A High Climbing Snake

Many birds will come flying around when it is feeding time for my ducks and chickens. This usually happens at around 11AM everyday. Not much of an eventful occasion, except for one fine sunny morning on 23rd April 2014. A fluttering sound caught my attention, and when I look up, I saw a sparrow with its head trapped between the jaws of a slender greenish/yellowish snake with dark shades. The snake must have launched a surprise attack from the hollow section of the pipe that makes up the orchid stand. With the snake's tail firmly gripping onto a bolt, it is impossible for the sparrow to escape. I would have never imagined that this is possible - a bird with maximum mobility being caught by a creature that has no limbs and slithers on the ground. This is a first for me.

A Little Heron Makes An Appearance

And there it was, resting on a branch of my durian tree one late morning last month, March 2014. The time was about 10:30 AM. I caught sight of it by accident actually while I was in the house. It was totally unexpected. It just stood there quietly on the branch.

Standing at about 1 feet tall, this bird, a Little Heron, is one of the largest bird that I have ever seen in my garden. As far as I could tell, it was alone as no other bird of this species was spotted.

This is actually my second encounter with a Little Heron. The first was a month before this on February 2014, also in my front garden. Back then, it was perching on the telephone wire above my front gate. I cannot be sure if this is the exact same bird though.

A long legged bird with a long beak would suggest that this is a waterbird. Its natural habitat should either be a mangrove swamp or a wetland. But my house is in the suburbs of Ipoh city. And I have lived in this neighbourhood all my life and this is the first time that I have seen Little Herons in this area. I do wonder if this has something to do with the local drainage system that has, in my opinion, turned into mini jungles at certain sections. The drains were not like this before but only in recent years.

This bird was aware of my presence while I was taking these photographs. Most birds would take flight, especially when they see me pointing a camera at them. Little Herons, though, seems to be unperturbed, even while I was plodding around them, looking for the perfect angle for the perfect shot.

These pictures were taken while I was standing at about 15 feet away from the bird with my compact camera. My camera was set to 16MP with maximum optical zoom at 5x. I think they turned out quite alright, for an amateur photographer like me.

RavenPlus Version 1.0.503 - A Fix For "Empty Blog Content Upon Posting"

My last blog post actually had empty blog content upon posting. I never had this problem before since I started using Raven some 5 or 6 months back. And neither did this problem occurred after I made modifications to Raven, that is until the last blog post.

RavenPlus - My "py2exe" Build Of Zoundry Raven

Since there has been no development with the offline blog editor Zoundry Raven (Raven) since 2008, I have been fixing and customizing Raven to fit my own needs for something like 8 months now. I am no expert in the Python programming language (I only have less than 8 months experience). But luckily I find the Raven's Python source code to be quite easy to follow and understand. I have a background in computer programming, by the way.

Since the beginning of February 2014, I have been trying to package my customized version of Raven into a MS Windows .EXE executable so that it can be run like any other Windows program without the need of installing the Python compiler or any other libraries that Raven requires. After trying for something like 3 weeks, I have finally succeeded.

Downloading BBC WS "Top Of The Pops" With "rtmpdump"

I would have preferred if I could download it off the BBC's Podcast web-page but unfortunately I can't. Below is the command that I use to download the BBC World Service radio programme "Top Of The Pops" to my desktop computer, thanks to the software rtmpdump.


rtmpdump.exe -r "rtmp://wsondemandflash.bbc.co.uk/ondemand/mp4:48502/worldservice/css/latest/topofthepops" -o "topofthepops.flv"

Zoundry Raven: Getting Raven To Work With MS Internet Explorer 9

Zoundry Raven (Raven) version 1.0.375 (and 1.0.500, if you were to compile from the source code) is only good with Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) version 5.5 to version 8. Raven will NOT work after an upgrade to IE version 9 (IE9) on Windows7 .

There are two things that I noticed when I launch Raven after the IE9 upgrade:

• In the main window, under "Blog Post Summary" I noticed that what got displayed was mal-formed. All blog posts starts with the word "ZoundryDocument", which shouldn't be there. Also, there were no pictures or formatting of any kind - when there should be. They look just like any plain unformatted text document.
  
  
  
• Editing an existing blog post is not possible. The "Zoundry Error" message
  
  "Error: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'tagName'"
  
  gets displayed, multiple times, when the WYSIWYG editor window is launched.
  
  
  

The Fix

I have just spent the last couple of days going through Raven's source code, trying to find a fix after this upgrade to IE9. And luckily, the fix is actually quite simple. All that is needed to be done is to just delete a single character in the file "mshtmlcontrol.py", found in the directory zoundryraven-read-only\Raven\src\python\zoundry\appframework\ui\widgets\controls\advanced\mshtml.

Gender Bending My Male Papaya Tree

I am now embarking on an experiment of my own in my backyard. I am trying to get a male papaya plant, which yields no fruit by the way, to produce female flowers so that it can bear fruits. I accidentally came across some blog posts saying that this 'gender conversion' is possible. However, the details are a bit sketchy.

Ripping The Content Of A DVD To A .ISO Image File

I have just spent the last 2 days trying to figure out a way to rip the content of my DVD and save it into the ISO image file format (a file with a .ISO extension) so that I could mount this file as a 'DVD' under Oracle VM Virtualbox. I thought this would be an easy process but it did not turn out to be so.

After various attempts, I ended up using a freeware by MiniDVDSoft called Free DVD ISO Maker that allows me to easily extract directly from the DVD and save the content into a file in the .ISO format. Virtualbox mounted the .ISO file successfully, just like a real physical DVD. Wonderful little software. And it works beautifully without any problems.

Below is a description of my other (failed) attempts. It is just for my reference and also to others who may be interested.

Minimizing NTFS Corruption In C: Drive

Nothing terrifies me more than to receive a message from the Windows XP operating system telling me that one of my disks needs to be checked for consistency upon booting up. I have received no less than 4 of these messages this year alone, and it always happens on the C: drive. Files and/or directories will get deleted everytime when this happens. To restore the deleted files from my backup, I will first have to look in the corresponding "WinLogon" event in Event Viewer. The list of deleted files/directories are all there. I have been lucky so far as only noncritical files were deleted - Windows is still bootable in all cases. I always do a graceful shutdown of Windows before turning off the power to my computer. So this is something that should not be happening.

Switching To Zoundry Raven From Scribefire

I have made the switch to Zoundry Raven (or Raven) as my offline blog editor of choice. In fact, I have been composing and posting my blogs with Raven since 21st September 2013.

I was using Scribefire Classic (a version that is no longer supported) on Firefox version 3 previously. I have been happily using it for about 14 months until I had problems inserting "Amazon Affiliate iframe" ads. There were other minor limitations that I have encountered previously in Scribefire Classic but I have always been able to figure out a way round them. Unfortunately there is none that I could find with these "Amazon Affiliate iframe" ads. Upgrading to Scribefire Next/Chrome would be the most logical choice but regrettably there are just too many shortcomings with the later versions - and some are really odd ones. There have been no fixes and development to Scribefire since 2011. So Scribefire Next/Chrome is a no go for me.

Raven is not perfect either. Like Scribefire, it appears to have been abandoned and its support forum has gone offline. But luckily, Raven's code is available online as it is open-source. I have peeked at the code (I have a background in computing by the way) and found the Python code to be well designed, written and easy to follow - much better than Scribefire's. I do have to put in more effort at times as I am still new to the Python programming language. And I made my first fix about a month and a half ago.