Older blog entries for jmg (starting at number 50)

raph and dto: The X Windows system definately needs to be brought up to todays standards. But the design is significantly better than you think. One think that isn't exploited very much is the fact that you can have the X server to YUV instead of RGB. The problem is that many X servers don't support the extension.

Adding transparency shouldn't be hard at all. It's just adding an alpha channel to the window. X already has the windowing layering, so you simply definate how transparent the current window is, and there you go!

What really needs to have happened is to have X grow extensions to support effecient 2D acceleration. One really useful feature would be the ability to create a block of memory that you can modify in your local environment. Then using the pipe, you pass a reference to the memory to the Xserver (or kernel space if we ever get X in there) and then the graphics card adds it to the list of windows to be rendered. This would make effecient MPEG playing really cheap as you simply define a window the YUV encoding, and tell the Xserver to display that window. Then you get all the clipping and YUV to RGB conversion that the video card does. You may have to go backwards where the Xlib gives you a frame buffer, but it still isn't hard.

The real problem is that we haven't seen anybody champion an effort to add modern features to the Xserver. It would also be nice to stick the Xserver in the kernel (yeh, I know some of you will scream fowl), but the performance improvement should be tremendous. Even with modern workstations, you get a nice performance boost if you run the application on one machine (like a 440Mhz Ultra 10) and display it on another machine (like a G3 running MacOS). It simply comes down to the fact that you suddenly have two processors instead of one. One is dedicated to running the application, and the other is dedicated to displaying the results.

X should be brought into the 21st century.

nymia: Don't forget someone still has to write the new compilers and implement the assemblers for new processors. Assembly will never be dead, just few people will have a use for it.

GJF: New Zeland is more 1st world than 3rd world. I thought that 3rd, 2nd and 1st was just a line of econmic developement, but according to Merriam-Webster, 2nd world contries are those associated with Communism. (Darn it, m-w using post instead of get!). After visiting New Zeland earlier this year, the econmic situation is quite nice. I only spent about NZ$300 in cash while I was there as I could use my Visa Check card for almost all of my purcases. This included most meals. Most cash was spent on internet cafe's and transportation.

Uraeus: That only works if you can get ahold of the person you'd like to spend time with. I reciently had to call it quits with a recient (non-romanic) relationship because she just couldn't take any time out of her life to actually maintain some semblense of a relationship. She tells me which weekend would be best for her, and then is to busy to even remeber the correct date, let along call/tell me that she'd be busy that weekend. Constantly fighting a battle isn't worth it, and could possibly be why I haven't felt like doing much computer work the last two years.

Reading the "I Don't Like Your Examples! article raph posted is so true. At least he has the guts to defend his possition and not take the easy way out.

Probably shouldn't of spent so much time on this diary entry. Guess I'm just avoiding have to spend more time documenting the new hardware tool wrapper scheme that I have written for Credence Systems. I did a presentation to the people here in Hillsboro on it, and they like it. I just presented what I have done and they were like, ok, sounds good, can we do this with it? At least I did about double the size of the documentation, but there is so much to document. The documentation will probably end up being larger than all the shell scripts!

I have been thinking about a new revision control system. Really want to make something liker perforce, but behave on a WAN scale, so a developer can "import" my tree for libmime into his, and be able to "branch" the code and submit changes back to me, and be able to integrate any changes/bug fixes that I make.

After a discussion last week about documentation, I have been writing a design spec/paper for it. It really is true that you need to make sure you know exactly the problem you are solving before you start on the project, You just might get side tracked on the way. I was lucky with the hardware tools wrapper project as that one is pretty easy to fit in my head. Though I would of done better (not wasted as many hours) had I done a design document. It was just that I already had a better idea of what the tool environment should look like than my manager, that my manager just finally gave up and let me run with it. Thanks to the people from Racyer Graphics (now at Apple Computer) for inspiring my work. If I hadn't worked with their environment, I would of never been able to design this one and improve upon it.

Hopefully my trip the Australia will help get me back to being more sane. I was about to say caring about work, but why should I? If I want to travel and goof off, that's fine. I don't need to love work, I'm just lucky that I'm in an industry that pays well enough that I can save up to do an international trip in six months or so.

Hmmmm, long enough diary entry? I just had to add something to make it longer, didn't I?

nymia: Regarding your research on various file formats. The .com is simply a binary image that is loaded at 0x100 and jumps there to start execution. The first 0x100 is used for command line and other information. I would recommend you take a look at Ralph Brown's Interrupt List for more information. That was a very usefull place to find data structure for .exe's among others. I have an old printed copy of something very similar from Microsoft Press, but the book is at home. As for a.out and elf, take a look at any unix box for a.out.h and elf.h. FreeBSD has some good man pages on a.out(5) and elf(5).

Last night was interesting. Around 9:30pm the power went out at my apartment. It really sucked as I haven't invested in an UPS. My firewall was up for around 220+ days when the power went out which is impressive considering that other parts of the South Bay (namely Fremont) had massive problems with power outages and brown outs over the past summer. I was also lucky in that I happen to know exactly were my flashlight was under the futon. Made lighting candles easier.

After about a half hour of talking with my neighbors, I decided I might as well do something, so I headed off to a local bar to have a few drinks. They didn't have any Marzen in stock which sucked. But I made it through the night.

I got home and my main server hadn't rebooted because of fsck problems on the file system. I had to do a fsck -y (yeh, I know that is very bad, esspecially when you don't log it) to get things back up and running. I also wasn't sure that my firewall would come back secure, so I made sure that I had turned off my DSL modem before I left. I still don't know, but luckily, I had reciently saved my firewall rules to /etc/firewall.conf, so I just had to reload them. I did have to attach a terminal to my other mini-file server to get that machine up and running. Right now it's a K5-90, but really should be something else. FreeBSD's wdc and the IDE chipset don't like to talk DMA to each other, so I had to disable DMA (which I had done before manually) in order to get it booted. I still haven't added the server file system to fstab because I was originally going to use this hd for test of video capture.

In short, I really need to fix my home network so that it will come back up into a sane state if the power goes out. I'm just really glad I didn't need console access to my firewall, that would of really been anoying.

I'm also excited about going to Australia for a couple weeks. I'm leaving this friday. Hopefully will meet up with Holocaine for a few drinks while I'm in Melbourne. Finally took care of making sure I have a visa for when I arrive. I was nervous when I went to New Zeland because being a US citizen, you don't have to have a visa. You just show up at New Zelands door, and they give you a vistors permit which is good for three months.

I'm going to be taking my digital camera with me on the trip, so I will hopefully to posting photos and diary entries to my Base of Operations while I'm there.

I'm also going to be going up to Hillsboro, OR tomorrow for work. Gotta do a presentation on the hardware tools environment that I've designed to sell the people up there. It shouldn't be to hard, and is somewhat based on the hardware tool environment that I saw at Apple Computer while I was there. This environment is significantly better than Apple's and should be very flexible for the future. It's also extermely easy to wrap a program.

It has been nice keeping my diary up to date.

A while back I finally rented Fight Club to watch. It was definately an interesting movie. The ending was not what I was expecting, though near the begining of the movie, Brad Pitt did a speech that was simlar to a speech he did in 12 Monkeys. I happen to have recorded the 12 Monkeys speech a while back, and so, I had to record the Fight Club speech to and post them. Enjoy! m

Sleep: I have decided that your body knows when it has had enough sleep. That first time you wake up in the morning when you're wide awake is when you should get up. I have been to much in the habit of just going back to sleep instead of waking up. A week or so ago, I decided to do that. The first night I woke up after about four hours of sleep. I went the whole day on that, which was close to 15 hours. Then the next night, I got six hours of sleep. So, just need to get into the habit, and then hopefully I'll only sleep the amount necessary, and be able to get more done.

Yesterday, I meet keichii (aka Michael C. Wu) for the first time yesterday night. He's in town for an interview and BSDCon. dwhite and myself went out to dinner with him. It took us a while to finally find the restraunt that he was talking about. Thanks to GPS we were able to get close to where keichii and his friends were. We ate at this place where you go get your own raw meat and cook it at your table. It was quite interesting. On the way to the restraunt we drove by Quantum. (As part of my log of places I've been by.)

Jick

As for embedding python in HTML, I actually have two programs that do embedding. But work pretty well

The first one I wrote was a combination of lex and C. The total size is:

      19      50     404 Makefile
      74     148    1317 main.c
      29      92     591 parse.l
     122     290    2312 total

Though it's larger than it should be because of some work in main.c to make sure that having the binary suid is safe. Yes, that actually DOES work, check out WoHo! for an example. Pretty impressive what you can do with lex. I was also working on a WebMail client using this.

The second version that I wrote is in python and I have hacks to handle having html text stradling the python statement. This I wrote by converting the text between python statements into sys.stdio.write statements, and then running the resulting program. This has some cool features in that you could write the byte code compiled version to a file, and then just run that instead of having to reinterpet and parse the file again. Ahh, I had stated that I couldn't find it, but now I have!

      75     189    1474 newpy.py

I also didn't realize that I had actually added the code that saves the compiled version out to a file.

I know I just wrote an entry, but damn, I just finished watching 8mm. The writter of this movie, also wrote Seven. It's quite distirbing to watch, but also well written. If you have a quesy stomache, these are definately not a movie for you to watch.

I got my fourth strip for my white belt today. Guess I'll be taking the test for my next belt in a couple weeks. It's a shame that I'm going to be leaving for Australia in about 10 days. Hopefully that won't set me back to far. Need to make sure that I continue to practice the two weeks that I'm in Australia so that my muscles don't start to waste away. I need to work on more muscle mass.

Think I might start working on an Imperium clone that is based on a web interface and python. It'll be a bit different from Imperium as it will be real time instead of term/move based, and you'll get to write python scripts to model your units and I plan on implementing communication delays (so you can model runners in really old days), per unit maps (this might be a bit more complex, not sure about this) among other things. Now that we have plenty of space, having db's of 100's of megs isn't that much of an issue.

Last night was fun. I hung out with a friend that I haven't seen in a while. He's down here living in Sunnyvale and isn't to far from dwhite in Mountain View.

Pretty much just went out to dinner, rented a movie (Gun Shy), and then went to work out for a bit. Nothing that exciting.

Hmmm... guess I better post this, I wrote it yesterday, but left it.

The license for HackSDMI sucks. Here's a list of the links after you Agree to the T&C. Enjoy!

You know, it'd be nice to be able to exchange telephone/cell numbers with another car. It'd only work if you both wanted to talk. Then you could really let them know what you think or something. Today drining home from work, this woman cut in front of me with only about 2 ft in front of and behind her. Of course, that's just about the time traffic started speeding up and I switched into the lane she was in, which ended up passing her. So she follows me for a few miles till she finally takes an exit to leave. It would of been interesting, but oh well.

God I'm nasty when I'm drunk. Or at least when I'm in a decient mood and drunk. Just don't cross me, I'll bite your head off!

And why is it that the earth just rocks?

Your anal when you preview a message that consisted of the above?

Oh, now I remeber, I was wondering why in the article posting it removes the </p> from your follow up? what is this? arciace HTML1.0?

dsifry

As far as digital cameras go, I've been happy with my Epson Photo PC800. It's full automatic when you want it (I actually keep it on Program mode where you can adjust some things), and then you can go down to full manual which allows you to adjust exposure levels, apature (2.4 or 8 :( ), shutter speed (1/2 - 1/750 in various increments, or auto), focus point (only 10 levels), and "film speed" (ISO 100, 200 or 400 equiv). It also lets you adjust white balance which is nice. You can turn it off, or have it do auto, or set a custom white balance. Just point it at a white sheet of paper and it will "negate" the lighting condition. The main reason I bought this camera was more the size than anything. It's only slightly larger than a pack of cigerettes (I don't smoke) so you can carry it in your pocket. Of course you can always read more info on Epson's web site. One cool feature I haven't tried is that you can hook it up directly to an Epson printer and print w/o using a computer.

The camera was a bit on the less expensive side of $550 including tax, but that was an open box special at Fry's (ugh). I'm happy now that I've gotten a 64meg CompactFlash card for it.

Oh, one bit of advice, try to go CompactFlash. It's a lot more flexible than the other medias, plus you can get IBM's 1gig CompactFlash hard drive assuming the camera supports such large sizes.