Older blog entries for raph (starting at number 332)

28 Mar 2003 (updated 28 Mar 2003 at 06:37 UTC) »
Other blog : Notes on the "Saddam prepares to flee to Syria" hoax
Mandrake 9.1 torrent

If you want the Mandrake 9.1 ISOs:

Joining the torrent is especially appreciated if you have good bandwidth and are not behind a NAT. In the early phases of the torrent, downloads will be a little slow (20kB/s), but it should pick up in a couple of hours. If you can leave your BitTorrent application open even after the download is complete, that would help even more.

Feel free to spread the word; the more people who join the torrent, the better it goes.

This can be seen as a trial run for the RedHat 9 ISO release.

RH 9 torrents

Red Hat has announced that ISO's will be available to paying customers on March 31, and on their public FTP server a week later. I consider this a fabulous opportunity to bring BitTorrent to the public attention by showing what a good job it can do with the hosting. Relying on public mirrors will be frustrating, tedious, and probably slow. BitTorrent can deliver excellent latency, bandwidth, and reliability. Are you interested in helping Bram set this up?

MPEG2 interlacing

graydon wrote me with a link to the MPEG2 work of Billy Biggs. His observations match what I've seen as well.

Billy observes that the interlacing codes on DVD's often don't seem to make much sense. In particular, source frames sometimes get sliced so that a single frame on the DVD interleaves fields from two frames. The main point of the RFF flag is to give enough slack to the encoder so that source frames boundaries and DVD frame boundaries line up.

There are two ways to look at the RFF flag. You could consider it a form of semantic information, identifying for each "picture" (meaning field or frame) whether it's interlaced or not, and if telecined, where the frame boundaries are. Alternatively, you can see the MPEG2 sequence on a DVD as nothing more than a compressed NTSC video source, with 2 fields in each frame, 29.997 fps. In the latter view, what the RFF flag buys you is a better compression rate. Duplicated fields need only get encoded once, and you don't have to DCT-encode frames with lots of high-spatial-frequency interlace patterns. Both help quite a bit.

Yet, DVD's have enough bits on them that most movies don't need to squeeze every last drop out of the compression. Thus, I'd guess that a lot of DVD's get encoded using heuristics to guess the RFF flags. So what if the heuristic gets a few frames wrong? It still plays fine, and hardly makes a dent in the overall compression ratio.

The problem, of course, is when people use the RFF flags for something else other than plain NTSC out. Examples include progressive-scan TV's (becoming popular now), playback to computer monitors, and of course transcoding. There, incorrect RFF flags can cause serious artifacts. Even so, since most DVD's get them mostly right, it's probably reasonable to use them even in these applications.

However, free tools (at least the ones I've seen) don't even do a reasonable job coping with mixed interlacing patterns.

  • transcode, in its default mode, assumes a frame rate of 23.976 fps, and, if the source exceeds that framerate, it drops frames. With incorrect RFF on input, result is motion artifacts.

  • mpeg2dec, in most modes, simply ignores the RFF flag info. Similarly, the "object-y" libvo API has no way to get at the RFF flags. The new "state machine-y" API lets you get at them from the info->display_picture structure.

  • The yuv4mpeg format has no way to represent RFF flag info on the decoded sequence.

  • mpeg2enc, the tool used for most MPEG2 encoding, can only encode at the framerate, or with 3:2 pulldown. It cannot generate a sequence with arbitrary RFF flags.

I have hacked up these tools to provide reasonable pulldown when transcoding to SVCD. I instrumented mpeg2dec to output a file with one byte per frame, containing the RFF and TFF flags. Then, I hacked up mpeg2enc to get its RFF and TFF flags from this file, rather than cycling RFF on:off:on:off as is the standard behavior when the -p (--3-2-pulldown) option is set. The resulting files have good A/V sync and no motion artifacts, but the resulting setup is awkward at best, and when the source contains long runs of 29.997 fps frames, mplex complains of underruns. I set the (compile-time) option to ignore these, though, and the DVD player seems to handle them just fine.

The tools need to get fixed. I'm posting this largely to encourage that. However, it's not easy to just fix the code, as the real problem is in the interface between encoder, decoder, and intermediate processing. These tend to be all separate processes, connected with pipes. If that's going to continue, then the tools need to agree on a way to get pulldown flags into the yuv4mpeg format. The other reasonable approach is to try to knit the modules together as shared libraries rather than pipes. That seems to be the approach taken by OpenShiiva.

Other blog: Indymedia, news.google.com, Balochistan post, Reaching out

Home media

One of the big, huge potential killer apps for free software is to run home media centers, such as the ones that VIA is pushing with their C3 chip. With good support for non-DRM audio and video, and good p2p networking (such as BitTorrent), such a system could be overwhelmingly better than the crippled alternatives put out by mainstream corporations.

To this end, OpenShiiva looks particularly interesting. I haven't tried it yet, but it looks like it's addressing both quality and UI. The free MPEG2 tools I've played with so far have serious deficiencies in both departments.

One specific problem is that no free MPEG2 encoder I've seen can handle video sequences with mixed 29.997 fps and 24 fps 3:2 pulldown. The MPEG2 spec allows such mixing freely, through the "repeat first field" flag, which is independently settable for each frame. If it toggles on:off:on:off, it's 3:2 pulldown. If it's always off, it's 29.997 fps. Many DVD's mix the two, for example splicing a video-source animated logo on the front of a 24 fps movie.

Part of the problem is that yuv4mpeg format (used as the input to mpeg2enc) loses the RFF flag information. Thus, as you dig into the source code to tools such as transcode and mencoder, you tend to see a lot of crude hacks to work around the problem.

I've hacked up my local version of mpeg2enc to preserve the RFF flags from the source stream, with good results, but unfortunately the patches aren't general enough for production use; among other things, mplex'ing the resulting stream can result in underruns depending on the exact frame rate.

I have some notes on the pulldown issue that I'm planning on publishing as a Web page. Are there any MPEG2 encoder hackers who care?

Being nice

Zaitcev: passions are running high, on all sides. I ask you (and all Advogato posters) to be respectful of other people's opinions. There is no question that Bush is responsible for death and destruction on a large scale. Whether it's legal according to international law is one question. Whether it improves the situation for the Iraqi people is another (I honestly hope it does). Reasonable people can, and do, differ on these questions.

21 Mar 2003 (updated 21 Mar 2003 at 04:35 UTC) »
Arrested for peaceful protest

I attended the noon rally at UC Berkeley, followed by a peaceful protest in Sproul Hall, and am proud to report that I have a misdemeanor arrest on my record as a result. It was a disturbing show of force by the University and police.

None of the protestors were in the least bit violent, and we weren't even keeping people from their business in Sproul Hall (we were in the front foyer; people could still access all offices through the north and south entrances). Several speakers talked of treating the police officers with respect (one young woman has many police officers in her family), and were roundly applauded. The nonviolent legacy of Martin Luther King was invoked repeatedly.

Even so, for whatever reason the University saw fit to arrest 117 of us anyway. The protesters were peaceful, but the police pinched people, pried them away, and carried them out. I would find this quite understandable if we were violent (as were some of the protests in San Francisco), or if we were causing disruption any more serious than the lines during the busy season for financial aid, but for police to forcibly haul people away from a public building in a University feels very wrong. I wonder if the decision to make mass arrests might have been partially motivated by a desire to create more publicity for the anti-war cause. It seems more likely to be malice or stupidity, though, given the arrogant and patronizing attitude of Vice Chancellor Horace Mitchell, who briefly addressed us before the police began their action.

The SF Chronicle has a brief story on the event, and UC Berkeley has a press release. I haven't yet managed to find myself in any photos or video footage, but if you see me, let me know :). There are some other arrest photos I found. I managed to record some audio from a message left on Heather's cell phone.

For coverage of the protests in San Francisco, see Kevin Burton's report and photos, and Lisa Rein's incredibly moving blog coverage.

As I posted yesterday, I am taking two days off just to learn what I can about the war, meditate, and resist in whatever way I can. Tomorrow's entry will return to the normal format of mind-numbingly detailed writing about technical things I find interesting. However, I'll probably start up a personal blog so I can write about religion, politics, and other issues without having to worry about whether they're on-topic here.

Kids

We haven't really talked to the kids about the war yet. Alan wrote a blog entry last night. He typed the first three words himself :) Even more exciting, he got an inexpensive used digital camera for his birthday. I'm hoping that he'll want to post a few of his pictures as well.

Max loves playing with digital images on the computer even more than Alan does - he's had a great time exploring the zooming and contrast controls in iPhoto. Oh, and he can peel carrots by himself now too.

19 Mar 2003 (updated 20 Mar 2003 at 01:39 UTC) »
War

I have given notice that I will be taking two personal days off from work as soon as war begins, and I'll handle my free software community contacts the same way. War looks imminent, if indeed it hasn't started already. I'm prepared to march in San Francisco, and just need to coordinate with my family.

I'm on #war-news on irc.freenode.org, sifting through the reports.

UTC 2204: War has begun.

UTC 2218: There will be a potluck, meeting for worship, and vigil at the Berkeley Friends Church this evening, around 7:00 to 7:30. I expect to be there with the family. Update UTC 0001: This is a "called meeting" of the Quakers, not a general-purpose peace vigil. Non-Quakers are welcome to attend, but do keep in mind that it is a silent meeting. There is a potluck at 6:30, and the meeting begins at 7:30.

UTC 2229: An anti-war protester has died in a fall off the Golden Gate Bridge. NPR confirms air-strikes against surface-to-surface artillery inside the Iraqi border.</a>

UTC 2243: Firefight begins.

UTC 2251: Iraqi helicopters fire on Kurdish village.

It doesn't appear to be full-scale conflict yet, but it's certainly imminent.

UTC 2339: It appears that I may have jumped the gun a bit in asserting that the war has begun in earnest. The bombing in the no-fly zone is actually not that new - similar bombing has been going on for a while.

Indeed, there may actually be hope that the invasion can be stopped. A story in the Independent Online quotes an anonymous State Department official as being willing to make a deal for Saddam's exile. However unlikely this may be, it would save untold lives, be considered a victory for America and Bush, and probably save the life of Saddam Hussein and his family.

In any case, I continue to pray for this to play out with minimal loss of life.

UTC 2353: Kevin Burton has set up a "chump" to archive the URL's we're posting on #war-news.

UTC 0137 I've been listening to NPR and reading stories on the Net for about 3.5 hours, and am tiring of it. Whether in Berkeley or at home, I look forward to spending the evening with my family.

Modular factoring

I haven't gotten much response to my last post on factoring codebases into smaller modules, but I have thought about the problem a bit more.

The first item is the desire to have a common runtime discipline that spans more than one module. The main problem here is that the C language doesn't nail down particular runtime decisions. In our case, the main things we need are memory allocation (one thing we need that standard C library malloc/free doesn't give us is a way to constrain total memory usage - for example, so that an allocation when near capacity causes items to be evicted from caches), exceptions, and extremely basic types such as string (C strings are inadequate because in many cases we do need embedded 0's), list, dict (hash table), and atom. A great many languages supply these as part of the language itself or as part of standard runtime, but C is not among them.

Of course, the fact that C doesn't nail down the runtime is in many ways a feature, not a bug. Different applications have different runtime needs, and a single general-purpose runtime is not always optimum. Perhaps more importantly, these richer runtimes tend not to be compatible with each other. In the case of Fitz, we need to bind it into Ghostscript (written in C with its own wonky runtime), Python test frameworks, and hopefully other applications written in a variety of high level languages.

In any case, with regard to the specific question of whether we're going to split our repository and tarballs into lots of small modules or one big one, for now I've decided to go for the latter, but with clear separation of the modules into subdirectories. That should preserve our ability to easily split into separate modules should that turn out to be a clear win, while making life easier for the hapless person just trying to compile the tarballs and get the software to run.

BitTorrent

BitTorrent absolutely rocks. Basically, it gives you a way to host large downloads (either large files, large numbers of downloaders, or both) without chewing up too much of your own bandwidth. Rather, downloaders share blocks with each other.

I think this has killer potential for Linux distributions and the like. I know most servers hosting RH 8.0 were seriously overloaded when that came out. I think that BitTorrent could be a far more effective way to get the ISO's out than standard HTTP/FTP. Of course, Red Hat probably won't push this, because much of their business model is founded on the relative slowness and inconvenience of public FTP servers as opposed to their pay service.

There's also a lot of potential into wiring BitTorrent into package downloaders such as apt and rpm. Some of the folks on #p2p-hackers think that WebRaid might be a better solution, but in any case I can see BT working well.

We're going to try distributing Ghostscript using BitTorrent, and see how it works.

These are legitimate (and very important) uses of BitTorrent, but it's most likely that the next big jump in popularity will come from other quarters. BitTorrent excels at serving up gigabyte-scale files with good performance and robustness, with minimal bandwidth and infrastructure needs. It shouldn't take a genius to figure out what this will get used for. The exciting (and scary) part is that Bram might soon find himself with millions of users.

Fitz

Tor and I have been working a bit more on the Fitz design. We have to nail down a number of open decisions about coding style and the like. We don't want to cut a lot of code, and then find we need to redo big chunks. Our current draft is on the Wiki under CodingStyle. Many of the decisions are somewhat arbitrary, but even so aesthetics are important. We want to be able to look at the code with pride.

One of the most difficult issues is how to split up the code into modules. What level of granularity is best? The Ghostscript codebase tends to be fairly monolithic, and a large part of our goal is to refactor it into independent modules.

Clearly, a full featured PDF app will use all the modules, but it's also easy to imagine more lightweight clients that just use some of them. Perhaps an instructive example is a PDF validity checking tool (known as "preflight" in the graphic arts world). Such a tool has to parse PDF files and process the PDF streams, but need not actually construct a display tree for rendering.

One obvious approach is to make a giant hairball that contains everything. Clients just link in the library, and use what they need. There's little added complexity in the build and packaging processes, and there's no chance that the individual pieces will get out of sync with each other. However, it's not very elegant.

Another approach is to split everything into the smallest sensible modules. An immediate problem is that many of the modules will want to share infrastructure, particularly having to do with the runtime. For example, one of the things we're hammering out is a "dynamic object" protocol incorporating strings, lists, dicts (hashtables), names (atoms), and numbers. These kinds of objects show up all the time in PostScript and PDF documents, and are a handy way to pass parameters around. If we parse such an object out of a PDF file, and want to pass it as a parameter to the filter library, it would be really nice for the type to match.

So, in the "many small libs" scenario, I think there would be one base library ("magma") containing shared runtime infrastructure: at first, just memory allocation, exception handling, and dynamic objects, but possibly also loading of dynamic plug-ins and maybe threading support. All the other modules will allocate their memory and throw exceptions in a magma context, and pass around magma dynamic objects as needed.

The filter library would be the first such other module. It's small, very well defined, and will probably be quite stable once it's done. The Fitz tree and rendering engine would probably be the biggest, and see intense development over a period of time. Other obvious modules include a low-level (syntactic) PDF parser, and a higher level module that traverses PDF pages and builds Fitz display trees. We'd also need a module for font discovery (unfortunately, quite platform specific), and, eventually, one for text layout as well.

The problem is that support for packaging and versioning of libraries is generally pretty painful. There are lots of opportunities for these libraries to get out of sync, and many more testing permutations, especially if people are trying to use different versions of the same libs at the same time. Also, I worry that the fine-grained factorization might be confusing to users ('how come, in order to display a JPEG image, i use mg_ functions to create the JPEG parameter dictionary, pass that into an sr_ function to create the JPEG decode filter, and plumb the result of that into an fz_ function to draw it?') There are also some fairly difficult decisions about where certain logic should live. A good example is PDF functions. There's a good argument to put them in Fitz, but it's easy to imagine it in the PDF semantics module as well.

A related question is whether language bindings should be shipped as part of a library, or as a separate module. My experience has been that separate language bindings are often very painful to use, because of subtle version mismatches. The bindings tend to lag a bit, and they're much pickier about which exact lib version they're linked against than your average app.

There are other intermediate stages between the two extremes, but it's not yet clear to me whether any are clearly better. One such possibility is to have a single common namespace, but a bunch of smaller lib files so you only link the pieces you need. In the other direction, we could keep the source highly modular, with separated namespaces as above, but mash them all together into a single library as part of the build process (in fact, we'd probably want to do this anyway for Windows targets).

I know a lot of other projects struggle with the same issues. For example, 'ldd nautilus' spits out no less than 57 libraries on my system. Of these, glib corresponds fairly closely to the magma layer above, and is used by many (but not all) of the other libs. Perhaps coincidentally, many users find that building and installing Gnome apps is difficult.

At the other extreme, I've noticed that media player tarballs tend to include codecs and suchlike in the source distributions, often tweaked and customized. Mplayer-0.90pre8 has 11 subdirectories with 'lib' in the name. The advantage is that building mplayer is fairly easy, and that (barring a goof-up by the producer of the tarball) versions of the libraries always match the expectation of the clients. The disadvantage, of course, is that mplayer's libmpeg2 is not shared with transcode's or LiViD's. Also, it's harder to do something like install a new codec on your system that will just work with all the players.

Perhaps, over time, it will become less painful to distribute code as a set of interdependent libraries. In the meantime, we have to strike the right balance between keeping our codebases and development processes modular, and keeping life pleasant for users. I'm not sure the best way to do it, so I'd appreciate hearing the experiences of others.

Autopackage, namespaces, and DNS

I read about autopackage in LWN recently. It seems like a useful project, and I wish it well. I've certainly run into my own share of pain trying to install VoIP software and the like recently.

I'm very happy to see thought going into the question of what packages should look like. I've always felt that Linux package formats have been somewhat ad hoc and given over to the "scripting mentality", and that most distros sidestep the fundamental problem of resolving dependencies and versions by trying to create a snapshot of packages that just happen to work together. Over the long term, I'd love to see this replaced with something more systematic.

A good test of agility for package frameworks is whether they work on systems other than Unix. One of the most interesting things I've seen in this space is CLR Assemblies. From what I've seen, these really do try to be systematic and general, but of course are bound to the CLR runtime.

Indeed, one of the reasons that Java is so disappointing as a desktop platform is that they had the opportunity to really address the packaging problem, but blew it. The reality of Java packages is quite a mess: classpaths, .class files, jar files, war files, and of course "Web start" in a futile attempt to paper over the whole mess.

There is one aspect to autopackage's design that immediately struck me: its use of a DNS-rooted namespace. In fact, DNS is becoming the de-facto root for all kinds of namespaces, of which of course the Web is one of the biggest. This would be very cool if it weren't for the fact that the management of DNS is so corrupt. Even so, it basically works.

One of the discussions I had with John Gilmore at CodeCon was about what a next-generation DNS replacement should look like. I do believe that it's possible to fix many of the political problems of current DNS with better technology. Specifically, the single trust root of the existing DNS is just too tempting a target for parasites like the ICANN leadership. A better system would have distributed trust.

But I don't envy the person who tries to replace DNS with something better. One of the thorniest questions is what the policy for name disputes should be. I'm partial to pure first-come, first-served, largely because it's the only policy simple enough for people to understand, but I think it would encounter a lot of resistance in the real world. In particular, there's nothing to prevent squatters from bulk-registering all the words and trademarks in the world.

But what is a better policy? You can't really talk about a name service being secure unless you've specified a formal policy. It's a thorny problem. I sketched one possibility in my FC '00 submission, and am writing up an expanded version of that as a chapter in my thesis. It is in many ways an appealing design, but even I don't have confidence it's what the world should adopt.

So hopefully, we'll have smart people continue to put some thought into what kind of name service we really want. DNS is a very impressive accomplishment, and of course hugely useful, but eventually we're going to want something better.

Bayes and scoring

There's a lot of talk of Bayesian spam filtering these days, including an implementation the latest SpamAssassin beta. Indeed, Bayes is cool, but did you know that it's actually equivalent to systems that assign a score to each word (or other feature) and add them up?

Paul Graham popularized Bayesian statistics in his Plan for Spam. He analyzes word frequencies in a corpus of spam, and of non-spam, so each word gets a probability that it's spam. For example, "viagra" might be assigned a probability of 0.99 spam, and "eigenvector" 0.01 or so.

Then, when a mail comes in, you look at the 10 words with the most extreme probabilities (words common to both spam and non-spam don't tell you much and so won't be counted). Bayesian statistics will give you a probability that the email is spam or not, assuming that the probabilities of the individual words are independent (not a really valid assumption, but perhaps close enough).

The combining formula for two probabilities is ab / (ab + (1 - a) (1 - b)). But use the transform f(x) = log(x) - log(1 - x), and the equivalent combining rule is just f(a) + f(b). Do the math!

So you don't really need Bayes to do this computation. Perhaps it's most useful to think of the Bayesian math as giving a sound probabilistic interpretation of score addition, which seems fairly ad hoc at first sight.

Doing this kind of combination entirely in linear space is interesting to me, because it seems much easier to combine with other techniques. After all, eigenvector-based trust metrics are based directly on linear algebra. I haven't wrapped my head completely around how I'd meld these two ideas together, but it certainly is intriguing.

Sleep study

I had my annual physical yesterday (with a new doctor), and again the topic of doing a home sleep study came up. I'm pretty sure I have sleep apnea, but when I got a sleep study done last year, it was inconclusive. It showed only snoring, no actual apnea, but it also showed no REM sleep, which is strange. I'd really like to be able to take measurements over a longer period of time.

Primarily, I want to measure 4 things: EEG (for determining sleep stage), sound (snoring), airflow, and pulse-oximeter (for determining whether breathing is supplying adequate oxygen).

I've done plain sound measurements already, using the mic input of my laptop. EEG's are more challenging. Pro equipment costs a small fortune - even on eBay, there doesn't seem to be a good supply. I see a DIY project called OpenEEG, which might work. Obviously, I need electrodes and pre-amps, but it seems to me an off the shelf D/A card (maybe a labjack) might save me some time, and me more versatile for picking up the other inputs.

Most of the people doing home EEG seem to be into biofeedback, but from what I can tell the requirements are fairly similar.

I'd like to hook up with others who might be interested in building a home sleep study, or who can give me tips on finding the sweet spot between spending too much time and too much money. If I'm successful, I definitely want to post my recipes and software, as it's very likely to be useful for others.

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