I remember that early DVDs would start into the movie right away. and then, when done would go to the menu. When you insert a DVD you do it, since you want to see the movie. Not because you want to watch all the other crud, like a menu opening that contains key elements of the movie to come, often oddly animated.
The problem with this is, that probably not enough people care. They don’t care about spam, viruses on their computer, their diet either. In turn the quality of the offerings for ‘the general public’ get worse. To the point that they are plain junk in some cases. I read that ‘30 rock’ would be a good show. When I watched some of the first season the other day I was a bit shocked how little I was able to enjoy it. Probably a unique aversion since I don’t watch TV. So my tolerance for mental junk might be a bit different compared to people who spend hours in front of the TV screen.
Naturally my son wanted his own computer. He is 11 so isn’t it a birth right to have one? I only pointed to a stack of parts, being left overs from some upgrades and told that he could have one if we can put it together himself. He looked and me with this “Dad, I love you, but wtf is wrong with you + and what on earth have I done to deserve to be treated like this” look. He actually said “But I am eleven years old”. My reply was “yes, you are eleven years old”.
After a couple of days he realized that that I was serious about what I had said. Funny, since the previous 11 years might have given him a hint about that one. So he got the parts out. Had a good look at them, connected them in a way that made sense, connected them wrong, cursed, cried (of course not), asked questions and he ended up with:
I gave him a hand to put things in a case and everybody was happy.
But wait, there is the Internet, there is an eleven year old boy. An awesome one. But still!
I have not seen any software that would be able to protect my child from all the rotten stuff that is a couple clicks away on the internet.
The solution that we came up with works better I think. I explained my worries to him. He understood. I asked him if it would be
OK if I would look at where he goes at the net. He had no issues with that. Since Firefox stores visited URLs in sqlite and he
naturally runs an ubuntu machine this was easy to do. Each day that he used his computer I get an email from it that shows me
what he has been up to. He is totally aware of that and does not mind at all. And I never had anything to worry about.
Today was the first time that I saw in the end of such an email:
Which helps me quiet a great deal in what I have to do. Nice to see gmail getting better. With Buzz and Wave being what they are it became en vogue to bash google. It is nice to see that they continue to add nice features as well.
Which happened to bring them high in the google search results for “facebook login”.
Then facebook did a re design. I didn’t notice much difference. But some people got confused and looked for the “facebook login” on google. And as we all know
clicking on the first result is what one should do (not). Enough people were so convinced that what they actually saw was facebook they got very mad and left comments in this direction.
Two things become apparent:
Everybody has computers now. And I mean everybody.
And many people delegate everything (including their thinking) to google.
I really like this. Also because it gets to show that we take too much junk in the -after all- man made environment around us for granted.
Boarding passes right now have a format that looks like a computer punch card, which came into being in that size since dollar bills in the days of Mr. Hollerith where that big.
So your boarding pass does not fit anywhere because people used to pay with paper money of that size more than 120 years ago …
While we are at it: The airlines could get an image from me, since I am frequent flier. Then they could super impose it over a QR Code and add a check sum.
An optical scan would reveal instantly if that boarding pass would actually BE for me. Quick: Go and patent that. It might be worth your time. I am busy with other
stuff and would just be happy to see better boarding passes. Among a couple of other things.
via Eric Alba, who referenced passfail where Davin Yoon’s design can be found in the bottom of the page.
Adding more machines for INTERDUBS. They get tested, triaged and configured for a ridiculous long time. That way once they are production machines they do only one thing: Run.
We experimented with benchmarking the performance effects of SELinux. As we expected it is not worth disabling. But now we know. We also know something we should have known: Enabling SELinux again on a bigger file system will make the next reboot take forever. Hours. Of course it makes sense, since all files will have to be relabeled.
As we are running slowly out of IP addresses addresses are being used that were deemed to be reserved. This wouldn’t be the internet if this would go smooth. See pollutions in 1/8 for the details (thanks David for the hint).
Turns that out that 1.1.1.1 and 1.2.3.4 and not so awesome choices for an IP. Others thought so before.
Often I work with a couple of shells simultaneously in the same directory. One may be the editor with a program in it, and the other one running it.
When I add the following lines to .bashrc
alias sd='pwd > /tmp/ddd'
alias d='cd `cat /tmp/ddd`; pwd'
I just need to type ’sd’ (for Set Directory) in a shell that is already in the right directory. When I then log in with the other shell a simple ‘d’ gets me where the other shell already is. Extra benefit: When I want to continue where I was last I just type ‘d’ again. Just a little thing. But the world is made out of little things. Lots and lots of them.
When using via the wrtg54 ssh connections timed out after a while.
Which is was mildly annoying. The problem that with mildly annoying things is they are mildly annoying.
So one does not go and fix them soon enough. In this case it was terribly easy to cure errors like:
Read from remote host 1.2.3.4: Connection reset by peer
Connection to 1.2.3.4 closed.
All that it needed was to create a file called .ssh/config in the home directory and add something like these lines:
ServerAliveInterval 60
ServerAliveCountMax 5000
Nice that it didn’t require any changes on the other end.
Over the last years I accumulated quiet a bit of mail in Gmail. It works, and I find it very inspiring to see its features grow while I keep all my data. But I also grew worried: What would happen if my mail should go away? I have paid google exactly zero for keeping all my email. There would be nothing I could do.
Turns out that it is possible to make a copy. Googles own Matt Cutts described it well
I found that these getmail parameters worked well for me:
[retriever]
type = SimpleIMAPSSLRetriever
server = imap.gmail.com
username = EMAIL@gmail.com
password = PASSWORD
mailboxes = ("[Gmail]/All Mail",)
[destination]
user = getmail
type = Maildir
path = /root/.getmail/
It took a while. Actually days. It seems that you only get mail out at a slow data rate. Then there is a bandwidth limit. getmail failed after a while with:
Just waiting a couple of hours took care of this. Having had the mail not backed up for 5 years it was quiet alright to wait 5 hours.
Another error occured with 5 mails. Getmail for instance would end with:
getmailOperationError error (IMAP error (command FETCH ('3049', '(RFC822)') returned NO))
And it would do so repeatedly with the same number. I assumed that something had gone awry with those mails. After pretending that the mail already had been retrieved via the oldmail-imap file getmail soldiered on.
Tragically at some point my connection went away. I had downloaded around 120,000 mails during that session.
Getmail updates the oldmail-imap file only when done (or cancelled via ctrl-C). So the next time it started I went to download the same mails again.
Even with that glitch things worked out. And I feel pretty good about having a copy of my mail now.
Having a secure copy of your data is never a bad idea.
Since more than 25 years I write computer programs. Writing some information to a file for later use is a very common thing. It worked (most of the time). But it never felt right. Common up with a format, creating a writer and a parser. All that can be done. Rather mundane. Finally I switched to using sqlite for this kind of thing. And this feel right. It works. And will just cover 99% of all cases were I have used “fopen” in the past. One of the things that I like about coding for a living is that it keeps getting better. Not me, that’s for sure, but the tools. And that almost makes up for the natural decline in raw brain power.
In the right hands you can make some very compelling images with a camera body that retails around 2.700 $US.
I had hopes that miniDV would spawn new content, due to the leap in quality of the recording technology. It didn’t work out that way.
I am hoping again that the 5D Mark II and similar devices do that.
At least wedding videos will look better than they used to.
Back in the day an electron beam was running across the TV screen. NTSC was running with 30 and PAL with 25 frames a second. If the beam would go line by line the screen would flicker. The solution was, to let it run twice over the screen for each frame: Once for all odd lines (1,3,5 etc) and then again for all the even ones (2,4,6). That looked better. It is called ‘interlaced’. Each of these passes is a ‘field’.
Film cameras liked to run at 24 frames per second. Cinema does not flicker since each frames is shown twice, but that is not the point here.
When you have 24 fps footage and your TV runs at 30fps, what do you do? The solution was to insert a so called 3:2 pulldown to make 30 frames out of 24. This was done based on 60 fields to make it look smooth.
Interlacing is dead. There are no electron beams going over glass tubes to make images to speak of.
If you like to compress an NTSC spot that was shot on film, and that has the 3:2 pulldown in it, then you should go back to the 24fps version first. Since I could not find anything that worked I developed this. In 1998. Then, in 2008, I needed it again, and so I looked again. Much to my surprise, nothing really worked the way it should be. Many tools have the button to do an ‘inverse telecine’. But none detect cuts and deal with changing cadence patterns. So, I wrote it again. This time based on quicktime.
I decided to give it away: 32none is a free tool now.
For instance. you send / forward an email to tomorow@replylater.com
and it will send it back to you tomorrow.
Google should buy replylater.com and make this an internal feature of gmail. They don’t need to technically. It would be just a nice acknowledgment.
My project management is much based around email. At any point I have between ten and thirty projects going in the same time. And I need my head for something else, then to keep them all in there.
With a mail based workflow it is actually pretty easy to juggle so many things. replylater.com just adds a wonderful time dimension to it.
I have a couple Google Voice invites left. So far it has been working amazing. For instance do we route our 24/7 support number through it, and forward it to different people depending on the time of the day. That way people are awake when they answer. Google Voice has numerous other nice features. And best of all, they work very reliably.
If you like to get one of those invites then please get in touch.
The compute power you see here can be replaced by one or two racks today. For maybe a tenth of the price. I used to know my way around SGI hardware, Irix, OpenGL a little bit. I think it was patch number 1508 that brought me over to the US. Or was it 1805?
None of that matters in the slightest bit any longer. The 7 billion Dollars that SGI had in market cap at one point completely evaporated. The glorious campus they built is still in use today: Google picked it up.
In some areas technology moves forward so fast, that the outdated components still far away from the their own end of life.This can be good and bad. Some people have warehouses full of Onyx2s. Not so good. I happen to have lots of disk drives. Pretty good. I would not rely on those drives for anything critical, but having more drives to rotate the personal Backups for instance is never a bad thing.
A batch of those drives was connected via a 3ware card before. It turns out that both Ubuntu’s installer as well as OS X disk utility have troubles with those drives. They will recognize them, but partitioning will stall with OS X. At least ubuntu will display an error message. It displays an I/O error during the creation of the swap partition.
I would think that this is a feature: Getting drives accidentally confused will not lead to you loosing your array, since -as a civillian- your attempts to harm the 3ware drives will fail. The fix was straight forward: I just connected the drives to the 3ware card and ‘deleted’ the array that was supposed be on them.
With INTERDUBS growing in the US solidly it was time to start to add another dimension to its growth. It is an interesting experience to go through the same motions again. Just on a different continent. Luckily we found a great data center partner. It is pretty cool these days that one can get a virtual test server within minutes. Of course we are building real machines again for the real install. After some research we found some great vendors: ISP Proshop served us extremely well for cases, cables and the like. We found that Alternate.de has very decent inventory in terms of high end server parts.
Some observations along the way:
Calling a vendor can mean that they already have your order on their screen. Before they pick up the phone (after the 1st ring). Caller-ID plus decent software makes this possible.
Ordering parts it can happen that they arrive 16 hours after you did so. Standard shipping. 5 Euros.
Payment is done electronically. Online, bank account to bank account. Securely, since you have a little key generating device. And no credit company sits in the middle, getting their 3 percent, just because banks didn’t get their act together.
Prices are horribly high. Almost 20% tax on top of things.
Another drawback: If you are fond of those plastic packing chips (who isn’t) you will come up empty. Crumpled recycled card board works just as well it seems.
For years now there have been gmail keyboard shortcuts. Finally enabled them. After 2 hours I can not wait to get more email so that I can handle it without reaching for the mouse. Extremely awesome.
Dennis Baron’s book “A Better Pencil” does not only has a nice title, but going by this Salon Interview it seems to well worth the read.
I tend to disagree with him when he proclaims:
And the funny thing is that you could put anything out there, and somebody is going to read it.
I think there is an awful lot of things that get written today and that will never be read. And not only on Twitter. We tend to apply the existing rules, concepts and understandings for way to long. Cars looked as if you were to put a horse in front of them for way to long. In the past if something got written then it indeed got read. Varying audience. But since publication cost was significant filters on many levels made sure that it was recoverable.
Now publication cost is zero. Yet, we still assume that we publish it and they will view it. This does no longer apply, since their is simply not enough readership to go around.
The corpus of unread things we cared to write is not a bad thing in itself. If we were aware then it would regulate itself.
The error of an assumed audience becomes expensive when you pour resources into something that will never find an audience that justifies the efforts that went into it. That video that you crafted so nicely for your company was not worth it when only a couple hundred people will ever watch it. Company websites cost sometimes 5 dollars or more per visitor. A visitor that most of the time will have forgotten about it after 2 seconds.
