Almost Dunn Blog

I finished my last exam at 11:00 on Wednesday, and my mom picked me up from residence the morning of Thursday. I've been home since, but haven't bothered signing on to MSN yet (my brother rules the computer at the house). Christmas was good, the family finally upgraded computer monitors (courtesy of my grandparents). The computer here at the house went from a 15" CRT, where the reds were shifted right by one pixel, up to a 19" LCD, where everything is crystal clear, and the VGA cable isn't even plugged in. Boy is it sweet. On a whim, I took a look at the installation manual (it's a Samsung SyncMaster 920T), and what did I see, but a section on how to set up Linux to use the monitor. The instructions are kind of ambiguous, and you would need to know what you're doing with X before following the instructions, but seeing Linux having a section in the installation manual is a step in the right direction. The instructions are as follows:
To execute X-Window, you need to make the X86Config file, which is a type of system setting file. 1)Press Enter at the first and second screen after executing the X86Config file. 2)The third screen is for setting your mouse. 3)Set a mouse for your computer 4)The next screen is for selecting a keyboard. 5)Set a Keyboard for your computer. 7)First of all, set a horizontal frequency for your monitor. (You can enter the frequency directly.) 8)Set a vertical frequency for your monitor. (You can enter the frequency directly.) 9)Enter the model name of your monitor. This information will not affect the actual execution of X-Window. 10)You have finished setting up your monitor. Execute X-Window after setting other requested hardware.

Of course, there is the X86Config file, which is in /etc/X11/, but it is apparent they want you to run the x86config program, in which case, it should have been lowercase letters. It as also obvious they are using the old XFree86 project instead of the newer x.org. They obviously have some work to do, but it joys me to see they have a Linux section on installing the monitor, right after the listing for Windows NT, and Macintosh isn't even on the page. I checked out the box, but there is no Tux on it, unlike the Lexar USB thumb/stick/jump drives, which actually have a Tux symbol on the store packaging for all consumers to see.

Yesterday (Monday) a bunch of the guys who lived on 4th Nootka last year met up and went out for lunch at Great Wall Mongolian BBQ, on Broadway West. Steve, who has been on exchange for the past semester in Quebec, was in town for two days before going home for the holidays, so we tried to get as many people as possible together for lunch. Most of us met at the UBC bus loop and headed in via the 99-B, getting off at the Safeway on MacDonald, then heading back West one block. It wasn't the best decorated restaurant (not bad on the outside, but so-so on the inside), but the food was pretty good. The whole thing is done in an interesting buffet style, where you grab a bowl, put in frozen strips of chicken/lamb/beef/pork, layer on some vegetables and noodles, and apply your own combination of sauces from twelve choices. When you are satisfied with your concoction, you put the bowl in a queue and the chef will fry the contents of your bowl. Each bowl is done separately to prevent mixing, and you can see the setup in the pictures below. While you wait for your bowl to be cooked, you go sit down and the waitress will bring your bowl to you, hopefully remembering whose was whose. We ended up staying there for about two hours, just reminiscing on everything we had done last year. It was quite a good time, and for $11 for all you can eat, it was a pretty good deal. Pictures are, as always, on my webserver.

Harrison

Chorus

Little darling
It's been a long cold lonely winter
Little darling
It seems like years since it's been here

Chorus

Little darling
The smiles returning to the faces
Little darling
It seems like years since it's been here

Chorus

Bridge

Little darling
I see the ice is slowly melting
Little darling
It seems like years since it's been clear

Chorus

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Last night I had my Math 221 exam, and had planned on watching a movie after I got back to give me a chance to unwind. The person I was going to watch the movie with was busy, so we decided to delay the screening until tonight, and I climbed into bed early (around 11:00). I decided I would get up early this morning to try out a little experiment. Getting up at 5:30 in the morning, I went through my standard routine, then got my camera set up to do some time lapse photography of the Sun rising in the South-East. I set up my tripod in front of my window facing the approximate direction that I have noted the Sun coming up over the past couple days, and made sure my battery was charged and my flash memory empty. Starting at around 6:45 this morning, I pressed the shutter button on my camera every 10 seconds until the Sun rose. A website on the Internet said the Sun would rise at 8:02 this morning, but due to local terrain and buildings, the Sun didn't show its merry face until around 8:27. My intention was to start when it was still pitch dark outside, but the sky started to lighten sooner than I thought it would, so I kind of missed my starting time. All the pictures were taken on my Nikon CoolPix 5900, with the autofocus light assist turned on, though I should've turned it off to make my life easier, as the light was bouncing off my window (and, after reviewing the pictures, was probably throwing the focus off). I also clocked the resolution down to 3 megapixels (2048x1536) and medium JPEG compression. Wite balance, matrix metering, colour, contrast, image sharpening, iso sensitivity, and saturation control were all either default or auto. I turned the focus area and noise reduction off, as I knew that dark shots would have a lot of natural grain and such. The battery held up quite well, taking 611 pictures over a period of 1 hour and 45 minutes, with the lcd monitor on the whole time. I then took all the pictures, put them on my computer, and used MPlayer/MEncoder to encode a DivX video with resolution 1024x768 at 15 frames per second. The specific command line code, for the curious:
mencoder mf://*.jpg -mf w=2048:h=1536:type=jpg:fps=15 -vf scale=1024:768 -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:mbd=1:vbitrate=2400 -oac copy -o sunrise_small.avi
I haven't been able to encode a full resolution 2048x1536 video, as the codec seems to give a Segmentation Fault at that resolution (I don't blame it), and I can't get other codecs to handle it either. The video turned out quite small, due to very little apparent motion, at only 12.4MB. You can grab it here.

In the beginning of the video, you can see Venus high and to the center. Around the 4 second mark, Mercury appears behind the bright tower in behind the trees on the left. Because I had to depress the shutter by hand and the lighting conditions were so low, some of the frames came out blurry, despite using a tripod. There were also times when I would shift my arm or press a button too hard and would move the camera, causing the wobble and shifts that happen sporadically. Around the 20 second mark, small black dots appear in individual frames that look like dirt on a traditional film strip, these are actually birds waking up at around 7:30 in the morning and flying in front of the camera. There was one cool point around 7:45 where a plane flew overhead, and the whole belly and wings of the aircraft was reflecting the Sun. I checked for this frame, but the aircraft is too small in the picture to be noteworthy. The Sun finally peeks around Promontory Estates at around 8:27, and the last frame of the video was taken at 8:30.

My method for timing was basically to count to myself (I don't have any lit clocks that show seconds, and my computer monitor would cause too many reflections on the window), so the video isn't very accurate in any sense of the term. The ultimate system would be to have some sort of computer controlled remote shutter switch, so I can write a script or use a program to fire the shutter at exact time intervals without any risk. An AC adapter would also be nice, for those extended time lapse sessions (I figure my battery had about 15 minutes of juice left before it would have quit).

That could also read "Attack of the Aluminium" if you live in the UK or Australia.

Friday the 3rd was the last day of classes here at UBC, and what remains of our semester is called "Exam Period". Of course, exams only being ~2 hours long, this leads to much time on one's hands, and after a full semester of working, doing essays, toiling over labs, and trying oh so hard to get up for 8 a.m. classes, some fun must be had. Bryce, immediately following classes on Friday, had left to go home for the weekend (to get some laundry done up), while his roommate, Ryan stayed here. Seeing a prime opportunity for mischief, Casey, who is lucky enough to have a single room, decided to pull a little prank on Bryce. As it turned out, this prank would not be so little after all. Starting at 6 in the evening on Sunday, aluminum foil was obtained in large quantities, both through the form of purchase, and through the form of legitimate donations by the managers of local food services companies (the Totem Cafeteria and Pie R Squared, the pizza store in Student Union Building, being the primary ones). An underestimate (a gross oversight in this case) of required amounts led to more supplies being acquired later in the evening, from the graveyard kitchen staff of the aforementioned Totem Cafeteria. When all was said and done, the amount of aluminum foil used would appropriately be measured in miles instead of the normal feet, and the author wishes he had invested money in Alcan and Reynolds. But for what could this amount of aluminum be used for?

In Greek mythology King Midas of Phrygia is granted his wish that everything he touched would turn to gold. For one long night our resident Greek and Middle Eastern Archeology student, Casey, wished that he could have an "Aluminum Touch", enabling everything on Bryce's side of the double room to turn to aluminum, and so it did. It took until around 2 in the morning, and required the help of many people (who mostly came and went as they wished), but everything in Bryce's room ended up wrapped like some demented Christmas present, all shiny and silver in colour. All we were missing was Burl Ives singing "Silver and Gold". If you are feeling brave enough, you can download a zip file of pictures that I have prepared, that weighs almost as much as the aluminum ball that could be found in the hallway the next day. Prepare your hard drives for a full 75MB, and download this file.

The next morning, when Bryce arrived with clean underwear in hand, all he could say was "Wow." With all the effort that had been put in, with all the love and care it took to wrap all his possessions, Bryce couldn't feel angry, but instead amazed. It only took about half and hour to unwrap the room and contents, which made for an aluminum ball about two feet across. Believe me, an aluminum ball two feet across is next to impossible to "hackey sack", but it sure was fun to wrap up an early Christmas for an unsuspecting receiver.

Here's a problem that someone showed me today on Windows XP. The problem: can't switch primary/secondary mouse button functions (ie. can't switch mouse from right-handed to left-handed). The background: One Dell laptop with Synaptic TouchPad and PS/2 mouse plugged in with USB adapter dongle. The person has switched the layout of their room, putting their laptop on the other side of them, so now, after several years of using the laptop, they want to change the "handedness" of the mouse. Their level of ambidextrous abilities is beyond the scope of this post, and why any right-handed person would suddenly want to switch is not my point. Going into the mouse settings, as per Microsoft's instructions shows that the "Switch primary and secondary buttons" checkbox is disabled. Of course this Google search comes up with nothing. At first I thought this could be due to conflicting software, and perhaps he had Logitech or similar software overriding Windows' functions. He said he didn't have any such software, and the generic brand name printed on his mouse, combined with the lack of any such program in the Start menu confirmed this. My next thought was that Microsoft or some other software couldn't handle having the buttons switched with the Synaptic pad turned on, ie. switching the buttons then touching the pad would be counted as secondary click. Disabling the touch pad did nothing for the ability to switch mouse buttons. Then I remembered (with some refresher from Google) about the command "rundll32.exe user32.dll,SwapMouseButton" but according to this page, that command is not a toggle, and not reversible through the same command. Seeing as how I didn't want the "client" to be left stranded in lefty mode, I didn't follow through on the command. Then I thought maybe XP was having problems with the PS/2 to USB adapter (despite the fact that I have changed handedness on Windows 3.1 with the old serial mice). Grabbing my USB mouse (Microsoft brand, no less), we unplugged his mouse, plugged in mine, tried to do the switch, then restarted and tried again. Then we logged on as system administrator in Safe Mode (thinking, maybe he didn't have permissions somewhere), and still nothing. I have no idea why he can't switch mouse buttons, after having tried all that. I narrowed it down to one final problem: "You're using Windows."

Last Monday, we had the first morning frost (at least it was the first as far as I could tell). This was expected, and probably past due, considering how late in the year it is. The great surprise came Tuesday when UBC awoke to see a couple centimeters of snow on the ground. After attending classes on Tuesday I took my camera out and went for a good hour long walk. The temperature was hovering around zero, so the snow was falling lightly, while the trees would be raining down water, which caused a neat effect. It has been a week now, and the snow is still around, which is quite unusual for these parts. It has at least partially melted, reducing the roads to a muddy mess. To see the pristine beauty that was one week ago, check out the pictures.

Anybody living in the Greater Vancouver Regional District will know that it was rather foggy a week ago. UBC was no exception, with the fog rolling in to a visibility of around 500 meters. This humidity in the air had the effect of depositing a layer of "dew" on everything around, including spider webbing. I took my camera and tripod outside to the walkway that connects my building with the commons block, and set it up to take various photos of the dew-drenched spider webs. Most people who passed were curious and astonished at what I was doing, and most thought I was a little "strange". After taking photos of the webs, I coerced Byron to join me and go down to Wreck Beach and we took photos of the cliffs, the breakwall, and the surf. I have put all the photos of that day on my webserver, with a link page here. The link page is a simple html, but it in turn links to the original, unscaled 5.1 megapixel images, so you have been warned. These pictures have not been Gimped in any way, and the first image in the set is from a different day (in case you were wondering about the lack of fog in that photo).

How Microsoft Tricks Its Users

Man, sometimes you just have to laugh when you use Microsoft and their software. I'm home for the Canadian Thanksgiving Weekend, which means I upgrade software and clean up my parents Windows XP computer. Today I visited Windows Update to get all the latest fixes (that aren't done in the auto updates), and the first page said that I had to download the latest version of the Windows Updater software. Among the list of advantages to this new version were things like resuming downloads, smaller download sizes, Windows and Office downloads in one program, and other features that I can't remember. I looked specifically if they were adding any copy protection or piracy checking, and that was not in the list. When I downloaded this new version of the software it downloaded only one package, called "Windows Genuine Advantage Validation Tool (KB892130)". I just love how Microsoft lied to me, saying it was this all new improved version of the updater tool, mentioned nothing about piracy checking, and then loads up a tool that serves no purpose but to check if my Windows is pirated.

Don't worry, I have the corporate version of Windows, which means they do no checking anyways.

You've probably heard of Google's instant messaging / voice messaging software called "Google Talk". I've seen more and more screenshots of people using Google Talk, either to test it out, or to use it extensively. I decided to check it out myself today, primarily because it works on the Jabber protocol, and I already have a Jabber account at jabber.org. In my research I found out that while Google Talk does use the Jabber protocol, the talk.google.com servers don't communicate with other Jabber servers. I was hoping I could use my preexisting @jabber.org account to chat with my @gmail.com friends, but have had no such luck. Google claims that they are working on it, and will update the service to support 3rd party servers, but they are still working out the kinks (like IM spam). So I will give this Google Talk thing a go, sans the voice functions. The nice thing is that if you already have a gmail account, then you already have a google talk account and you just add the account to your favourite jabber client.

I would still prefer that people add me under my "tiosc@jabber.org" account, but if you do use Google Talk, then you can add me under "dunnadam@gmail.com". It would be nice to use Jabber at least once to talk with someone! You can read more about Google Talk here, and you can find out how to add your account to the best instant messaging client here.

On Tuesday (I know, I'm a little behind on these posts) Google gave a presentation here at UBC titled "Organizing The World's Information". Three Google engineers came up from Mountain View, along with one intern from UBC (the kid in white in the photos) to give the presentation. The presentation basically had the objective of recruiting, although no effort was made to hide this fact. It started with Dave Marwood, a UBC alumni himself, talking about the challenges that Google faces, like distributed processing, search algorithms, easy user interfaces, etc. He then talked about the lifestyle at Google, which morphed into how one could apply to work at Google. After the slideshow was finished, there were questions and answers, most having to do with recruitment, some about secret Google projects (to which they claimed ignorance). Pizza and pop were given out before the event started, and pens and long sleeve shirts were distributed afterwards. A raffle was also held for other Google clothing items. The talk was quite interesting, and they tried to show all the different areas that Google does research in, not just search. I didn't take any pictures of the slides, out of respect and copyright concerns, but I did get one of the opening slide, showing the presenters names. The lighting wasn't the greatest, and I kept my flash off, so some of the pics are also blurry. I picked up one of the orange pens, and the two shots of the shirt are the large that I picked up, front then back. I really don't feel like downscaling the pictures, so all of them are presented in the full 5.1 surround pixels.
Google raffle prizes on table
Slide 0
A fair turnout
Dave Marwood in background with intern in front
The recruitment part of the presentation
Dave Marwood and Wenxin Li
Intern and Kelly Poon
Savages fighting it out for Google shirts
Empty pizza boxes
Different angle of pizza boxes
Crowds starting to die off
People mingling
Google pens!
Front of Google shirt
Back of Google shirt

Speaking of surround pixels, last night I finished the compile (some eight hours) of a panorama tool called hugin. For the first test, I took five pictures of my room (in its messy-state) and stitched them together in hugin. Some Gimping had to be done to crop and scale, as I haven't figured out all the settings yet, and you will notice that the right-most picture was blurry. On Thanksgiving I will get an old tripod from my house and do more of this panorama stuff so that people on the other side of the world can better experience UBC life ;) Until then, all you get is my room.

Yes, it's always nice to get together with old friends to see how each other is doing. Sometimes when you meet people you haven't seen in a long time you have a different attitude towards them. When you previously had to spend many hours a day with these people you wanted nothing more than to eviscerate their intestines with a fork, but now that you meet them many months afterwards, you can both look back and laugh at times and events long ago. It's always nice to see old friends.

This past Saturday (Sept 24) I went out with a bunch of guys that I used to live with here on Nootka 4th. Many couldn't make it, due to being out of the country, out of the province, or otherwise out of reach. The eight of us that could get together met up at the UBC bus loop and went out for dinner at Shabusen. Shabusen is a nice little place in downtown Vancouver (Google it, there are only two locations in the world, the other in South Vancouver), where they serve Japanese sushi and Korean BBQ, with the availability of all-you-can-eat. All I can say is, "Oishii!" I've had sushi before, but only stuff like California rolls, and not really the "proper" sushi. This time raw salmon and tuna was had by all, along with a plethora of other vegetables, dumplings, wasabi, and other things for which I don't know the names. My personal favourite was the Korean BBQ, which was raw pork, beef, or chicken, marinated in special sauces, which you then cook yourself over a BBQ that is built into the table. My descriptions can do no justice, as I don't know what half the stuff was that I was eating, but it was very good. If you want to stuff yourself on Asian food sometime, try Shabusen. It is a bit pricey, at $23, and you will have to make reservations before going, but for a special occasion such as this, it was great.

To see some pictures of the outing, and check out the array of food, go to the pictures page. It might take a bit to load, as there are 29 jpeg photos. Clicking a photo will get you the Ultra-Extreme-Platinum-Super-Huge Edition (a full 5.1 megapixels).

Well, I'm trying to get back into some form of exercise, and jogging would be it for now. I must admit that inspiration comes from Mikee, although I'm not following the Sun Run routine thing. I also haven't determined things like route and time just yet. I have found that I'm really out of shape, and just can't run like I used to. On the positive side, I can feel myself improving from one day to the next, because I'm so out of shape. Due to this, I don't have a set route to run, because after a couple weeks the current one will likely be too short. I'm also trying out the early morning run thing, getting up around 5 (more like 5:30) to do the jogging before my day starts. I don't have any good graphing software, so there won't be any statistics gathering (like I did for my meal plan points and my biking times). Should be interesting, to say the least.

There is a lot of stuff happening around Windows Vista this week. It seems that MS has decided to use the Professional Developers Conference (right now in Los Angeles) to announce things and show things off and lift NDAs on people like Robert Scoble. Two places to watch: Slashdot and Channel 9.

Well, I know it's been a long stretch since I last blogged, but anybody who has this on a feedreader will probably get it within a day. Those who were visiting the site manually will have dropped off by now and won't know anything about it.

I'd say I'm now pretty much settled into university. I'm back at UBC, taking second year computer science, and I'm living in Nootka 464. I'm right back on the same floor that I was on last year! The kids here are fine, they seem to be more the partying type than last year, but they also manage to find their parties elsewhere, which is fine by me.

One of my plans in coming here was to have my main box (Babbage, PIII 500MHz) as my work machine and then set up another box (Cerf, PI 90Mhz) as a server machine, hosting things like http, ftp, svn, and maybe even some bugzilla. Unfortunately, the bios seems to be going on it (can't boot from cdrom like it used to), so I think I will just junk it. If anyone needs a 2GB hard drive, a 1GB hard drive, or some old old RAM, they can talk to me. I don't think I'll get too many inquiries. Perhaps in a while I will get Apache set up proper like, with some ftp and subversion, just like I planned. That won't be for a while though.

UBC is also really messing with me. Someone put the wrong co-requisites on the registration website for one of my courses. Long story made short, I'm not allowed to take a course this semester that I wanted to, and I'm being forced to take it next semester (it's a requirement for my degree). This means that I will be taking 4 courses this semester and 6 courses next semester. My plan is actually to attend the classes for the course this semester so that when I have to take it next semester, I will already know most of the material (except the labs).

On the previous two notes, when I do get my Apache up and running, then I will add my timetable to my server. I have already copied it from the UBC webpage (dynamically generated just for me) and stripped the html down to bare minimum. You'll just have to wait.

On a non-personal, non-educational note, I've had this problem with XMMS (Linux's answer to Winamp) not reading the file length of some MP3's properly. It either reads them to be too long, or can't get the length at all and treats it as a stream. In the latter case, any seeking results in a "failed to seek" error. I tracked the problem down today to being a bug in the MAD decoder plugin incorrectly reading tags when XING tag reading is enabled. Perhaps over Christmas break I will make it my job to hunt this one down and fix it (or sooner if I can). One quick fix is to disable MAD and use MPG123 or to disable the XING tags in the MAD options.

Took my Windows XP machine (the faster of the two) up to Oliver BC to edit some wedding video for some family friends. Edited a total 92 minutes of video, including some image touch-up (the lighting was terrible in the dance hall), and some sound touch up (their camcorder has a very bad microphone that was at the back of the hall). Everything was going fine until I wanted to export the video and burn it to DVD.

Adobe has a built-in DVD burner that does everything for you, as long as you're not looking for menus and titles and stuff, which I'm not. I still didn't want to use the built-in burner because I wanted to burn multiple copies from one masterfile on my hard drive, and as far as I can tell, Adobe's built-in burner script doesn't keep temporary files around for long. I figured that Nero would be able to handle it all for me, so I exported the video using the MPEG2-DVD option in the Premiere exporter. According to my readings, NTSC DVDs can only handle PCM and Dolby AC3 for the audio, while PAL DVDs can do PCM, AC3, and MP2. Premiere comes with a trial copy of some AC3 encoder, and only having 3 trial encodes left, I opted for the PCM. Adobe ended up exporting an .m2v file and a .wav file (I was expecting it to put both video and audio into one container, but this wasn't a huge problem). I opened up Nero, only to find that it will only handle .vob, .ifo, and .bup's. In order to burn anything else to a DVD Video requires NeroVision DVD. Not feeling like hitting up eMule or any of that nonsense (considering I'm not on my own internet), I tried hunting around for freeware to do conversions and/or burning for me. One project I found was DVDAuthorGUI, which seemed like it would work, by taking the exported files and putting them in .vob files for Nero. When I got that program fired up, it turned out that it couldn't handle PCM wave audio, and needed either .mp2 or .ac3. At that point I had to go hunting for another program to convert my wave file to ac3. BatchffmpegGUI XP helped me along there, so that I had an ac3 audio that could go into a vob along with the mp2, which Nero could then burn. To top all this off, I was constantly short on hard drive space, shuffling files around from partition to partition trying to make this stuff work.

For the people who think that video games cause violence, I can assure them that video games cause far less frustration and pent up anger than having to deal with formats that are patented by large corporations. Why can't the process of exporting a DVD be easier? Why is it that a consumer has to spend hundreds of dollars buying software and licenses, or download software that can't be distributed in compiled form in the United States. The media conglomerates are so interested in their own investments that they make it purposefully difficult and expensive for a consumer to work with his own personal video recording. What a pain in the butt.

In relation to my Whistler trip post, I have another post, this time related to the biking aspect. My brother has finished editing a video, that I compressed into XviD/Vorbis/Matroska. You can either dink around with filters for the ultimately crappy Windows Media Player, or you can get VideoLan Client, which will play the video out of the box. You can grab the video off my ftp server here. I would have posted it on something like OurMedia.org, but my brother used a copyrighted song for the background. All the video was taken using my Nikon Coolpix 5900 digital still camera.

I'm trying to clear up some space for the purpose of video editing on my Windows XP Pro machine. The E: drive is my chosen partition for this job, as it has nothing on it except for the raw capture. One problem I was running into was a slight problem of missing 2.4 GB. On a partition that is 24.5 GB, 2.4 GB is a lot of missing real estate. So I made sure that everything was cleared off (except for the raw video), and I mean everything. All the other files were moved to different partitions, the recycle bin was emptied and the system restore points were cleared. Still I'm missing some space. So I ran scandisk and defrag, hoping that would clear up 2.4 GB (a miraculous feat) on this FAT32 partition (I chose FAT32 when installing XP for Linux compatibility reasons). This did not clear up the space, so I converted it to NTFS. I then went directory diving in cmd.exe, deleted a small file from the recycle bin that wasn't showing up in explorer, but that still doesn't get me back my 2.4 GB. Check out the following photo:

Windows Stupidity. Please excuse any Flickr problems, you will need to view the larger size to read the text.

In this photo, on the top left, you can see that the recycle bin is empty, according to the cmd.exe shell command dir. In the bottom left is explorer.exe showing that the recycle bin is empty. On the bottom right we see my explorer settings to show that I am viewing all hidden and system files (I leave my settings like this all the time). Finally, in the top right, we see that the recycle bin is taking up 2.4 GB out of spite for its master. A comparison of the raw video folder with the total partition usage will confirm the 2.4 GB deficit. I know many people wonder why I use Linux, and maybe it's things like this that caused me to switch; Linux just doesn't screw with my head in such evil ways.

Does anybody know any other ways I can get back my hard drive space? I don't want to have to format (raw video is on there, and not enough space on other partitions), but perhaps there are other sneaky things that Windows is doing I don't know about?

Yes, it seems that everyone is getting on the Google AdSense bandwagon, and now I am no exception. I'm not actually a fan of advertising, as I usually find it to be intrusive and distracting, with Flash popups and popunders, huge animations, or full page ads that take precious seconds to redirect you to the actual content. But what's wrong with wanting a little money? So I now have an advertisement at the bottom of the sidebar on the right. Statistically, according to Google, this is the worst place to put an advertisement, but that's okay, because I'm not paying for blogspot.com anyways, and I highly doubt this will be a big source of revenue for me. So let me test this out: I've picked the smallest ad size that would fit, and stuck with text-only ads. This should keep the advertisers nice and quiet while you read Adam's blog.

Update: I would also like to point out that most of my readers get this through syndication and aggregators (you should, it saves me a lot of time), which does not have the advertisements, thus the majority of my readers are unaffected. That, and I fixed a spelling mistake.

Not too long ago, a Korean MSN correspondent of mine asked me what Canadian music was like. My favourite band is by far The Beatles, with classical music, soundtrack music, and other forms of 60's and 70's rock holding up the rest of my playlist. I sent the Korean some Guess Who and Bachman Turner Overdrive, but that isn't very representative of current Canadian artists. This is when I realized that I'm not very Canadian in my music listening choices. I don't listen to the radio much (kind of hard considering the esoteric stuff that I listen to), and it seems like most of the big bands I have heard of are from the States or from the UK. The only "current" stuff that I could think to send was Alanis Morissette, Dave Matthews Band, and Nickelback, and even those weren't yet sitting on my hard drive at the time. Keeping a Canadian identity is very important for our society, especially with the proximity of the heavy-weight American media, and I decided that I needed to change that. I did some research on Canadian Music over at Wikipedia to get some ideas, and am trying out some of the suggestions from there. Today I found out about the CBC Radio 3 Podcast, and am currently listening to show #2. As a point of interest, Grant Lawrence, the DJ for the podcast, claims that the CBC Radio 3 podcast is the first ever public radio podcast with "pod safe" music, which means that the artists approved their music to be played over the podcast (first show, 30 seconds into it). I'm not going to fact check if it is the first legal music podcast in the world, but it wouldn't surprise me. So go check out the podcast, add it to your syndicator programs and be prepared to get blown away by the Canadian underground!

On another note, I've gone ahead and ordered three boxes of Wi-Fi Speed Spray (in case I should buy a Wi-Fi system in the future), and I would urge all of you to do the same. I mean, how can you go wrong with those equations?!

My brother and two of his friends volunteered for the Crankworx Mountain Bike Festival up at Whistler over the past weekend, and I volunteered to drive them up and stay with them (as no other parent was available). We drove up Thursday morning at 5, arriving shortly after 8, and were there until 4 in the evening on Sunday. A good time was had by all, the kids meeting all their heros and me walking around on the hiking trails. I set up a flickr account to post a small set of pictures here. The Lost Lake picture is out of order, making it seem as if the lake is at the top of the mountain, when it is actually at the base. I also didn't post any of the biking pictures, as I'm not into that stuff.

It looks like yet another feature is being pulled from Windows Vista. This time, the Microsoft Shell (MSH, codename Monad) is the feature being pulled from MS's next operating system. Monad was going to be one of those cool features for geeks, as Microsoft was looking to the unix shells as a model on how to do great things with the command line prompt. Personally, I hated the command line, until I started to use Linux, and then I realized how a real command line is supposed to work. Monad has many great features, and looks like it will be a killer system, in conjunction with the Windows File System (also chopped from Vista). I know that Byron was looking forward to Monad, but it looks like his favourite OS company has let him down yet again ;)

MS is planning on releasing Monad with the server version of Longhorn, due to be released sometime in 2007.

In relation to this blog, I would like to suggest that one should never buy Mitsumi DVD-R 4.7GB 4x media. I went back to Futureshop and bought a five pack of Memorex DVD-R 8x, and so far 2 burns out of 2 burns have come out fine. I know that my sample size isn't very large, but 10/10 fails with Mitsumi media and 2/2 passes with Memorex media may be the start of a statistical trend. For both media I burned at half the speed they were rated for.

As for the FFII incident, an update that I got through a Debian blog (who in turn got it from ffii.de, but the link doesn't work for me) was that a DNS hosting company chickened out and removed the ffii.org site after receiving a letter from a Nutzwerk lawyer.

Here's an annoying problem for you: two computers in a house, connected through a hub to Shaw Cable Internet. Now try ftping. I've come across this problem earlier this month, and it's back to haunt me today. As it turns out, Shaw's DHCP servers aren't smart enough to assign the same IP subnet to all computers registering through the same cable modem (I am entitled to two public IP addresses). When I try to transfer files over ftp all communications have to go through Shaw's router because they are on different subnets. This means that all transfers are limited to 50KBps, and the transfers will count against me in my monthly upload/downloads. One way I have found around this is to set IP aliases on both machines, creating my own private network (10.x.x.x). Of course, Windows needs to be rebooted every time you fart, so I have to wait for Kevin to save his game of Rollercoaster Tycoon so that I can restart the machine and get my own private network running in parallel. Oh, and this method seems to break the simple domain names that Shaw uses (like "shawmail" for my pop3/smtp server). Do I fiddle around with my DNS and gateway settings (breaking any hope of proper DHCP), or do I reboot Windows twice every time I want to transfer files? I've emailed Shaw technical, and the guy basically said that IP address allocation is handled by the DHCP server so they have no manual control over it.

Has the FFII website been shutdown by Nutzwerk GmbH? FFII, the foundation that fights to get rid of software patents, among other legal battles, has apparently been driven into the ground by libel lawsuits filed by Nutzwerk GmbH over the past couple months. Apparently, FFII had posted some documents on their website about a legal win over Nutzwerk, and some of the text was seen as libelous to Nutzwerk (the FFII was badmouthing Nutzwerk). Since April, Nutzwerk has filed 5 court lawsuits, and word has it that ffii.org has been taken down due to financial strain. ffii.org.uk is still up, but has no related information. ffii.de is still up, and has links to two news articles, but these articles are both hosted on wiki.ffii.org, and are thus not available. Google has a cache of the earlier article, but has nothing for the more recent article. You can view a German press release on the Nutzwerk website here. Has Nutzwerk managed to take the ffii.org website off the net? Is the FFII merely trying to get the attention of the community? Has anybody heard anything more?

My school machine, the 500MHz is coming back into a state of usefulness. I try to do an average of one new program per day, letting it compile over night. Two days ago I got gaim installed, and yesterday was liferea. Today I will be looking around at different word processing programs (OO.org or Abiword or something else?) and I also have to get something for calendaring and todo-listing. Doing 1280x1024 on a 15" screen is also quite different and sometimes hard to see the smaller fonts.

Approximately a month ago I bought a DVD burner. There are so many files on my hard drive that are over 700MB that I would like to burn off, and I also want to convert the two dozen 8mm tapes in our house to DVD video. The burner I ended up buying was the Samsung DVD+-RW 16x DL burner (TSSTcorp TS-H552U) through NCIX for $60+tax. For my first media I bought ten Mitsumi DVD-R 4.7GB 4x discs at Futureshop. As of this morning I have burned all ten discs, and every single one of them has data errors. They aren't complete coasters, but in my mind, they are. I have used Nero 6.6.0.13, Adobe Premiere's built-in burner, DeepBurner, and Cheetah DVD Burner. I think it's safe to say that it isn't the fault of the burning program. I will have to go out to the stores and buy some more media (different brand this time) and try those. If they don't work, I will plunk this drive into the 500MHz Gentoo machine, and see what it can do.

I do hope that I can somehow get this thing to work.

I'm currently installing Gentoo Linux 2005.0 onto the 500MHz that recently crashed. So far I have been through Red Hat 7.3, 8.0, Mandrake 10.0-10.2, and Ubuntu 5.04. I figured it was time to give Gentoo a try. Unlike most other distros, which prepare downloads in pre-compiled binary packages, Gentoo does everything from source. For a stage 1 install of the operating system, you first run a live cd, then use the compiler on the live cd to compile the gcc compiler. Quite literally everything on the computer has been compiled by the end user (for a stage 1 install). It is not terribly difficult, as scripts do most of the work for you, and there is a step-by-step handbook available online. I read the first couple pages in the book yesterday, and started the install process this morning. It took me from 8:30 to 11:00 to step through the initial set up phase (that includes about an hour of downloading stages and portage info). I basically read the manual off my Pentium 4 while doing the install on my Pentium 3. At around 11:30 I started my stage 1 compilation, and when they say it takes a long time, they mean it. On my Pentium 3 500MHz with 256MB of RAM, it wasn't until 2:00 that I got a compilation error. Turned out that there was a "bootstrap comparison failure" with the file gcse.o from the gcc package. Googling didn't turn up much, and most of the solutions out there were to do a make clean and then try again. So I changed my compilation options from the very aggressive -O3 optimization scheme to the relatively aggressive -O2, and set it back to work. It is now 5 hours later, and I'm still waiting for it to finish. I've always wondered what it would be like to have an entire operating system compiled specifically for my architecture. No longer will I be using i386 binaries, but instead will have -march=pentium3 -msse -mmmx -mfpmath=sse specifically for my Katmai CPU. It will be exciting. I think I will also try out Fluxbox as my window manager, though I'm whimping out and keeping the GTK and QT libraries around. I hope I can get past stage 2 before I have to go to bed, as stage 3 will probably take a day or two to compile through. Windows XP doesn't seem like such a long install process in comparison!

The machine that I had in residence is getting closer and closer to retirement. Today I rebooted it (after 22 days uptime) to switch over to a new kernel I installed a couple days ago. Upon attempting to start, the kernel panicked with the following:
"kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(0,0)"
According to Google, this is commonly caused by hard disk drivers not being loaded into the kernel (eg. raid, serial ata, and reiser). Seeing as how I am using ext3 on parallel ATA on a pretty standard motherboard, I think it is highly unlikely that Ubuntu doesn't have my drivers compiled into the kernel. I have been known to have hard drive problems in the past. Put in Ubuntu Live, backed up some stuff, then started playing around to see if I could fix it. I decided to try running Memtest just to see what it would have to say. I've never seen Memtest return an error on my hardware before, but this time I'm looking at around 60 bad memory blocks around the 86MB area of my ram. Judging by NCIX, the going rate for PC133 ram is about 4x that of everything else. It would cost me around $100 to replace the ram in Babbage, while a new computer can be had for around $350. With the unreliability of the whole machine, I'm thinking I should just get something new for September. I will use Babbage until August, and buy a computer then, hoping that new computers come down by a couple price points. My next machine will also be fully researched for Linux compatibility in the hardware.

Sorry for any spelling mistakes, I'm typing on qwerty again.

Well, another episode of Systm is out, and this time they check out MythTV. If you've always wanted a TIVO (which runs Linux, btw), but enjoyed tinkering yourself, and didn't want to pay the annual subscription fee, check out this video. I know Carl would like to see it, if only he weren't on dialup.

I've given thought to building my own MythTV box or Freevo box. It would be a fun project, but I just don't see it happening any time soon. Of course I would just have to go with DVI, Audigy, and IR remote, but all those fun toys add money. I've never used a TIVO, but I have used Windows Media Center (took me 2 minutes in the local FutureShop to crash Media Center), and I think that Linux-based systems can kick the pants off of the Win MCE. The MAME plugin for MythTV alone kicks butt (playing thousands of old arcade games on your television).

Why, oh why, doesn't systm have an RSS so that I can be notified of the next episode?

Steven Garrity has a nice little three part series on why open formats aren't popular, and why they are having problems getting adopted.
The Catch-22 of Open Format Adoption,
Part 1: Music
Part 2: Instant Messaging
Part 3: Office Documents

My thoughts on Part 1: Music
He does make a very good point about how people associate mp3 with free, when it actually is not. Lame (Lame Ain't an Mp3 Encoder) is the most popular mp3 encoder, used by about 99% of the music ripping underground. It is, however, technically illegal. There are patents held by Motion Pictures Experts Groups (MPEG) members, and these members require licensing fees to use mpeg 1 layer 3 (mp3) technologies. Should the FBI and the courts in the States (and any other country that has patentable software) start cracking down and actually start enforcing the law, then people who rip music would have to start using Nero, Adobe, or some other encoder that must be paid for. For the record, the open source Lame is also orders of magnitude better than the reference encoders, so don't think that paying for the encoders will get you better quality; forcing Lame out of the equation will actually reduce quality of rips. The same thing goes for XviD. Despite being open source, it is still covered by patents, and is illegal to distribute in compiled form (I don't know where Koepi and Nic live, but should they be in the States, they are breaking the law for providing us with an excellent video encoder in binary format). Steven pretty much hits the nail on the head as to why Vorbis hasn't been adopted, although I believe that Winamp comes with Vorbis support out of the box.

Part 2: Instant Messaging
My brother, who is in middle school, recieved his year book today. The theme: Mount Slesse Messenger (a play between the school's name, Mount Slesse Middle School (MSMS), and Microsoft Network Messenger (MSN Messenger)) The front of the year book says "welcome msm" at the top. In the center is a little green blob man, just like that little green MS guy, wearing a muscle shirt with the school logo. Beside the guy is a button that says "Sign In .net", with the exact same colour scheme, font, and format as the MSN Sign In button. The entire year book is done up to look like MSN Messenger, with just enough changes to prevent copyright or trademark legal action from MS Canada. I also went to the school's year end assembly (to film my brother playing in rock club), and saw the unveiling of the year book. To initiate the unveiling, the student said, "what do we use almost every day?" Within a split second a girl from the back screamed "MSN!" This is very interesting to me as a person familiar with the Internet. MSN quite literally stands for 'Microsoft Network". It started off as an ISP that MS was using to gain market share from AOL. It has since extended to a set of services offered online by MS, from the ISP to the web portal "msn.com" to the MSN Messenger program. To a 15 year old girl, however, MSN has no connotations to a service provider. It doesn't represent a news site or a web search (Google for that one probably). For 15 year old kids in Western Canada, MSN has it's own urban dictionary definition of "gossiping with friends when you should be doing homework." Those three letters mean simply that, and the kids don't care about openness, or what company provides it, or how Yahoo! is more popular in another part of the country, and AOL IM is popular in another place, while SMS is the thing in Europe and Asia. Changing protocols would be very difficult because practically everyone here uses MSN. As Steven says in his article, you can use a multi-protocol client, such as Gaim. I use Gaim to log in as both "javaman1138@hotmail.com" and "tiosc@jabber.com". You can also view in Jeff Waugh's Project Topaz presentation from Guadec how he really got a girl interested when he said that Gaim can support MSN and Yahoo! and AOL all in one window, and all on Windows. Despite the capabilities of Gaim and Trillian to use multiple protocols, it is unlikely that there will be a massive migration. I have yet to meet another person using Jabber.

Part 3: Office Documents
Here is one closed format that I can't figure out how it became so popular. Winamp and MSN Messenger may be free, but when someone sends you a MS Word .doc file in an email, you need to run out and spend $400 at a computer retailer. Even with Dell and other OEMs selling reduced price boxes with a new system, how is it that everybody ended up having this expensive piece of software? Is pirating more prevalent than I thought? I'm not saying that OpenOffice should have been more popular, but why did people spend so much money on Office when there is a perfectly crappy piece of MS software called "Wordpad" that comes with every Windows box? What and when exactly was Corel WordPerfect killed off? I mean, MS Office is $399, while Corel's Office is "only" $299. Since when did people enjoy paying $100 more for an office suite? Why don't the kids use the bundled Wordpad like they do the bundled Media Player and bundled Internet Explorer? Could OpenOffice take over with its low low price of only $0?

My mom has to make changes to the school's parent advisory council constitution. This file was created in MS Word in 1997, and has not been edited since. When I save the file, I plan on saving the revised file in OpenOffice 2.0's OASIS .odt format, OpenOffice's MS Word .doc export filters, PDF, and HTML, with a text file explaining why there are all the formats. I wouldn't expect another edit to be made for another seven years, and I want to make sure that the file is still readable the next time that should happen. I rip my audio CDs in Vorbis and try to do everything in an open-source patent-free way, but I know not many do, and it is I who will have to adapt when someone sends me an email with an attachment.

In an effort to organize my music collection a bit better, I decided to try out MusicBrainz. Normally, I would have done all the music research myself, but that was taking far too long. So I went back to the site that Ian had mentioned a long time ago, and gave it a shot. The system basically makes a "fingerprint" of the audio using a short clip of the waveform and the clip length. This means that it can be a different format (MP3, Vorbis) and still get the same fingerprint. The theory is that many people have submitted known-good fingerprints which can be looked up. The program will then change your id3 tags and rename the files based on the information in the database. For my music collection it successfully tagged around 6/7 of my music. Around 1/2 of the remainder had a "fingerprint collision" which means that more than one song in the database have the same fingerprint, and you need to pick which one is the correct one. For the rest of the songs, it plain old didn't know what they were.

For the most part, the program worked out well. The program actually picked out some pieces that I had attributed to the wrong artist. There was perhaps two false positives (out of around 1000 songs) that I had to go back and change. Most of the user required selections were easy, such as picking the first option in the list. The program seemed to have the most difficulty with classical music. This is understandable, as there are different versions of the same song (Boston Philharmonic vs. Philadelphia Philharmonic playing Beethoven's 6th), and many songs can sound the same if you pick too small a sample (long stretches of violins holding a single note). Selecting the proper information for a classical song is no easy task, either. When scrolling through the list of albums for someone like Tchaikovsky, it is difficult to find an album that will have a song that matches the song on the hard drive, as different CDs have cut classical compositions at different points (eg. I have a Swan Lake excerpt that has Act II - Scene I, II, and III all in the same mp3 file, but most CDs have the scenes split up into different tracks).

It's times like this (organizing my mp3s and tagging them properly) that I wish more programs had support for Unicode and internationalized text. MusicBrainz isn't standardized themselves, as they have Kanno Yoko's name as the original Japanese Kanji (菅野よう子, for those who can read it), while a song from the Spirited Away soundtrack is listed as "A Summer's Day", when I've always known it as "Ano Natsu He". Firefox can handle Asian script, while Rhythmbox (default player for Gnome) cannot. I guess there has been a lot of work done on i10n and i18n standards, but it is up to the programmers to implement the capabilities. When you're developing applications, just keep in mind that less than 50% of the Internet uses English as the mother tongue.

Today I spent most of the day by volunteering over at the local middle school. They were having a BBQ fundraiser for the Parent Advisory Council, so I helped in the setup, handing out burger patties, and cleaning up. Unfortunately for the fundraiser it was raining today and the kids weren't in a very "BBQ" mood. There are now lots of burger patties and buns left over (some hotdog too), which the parents may have to "buy back" from the PAC. If you want to buy some burgers, I may be able to talk to my mom, and you could buy some burgers at a (slightly) cheap price. Tonight's dinner is going to be: hamburgers and hotdogs.

The GIMP Toolkit (GTK+) hit 2.6.8 today, with the release announcement over here. This is mostly a bug squashing release, so most of you won't be interested. There is one feature that I'm looking forward to, however, in the file chooser. The first point on the changelog states: * GtkFileChooser - Don't select first row in SELECT_FOLDER mode [Christian Neumair]. This isn't really a bug fix as much as it is an annoyance fix. Here's where I see it: when using File Roller to decompress files I downloaded, I want those files to go into my home directory, so I click the "Home" quicklink in the file dialog. This should put the currently displayed directory into the home directory, and let me decompress there. What it actually does is put me in the home directory and automatically select the first item (usually a folder) in my home directory, and I can't deselect it. This results in decompressing into some directory that I don't want the files to go into. My workaround is to select the "Filesystem" quicklink, then go into /home and then select adam. Now I should be able to open the file dialog, select the "Home" quicklink, and decompress straight to my home directory.

Now I just have to wait for the libs to hit the Ubuntu repositories. This is one thing I don't like about precompiled distributions - you're always playing the waiting game.

Sorry about the lack of posts recently, but that would be an accurate description of how eventful things have been around here lately. Got out and did some gardening today. I have also been learning about using GnuCash (accounting for Linux) (which requires the old GTK 1, which isn't very Ubuntu friendly). So many things I would like to learn over the summer, yet it feels like there is so little time.

Some of you may remember the old Ubuntu artwork controversy from October of last year. This featured models who were showing off a little too much skin for some people (PG 13 perhaps). Today Jeff Waub, GNOME hacker, linked to a very interesting possible splash screen. This is only a joke, and you will need to be 18 or over to see the artwork (not work safe!). It is over at Alvaro's blog.

Got Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas today. That is a massive game, shipping on DVD, and sucking up 5GB for the full install. My machine only has 256MB (once there was a time, children, where 256MB was more than enough), and it gets around 5 frames per second, with everything on low. I have actually determined that it is a RAM bottleneck issue, and turning off all audio clears up enough RAM to push the graphics up and maintain around 20 frames per second. If you want to play this game, you'll definitely need more than 256MB system RAM. Other than that, it is a nice game, with much more to explore than VC or Liberty City. I'm letting Kevin do all the missions, then I just step in and play with the new goodies and areas he unlocked.

Tomorrow morning I'll be heading out to Oliver, near Osoyoos. Going to a garden wedding on Saturday afternoon, so hopefully the weather will be nice. I'm hoping the drive up and back will also be nice. I'm not driving (we're carpooling with some friends), but I would like to take some nice photos with my camera of the mountains and scenery. I took photo down in Washington that would have been perfect, only it turned out blurred due to the movement of the car. Had I stopped the vehicle and used a tripod it would have been a great desktop background. Now I'm mad that it didn't turn out, and I'm determined to take more photos in hopes of getting more really good desktops.

Now here's a cool site for you: mirrors.playboy.com. Turns out that playboy.com, the site of Hugh Hefner fame, is hosting mirrors of projects like Perl Archive, FreeBSD, Apache, Fedora, Firefox, and Thunderbird. mirrors.playboy.com is actually an official mirror to download from at the Firefox website. The site is completely work-safe, with the exception of the domain name, should someone look over your shoulder, or the system admin look through the proxy's logs. You can read more about it here.

Was there this much upset when Apple switched from Motorola to IBM?

So, I've been playing around with Subversion today. Okay, not really playing, trying to figure out how to get it set up. Tonight into tomorrow is when I get to play around with it. I would like to get a real versioning system set up by the time I am back in school, not just for myself, but so that the rest of the computer science students also have a playground to put their stuff. Right now, you can check out my Subversion repository using standard http and a web browser. Just point your browser towards http://70.70.60.128/svn. To do real svn checkouts or commits, you need a real svn client and a password. If you want to get full access to the server (who would want to do that?!?) email me. I would like to try my hand at the administration stuff, in prep for September. The server can't be guaranteed, of course, so don't put anything critical up there.

Today http://ca.archive.ubuntu.com/ went down for a couple hours, so I switched over to http://archive.ubuntu.com/ for my repositories. I wonder what happened.

At around 2:30 this morning, NVIDIA posted their latest Linux drivers, 7664, for IA32, AMD64, and Solaris x64. New features include OpenGL 2.0 support, Xinerama + OpenGL support, GPU clock manipulation, support for Quadro G-Sync, and support for the GeForce 6200 AGP. You can check out the drivers here, read the readme here, or go to the forums here. Not too many people over at the forums have used and commented on it yet, but as they wake up to find new drivers, the comments should start pouring in.

One thing people will certainly be commenting about is the removal of support for "legacy" GPUs. NVIDIA, up until this date, has always had a "unified driver architecture", meaning that the same driver executable download would work for everything from a GeForce 256 up to a GeForce 6800. They have had this feature for as long as they have been making video cards, on both the Windows and Linux platforms. These latest Linux drivers, however, have taken out support for RIVA TNT, RIVA TNT2/TNT2 Pro, RIVA TNT2 Ultra, Vanta/Vanta LT, RIVA TNT2 Model 64/Model 64 Pro, Aladdin TNT2, GeForce 256, GeForce DDR, Quadro, GeForce2 GTS/GeForce2 Pro, GeForce2 Ti, GeForce2 Ultra, Quadro2 Pro.

For once, I'm lucky to have a lower end "MX" card, as my GeForce 2 MX 400 is still in the supported list, while the higher end GeForce 2's have been sent to the driver scrap yard. I did a check on the Windows drivers for NVIDIA, and all their cards are still supported, so it looks like Linux is the only place where they have defined these legacy cards. Will Windows drivers hit the chopping block next? Will my GeForce 2 MX still be supported in the next round of driver releases?

Microsoft has released some info on the new XML file formats they are planning for the next Office (to be shipped around Longhorn time, and still called Office 12 internally). These are the same formats that raised concern, and got them okayed, by the government of Massachusetts. The very same XML formats that they claim will be open for all to see and use and develop, but are strangely covered by patents that MS doesn't want to clarify on. Scoble was as giddy as a school boy on prom night all day, as he waited for the 21:30 time that he was allowed to post about it (when his NDA expired). Without further ado, an interview, with Brian Jones, one of the Office XML developers. These new XML formats will be available in the next Office, as well as through patches for Office 2000/XP/2003.

They are touting it as a great thing, something that will revolutionize the way we handle our document formats. We can have proxies automatically strip out macros, to prevent viruses from travelling. We can have search programs search through documents in many smart ways (search for author, search for creation date, search for the word "antitrust"). Anything you can imagine doing with an open document that has been marked up in XML is now do-able. (I'm thinking about the creation of a .docx -> .odt converter). For those who don't know, OpenOffice.org, Abiword, and just about every other major open source office suite has been using XML in zips for years now. As for the searching within our files, don't forget about Beagle, which is a very young project, and is still in development. Beagle is to Linux what Google Desktop Search and the Microsoft Desktop Search (unreleased, and not the official name) are to Windows. I imagine that Microsoft will get many APIs out and many of their own plugins out for IIS and Exchange server, so that many cool things can be done with the new formats. Can open source stay one step ahead?

Start your emacs! Google is doing a code bounty-style program for students, and calling it the "Summer of Code". Here's how it works: Google has paired up with 8 open source groups (like Ubuntu and Apache). Students can browse a list of software projects that need to be done (a menu editor is on Ubuntu's list!), and the students submit an application before June 14th to Google to write a program. Google and the participating organizations will determine if the application will be granted (200 slots are available). If a student is approved, they will recieve $500USD to get them started. On September 1st, all the students hand in their projects, and the participating organizations look at the work. If requirements were met, the student recieves another $4,000USD. Open source coding will be done, and students will be paid $4,500USD for their work.

http://code.google.com/summerofcode.html

It's times like these I wish I knew more C++, and how to write code for larger projects. Damn! But it's still cool to see this being done. I was surprised at how many students in UBC.CS still use Internet Explorer (Asians/East Indians seem to use IE, while the caucasians seem to be more into the open source stuff).

So, continuing my adventures with Ubuntu today, I tried plugging in my digital camera. This would be a Nikon Coolpix 5900 plugging in through USB. Linux picked up and mounted it, and Gnome recognized that it was a picture holding device without requiring any braincells on my part. Gnome's default option was to import the images in a photo viewer (gThumb). gThumb, however, could not properly import the photos. It could browse the camera's memory just fine (it is a basic mass storage device, after all), but the import wizard doesn't have my model of camera, so the automation stopped there. Maybe I will try filing something over at bugzilla.gnome.org, but there is only one guy working on gThumb, and I don't have good technical documents on my camera. Supporting the zillions of cameras out there must be difficult.

I also installed ScummVM (to play those old games that are so awesome), and wanted to add it to the Gnome Applications menu. Gnome (after versions 2.8) doesn't have a menu editor! There are absolutely no official programs for doing menu editing! There is one over at gnomefiles, but it is for gnome 2,11, and I'm on 2,10 (there was a huge change in vfs structures between the two, so I don't think it would work). Luckily for me, the other major gnome menu editor is smeg, which the guy is developing with Ubuntu in mind. Lucky me! Had to use a script to install it (smeg isn't in the hoary repositories), but I got ScummVM added to the games section in my menu. Gnome developers should seriously get a menu editor out there!

Also out today is the alpha test 1 for Firefox 1.1 (codename "Deer Park"). One thing that I'm looking forward to testing out is the native SVG support. They're still missing some of the specs for SVG, but it's nice to see this stuff finally being supported and built natively.

Well, on Friday Babbage (500MHz, was the machine I used in residence) decided to choke on me. I was in the process of updating packages (many packages had been released since I last updated it before final exams), did a reboot to fire up a new kernel, and I got caught in a fsck loop. Everytime it booted, it said that it had errors on disk, would try to repair, then restart. Figuring that the filesystem had been hosed in some way, I decided to give up, and do a reinstall. At least this happened over summer, and not while I was in school! Up to that point, I had been running Mandrake 10.1 (kinda fuzzy because I was all over the place in what packages I had installed, so some of it would be closer to 10.2), and decided it was time for another change. So far I have run Red Hat 7.3, RH 8.0, Mandrake 9.something through Mandrake 10.2. So I figured I'd try my hand at Ubuntu. Burned Hoary Live using the WinXP machine, backed up some files, then burned off Hoary Install, and proceeded. I must say that Ubuntu's installer is not pretty (compared to RH/Mandrake, which beat out even WinXP's installer), but it still manages to be slick and easy. One cool part was the keyboard selection. Seeing as how I use Dvorak for my keyboard, I had to select a non-Qwerty format. Ubuntu gives you a list of about 10 international characters, any one of which you are supposed to type. Based on what you type, Ubuntu tries to guess your keyboard layout. Type a 'y' ('t' if you're looking at a Qwerty keyboard), and it automagically guesses Dvorak, type something else, and it gives you 5 more characters to help narrow it down. You can pick any international keyboard using this method. Much easier than picking my keyboard from a list, and ten times cooler. I really rushed through the install, and I am experienced in Linux, so I can say at would or wouldn't be suitable for a Windows user. The most difficult part was the partitioning (though memory has it that it was easier than the WinXP partitioning and formatting dialogues).

I've just gotta say that this Ubuntu stuff is pretty damn slick. Package management is really well done, so far it seems about one notch above Mandrake's urpmi. Stuff like this makes me wonder how I found software for Windows. I was disappointed in one thing: Ubuntu didn't automatically mount my second hard drive (ext3) into /mnt. I looked around in other directories, and looked at system configuration utilities, and saw nothing that let me managed mounted disks. In the end I had to hit up the terminal and did the old mkdir /mnt/hd followed by mount -t auto /dev/hdb1 /mnt/hd. This is one thing that an end user shouldn't have to do in command line, and having a nice utility for managing disks might be included. It isn't that common a task, however, so perhaps having it automagically detected, added to the /mnt directory, then let the user click on it to have it mount on user demand. Knoppix does something like this, where they have disk drives unmounted by default, and a click is all you need.

Back to the package management, it was interesting to see how few packages are available by default. "Music Player" (actually Rhythmbox) and "XMMS" are the only available music players. "Totem" is the only movie player on the list (Totem sucks - by personal experience and many times given it another chance). I don't actually know if such restrictions are a good thing or a bad thing for the average end user. Getting access to more packages is somewhat simple, as you just have to change one line is your repository preferences to include "universe". For now, I will leave it without universe, and will add that in as a package comes up that I want. I will probably still end up compiling MPlayer myself, as I look forward to all the latest in forbidden codecs ;)

I will keep this place up to date as to my experience with Ubuntu, but so far it looks like a pretty darn good desktop for human beings (as opposed to BOFHs).

GUADEC 2K5 started yesterday, and many Gnome developers have converged upon it. Fluendo, one of the sponsors, speakers, and developers of GStreamer, is hosting live video feeds from the three main conference halls. They also have up the video archive of yesterday's presentations. All media are Vorbis audio, Theora video, with Ogg for a wrapper, so you might need to break out the VLC if you normally use Windows Media Crap (TM). At least these media don't have patent restrictions ;) I'm enjoying the Cairo presentation from Day 1 archives. The Dirac presentation had some audio problems, and didn't really present much for new information to me. I plan on watching the PiTiVi video after supper.

A short anecdote: one of the things I pulled off of Hoary Universe repository today was Liferea, the news feed syndicator I use. Imported my list of feeds (that I haven't checked since before exams) and had to skim through over 700 new items. Gah!

I know it's been a while since I blogged, but I'll try to ease myself back into it. For today's post, I'm throwing up my term paper for English 112. This particular piece won me a nice shiny A+. (This abstract was actually the cover page, and was formatted better, for those of you familiar with University discourse).

Pre-Print Archive Access for the Underprivileged

Adam Dunn

Abstract: A new method of releasing scholarly articles, the pre-print archive, is changing the face of academic publishing, and those who stand to most benefit from this phenomenon are the researchers who live in developing countries. How can these under-funded scholars benefit, and thrive in the elite world of academic publishing, and how can the well-developed countries benefit from the newcomers? By embracing the pre-print archive.

Professor Osinubi
English 112
Section 07P
4 April 2005

PDF Download

When my parents brought home my school computer, my brother hooked it up to the Internet, and this became the server for http://roadtrip05.dyndns.org. When I came home last yesterday, I noticed that he had neglected to plug in a keyboard, so i had no way of locally logging on to the server. I know that it is a big no-no to plug in a PS/2 keyboard while the computer is running, but I decided to risk it anyway. Needless to say, kernel panicked (first time I've experienced an actual kernel panic), and the server crashed. Luckily, no hardware was damaged, but Shaw did manage to change the server's IP address in the time that it was down. I've updated the IP address in DynDNS's records, but it may take a while to replicate through DNS hierarchy.

Yes, the first topic on today's agenda is that I am back at home, and I should practice my typing a bit more. The whole exams/roadtrip/staying a week at Auntie's threw off my computer usage for quite some time. I come back to find much spyware on the house computer, slowing a 1.4GHz/WinXP down to slower performance than my 500MHz/Mandrake. I will have to redo this computer, as it is more than due.

Another interesting point is that most of the goodies I had hooked up to my 500MHz in res is now hooked up to the 1.4, these namely being the optical mouse, and the LCD flatpanel monitor. Because LCD monitors are so crisp and clear, I do find them to be easier on the eyes, as I deal with large amounts of text in my computing day. With these ultra-defined pixels comes the ability to redifine the way that anti-aliasing is done, and Microsoft has tried to do "sub pixel hinting" on text, and called it "ClearType". While this is a valiant effort, now that I return home, I find that they have just done a half-assed job of it, and it still doesn't look right. If you have an LCD monitor (laptop or flatpanel, the fat CRTs can't do sub-pixel hinting), you can go visit the ClearType Tuner in Internet Explorer only (if you're like me, and have deleted IE from your desktop, you can still run it with Start>Run>iexplore). Turn it on and watch your text be anti-aliased! Oooh, no more jaggy edges. Instead of jaggy edges, we see something else, in the form of reds and blues that edge our text! Is this the way that ClearType is supposed to work? Personally, I hate it. KDE has a little option to turn on sub-pixel hinting as well. When it comes to KDE's sub-pixel hinting, I find it is hit or miss. If the fonts are hinted improperly, you get ugly edge colours which are on par or worse than that in Windows. If the fonts are done properly, you get something that actually looks better than in Windows. Could I possibly be mistaken? With the millions that MS spends on research, am I supposed to believe that proper sub-pixel hinting should reduce jaggies at the cost of introducing some bad edge colours? Do these edge colours actually reduce eye strain and increase readability? Is it possible that the jag-less, edge colour-less fonts in KDE are actually the ones that are hinted improperly? This isn't just on my monitor, as two other people on Nootka 4th turned on their ClearType and watched their fonts go from jagged black to smoothed turqoise.

Keep in mind that I have been using Linux for the past six months, then I come home to a slower performing computer (despite being faster in specs), and had to wipe spyware/adware off my Aunt's two computers. She has a 2.6GHz and it took ~5 minutes to kill off all the popups and get IE at the Google home page (5 minutes is not an exaggeration, I'm serious, I should have taken a video, because it really was 5 minutes, I swear). I'm really learning to hate Microsoft.

A quickie post:
So I'm down in the States, travelling towards Colorado. Saw Yellowstone National Park, and Old Faithful today. On the road, in a hotel room now, and have to get up early. For more info, check http://roadtrip05.dyndns.org/roadtrip/.

See ya round!

I figured I'd write up this post before I got started on the books for the day.

Those of you who are my long-time readers may remember my interest in various new types of video compression technoloy. For those of you who are *really* my fans may remember back in 2002 when I was keeping track on a new promising technology called MPEG AVC aka. MPEG-4 Part 10 aka. H.26L aka. H.264. I first discovered the codec back in February of 2002, but at the time, I had thought it was dead, and wasn't going to go anywhere. Then there was some amount of revival in July, 2002, but it didn't sound as if it would be used for DVD compression. The big turnaround came in October, 2002. On the 13th, a news article was released, stating that development on H.264 was going strong, and the possibilities were promising. The next day, on October 14th, I found an announcement about a project at Sourceforge.net to create an open source H.264 encoder. Then on the 28th, an early codec comparison was done to see how H.264 performed (and it did quite well for an early alpha). Unfortunately, I haven't heard any news on H.264 since then, until the past couple days.

Leave it up to the anime encoders. The anime encoders were one of the first groups of people to adopt the Ogg Media Format, and the Matroska format. While the American ripping groups are still using standard MP3 and DivX in an AVI, the anime groups are using surround sound AAC in two languages with multiple switchable "soft" subtitles, while XviD provides the video, all wrapped in a cozy MKV. These people are right at the forefront of ripping, and know more about filters, pre-processors and post-processors than most rippers do. It looks like they are also going to start adopting H.264. I've already downloaded three episodes of GANTZ in H.264, and they look great. Unfortunately, as is nature with H.264, I am barely capable of watching the videos on my 500MHz machine. On a 3GHz machine, the video decoding takes up about 30-40% of the CPU. I don't have the capabilities to do any comparisons at the moment, but I will download the DivX version of GANTZ, hoping that the bitrates and resolutions are the same, and I will try doing some rough codec comparisons over the summer.

So far, Anime-4ever is currently in test mode with H.264 (they've got GANTZ, Inu Yasha, Spiral, Gate Keepers, Get Backers, and a couple others in both H.264 and DivX), and Zhentarim is thinking about making the switch soon.

If you'd like to try watching some H.264 encodes, and are on a Windows machine, then follow a4e's AVC Playback Guide. If you're on Linux, then go get the latest CVS of MPlayer (1.0pre6a isn't good enough), along with the essential codec pack (all codec pack is much cooler though, so grab that instead of essential). Have fun!

Now that the end of the school year is upon university students, the resident advisor has given the residents of the floor a survey to fill out. This survey is the ACUHO-I/EBI Resident Survey, by Educational Benchmarking, Inc., 1999. It is an international survey (at least Canadian and American), since it has a section that is only to be filled out by students at U.S. institutions. Why in the world am I talking about this survey? For section (E), the participant is supposed to fill out their gender, with the bubble-sheet options of
(A) Male
(B) Female
(C) Transgender
(D) Other

Now, I can understand the Transgender thing out of political correctness, as there are birth defects and surgeries for those things. Who, exactly, would be an "Other", if transgendered is already covered? Perhaps it is to fill space on the bubble sheet, but there are other places where spaces were left open. I'll let you figure that one out.

We all know that Wikipedia has come under fire by traditional encyclopedia groups about its reliability. Most of the traditional crowd say that Wikipedia will never match the quality, validity, readability, etc of the encyclopedias that are edited by professional, paid reveiwers. Byron down the hall (there he is again, two posts in a row) really likes Encarta Encyclopedia, which is owned by Microsoft. On multiple occasions we have had little "competitions" to compare the content of Wikipedia versus Encarta. I will admit that Wikipedia may never get to the same readability as the traditional encyclopedias. Wikipedia's goal is to be the repository of human knowledge, so accuracy should be attainable in tens of years, but style is up to readers, and will be difficult to format into one consistent style. Does that make it magnitudes worse than Encarta?

Of course, I also read Slashdot, and noticed today an article about Encarta Adopting [a] Wikiesque Process. That's right, Encarta will take article submissions written by users, edit those submissions, and then publish them. Perhaps Wikipedia isn't so bad after all, now that a professionally edited encyclopedia is adopting a user-submitted process. Not only is Encarta trying to get closer to Wikipedia, but they will probably fail at it. Encarta will attempt to review all the articles that get submitted, fixing up grammar, style, and checking validity of the article. Now consider that on March 9, 2005 (the latest date for which the stats were updated) Wikipedia received 782 new articles [1]. In the month of February, 2005, Wikipedia had an average of 853 new articles per day [1]. I really don't think that Microsoft is paying enough staffers to sort through 853 articles per day, even if they use automation to filter out 90% junk articles (leaving 85 articles per day to go through). Oh, and by the way, these numbers are for the English edition of Wikipedia only. Average submissions for all languages are in the 3,000 articles per day range.

Another thing to take note is that Microsoft will get "permission to (1) use, copy, distribute, transmit, publicly display, publicly perform, reproduce, edit, modify, translate and reformat your Submission, each in connection with the MSN Web Sites, and (2) sublicense these rights, to the maximum extent permitted by applicable law. Microsoft will not pay you for your Submission." [MS Terms of Use]
It also looks like attribution will be as follows: "If you choose to sign in and use a nickname when editing, your nickname may be associated with the updated article on the What's New page." [About Editing] Does this mean that MS may not put original credit on the article (only on the "What's New" page) and use your work to make more money? Hmm.

Just in case there is somebody out there that hasn't realized it yet, I'll reiterate: graphics technology has come along nicely in recent years.

Byron down the hall got his brand new 256MB NVIDIA 6600 (now affectionately called "Beast") in the mail yesterday. As he played Doom3 and FutureMark, I was just floored by how much graphics has really come along recently. I remember playing Wolf3D, Duke3D, and Descent, which were at the forefront of bringing 3D (or 2.5D) to the average home user. Other than spawning new ways of gaming, these games also brought us closer to interactive realism in a fantasy setting. While we watched Toy Story in the movie theatres, we tried to imagine a day when those things could be done in real-time. With each passing generation of vid card and graphics engine, we expect more and better effects. Remember when the original Myst came out, and then not 5 years later, it was made into a real-time interactive game. Watching the FutureMark05 demos, I expect that these graphics will make their way into games within 2 years, while Byron estimates over 5 years (I realize that they are actually being rendered real time right now, but there are things like AI, physics, and sound that need to be handled by engines as well). Then there is Myst IV, which I predict will take around 5 years, and Byron says will take around 20 years. Personally, I think that I may even be too pessimistic with those estimates, but future graphics in games will no longer come down to processing power and engines, and will be more about artists, so these things could take a while to get out the door. This is where I point you to the Unreal Engine 3 page.

When it comes to these things, it would be nice to see OpenGL pull up its socks a bit. So far, OpenGL has remained a fairly stable standard, since SGI did lots of work on it in the 80's and 90's. MS came out with Direct3D in the mid-90's, and has been trying to play catch-up with OpenGL ever since. Games like Doom3 and Unreal Tournament 2004 are still done in OpenGL, and therefore are portable to Linux systems. With DirectX 10 (going to be called Windows Graphic Foundation [WGF]), MS will probably finally take over OpenGL in terms of functionality and capabilities. There is the new OpenGL 2.0, but that was more evolutionary than revolutionary. It would be a shame to see floods of games in WGF and none in OpenGL, resulting in no ports to Linux, just when the gaming scene on Linux was starting to get good.

So, did some upgrading and dinking around tonight. This has taken up quite some time, and I find myself writing this at 1 in the morning. Technically, it's Thursday, but I'll count this as Wednesday's post.

It all started when I wanted to watch the ClearType team and what they're all about over at Channel9. Of course, MS didn't have the downloadables going, so I was left with an MMS stream. Having compiled the latest MPlayer and the latest codecs (so that I could get Windows Media 10 sound) just last night (as in Tuesday night), I was happily watching on my computer. Then some quiet guy came on (Scoble should invest in a $2 microphone, seriously) so I tried to rewind. Rewind a stream, in MPlayer, when you're dealing with MS codecs. Not a good thing. So I had to restart my X server. Restarting my X got me into a new KDE that I had installed several days ago, but never booted into. So that got me thinking: why not point rpmdrake towards Cooker (unstable) and get the latest KDE, now that I'm here (in a state of not having anything open on my desktop). So KDE 3.3 and gcc 3.4.3 get thrown on the system. Then, with the new KDE all fired up, I'm browsing around, checking out the new features in my menu, and the stuff that I can get from Cooker. Then I see Monkey Bubble, which is one of those "fire a ball and try to get three of the same colour connected to get them to fall down" games. Like Frozen Bubble, only Monkey Bubble uses SVG for its graphics. Seeing as how I've been interested in Scalable Vector Graphics for quite some time, I figured it was about time that I tried out this Monkey Bubble. I must say that it is quite good! Graphics are good, could use some spit-shine, but the scalability is nice. Going from a small window on my screen to the full 1280x1024, the game maintains its graphics clarity and resolution, just as good SVG should (try running Frozen Bubble at 1280 - yuck!) The game seemed to run fast, and I am confident that simple SVG like this game can easily be put to use in games. SVG rendering engines are still not very optimized, as there are few people interested in the technology (Windows LH Avalon will use it though). With some good render engines (come on Cairo!), and some great vector artists, SVG is a plausible way of doing graphics for games. Go get Monkey Bubble!

So now that I have my own blog, I've been searching around for other blogs that I can add to Liferea. Unfortunately, I don't know of any good Linux sites where they list a bunch of blogs, but MS does have some good ones. Now, many people have been asking me if I'm a big convert going back to the dark side of MS. The answer is a resounding "No!" The reason why I have been adding some of the MS feeds is so that I can keep an eye on what they're up to. I'm sure Sun Tzu said something to the effect of (I haven't reached this part of his book yet) "Know thy enemy." On that note, I've been watching the vids over at Channel 9, and some of them are pretty interesting.

Does anybody else out there have some good blogs that I should read? I've got a soft spot for eye candy, so any blogs owned by developers of Gnome, KDE, or x.org would be nice. You can check out the list of feeds (not just blogs) that I read here.

Saw this little story this morning, and couldn't help but laugh. Of course, we all know about Ubuntu's official icon, and their desktop themes (one of them even got Ubuntu in a bit of hot water, since some people don't like the human body). When you look at the MSN Spaces Logo, you can't help but wonder where they got their inspiration. Doesn't it kind of remind you of [W/L]indows? Maybe MS will pay $20M to buy this icon now....

While some media outlets are trying to stifle online media (MGM v. Grokster is going on in American courts right now), there are others that are actually trying to support online media, and open source projects at that. Some time ago I found out about Dirac, an open source video encoder using wavelet compression for some high-quality video encoding. It is funded and researched by none other than the British Broadcasting Corporation. Their hope is to use Dirac to do future online video feeds for BBC viewers.

Then there is the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. I've known for some time (and written about it before on FvForces.net) that they have their geeky radio show "Quirks and Quarks" available online in .rm, .mp3, and .ogg audio formats (for some reason they have reduced the ogg to only certain segments of the show). Today I was browsing the main page of CBC.ca, and found out that they are doing podcasting trials. Use an RSS capable music player (or a audio capable RSS aggregator) to listen to "Quirks and Quarks" or "/Nerd". The podcasts are only available in MP3 format, but they'll eventually figure it out ;) Head on over to the CBC site, show your support for online media, courtesy of the CRTC!

I know there are a lot of people who have been asking me about my exam schedule. Since I don't know it off the top of my head, I figured I'd post it here. Here it is. The date for the "Leave for Colorado" thing is not set in stone, that is just the earliest date that we can leave.

Looks like somebody loves us. It took a while for 7167 to come out, but almost no time at all for 7174. This includes x86 and x86_64, as well as the FreeBSD version. Go hit up the downloads here. Sorry, but I don't have any benchmarks or experience with these for you. I haven't actually been using nvidia drivers for some time now (had some bad crashing under the 5xxx line). As usual, the official feedback forums are over at nV News.net.

For those of you looking to put your new drivers to good use, Oddlabs has recently announced that Tribal Trouble has gone gold. There is a free demo, or you can buy the game for $25. Having played it myself, I can safely say that it is quite a fun game from a small group of students, and is a great example of what kind of gaming Linux can get. It also plays on Windows, if you feel so inclined.

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