adopters of NPP, supports real time money transfer between it and other participating financial institutions (OFI).

However, there are a couple of problems in Westpac's payment system:

1. When sending one time code (OTC) via SMS during a payment request, its notification system gets congested from time to time. It had happened to me multiple times in the last few months and I am not even a heavy user of payments. Yesterday, when I tried to transfer money, the SMS did not arrive again. So I retried sending the SMS, as well as trying to use another mobile number. All failed. Then after 20 minutes also, both of my mobile phones received a whole bunch of SMS from Westpac all at the same time!
2. The daily limits that you set on your account is accumulated when you ATTEMPT to pay. So even if you cancel your transaction, the limit still gets accumulated. So you can imagine, after the above SMS failures, if you try to cancel and re-initiate the transaction a few times, then you eventually will be met with an error saying that you have reached your daily limit, but in fact, you have not even completed a single transaction!

I can't imagine how such basic bugs can pass their design review and QA!

R.I.P. James Bond

 I can't believe they killed James Bond in the name of some dubious political correctness! Now back to oil painting - I watched this video and followed its techniques. Here is the result:

Subtitles - in Awk

 Last year, well, yesterday I wrote a simple javascript to fix the SRT file to a French movie and the result was good. I got to enjoy the movie. Then I thought I could go back to my root and rewrite it as unix shell script - awk script to be more precise. So here it is:

#!/bin/awk -f

BEGIN {

    FS=" --> ";

    RS="\r\n";

}

{

    if ($2 != "") {

        ssecond=substr($0,7,2);

        esecond=substr($0,24,2);

        if( ssecond<59) ssecond++;

        if( esecond<59) esecond++;

        printf("%s%02d%s%02d%s\n", substr($0,1,6), ssecond, substr($0,9,15), esecond, substr($0,26,4));

    }

    else

        print;

}

No surprise, the performance of the awk script is much better than Node.js.

$ time ./srt_update.awk input.srt > output.srt

real    0m0.020s
user    0m0.009s
sys     0m0.000s