Blog Archive: December 2017
Songs of the Day
Heres my New Years Resolution: Ill try to try to publish a short piece every day recommending a song that I think is excellent, and apt to please at least some readers. Lets see how far into 2018 I get; a quick run through the collection turned up around 240 candidates, so a whole years worth of songs would be a stretch goal. Read on for motivation, logistics, and mechanics. Or just read the song notes, starting tomorrow. Or dont. Why? 2018 will be this blogs fifteenth year, and the fragments dont flow as fast as they used to; I have to reach back pretty far sometimes to achieve even three or four microessays a month.
eBay: 1 point down, 1 up
A month and a half ago I ordered blindfolds for covering my face when sleeping, from three different sellers. Two of them arrived after average timing, but the third,which eBay Australia tells me was bought on 11/20/17 4:... , didn't. Checking the item showed amazingly detailed tracking for something that cost $1.00 including postage. It showed: The texts are strange, as are the times, but it's clear that the trail stopped over 3 weeks ago, and that they consider it still in transit . OK, contact the seller and ask for resolution.
AV cables for Olympus
The field monitor for my Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark II works relatively well, but it's made more difficult by an apparently deliberate bug in the camera firmware that switches focus stacking off when an HDMI monitor is connected. How about the composite video output? I had one for my E-30 years ago, and used it to connect a viewfinder to the camera. Where is it? After some investigation, I discovered that it came with the camera, so it went with the camera too. And more modern models don't have that cable. OK, they cost almost nothing. Off to take a look.
Moving Mobile Windows
A large proportion of the information I consume on my mobile comes from two apps: The Economist (iOS, Android), and a whole lot of feeds via Feedly (iOS, Android). They both present text in narrow columns and share a lovely, simple navigation metaphor which unfortunately has recently broken (on Android at least). In both cases, each story is presented in a single column that fills the screen from left to right and extends arbitrarily far down, as long as need be for the pieces body. The stories are side by side. There are only two ways to navigate: Up or down the columns, and right or left between stories.
Finally usable focus stacking photos?
I've been pondering about how to calculate parameters for focus stacking for nearly a month, without coming to any really concrete conclusions. But then, nobody else has either, and they're still taking good focus-stacked photos. OK, time to try again. I've established that I can use the Feelworld FW760 with the focus stacking mode of Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark II by turning to AV input before taking the photo. Otherwise the camera refuses to focus stack. With this setup I finally got a worthwhile photo of a Hibiscus rosa-sinensis: Which of the two photos?
X on Bauhn TV
Spent some time today playing with X setup on the new TV. For some reason the IgnoreEDID option didn't help, and I kept ending up with the same old mode lines. But then I thought a bit further. This isn't an analogue system. The data comes in from the HDMI interface and is immediately processed. In this particular case, the TV needs to know that it's 1920×1080 and upscale it to 3840×2160. The sync delays are irrelevant. So why was it overrunning the screen? That's typical of analogue systems, where the sync pulses and delays are necessary for a correct display.
XXX TV
Yvonne off to town today for Pilates. She called me back from ALDI: she had been looking for one of the TVs they had on offer last weekend. I told her that it was a hopeless case and that she shouldn't waste her timebut she had found one! I later heard from Jamie Fraser that at his local shop in Horsham they even had four of them. That's quite unlike ALDI's electronics specials, especially not directly before Christmas. I wonder if the size was an issue. So she brought it back (a Bauhn ATV65UHD-1217, according to the package, and with a 165 cm (65") diagonal), and we swapped out the TCL: I'm not even going to try to add a URL for the new TV.
Reviving my Christmas daddy-daughter podcast, with Poesy!
For nearly every year since my daughter Poesy was old enough to sing, we’ve recorded a Christmas podcast; but we missed it in 2016, due to the same factors that made the podcast itself dormant for a couple years — my crazy busy schedule. But this year, we’re back, with my off-key accompaniment to her... more
Olympus firmware upgrade
Release 1.4 of the firmware for my Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark II was released a couple of days ago. To install it, I had to connect the camera to dischord, my Microsoft box, because Olympus, in its wisdom, will only install firmware with its own programs (in notable contrast to Canon, who just place it on the storage card and let the camera install it). Firmware installation is now more complicated: first you the program saves the camera settings, then it installs the firmware. Then you power cycle the camera and reload the settings. I've done this before, and modulo the glacial speed and the inconvenience, it just works.
Many years ago I worked on IBM DB2 and so I occasionally get the question, “how the heck could you folks possibly have four relational database management system code bases?” Some go on to argue that a single code base would have been much more efficient. That’s certainly true. And, had we moved to a...
Four DB2 Code Bases?
Many years ago I worked on IBM DB2 and so I occasionally get the question, “how the heck could you folks possibly have four relational database management system code bases?” Some go on to argue that a single code base would have been much more efficient. That’s certainly true. And, had we moved to a...
Daily Android pain
Gradually I'm coming to understand what little there is to know about Android TV, but there are still details to follow up on. Somebody recommended VLC for Android. That's a program that I have used before, so it seemed reasonable. But of course it has been dumbed down for Android, and once again I found myself facing guessworkand the lack of an online help window. The complete lack of windowing on Android TV borders on the insane. Yes, I could have gone and got euroa, my Microsoft laptop, but I pressed on with guesswork. And how about that, I was able to establish a connection to eureka using SMB (really Samba).
Save 40-60% on the 3rd edition of TPOSANA
The 3rd edition of "Vol 1: The Practice of System and Network Administration" was nominated as a "2017 Community Favorite". To celebrate, you can get it 40-60% off between now and Jan 8, 2018. Click this link and use code "FAVE" See all the favorites here: http://informit.com/favorites By the way... there haven't been many reviews of this book on Amazon, and none that have mentioned the new content in Section I, II and III. I've you've read the new edition and would like to post a review, we'd love to know your opinion (good or bad).
Still more Android TV
I really must have more interesting stuff to do than annoy myself with this brain-dead Android TV. But somehow I want to understand it better. I still can't see how anybody could have come up with such a stupid interface, unless they have been hiding under a stone for the last few decades (or think that their customers have). One thing helped: I found the manual online. Surprise, surprise: it also has a greyscale title page, though there is some use of colour inside. That enabled me to search the manual and discover some things that I haven't seen before. First, it seems to describe different hardware from what I received.
Rethinking the 'production' of data
This article titled "Daten müssen strategischer Teil des Geschäfts werden" appeared in German last week in the "IT und Datenproduktion" column of Wirtschaftwoche. How companies can use ideas from mass production to create business with data Strategically, IT doesn't matter. That was the provocative thesis of a much-talked-about article from 2003 in the Harvard Business Review by the US publicist Nicolas Carr. Back then, companies spent more than half of their entire investment for their IT, in a non-differentiating way. In a world in which tools are equally accessible for every company, they wouldn't offer any competitive advantage so went the argument.
Rethinking the 'production' of data
This article titled “Daten müssen strategischer Teil des Geschäfts werden” appeared in German last week in the “IT und Datenproduktion” column of Wirtschaftwoche. How companies can use ideas from mass production to create business with data Strategically, IT doesn't matter. That was the provocative thesis of a much-talked-about article from 2003 in the Harvard Business Review by the US publicist Nicolas Carr.
Android TV: enough!
Spent a lot of time this afternoon trying to make my Android TV useful. I failed. What would I need to replace teevee with the TV itself? At the very least a shell, a web browser and software to play videos. I already discovered a couple of shells, and $ Termux seemed usable. What about playing videos? Do I have a deal for you! Every time I press the Home key, I get suggestions of what to watch, typically at the price of $2.99 per programme! The only one I found even remotely interesting was one I had already recorded from TV, and that Yvonne found so interesting that it's still on disk.
How To Sell Bitcoins
In 2013, I bought a few Bitcoins from a dude in a coffee shop, paying with hundred-dollar bills. Later that year I sold enough to get my money back. Then I forgot about them, Bitcoins price gyrations occasionally registering in a corner of my mind. But earlier this month I decided to find out if the remainder could be turned into real actual money, and it turned out they could. Heres how. Important note: This narrative applies specifically to exchanging BTC for Canadian dollars, in Canada. Some lessons may apply in other jurisdictions. How I did it There are a lot of people out there on the Net who are eager to sell you Bitcoins, but when you want to sell them back for hard cold cash, the offerings seem to thin out.
When You Cant Afford Not to Have Power Redundancy
Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport suffered a massive power failure yesterday where the entire facility except for emergency lighting and safety equipment was down for nearly 11 hours. The popular press coverage on this power failure is extensive but here are two examples: WSJ: https://www.wsj.com/articles/power-outage-halts-flights-at-atlanta-international-airport-1513543883 (pay wall) CNN: http://edition.cnn.com/2017/12/17/us/atlanta-airport-power-outage/index.html For most years since 1998, Atlanta International...
When You Cant Afford Not to Have Power Redundancy
Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport suffered a massive power failure yesterday where the entire facility except for emergency lighting and safety equipment was down for nearly 11 hours. The popular press coverage on this power failure is extensive but here are two examples: WSJ: https://www.wsj.com/articles/power-outage-halts-flights-at-atlanta-international-airport-1513543883 (pay wall) CNN: http://edition.cnn.com/2017/12/17/us/atlanta-airport-power-outage/index.html For most years since 1998, Atlanta International...
'Paris s'éveille'! Introducing the AWS EU (Paris) Region
Today, I'm happy to announce that the AWS EU (Paris) Region, our 18th technology infrastructure Region globally, is now generally available for use by customers worldwide. With this launch, AWS now provides 49 Availability Zones, with another 12 Availability Zones and four Regions in Bahrain, Hong Kong, Sweden, and a second AWS GovCloud (US) Region expected to come online by early 2019. In France, you can find one of the most vibrant startup ecosystems in the world, a strong research community, excellent energy, telecom, and transportation infrastructure, a very strong agriculture and food industry, and some of the most influential luxury brands in the world.
More Android TV experience
I'm still not convinced that there isn't more to be gained from my Android TV, and today I did some more attempts. The entire instructions are on 2 sides of A4 paper, and they're correspondingly vague. The biggest issue I had was that the toyshop wanted me to use voice input, but that didn't workat all. I don't know if the microphone is broken or non-existent, but I don't really care, since voice recognition is such a long way from being useful. The instructions didn't help, of course: they didn't even mention voice input (so maybe there isn't a microphone). But it seems that enough clicks (more than 1) in the right place enable it to read the keyboard.
'Paris s'éveille'! Introducing the AWS EU (Paris) Region
Today, I'm happy to announce that the AWS EU (Paris) Region, our 18th technology infrastructure Region globally, is now generally available for use by customers worldwide. With this launch, AWS now provides 49 Availability Zones, with another 12 Availability Zones and four Regions in Bahrain, Hong Kong, Sweden, and a second AWS GovCloud (US) Region expected to come online by early 2019.
Talking Walkaway on the Barnes and Noble podcast
I recorded this interview last summer at San Diego Comic-Con; glad to hear it finally live! Authors are, without exception, readers, and behind every book there is&another book, and another. In this episode of the podcast, were joined by two writers for conversations about the vital books and ideas that influence inform their own work.... more
An 8th graders brilliant trailer for Walkaway
The Last JSON Spec
The IETF just published RFC 8259 (also known as STD 90 ). Editor, yr humble servant. The legacy-ASCII full text is here and Ill link a nice-looking HTML version from here sometime in the next day or two. I think this is the last specification of JSON that anyone will ever publish. The story of how we got to RFC 7159, this RFCs predecessor, is told in JSON Redux AKA RFC7159 and I wont re-tell it. The reason 8259 exists is that the ECMAScript gang went and wrote their own extremely minimal spec, Standard ECMA-404: The JSON Data Interchange Syntax, and there was reason for concern over dueling standards.
Bloody connectors!, part 4
Connecting the TV to the network involved adding a switch in the lounge room: That went easily enough, but later I discovered that copying image files from eureka went at a snail's pace. A quick examination with netstat -biIem0 1 confirmed. Here first with the switch connected, then disconnected and teevee connected directly to the wall socket: The fourth column is the number of bytes input per second.
Vultures available!
Two weeks ago I tried to set up a server with Vultr, only to be told that there were none available at my chosen location (Frankfurt/Main). So I put myself on a please notify list. But the following day I discovered that they were available after all, and set up a machine quite rapidly. But vultrs don't forget, it seems. Today I received an email: Date: Tue, 12 Dec 2017 17:35:23 -0500 (EST) From: [email protected] To: [email protected] Subject: Vultr.com - Deploy in Frankfurt! Vultr.com has added additional capacity in our Frankfurt location!
Configuring new TV
OK, let's configure the new TV. Where's the configuration menu? There seem to be four different ways to access parts of the configuration.
Bloody connectors!, part 1
Took advantage of the power outage to finally install the new 4 TB disk drive in eureka. The good news is that the reboot worked with no trouble. Services that still require manual start are: mailtunnel, set up an ssh tunnel to the external server, since Aussie Broadband block outgoing port 25. linkcheck, a script which checks network connectivity. wh1080, which runs the weather station software. Yes, there are probably ways to get them started automatically, but that would require thinking, and there are some non-obvious issues involved, like loading ssh keys.
Net Neutrality is only complicated because monopolists are paying to introduce doubt
My op-ed in New Internationalist, Dont break the 21st century nervous system, seeks to cut through the needless complexity in the Net Neutrality debate, which is as clear-cut as climate change or the link between smoking and cancer — and, like those subjects, the complexity is only there because someone paid to introduce it. When... more
A new TV
My TV has been giving me problems: from time to time, when I turn it on, it runs for a minute or so and then hangs hard, requiring a physical power off to continue. But today, even that didn't help, and to watch the news in the afternoon I put a normal computer monitor in its place. What do I do now? I bought this TV 4½ years ago, my first ever digital TV. And like the three projectors before it, I really only need it as a monitor: the interface to real TVs was just too fiddly. It has a 58" 1920x1080 ( Full HD ) display, and I was estimating that it would last 4 years, by which time 3840x2160 ( UHD ) would be the norm.
New Hugin
A new beta version of Hugin is out. Built it today, and it just worked, once I rebuilt the pkg-plist file (a good thing we have make makelist). ACM only downloads articles once. It's possible that this article has changed since being downloaded, but the only way you can find out is by looking at the original article.
Zerene stacker on FreeBSD
I have already established that Zerene will install on FreeBSD. But will it run? In principle if a program that runs on Linux installs on FreeBSD, it will run too. So I tried it out, in the process tripping over a few nits. Yes, it runs, loads files, displays them. But then I got an unexpected surprise while trying to stack them: That's more than just an adaptation issue. Something to do with locking? It could be complicated. A good thing I don't have to rely on the functionality.
DevOpsDays New York City 2018 Speakers Announced!
Exciting news from the D-O-D-NYC committee! Speakers announced. Wow! I've never seen such an amazing lineup of speakers! The best of the best. The committee this year was flooded with so many amazing proposals but sadly it is a 2-day conference so they had to be very selective. Who benefits? You! Early bird discount ends on Friday. Register soon and save! DevOpsDays-NYC 2018 is Thu/Fri January 18-19, 2018 in midtown Manhattan. Easy to get to via all forms of public transportation. For more information: http://dod.nyc
Expanding the AWS Cloud: Introducing the AWS China (Ningxia) Region
Today, I am happy to announce the general availability of AWS China (Ningxia) Region, operated by Ningxia Western Cloud Data Technology Co. Ltd. (NWCD). This is our 17th Region globally, and the second in China. To comply with China's legal and regulatory requirements, AWS has formed a strategic technology collaboration with NWCD to operate and provide services from the AWS China (Ningxia) Region. Founded in 2015, NWCD is a licensed data center and cloud services provider, based in Ningxia, China. Coupled with the AWS China (Beijing) Region operated by Sinnet, the AWS China (Ningxia) Region, operated by NWCD, serves as the foundation for new cloud initiatives in China, especially in Western China.
Expanding the AWS Cloud: Introducing the AWS China (Ningxia) Region
Today, I am happy to announce the general availability of AWS China (Ningxia) Region, operated by Ningxia Western Cloud Data Technology Co. Ltd. (NWCD). This is our 17th Region globally, and the second in China. To comply with China's legal and regulatory requirements, AWS has formed a strategic technology collaboration with NWCD to operate and provide services from the AWS China (Ningxia) Region.
Buying Zerene
My experiments with focus stacking software last month made it clear that I should buy Zerene and not Helicon Focus. And today I needed to do so: my 30 days free trial were up. So off to the Zerene web site, where they asked me for $89, as advertisedand $8.90 GST! Why that? Imported stuff under $1,000 is (still) free of tax. Sent an email asking why, and half an hour later got an answer from the author, Rik Littlefield, explaining the situation, after having checked the ATO web site. He didn't find the $1,000 limit (that's here), but did note that it didn't apply to companies with a turnover less than $75,000 per annum, so he issued an invoice without tax, and with a 10% Christmas rebate that hadn't made it to the web site.
Buying Zerene
My experiments with focus stacking software last month made it clear that I should buy Zerene and not Helicon Focus. And today I needed to do so: my 30 days free trial were up. So off to the Zerene web site, where they asked me for $89, as advertisedand $8.90 GST! Why that? Imported stuff under $1,000 is (still) free of tax. Sent an email asking why, and half an hour later got an answer from the author, Rik Littlefield, explaining the situation, after having checked the ATO web site. He didn't find the $1,000 limit (that's here), but did note that it didn't apply to companies with a turnover less than $75,000 per annum, so he issued an invoice without tax, and with a 10% Christmas rebate that hadn't made it to the web site.
More Exif investigations
I've been pondering on how to analyse the Exif data from my camera for nearly two weeks now. It's not easy. Today I went back to my investigations of March 2016, which were incompletely noted. It seems that the hacks I described there were against /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/Image/ExifTool/Olympus.pm. I still don't understand the format, and clearly some of it is wrong, but even so, they had one advantage: they show which tags exist, along with some representation of them. OK, how about a shotgun? For all potential tags between 0x300 and 0x3ff, just add a line like: 0x333 => { Name => 'Focus333', Writeable => 'int16u' }, That completely ignores data types, but it will at least find the tags and give some representation.
MediathekView bugs
As I said a few days ago, I've been using MediathekView for some months now, and parts of it are excellent. But in the last day or two it stopped listing Abo (short for Abonnement , subscription) programmes. I've been wondering why, and today I spent quite a bit of time reinstalling and comparing configuration files. It's interesting to look at what the ~/.mediathekview3 directory looks like after it has been running for a while: === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/47) ~/.mediathek3 5 -> l -rw-r--r-- 1 grog lemis 80,929 4 Dec 11:07 downloadAbos.txt -rw-r--r-- 1 grog lemis 133,820,824 5 Dec 18:19 filme.json -rw-r--r-- 1 grog lemis 112,747 4 Dec 13:01 history.txt ...
Powerline Ethernet revisited
Jamie Fraser has bought some second-hand powerline Ethernet adapters. I've been there before and had very poor results. But was that maybe due to the power wiring in Kleins Road? I still have a couple (why did I keep them?) , so I tried it out today, moving a file from eureka to teevee. The result? 935,505,198 bytes transfered in 9 minutes, 11 seconds. That's 1.7 MB/s, or 13.6 Mb/s, marginally more than half the capacity of my external Internet link, and about 2.7% of the claimed speed of 500 Mb/s. At least I have confirmed my opinion that they're useless unless connectivity is the most important factor.
Fastest camera wireless connection
I've noted my disappointment with the wireless performance of the Olympus OM-D E-M1 four years ago today, as it happens. Is this just Olympus' fault? It seems not. This article presents the fastest ever ( blazing fast ) wireless controller for a camera: 10 Mb/s! At that speed, it would take nearly 20 seconds per image to transfer photos across the network. Clearly more development is needed. ACM only downloads articles once.
Field monitor, take 2
Why doesn't my new Field monitor display the viewfinder image? Last week I was only able to display images that I had already taken, though I noticed discrepancies in the instructions . So I've been planning to research further, and today I finally got around to it. And how about that, I found this video showing almost exactly what I was looking for, using an Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark II. It's a marginally different monitor, and the first quarter of the 13 minute clip is spent raving over the packaging. But finally he shows the camera doing exactly what I want it to do.
More video download alternatives
I've been using MediathekView for some months now, and parts of it are excellent. But there are a number of issues: It only shows the programmes for the past month. That's the maximum; it defaults to two weeks. And there's no good reason: it has older programme data, but you can't access it directly. There's a different view for series, where the time limit doesn't apply, and it shows that (currently) the programme data goes back decades: the oldest date is March 1978, and from about 2005 on there are multiple programmes.
Hugin: classic aliasing
While doing my house photos today, I ran into a particularly bad mismatch in a control point. On closer examination, I discovered that it's a bug, not a feature: I wonder how to fix that. ACM only downloads articles once.
More work in Frankfurt/Main
Yesterday's installation of ffm.lemis.com, my virtual machine in Frankfurt am Main went very smoothly. It does what I want it to, but I'm sure it could do more. The obvious first thing to do is to bring the system up to date. Checking out the source tree was nice and fast, but the build itself took forever. There's only one CPU , which claims of itself: CPU: Virtual CPU 714389bda930 (2400.11-MHz K8-class CPU) Origin="GenuineIntel" Id=0x306c1 Family=0x6 Model=0x3c Stepping=1 Features=0x783fbff<FPU,VME,DE,PSE,TSC,MSR,PAE,MCE,CX8,APIC,SEP,MTRR,PGE,MCA,CMOV,PAT,PSE36,MMX,FXSR,SSE,SSE2> Features2=0xfffa3203<SSE3,PCLMULQDQ,SSSE3,FMA,CX16,PCID,SSE4.1,SSE4.2,x2APIC,MOVBE,POPCNT,TSCDLT,AESNI,XSAVE,OSXSAVE,AVX,F16C,RDRAND,HV> AMD Features=0x28100800<SYSCALL,NX,RDTSCP,LM> AMD Features2=0x21<LAHF,ABM> Structured Extended Features=0x728<BMI1,AVX2,BMI2,ERMS,INVPCID> XSAVE Features=0x1<XSAVEOPT> Hypervisor: Origin = "KVMKVMKVM" real memory = 1073741824 (1024 MB) That's significantly different from www, which claims: XEN: Hypervisor version 4.4 detected.
The vultrs are coming
While writing yesterday's diary entries, checked the Vultr web site, not made easier by the fact that they give me a different view of the world if I log in: my current machines (none, of course). But somewhere down the bottom of the page I found a Deploy link. OK, give me a machine in Frankfurt am Main. Can do! And indeed I set up a machine running FreeBSD 11 with surprisingly little difficulty or documentation. How do you set up a completely new remote machine? I was given ssh access Something like: Get root password from the web site.
We have radiation!
The Dereel Facebook community lit up today: the second radiation tower (Telstra mobile phones) is active. We now have coverage, though some people have reported that things aren't significantly better. I don't see us using our mobile phones significantly moreit's much more expensive than VoIPbut it would certainly be useful if the National Broadband Network fails Yet Again ACM only downloads articles once.
Dark Vegas
I spent four nights in Las Vegas while at re:Invent. The citys daytime aspect is kind of flat and low-contrast because who cares what it looks like then? Photographers there come out like vampires after dark. I took along the ludicrous Achromat lens for the sparklies, so got em if ya want em. Also hotel, music, and venue recommendations you wont want to miss. Lets start with the sparklies. That lens sure is fun. Not to mention the effect when you tell your table-mates you brought along your Las Vegas Lens and pull a whole lot of tubular gleaming brass out of your bag.
Vultures in Frankfurt?
For various reasons I need a web presence in Germany. A proxy would do it, if I could find everything I need like that. But then Jamie Fraser came up with Vultr, a provider of really cheap virtual machines. I already use one with RootBSD, and I'm happy with them. But they're not in Germany, and I pay $35 a month. Vultr offers VMs (with FreeBSD) for as little as $2.50 per month, though they would charge more than RootBSD for the configuration that I have there. OK, take a look. Before anything happens, they want my credit card number. After recent experiences, I preferred PayPal, where I had to pay $10 up front.