Success!
Posted by stephen on Tuesday, 31st January, 2006 @ 15:11
I thought I'd best place this warning here having just come out with the load of nonsense below, this has become a long post. Not because it is full of great and detailed information but because I've padded it with an unnecessary and pleonastic narrative, for which I can only apologise. I'm approaching the end of Stephen Fry's autobiography at the moment and I fear it's started to influence my own writings.
As by now you're aware, one of my tasks for our work in Scotland is the live streaming of terrestrial TV, transcoded from it's native MPEG2 into MPEG4 (H.264).
It's something I've been rather dreading ever since I realised that hardware encoder cards are not that widely available, and even those that are won't be just plugin and go with the VLC streaming solution we currently employ.
My eventual conclusion was that we needed to be able to transcode in software. Increased processing power is actually cheaper than buying hardware encoders, and the lack of rackspace available to us means we don't really have the PCI slots to spare anyway.
So on we trundled, assuming that software transcoding in realtime was going to be possible. I think I blocked out of my mind an almost certain knowledge that it wouldn't be possible. Based on my experiences with QuickTime Pro, H.264 encoding is a long and difficult task, even for my trusty PowerMac G5.
Last night I received a phone call from Richard telling me I must come in tomorrow (now today). The guys from Scotland would be down on Wednesday with their wireless kit for some testing and we must have some MPEG4 content available and a server to stream it ready and waiting for them.
My biggest task right now is finishing off the documentation for RegenTV, a task I was told I must complete by Wednesday if we were to be paid again anytime soon. So spending all day in Stratford, not being at my most productive because of the many distractions was not an appealing prospect. Add to that the 2h30m best case scenario for driving to work and back. I say best case, it only really occurs at odd hours of the day. Last Thursday I spent 4h30m on my way to and from work. Thus is the nature of British motorways.
So I decided that I must complete the MPEG4 task last night. Not to produce a realtime transcode, but to simply have some MPEG4 content from TV and the mechanism to send it as a multicast stream across a network.
From previous experience I've discovered that QuickTime encoded H.264 files can't be encapsulated in an MPEG2 Transport Stream and multicast by VLC. So the task is to get VLC itself to do the encoding. I grabbed a line from the VLC documentation that transcodes and streams in a single pass, modified it for MPEG4 output and fed it a file ripped from my TiVo.
Segmentation Fault
Bugger. All the log messages until that point seemed to indicate everything was working perfectly. So what happened? I was using the packaged version of VLC for Ubuntu. Based on previous experience of VLC crashing I thought it best to try and compile from source instead.
After many rounds of ./configure and make and apt-get install somelibrary-dev I finally got a complete build. Then I noticed that x264, the H.264 encoder wasn't included. So off the to the VLC developers site to download the apparently very experimental code. It built first time without a hitch, great! Rebuild VLC and I'm away.
Now for the tricky bit, feed in the magic runes...
/usr/local/vlc/bin/vlc -vvv FatherTed.mpg --sout \
'#transcode{vcodec=mp4v,acodec=mpga,vb=800,ab=96,deinterlace}:
standard{access=udp,mux=ts,url=239.192.255.1}'
And success it would seem! Lots of warnings about dodgy MPEG data and timing problems, but a running process none the less. As long as there was both audio and video in the Transport Stream I'd be safe. I'd just feed it into a file instead of onto the network and the computer can have all the time in the world to do it's thing.
So I fired up VLC on the G5 and tuned to the appropriate multicast address. And something unexpected happened. There in front of me was full size, good quality video with only the occasional stutter. A quick change from multicast to unicast and I tuned in again. Perfect picture!
I'm not sure what saintly deed I'd performed in a previous existence to deserve such fortune. But that wasn't the end of my surprises that evening. I thought it best to check on the load being placed on the streaming server. Blimey! 20% CPU usage for a single stream! And the server in question is 2 years old.
I could only begin to imagine what strides in CPU performance in the past two years would allow me to achieve with a more modern system.
The next test, run another stream in parallel. So a few more runes and Kevin McCloud and one of his Grand Designs was being flung across my network eagerly seeking a viewer. So up was fired VLC on my PowerBook and sure enough, two streams from one server to two wireless clients running perfectly well, using about half the bandwidth available on my entirely not-optimised network (experience learned available bandwidth rather than theoretical available bandwidth). And a pair of VLC processes taxing barely half of their host's thinking powers.
And so an overly excited Stephen got on to the phone to his boss who doesn't answer, sent a message on Skype, only for him to disappear and to then receive a 'Message could not be sent' dialogue box, most probably sent from the bowls of hell to torment me. The final attempt, a frustrated and quickly typed text of "Good news!" was sent as I bubbled away desperate to tell someone of my exploits.
Within moments my call is returned and Richard makes the assumption that good news must mean that I've taken the test and I'm not pregnant after all, despite 24 years without a period. Apparently this is the usual good news he gets.
But no, I eagerly relay my even better news and create a much excited and happy boss. Not quite as much excited and happy as myself I suspect. But that can only be a positive thing for anyone who wishes it to be known that they have an interesting and full life.
The call is concluded and I returned to the scene of my triumph. Only to realise that I've been premature in my declaration of victory. I've not encoded to MPEG4-10 (H.264), I've encoded to the inferior MPEG4-2. Bugger. So a quick change to the magic runes and lets see if all hope is shattered...
Joy of joys, I still had Father Ted streaming in real time. Albeit a little jerkily, but ultimately watchable. A quick check on the server and the VLC process is consuming as much of my processing powers as it can lay it's little French paws on.
But that's OK. I've done enough. My processor is 2 years behind current designs which should be more adept at handling the task. We'll be most likely limited to one stream per server, or two if we're lucky enough to acquire some dual-core technology. But that's OK, that's all we intended to deliver in the first place.
A few more tweaks of the runes and I've got it down to 446Kbit of video bandwidth and still have a very watchable picture, at the very least equivalent to the 1Mbit MPEG4-2 stream.
So I think we've arrived at a useful place. If the wireless bandwidth is going to be a problem we can do a small number of streams in H.264. If there is more bandwidth available we can do perhaps three or four times as many channels per server with MPEG4-2, assuming our as yet non-existant set top boxes support such a thing.
And the best news of all. I'm at home today!
Technorati
Posted by stephen on Saturday, 28th January, 2006 @ 15:29
I'm currently trying to claim my site on Technorati. The invisible JavaScript thing doesn't seem to have worked, so the next step is to try posting this link.
What ya working on?
Posted by stephen on Friday, 27th January, 2006 @ 15:47
It's been a little while since I had one of my geeky blog moments, so I thought I'd take the opportunity to blurt out a little bit about what's been happening with work lately.
As I've mentioned before, Richard and I will be off to Moffat in Scotland in the next couple of months to fit up a hotel with an IPTV system. Hotels and the commercial sector aren't really what we're about, so you might be asking yourself why we're doing it.
Our work is part of a project to examine what services can be delivered over wireless networks.
With all the buzz lately about triple play services, telephony, television and Internet access through a single IP connection, large parts of Scotland are missing out. Only very recently has the area we're going to received ADSL. And there's no LLU, no connections above 2Mb for the foreseeable future (the Scottish Executive gave BT money to set it up in the first place) and many homes are beyond the usual reach limits of DSL technology. Some don't even use copper pair cabling.
Costs of laying a wired network of any kind are enormous and commercially it's just not viable at the moment. There's near-zero chance a cable company is going to come along and fix the situation. So Scottish Enterprise has stepped in and decided to sponsor a project to find out what IPTV services can be made available wirelessly.
A local wireless broadband provider, working with Locust will be sorting out the wireless networking issues and adapting their mesh technology where possible to the kinds of traffic an IPTV service generates.
Our role is to provide a low-cost RegenTV head-end and Set Top Boxes. Two new developments to RegenTV are being made by us. First off, access to a full-featured web browser without the need to log in to a full desktop session. As you'll have seen from previous blog entries, this has been completed.
Secondly, our video content must be provided in MPEG4 format to reduce the bandwidth requirements as much as possible. For video on demand this is straightforward, the software we use is already capable of ingesting and delivered MPEG4 streams. For redistribution of free-to-air digital TV, it's a little more tricky.
My current challenge is taking the MPEG2 transmissions off the air, decode the video and re-encode it into H.264 format, all in realtime. A lot more complicated than simply pulling apart an MPEG2 transport stream and multicasting each channel onto our network as we do now.
H.264 is a fairly recent standard. As such, it's proving very difficult to get hold of encoding hardware at a reasonable price with decent software support. So I'm currently investigating with a full-featured DVB-S card that'll provide VLC with an already decoded video stream and then transcoding to H.264 and spitting out a multicast. My main concern is can we do it fast enough in software? I'll find out soon!
A rather unexpected surprise was the lack of vendors with H.264 capable set top boxes. What seems to have happened is that one vendor has produced a prototype and mentioned it to their marketing department. This has pushed all the other vendors to do the same. So far, only one company we've talked to has a proper commercially available box right now. All the others are three months off. We've got two months left to complete this project!
The aim of this project is not to produce a working IPTV solution for a hotel. It is a research and development exercise to find out what services can be offered over wireless. Which is definitely a good thing. We have huge reservations about realtime video transmission over wifi technology. A lot of online research has borne out this assumption. But we shall see!
I suspect that ultimately this project can deliver a meaningful service. But I suspect not in the form we'll be working with now.
I can imagine that for a proper rollout in peoples homes the best approach would be a set top box with hard disk and DVB-T tuner. This would be connected both to their TV aerial and to a wifi antenna. PVR functionality is offered for over-the-air broadcasts, Internet access is available wirelessly, potentially along with VoIP service.
And Video on Demand content would be trickle fed through the wifi connection so users would select in advance what local or premium content they wish to watch. This would then be available on their STB's disk at a later time.
It may not be ideal, but short of running fibre I think it's a reasonable and useful solution for the time being.
Lucky
Posted by stephen on Tuesday, 24th January, 2006 @ 00:22
I've just watched a documentary on Channel 4 entitled 'Gay Muslims' and it leaves me feeling a little shocked. It most definitely highlights to me how lucky I've been in my life.
I came out back when I was 13, first at school to a few friends, it didn't take long to be the whole school, though not really by my choice. Then second to my parents. After that, school wasn't really too much fun a lot of the time.
The town where I want to school is a fairly small one, and pretty isolated really, physically and culturally. Kids aren't always comfortable with people that are different from themselves and even worse at that age I'm told that a significant minority of boys that are ultimately straight will question their sexuality. So I think maybe my presence caused them to be confronted with a few things they didn't want to deal with and felt they had to reject.
More than that, in some cases their parents didn't want to deal with it either. I remember, not long after I came out, changing from middle school to high school, and going from getting a bus to biking to school as it was a lot closer to where we lived. I'd very tentatively planned to bike to school with one of my friends at the time who lived not too far away. And I remember getting a phone call from him out of the blue not long before term started telling me his parents didn't think it was a good idea.
I was finally pushed by my form tutor to tell my parents, I guess so they could help me cope or at the very least be aware of what was happening to me at school. I decided to tell Mum first, as I lived with her and my brother and my Dad lived about 100 miles away not far from where I'm living now.
She was a little shocked at first, and I think it must have hurt her somewhat to start with. She was afraid for me, worried that I'd have a lonely life, be targeted by dirty old men and die of AIDS I think. She wanted to know why I felt like this. I imagine she questioned her own actions in bringing me up.
She very soon phoned my Dad and he drove down that evening to see us. He sat me down and was very calm and understanding. I don't remember it too well, I really wasn't comfortable talking about it. I later learned that he'd spoken to his boss after speaking to Mum and he'd insisted on seeing him right away to have a chat about it. He wanted to make sure that my Dad in no way made me feel bad about it, just in case it was just a phase and a bad experience might turn me into a homophobic git with a real chip on his shoulder.
Mum very quickly turned to acceptance and I was continually reminded by both of them that I would always be their son and that they loved me. I think I told mum a little about school and she went to see my form tutor.
I think the teacher wanted me to go and see a local gay support group, but I didn't want to, I don't really know why. I think I didn't want to make a big thing out of it, didn't want the attention and didn't want Mum to have to deal with anyone she might know finding out.
Anyway, time went on, and nothing really changed at school. Various things caused that really. There was no effective way of dealing with it I suppose. I remember my Media teacher feeling very strongly about it and offering to confront the worst offenders when I was out of the room. I was really very touched by her sentiment at the time.
She later came back to me and said she couldn't, she'd been told not to by the deputy head, who was responsible for discipline matters. I guess it conflicted with Section 28 back then, or maybe just with his views. Because not long after some of the more problematic guys told me how they'd been called in to see him and he'd basically sympathised with their position (I believe he used more verbose terms than that) but told them they really shouldn't get at me. I think they were as shocked as I was.
So nothing really got any better and every now and then Mum would ask how things were and I always said they were a lot better. I really wanted to protect her from worrying about me and from hurting for me. She tells me these days it's her job to worry and I shouldn't have felt I couldn't tell her. I didn't really open up to Dad either until a few years after, I just got on with things as best I could.
Eventually, I finished school and got a job in London, then later, here in Bedford and now back in London, though Bedford is still my home. And I'm happy to say that ever since I started my working life, being gay has never caused a problem for me or anyone around me.
And I have to say that these days I really have no grudges or malice directed at anyone who made life difficult at school, being a teenager isn't an easy thing.
I shall always be grateful for the wonderful parents I have. These days my Mum especially is always asking how things are going with whoever I'm seeing and doesn't like it too much when I'm single or split up with someone. Both my parents have met my partners and I always felt very much welcomed them into our family.
Watching the documentary tonight really reenforces the feelings I wrote about in 'Open Minded?' a couple of days ago. And it really brings home how lucky I am for my parents and my many friends and colleagues over this past nearly 6 years.
It really pains me to see that there are people out there, just like me and so many others, but who can't be themselves or who are rejected by their families and communities when they try to be.
And this is not just in some far off country, it's right here.
Birthday Blog
Posted by stephen on Sunday, 22nd January, 2006 @ 23:55
Another year's gone by and at around 1pm today I was 24 years old. Blimey, this past year has gone by so quickly. All in all I think it's been a good one.
Anyway, my lovely Jamesy came over yesterday and gave me a wonderful present, a picture he painted himself...
We went out for a nice Indian in Bedford and then off to Milton Keynes to see Brokeback Mountain. Having queued for 20 minutes and being about three people away from being served, the 9pm showing became full. And as they were only showing it at 6pm and 9pm and Bedford aren't showing it at all we came home again and I downloaded it. Naughty me. Will still try and see it in the cinema on Wednesday.
So slightly pissed off that appartently it's not interesting enough to the general public to be shown everywhere and more often. Despite hearing rave reviews about it from all directions. Perhaps we're just not quite as tolerant of homosexuality yet as I thought we were.
Also rather pissed off with Milton Keynes, I always hate going there, the A421 is so slow! And the place has no character and no soul. Parking for Xscape was a nightmare, it was full of real chavvy people (a bit snobbish but I've had a few glasses of wine now so I don't care). So I think we'll try for Stevenage on Wednesday.
Anyway, back to the positives. This is oddly turning into a diary entry which is unusual for me! Took James to work at around 7.30, Dad came over at 10.00 and gave me a lovely card and the DVD I wanted along with the DVD of Coast which I'm really pleased with. And thanks to Dad's help, Sophie now has here very own little back door that she's currently rather reluctant to use!
Just after lunchtime and I pick up Richard from the station and we do a little bit of work. Chat a bit, watch some Family Guy and American Dad, then off to the Black Horse in Woburn for another fantastic meal. My present from Richard! Though I'm buying him dinner tomorrow in return so not sure how that works!
And now, a bottle of wine, a bit of blogging and chatting to some nice people.
Open Minded?
Posted by stephen on Saturday, 21st January, 2006 @ 01:37
Warning: This entry may be considered somewhat controversial. I'm entitled to my opinions and use this platform to express them freely, just as anyone reading this is able to do.
I've always liked believing that I'm an open minded person. I don't think I'm sexist, racist, homophobic, heterophobic or overly burdened with any particular prejudices. I guess I'm a product of a good upbringing and a mostly reasonable and tolerant society.
Despite that, some things have recently set me thinking about how open minded I really am. Having watched a few series of Big Brother now I start to question the value of debate. When two parties argue from opposing viewpoints is there ever any chance of either party changing their mind?
Think about it. When was the last time you argued with someone and you walked away having lost the argument? Did it actually make you change your opinion?
Perhaps arguments actually serve to help undecided observers choose their side? Does the value of debate serve not to open the minds of the those who have already formed their opinion but simply to polarise the fence sitters?
I've just read this article about first impressions on the web. A quote that really stuck out for me was this one.
...where users search for confirming evidence and ignore evidence contrary to their initial impression. People want to be right, and tend to look for clues that validate their initial hypothesis.
There's one particular area where I'm not so great at being a tolerant and open minded individual. And I've tried to be, I've tried to allow for the alleged possibilities, but I keep finding myself slipping back into my own definite views.
And that area is religion, spirituality and science. I'll put my cards on the table, I'm a scientist. I'm a rational person and believe things when I see them or when a sufficiently reasonable argument and evidence is put before me.
Religion seems to me to be an outmoded social process that helped fill gaps in understanding and at the same time allowed for overarching control of large numbers of people. In modern times science answers or can begin to answer many questions about the nature of the Universe. With the levels of education available in the Western world and increasingly across the entire globe it seems strange to me that religion isn't dying off as a relic of an age of ignorance.
How is it possible for any reasonable person to take the collective works of hundreds of people across thousands of years, reinterpreted tens of times and read each and every line as absolute truth?
Which brings me on to spirituality, the whole New Age thing, where people don't ascribe to any set doctrine but instead build up a patchwork of beliefs that fit the way they want to see the world.
This same process seems to be used by religious moderates, pulling out the parts of their holy works that fit their world view and ignoring that which does not. Even the fundamentalists struggle when such holy works are full of internal contradictions.
I think my feelings in this area were rather well summed up by Prof. Richard Dawkins in his recent Channel 4 documentary "The Root of All Evil?". It's so easy to imagine that any person with sufficient education would come to the conclusion that religion is ultimately meaningless yet hideously damaging to humanity. But it's not the case, millions of people are indoctrinated and hold beliefs that are based on nothing. Yet so powerful are these beliefs, they give their entire lives over to them.
One might argue that science is just another religion. Another set of texts that attempt to explain the world. But science isn't a set of immutable facts written in a book. Science is a process for constantly striving for a better understanding of the Universe. It's about edging closer to the truth and taking delight at each step forward as we learn we didn't quite get things right last time.
Is the fear of no longer existing as a conscious being so great that it's necessary for us to scrape around for a higher meaning? Isn't every living thing, every land, every star such a wondrous and beautiful thing that living this life is absolutely worth while?
Isn't it rather arrogant and ungrateful to expect more when we're so ridiculously lucky to exist here and now and experience this life?
VNC Victory
Posted by stephen on Friday, 20th January, 2006 @ 12:58
After a little more work at 2am (late night to early morning is definitely my most productive time) and with a little help from VNC version 4 and Twisted.Web, I've pulled together my Firefox for Set Top Boxes project.
A number of VNC and Firefox sessions are spawned in advance and each web request from the STB is given a unique display ID to connect to. At the same time, a new session is spawned to make sure there's enough available for new users and that it's available to use as quickly as possible.
For each session a unique Firefox profile is created, ensuring users don't see the histories, cookies, etc of previous users and allowing the process to run as a single non-root user.
All that's left to do now is find a window manager that'll let me remove all functionality except the close widget and to customise Firefox to go to the right home page, use the right proxy and remove access to preferences and the local disk.
Money
Posted by stephen on Thursday, 19th January, 2006 @ 23:27
I've just watched a rather interesting and entertaining programme on BBC2 called Pay Off Your Mortgage in Two Years. As the title suggests, the presenter believes it's possible for most people to sufficiently reduce their outgoings and boost their incomes enough to pay off their mortgage in just two years.
How? Through two years of very hard work! Both in terms of living week to week on as little as possible and by exploiting your talents outside of your day job, even loosing the day job eventually.
One example of cutting down given tonight was the couple in question's lunchtime habits. By making their own vegetable soup and having that for lunch twice a week they saved ?8. Over the two years, that's ?832. Not a lot off ?90,000 perhaps? But it's one of many tiny details that really add up.
When I think about my spending it's actually quite scary how many unnecessary outgoings I have. For example, my NTL Cable Modem is currently costing me ?34.99 per month for a 10Mbit connection. I used to have a 512Kb connection when I first got broadband, and that seemed super-fast at the time. Now the minimum NTL will sell me is a 1Mbit connection for ?17.99 per month.
Do I really NEED 10Mbit access to the Internet? In two years I'd have an extra ?408 if I dropped to 1Mbit. That's a really bad example because it's something I really don't see myself doing!
I've got ?149,600 of mortgage repayments left over the next 22 years and 8 months. That's if it stays at ?550/month. Which it won't when my fixed rate runs out in nearly 5 years time. Even if it does, I've currently got around ?87,500 of capital left to pay off, which means I'm paying Halifax's shareholders ?62,100 for the privilege.
If I was able to pay my mortgage off in 11 years, I'd save over ?30,000! And 11 years feels like a more realistic goal for me than 2!
But how to save and how to earn?
Podcasting
Posted by stephen on Wednesday, 18th January, 2006 @ 02:12
I know I'm rather late to the party, but I've recently discovered podcasting, more specifically audio blogs rather than the various commercial offerings. And I can't work out exactly how I feel about it.
On an intellectual level, it seems mostly to be a load of people drivelling on about nothing particularly interesting. But there's some more basic, human value in it.
First off, there's the Big Brother style of appeal. Every year I tell myself I'm not going to watch it, and every year I find something oddly compelling about the whole thing. And Podcasting seems like a microcosm of that experience. Little snippets of other peoples lives are somehow interesting, sometimes from a comedy perspective, sometimes for drama. I'm sure there's some deep psychological, sociological and evolutionary reasons for that.
Secondly, and perhaps related to the previous point, there's something almost comforting about the experience of listening to someone else talking about their lives. It reminds me of the phone conversations I have with my far away friends who I don't get to see as much as I'd like to. Maybe I need more friends? I don't think so though, I think perhaps it's that when you see people often you don't always talk about the little details or the deep stuff on a regular basis. And that stuff is important.
Which leads me to an observation about the medium as a whole. Audio blogs strike me as ideal for personal publishing. Like listening to the radio, listening to a podcast in my experience is something done whilst doing something else, like driving or writing documentation! Which makes it ideal for non-technical subjects, where a much higher level of concentration would be required. In the case of audio blogs, devoting too much attention to listening would likely prove less valuable.
Because of that, I believe there's considerably less value in video blogging, or vlogging or video casting or whatever the latest buzzword is. Watching video generally involves a much higher level of involvement. Perhaps I'm wrong though, doesn't Big Brother prove otherwise?
In fact I know a lot of people who have the TV on all the time, in the background, paying little attention to it. I've never really done that, perhaps because the majority of TV content is geared to the viewer paying attention to keep up with the plot. Time will tell no doubt.
In the mean time I'm far too self conscious to do either a podcast or a vlog. I don't believe I've got anything interesting to talk about, but perhaps that doesn't matter?
Google Video
Posted by stephen on Tuesday, 17th January, 2006 @ 23:28
I've been following links that take me to Google Video more and more this past week or two. I could say something interesting and profound about the whole thing, but I'm not going to instead I'm going to link to...
A crazy lady from American Wife Swap who helps highlight why Christians should be humanly euthanised for the sake of the gene pool. And a slightly revised Madonna music video.
Openness in the Workplace
Posted by stephen on Tuesday, 17th January, 2006 @ 23:16
Today it's been brought home to me just how lucky I am to have ended up in my current job.
Not only do I get to work on some really interesting projects, work with some really cool people and have a load of fun, but the company I work for has a great approach to business.
Perhaps because we're a social enterprise, so driven not to make a profit but to benefit the local community. It's not my local community, but still, it feels good!
Maybe it's to do with our tiny size, a board of incredibly experienced directors, our tireless, doggedly determined and excitable MD, my long-haired, PBX loving, Jesus lookalike boss and me. And our tiny team is passionate about the stuff we do.
Whatever it is, what I've ended up in is the most flexible, transparent and open company I've ever worked in. There's no politics involved, except the politics of the work itself (as most of the cash at this point comes from various government sources).
There's no secrets. Even though I'm the smallest cog in the gearbox (or however that expression should go), I was copied in on the company's account return to Companies House today, so I know just what's happening, even financially. And that's great! It means I can appreciate exactly how much money we need to make to keep us paid and where our costs are.
And that helps motivate me to make sure we keep things working. So thank you the directors of Newham.net, Richard S and Richard O, you help me love my job!
Appleness and My Website
Posted by stephen on Sunday, 15th January, 2006 @ 23:42
So I find myself lusting after a MacBook Pro and hatching plans to sell my year old 12" PowerBook, and maybe even the PowerMac G5 if it made a good desktop replacement.
But I'm going to be patient, they don't ship for a month, and I want to read some reviews of them first. First generation Apple products can sometimes be a little flakey, and they've not mentioned battery life at all and they have always done so in the past, even if their estimates were a little optimistic of real life experience and only really applicable to the first few months. My year old battery now lasts about 1h30m at best.
Plus there's been rumours that the only reason the rest of the product line hasn't been converted yet is because of a shortage of Core Duo processors and that there'll be a more revolutionary upgrade coming in a few months. So I really should wait for that. I'm using the G5 loads more these days, so the laptop really isn't as important to me as it was.
The lovely James decided to go Mac recently, and finally purchased his brand new Mini this week, I ordered it Thursday lunchtime, it arrived Friday. The Apple Store is sooo much faster when they have stuff in stock waiting in the UK!
What I wasn't expecting to find in the box this soon was a copy of iLife '06. I'd assumed we'd have to send off for it after we'd received the Mini. But sure enough, there it was!
iPhoto gets more slick and more useful with each release, which is great. The calendars look fantastic. I've never ordered prints of my digital photography, preferring to get it online or on DVDs. The alternatives the latest version of iPhoto makes available make getting stuff printed much more appealing to me. Photocasting is pretty useless to me as I don't have a .Mac account and don't plan to get one. Maybe if I can stick my own domain name on it I'd be tempted.
A quick launch of iMovie let me briefly play with the animation thingies, which are kind of cool. Though as I've bought Final Cut Express, I'm not likely to use this particular app too much.
iDVD has a much more usable layout in my opinion, and widescreen menus are a great addition, especially for the UK (and I assume most of Europe) where we've had widescreen TVs as the norm for years now!
GarageBand's podcast studio is pretty cool, and the integration of all the apps, highlighted most by the sixth member of the suite, really shows here. The sound effects and jingles are very good. If I made podcasts I'm sure I'd find it all very useful. But as I demonstrate with my currently intermittent blogging, I've not really got anything to talk about.
On to iWeb... I have to say, this is a really cool app! It takes literally a few minutes to put a nice looking site together. My main reservation is that it'll create hundreds of sites that look identical. But from recent blog reads, WordPress seems to do that already. Anyway, that's besides the point. This program makes putting a page together incredibly easy, integrating your iLife data in an easy drag and drop fashion. And you can Publish to a Folder as well as .Mac. Not quite so swish, no AJAX photo galleries, and something weird happened to the character encoding when I uploaded it.
Here's what my site my look like if I'd built it in iWeb. It's not too bad for 5 minutes of work (then 10 mins of replacing the weird encoding, you can still see it if you drill down to the blog entry).
That, along with some other sites I've looked at lately (along with some reliablity issues I've had which are down to Apache's interaction with Zope, and not a problem with Plone), make me want to abandon Plone. Customising the visuals just isn't that easy or flexible. So I'm tempted to rebuild from scratch and import everything over, make it look a little nicer and actually have a working comments system.
Watch this space...
VNC Geekery
Posted by stephen on Sunday, 15th January, 2006 @ 21:35
Soon I'll be off up to Scotland to plumb RegenTV in to a hotel. The intention is to deploy it wirelessly with 802.11a (in case you've not seen, the Intel Macs support 802.11a too now) to the hotel rooms, eventually with the idea that people other than ourselves will come along later and deploy the service across the local town. An interesting idea indeed!
We're a little sceptical at the moment as to whether or not there's going to be enough bandwidth and QoS to support video. So we're going to do a little scientific experiment to find out if it's possible. I've been charged with writing up the report, as of the three of us involved I'm the one who most recently went to school and therefore apparently have the best chance of remembering the write ups from A-Level Physics (pity I didn't actually finish that).
I'm kinda hoping it doesn't work at the moment. If it does, we've got a lot of development to do and a lot of kit to buy on a project with a modest budget and timescale. Transcoding MPEG2 to MPEG4 isn't going to be too easy and limits the number of channels we can offer. It'd be fun to develop really, but need more time!
I've spent this weekend working here and there, which I don't mind as I'm kind of enjoying it and I did nothing for about three weeks around Christmas. I'm flipping between writing documentation for RegenTV and creating a new service.
The documentation is slow going, but looking pretty good so far, and will be available on the RegenTV site at some point I guess. Hoorah for Open Sourciness!
The new service aims at improving the web browsing experience we provide. The set top boxes we use offer an incredibly basic and slow browser with no Flash, etc. In Stratford, we offer PC-on-TV with Citrix to Windows and with VNC to Linux/KDE. Once logged in our peeps can access IE, Firefox or Konqueror and have a more fulfilling browsing experience.
Now, our hotel isn't going to have a PC-on-TV service. It's not exactly vital that guests can make spreadsheets on their hotel TV. But browsing the web would be good. And issuing usernames and passwords for visitors to login would be rather rubbish. Doing it with Citrix on Windows is pretty easy, publish IE as an application and tick a box to allow anonymous access to it. But that's expensive, closed source and just a bit ick.
Linux isn't quite so easy. I've not found a way of publishing an application with VNC, just a whole desktop session. NX seems like something that could do it, but we don't have an NX client on our STBs unfortunately.
So I've decided to write a little daemon in Python that acts as a web server, handing out HTML pages to set top boxes that include some Javascript to kick off the VNC client connecting to an incrementing VNC port. Currently it starts a vncserver session on demand that itself starts Metacity and Firefox with a brand new profile for each session.
I want to make sure I customise Firefox enough to ensure that our users can't access any parts of the system they shouldn't be able to get to. I also want to write in a prefork model, ala Apache, that'll keep some web browser sessions in reserve, so that the STB gets an immediate browser ready to use and doesn't have to wait for it all to start. Has been pretty straightforward so far.
I've got 44 days of work to do in the next 6 weeks, which equates to 50 days of work time apparently, so it's cutting it a little close. Fortunately, we budgeted 5 days for this VNC Web Browser service, I thought I was being conservative with that, but others thought it'd be a lot longer. And so far I reckon it's probably going to be another day's work beyond what I've got done this weekend. Woohoo!
Retro News
Posted by stephen on Thursday, 05th January, 2006 @ 15:30
I was watching the ITV Lunchtime News today and one of their features was post, phone and email scams. Of course, this features some stock footage of post coming through the door, a text message on an ancient Nokia phone and a picture of someone using a computer, which I've screen grabbed...
Notice anything? It's an Amiga 500 Plus, circa 1991 or there abouts. The guy using it is even fiddling around with the Workbench 2.04 icons. Well, I could suggest that this computer isn't even usable on the net, but that's not true, I got my A500 online, albeit by upgrading to Workbench 3.1, 5Mb of RAM and a 120Mb hard disk. Still, I think it's not necessarily the most appropriate bit of video to show someone online.
However, I thought it was rather cool to see an Amiga on TV, it's been a few years since CBBC and Fun House gave them away as their stock prize. I wonder what the original context for this footage was.
