April 05, 2006
How's that for reactivity
A bunch of us updated our versions of Ubuntu this afternoon. update-notifier 0.41.11 had a problem that caused it to crash when Gnome started.
Three hours later the problem was fixed.
My goodness do I feel bad about all of my old bugs now. Maybe I need to get us into a mode like this. Emotionally I'm not a very just-in-time guy, but there are some things to be said for operating like that.
Posted by Mark at 08:17 PM | TrackBack
April 04, 2006
File sharing and legal trouble
BBC News online has an article about how music industry middlemen are fighting to sue people for sharing tunes they bought (or got from somebody else). The problem is apparently big enough to eat into sales and profits.
What's file sharing going to be like a few years from now? Will home bandwidth increase by a factor of 10 over the next 10 years? If so, the legislation is going to take us in the direction of drug legislation now, except that children will be sharing movies, music, and video games rather than getting high.
I can imagine the police knocking on my door to lead me away to jail because one of the three kids downloaded a cracked version of some recently released movie. That said, maybe I'll be unemployable by then and won't even be able to afford normal wireless Internet access.
Posted by Mark at 08:45 PM | TrackBack
March 29, 2006
Subversion
My brother Matt set up a subversion repository on this site. It seems to work fine. If you want to add more date formats, go ahead. (You'll have to ask one of us before you can commit, I guess.)
The nice thing about subversion is that if you know cvs, getting started is like falling off a log. Furthermore as (the other) Matt explained, each commit is a revision of the whole thing. You proceed along the trunk, and have another directory hierarchy for branches, and yet another for tags. I guess that's the suggested default setup. Whatever it is, it's a clear product management default that makes you think about the project in the right way from the start.
Not that we're going to be releasing any earth shattering software from that repository, but it's nice to know that given enough monkeys and enough keyboards, we have the right technology to do so. Hey, the Internet is a big place.
Posted by Mark at 08:57 PM | TrackBack
March 28, 2006
Tail wagging dog
Ludo pointed me a few days ago to Dan Bricklin's article, When The Long Tail Wags The Dog. Dan looks at how the overall value of general purpose tools such as the spreadsheet or the telephone can outstrip that of special purpose tools, in particular when there exist highly personal, "must have" applications the general purpose tools can enable. The general purpose tool, "is of high value for a wider range," than its special purpose counterpart.
In agreeing with the general thesis, I'd underline that the general purpose tool has to be more like a telephone than a Swiss army knife. Dan alludes to this when he writes, "A general purpose tool that most people can't use easily or understand how to apply in new situations will be less popular." I know a number of writers who refuse to learn vi, and it's probably because gedit or whatever it is they use is more like a telephone than a Swiss army knife.
Posted by Mark at 08:41 PM | TrackBack
March 27, 2006
Ugly ducklings officially okay
Jared Spool wrote about how what he sees as ugly sites can still attract users.
At some point, (and I don’t quite know where that point is at this time,) fashion, visual appeal, and aesthetic comfort becomes a priority to the audience. At that point, you better be ready or else you’ll look dated and amateurish. But get there too early and you’re wasting valuable resources on something users don’t care about.
Hmm. Function over form. Isn't he just pandering to those of us aesthetically challenged folks who only wonder whether Mac OS X would be worth it when trying to edit home videos?
Interestingly I notice that an iPod comparable to the MP3 player I bought is currently only $10 more expensive at Amazon.com. I'd pay $10 more for the same computer if it made video editing easy (as long as it's still UNIX-like underneath).
Posted by Mark at 07:52 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
March 23, 2006
Too complicated
Tim was asking me this evening how to copy some text from a Wikipedia article on Star Wars to another file. Even that I could see was not sinking in instantly.
Then later I came up here and had network problems. I could get an IP address from the router, and the router was getting two name server IP addresses from the DHCP server it gets the address from. But lookups weren't working. I finally found a printed message from my ISP in which two other, different DNS IP addresses were mentioned. After adding those to /etc/resolv.conf I could browse the web. No sweat.
Then it dawned on me that all of this is too complicated, that I'm warped by my job into thinking that fixing the DNS server IP addresses in /etc/resolv.conf by hand is a normal sort of thing to have to do on the client side. We need to figure out how to make this stuff simpler not just to develop to, but for normal people to debug.
Posted by Mark at 09:29 PM | TrackBack
March 21, 2006
Webcam on Ubuntu, part VI
On a tip from Christian Juner, I installed Ekiga on Breezy. It seems to work on Dapper Drake. It also seems to work, almost, on Breezy.
For a reason I've not yet managed to discover, my registration is coming back "Forbidden." Yet I can login at ekiga.net. The log, Tools > General History, is concise. The folks on the mailing list who seem to have had the same symptoms all got around it. One person said a change of passwords worked.
I've not yet tried to learn which ports I might be supposed to open. Tried to interest Luke in trying this out at work since he was on Windows. He saw the intructions for using SIP with whatever Microsoft's comparable software is called and gave up before trying.
Posted by Mark at 09:17 PM | TrackBack
Everything slips
Yet another big software project schedule has slipped. Ubuntu Dapper Drake is slipping to June 1.
The good thing is that it's already fairly solid, if not so stable. For my use it already seems to work.
Curiously the documentation freeze is coming before the user interface freeze. Can Ubuntu docsters count on the specs so completely they're ready to finish the doc before the developers quit tweaking? I need to get my head around that one.
Posted by Mark at 06:21 AM | TrackBack
March 16, 2006
apt-get dist-upgrade?
On the laptop where I write this entry, I used apt-get dist-upgrade (or did I do that in Synaptic?) to move from Ubuntu 6.04 Flight CD 4 to Flight CD 5. This system would be awful to use in real production. The problem is not the stability or the bugs. It works fine and I haven't run into any bugs. The problem is the volume of updates. Over 100 megabytes this morning. Another 100 megabytes this evening if I had the energy to get the updates.
But should I do apt-get dist-upgrade on the PC where we have all our stuff? I know some of the apps have been dropped, and some have changed.
Matt did the same sort of thing with yum the other day and found he had to redo his network configuration afterward. That's all he found immediately, but I didn't ask him what he found next.
Sometimes we think of Solaris as being a bit stodgy, but at least you can upgrade most of the time without fear that your whole configuration will be hosed.
Posted by Mark at 09:44 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
Building playlists
A while ago I ripped my CD collection (except for a couple of recalcitrant CDs that wouldn't rip properly for one reason or another). Maybe when the children have grown I'll be able to sit in the living room and listen to a CD, but for now I need them on the MP3 player.
Listening while jogging along the road is not so good, but listening while sitting in a running car is worse. That's probably why so many adults listen to talk radio. Classical music in my car is like drinking from a mud puddle.
But sometimes I'd like to listen while I'm at the computer. In that case, I'd like to have album playlists. And I don't want to do that by hand for all the CDs I ripped. Do I write my own m3u file builder? Can I find a good one online?
Posted by Mark at 09:33 PM | TrackBack
March 14, 2006
15 cents/(GB*month), plus 20 cents/GB uploads
I noticed on TechCrunch an entry about Amazon's Simple Storage Service. It looks like they've put a price on easily extensible online storage.
What they don't seem to have priced yet is web storage that is guaranteed not to disappear without notice. Way down in the disclaimers section of their agreement you find that they're not going to be liable for any disasters.
Posted by Mark at 09:38 PM | TrackBack
March 12, 2006
Device recognition better now
Tim wanted me to put Windows 98 back on the Vaio instead of Ubuntu. He wants to use old games that I cannot get to run on Ubuntu with Wine, the Windows emulator.
First of all, the Vaio recovery CDs that reinstall Windows 98 do not include a utility to change the partition table. Good thing I had an old Gentoo CD lying around for fdisk.
Next, there are bad blocks on the disk. Windows 98 is going to run into them some day and break. Will try the disk management tools, but don't know if they'll work.
Finally, using the wireless card with Windows 98 is a pain. The setup and driver didn't fit on a floppy, so I had to burn a CD. It took me a while just to find the driver. Seems to work now. A disappointing bit is that this computer has one PCMCIA slot, so it's either the CD drive or the network, but not both.
Posted by Mark at 10:16 AM | TrackBack
March 04, 2006
What I cannot find online
I've been looking for evidence it'd be possible to take a shower after the semi-marathon Sunday, but cannot find anything. Nor is it clear there'd be an alternative, like showers at the Gare de Lyon for example.
Maybe I'll just have to stink all the way home tomorrow evening. Of course if the weather turns out to be as cool as predicted, we might not sweat that much after all.
Posted by Mark at 07:03 AM | TrackBack
February 27, 2006
Webcam on Ubuntu, part V
This evening both audio and video worked between GnomeMeeting and NetMeeting. I'd turned off sound events at startup in Ubuntu. That seems to have the effect that the audio settings in GnomeMeeting work, rather than breaking silently.
Thank you to the developers who put whatever is built in to break feedback loops.
Posted by Mark at 10:13 PM | TrackBack
February 26, 2006
Webcam on Ubuntu, part IV
I can manage to get GnomeMeeting from one system to call NetMeeting on the laptop from work, which has Windows on it. I can get audio from NetMeeting that plays back through GnomeMeeting and vice versa, but I cannot get audio with the webcam to work in GromeMeeting. I cannot even get the text to go through for reasons I do not understand. Quite frustrating.
Furthermore, it's not clear how I can post my H323 address out through the NAT, nor can I figure out how I'm going to be able to find someone else's H323 address. In some ways it feels like this stuff's not quite ready for prime time on Ubuntu.
Posted by Mark at 02:51 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
Webcam on Ubuntu, part III
Hmm. Hmm. The audio works fine at the command line. I've recorded a short test with the rec and play commands.
rec -d /dev/audio1 test.wav; play -d /dev/audio test.wav
The Gnome applications I've tried, such as gnome-sound-recorder, do not seem even to be using the microphone.
Posted by Mark at 09:58 AM | TrackBack
Webcam on Ubuntu, part II
Although I can load the quicktime module I built and can get the webcam to work, loading the module at system startup results in things going haywire. Here's what I see in dmesg:
[4296518.087000] quickcam [52.080121]: failed qc_capt_get()=-90
[4296518.087000] quickcam [52.080128]: failed qc_v4l_read()=-90
[4296518.111000] quickcam [52.104330]: submit ISOC_URB 0 failed
[4296518.111000] quickcam [52.104344]: failed qc_isoc_init()=-90
[4296518.111000] quickcam: unable start isoc
When I remove and reinsert the module:
[4296548.265000] quickcam [22.253775]: ----------LOADING QUICKCAM MODULE------------
[4296548.265000] quickcam [22.253787]: struct quickcam size: 3904
[4296548.270000] quickcam: QuickCam USB camera found (driver version QuickCam Messenger/Communicate USB $Date: 2004/12/30 10:00:00 $)
[4296548.270000] quickcam: Kernel:2.6.12-10-386 bus:1 class:FF subclass:FF vendor:046D product:08F6
[4296548.270000] quickcam [22.258686]: poisoning qc in qc_usb_init
[4296548.280000] quickcam [22.268615]: E00A contains 08F6
[4296548.280000] quickcam: Sensor VV6450 detected
[4296548.326000] quickcam [22.315156]: Quickcam snapshot button registered on usb-0000:00:02.0-2/input0
[4296548.362000] quickcam: Registered device: /dev/video0
[4296548.362000] usbcore: registered new driver quickcam
Hmm. At least /dev/video0 works after that. What must I do to get the microphone to work?
Posted by Mark at 08:51 AM | TrackBack
February 25, 2006
Webcam on Ubuntu
You can tell by my expression that getting everything working is not quite easy, yet.
First, I followed instructions from somebody in Belgium. A nice scrip, though I didn't know that lsusb would tell me what I needed to change in the Perl line. (This QuickCam Messenger is product id 08f6.) Also, the latest version of the driver is 1.1 rather than 0.8.
Next, I needed to get gcc-3.4 installed. The one by default is 4.0.
After a bit of playing around, I can see the video feed. Yet I cannot get the audio worked out. Will have another look later.
Posted by Mark at 03:37 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
February 23, 2006
Web-based web page editor
Most folks creating their own web pages are probably already doing it through their browser, by blogging. There are however cases where you may want to create a static page or two. We create them at work, for example, as cover pages for documentation snapshots we post for review, for some of our plans, pages we expect people to link to directly and perhaps consult frequently.
If you know HTML, you probably end up editing your static pages in something like vim or bluefish. If you don't know HTML, maybe you export to HTML from a office program like OOo Writer or OOo Calc. A recent alternative for folks who do static pages and want to be able to edit them without having installed software is Google's beta Page Creator.
I gave Page Creator a whirl. It puts your home page under a URL at their site. You can see the page I created here.
If you wanted to create static sites with this method, you could use HTML redirects from your main site, or just link from your blog. It's not immediately clear how you're supposed to do a backup. Maybe the idea is that you crawl through the pages starting from your home page. Maybe in this Web 2.0 world, you leave the backup to someone else.
Posted by Mark at 09:27 AM | TrackBack
February 20, 2006
Paper for digital storage
Today I went to see my doctor to finish off the high blood pressure question. He looked at the results from a couple of weeks ago when I wore the portable blood pressure measurement device all night, and spent a little more time than the cardiologist saying the high readings appear to have been a fluke. Today he said my blood pressure was douze sept. I guess he meant 12.7 over something not worth mentioning. Either that or he mean 12/7, which is 120/70. Neither reading is cause for alarm.
The interesting part of the visit came when he confused me, or at least my job, with another American he treats. This other guy apparently is moving to China to work on productizing the use of paper for digital storage. He wasn't talking about punched tape, but instead storing digital information in paper fibers. Presumably we have better preservation technology for paper than we do for magnetic or optical media. Perhaps we now have techniques for cramming lots more onto paper.
I recall reading something this, but cannot recall where, nor what would bring it back up. Google's not helping.
Posted by Mark at 06:05 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
February 19, 2006
Favorite option
The 3D acceleration seemed slow on this system. This is the test.
$ glxgears -iacknowledgethatthistoolisnotabenchmark
6004 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1200.728 FPS
7212 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1442.209 FPS
7209 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1441.750 FPS
7213 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1442.500 FPS
7060 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1411.919 FPS
6305 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1256.035 FPS
X connection to :0.0 broken (explicit kill or server shutdown).
You can also get -iacknowledgethatthistoolisnotabenchmark with -printfps. Too bad.
Posted by Mark at 08:54 PM | TrackBack
More online robbery
Now that I'm looking into things at Free.fr, I also see that despite their posted tarifs for telephone calls, they've been charging us for calls they say are no additional cost.
It's not much money, but needs to be corrected. Since it's going to cost me time to fix their mess, I wonder what I can do to cost them as much as possible. Maybe some letters to editors would help.
Update: Aha! The thieves seem to have protected their theft on a technicality. They don't propose the offer, but I have to go read 20 pages of fine print again to find the differences between what they proposed to me at the end of December and what I'd have to accept now that I'm signed up. Hmm. So if I'm going to get a fair shake for my work, it's going to need to cost them dearly.
Another update: It's not 20 pages. It's 41.
Posted by Mark at 01:03 PM | TrackBack
Connection down all morning
I have not yet figured out where the problem occurred, but our DSL connection was interrupted again all morning. Our provider of course provides a procedure that systematically blames France Telecom. Yet I don't recall ever having more than momentary outtages, always fixed by restarting the software connection, when France Telecom was our provider.
The technical people at our provider are probably aware this sort of thing happens, because in general they're quite competent. Maybe it's at the transfer of the ATM frames from FT equipment to Free.fr equipment. Maybe it's just that the bankers who own Free.fr figure consumers will have no recourse, and will just blame FT, even though they're aware the problem is on Free.fr's side. If we, Free.fr's customers, could find that out, we could perhaps force them either to give us money back pro rata, or with a penalty, such that they'd be forced to provide higher quality service.
Posted by Mark at 12:48 PM | TrackBack
February 14, 2006
And you thought my running entries were too much
This guy uses his watch plus Google Maps to upload traces of his actual runs to his blog.
He's willing to share the software, but you need a particular model of watch for it to work. Not sure I'd be willing to make the investment. I'm waiting for the heartbeat monitor to that sends email and lets you keep a running verbal account of how you feel, altitude, temperature, blood concentrations, brain wave activity, shoe wear and tear, etc., and uploads all that via wireless into an online expert system coaching program that whispers advice through your headphones.
Posted by Mark at 08:47 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
Reintermediation
According to MSNBC, Warner Music experienced a large relative uptick in digital music sales this past quarter.
Warner Music, which went public last May, said digital revenues surged by 176 per cent to $69m in the first quarter, from the $25m achieved the previous year and up 30 per cent from the previous quarter. Digital sales now account for 7 per cent of overall revenue, the company said.
To what extent does that offset the money the majors claim to have lost by being disintermediated from the physical music media markets?
Posted by Mark at 08:38 PM | TrackBack
February 10, 2006
Broken Gnome, part II
By the way, I found out Gnome was breaking because I'd set LD_LIBRARY_PATH in my environment, and some incompatible, contributed software libraries got linked in first. Boom.
The thing I hadn't see was that you can start a failsafe session on the SunRay, which doesn't try to run gnome-session. Good for debugging. Sort of.
After I removed LD_LIBRARY_PATH from my environment, I had to figure out which apps wouldn't open without it. And I still get two instances of gconfd-2. Shutting down the session only kills one.
Maybe I'm not supposed to have the contributed software binaries in my PATH?
Posted by Mark at 09:37 PM | TrackBack
February 06, 2006
Fat browser
Somebody's blog entry on Understanding memory usage on Linux got Slashdotted. I went over to look. It's mainly about the effect of shared library code and looking at this with pmap -d.
The example was with a KDE text editor, which apparently uses lots of shared library code, and so looks much more bloated under ps than it actually is. There are however other applications that not only look bloated, but also are pretty big.
$ ps -e | grep firefox
10447 ? 00:07:38 firefox-bin
$ pmap -d 10447 | tail -1
mapped: 156204K writeable/private: 118824K shared: 768K
That's Firefox with the aforementioned article opened, nothing else.
Posted by Mark at 10:16 PM | TrackBack
February 03, 2006
movein.sh ?
My brother Matt and I were thinking about online backups. If you're like me, your ISP provides more space than you need to backup everything in your family's $HOMEs. The biggest pain in reinstalling is transferring files and setting up the $HOMEs again including configuration of preferences, etc. At home I don't want to run a file server for /home in the basement all the time.
So Matt's suggesting a movein.sh script that gets everything and sets it up for you, and you don't have to do that manually every time you bring a new machine online. Hmm. I wonder about authentification as well. What if I had LDAP-based naming on my machines, but left the server running at my ISP? It would be the opposite of high end.
In any case if a web-based service took the user auth and user data problems away from a particular home system, that might have a tendency to encourage people to change systems more often. I'd also be one step closer to work from anywhere.
Posted by Mark at 08:30 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
February 01, 2006
/home at home, part II
I've finally taken the time to move everything in our /home at home over to a single disk. I checked that lots of things still worked, then eliminated the duplicate files. This leaves me with space to capture and edit video, or try out other OSs. If only I had the energy and the time.
Posted by Mark at 09:50 PM | TrackBack
January 25, 2006
DSL up
Nothing I did made any difference. Nathalie said the problem disappeared during the morning.
I'm guessing it was my DSL provider, Free, who broke something and now probably isn't going to tell me about it.
Posted by Mark at 02:49 PM | TrackBack
January 23, 2006
Dapper Drake flight CD 3, part II
My first job in QA is volunteer work. Not exactly high value add stuff. I just went down the menus and tried to start all the apps. There were several that didn't work in this alpha version, so I logged bugs, a few of which ended up being duplicates.
It's a good way to learn a little bit about the packaging system, though mine attempts to find causes are mostly stabs in the dark. After one of the Ubuntu core dev guys, Sebastien, noticed a set of my bugs were all due to the same missing library for handling SVG images, I realized one of my others was probably just a missing dependency that didn't get flagged somehow. When I found the right package, the problem disappeared.
Somebody in marketing once talked about "unattended complexity." Rob and Luke had that on their whiteboard. Flagging dependencies brings those words to mind. We sometimes have people ask, "What's the minimum set of packages we need to install to run your software in production?" If you start doing anything very interesting, that becomes a hard question to answer.
Posted by Mark at 09:17 PM | TrackBack
January 17, 2006
whereami for laptop network configuration
One of the Ubuntu Wiki's sent me to whereami, the network autoconfiguration utility you can get for Debian and therefore Ubuntu.
Configuration is done using two files, detect.conf and whereami.conf, the former being used to set up your network connection including which interface you use and how you get that configured, the second for other actions you want to script depending on the network configuration. /etc/init.d/whereami start runs at boot time, though you can also of course sudo /etc/init.d/whereami stop; sudo /etc/init.d/whereami start any time you change networks.
So far the only thing I do in whereami.conf is set proxy preferences for Firefox, but since it's just a shell script with location information, I could do just about anything. Highly recommended if you have a portable computer.
Posted by Mark at 04:19 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
January 16, 2006
Merging $HOMEs
There's a nice Linux Journal article on unison, which is a good way to keep in sync once you were foresightful enough to set a home directory up properly.
But why didn't I think in the first place about setting up one of the PC disk partitions as a permanent $HOME for everybody's stuff? Now I'm trying to go back and synchronize things between the two systems I have installed on the PC, in preparation of syncing with the laptops, and eventually organizing a sync with my work $HOME for those mornings or afternoons when I'd get more done by shutting myself away and ploughing through some work.
I read a NYT editorial in which the writer was complaining about slow network access. Apparently some Scandinavian ISPs are offering Gigabit speeds to your house for the equivalent of about $100/mo. If I had that kind of access, the very next thing I'd want is all my data mounted from the network and backed up by competent professionals. Mobile high speed access and almost no local data. That would be the cat's meow.
Posted by Mark at 09:05 PM | TrackBack
January 14, 2006
Wireless access at home, part II
The old laptop I'm using to write this entry has a PCMCIA card plugged in, and so is the third wireless device configured to use the home network. I'm at Tim's desk.
My hope is that I can get him to play some of the educational games on the computer if he has network access, too. In the past I tried to get him to do that, but he figured a computer without an internet hookup is useless. So the only one he used was the PC upstairs, the main machine I want to use as well.
Although it's PIII 500 MHz processor and 128 MB RAM make this Vaio a relic, the only serious shortcoming I see against using this one for what Tim and Emma and potentially Diane want to do is that the sound card is somehow broken, probably as the result of a fall a while ago. No way to hear, "Hi! I'm Barbie!" when you visit Barbie.com.
Posted by Mark at 10:41 AM | TrackBack
January 13, 2006
New hardware breaks video device, part II
Jean-Luc and Fabio suggested the problem was with interrupts. The fix that worked was to boot with pci=noacpi. So now both Xorg and the wireless adapter work together:
Interestingly I now have even more things doubling up on the same IRQs, but it nonetheless works. I've not yet figured out what perturbs the signal strength, but it fluctuates wildly, at times dropping down as low as 66%.
Posted by Mark at 08:19 PM | TrackBack
January 12, 2006
New hardware breaks video device
No idea, and cannot find a clue. When I start Ubuntu 5.10 after having plugged in the wireless card, the wireless card is recognized and works fine (although not on 5.04). But my xorg.conf doesn't work. Something weird is happening with my video. From dmesg:
[4294758.173000] agpgart: Found an AGP 2.0 compliant device at 0000:00:00.0. [4294758.173000] agpgart: Putting AGP V2 device at 0000:00:00.0 into 4x mode [4294758.173000] agpgart: Putting AGP V2 device at 0000:02:00.0 into 4x mode [4294764.798000] NVRM: RmInitAdapter failed! (0x12:0x3a:1167) [4294764.798000] NVRM: rm_init_adapter(0) failed
Xorg fails with a message that tells me it cannot read or write or something from /dev/nvidia0. Of course the permissions on that device are crw-rw-rw-, so something weird is going on. I reinstalled the packages thinking perhaps something had gotten corrupted, but that didn't help.
Too tired to think about it now. Going to bed.
Posted by Mark at 11:17 PM | TrackBack
January 11, 2006
Trackback and comment spam down
If you have a blog, you no doubt get spam in the comments and through trackbacks. By the way, the difference between comments and trackbacks are that comments involve somebody leaving a note on one of your blog entries, whereas trackbacks are links back from someone else's site on which they cited your entry. MovableType 3.2 has a ranking system for filtering out the comment and trackback spam. It works fairly well.
A while ago, however, I was submerged with trapped spam, hundreds of comments and trackbacks each day. That seems like a lot for a blog only a handful of people read. I felt compelled to get rid of junk comments and trackbacks by hand, for fear of slighting someone out there who left a legitimate comment that got filtered.
For some reason the comment spam recently dried up. Even the trackback spam is at a trickle of a few per day. Why is that?
Posted by Mark at 09:17 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
January 08, 2006
Voice over IP
The number has been attributed for the Freebox. I picked up the phone and got a dial tone.
Dad had called this morning already. I called Mom's. Dana answered to say that Mom is out today on a visit. We talked a while and had a fully acceptable connection, with only a few strange noises. Seems to be usable.
Posted by Mark at 04:47 PM | TrackBack
January 06, 2006
Online robbery
We're switching our DSL provider to Free.fr. It's great.
I don't actually have the hardware. Online I see the box is theoretically somewhere in the same department as Lyon according to the French postal tracking site. So there's no way using what they've done for me, yet.
They have however managed to bill me already. That must've been a part of the fine print I misunderstood. The part where in a regular human language it would be obvious that they don't actually have to provide you a service to start taking money out of your bank account.
Posted by Mark at 08:52 PM | TrackBack
January 02, 2006
Spring cleaning needed
Looked in my home directory on the PC, since I'm still thinking of backing it up and moving stuff.
$ du -hs .
20G .
Only 10G of that is SVCDs, and 6.7G is ripped music. But that still leaves more than 3G. How did I accumulate all that stuff?
Posted by Mark at 11:22 PM | TrackBack
December 27, 2005
DSL envy in Desvres
We arrived, mostly without a hitch, just half an hour late in Lille.
Colette was wondering about DSL at home. Cegetel wanted to give her a 2 Mbit line. I looked up their stats at DegroupeTest.com. Only 458 m by wire from the commuter, 6 dB attenuation! They could have at least 8 Mbits, and here we are on dial-up.
Unfortunately the line cannot be degrouped yet. Still I should move up here. My connection would be almost as good as it is in the office.
Posted by Mark at 07:23 PM | TrackBack
December 24, 2005
/home at home
When I bought a new disk for the PC at home, I partitioned it right away and put the new Ubuntu on half of the new disk, leaving the old Ubuntu on the other disk. Then instead of using the existing /home, I started a new one on the new partition, leaving myself 40 GB for "files" on a second partition of the new disk.
It later occurred to me that I've been taking the wrong approach for years. $HOME never really changes. You carry it with you. Systems come and go every six months or so. Ideally I'd try out a new system probably every three months, maybe more often. The ones I want to try out on this PC, but haven't because I made such a hash of partitioning, include OpenSolaris -- Have we incorporated enough of the GNU stack yet? -- Gentoo, FreeBSD, a recent Fedora, maybe something exotic. Yet our $HOME files need to be in no danger just because I want to try out a new OS.
Backup would be simplified radically as well. I used to back up software that came from someone else. Only recently have I realized that unless you're the one making the software, you should not bother backing it up. Save your software. Save your config. Save your content. The rest you can download from somewhere. If you cannot download the software from somewhere and yet you rely on it, are you sure you're doing the right thing?
Posted by Mark at 08:34 AM | TrackBack
December 23, 2005
Still no Gmail, but only under Ubuntu 5.04
It's strange, I can no longer get to Gmail under Ubuntu 5.04. What is that? Some strange component problem under Firefox 1.0.7?
The interesting thing is, my Inbox gets read when I go to the personalized home page at Google. But when I try to get through to Gmail, I cannot do it.
Posted by Mark at 09:39 PM | TrackBack
How to of the day
Went to the top page of Google, where you can get a personalized home page, kind of like the portal we have at work. One of the categories I'd added was "How To" of the Day.
Today my top how to of the day is How to Write a Resignation Letter. They must've noticed we didn't get a half day off for Christmas or New Year's this year.
Posted by Mark at 04:57 PM | TrackBack
December 19, 2005
Browser as resource hog
You use it all the time, and it burns through lots of resources. Your web browser.
As I write this entry, I have one browser window open. I'm also downloading a file. Alongside that, I'm converting some digital video files to MPEG.
Firefox is burning through about 1/3 as much CPU as ffmpeg! While I use it to enter some text in a form, and download a single MP3 file. In the last half hour or so, Firefox has burned through about 8 minutes of CPU time, 4x what Xorg uses.
Posted by Mark at 09:30 PM | TrackBack
December 18, 2005
Video capture, part XXIII
Transcode, by the way, is hanging converting raw digital video instead of .avi files. Not for each file, but since the only solution I've found that works is kill -9 pid, I need to perhaps export these clips to .avi. Too bad I cannot fix it before Mom goes home.
Posted by Mark at 05:25 PM | TrackBack
Video capture, part XXII
Many CLI video processing tools are worse than ldapsearch. Check out the list of options in the man page synopsis for transcode:
transcode(1) transcode(1)
NAME
transcode - LINUX video stream processing tool
SYNOPSIS
transcode [ -i name ] [ -H n ] [ -p file ]
[ -x vmod[,amod] ] [ -a a[,v] ] [ --dvd_access_delay N ]
[ -e r[,b[,c]] ] [ -E r[,b[,c]] ] [ -n 0xnn ] [ -N 0xnn ]
[ -b b[,v[,q[,m]]] ] [ --no_audio_adjust ]
[ --no_bitreservoir ] [ --lame_preset name[,fast] ]
[ -g wxh ] [ --import_asr C ] [ --export_asr C ]
[ --export_par N,D ] [ --keep_asr ] [ -f rate[,frc] ]
[ --export_fps f[,c] ] [ --export_frc F ] [ --hard_fps ]
[ -o file ] [ -m file ] [ -y vmod[,amod] ] [ -F codec ]
[ --avi_limit N ] [ --avi_comments F ] [ -d ]
[ -s g[,c[,f[,r]]] ] [ -u m[,n] ] [ -A ] [ -V ] [ --uyvy ]
[ --use_rgb ] [ -J f1[,f2[,...]] ] [ -P flag ] [ -D num ]
[ --av_fine_ms t ] [ -M mode ] [ -O ] [ -r n[,m] ]
[ -B n[,m[,M]] ] [ -X n[,m[,M]] ] [ -Z wxh[,fast] ]
[ --zoom_filter str ] [ -C mode ] [ --antialias_para w,b ]
[ -I mode ] [ -K ] [ -G val ] [ -z ] [ -l ] [ -k ]
[ -j t[,l[,b[,r]]] ] [ -Y t[,l[,b[,r]]] ]
[ --pre_clip t[,l[,b[,r]]] ] [ --post_clip t[,l[,b[,r]]] ]
[ -w b[,k[,c]] ] [ --video_max_bitrate ]
[ -R n[,f1[,f2]] ] [ -Q n[,m] ] [ --divx_quant min,max ]
[ --divx_rc p,rp,rr ] [ --divx_vbv_prof N ]
[ --divx_vbv br,sz,oc ] [ -c f1-f2[,f3-f4] ] [ -t n,base ]
[ --dir_mode base ] [ --frame_interval N ] [ -U base ]
[ -T t[,c[-d][,a]] ] [ -W n,m[,file] ]
[ --cluster_percentage use ] [ --cluster_chunks a-b ]
[ -S unit[,s1-s2] ] [ -L n ] [ --import_v4l n[,id] ]
[ --pulldown ] [ --encode_fields ] [ --nav_seek file ]
[ --psu_mode ] [ --psu_chunks a-b ] [ --no_split ]
[ --ts_pid 0xnn ] [ --a52_drc_off ] [ --a52_demux ]
[ --a52_dolby_off ] [ --print_status N[,r] ]
[ --progress_off ] [ --color N ] [ --write_pid file ]
[ --nice N ] [ --accel type ] [ --socket file ]
[ --dv_yuy2_mode ] [ --config_dir dir ] [ --ext vid,aud ]
[ --export_prof S ] [ -q level ] [ -h ] [ -v ]
Makes you want to do something else, doesn't it? Like lie down and forget the whole thing.
Posted by Mark at 03:52 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
December 15, 2005
Gmail timing out
Not sure why, but I'm having regular trouble getting through to Gmail from home the last couple of weeks. Firefox waits and waits, then times out. Ping's okay:
$ ping gmail.google.com PING gmail.l.google.com (72.14.205.107) 56(84) bytes of data. 64 bytes from 72.14.205.107: icmp_seq=1 ttl=239 time=167 ms 64 bytes from 72.14.205.107: icmp_seq=2 ttl=239 time=167 ms--- gmail.l.google.com ping statistics ---
2 packets transmitted, 2 received, 0% packet loss, time 1000ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 167.005/167.055/167.105/0.050 ms
$
Maybe I should Google for the answer? (Update: "gmail not responding" first hit is for a mail Subject: slapd not responding to sasl_bind. Hmm.)
Posted by Mark at 10:28 PM | TrackBack
December 12, 2005
Quick slideshow, part II
Quick slideshow, but not too quick. I decided just to guess at the number of frames to hold each photo. Five, about 5 photos/sec, was too quick. Half that fast is okay for us. We have lots of duplicates. Laziness gave me this:
#!/bin/bash
for item in `ls ${1}/dsc[0-9]*.jpg`
do
convert $item /tmp/`basename ${item} .jpg`.ppm
done
rm /tmp/list.photos
touch /tmp/list.photos
for j in `ls /tmp/*.ppm`
do
for i in 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
do
echo $j >> /tmp/list.photos
done
done
cat /tmp/list.photos | xargs -n1 cat | ppmtoy4m | mpeg2enc -o $2.m1v
I wonder if it's worth rewriting for configurability. Takes longer to run the script than to write it. The first MPEG compilation is diane.m1v (16 MB).
Posted by Mark at 09:42 PM | TrackBack
Over to bash at work
Switched my default shell to bash last week. For quite a while I've been using tcsh at work, bash at home. Wonder why I was doing that. Must've been something about what was installed by default.
Posted by Mark at 10:51 AM | TrackBack
December 11, 2005
Quick slideshow?
For each of the children, we have a bunch of JPEG photos all the same size, taken with the camcorder.
I found some doc on how to convert JPEG to MPEG, and wrote a short conversion script. (All the photos start with "dsc")
#!/bin/bash
for item in `ls ${1}/dsc*.jpg`
do
convert $item /tmp/`basename ${item} .jpg`.ppm
done
ls /tmp/*.ppm | xargs -n1 cat | ppmtoy4m | mpeg2enc -o mpegfile.m1v
Trouble is, this is one image per frame of the MPEG. At that rate it's just a mess. Is there a trick to slowing it down? Just cat each image a few times?
Posted by Mark at 05:36 PM | TrackBack
December 08, 2005
DSL eligibility
Tested our telephone lines at DegroupTest.com. Their tests show the same results as what I've seen in the past, which is that France Telecom can give us nothing better than 512Kb. 58.76 dB attenuation on both lines, each 5202 meters from the hookup.
The sys admins at work are still suggesting Free.fr instead of France Telecom, mainly because Free's pushed the DSL envelope lots harder than France Telecom. Pierre says Free's starting to introduce 100Mb lines in metropolitan areas. The pricing seems to be identical. Maybe I'll go ahead.
Posted by Mark at 08:18 PM | TrackBack
December 02, 2005
Public beta, part II
Gmail's unavailable, and has been for the past hour. Cannot get to Google.com either. Not sure what the deal is, nor am I going to waste my time trying to figure it out.
The other glitch right now is with the printer under Ubuntu. From 5.04 it prints images from Firefox, no problem. From 5.10, it doesn't. The stuff in syslog looks like this:
Dec 2 21:10:16 localhost kernel: [4295502.794000] drivers/usb/class/usblp.c: usblp0: nonzero read/write bulk status received: -110 Dec 2 21:10:16 localhost kernel: [4295502.797000] drivers/usb/class/usblp.c: usblp0: error -110 reading printer status
Something Google.fr took me to at LinuxQuestions.org suggests I should try /etc/init.d/hotplug restart.
Posted by Mark at 09:32 PM | TrackBack
November 29, 2005
How to lower unemployment
As everyone knows, but nobody says out loud, the primary mission of the French ANPE is to reduce the numbers of people registered as unemployed... by whatever means necessary. Basically the most difficult way of getting you out of the stats is finding you a job, so they don't try to do that. It's considerably easier to eliminate you by having you jump through silly bureaucratic hoops until you give up or get eliminated for getting caught up in one of the hoops.
Nathalie worked 7 hours this month. That's not yet enough for her to be completely off the roll. So the first thing they tried, since they know from the information they required earlier that she's a mother of three children who are at home all Wednesday, was to set up a mandatory meeting in the middle of a Wednesday. They claim it's impossible to change the meeting time once it's arranged. By definition you are not employed, so therefore your schedule is wide open. They don't even have to ask you before requiring your presence at a certain time.
Another way they get you is to make it technically difficult to get the papers you must have in order to prove that you jumped through the useless hoops. Assedic.fr has some unpleasant features, such as a useless pop-up on the cover page that Firefox of course blocks by default, and scrolling text that gets garbled in Firefox. If you're out of work on the dole but want to be able to use the site, you still have to pay the Microsoft tax.
But they outdo themselves on the page that handles getting a version of the monthly declaration you need to avoid getting thrown off the list. You do your declaration online, then they generate a PDF for your printing. Unfortunately neither Adobe Acrobat nor