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.
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.
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.
So I wrote a script that will save me a minute. I pretty much assumed that I wrote it, just because I like writing code, and this task was just something that fit into the timeslot before dinner. I chalked up the twenty minutes it took as wasted time. Others check Facebook, I write a script that can be done before the next thing on the schedule.
As i said this one will only save a minute. But it will do so every day. Still no big deal, I thought. But -funny as it goes- it finished it a minute early, so I came to realize that I will have saved six hours after a year. Yes, in my head it takes takes 60 seconds to compute 365 / 60. Anyway: after two years I get one more day in Hawaii. That’s actually not bad at all for something squeezed in before dinner.
It also gets to show how bad we are actually in estimating what the impact our actions is. I didn’t start out to save a work day in two years. I simply had twenty minutes to fill and a repeating task that could be sped up. Guess I got lucky. Again.
“It usually takes about 12 to 18 months to build a new center,” she said. “We’re cutting that down to less than a year.”
from a NY Times article about Microsoft and Google and their respective data center operations.
It is interesting that after years in corporate culture people start saying this kind of thing and feel that there is nothing wrong with it.
The article poses the question whether google benefits from looking at each level of the technology stack and inventing where needs are. It does not come to a conclusive answer. I think it is rather obvious: Google was able to reduce its capex spending simply when it felt oppotune to do so. To my knowledge and own experience there hasn’t been any noticeable impact on the Google useability by this reduction in spending. I would guess google simple turned down the pace innovation while the influx of new equipment was slowing.
On a -in comparison- microscopic scale I experience the benefits of looking at the entire technology stack first hand. Part of what runs INTERDUBS is of the shelve, and other parts are enhanced, customized and severely optimized. Some we even actually build ourselves. We constantly look at the running service and identify room for improvement. Be it, in the user experience, or how efficient internals work. Having an understanding of the entire system on all levels lets us identify clearly where enhancements should be made. Each of these steps might only add a couple of percentage points. Having metrics and detailed information about all aspects of the system at all times not only give us visibility into which areas are to be tunesd and enchanced next. It also reveals, that all those little optimizations add up into a configuration ,that is faster by dimensions than the un-altered and generic one would have been.
Having this culture of change and constant optimization is allot of fun. I was plain scared having to do this on live data and a running service. But the goal was that INTERDUBS is available 24/7. And it turns out that technology - used in the right way - is able to do this now. It is literally flying the airplane and rebuilding it in the same time. You start in LA in a 707 and land in New York on a A380.
On Amazon some TV shows I wanted to buy are cheaper in Blu-Ray now than they are on DVD. So I got a Panasonic DMP-DB 60 player. When the disk is already in the player it takes 2 minutes before it starts playing. Then there are another 2 minutes of commercials that can not be skipped.
In other words on a good day I clean up 15 balls from a pool table faster than the time it takes between hitting play and starting to watch a DVD.
Newspapers used to run things. They used to be everywhere. In Paris a couple of weeks ago I realized at some point that we had not seen anybody reading a paper. Even books were rare. It was not only a sudden but also a complete change of habits.
I think we have no actual idea what this means and will mean for the future. Technology develops in a certain pace determined by the problems to be solved and the momentum and financial interests behind it. Peoples use and application thereof is a completely different story.
In hindsight things seem to make sense. But actually only if you choose to ignore facts that don’t fit the pattern. Texting for instance, now a billion dollar revenue stream for cellphone carriers, was never intended to be used by people. It was considered a byproduct of some engineering mode for cell phones.
The invention of the Kinetoscope preceded the existence of movies as we know them by more than a decade.
Technology for pre - internet media was unable to adopt. It took great efforts to shoe-horn color into black and white TV signals. 35mm was the dominantly width in use of film strips used in movies as long as movies existed, and before they became digital.
The internet connects mostly computers with each other. This simple fact puts it into its own league as far as media technology is concerned. MySpace goes and Twitter comes at break neck speed. Limited only by peoples imagination and their willingness to adopt.
Trying to apply mechanisms and rules from ‘old media’ in the Internet space will be as successful as the applications of lessons learned from WW1 was helpful to France when they felt save behind the Maginot line.
Finally I canceled my TWC cable modem connection. About the only thing that is good about Time Warner Cable is that you can cancel it at any time. When the connection worked it was pretty decent. Problem was, that I had regularly a ping loss of 10-20% during the evening and on the weekend. Which makes the connecion useless. In the last weeks I went along with everything that TWC suggested. They swapped the cable modem. Which was pointless since the packages were were dropped inside of their network. Basically they were unable to address the issue within 6 weeks. Their support knows a couple of routines and motions they can go through. Anything that falls outside of that will not be addressed it seems. No escallation. Overall their “Level 3″ support gave me the impression, and the evidence of the problem not getting addresses within 6 weeks supports that, that they do not understand the network that they are responsible for. Getting rid of the connection was the only option. Too bad, since during the 20 hours a day that it usually worked it was actually fine.
Original quote from Timewarner Cable support yesterday after trying to troubleshoot a connection issue for 40 minutes.
Bonus points when dealing with an institution as stupid as that: Figuring out the pattern of the special “access PIN” numbers for the Level 3 phone support after having received a couple of those. Let me know if you need one. And make sure to know if you run that OS that is obsolete since 1999.
In 2007 GM lost $4,589 on each car they sold, in 2008 $4,670. Imagine any GM car, then remove things from it that cost four and a half grand*. This is the car you would get when would try not to loose money on making them. What do you care? Well you should, since next week you will probably own GM. And their losses will (continue to) come out of our (tax) pocket.
* OK, I got those numbers from the Internet and did the division myself, so all sorts of things could be wrong here. And you can also put back about one thousand dollar worth of parts into your imaginary Escalade: That’s what gets spend on marketing to convince you to buy the thing. How about a spare tire, seatbelts, a radio and a fan on the passenger side?
An interesting collection of more or less vague ‘cloud sizes’. My guess is that most of these machines are no longer specialized hardware or workstations. Explains why Sun -for instance- is having such a hard time. Once you scale well in software and do handle hardware failures in that layer too there is really no need for expensive irons. I wonder how many of those large footprint installs run Windows like operating systems.
Having seen meme’s come and go together with their tools I am extremely neutral on any new technology that comes up. Does not stop me from seeing if it could be useful.
As usual I try and then see what happens. Easier to ‘do’ and then see instead of having endless evaluations and discussions about something.
Four days of intense work for less than a percent of improvement sounds not like a great use of my time. But I am actually very happy about the outcome: I was able to increase the success rate of clip meta data detection in INTERDUBS by 0.8%. This is great since it went up from 98.8% to 99.6%. Or looking at it from the other end: two third of all flawed detections were and will be corrected with the improved code. One of the benefits of having 100,000s of clips online is to be able run simulations and stats while improving the code. There is a wide variety in what people like to use as their encoding and file format. I’d rather do some more -invsible- work on the backend than to lecture my clients on how exactly they should encode their files. There are recommendations. Sure. But why fail if you don’t have to?
Even though this application of Grubers Broken Windows is seemingly invisible, in the end it certainly is not: A well running system just needs less support per client. Actually so far I was able to decrease the total time spent on support. Despite the fact that the client based tripled last year.
an OS X server got unhappy and seemingly did hang on bootup on the gray screen with the rotating ‘progress’ indicating.
Booting it with text mode enabled (holding command V) revealed that the machine would loop with the following error message snippets:
posix_spawnp ... /usr/sbin/mDNSresponder ... no such file or directory
ls -lsd /
0 drwxrwxr-t 43 root admin 1530 Dec 20 03:57 /
Booting into single mode (command -s) and then doing the suggested fsck and mount -uw / revealed that the permissions actually were set to:
drwwrx---
Meaning that others have not even read permissions. This makes the mDNSresponder seemingly unhappy. I would guess that it quickly gives away its root privileges after launch for security reason. Running what the internet suggested
I have no idea why, and it os most likely me. But traveling with the same user to another laptop .exrc stopped being looked at for vi. Strange. .vimrc still works. So I put my settings in there and continued to work. Not sure what’s going on. Not time to investigate.
So now I am on laptop number 5 ( Titanium, 12″ G4, 15″ G4, iBook G4, 15″ first gen Macbook Pro) and I am considering to get a second one to put it away so that I can keep on using this kind of machine once I have worn this one out. Storing a computer for 4 years before you use it for the first time is a stupid thing. I still consider it. Apple might have peaked with this machine.
I got a refurb Al 17″ (pre unibody) and it works like a dream. It’s non glossy 1920×1200 screen is gorgeous. Hey even the trackpad works, and the keyboard is a match to the fingers. All things I didn’t like about the unibody flavor. And the price is pretty sweet for a 4GB Ram (nice one) 300GB drive machine I paid $2100.
Being able to drive a 30″ screen and the better sound of the built in speakers are other benefits that I did not consider but certainly appreciate. And the thing is cool. The 15″ was heating my fingers. But only when it was cold. I hope this gfx card lasts longer than the one in the machine before.
Downtime happens. And it is not pretty. But science can help. And all science starts with data. That is why I monitor how sites like INTERDUBS are availabe to their users. A company that shall remain unnamed was down for four hours this morning, which made me wonder how everybody is doing. I also wanted to play with Google Charts a bit more.
Accumulated downtime since April 2008. Less is better:
Congratulations to Adbeast for being clearly better. I am happy about the second place in this case. It is hard to derive the user experience of outages just based on this one measure. It very well mayb be that the customers of Competitor A - C are also happy with how things are going for them.
In anyway I also feel good in light of thise data about offering 99.999% uptime guarantees with a full months money back.
Update March 2009:
It turned out that I probed a static page for Adbeast. So the praise that I would have loved to give is somewhat unjustified. At this point it is early to tell how the real content pages rank. So far they are much less stable INTERDUBS though. Which is almost a shame: Nobody beliefs a statistic that makes the author of the statistic the clear winner …
I have no freaking clue what I am doing. So be careful just following this blindly.
When I initially googled for this issue I did not find this specific solution:
When tried to install vsftpd.2.0.7 from source on a centos 5.2 64 bit machine I get the error:
sysdeputil.c:162: error: expected declaration specifiers or '...' before 'capset'
Followed by allot of similar errors. I was able to address this by
yum install libcap-devel.x86_64
At which point the linker complained:
/lib/libcap.so.1: could not read symbols: File in wrong format
I had to actually commend out the line
locate_library /lib/libcap.so.1 && echo "/lib/libcap.so.1";
in vsf_findlibs.sh. After that it compiled and seemed work.
Since I don’t watch TV just some DVDs I was quiet happy with the decent Sony Tube thing making the pictures. Yesterday I wandered over to the the going out of business sale public viewing of Circuit City. Which I can not recommend: 10% off all items that have not been marked down already. And the staff is as motivated as it was in the last year when it’s own purpose seemed to have been to avoid customers.
Standing in front of a panasonic 50″ with 720p and 1080p I was wondering if I should spend $1100 or $1500. I did do the right thing: Not getting either. Of course the store feeds the screens crappy std-def TV signals. But it made me curious. This week I also had another look on a specific 65″ 720p panasonic plasma from 2005. And subjectively a blue-ray DVD looked great.
I collected a couple of resolutions of devices and aligned with viewing distances. My conclusion is that a 50″ with 720p is more than enough: In order to be able to experience the higher resolution of the 1080p device I would need to sit ridiculously close to it. Even a 65″/1080p would have move me much closer than I usually watch in order to match resolutions that I am accustomed to and experience subjectively as a good picture. That -of course- will not stop vendors to make 1080p 42″ devices. And people will buy them as much as they bought cameras based on their megapixels years after more megapixels actually meant better images.
So I am roaming Craigslist now for 720p plasmas as big as possible. I will loose out on the improvements in plasma pixel technology (live, contrast ratio, coating). But I certainly don’t need to wast any money on a 1080p since they simply don’t make them big enough. Maybe I should get a projector after all …
Just too bad that Verzion isn’t. So I think I could use FiOS. The Verizon website however has a problem with the address that I happen to have. A message then claims that I could call to find out if Fios is available. Calling that number I just go through 5 menus only to be disconnected when the system tries to hand me over to the next station. On the internet that’s called a broken link. I am sure Verizon has spent some money on marketing to make me aware of Fios. They also have spent money to put the actual thing in place. Too bad that they are unable to make a sale since their sales tools just happen to be broken. I guess they need a bail out too pretty soon …
The code management system I wrote for INTERDUBS happens to also count the number of updates that I publish to my clients. It just hit 1,000. Of those about 10-20% were cosmetic updates. Like typos or smaller changes in the html to make things more readable etc. Luckily less than 5% were bug fixes. I code in small chunks and those extensively. And maybe it is also a matter of routine. I hope I know what I am doing, and where changes would jeopardize the system. Of course stating this is inviting trouble. A thousand times I changed the running INTERDUBS. While it was in use by clients and admins. And: nobody ever noticed. Flying the airplane and fixing it. I really love this part of the project: Somebody has an idea. I look at it, and can tell them right away how doable it is, or in the best cases the reply email is as terse as “good idea! done”.
The fast majority of all the good things that came in those 1,000 updates were actually customer ideas. The people using the system know best what they need. It is really great being able to listen to them and to implement what they want.
Syntax coloring in vim is pretty awesome. Comments however are by default blue. A color that is hard to read if you have a black background on a LCD screen.
It turns out that this pretty easy to change. For perl you would simply do:
I had not heard of the monome before. I saw one today and it looks very nice. Could be so much fun. If I’d had the time + skills for it. Still a pretty awesome device.
