Older blog entries for rillian (starting at number 66)

sorry state of affairs

So live.guadec.org has a live A/V stream...in realplayer. Ouch. Real is actually (still) a reasonable choice for live video streaming, but a vorbis stream and a continuously refreshing webcam page work about as well. Better if you feed it the viewgraphs at a reasonable size. But there's absolutely no excuse for archiving talks in realaudio. I shouldn't have to say it, but use Vorbis. So much for the benefits of open technology.

I guess this is really another clue that we're not doing a good enough job with the tools. Icecast2 remains perpetually unreleased, and while it's not hard to get working, it could certainly involve fewer steps and the documentation doesn't amount to much. And no one's ever written a brain-dead webcasting app.

theora alpha 2

In the actually doing something about it dept., we made the alpha 2 milestone release of the theora video codec last week. Yay! We've made all the bitstream-compatibility changes we intend for 1.0, so the main idea was to get people looking at it in case we need to make any more. :) Bug fixing and code clean up continue, but the main item for the beta release is a specification for the codec. If you'd like some code to read, please check out the source and pitch in with the writing.

London

Mostly settled in after the move now, and even starting to figure out where things are. It's certainly much more suburban than where we were in East London, which is nice...and a little scary that it's nice. Fortunately the tourist traffic to the gardens holds back the residencia in our little corner.

We're also right across the street from a nice (they're wonderfully snooty) cafe, so today I moved the airport up on top of the kitchen cabinets so it had line-of-sight out the window, and now I'm getting a nice strong signal amongst the umbrellas. It's too bad I don't drink coffee, it's a nice place to work.

The DSL install went quite well after all. There were some hassles getting the actual phone connected, but that only took a few hours, and the activation didn't require a visit at all. I plugged in the modem the day I got a schedule for the install and it just worked, three days before my ISP wrote back to confirm BT can connected me. :)

What was really strange was my ISP has no provision for moving customers--you have to cancel the service and reorder at the new location. This means all your account info changes, which isn't cool. Funny thing is this seems to apply internally as well: my modem worked on the new line with the old config including the old IP addresses! So if they'd just fix their database front end, it could have been really painless. I changed anyway, because I took the opportunity to switch to 'business class' in the nebulous hope it would help with the connection glitches I was getting.

Still, I'm pretty happy with the new place. We still wouldn't have moved if we'd had the choice, but the change is nice. We keep telling ourselves there's only two more moves to go. :)

GNU Ghostscript

atai, good luck with that. Compromise isn't possible; that is the whole point of the split. It's not like we didn't try there. The only thing that's acceptable to both parties is for someone to do a port, in the direction you've contributed already.

It's frustrating that they haven't accepted even your modified version for distribution yet. Maybe you should ping them again.

London

It's been a hectic couple of weeks. We've moved flats, from Bow in the east end to Kew in Richmond, half way to the ring road in the west. I really like the new place; it's better finished than the old place, with high ceilings and better, though still not up to North American standard plumbing. The landlord seems a lot more interested in keeping things up as well, which was a relief.

The location is great as well, just two blocks from the main gate of the Royal Botanical Gardens. We've had season passes for a while, and on friday I went in with my laptop and sat working as geese walked by on all sides pulling grass and the concorde flew overhead. That was pretty neat. :)

The moving part was stressful. Part of it is just not being familiar with the system, but there also seems to be some basic impedence mismatch that keeps bureaucratic adjustments from every going smoothly. Normally it's just annoying, but with basic shelter at stake it was a little more worrying. In retrospect everything went well enough, and we're just waiting for the DSL install before things are back to normal.

Xiph

I've been more inspired to work on xiph stuff lately, largely because Emmett has left (I'm sorry to say) and (I'm not sorry to say at all) jack is asserting himself again. Monty has been swamped with vorbis work since doing the initial port of the theora codec, but several of us have banded together to pick up development and have made good progress. Video is what got me involved in the first place, so it's about time!

We've also been trying to organize ourselves a little better and get everyone on the same page again. Xiph has grown quite a bit lately, accreting several other projects, and it's gotten hard to keep follow everything that's going on or figure out how to contribute. We're also trying to open the process back up again, more the way Jack and I (at least) think things should be.

To help organize things and document our collective direction, we've started a wiki. It's really an experiment, but so far I think it's going well. It's a great tool for maintaining todo lists, meeting agendas and so on. Please have a look and contribute if you've been following our efforts.

Matrix

Went to see The Matrix Reloaded on friday. It was much better than I feared after the tacky bad press it got opening week. StevenRainwater, I really like Susan's musical theory. One of the first things I noticed is that the action sequences felt stirred-in in a way that the original didn't, like they didn't really serve to advance the story; thinking of them as dance interludes is clever.

ction aside, I was really happy with the direction they took the science fiction. It's a lot more complicated than the original, enough to make it an actual trilogy rather than a pair of sequels. It's funny how the messages about control have complexified, like they're written this movie from a perspective that's sold out compared to that of the first movie: now that you know you have the power to make a big budget studio movies, things don't look so simple as maybe you assumed.

JBIG2 in Ghostscript

Checked in the first integration of jbig2dec with Ghostscript last night. It took a while to get everything working; the stream implementation in Ghostscript is a bit tricky to work with. The code doesn't yet handle shared 'global' decoder contexts between page images, but all the (single page) pdf files I've seen don't use this feature, so it actually works for wild files. That's very encouraging.

One of the things we've talked about is cleaning up the stream library in Ghostscript. There's sort of a long term project to improve modularization in general, and this is a good place to start (aside from Fitz which will separate the graphics library). It was first suggested by raph about a year ago, and tor brought it up (independently?) recently. Practically speaking, it seems like something the core developers are never going to get around to. So if anyone's looking for a nice refactoring problem, please do take a look.

Edinburgh, city of the future

Been back in the UK for a couple of weeks now. We went to Edinburgh for a couple of days just after I got over jetlag. S had a meeting to go to and I tagged along. We went out in the evenings, and stayed over an extra day to wander around. Beautiful weather for it too: we got a little snow on friday, just enough to be fun (if you weren't trying to leave town) and then a warm sunny day on saturday.

Seemed quite a nice town and we had a great time. The really wild thing is the geography. The castle and the old town are up on a ridge, with what are effectively cliffs dividing different parts of the down. The really wonky thing is that a couple of the major streets are elevated, though the way the buildings are fronted it looks perfectly normal. We were just walking along and would look down a sidestreet to suddenly realize we were four stories up! And there were all these crazy-steep staired passages leading from one level to another. We even found a little lane that ran along the roofs of a row of buildings.

I think that makes for a really cool arrangement. Riding the DLR around Canary Wharf in London I've often remarked that this is how a 21st century city should be, with tracks winding between the buildings several storeys up. Now I see...Edinburgh has been a city of the future for a hundred years.

How not to run an irc network

Last week I got a repeat cold message, Do you know Yopi? from someone on freenode irc. In retrospect, it sounded like they were just looking for someone, but there was a language barrier, and the first time they didn't really respond when I tried to work out what they wanted. So when I got the same message again from a different nick a week later, I worried it might be spam and went to the oper channel to report it in case there was a pattern.

The openprojects staff had always been in my experience interested in helpful in such situations. However, when I went to report the issue, I found #freenode to be a moderated channel. One is expected to msg random people with 'staff' in their hostmask before being granted voice (not an easy thing for novice users with 60 people in the channel) just to ask a question. This struck me as both offensive and ridiculous, but I didn't worry much about it. The network has generally been quite stable, and has let us use our channels in peace.

Yesterday, the freenode admin staff closed down the #vorbis channel. As in we were all booted off without discussion, and joins are disabled. lilo thankfully took the time to explain after the fact so I'm no longer angry, just sad and annoyed.

#vorbis was a very small channel. Most everyone moved to irc.xiph.org in the huff over lilo's canvassing for donations. We mostly had a handful of lurkers, but Michael Smith and I both maintained a presense there. We continued our usual exchange of pleasantries and occasionally used it for technical discussions, in addition to helping visitors when we could. I actually preferred it to the official #vorbis because, while the signal was much lower, the signal-to-noise ratio was much higher, and because I never appreciated the reason for the move in the first place. A pointer to the new channel was forcibly installed at the time of the move and the ownerships changed, but the channel had more or less become what it was obvious to me it would be from the time of the move: a small topical channel on another network from the primary activity of the project.

Lilo's explanation was that he was doing it in retaliation for political games with Emmett Plant. This is so wrong-headed I barely know where to start. It's also surprising given the pretty good advice he's written in the past of irc management. Maybe it shouldn't be; this feels very much like what everyone was complaining about when he was asking for donations on the network, which never bothered me.

Certainly Emmett can rub people the wrong way, but I think the problem lies elsewhere. Lilo clearly views the #vorbis channel as pawn in an argument and nothing to do with the people actually using it. Freenode has a strange policy about channel moves. Lilo has said several times that #vorbis was granted an exemption, by which I guess he means allowing the remainder of the channel to remain after the rest of it has left in a huff. Maybe what's happened to #vorbis is was is meant by 'freezing' the channel. This is just stupid. The policy is heavy handed at best, and seems designed to prevent amicible changeovers. People and channels come and go, and it shouldn't be anything to the network staff. Furthermore, it's impossible from the outside to choose a side in succession disputes. There's just too little information or time for discussion.

Anyone can start their own irc server. The advantages of a shared network like freenode are, as with sourceforge, in the collection of like-minded people who can more easily find each other and in support of small projects for whom the infrastructure is expensive. Not given the space they need, people move elsewhere and the commons is diminished. This is not the way to run a friendly network service. Perhaps they're hurt about all the people who left the network. The end result of this is that I've left too, finally moving to #vorbis on irc.xiph.org.

fresh snow

Finally got around to upgrading my desktop system. Actually, snow has been the server-in-the-closet for a the last couple of years, but when rain died early year I amalgamated parts and started using it as a desktop. We shipped it to London, and it's been doing double duty here too.

However, it was a 300 MHz K6, and while perfectly adequite for mail, repository, etc. it was getting painful to browse the web with, and was essentially hopeless for development work. (funny how standards change.)

S also doesn't have a computer of her own, so it's nice to have something a little snappier to work on at home. I'd delayed upgrading first because of the move, and then because S was thinking about getting a tibook, but we decided upgrading snow would do for now.

The new innards are an MSI KT400-based motherboard, a 1.8GHz athlon and .5 GB ram. It's pleasantly snappier, but not amazing by any stretch. Economy and all that.

Unfortunately the upgrade could have gone smoother. The manual had the cmos reset jumper labelled backward, with a stern warning about not powering up the system in the reset position. Fortunately it was wrong on both counts, but I couldn't figure out why the board showed no inclination to power up at all. Ended up taking it back to the store and asking. It was the second thing we tried, after the power supply.

Also ended up with a new video card, replacing the 4-year-old hand-me-down RagePro I'd been using. Not really sorry there, but again, I'd gotten it all put back together before I realized AGP1 wasn't the same connector as AGP2/4/8. Bought a lower-end radeon 9000, which also turned out to be something of a mistake. I've long been boycotting nvidia for their refusal to publish specs for their 3d hardware, but it turns out ati has recently reversed their policy are are now also offering in-house binary-only drivers. Ugh. The card is also too new to be supported in debian's X11, even in 2d. I have in working in 1024x768 with the vesa driver until I can build from xfree cvs.

So in short, it was a lot less fun than the last time I build a machine. Macs are looking attractive again.

middle age

Speaking of, it's just surreal. I turned thirty a couple of months ago, and suddenly I'm worrying about retirement, and enjoying watching my little pile of savings grow more than buying new toys with it. Seems like a pretty big change over not so much time. Maybe S is just rubbing off on me. :)

Only two more weeks in London before we head back to NA for winter holidays. S is meeting my mother, then flying up to spend xmas and new years with hers. She has to come back soon after, but I'm staying on a few weeks, including a trip to SF in mid January for a Ghostscript meeting. So much to do still!

Proofreading

Discovered the distributed proofreading website for Project Gutenberg. Beautiful low tech approach to community building. I've been doing a couple of pages a day. It's nice and relaxing, and feels good to contribute. I tried scanning a book for pg once, but just burned out on doing the corrections; this makes it much more manageable.

I've always had mixed feelings about Project Gutenberg. On the one hand, I really believe in what they're doing. On the other, their willful lack of technical sophistication really offends my sense of efficiency. I just really, really, hope they'll keep the scans.

account syndication

Raph somehow talked me into doing a test implementation of bram's single sign on protocol. I'm doing it for advogato because that seems the most immediately usable, but I may do a python cgi version as a second example. So far I've only got as far and implementing hmac (I only just now found libmhash) so it will take a while yet.

This is simple enough to be useful to casual projects. Raph I think is excited about being able to export the trust ratings, but the real value would be in not having to register on every little web forum. That means a standalone registration engine and knowing lots of people who write blog software. It might still be worth using mod_virgule, with certs just on the general level of 'this person is not an idiot', of course. I suspect we might have to use a real database for the accounts in that case.

The drawback to single sign on is of course namespace pollution. You could attach a de to each nick and support multiple account hosts (rillian from advogato, stacy from livejournal). The certs are much harder to export, since you have to somehow label the domain. That would make a nice thesis topic.

One fun thing happened looking at the mod_virgule code. I was checking to readme to see where the mailing list lived these days, and was pleased to see it had been updated with info about the cvs repository move. "How nice that someone did that," I thought. And when I got to the bottom it was signed, rillian. Hmm. Either I'm getting old, or I'm startarting to actually deserve journeyer status. :)

repairman effect

Sandra stayed home today to meet the repairman coming to fix our shower. (I was out seeing A House Built on Water.) He turned the shower on et voilà hot water! It seems everytime we'd tested it in the last two weeks it had either been the water pressure was too low (not uncommon lately) or <sheepish>we'd forgotten to turn the power no</sheepish>. Oops. He did give us careful instructions on how to, er, increase the lifetime of the thermostat. Not that it's defective, mind, just...do this and things will be better.

London

We finally saw the Rosetta Stone. They'd 'restored' it since the last time I was there (1989). Mostly this involved cleaning off the wax that made the inscription easier to read and putting it in a glass case. It's prettier I suppose, but much colder, and even if it matches the rest of the presentations I felt a bit like it was change for fashion's sake.

Our shower's broken. Has been for about a week. I poked at it a bit, but other than determining it was getting power and not using it I wasn't much use. After some persistence with the fixit person we have an appointment to get it looked at in another week. I guess they really are luxury items here.

Ghostscript

Water continues to pile up for the 8.0 release. I've been looking at Valek Filippov's improvements to the URW fontset for a new release. There's not really an upstream anymore, and we've not updated ours since Ghostscript v6, so things have fragmented a bit. Filippov has done great work extending the glyph set and Owen Taylor (I think) has fixed some long-standing problems with the hints.

There are also a number of minor corrections, so overall they're much better. There are some problems too. Redhat shipped these so they're widely distributed, which is good for testing and bad for things like the fontname changes. Hopefully we can unify our changes and produce something coherent.

Got a bug report on jbig2dec, the first traffic in a couple of months. Looking forward to having time to work on that again. We've got a long way to go.

Physics

Spent some more time playing with my counterdrift statistical physics toy. The macosx screensaver is a little more interesting now, and I added instrumentation of the particle current. Didn't learn much from that, unfortunately. I need to do some calculations to compare the measurements with and I've forgotten how.

Also dusted off my Complex Ginzburg-Landau code and built a subversion repository from all my old versions. I never did get this to work, but seems like time to try again. S's multigrid project at work has fallen apart so we're going to experiment with applying her code to the CGL equation. Doesn't look like anyone's tried. I'll also write a split-step fourier version for comparison now that I'm not so afraid of it. I originally wrote this in 1995 as part of a course project and the current code uses the conceptually less sophisticated coupled lattice map.

We could even do a parallel steered multiscale model of the defect dynamics to be fully compliant with S's job description. Probably would have to to get much science out of it, but that takes hardware resources and we're a long way from interesting her supervisor. Anyway, it should be educational no matter what happens.

Apple's gcc slow

bratsche, Apple's gcc runs noticeably slower than under linux on the same hardware--more than the general kernel penalty. Apple 'did something' to their build that really slows it down; if you compile your own gcc it goes much faster. I've not looked to see what the difference is.

Hmm. And I assume you're using 'make -j2' since it's a dual machine? That helps too. :)

Chroma keying

chakie: just a guess, did you pull out only one color value, or a range? It looks like you didn't get enough of the marginal values. Chroma keying is a bit of an art--you basically want to set an alpha proportional to the amount of the key at the given pixel, and then map that portion to black without skewing the colour. That's really hard to do with you have something partially transparent like it looks like your trees are. (the is the main reason you use a rim light when shooting bluescreen stuff.)

Generally that means you need a specific plugin, with knobs you can twiddle for the best compromise between key in your image and foreground erosion. I've not tried to do any of this in gimp, but I imagine there's code available. Heroine's Cinelarra claims to do it was well, so you might try that if gimp doesn't work for you. Good luck!

Hope that helps.

back in the UK

Got back thursday from my trip to SF. Had a nice time, but it's nice to be back. Still getting over the travel skew, but mostly better now. Going east is definitely a lot harder.

We went to the Science Museum yesterday. It was quite an interesting contrast to science museums I've been in in north america. Partly it's just, as S put it, 'They have the old stuff'. Like in the food section they had a classical greek vase just stuck casually on the wall to illustrate the long history of fish farming. Because, you know, they could just borrow it from next door. So the artifact collection was really impressive. As a child I would especially have appreciated studying all the models and examples of industrial machinery. It's all fairly obvious now, but I could have learned so much then.

On the other hand, while there's less dumping down that I was used to, the explainations weren't really any better, so as an adult it was still sometimes frustrating, because either you already knew what they were trying to say, or you don't follow at all.

Still, they had an actual section on math which was really nice to see.

I did get to see their Difference Engine which was just beautiful. Unfortunately it's now walled up in a glass box and doesn't look like it gets out much. I'd really love to take home a table from it. Unfortunately, we missed the Clock of the Long Now. Foolishly we thought it would be in the 'time measurement' section, and by the time we were through that, it was time to go home. Oh well. The museum is (currently) free (yay!) so it's easy to go back.

walking on a higher cloud

While in SF I bought quite a few new computer bits. First of all I got a flash card and reader for my dv camera. It also has a still camera feature (at 1200x900) but I bought it used and it didn't come with the memory card or reader (or a bunch of other accessories) You'd think with a ccd that big that it would do pal as well as ntsc and so on, but no. Anyway, this one came with a 128MB card for only $10 more than the card itself. I'm very pleased with it. It's tiny, and has single thumb slide that both retracts the usb connector and ejects the card. The card is big enough to use for casual file transfers. We played with it a bit that way at the code fest. It worked fine on all the osen, just shows up as a disk. I also got a couple filters for the camera. The polarizer really helps with outdoor image quality, but I have to take it off indoors because of the poor low-light behaviour. Lens is just too small, I guess. I'm actually pretty pleased with the camera. The image quality is pretty good and it has progressive and manual exposure modes, which is what I was really looking for.

The biggest thing was a new hard drive for cloud. The tibook's harddrive suddenly developed noticible bearing noise when it was about a month old. That's been getting slowly louder ever since, and not only was I starting to worry about its lifetime it was usually the loudest thing in the room! So I bought a 40GB IBM travelstar with fluid bearings. It's a quiet as I'd hoped for. I'd been holding off replacing it since we started planning our move to england, and in that time the price has fallen by a factor of two, so I'm very happy. Usually I can't hear it unless the head is moving; I'm slowly getting over the panic when I open the lid and can't hear it starting up. :)

I also got a firewire enclosure for the old drive, which worked out well. I put the new drive in it first and was able to do a backup and bootstrap a new linux install to it. I'm happy to report that that part of the firewire drivers work fine under linux. It's just another scsi disk. I then switched the drives. I did a fresh macos install, which is slowly coming back up to par. (fink takes a couple of days to recompile among other things.) Seems to have helped with instability a bit.

I haven't completed the new linux setup yet, but it should be simple to copy /home back from the old drive. Root is xfs now though, which is really nice. I'm looking forward to trying a 2.5 linus kernel on it now that it's been merged in.

snow is now running 2.4 as well. Something in the debian startup scripts had always choked before, so I was still running 2.2.20, but whatever it was has magically fixed itself. The USB stuff works much better now, including my headset.

So new toys all around. Everything is showing its age, but I hope the cloud will remain useable for another year or so. Snow was just the server-in-the-closet and is a bit painful as a desktop machine. We'll probably upgrade or replace it soon.

VOIP

As raph mentioned, the ghostscript group has been playing with voip applications, most recently teamspeak. Being closed source, it of course won't run on ppc so I haven't been able to try it on cloud, but with the new kernel my headset does work on the snow (which is ia32). I got it to run after manually unpacking their silly installer thing. And hacking in some of the variant library depends. It's nice, much more irc-like that phone-like, with channels, ops and so on. Makes complete sense for gaming. I'd amend raph's comment that it's a bad sci-fi female voice announcing joins/leaves.

Unfortunately the program hangs when I try to tell it to use /dev/dsp1. So looks like buying a new sound card (the current one doesn't support input on linux) might actually make that work...but what a mess.

Like jack said recently someone just needs to sit down and write something. It's particularly hard (or opportune) for us because our developers are all on different osen, so we can't just grab something that works on linux (or more easily, windows)

I think that's enough for now. :)

GNU Ghostscript

I'm just going through the documentation for the 7.06 release. The main point is Richard Stallman's request that we remove all references to the non-gnu ghostscript (and associated website &c.) After that I'll send it to the FSF for review and hopefully we'll have a new GPL release.

No real news otherwise. We're having a code retreat at raph's studio this weekend which should be fun. I'm flying out tomorrow to have a few days to get over jet lag. Hopefully I'll feel well enough to see some things in SF between now and then. I'm staying with the usual friend, but she's busy with work this week and most of our visiting will have to wait until after.

Poincaré principle?

Raph, you forgot to define 'Poincaré principle'.

London

Rode my first double-decker bus this weekend. Was fun, and surprisingly quick. The upper level is definitely prime real estate though. We got to ride up there once, but the other two times, there were folk camping on the stairs waiting for an open seat.

One of them had nice flat panel screens at the front, presumedly to show route information. Can't tell for sure because they were blue screened. *sigh*. I've noticed some of the busier bus stops have displays as well, but I've not figured out if they're live or just announcing the schedule. Vancouver was putting up some stops like that when we left, but I'd never seen them turned on.

Also went through the new GLA building. Really nice views of the tower bridge. Quite liked it's insides, and it was interesting to see what all the fuss is about (non-traditional buildings seem quite controversial here--I'm just glad they're trying) I may have to go to a council meeting to see how the public space works. I also admired the new Swiss Re building. We've been able to see it from near where we live all summer, but I didn't make out the shape until we saw it from the observation deck just across the water and the completed outline on the skyline plaque on the Tower Bridge. London seems to really be paying attention to planning and architecture and planning. I'm glad they picked this one, especially over some of the alternatives.