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I've been helping a friend of mine move his website from Cutenews to Wordpress. Wordpress is a great Blogging platform and the guys that created it also have a service called Wordpress.com whereby they host your site for free; however, you have very little leeway to customise the themes they offer.

My friend became quite attached to the Contempt Wordpress.com theme which is a variant of this Contempt Theme. The available versions of Contempt; however, miss an important feature - the category listing. After messing around for several days, I realised that the only option was to write my own variant with this feature.

On the right is a screenshot (click to enlarge) of what the category listing looks like. It's basically a listing of all the articles in a category. With ContempOT you get this type of listing whenever you select a category, author, archive, etc. Without this feature, most themes will give you the full text (or partial text) of each article. This causes a problem when you have hundreds of articles in each category.

So, if you're interested in trying it out - You can download the ContempOT theme by clicking here.

In case you're wondering how I got the name for the theme, OT are the initials of my friend's site. It's currently still in development, but as soon as it goes up, I will link it to this article so you can see how the theme looks on a live site.

The image to the left is a frame capture from a movie I recently uploaded to YouTube (Click Here to View). It's been converted from a 1948 film reel shot by my grandfather showing life in and around Budapest shortly after the end of World War II. The image is interesting because it shows the destroyed Széchenyi Chain Bridge as seen from a car traversing a temporary bridge over the Danube. Although all of Budapest's bridges were destroyed by the Germans during the Siege of Budapest, the Chain Bridge is one of the city's iconic structures and it's still shocking to see it destroyed.
While on the surface, the people in the film seem to be living relatively normal lives, if you look at the background you can still see a lot of rubble from the war. What you cannot see are the mental scars from the brutality that all of these people would have gone through only a few years earlier.
I cut the nearly 25 minutes of film footage down to about two and a half minutes to show life across four seasons of 1948. The film is set to music from an old 78rpm record sung by my Great Uncle, Miklós Vig, who unfortunately did not survive the war.
The footage includes the following:

• View of Széchenyi Chain Bridge (0:10)
  
• May Day Celebration with Rákosi spelled out by marchers (0:21)
• A walk around Pest (near V and VII district?) (0:35)
  
• A boat ride on Lake Balaton with a view of Tihany Abbey (1:17)
• A zoo (unknown location) (1:31)
  
• A view of Svábhegy (Schwab Hill) (1:41)
  
• The Gyermekvasút (Childrens' Railway) (1:48)
• Ice skating (unknown location) (2:01)
  

Those of you familiar with Sydney may wonder how I took a picture of the Opera House surrounded by cranes. In fact, this is a screen capture of a film shot in 1969 during my father's visit to Australia (click for YouTube link).
For the past several years I've been progressively digitising all our family's old media such as slides and VHS tapes. Doing so provides easy access, easy duplication and an archive that will not degrade in quality over time. The entire contents of my "family archives" fits neatly on a 1GB disk.
The biggest challenge in digitising old media is finding the equipment to play it. Fortunately for most media such as VHS tapes, audio casettes, slides and even vinyl (or shellac) records, it's quite easy and inexpensive to convert them at home. For audio sources, you can typically plug the player (e.g. Walkman, record player) into the Audio-In jack on your computer in conjunction with some free software such as Audacity. For the video sources you can use a fairly inexpensive video capture card. For slides, there are several inexpensive slide scanners.
When digitising the media, I highly suggest capturing at the highest quality possible. The price of digital media will only go down which means the cost of storage will go down. Digitising at a lower quality will just mean re-doing all the work later when you realise you'd prefer higher quality.
For the media mentioned above, you can do it yourself or pay someone to do it. There are many services that take old media and convert them. Essentially this is simply a time trade-off since the quality of a "professional" conversion is not materially better than you can do at home. You are just trading off time for money.
When it comes to 8mm or Super-8 motion picture film the story changes completely. The equipment required to capture the film at high quality is very expensive and would be uneconomic to buy for a conversion of the "family collection." Converting at home usually means projecting the image onto a screen and using a video camera to record the images. The problem is that the frame rate and picture size (aspect ratio) of film is different to modern video and you will be doomed to a poor quality image. The "correct" way to do it is to individually scan each frame and then digitally convert all the frames into a movie. This basically cannot be done at home.
I discovered a place called DVD Infinity which has a proprietary technology to transfer the movie frame-by-frame. They are not cheap, but the quality is incredible. As an example, I posted some clips from a reel taken in 1969 from Sydney onto YouTube. This 40-year-old reel has been stored like most family reels - in a closet, then in a basement. Time hasn't been kind to the colours, but compare this to some of the other 8mm conversions on YouTube to see the quality difference in the DVD Infinity conversion process. Things to notice are: 1) The image is uniformly bright and goes neatly to the edge of the frame with no vigneting. 2) The image does not flicker. 3) The image does not appear to move forward and backward (due to 'slack' in the projector).
I do not work for DVD Infinity, nor do I personally know the owners, nor do I have any commercial relationship with them - just a very happy customer.

I recently read that Air New Zealand's first Boeing 747-400 (ZK-NBS now 19 years old) will be sent to the scrap yard. In fact, it is the first 747-400 of any carrier to be 'scrapped' - every other -400 built is either active, stored or has been written off (like this one). This marks the beginning of a long sunset for the iconic Boeing 747-400.
I've only had a brief encounter with ZK-NBS, but it was one of my more memorable flights. On July 28, 2001, I left Sydney on a round-the-world ticket headed for Los Angeles and ultimately New York to attend my brother's bachelor party. The plan was then to continue to Atlanta the following week for the wedding and from there to Moscow to attend MAKC and then back to Sydney. Settled into my comfy seat, the trip progressed smoothly for the first 8 hours. Then, lightly dozing in my seat, I noticed that we were making a fairly wide left turn. I first thought we were going around some weather but soon I saw this on the screen and knew something more complicated was happening. I also noticed the flight attendants walking down the aisles and row-by-row waking people up to tell them something. When they got to me the story was that an engine had to be shut down and that we were diverting to Auckland. The stated reason was that Air NZ had a maintenance facility there (but didn't want to divert to HNL instead?). Then another couple of hours into the flight heading back the wrong direction, I see this on the screen. Several things were going through my head, but one of them was that AKL was no longer our final destination. The captain then came on and said that due to the strong headwinds we would no longer have enough fuel to make it to Auckland (nor back to Sydney). So, off we went to Nandi, Fiji (NAN) - landing there after nearly 14 hours of flight time (in 14 hours we could have made it to LAX in the first place!!). The landing was smooth as silk and gave no hint of being done on 3 engines. We were greeted by Fijian customs who set up 2 lanes for "Fiji Citizens" and 2 lanes for "Crew/Other". As there were no Fiji Citizens on board, 2 of the customs guys had a pretty easy time watching everyone else go through the other customs line. That night we all split up and were sent to various resorts on the island. I was also to miss what turned out to be an epic bachelor party in New York. The next day we were told that the engine could not be repaired and that they were diverting another plane from AKL to pick us up. It turns out they sent two (the AKL-HNL flight and the AKL-LAX flight). The passengers on those two flights were only told of their side-trip to NAN after they had departed AKL and were not too happy to meet us in NAN. The other issue was that NAN didn't have enough supplies (or maybe there was no time) to fully cater the aircraft and that night we left NAN bound for LAX with just chips and Coke for the entire flight. Having an entire day in Fiji was fun (but not as much fun as the bachelor party turned out to be) and I managed to also get a few pics of the plane being repaired. Including this one as I boarded the replacement flight to LAX. A little while later (late September 2002), ZK-NBS had another in-flight engine shut down and someone from the NZ Herald newspaper tracked me down based on my photo on airliners.net. Apparently ZK-NBS had (according to the reporter who contacted me) "a string of safety incidents." They bought the rights to use the photo and also interviewed me for an article with the catchy headline "Third air scare for jinxed jumbo jet" (see the full article here), but never used the photo. Ahhh fame, I hope I didn't let it get to my head.

Over 20 years ago, in one of my Doherty Jr. High Social Studies classes I remember Mr. Eiserman mentioning the Moscow Metro and showing us a picture. I don't even clearly remember the topic of the class, and it may not have even been Mr. Eiserman's class, but the picture of the metro stayed etched in my mind and has since been a source of fascination ever since. I'd been to Moscow (including the obligatory rides on the metro) on a number occasions since then, but never with any sort of camera equipment that would work well (and discretely) in the low light of the metro.

Click here to see a photo album that shows some of the incredible architecture of the stations themselves. I don't even know if you're allowed to take pictures, so these were all done fairly discretely - so excuse the poor composition on some of them.

YouTube video demonstrating the frequency of service. This is a 4 minute clip, see how rare it is to have no trains at the station.

YouTube video demonstrating ridership. This is how you get 7 million people per day through the system.

The metro is a true work of art built during a time of rapid development of Soviet society. Moscow was intended to be the capital city of the world proletariat and as such needed an efficient way to carry the millions of the city's workers. Today's Muscovites (7 million of them a day) travel on the nearly 300km of track across 12 lines and 177 stations of the system. The Soviet leaders also wanted to use the metro to show off the great artistic skill of its people to the outside world and also to celebrate their achievements with the people at home.

The operational scale of the system is impressive. On average across the network, a train arrives every 90 seconds. In practice, downtown stations have an even shorter headway. There are timers on the ends of the platform that indicate the number of seconds since the last train's departure - so you always know how long you're likely to wait. Check out the video below:

For further reading, I recommend a great book I found titled simply Moscow Metro (isbn 9785984010030). It's in English and has the history and photos of most of the stations. Of course there is a ton of information on Wikipedia, but not so many photos.

For several years I've been looking for a chance to ride on a Tupolev 154, but living in Australia there aren't so many opportunities. Therefore, on our recent trip to Russia I took care to chose specific Aeroflot flights between Moscow and St. Petersburg to ensure a ride. While both our flights were originally booked on Tu-154s, an equipment change meant that our SVO-LED fligth was on one of Aeroflot's new A320s. Fortunately the return flight was on a Tupolev Tu-154M (reg: RA-85765).

The entire Tu-154 experience was like going back in time about 30 years. This included the sights, sounds and smells of air travel. The Tu-154's three Soloviev D-30 turbofans make an incredible sound and the first two videos capture the sound nicely. The landing video also has the sound of the incredible racket that the thing makes on the ground. This is mostly from the poorly secured internal furnishings. It's also interesting to note that one of the over-wing exits is sealed shut. From the exterior it looks quite dodgy, but if you look at the safety instruction card, it's a documented feature.

To jump straight to the pictures, click here to access the slideshow.
To see the in-flight video, click on this YouTube link.
To see the landing video, click on this YouTube link.
To see the ground equipment, click on this YouTube link.

I have to say that both of our Aeroflot flights were comfortable and on-time with a full meal and drinks on the short hop. This is in contrast to what I've now become accustomed to on the low-cost-carriers I take for similar short hops (SYD-MEL, SYD-BNE, BOS-RIC).

For further reading about the Tupolev 154 series, there is a great article here.

Last weekend Nick and I flew down to The Australian International Air Show at Avalon Airport outside of Melbourne. By Sydney standards it was a chilly day and the incessant wind and intermittent showers put a bit of a damper on the show. Although the F111c which was going to be one of the show highlights couldn't fly due to the weather, the Jetstar Airbus A320s that we used to fly in and out of Avalon operated without any problems. I have put together a photo album from the trip which has some neat shots in it (including the F/A18s in the photo at the top of this article). They had the usual "crowd pleasers" like the jet-powered truck, a guy on a jetpack, an Interstate S-1A-65F landing on a moving truck, etc. Other interesting aircraft included the still experimental Boeing 737 AEW&C (N361BJ) of which the RAAF is the launch customer; the brand new Boeing 777-300ER (VH-VOZ) of V Australia; the RNZAF Boeing 757-200 (NZ7571) which made an impressive flying display and on which I managed to sneak aboard (on the ground, of course); a stock standard Boeing 747-400 (VH-OEG) of which I made a nice shot of a cross-wind takeoff; a rare commercial example of a McDonald Douglas KC-10 Extender of Omega Air (N9754VV); the Lockheed L1049 Super Constellation (the only example still flying); a bunch of USAF planes that flew-in including a C-5B Galaxy, some B-1B Lancers and a C-17 Globemaster III that demonstrated its impressive short field performance. Overall a great day.