bytex64.net/blog

Oh, and yes, Happy Christmas!

My Christmas went well. We were lacking Andrea as she was off with Alex at his family's this year. We had a rather different tree, a tropical bush-like evergreen that sat upon a chair and was decorated with a string of lights and many tiny shiny balls. After opening presents, we ate MREs. Andrea and Alex joined us later in the day for dinner. The obligatory swag list:

• Erickson got me The American Language, Fourth Edition, by H.L. Mencken. It's a wonderfully weighty tome detailing the divergence and evolution of American English from the English of Great Britain. So far, it's been a brilliant and entertaining read.
• Erickson's parents got me John Hodgman's two books, THE AREAS OF MY EXPERTISE, and its continuation, MORE INFORMATION THAN YOU REQUIRE. They are packed with more entertainingly plausible lies than a man should be able to create in his entire lifetime.
• Some clothing and food, notably some real bacon bits.
• From Danielle, a set of bacon-scented candles. Unfortunately, when lit, they smell a lot more like soy than bacon. I suspect that they were made by a vegetarian. Luckily for Danielle, it is the thought that counts, and I love them. :)
• From Andrea, a bar of Dove chocolate, a candy cane, a lexically well-mangled card, and a mystery gift still traveling through the mail.
• From Tim, a new stocking cap that replaces the one I lost not days after buying it.
• From Mom and Dad:
  • A spare (1200mAh!) battery and car/wall charger for my camera.
  • A suction-cup camera mount that will only be used in an entirely safe and responsible manner.
  • The Korg DS-10, which is currently the most Korg you can possibly get for your money. Expect a full review later.
  • A couple of splatter screens for my skillet.
  • And as a complete surprise, a replacement set of air shocks for my CRX's hatch.

I think I made out pretty well. Oh, and even though it wasn't really a Christmas present, thank you Alan and Annie for the oatmeal raisin cookies. They were delicious. :)

I hope everyone is fat, happy, and not freezing/sliding/drowning/blowing away. Not joking about the drowning/blowing, either. We are seriously under a flash flood and tornado watch right now. Eeek.

I don't think I've mentioned Racer here before. It's a driving simulation made by a mad Netherlander by the name of Ruud van Gaal. It's free (as in beer), comes for Mac, Linux, and Windows, and many downloadable cars and tracks are available for it. Racer is very much not a game — it's similar to GT4 or Forza, but lacks niceties like steering compensation, automatic clutching, and proper car AI. You cannot effectively play Racer unless you have at least an analog joystick, and it's really designed for use with force-feedback wheel controllers.

But because it's so configurable, you can leave the realm of the real and do nutty things like 900HP quad-bikes or cars that handle like slot-cars. A recent car that I downloaded was a 1987 Honda CRX Si (not the same body as mine — they switched to the new body in 1988). As it stands, it's not a bad car... but just for funsies, I decided to fork the space-time continuum.

Up until recently, Honda has not participated in rally racing. So I thought... what if Honda had been working on a Group B rally car based on the CRX, something to compete with the Renault 5 Turbo, but couldn't field it due to the fallout of Group B in 1986? What would such a car be like? Well, right now, it's a 185HP 2L 4WD monster that I like to call the "Honda CRX DRIFT LIKE A MADCUNT EDITION." I like it. :)

On very much the other end of automotive simulation, Alex has... borrowed... a copy of Tokyo Bus Guide, one of the most hardcore games in existence. I can see you laughing, but it is an unusually engaging and challenging game. You have to follow traffic laws, stop at bus stops, announce stops, and not crash into anything. If you hit a pedestrian or car, it's game over. But once you get the hang of it, it's really gratifying to get everything right. The game takes such razor-sharp concentration that hours will fly by as you crawl around town picking up and dropping off passengers. It's highly recommended.

Last night I was in the bathroom dropping the Huxtables off at the pool, and I realized that the turd sitting in the toilet was a sort of record of everything that I've eaten. And then I thought:

"I wonder if that's why they call it a log."

The song "Still Alive" is, to borrow Jonathan Coulton's poetry, a triumph. But did you know that there is a version of the song...

• sung by Jonathan Coulton?
• sung by Felicia Day at PAX? (Ah, Felicia, you're so wonderful...)
• sung by the Pyro from Team Fotress 2?
• in Japanese?
• sung in English by Hatsune Miku, a voice synthesis program that only works well for Japanese?
• done in Mario Paint Composer, a remake of the Mario Paint music composer?
• played on an Intel 8080 microprocessor via a SID chip with ASCII graphics on two attached serial terminals?
• remixed in the style of...
  • melodic trance?
  • euro house?
  • hardcore rave?
  • 8-bit bleep?
• that plays from a homebrew NES ROM?
• done a capella?
• played by a player piano?
• played on an ocarina?
• played on a hacked exercise machine?

And there are two versions that aren't really new versions of the song, but have great visuals to go with them. Here is the song...

• with a really great animated video made on an Amiga 4000.
• with kinetic typography.

And now you know. And knowing is half the battle!

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone. :)

When browsing Google Video I came across a "documentary" called The World According to Monsanto. In the first ten minutes, the narrator lists some of Monsanto's accomplishments. "Agent Orange, aspartame, bovine growth hormones, PCBs..." while focusing on the Wikipedia page that listed these things.

PROTIP: In order to avoid undermining the reputability of your documentary, make sure you do not quote from Wikipedia sections marked "[citation needed]."

You may have noticed that Youtube has gone widescreen, but you may not have noticed that they're experimenting with 720p video. It's not available generally, but you can get to it by adding '&fmt=22' to the URL. Obviously, it's not going to work unless the original video is 720p, and there aren't many right now. To see an example, try out this clip of me racing a Lancia rally car downhill (in a video game).

Since processing 720p video is rather CPU-intensive, I decided today that I would get a cinelerra render node running on yomiko. This wouldn't be hard — I've compiled Cinelerra and most of its dependencies from scratch on my video editing machine. Or at least, it shouldn't be hard.

Being a Slackware nerd for about a decade now, compiling everything was a breeze. I got cinelerra working on a batch job and... it's much slower than it should be. This is running on an Opteron with all the assets on local disk, and it runs half as fast as it does rendering in the Cinelerra GUI with assets over NFS. It doesn't make any sense to me, but it also wasn't really a show-stopper.

In the process of upgrading several rather important packages, I created a problem where ffmpeg would segfault when using x264 as the codec. I tried updating x264 and ffmpeg to their latest versions, only to find that both projects had recently broken their ABIs. Taking a step back, I recompiled x264 and ffmpeg a dozen times while running through a git-bisect, but I only found the problem when I ran ffmpeg through a debugger and saw where it was crashing — I had compiled x264 statically, but there was a shared lib from the previous x264 lying around that ffmpeg was using. That fixed, everything was running along swimmingly.

Erickson postulated that if I did real, paid work for the amount of time spent dicking with this, I could afford a Mac Pro and a copy of Final Cut Pro. I told him that that having everything work the first time would be boring. The fact of the matter is, if I didn't spend those hours debugging, I would have spent them playing Racer.

Moral of the story: Maintaining Linux multimedia tools is like disco dancing on the shiny, blinking razorblade dancefloor of madness.

%!PS
(While debugging the ffmpeg/x264 debacle, I found the wonderfully lispy but unfortunately brain-damaged stumpwm hogging one of yomiko's CPUs. Stumpwm had crashed a couple weeks prior after attempting the extremely difficult task of resizing a window. Apparently, it decided that rather than stop execution like a normal program, it would enter an infinite loop and help keep the house warm. Thanks, stumpwm!) show

In order to ensure your continued access to this blog, you are contractually obligated to watch Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog. Despite its name, it is, in fact, incredibly awesome. It is, without any hyperbole, the greatest supervillain musical ever made. And if that isn't enough to sell you, all I should have to say is that it was created by Joss and Jed Whedon. That's right. Go watch it. You're not legally allowed to read the rest of this entry until you do.

Full disclosure: I have a huge crush on Felicia Day. She is like, so awesome. :D

I don't generally like to talk about work here, but the last few days have been pretty extreme. I spent two days up in Northbrook putting together our new machine, and it was fraught with danger and peril at every turn. And by danger and peril, I mean late packages and soldering power connectors. But the machine is up and running and happy, so I'm happy.

Apple's Insomnia Film Festival site was apparently so terribly loaded that they postponed the contest until "after the holidays." I can't imagine how a company as big as Apple has could have fucked that up so badly, but by golly, they did. So last weekend James came down from Rockford anyway and we shot some footage for a new VFS. James wrote a really great skit that I think everyone will enjoy.

I've decided that in between all the fun over at the Dominion of Awesome, I could put up some actual educational content at the College. I made a simple creative writing utility called Write Stuff that gives you three random words and asks you to write something using them. I've slotted that into a new Literature Department. I've also created a Department of Practical Computation for fun computer things that currently houses only an empty blog. Erickson is also in on that one, so look forward to some hardcore geeking out.

And our dryer is broken again. :/

Dear Apple,

Your Insomnia Film Festival site is broken. Inspecting the site reveals two clearly wrong methods of redirecting to http://insomnia.apple.com/c that are both inoperative in every browser I and my friends have tried (Firefox 3.0 on Windows/Linux/Mac and Safari on Mac). Manually going to http://insomnia.apple.com/c gets me to what I need, but then the site breaks and begins acting like the main apple.com. Curiously, it still works on one of my other computers. Sometimes. Maybe. The site is unresponsive to the point of uselessness.

After scratching my head for two days and wrangling with the site for an hour, I'm finally registered for your contest. I'm honestly dumbfounded as to how the simple act of getting an email address and a few personal details could have been cocked up so badly. I understand that the economic crisis has been hard on all of us, but in the future, please resist the urge to hire your web admins from the local high school.

Regrettably yours,
~chip

Since its inception here on bytex64.net, I've had the /blog/ section completely forbidden to indexing by robots.txt-compliant web spiders. I did this for a few reasons.

In the beginning, my site was sharing webspace with someone else, and I wanted to tread lightly. Being searchable means a lot more visitors, and I wasn't confident that my site could handle it if I got listed somewhere. In retrospect, I'm pretty sure it wouldn't have. I've improved performance quite a bit since then, but I still don't think I could handle a slashdotting (even with /. in its decline).

Also, I like being a recluse. I don't always say nice things, and if those things are easy to find, people may get the wrong idea about me. This is, of course, unnecessarily paranoid. Furthermore, it's opposed to my ideals of openness and Constructive Bastardism. I wrote these things because that's who I am, and I shouldn't hide it.

More recently, I've been getting spambots, and being un-indexed provides a significant disincentive to spammers because their links will go un-noticed by search engines. Still, they come around occasionally, and some comment spam is designed to fool humans, not computers.

So I've decided to open things up by removing the robots.txt entry for /blog/, and damn the torpedoes.

To this end, I've hardened the comment entry system. Most HTML is still allowed, but attributes are restricted to prevent javascript and CSS shenanigans, and people posting flash or java applets will be... punished. If spam becomes a problem, expect the addition of some kind of captcha. This, of course, only applies to guests. I can still do whatever the hell I want. :-P

Hello, World. :)

Slashdot announced that Songbird, a comprehensive music playing application built on top of Mozilla and GStreamer, has released a 1.0 RC build. The article hails it as an alternative to iTunes. Erickson, being an Apple user interested in alternatives to iTunes, tried it out to see if it had improved any from its bloated beta years.

Spoilers: It hadn't.

As I watched him use it, it seemed sluggish on his MacBook Pro, and he reported that it was using a third of one of his cores just to play music. Because I wanted to share in the fun, I loaded it up on my laptop to see just how bad it was.

Starting it up, it immediately claimed 30 or so megs. That's not unusual, it is based on the heaviest lightweight browser out there. (Aside: Does anyone still remember when Firefox actually was lightweight?) Walking through the initial wizard, it was using a cool 70MB, but once I let it loose on my collection, the memory usage began to climb. 90MB... 100MB... 110MB... it passed up Firefox at 110, and continues onward to 120 as I write this. I think they might still have some leaks to plug. Aaaaaand... it has stopped at a whopping 132MB of ram. For those at home without calculators, that's 34% of the physical memory in that machine.

Curiously, the memory usage drops when I begin playing around with Songbird. Playing a bog-standard MP3 from my collection ticks over the CPU at 20%, though. For pure computrons, that's much better than Erickson was seeing, but it's still disturbingly excessive. On the plus side, the slow, clunky interface does look nice. :/

By comparison, my music organization and playing solution, which is comprised of mplayer and the computer equivalent of bubble gum and baling wire, uses about 11MB of memory and ~2.5% CPU including an xterm. Granted, my system doesn't have a GUI, but I consider that to be a feature. Hell, foobar2000 running under wine is faster, uses less memory, has more features, and may well be more stable than Songbird.

If Apple users are excited about Songbird, I can only conclude that iTunes fucking blows. Oh, well. I guess you get what you pay for.

Oh, wait...

I barely fought off the urge to end my last post with "OH WAIT, WE DID. YOU ARE ALL FUCKING MORONS," but I felt that it would undermine my point. I just want everyone who has said that I should get a myspace/facebook account to understand: I really do genuinely and desperately want to punch you in the face.

Yesterday I saw history made: we elected our first United States President that wasn't an old white guy. It's a milestone, but I think the reality of it is said best (as it usually is) by The Onion: Nation Finally Shitty Enough To Make Social Progress. Personally, I'm just relieved that we were able to elect a president without bickering over results that were within the margin of error.

I find myself quite impressed at Obama's victory. I'm not impressed with Obama specifically — we will see in time whether he has the right stuff to make good on his promises. What I'm most impressed with is that the majority of people believe in him. That instead of a world of fear and uncertainty, they believe in a world of hope and change. Obama is our new leader, but it is these people who will make change happen. And that gives me a warm, fuzzy feeling about our country that I don't think I've ever felt before.

Here's to all the people who have made and will make this happen.

I've been thinking about Facebook. An article likens Facebook to a "virtual student center" where people come to hang out online even though they can't meet face to face. And then I got to thinking... Why does Facebook have to have all the fun? Couldn't we spread that idea to the whole web?

The whole thing would have to center around personal expression and the connections we make with others. So first, there will have to be a kind of presentation language that people can use to create personalized spaces. And to show relationships, the language will have a way of referencing spaces created by other people — a "link" if you will. With these "spaces" and "links," we can create an an interconnected world that allows people to find others with similar interests.

And of course we must provide communication for our users. People like using different methods of communication for different situations, so we should provide an array of methods from casual to formal, point-to-point to broadcast. For casual communication, we'll create a simple instant messaging system, while more formal "mailbox" style messages will require a store and forward messaging system. There should be a public chat system and forums for public discourse. And of course, people will want a place to write entries that everyone can see, and inverting that idea, a system like the Facebook wall where everyone can post comments or congratulations. And of course, people will want a centralized way of organizing notifications for important events and postings to tie it all together.

To duplicate Facebook's "applications" we can create a standardized interface for writing interactive applications on the web which will use standardized methods for inter-site communications. The client-side of these applications can leverage existing Flash, Silverlight, and Javascript technologies for a truly next-generation experience. With an application platform in place, many useful web applications and widgets will be created by our users. People will no doubt also want to share pictures of themselves drunk at parties, so there should be an application that allows you to easily share photos with your friends.

And no system of such lofty information capacity should be without a search system. Unfortunately, it's beyond me how such a wide-reaching beast of a database could be designed, so I guess we'll just have to wait until an enterprising group creates such a system.

It's a lofty dream, but wouldn't it be great if we could create something like this? :D