Too much spare time
Posted by stephen on Thursday, 29th December, 2005 @ 00:53
As I'm not working over Christmas and New Year, it seems I've had to come up with other ways to use my time. Oh dear.
Slideshows & Tums
Posted by stephen on Wednesday, 28th December, 2005 @ 15:55
Just finished re-encoding and uploads the rest of my Wales holiday slideshows. Sounds terribly boring I know, but I like them. You'll find them all in my newly ordered Video Section. Maybe one day I'll actually create some actual video rather than iPhoto slideshows!
I've just had a week of eating out a lot, eating cakes, crisps and other healthy things like beer.
So, time for a little penitence I think. My mate Steve has recently purchased Gillian McKeiths array of DVDs and books and it seems rather interesting. Of course, I'm too cheap to buy such things myself, so I just had a quick watch of the DVD when I stopped in at Norwich on the way home Boxing Day.
This morning Tesco delivered me (because until start eating this stuff I'll apparently remain largely apathetic and lethargic) a load of vegetables, fruit, fish, nuts, teas and pulses. No soft drinks, no meat, no milk, trying soya milk instead.
So today marks the start of my no doubt short lived attempt to reduce the size of my tummy. Shockingly I was 14st7 on Boxing Day, so hopefully we can bring that down a bit.
I started the day with a glass of warm water and lemon juice, a few blueberries, followed up by oats, bran and linseeds with a few raisins soaked in soya milk. Surprisingly, it wasn't not too bad.
A cup of nettle and blackcurrant tea came later (with nothing added), followed by an apple, and later another couple of glasses of water.
Then, most shockingly of all, I got on my new coat (courtesy of my dad and brother), put my hat and scarf on and drove ten minutes down the road to Rowney Warren and went for an hour's walk in the snow covered woods.
I'm not long back from that and I'm feeling pretty good so far. Tonight's meal is stir fried veg with Rainbow Trout, no jarred sauce, no noodles, no chicken. Lots of pine nuts, sesame seeds and linseeds though. Yummy, I hope.
Christmas
Posted by stephen on Saturday, 24th December, 2005 @ 13:52
Well, I'm about to head off to Lowestoft via Norwich for Christmas, but before I go I thought I'd upload a quick video I made in iPhoto that's part of a DVD I've made for my brother of our holiday in Wales. You can watch it here. It's a cool little slideshow of a rather lovely part of the country.
Merry Christmas and catch you next week!
Stuff happening
Posted by stephen on Friday, 23rd December, 2005 @ 11:08
Oops, been a while again since I've done anything to the side, must get more disciplined about it. I'll blame Christmas for now.
I'm currently sifting patiently as Apple Mail downloads in 256 message batches thousands of bounces to a load of spam that was sent last night from various names at freakymousemats.com. Grrr. I'm all setup with SPF for my domains, but no one seems to use that yet (I can't complain really, I don't actually check for it on my server either). Unfortunately I tend to sign up to various services as sitename at freakymousemats.com, so I know when I get spam who's given away my address. Unfortunately, I can't say I remember all of these I've used and I actually need some of them, so I can't do the simple thing and throw away all email that's not to stephen at freakymousemats.com. Oh well, currently I'm diverting each of the pretend names they've used to /dev/null.
What else has been happening? Well, Christmas is just about organised and I found out Tuesday from Richard who's recently been on a diplomatic mission and has returned with lots of RegenTV work for January and early Febuary, so I should be staying up there for a week at some point when we're ready to deploy. We'll be trying to use wireless to deliver the service, which should be interesting!
As I'm working at home so much at the moment, I decided that it's better for the health of my hands and for my productivity if I sit in front of a desktop computer. As much as I love Linux for a server, it's just not my idea of a nice desktop environment, and Windows is just impossible. So, I decided it was time to liberate my Power Mac G5 from it's QuickTime duties behind my TV.
To replace it, my PC, surely Windows or Linux couldn't struggle too much to play back video from a network share to the TV? Hmm, well, it's probably manage if I spent more time on it. But despite a new GFX card purchase for a DVI port, and manually entered display timings required to get the native 1280x720 resolution, I could only get output from the VGA port to successfully work. And it suffered quite badly from banding. Complete Windows crashes and some X server hangups only added to my conclusion that this just wasn't good enough.
So back down came the G5 and for a little while I hooked my PowerBook into my monitor, keyboard and mouse. That does the job, but is a complete pain in the arse making and breaking the connections every time I want to use the laptop as nature intended.
The inevitiable solution? Why, a Mac mini of course! Rumours abound about an x86 Mac mini with DVR capabilities and iPod dock connection coming in January. So I should wait. But a little research and some logical thinking... OSX x86 hasn't been through anywhere near enough developer releases to be ready, the Yonah processor is apparently likely to initially cost $200 a pop at volume, so the chance of it being in a $500 machine is pretty low.
I could imagine there'll be a Front Row bundle in the next mini, but that's not a problem on my G5, so wouldn't be a problem on a current generation mini. As for DVR capabilities, even if this happens, which I'm not sure is likely, I suspect there's a high probability it'll be tied to the US market and so be rather useless to me.
My doubts about how much better a new mini will be and the discovery of a 1.42Ghz mini with SuperDrive and 1Gb of RAM for around ?170 less than the new price on Amazon tipped me over the edge. So, my G5 has been given a more suitable job for a computer of it's large stature and speed and I now have a ultra quiet, ultra tiny mini next to the TV. Hoorah!
Identity 2.0
Posted by stephen on Friday, 09th December, 2005 @ 01:37
There's lots of buzz right now about Web 2.0 or web services, or whatever you want to call it. And there's lots of great stuff happening around it, especially with people like Google and Flickr making their APIs accessible to everyone.
All this great stuff leads to having to remember (or have your Keychain remember) a whole bunch of usernames and passwords so that each service knows who you are. It's big and complicated and there's loads of issues. In steps Identity 2.0. If you're in web development or even if you just use the web a lot, go watch the video.
Addiction
Posted by stephen on Wednesday, 07th December, 2005 @ 21:35
This week, for the second time in as many months, I've found myself utterly glued to Wikipedia.
I find myself looking up a single item on this excellent site and following tens of related threads until several hours of my life have gone past. I don't know if this is symptomatic of some character trait of mine or if it's totally natural.
Most recently, I was watching something on TV and heard a reference to Three Mile Island. Having heard this expression before and knowing nothing about it, I headed to the aforementioned site and looked it up. Very informative. And before I knew it I was studying articles on Chernobyl, Windscale, fission, several nuclear reactor designs, the SCRAM emergency shutdown procedure, Uranium, Sellafield, UNESCO, Manchuria, the end of the second world war, heavy water, Japanese experimentation on humans (Unit 731), saline, bubonic plague, the Ark of the Covenant, Babylon, the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Well of Souls. And that's skipping over a few things! I was rather late to bed that evening, and still had a window full of tabs to read in the morning.
A previous search for something mentioned in Never Mind the Buzzcocks made me curious about what the site would have to say about the show itself when I saw an entry in the article I'd looked up. That led me on to Have I Got News for You, the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation), the BBC (British Broadcasting Company), ITV (from it's creation, including articles on each of the regional companies and everything changed), Sky, BSB, broadcast reforms in 1990 and a whole load of other things.
I think I need to set up a rule in my firewall to only allow a certain number of connections to that site a day, else I might loose what little spare time I have left.
My Giant iPod
Posted by stephen on Saturday, 03rd December, 2005 @ 17:00
With a little Apple magic and the help of Salling Clicker my Nokia 6680 is now the remote control and my G5 is now a giant iPod...
Speed Daemon
Posted by stephen on Friday, 02nd December, 2005 @ 14:04
With intentional UNIX misspelling :)
NTL have this morning upgraded my 3Mbit 30Gb/month service to 10Mbit 75Gb/Month. And they're charging me ?3 less per month for the privilege.
And the best thing is, it truly runs at the speed advertised. I didn't even know until I downloaded a small 2Mbyte program, and it disappeared from my Safari download list before I even got to see it!
This is one of the massive advantages cable has over ADSL. The coax coming into my house offers a very high quality signal path that has to be enough to provide many 34Mbit video transponders for cable TV. Whereas many ADSL providers now advertise 8Mb or even higher services, the actual connection speed is extremely dependent on the quality of the phone line and the distance from the exchange, with most users apparently unable to receive much more than 4Mbit.
I now also have 512Kbit upload as opposed to 300Kbit previously, which is the speed of my original broadband downstream connection! Though personally I think this is woefully inadequate and really stifles the potential of the Internet as a medium with intelligence at the edges.
Anyway, I'm very happy, NTL have always provided me with a great service and it just got better. I'd recommend them to anyone.
Nightmares on Demand
Posted by stephen on Thursday, 01st December, 2005 @ 00:57
This week I have been mostly trying to get our very expensive, very commercial Video on Demand server to submit to my will. Bit by bit I've managed to get it working, with a little help from it's creators here and there. But this thing is a pig to work with, accepts only very specific MPEG2 files (that require expensive hardware or oddly enough a TiVo and VLC to produce) and is very closed source. The only bit of commercial software we actually use. Except for the backup system, but that's easily fixed later!
Consequently I've spent far too many hours this past week getting into the guts of how MPEG files are constructed and how transport streams work, etc and have learned way more than I ever wanted to know.
The problem we've got is there aren't any open source video-on-demand servers. There's VLC, it can respond to RTSP requests, but it doesn't implement any of the cool stuff that makes it worthwhile, like pausing, fast forwarding and rewinding. And apparently it doesn't scale well.
I've been thinking for a long time that building a VoD server isn't really that complicated a problem. And my friend Dave (I was the old landlord who used to bang on about how great Macs were much to his ire, look at him now!) said the other day if it was him, he'd try and write one. Well, I've learned a lot about the subject in the past few days, and found a lot of useful stuff that means most of the work is done already.
So if I'm a little smart and a lot lucky, I might be able to take the RTSP protocol spec, the Twisted framework for creating servers and the PyMedia library and mux them together with a little study of some tcpdumps from what's going into my DSL4000 and build a VoD server.
I honestly don't know if I stand a chance at this. I'm not a good programmer by any stretch of the imagination, but I've always felt my talents more lay with gluing existing stuff together. So we shall see. Watch this space.
