arturmarques.com iLog

I am a long time user of Chris-TV, a sofware that handles many analogue PCI TV cards – I use it with a Hauppauge’s dual tuner PVR-500.
I think this software product lost some of the attributes that once, years ago, made it the only viable solution for those who really wanted to use their PC [...]

After the failure of my 27 months old XFX 8800 Ultra, I bought an ATI 5970 VGA card, which is impressive hardware on paper, yet served by very imature drivers. This card performs great on 3D games but is miserable on “simple” 2D desktop applications, namely for video – and I am a very intense video [...]

Round / Grand Prix / Circuit / Date / Race result01  Bahrain  BIC  March 14  02  Australian  Albert Park  March 28  03  Malaysian  Sepang  April 4  04  Chinese  Shanghai  April 18  05  Spanish  Catalunya  May 9  06  Monaco  Monaco  May 16  07  Turkish  Istanbul  May 30  08  Canadian  Gilles Villeneuve  June 13  09  European  Valencia  June 27 [...]

“Drawn to Japan – A Manga Adventure”, is a 12 minutes funny introduction to ten Japanese particularities: (1) exchanging business cards, (2) hot springs, (3) toilets, (4) riding the bullet train, (5) the tea ceremony, (6) the Japanese subway, (7) food and (8) how to eat it, (9) the samurai, and (10) karaoke. Oh, and [...]

I consider Alain Prost the best F1 driver, ever, and by far! Today, 2010–02–24, was his birthday.
To feel some of the old F1 magic, that once got me out of bed to watch the Asian Grand Prixs at 05:00 AM and earlier, I drove the 1993 William Renault and the 1991 Ferrari, on rFactor. Great fun.

Above, [...]

I rejected VS.PHP as a viable solution for PHP debugging. It happened in 4 steps.
(1)
I was trying VS.PHP 2.8 with Visual Studio 2008, when I found that, for curl projects, it is needed to edit the file php-xdebug.ini located in the VS.PHP install folder, and then uncomment the use of the curl extension.
This means that at line [...]

SugarCRM’s integrated upgrade wizard, failed to update my Sugar 5.2 install. The diagnose stated that all requirements were met, but then it silently [no explanation given] redirected me to the homepage after the upload of the upgrade package, which in my case was SugarCE-Upgrade-5.2.0-to-5.5.0.zip.
Tired of the failures, I downloaded the silentUpgrade-CE-5.5.1RC.zip. This file unpacks to [...]

Minutes ago, on 2010–01–27, Apple’s Steve Jobs presented the IPAD – a tablet PC. As a write, the presentation still goes on, no price quote as been given, and very few people actually used the device, which it looks to me like Compaq’s Tablet TC1000, nearly 8 years later…
The IPAD’s screen is smaller (9.7 inches versus [...]

“Reviving their secluded hot springs – The struggle of inn owners in Kurikoma Gotou” is a short documentary depicting the aftermath of the Iwate Miyagi Nairiku earthquake, from the perspective of inn owners, whose hot springs based businesses were severely affected.The program starts with aerial pictures of the village of Kurikomayama, showing the effects of [...]

The 2009-11-27 edition of “NIKKEI Japan Report” was about the weather and about Nippon Steel Corporation (TYO:5401). Both features were extremely interesting, following an approach that highlighted the Japanese particularities, but could easily be translated to other countries, namely the more volatile meteorological conditions and deflation, hands on with a stagnated or decreasing population. As [...]