Warp speed, Mr. Sulu

posted by chip on Saturday, the second of July 2005, at a quarter till ten at night

A lone hacker works on a terminal in a poorly-lit computer lab. As he pulls his hair out, another hacker enters the room.

Hacker 1: Hey, I've got some good news.

Hacker 0: You fixed the bug?

Hacker 1: Oh, that? No. But I did significantly speed up my hard drive access by running 'hdparm -c3 -u1 -d1 -k1 /dev/hda'.

The first hacker stares disbelievingly as the other hacker smiles and leaves.

Our main media computer, appropriately named "jukebox," has had a problem with its 120GB hard drive since we put it in. For some reason, the IDE chipset (or the Linux driver) defaults to pio0 mode. For those who have no idea what this means, it is the most basic hard drive access method there is, and gives you abysmal transfer rates with 100% CPU usage. We were getting around 3MB/sec off of this drive, which worked fine for watching video, but if we were doing something else, like downloading another show with bittorrent, noticeable freezes would appear when watching. I thought I had tried using hdparm to fix this before, but apparently I didn't use the right switches.

Anyway, with that, disk access is up to 20MB/sec with ~30% CPU usage. As an added bonus, the same command run on the primary hard drive (which was already running in udma3 mode) upped disk access to a similar level from 10MB/sec. I'd been looking for another IDE controller to fix this problem, so I'm pretty happy that all it needed was some tweaking. I found the command in a document full of tweaks for speeding up Cinelerra, which included such questionable things as disabling swap space and hacking the kernel to disable kswapd, so I wasn't too sure if it was going to work. I just tried it on my K6-2 machine, and got more modest improvements. There's also a warning about -c3 causing read errors, so if that doesn't work, disable it with 'hdparm -c0'.

In celebration, I'm going to go encode some video!

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the scrambler!

posted by chip on Friday, the first of July 2005, at one in the morning
If you didn't find the little checkbox on the left hand side of the page, uh, read the rest of this before you try it out. :) I was thinking the other day, "Could I crawl the entire document tree of a webpage and scramble the text content? Could I do this while you're looking at it?" So I wrote some code, and came up with the scrambler! Here's how it works:

Load it into your webpage with

<script type="text/javascript" src="scrambler.js"></script>

It's a good idea to put this in the <head> section, since it will have to be loaded before the next part runs. Then, where you want the checkbox to show up, put in

<script type="text/javascript">
print_scramblethingy();
</script>

As a bonus feature, you can execute the underlying auto-scrambling code by calling start_scramble(node) and stop_scramble(). The node argument is a DOM Element (my favorite example is document.body). You can also scramble once with scramble(node). Oh, and as you might expect, I have no idea if it works in Internet Explorer.

Have fun. }:->

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Arrrrrrrrrr....

posted by chip on Thursday, the thirtieth of June 2005, at a quarter past three in the morning
To those of you who tried to download the videos and couldn't get them to work, I'm going to say this again. Try using VLC. For those of you who already tried that, um... *shrug*. It works for me. :) Also, try downloading the videos again. It's entirely possible that netfiles decided not to give you the entire file. It did that to me today. It's also entirely possible that netfiles decided to turn your download into an overripe banana, but I've heard that that's a lot less likely. Go to the directory listing and verify the file sizes are correct. Alternatively, you may try downloading it from Yan's netfiles, but I very much doubt that it will make a difference, since they're, y'know, all on the same broken system. He also has a copy of VLC for windows up there.

So the one pirate notices one o' his mateys has a rather large ship's steering wheel on his belt buckle. "Why for ye got that thar steerin' wheel on yer belt buckle fer?" The second pirate replies,

"Arrrrr, it's drivin' me nuts."

Ahaha. Ok, you've probably heard that joke (or if not, at least saw it on Robot Chicken). Recently, I downloaded one Initial D for PSX, burnt the image to a CD, and played it on my modded PS2. Now, depending on where you live, this may be illegal in about 3500 ways, not the least of which being "downloading a japanese language game and blithely advancing through the dialog because you have no freaking clue what they're saying." Long story short, I'm a pirate. Arrrrrr!

Not that I wasn't a pirate before, technically. It's just that, well, I told myself I wasn't going to pirate games with my mod chip. *shrug*. I think I'll probably wind up making up the difference by buying the game (or its PS2 version), anyway.

I was talking to Erickson earlier, and I told him that with how much we discuss tech items, we could make a half-way decent podcast. I've since decided that the world doesn't need another 30 minutes of geeks geeking out over geeky things that every other geek is geeking about, so I've shelved the idea for now. I also made a joke that I could just run our IM conversations through a text-to-speech synthesizer. Well, I loaded up festival, wrote some scheme, and made this (source code). Don't worry if you can't access it, or play it because it's Ogg Vorbis. It's really not worth your time to get it working. It's kinda hard to understand, anyway. Special thanks to CMU for making free, open source voice synthesis tools that I can use to make computer voices imitate me and my friends. :)

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Live, From Urbana, it's Saturday Night...

posted by chip on Wednesday, the twenty-ninth of June 2005, at five in the morning
At the suggestive grunts uttered from Yan's fitful sleep on my couch, I finally got around to digitizing and uploading some of the video I shot last weekend. Not *all* of it, mind you. I have to save something for the show. *rubs hands together evilly* Here, in no particular order...

My apologies for the poor video quality. In order to make them fit to download, I had to hack and slash them. If anyone wants a full quality version, just ask. If anyone has problems viewing them, I'd recommend getting VLC. It's a standalone player that's immune to bad DivX installs, and eats poorly-made AVIs for breakfast. Oh, and it's free. Can't beat that with a porcupine tied to a stick.

I've made a change to the site that won't be immediately obvious. It's not exactly an easter egg, either. Just, when you find it, don't panic. :)

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ASCII RAVE!

posted by chip on Tuesday, the twenty-eighth of June 2005, at a quarter till midnight
The content of this blog entry is so stupid, I'm going to distract you so you don't read the whole thing.

BEHOLD!

Those of you still reading must either be immune to ASCII animation, or using a broken browser. (I have a report that it doesn't work in IE, but I didn't bother to ask what version. Best just to stay away from IE altogether.) I know for a fact that it works in Mozilla Firefox.

It rained for about 15 minutes today, but oh what a quarter-hour it was. I believe it was termed a "torrential downpour," with lightning that felled trees, knocked down power lines and crushed cars, that sort of thing. Happens all the time around here. I was forced to take a detour while walking home, as a tree branch on Busey and Western had fallen, taking down a power line and taking out a Ford Taurus. An AmerenIP truck was there, but as far as I can tell they were just staring at the wreckage. Plus, bonus free car wash!

On the way to work, my mind was going off on one of its tangents, and somehow I'd came up with the idea of "Kan Kan Revolution." Not as a game, mind you, just the name. I'm guessing if it were a game, it would probably involve hugging kittens in time with music or something like that. It got me thinking (consciously this time), suppose friends' names somehow got melded with some video games. What would those games be? Well, here you go:

I tried to match names with their favorite games, or at least tried to match a personality trait (like Nancy's Dream Land). If I didn't list you, it's probably because I don't know what game you like, or that I can't seem to find a way to combine "Marcin" and "Karaoke Revolution." }:-> What would my name be, you ask? Chip Turismo, of course.

No? Alright, fine.

BACK TO THE SPINNER!

1 comment reply permalink

Video Free Somethingrather

posted by chip on Friday, the twenty-fourth of June 2005, at a quarter till five in the morning
Some of you may remember an old internet radio show Yan and I did back in the day. No? Nobody? Well, I don't blame you. I never told anyone about it, and you can't hear a single word we say because we're speaking through the phone recorded on a craptacular microphone. It's best forgotten.

Anyway, now that I've got a video camera, I suggested to Yan that we create a "Video Free Somethingrather," a video form of the same idea. After I said it he groaned in his usual way, then a smile crept over his face, and I knew that the idea must go forward.

Right now, I've got a set of notes of things we want to do, but what I really want is to hear from the crowd. Ideas would be great. Volunteers who want to do their own segments or act in ours would be better. :) I've got a wiki page up that's got the current notes, so you can get a feel for the flavor of the show. Feel free to edit in your ideas. (You do know how to use a wiki, right?)

Hop to it.

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Link-o-rama

posted by chip on Wednesday, the twenty-second of June 2005, at half past four in the morning
I'm going to start off by apologizing. This isn't the blog entry you were expecting. Honestly, I'm fresh out of stuff to blather on and on about right now, but I do have Something Awesome, Something More Awesome, and Something Truly Baffling.

First off, Something Awesome. My brother sent me a video of some mad DJ skillz coupled with some hardcore geekiness, otherwise known as Keltech Strikes Back (also try this link if the former is bogged down). I've got that stuck in my head, and it feels good. This is how you promote your music without large record labels. All you have to do is be freaking awesome and be able to turn it into a MPEG-4 movie. :)

Second, Something More Awesome. While reading the third item, I saw a banner ad for something Initial D related. I clicked on it to find that a Hong Kong production studio is making a live-action Initial D movie. Watch the trailers. This isn't some half-assed live-action remake. This shit is spot on. Of course, if it's about cars, how could it not be, right? This movie is going to take The Fast and the Furious, take it into a dark alley, beat it seneless, shoot it in the head, and piss on the still-warm body. Figuratively speaking. :-/

And now that I've got you all excited, the third bit of news is, well, Truly Baffling. Billy Corgan took out a full page ad in the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun Times to announce that he's bringing back the Smashing Pumpkins.

I'll allow you a moment for that to sink in.

Yeah. Even if I ignore the fact that Billy Corgan is off his rocker, I still can't figure out why the fuck he's exhuming his old, tired, grunge band. Did Zwan not sound enough like The Smashing Pumpkins for his taste? Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of The Smashing Pumpkins. "Bullet With Butterfly Wings" was my coming of age song, as I'm sure it was for many of you. In my completely biased opinion, though, the band ended at a good time. I really have no desire to hear more Smashing Pumpkins, because it's not Smashing Pumpkins anymore. It's some other band with the same name. It'll be a farce, like the New Beetle compared to the original Beetle. Just call it something else, please?

Billy. Please. Think of the children.

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YubNub!?

posted by chip on Monday, the twentieth of June 2005, at six in the evening
We interrupt this workday to bring you something that just showed up on digg. It's called YubNub, and it bills itself as the "a (social) command line for the web." Command line? Yes. Instead of actually going to websites and using them, YubNub allows you to enter terse commands that take you to websites, search, or whatever can be done from a GET request. While I'm sure most of you don't get this at all, I find it to be extremely interesting, if not (as I found out) terribly useful.

The social part comes in by allowing the users to create commands. The good news is this has created a plethora of commands. The bad news is that this has created a plethora of commands. :) Much like any UNIX shell, it's going to take a lot of memorization. Worse, if you wanted to create a command called "pa" to search "Parrotlets Anonymous" (Yes, Chrissy, I just made that up, so don't bother Googling for it. :) ), you can't. "pa" is already taken, and takes you to Penny Arcade. This is what they call a "flat namespace," and it means that all commands exist in the same place, and defining them is a first-come first-served affair.

There are a lot of commands that don't take arguments at all, and just link you directly to sites. Like the command "fark." You'd think that would allow you to search Fark, but instead it simply redirects you to http://www.fark.com/. I could create something like "farksearch," but that clutters the namespace, and confuses the search argument idea that I like about YubNub.

Still, the idea has tremendous potential, and in a semi-social form, where each user creates their own namespace, possibly importing commands from other users, it could be extremely handy. I'm positively salivating at the thought of making my own version, supporting namespaces, multiple arguments, and creamy AJAX goodness.

That is all.

2 comments reply permalink

Bulls and Bullshit

posted by chip on Monday, the twentieth of June 2005, at a quarter till two in the morning
I went home for Father's Day today. But before that, I had an interesting conversation with Kan Kan about the gender percentages of our respective departments. She had mentioned something about an espresso brownie being a "nerd girl's dream come true." I told her I'd remember that next time I saw one of these mythical "nerd girls."

Apparently, she received a document with her acceptance materials that explained the percentage of females in the graduating classes of various engineering majors. She claimed that EE (her department) is something like 9% girls, and that CS has something like 50% girls.

"Bullshit," I replied. "That can't be true."

I'm serious, too. I think there's only about 5 different girls I've seen in any CS class above the 100-level stuff. Anyway, I found this with a little searching. Apparently, CS is something like 10.4% girls, EE is 14%, and CompE is down at 7.5%.

That settled, I went home and had some lasagna, shot some clay pidgeons, and drove my sister's recently bought Honda Prelude. Whether or not it's an Si is still up for debate. While the engine feels powerful enough, it may have just been the difference in torque between the 13B rotary I'm used to and, well, any piston engine ever made. (hint: rotary engines aren't famous for torque) The engine lacks any VTEC badging, and the only thing on the car that hints that it's anything more than a stock Prelude is this badge on the trunklid that says "VTEC Tuning," which looks to me like a chintzy aftermarket stick-on.

But anyway, out on the road the engine makes the familiar Honda engine noise, and it handles well enough. More slippery than my RX-7, and surprisingly enough, more tail-happy, too. More fun to drive? Well, no chance of that with its sluggish 4-speed automatic that drives the front wheels. On my test drive (with Andrea in the passenger seat) I narrowly dodged a deer that decided to make its way across the road. My F-Zero "Oh shit! Blinking drone!" reflexes coupled with my Initial D "hard braking dive to the inside" move saved us. Ok, maybe not, but that's the story I'm telling the kids. ;)

Later on the same run, we came across a couple of escaped cows grazing on the side of the road. On the way back the larger one charged at us halfheartedly. Only in the country...

So my sister says there were these street racers in C-U and she went to one of their "meets." From the sound of it, it sounds like a bunch of Civics and Mustangs. She told me a story of a girl racer who races a white truck, who is apparently anti-social to the point of only storming through their get-together, and not actually stopping... The whole thing sounds kinda weird, but maybe I'll stop by and watch sometime.

What? No, I don't drag race. Despite what you may have seen Vin Diesel doing in The Fast and the Furious, an RX-7 is not a drag racing car. Mine's not even a turbo. An RX-7's forte is in slicing up turns in a circuit, not blasting down the quarter mile. Also, NOS likes to explode engines, and rotary engines like to explode. Do the math. If I was into drag racing, I would have gotten a Camaro or a Mustang. Something with lots of displacement and fat-ass tires.

Well, maybe just once...

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Anonymity is now optional!

posted by chip on Sunday, the nineteenth of June 2005, at a quarter past six in the morning
Just a quick update: I've added the ability for guests to identify themselves when posting comments. It's still purely voluntary (i.e., if you don't put anything, you'll show up as "Guest"), but I thought you guys might like it better than having to remember to put your name in the post. For people reading, it's better and easier than divining the author from their writing style or (for me) checking the access_log. Ugh. It's late. I'm going to bed.

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