Source blog: Greg's diary
More GPS fun
For no particular reason, dragged out my old Garmin GPS II device today, put some batteries in, and left it to find where it was. It took nearly an hour! And yes, it works. But what use is a GPS receiver without navigational aids? And navigators are now so cheap that it's just not worth thinking about. Today Yvonne bought a new navigator at ALDI for $59. I've been buying every one they have on offer, about twice a year, in the hope that the maps will some day improve. Today might be the day: finally they've discovered Kleins Road, where I live.
Back to committing
This ports build has seriously held up other work I've had waiting. Today started on the backlog: merging changes in head back into the stable branch. In the Good Old Days with CVS, it was all manual, but now we're using subversion, and there's a merge command. Spent some time learning how to use that.
Ports: done!
I've been working on a complete build of those FreeBSD ports that I use for over 5 weeks. I can't say I haven't made progress, but it was very slow, and all of this should have happened without any problems. Still, it was a little surprising when I read today: install -o root -g wheel -m 444 /src/FreeBSD/svn/ports/graphics/feh/work/feh-2.9.2/AUTHORS /src/FreeBSD/svn/ports/graphics/feh/work/feh-2.9.2/ChangeLog /src/FreeBSD/svn/ports/graphics/feh/work/feh-2.9.2/README /src/FreeBSD/svn/ports/graphics/feh/work/feh-2.9.2/TODO /usr/local/share/doc/feh ===> Compressing manual pages for feh-2.9.2_1 ===> Registering installation for feh-2.9.2_1 124.86 real 73.52 user 24.97 sys I'm done!
Ports build: resolved?
The good news about ports is that the port build cluster has now recovered from the security incident, though it doesn't seem to have made it to the newsflash page yet. Up-to-date packages are now available, so theoretically I can stop my attempts at building from source. One problem: I need to generate Makefile targets to install only those ports in the list that aren't already installed. So for today I carried on as before, using the packages only when I had trouble with the ports. The first was in a dependency for enblend, though not my fault this time. The documentation didn't build: restore=: && backupdir=".am$$" && am__cwd=`pwd` && CDPATH="${ZSH_VERSION+.}
Ports: your fault
On with the ports pain. Today I had: === root@stable-amd64 (/dev/pts/0) /usr/ports/graphics/digikam 12 -> make all ===> digikam-0.9.6_4 depends on file: /usr/local/bin/moc - found .... ===> libkipi-0.1.6_6 depends on shared library: kimproxy.0 - not found ===> Verifying install for kimproxy.0 in /usr/ports/x11/kdelibs3 ===> kdelibs-3.5.10_13 is marked as broken: kdelibs-3.5-openssl-1.0.0.patch is unfetchable. So: basically a broken port. But the current version of KDE is version 4. Looking at the ports, I discovered that there are no fewer than 5 digikam ports, three of which start with digikam-kde4. What does /usr/ports/UPDATING have to say?
Understanding the Creative Cloud
I thought I had commented enough about Creative Cloud , but then I got a message from Michael Hughes: When you click on what's included, they have: The world's best desktop applications for photography, video, audio, and design. So I'm I missing something? It looks like they are still selling you desktop applications. Why are they using the cloud ? So I read the page, and I'm sure it didn't say what I saw before.
X display resolution insights
Since I've had the new 58" TV, some menus, notably in web browsers, have been in minuscule fonts, and I haven't found a knob to tweak to fix it. But it occurred to me that the text is about the same absolute size that it would be on a normal desktop monitor. At 60 cm it would be legible if the display resolution were high enough. At 3 m distance it's illegible. Further investigation in the nVidia X config options appendix showed that I could override the DPI value for the panel, which X had calculatedprobably correctlyat 42 DPI. Increasing the value to 120 seemed to set it about correctly for the distance: --- xorg.conf 2013/03/27 00:53:46 1.22 +++ xorg.conf 2013/05/12 06:27:59 @@ -80,6 +80,8 @@ Driver "nvidia" VendorName ...
Updating web browsers, the hard way
The installation of firefox on teevee is ancient (release 6.0), and it doesn't have flash. Clearly I need an upgrade. But how? Under FreeBSD that's done with the Ports Collection. And I'm having enough trouble on a brand-new machine. Just trying it with an old, out-of-date machine seems a Bad Idea. So I tried upgrading from the binaries. Also, it seems, a Bad Idea. In summary: The first attempt failed because perl, pkgconf and xcb-util-renderutil were out of date.
Ports progress
Now that I've processed my weekly photos, I can return to building ports. On Friday I had a strange dependency failure in openjdk. Tried again today in various ways, including an attempt to install version 7 instead of the version 6 that the depending port was asking for. No go: it still complained that libz was missing. In the end gave up and installed the binary package, which workedand didn't install any libz! I wish I understood why I'm having so much trouble.
X cursor hang: insight
Heavy CPU and memory use, such as I cause while processing my weekly photos, frequently triggers this horrible X bug that I've been suffering from for over a year: the X server loops, and the cursor jumps back and forth between two screens. I've taken to not using the mouse when the system is paging heavily, and today I didn't (quite) have the problem. What I did have, though, was surprising: on the second server, which is a single display spread over 4 monitors, the mouse cursor moved to the wrong screen! Moving left from the second screen from the left should, of course, have taken me to the leftmost screen.
Creative cloud: good or bad?
Mail from Tom Maynard today: I know several professional photographers who do not share your view of Adobe Creative Cloudand, even I dispute some of the statements you made, since I investigated the Cloud as an alternative to outright purchase of Creative Suite 6. OK, that's valid. But what are the reasons? I've been following this thread, in which people object mainly to the same things that I did a couple of days ago, and alsoparticularly the professionalsto the fact that they have to move their intellectual property offsite.
Daily ports breakage
After my fixes yesterday, a surprising number of ports compiled without error. The next one to die was chromium (or is that chrome? I still don't know): ./base/basictypes.h:206:39: note: in definition of macro 'COMPILE_ASSERT' typedef CompileAssert<(bool(expr))> msg[bool(expr) ? 1 : -1] ^ ./base/observer_list_threadsafe.h: In constructor 'UnboundMethod<T, Method, Params>::UnboundMethod(Method, const Params&)': ./base/observer_list_threadsafe.h:66:9: warning: typedef 'badunboundmethodparams' locally defined but not used [-Wunused-local-typedefs] badunboundmethodparams); ^ ./base/basictypes.h:206:39: note: in definition of macro 'COMPILE_ASSERT' typedef CompileAssert<(bool(expr))> msg[bool(expr) ?
Daily ports breakage
This morning's ports breakage: ===> Applying FreeBSD patches for libmatroska-1.3.0 ===> libmatroska-1.3.0 depends on package: libebml>=1.2.1 - not found ===> Verifying install for libebml>=1.2.1 in /usr/ports/textproc/libebml ... ===> Registering installation for libebml-1.3.0 ===> Returning to build of libmatroska-1.3.0 ===> Verifying install for ebml.3 in /usr/ports/textproc/libebml ===> Returning to build of libmatroska-1.3.0 Error: shared library "ebml.3" does not exist *** [lib-depends] Error code 1 What's that? I have just installed libebml, and it claims it wasn't installed? In fact, the version that got installed was the version in the Makefile, libebml.so.4.
Photoshop: Triumph of marketing over technology
So it's official. Adobe will not develop its Creative Suite software any more. Instead they have created a Creative Cloud . To quote the Creative Suite page: While Adobe Creative Suite® 6 products will continue to be available for purchase, Adobe has no plans for future releases of Creative Suite or other CS products. With a little trouble I found the pricing page for Creative Cloud . Apart from free trial membership, the very minimum you can pay is $20 US per month. And you have to commit to at least 12 months, so you can't save things up for a few months, buy a month's worth of processing, and then stop again.
Ports pain, next installment
After fixing my build environment, I thought that my ports would build cleanly. So I wasn't really expecting this when I came into the office: ===> Building docs cat ./src/attach.c ./src/auth.c ./src/btree.c ./src/btree.h ./src/btree_rb.c ./src/build.c ./src/copy.c ./src/date.c ./src/delete.c ./src/encode.c ./src/expr.c ./src/func.c ./src/hash.c ./src/hash.h ./src/insert.c ./src/main.c ./src/os.c ./src/pager.c ./src/pager.h ./src/parse.y ./src/pragma.c ./src/printf.c ./src/random.c ./src/select.c ./src/shell.c ./src/sqlite.h.in ./src/sqliteInt.h ./src/table.c ./src/tclsqlite.c ./src/tokenize.c ./src/trigger.c ./src/update.c ./src/util.c ./src/vacuum.c ./src/vdbe.c ./src/vdbeaux.c ./src/vdbe.h ./src/where.c | grep '$Id: ' | sort +4 | tail -1 \ | awk '{print $5,$6}' >last_change /usr/local/bin/tclsh8.5 ./www/index.tcl `cat ./VERSION` >index.html /usr/local/bin/tclsh8.5: not found gmake: *** [index.html] Error 127 Stop in /src/FreeBSD/svn/ports/databases/sqlite2.
Back to building ports
One of the things that I had to put on hold while doing my photo processing was the ports build that has been going on for over a month. Today I was able to continue; and of course several ports had changed, so once again I had the continual hangs waiting for configuration information. I still don't have qt built.
Whose NBN?
The discussion about the Australian National Broadband Network is ramping up in preparation for the elections in September. The incumbent Labor government has introduced a very ambitious FTTP solution, originally only with 100 Mb/s maximum speed. But now the opposition parties ( Liberal (in my mind really conservative) and National) look set to win the next election and replace it with an FTTN solution that is barely acceptable now and most certainly will not be in the future: a guarantee of only 25 Mb/s with the hope of 50 Mb/s some time in the future. It doesn't help that the NBN project is significantly behind schedule: This government clearly doesn't understand networking.
A new machine?
My photo experiences show that I need more memory at any rate. But my motherboard is nearly 5 years old, and it doesn't take more than 8 GB of memory. Time for a new machine? The current CPU is an AMD Phenom 9550, which PassMark rates at 2493 points. The top of the line processors rate at 14,969, at prices I'm not prepared to pay. But I thought I could find something at about 70% of that rating for under $300. I was almost right; for $280 odd I can get an Intel Core i7-3770K with 9,461 points (63%), and for $180 I can get an AMD FX-8350 (9,144 points or 61%).
Photo processing: your computer is too wimpy
Before leaving for Geelong, I checked how my enblend run was going. Again 20 GB of process space, 5.5 GB of memory. It had been running for 14 hours, had used only 80 minutes of CPU time, and had processed about half the photos. When I got back from Geelong 3½ hours later, it had only used about another 10 minutes of CPU time and loaded another 8 image.
A day processing a single photo
On with the big panorama today. It took me all day, and by the end I still wasn't finished. Here the times it took to align the images: Process Time (minutes) hugin 40:56 cpfind 192:57 icpfind 1:20 ...
Linkedin: mutual admiration society?
I've commented in the past about strange messages like this one: Congratulations! Your connection Peter has endorsed you for the following new skills & expertise: Linux MySQL Unix Panoramic Photography FreeBSD Open Source Brewing Kernel The difference in this one is that I know it's genuine: it's from Peter Jeremy, and it makes sense. But this time I went to my Linkedin profile to see what else had accumulated there. It's amazing. I've been endorsed for things I know nothing about, like Solaris, Cloud computing or perl, by people with whom I have had no contact for decades, in at least one case for over 30 years.
Ports: progress
Next port build error today, in X: checking for XF86DGA... configure: error: Package requirements (x11 xxf86dga >= 1.1) were not met: Package xxf86dga was not found in the pkg-config search path. Perhaps you should add the directory containing `xxf86dga.pc' to the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable Package 'xxf86dga', required by 'world', not found That makes no sense at all. More environment variables? I've been working on my .bashrc literally for decades, as the comment at the top states: # $Id: .bashrc,v 1.57 2012/10/04 06:01:06 grog Exp $ # This is the cruft of ages, originally started as a .bashrc on # Inactive System V/386 in about May 1990.
Scammers get cleverer
Received a strange email with quadruple spaced lines today. Here's the relevant content: From zacharyetherington@gmail.com Fri May 3 19:30:09 2013 X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,FREEMAIL_FROM, HTML_MESSAGE,T_DKIM_INVALID autolearn=ham version=3.3.2 Received: from eureka.lemis.com (eureka.lemis.com [192.109.197.137]) by eureka.lemis.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 0B062F74FA for ; Fri, 3 May 2013 19:30:09 +1000 (EST) Received: from mail.lemis.com [208.86.224.149] by eureka.lemis.com with POP3 (fetchmail-6.3.21) for (single-drop); Fri, 03 May 2013 19:30:09 +1000 (EST) Received: from mail-oa0-f65.google.com (mail-oa0-f65.google.com [209.85.219.65]) by w3.lemis.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 464453B764 for ; Fri, 3 May 2013 09:15:48 +0000 (UTC) Date: Fri, 3 May 2013 10:15:47 +0100 Subject: Link removal please.......
Computational photography continued
Continued with the computational photography course today. Somehow it's tailing off. The first couple of lectures and assignments were interesting, but now it's becoming too superficial. Saw a lecture about panoramas, which had a theoretical discussion of image alignment. Normally this is done by placing control points between individual images, but he didn't mention that at all, instead talking about homography in general terms (showing matrix operations but not really explaining what the individual parameters were), and glossing over things like projections.
Ports pain, next instalment
On with my month-long attempt to build a clean reference installation of the FreeBSD ports that I use. Today my error was: ===> qt4-corelib-4.8.4_1 conflicts with installed package(s): qt-3.3.8_14 So what installed qt version 3? Some out-of-date port? I started building all ports from scratch with a new ports tree just a few days ago. Still, presumably that port would work with newer versions of qt, so decided just to remove the old version. But it wasn't just one port: === root@stable-amd64 (/dev/pts/0) /home/Sysconfig/scripts 7 -> pkg_delete qt-3.3.8_14 pkg_delete: package 'qt-3.3.8_14' is required by these other packages and may not be deinstalled: arts-1.5.10_8,1 kdelibs-3.5.10_13 libkipi-0.1.6_6 libkexiv2-0.1.9_8 libkdcraw-0.1.9_5 digikam-0.9.6_4 pdfedit-0.4.5_2 Are there really that many ports that depend on old ...
NFS locking and ports builds
Got round to looking at my NFS locking issues today. Simple: by default FreeBSD doesn't start the NFS processes at all, so you have to configure it in /etc/rc.conf. I had that already in my real computers, but not in the ports build box. Problem solved? Hard to say. The next problem was already there: no xterm. X had built, but for some reason xterm, a dependency, hadn't. Left another ports-try run, which it continued to do for the rest of the day and into the night.
Computational Photography or Python tutorial?
On with the computational photography assignments today. They're not really difficult; I did one before the network blew up, Convolution. This involves running a multi-pixel window (confusingly called a kernel) over an image and producing a new image where each pixel is the sum of the products of the kernel element with the corresponding pixel covered by the kernel. It would be easy enough in C, but I had to do it in Python, and that required learning still more functions.
Ports pain
My ports build still isn't finished. The latest error, while building vlc,, was one that I've seen before: (CDPATH="${ZSH_VERSION+.} :" && cd .. && /bin/sh /src/FreeBSD/svn/ports/graphics/frei0r/work/frei0r-1.3/missing --run autoheader) autom4te-2.69: cannot lock autom4te.cache/requests with mode 2: Operation not supported autom4te-2.69: forgo "make -j" or use a file system that supports locks autoheader-2.69: '/usr/local/bin/autom4te-2.69' failed with exit status: 1 *** [./config.h.in] Error code 1 This is the result of using NFS without locking. In the past I've chickened out and installed the ports tree locally. But the real answer is to set up locking on NFS.
Microsoft network pain
Things didn't stop there, though. I still had to get dxo back and running. But I hadn't been able to shut it down: the power key just hibernates it, and when I replaced the disk, it came back up again as before, still with scrambled display and unpingable. Somehow managed to get it into safe mode and to display correctlyand the network interface worked! Further investigation showed that the machine was now blocking ICMP, something it didn't do before. And that was presumably due to the firewall, which was enabled. I can't even recall whether it was before or not, but I'm sure I was once able to ping it.
Throughput of alternative networks
I had really wrapped up my investigation of the network equipment I bought last week: the wireless adapters worked, but not fast enough to justify using them. I'll return them. The powerline adapters work too, also not fast enough. But they're both cheaper and marginally faster, and if I were to return them too, the alternative would be to run CAT6 along the hallway again. So I'll keep one pair. And that would have been that, except that Edwin Groothuis was interested in more testing. He wanted to know what the performance was like if both adapters were next to each other on the same board.
Computatational photography revisited
I've been making slow progress with the computational photography course. Not that slow, roughly the speed that it's supposed to be taken at, but I started something like 3 weeks after the course started, and it finishes in a week. As a result spent most of the day going through the videos; there are still three assignments with a total of 11 programs to go, so it'll keep me busy.
Still more ports pain
Finally my ports-try has completed, 122813.19 real 60857.07 user 18081.91 sys That's a total of 34 hours, and 370 MB of build logs. Did things work? No, not even remotely. X didn't get built, and so many dependent ports didn't either: checking whether to rebuild gperf header files... checking for POLKIT... no configure: error: PolicyKit not explicitly disabled and no PolicyKit found ===> Script "configure" failed unexpectedly. Please run the gnomelogalyzer, available from "http://www.freebsd.org/gnome/gnomelogalyzer.sh", which will diagnose the problem and suggest a solution.
Power line Ethernet: slow
One potential reason for my slow transmissions with the power line Ethernet adapters was that the interface at one end was only 100 Mb/s. As planned, today I put a 1 Gb/s adapter in that machine, not without difficulty: it is a PCIe card, and the motherboard had only one PCIe slot, already occupied by the graphics card. But for a test I removed the graphics card. The results? No improvement; in fact it was marginally slower. So much for that. Up to speeds seem to require amazingly good conditions.
TP-Link setup, the real way
I couldn't really be bothered to work my way through the web links about WDS that I had found yesterday, so today I put the other router where I wanted it, at teevee, and used the powerline Ethernet connection to access it. As I suspected, the stupid installation instructions aren't just plain wrong some of the time, they're much more complicated than the real thing. To configure a TP-Link TL-WR841N 802.11n wireless router, do this: Ensure that you have an address in the 192.168.0.0/24 address range.
Build: one done, one continues
I had to shut down stable-amd64 virtual machine today while processing panoramas, which need all available memory, and I shut down eucla (the laptop) while trying to configure the wireless router, but after that I continued and finally got FreeBSD 9-STABLE running on it. Time to try a wireless cardI have an ancient Lucent/Orinoco PCMCIA card that fits. And of course it didn't associate. Powered down the router, and it took notice: it panicked out of wi_intr. And then I noted that I had forgotten to build a kernel with debugger, so there wasn't much I could do about it. Things didn't stop there, of course: I could no longer log in: login: in openpam_dispatch(): pam_nologin.so: no pam_sm_autheticate().
ALDI Networking Gear
Into Sebastopol this morning to pick up some of ALDI's weekly specials: 4 TP-Link TL-PA411 powerline Ethernet adapters and two TP-Link TL-WR841N 802.11n wireless routers. The main reason was to replace the Ethernet cable between cvr2 (the TV recording computer) and teevee (the playback computer) that has been lying in the hallway for two years. Getting the goods was difficult in itself. They weren't with the other specials; instead I had to find then up the front by the cashiers, and even then they wouldn't give them to me! Instead they brought the goods to the cash register when I was about to pay.
Still more ports and network pain
My ports build is still not done. This morning I once again had a build breakage of gcc. Started trying to download the binary package from http://ftp.freebsd.org/, which came across at a snail's paceit took 8 hours to get it here. And when it did, it wanted a second package, which I didn't have time to download. Once again I noticed that the uplink speed seems to be relatively unaffected by the problems. While downloading gcc at about 3 kB/s, I uploaded some photos: sent 1062018 bytes received 144 bytes 28324.32 bytes/sec total size is 1332763 speedup is 1.25 I'm not sure how rsync calculates the speed; presumably it's total data transferred divided by time.
Internode: we give up
My ongoing network issues have received some strange responses from Internode support. Yesterday I received a message telling me to change my settings to limit the frequency range to 900 MHz (in other words, eliminate 2100 MHz). That makes no sense for a number of reasons: there is no 2100 MHz service in this area, I have an antenna that only does 900 MHz, there's no way in the software to limit the frequency to 900 MHz, and it's fairly clear that it's not a connection problem anyway. Today I got a message from another person, which didn't exactly give me the feeling that he knew what he was talking about: It seems there is continued correspondence ongoing relating to the latency issues you are experiencing.
Building ports, continued
Yesterday my build of gcc 4.9 failed. That's a beta or similar version, I think, so today I tried gcc 4.8. It, too, failed. I had already previously built gcc 4.7, so decided to fall back to that. And it, too, failed! There's something basically flawed here. This was a fresh install of a virgin system. Why did it fail? Had I somehow managed to make a mess of other ports? One thing I did do wrong was not to make a snapshot of a recent version of FreeBSD STABLE without ports, so went back to do that. Then I can install the ports freshly on something that hopefully doesn't have any inconsistencies.
VCAT followup
Spent much of today writing up yesterday's VCAT hearing. One thing in particular interested me: are the limits in Australia so much higher than elsewhere? Wendy claimed that the limits in Austria are 1/4000 of the Australian limits, and later that they were 1/4000 of the actual expected emission of the tower. It's not easy to find this kind of information. Wikipedia took me round in circles, and even on the ARPANSA web site I had my difficulties. And of course they said nothing about Austria. Finally, though, I found some information: The ARPANSA limits depend on frequency.
Still more ports pain
Continued with my ports build today. I have Makefile targets to fetch all tarballs and configure them, so did that. Configuration (hitting Return most of the time) took 1½ hours. And since so many ports depend on more recent versions of gcc, I decided to build it first. A good thing too: it died on me. Why am I having so much trouble with ports built on a clean install?
VCAT hears Radiation Tower complaint
Into Ballarat this morning to the VCAT hearing of Wendy McClelland's objection to the Dereel radiation tower. They had set aside 3 hours (10:0013:00) for the hearing. I had left early, and that's a good thing too: it took me over 20 minutes from arriving in front of the Magistrate's court to getting into the correct court room. The parking place across the road is only good for 2 hours, so I had to go to Central Square and park there. And for that I needed coins, which I didn't have, and when I got back to the courts I was sent round the corner: VCAT has its own part of the building.
Computational photography: finally
Despite severe ongoing network problems, I've managed to download enough of the computational photography course to finally do something. It's more difficult than I expected: the course leaves a number of issues to the student, such as learning the software libraries that it uses (notably numpy and opencv), not to mention the python on which the whole thing builds. Somehow it's an island in a large and for me uncharted sea of new software. Still, once I found my way round the island, it was quite interesting.
More network hell
Returned to the computational photography course today. Started watching a lecture, but the connection was so bad that I couldn't watch it at all. Discovered, though, that there are MPEG-4 versions of the lectures for download, so started that. What a catastrophe! My packet loss rates are as bad as I've seen them, and some of the downloads came over at about 1.5 kB/s, slower than a steam modem. And after an hour, they timed out. Used the same workaround as yesterday: load the files on my external server and rsync them here.
Ports hell
It's been nearly 2 weeks since I started upgrading my ports on my build machine. They were only 3 months out of date, but it took forever, what with slow downloads, ports waiting for configuration input, trips to Adelaide and conflicts. Today, finally, I got a shortlist of still-failed ports: ** Listing the failed packages (-:ignored / *:skipped / !:failed) - multimedia/ffmpeg-011 (port deleted) - lang/tcl-modules (port deleted) * bsdpan-Image-Magick-6.83 (bsdpan-Image-Magick-6.83) ! ftp/wget (wget-1.13.4_1) (unknown build error) * lang/tcl85 (tcl-8.5.12_2) * x11-toolkits/tk85 (tk-8.5.12) * x11-toolkits/py-tkinter (py27-tkinter-2.7.3_3) * graphics/py-imaging (py27-imaging-1.1.7_1) * multimedia/mlt (mlt-0.8.2_1) !
More computational photography
Finally got round to looking at the computational photography course again today, in particular the software needed for it. I had reinstalled graphics/opencv, but it didn't seem to make any difference. In particular, the file cv2.py didn't get installed. I was wrong, though. Reinstalling opencv did have an effect: it installed a new version of perl, with the result that most of my perl modules disappeared. In particular, spamassassin had died. And it wouldn't reinstall: REQUIRED module missing: HTML::Parser REQUIRED module missing: Net::DNS REQUIRED module missing: NetAddr::IP optional module missing: Digest::SHA1 ...
Time zones interpreted correctly
I've complained about my GPS navigator on frequent occasions, but yesterday I noticed something interesting: South Australian time is half an hour behind Victorian time, and it seemed to have adapted automatically. On the way back, I checked. It really did switch time zones exactly at the border: This image was somewhat spoilt both by the difficulty of getting a good photo of the navigator in position, and the fact that I had to turn back into the rest area, so the second image shows us pointing in the wrong ...
Tablets: practical example
Yana has invited us to dinner at the Red Ochre Grill to celebrate her graduation. That's another place without an address suitable for a GPS navigator. I had been there before (well, same building), but the address War Memorial Drive doesn't really help: War Memorial Drive is about 5 km long. How do I tell my GPS that? Enter the coordinates, of course. How do I find them? Under the circumstances they should be on their web page, but they're not.
Entering the digital generation
Di Saunders isn't what you'd call a tech-head. She's more interested in horses, and she only uses computers for communication. But she has an ADSL connection, something we can't get, and in recent times she has acquired an iPhone and a Samsung Galaxy Tab 2, the latter for the express purpose of reading eBooks. I've looked at that option 20 months ago and came to the conclusion that it wasn't for me. One of the reasons was the low resolution of the tablet, which didn't seem to be the case for the Samsung, though on comparison the Samsung has only 1024×600, in fact lower than the 1024×768 of the ALDI tablet.
Computational photography comprehended
After some searching, discovered that there was a good reason why I couldn't find yesterday's zip archive for the computational photography course: it doesn't exist. Somehow the layout of this course is not what I expected. Downloaded the archive for the first assignment and took a look at it. The most obvious thing is that I needed software that I didn't have: numpy and cv2. Are they in the Ports Collection? Maybe. Went looking for graphics/numpy and found that Thomas Gellekum had removed it without further comment about 11 years ago.
Monitor display scrambled again
I've been very happy with my new monitor, but there's one issue that is somewhat disconcerting: when I turn it on in the morning, sometimes the display is scrambled, just a row of random vertical lines. Usually power cycling helps, but on a couple of occasions I needed to do it twice. Today, though, it repeated 4 times. Discovered that switching to a vty solved it, without power cycling.
Computational photography
Carlos Cartola Carvalho sent out a message about an online course in computational photography today. It's free, so I took a look. It requires real work, but it could be worth it. But how do you get started? There are lots of online tutorials, but they start by telling you how to install some unidentified tarball^W zip archive that so far I haven't been able to find anywhere on their site.
More network troubleshooting
My network connectivity hadn't improved today. It's clear that my initial suspicion of the link between Melbourne and Sydney was wide of the mark, but one result was that I didn't go back to the beginning and consider the other alternatives. One was packet loss. Under those circumstances you're not filling the pipe, so concurrent transfers, such as the one I tried yesterday afternoon, can improve the total throughput. Fired up wireshark to take a look. Yes, indeed: wireshark's highlighting makes it very clear what's going on on the screen, but I find tcpdump easier to understand.
More network debugging
Yesterday's network problems haven't gone away: my file download speeds remain round 10 kB/s. Finally got round to ringing up Internode Support, where I had to explain to Dan that the problem was networking and not remote file access. Pointed him at the traceroutes that I had done; coincidentally Daniel O'Connor had also done one from Adelaide, which showed a similar step in response time when accessing the Sydney node. [ur 21:26] ~ >traceroute ftp.mutt.org traceroute to ftp.mutt.org (82.165.34.161), 64 hops max, 52 byte packets 1 ns (10.0.2.1) 5.671 ms 2.706 ms 3.740 ms 2 lns20.adl6.on.ii.net (203.16.215.174) 68.297 ms 70.227 ms 41.383 ms 3 te3-3.cor1.adl6.on.ii.net (150.101.134.209) 45.237 ms 40.820 ms 54.298 ms 4 xe-11-0-0.cr1.adl6.on.ii.net (150.101.225.229) 40.998 ms 47.384 ms 69.414 ms 5 ae4.br1.syd7.on.ii.net (150.101.33.34) 549.616 ms 408.192 ms 357.494 ms 6 te0-2-0-3.br2.sjc2.on.ii.net (203.16.213.158) 356.865 ms 484.262 ms 358.881 ms Finally he managed to see ...
Let's fake a nadir
My spherical panoramas are gradually maturingexcept for the nadirs. A couple of months ago I took some panoramas in the Great Otway National Park which would have been almost perfect if I had been able to get a nadir. It's almost impossible to represent a spherical panorama on a flat surface: The flash version looks much better, but the hole at the bottom is unpleasant. But the floor is simply wooden planks, and I have enough images of that. Today tried an experiment: take part of the floor of an adjacent image and replicate it, then manually place control points to put the new image under the tripod: There are a number of issues with this approach.
Danish food and pronunciation
Watching the Danish Food Safari on SBS Television today. Like the Polish Safari a couple of weeks ago, it's interesting because it has things in common with German food. I had a second interest: understanding how the Danes pronounce things. It's different from Swedish, which in the past I've tried to learn, but like the Swedes they tend to drop sounds. Of course, an Australian commentator doesn't help: is the dish gravlax or gravad lax? The presenter used the former, the Danish person doing the preparation the latterI thought. It seems that in Danish it's either, but the latter is spelt gravad laks .
Finally: the Dereel mobile phone tower
Jeffrey Kirsten has saved Dereel! He has erected his own mobile phone tower: I'm trying to get him to publish another one with him underneath wearing a tinfoil hat.
Network problems of a different kind
I've been moaning for months about the terrible quality of my Internet connection, in particular the wireless linkI've seen ping times of over 6 minutes! Lately things have been better there, and I've typically had ping times of under 200 ms, which I consider acceptable (a good ping time for this link is 60-80 ms). But for the past few days I've been trying to upgrade my FreeBSD ports. The last time was in January, but it seems that since then just about everything has changed, and I'm continually downloading new tarballs and having (dependent) ports that I've never heard of hang, asking me what options I want.
Backing up the Microsoft box
In the past my approach to Microsoft systems has been very much hands off : the thing's there, I don't understand it, so don't try. Backing up is simple like that: boot FreeBSD on the box and copy the disk partition. But now that the machine is running all the time (usually hibernated), that's no longer appropriate. And surely there's some kind of backup software for it. Yes, indeed, though only because this operating system is Business ; it seems that Home systems don't need backups. I fired it up and was thoroughly confused. It offered to back up either files or my entire computer (what, hardware too?)
More opinions on LiberalNBN
Not surprisingly, there's been a lot of talk about the Coalition plans for the National Broadband Network. I'm surprised how negative they all are. This one is a little extreme, but it gives a good feel for what people are thinking. And how fast will 25 Mb/s or 50 Mb/s be in 3 or 6 years' time? Did some searching and came up with this document from the OECD, obnoxiously only available in Microsoft Excel format. It's 18 months old, and at that time it states that the average advertised download speeds exceeded 50 Mb/s in 8 countries, and they exceeded 25 Mb/s in 24 countries, paradoxically including Australia (with a claimed 34.64 Mb/s).
Upgrading ports, Yet Again
Years ago I discovered phpMyEdit, which allows you to edit MySQL tables. It hasn't weathered well: PHP changes have removed the functions it uses, and I have to keep a separate down-rev web server in a VM to be able to use it at all. Clearly I need a replacement. Recently Anthony Curtis has been showing up on IRC, so I asked him. He didn't know of anything either. But Andy Snow came up with a suggestion to use adminer, which does much more, but also claims to be able to edit tables. So: how about installing it? The first thing the port did was to try to upgrade PHP.
NBN plans: the other side
We had a lot of discussion of the matter on IRC, of course. And there are lots of reactions. I like this one: More interestingly, though, somebody came up with slides from a presentation that Simon Hackett made. It's fascinating: FTTN would cost money that would be wasted when moving to FTTH, it uses more power, is less reliable, and just changing the infrastructure plans could take years. And the final link, currently VDSL-2, is already stretching technology to its reasonable limits: Another point that came out of these slides is why the current NBN is so far behind schedule: your friend, Simon's friend and mine, Telstra.
"Coalition" NBN plans
The Australian Federal Opposition parties ( Liberal (in my mind really conservative) and National, who have been in a coalition so long that they're generally referred to simply as The Coalition ) look increasingly likely to win the next Federal election on 13 September 2013, despite their leader. While I don't have much love for the incumbent Labor Party, they did one thing right by initiating the National Broadband Network. The Coalition consider it unnecessary and had previously stated that they would cancel it if they came to power.
Olympus Viewer 3
Now that I have the new Microsoft box I can more or less come to terms with photo processing with DxO Optics Pro . But there's one thing that doesn't work: it doesn't know the characteristics of my Olympus Zuiko Digital 18-180mm F3.5-6.3 lens, so it can't correct distortion and chromatic aberration. That's a particular problem because that lens probably has the most distortion and CA of all my lenses. Today I heard that Olympus has released version 3 of Olympus Viewer. I've tried the previous version before and was irritated by the interface, so it seemed a good idea to try it out and see if they have improved it.
ABC reception problems: why?
More investigations of my interference problems (if that's what they are) today. Here's the output of femon -l (log format), starting when tuned to a commercial channel, and continuing with ABC. 2013-04-04 10:19:40 Adapter 0: status SCVYL signal 197, S/N 218, noise -22 2013-04-04 10:19:42 Adapter 0: status SCVYL signal 198, S/N 218, noise -21 2013-04-04 10:19:43 Adapter 0: status SCVYL signal 196, S/N 219, noise -23 2013-04-04 10:19:44 Adapter 0: status SCVYL signal 197, S/N 217, noise -21 2013-04-04 10:19:45 Adapter 0: status SCVYL signal 197, S/N 217, noise -21 2013-04-04 10:19:46 Adapter 0: status SCVYL signal 165, S/N 188, noise -23 2013-04-04 10:19:47 Adapter 0: status SCVYL signal 167, S/N 190, noise -24, 1234 block errors 2013-04-04 10:19:48 Adapter 0: status SCVYL signal 165, S/N 191, noise -27, 1234 block errors 2013-04-04 ...
Too stupid for Facebook
I almost never get up on my hind legs and proclaim that I'm a computer expert. I've been using computers for 45 years, and networks and email for over 30, so I suppose I should qualify. Now there's this Facebook thing, with which I really can't identify. But it can't be difficultafter all, every man and his dog uses it. And a number of them have asked after our welfare after the bushfire last week. If I had had any sense, I would have posted a status on Facebook. Well, it's not too late, so today I did it, along with a link to my diary.
Faster than light: it works
Finally the specifications for Faster-Than-Light Communication have been published. They work, as I reported over 22 years ago.
FreeBSD to drop support for i386 architecture
Mail from Eitan Adler in the FreeBSD mailing lists today: a proposal to drop full support for the 32 bit Intel i386 architecture (the one others call ia32). His reasoning: Computers are getting faster, but also more memory intensive. I can not find a laptop with less than 4 or 8 GB of RAM. Modern browsers, such as Firefox, require a 64bit architecture and 8GB of RAM. A 32 bit platform is not enough now a days on systems with more than 4 GB of RAM. A 32 bit core now is like 640K of RAM in the 1990s.
Find your Unicode symbol
Found this site somewhere today. Nice idea: you draw in a symbol and it tries to find a matching Unicode character.
SBS: We can do worse!
I've complained about the SBS web site on numerous occasions, for example here. Most of it, though, has been related to markup breakage, and nine years ago I even gave it slight praise for presenting programme information where the other channels were content with presenting titles. Now, though, they've succumbed to the modern appearance over content syndrome. Here's the old and the new information for the evening of 27 March 2013: Here's a single programme description: Yes, the old one is far plainer than the new one.
Xinerama for Hugin
Hugin uses two separate windows, each capable of showing images. In one case, masking, it's useful to correlate the image in the mask window (left images) with the image in the fast preview window (right) to see the effects of the mask. In the following example I'm masking out my hand and checking that there are no gaps (shown in reddish-brown in the fast preview window): But although I have four monitors on my desk, Hugin can only display on one X display.
Facebook thinks for you
I have a surprisingly diverse group of friends on Facebookmuch of what scrolls past is written in scripts or languages that I don't understand. But Facebook sifts through this information and comes up with suggestions. On the Dereel 2013 Fire Help Page I get the following suggested members: You'd think that this were random, but no, it's always the same group of people. David Yeardley lives around the corner and would make a good member. That's probably a complete coincidence, because the others are so far from appropriate members that the mind boggles.
More TV stuff
Finally got round to installing the new TV properly . It's still in the middle of the room, because the wall to the hallway is missing, and it looks pretty terrible. If we don't move house soon we may reconsider the location. But it worksalmost. On one occasion I couldn't turn it on again. I had to power cycle it before it would turn on. I hope that doesn't happen too often. It's also clear that the screen illumination could be better: the corners are noticeably darker, though that's not obvious when viewing a film. Under the circumstances it's nice to know that I can take it back before the end of May with no questions asked.
TV IP configuration
More playing around with my new TV today. This is the first I've ever had with an Internet connection, and I was interested in what it could do. It has a main menu reminiscent of a computer display: That white window at top left is a window in natural size into the X display, showing nothing useful. But it has a web browser with an emblem reminiscent of firefox. Tried that, but I couldn't communicate with the global Internet. It had obtained an IP address via DHCP, amusingly enough 192.109.197.224, flachmann.lemis.com, but it didn't get a valid default gateway.
Even more spam
Spam seems to be particularly bad at the moment. But when I started getting offers of Viagra (sent to an address that I only gave to Growmaster), I was puzzled. SpamAssassin should have filtered that out. Took a look at the headers: no headers from SpamAssassin. But it was running. What was wrong there? Decided to install the latest version, with some surprises: ===> p5-Mail-SpamAssassin-3.3.2_8 depends on package: p5-NetAddr-IP>=4.00.7 - found ===> p5-Mail-SpamAssassin-3.3.2_8 depends on package: p5-Net-DNS>=0.63 - found ===> p5-Mail-SpamAssassin-3.3.2_8 depends on package: p5-HTML-Parser>=3.46 - found ===> p5-Mail-SpamAssassin-3.3.2_8 depends on package: p5-libwww>=0 - found ===> p5-Mail-SpamAssassin-3.3.2_8 depends on package: p5-Encode-Detect>=0 - found ===> p5-Mail-SpamAssassin-3.3.2_8 depends on package: p5-Mail-Tools>=0 - found ===> p5-Mail-SpamAssassin-3.3.2_8 depends on file: /usr/local/bin/perl5.14.2 - found ===> Configuring for p5-Mail-SpamAssassin-3.3.2_8 NOTE: settings for "make test" are now controlled using "t/config.dist".
New TV
Up early this morning and off to ALDI in Sebastopol to buy their special offer 58" TV, arriving just before they opened. A good thing to: they had about 9 of them, and they were all gone within about 5 minutes. Back home after finally finding a way to transport it, and set it up. It's not just big, it's also heavy38 kg if you believe the statement on the package. An amazing number of connections: 4 HDMI, VGA, even an Internet connection.
Ports: Upsetting the apple cart
Processing the photos of the stray dog proved to be a problem: exiftool had disappeared. I don't know why, but since it's a perl module, it's reasonable to assume that the reinstallation of the new perl version yesterday removed it. I wonder how many other ports have disappeared. I note also that the fonts used by wine seem to have changed. One more reason not to upgrade ports on a production machine until they've been tested elsewhere. On the other hand, it seems that I do have LibreOffice installed. No idea how that happened. I looked for an obvious executable yesterday, something like /usr/local/bin/libreofficeand that's exactly what was installed, admittedly a symlink.
LibreOffice install
I don't use things like Microsoft Office or clones. But since I've started using a Microsoft box, I should maybe consider it, especially as I could do with a spreadsheet right now to calculate costs for the house. I don't want to spend money on it, of course, but then there's LibreOffice. Today was the last day of my billing month for Internet traffic, so I downloaded it both for Microsoft (after their page gave up trying to identify my Vista box as PPC MacOS X) and FreeBSD.
End of an era: death after 3737 days
Somebody pointed me at this slashdot story today: a machine shut down after 3737 days of uptime (that's over 10 years, 2 months). It makes my "After running uninterrupted for 3737 days, this humble Sun 280R server running Solaris 9 was shut down. At the time of making the video it was idle, the last service it had was removed sometime last year. A tribute video was made with some feelings about Sun, Solaris, the walk to the data center and freeing a machine from internet-slavery."
Getting nanoseconds from stat(2)
The 0 in the nanoseconds from stat(1) puzzled me, so I went to take a look. And how about that: the stat(2) system call returns the fields set to 0: === gdb -> Return 336 rc = lstat(file, &st); === gdb -> Return 339 if (rc == -1) { === gdb -> p st $1 = { st_dev = 129, st_ino = 11732393, st_mode = 33188, st_nlink = 1, st_uid = 1004, st_gid = 1000, st_rdev = 47224992, st_atim = { tv_sec = 1363569201, tv_nsec = 0 }, st_mtim = { tv_sec = 1350666025, tv_nsec = 0 }, st_ctim = { tv_sec = 1350666025, tv_nsec = 0 }, st_size ...
Don't enhance test(1)
A couple of weeks ago Peter Jeremy made some modifications to test(1) and with approval of his mentors (John Baldwin and myself) committed them to the head of the FreeBSD source tree. The changes are summarized in the man page: file1 -nt file2 True if both file1 and file2 exist and file1 is newer than file2. file1 -ntXY file2 True if both file1 and file2 exist and file1 has a more recent last access time (X=a), inode creation time (X=B), change time (X=c), or modification time (X=m) than the last ...
NBN: Yes, no, maybe
One of the good things about the new property is that it's only a stone's throw from the Enfield radiation tower. We could get good network coverage there immediately. Out of idle curiosity, went to the NBN rollout map to see what the coverage was like, and in the process discovered a link at the top overwriting another text and saying Find a service provider : Followed that, and discovered that the link forgot where I was: I was presented with a map of Australia.
More weather station flakiness
For some reason the wireless communication between the external and internal components of my weather station has been particularly flaky lately, and there have been long periods of time with no readings. Changed the batteries, but the old ones weren't particularly discharged, and it didn't help, so finally got down to complete some modifications I had started years ago to ensure that I don't try to save invalid readings. What a series of functions just to read a page of weather data from the unit: /* * Read routines. There are lots of these: * * read_station reads 8 bytes from the station, the maximum it can deliver.
Microsoft update fun
Microsoft released patches for its operating systems today, apparently something they do every month. Now that I have a real Microsoft box, it seems to be right to upgrade. But of course my network link wasn't up to it, and rather than wait forever, decided to postpone. Clicked the stop download button, and got: Code 80244023 Windows Update encountered an unknown error. Get help with this error I've seen this one before, and at the time decided, presumably correctly, that it meant network connection interrupted .
Committing ports: the bureaucracy
Review of my new port from Edwin Groothuis this morning, suggesting a couple of modifications, including noting conflicts with the normal Hugin port. That required testing, including building both ports a couple of times, but finally I was ready to commit. Not quite what I expected: Path "head/graphics/hugin-devel/distinfo" is missing the svn:keywords property (or an fbsd:nokeywords override) What does that mean? No idea. Discovered a PortSubversionPrimer, resplendent in missing spaces, which told me about properties, and that I needed svn propset to set them. More careful reading showed that I needed to add entries to ~/.subversion/config, something that I had done years ago (coincidentally exactly 4 years ago today) for the src tree and then forgotten.
Network pain continues
I've more or less resigned myself to the fact that my network connectivity is barely acceptable. Roll on the radiation tower! It's hardly worth mentioning the disconnects any more, but they continue unabated. Each of these represents a successful reconnect after a dropout: === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/4) ~ 125 -> grep myaddr /var/log/ppp.log Feb 25 20:12:36 eureka ppp[1982]: tun0: IPCP: myaddr 118.209.58.27 hisaddr = 10.1.0.1 Feb 26 13:12:31 eureka ppp[1982]: tun0: IPCP: myaddr 118.209.82.100 hisaddr = 10.1.0.1 Feb 27 02:05:54 eureka ppp[1982]: tun0: IPCP: myaddr 118.209.127.130 hisaddr = 10.1.0.1 Feb 27 09:29:38 eureka ppp[2717]: tun0: IPCP: myaddr 118.209.61.68 hisaddr = 10.1.0.1 Feb 27 15:22:14 eureka ppp[2717]: tun0: IPCP: myaddr 118.209.116.108 hisaddr = 10.1.0.1 Feb 27 16:06:23 eureka ppp[2717]: tun0: IPCP: myaddr 121.44.113.98 hisaddr = 10.1.0.1 Feb 27 17:22:40 eureka ppp[2717]: tun0: IPCP: myaddr 121.44.86.185 hisaddr = 10.1.0.1 Feb 28 18:11:28 eureka ppp[2717]: ...
Polishing my ports commit bit
News from FreeBSD portmgr today: I have my ports commit bit back, after having given it up some years ago for safe keeping . It's a little tarnished, but nothing that a bit of cleaning won't fix. Some years ago I mentored Edwin Groothuis for a src commit bit. He has a ports commit bit, so I asked him to be my mentor while I did the cleaning. A week or two again a beta release of Hugin came out, so it seemed reasonable to add a new port, graphics/hugin-devel, for that: the FreeBSD port of Hugin has been lagging quite a bit lately.
Who needs swap?
An unexpected effect of the completed verandah panorama was that Hugin decided that the optimal size was considerably larger than before. Although it has always stitched a full 360°×180° panorama, even when the bottom was missing, today the calculated size increased considerably: === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/4) ~/Photos/20130309 105 -> identify ../20130303/Pano/verandah-centre.jpeg Pano/verandah-centre.jpeg ../20130303/Pano/verandah-centre.jpeg JPEG 13068x6534 13068x6534+0+0 8-bit DirectClass 21.2MB 0.000u 0:00.000 Pano/verandah-centre.jpeg[1] JPEG 21866x10933 21866x10933+0+0 8-bit DirectClass 44.21MB 0.000u 0:00.000 === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/4) ~/Photos/20130309 106 -> ls -l ../20130303/Pano/verandah-centre.jpeg Pano/verandah-centre.jpeg -rw-r--r-- 1 grog lemis 21200630 3 Mar 12:41 ../20130303/Pano/verandah-centre.jpeg -rw-r--r-- 1 grog lemis 44207375 9 Mar 16:23 Pano/verandah-centre.jpeg So instead of an 85 MP panorama, I ended up with a 239 MP panorama; surprisingly, the image sizes don't reflect that.
A nadir, finally
Last weekend's attempt at a full 360°×180° panorama of the verandah wasn't overly successful. One of the issues I had was finding appropriate control points: the floor was too uniform and repetitive. Today I tried the trick of putting a few flowerpots on the floor in the range both of the nadir and the lower row of the panorama. That worked nicely, though I still have issues with the alignment of the floorboards, probably relating to the accuracy of the positioning. Still, the result isn't too bad: How much work would it be to fix the remaining jaggies in the floor?
Wendy McClelland exposes scam
Yvonne pointed me at an article in the Hepburn Advocate today. Wendy McClelland has taken pity on all us poor souls who were conned by the NBN: NBN endeavoured to convince the public to want Wi-Fi radiation broadband via a proposed tower to deliver at speeds of 5-12 megabits per second. NBN staff stated it was faster than satellite broadband. Most residents who attended were duped by the con. Count me as one of the residents who was duped .
Thirty years of audio data storage
Edwin Groothuis pointed me at this image on the web today: Amazing how times change, and in particular how much content is now served by the Web.
More weather station software
Peter Jeremy came up with this weather station software site today. It seems to do roughly what my software does (hopefully with fewer warts), but I haven't really looked at it yet.
No day for computing
Somehow things didn't go well today. It started when I came in and found a message from Wolfgang Riegler telling me of an incorrect dependency in the enblend port. Fixed that and got Edwin Groothuis to commit it, and he then discovered that removing the port left an empty directory behind. Normally that's handled by a @dirrm line in the pkg-plist file, but this port doesn't have a pkg-plist: it's all in the Makefile. Spent some time reading the porter's handbook without finding out how to remove a directory. Should I revert to a pkg-plist after all? It makes sense to minimize the number of files in a port, since they're all small, usually smaller than the minimum fragment size.
Real world adieu
Nearly 2 years ago I took over maintenance of the Friends of the Ballarat Botanical Gardens web site in hope of contributing something to the cause and getting a better understanding of the Real World. I suppose that I've been successful in those aims. But it's been a pain! Clearly gardeners aren't the most technical people in the world. And even more clearly I don't have the interpersonal skills to be a webmaster. But the site is still almost completely devoid of content, and what little content I get usually comes in forms that require much correction before they can be put up at all.
Reinstating my ports commit bit
I've been updating a number of ports recently, and since I have handed in my ports commit bit, I had planned to get other people to commit them for me. But in each case they approved the commit and I ended up committing it myself. That's possible, but clearly not what's intended. And then Beech Rintoul sent a message asking for a new maintainer for the ImageMagick port, a tool I use quite a lot, so it seemed reasonable to take over maintainership. Spent much of the day getting it and a dependency, webp up to date. So it was clearly time to apply to get my commit bit back.
Differing fields of view?
Another message in the German Olympus Forum today: differing fields of view for Panasonic and Olympus cameras. The latter is claimed to have a slightly wider field of view. My guess was that the submitter was processing Olympus raw images with a program like ufraw, which leaves the edge in placemouseover alternation: They also show (second image) why I don't use ufraw any more.
Aligning images: still no silver bullet
One of the things that I wanted to do with the exposure comparison was to compare the histograms as well. To do that I had to take screen shots of the histograms and then align them somehowand what better tool than Hugin? I don't know, but it seems I need one. I followed my instructions, but the images didn't get aligned properly without selecting View optimization, and when I did, it couldn't cope. Maybe part of the story is the concept of focal length, which is completely missing here.
Hacking test: So nice, so nice, we do it twice
Hacking test(1) was easy, apart from the issue I had by not reading the struct header. Peter Jeremy thought so too, so he came up with his version, which went further than mine: I compared the modification timestamps, creation timestamps or access timestamps of two files. Peter made it more general: compare any two timestamps, including the birthtime stamp introduced with UFS 2, a total of 16 possible comparisons instead of the 3 that I had envisaged. What use are they? Who knows? You can't guess what people might like to do with the tool.
Hacking test
Talking with Peter Jeremy on IRC this morning, and he bemoaned that fact that test(1) doesn't have comparison operators between files based on creation time or access time. All that's currently available is a comparison between modification times: === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/9) /var/tmp 29 -> touch foo === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/9) /var/tmp 30 -> touch bar === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/9) /var/tmp 31 -> test foo -nt bar; echo $? 1 === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/9) /var/tmp 32 -> test bar -nt foo; echo $? 0 === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/9) /var/tmp 33 -> -nt means newer than ; there's also an -ot.
More fiddling with Hugin
So it seems that I will need to install wxWidgets 2.9 to have a chance of setting multiple displays, and even then it's not clear that it will work. But maybe there's an easier way: Hugin honours the DISPLAY environment variable, so how about setting that inside the program, before the window is created? Did thathow easy C is in comparison to C++but it had no effect. Presumably the widgets, or possibly GTK+, have looked at the variable on startup and hidden it somewhere difficult to find. That was to be expected, but I wonder how much sense it really makes?
Shutdown hang
Yvonne woke me this morning to tell me that her machine hadn't shut downsomething about not ready . At least that's better than an error occurred . But I saw something I have never seen before: What causes that? Why did it want to suspend? It's supposed to be shutting down. Peter Jeremy investigated and came to the conclusion that it did make sense, but of course there's no way to know what really happened, and it didn't happen again.
Hacking Hugin
I've been trying out the new version of Hugin. I can't say I particularly like it. It now comes with user levels ( Interfaces ), Simple , Advanced and Expert . The default interface is the Simple one, of course, and it shows a combination of the old Assistant and Fast Panorama Preview windows. It also bleeds text, which I find ugly. Once you select the Expert interface things don't look too different from before. Except for the Identify function in the Fast Panorama Preview. This shows the locations of the individual images and any masking, which is a very useful for more complicated panoramas.
Printing a PDF
Carola is leaving for Tasmania on Saturday, and she finally has her flight bookings complete. So she asked me to print out the documents for her today. Nothing difficult about that. They're PDF documents. All I need is to convert them to PostScript and print them. Arguably a print filter should do that for me. There's an issue with acroread, but I have pdf2ps, part of ghostview, so used that instead. But the printout wasn't what I expected: ERROR: invalidaccess OFFENDING COMMAND: length STACK: What does that mean?
Enblend fixed
How about that, a new version of enblend, 4.1.1. No explanation, but the bug is gone, so presumably that's a result of my reportnot such a bad response time after all. Updated the port and asked Jürgen Lock to commit it for me. He went to a lot more trouble, in the process discovering a number of issues not directly related to the upgrade, notably documentation. But finally it's there. Now to move on to the Hugin port.
More photo processing strangenesses
House photo day again today. Despite improvements in my technique, it took all day, at least partially because I had to start late. But once again I've run into some strangenesses in processing that may be due to the newer versions of the software. Here an example done with the old (2011.4.0) and new (2012.1.0) versions of Hugin: As in most cases, in this image I violated the rule that you should take all component images with the same exposure, but not by very much: the ends were exposed with 12.6 EV, and the middle with 14.3 EV.
Enblend bug confirmed
Reply to my message about the enblend bug today. It appears to be a known problem, and the respondent (Christoph Spiel?) even provided a link to a patch. This all begs the question why it hasn't been made more public. I'd consider that one a show-stopper. It seems to have less to do with 360° panoramas than with images with more than one seam line. I suppose I should try the development version.
The new enblend
My updated enblend 4.1 port is now ready for committing. I had done some testing with it on stable-amd64, but it seemed reasonable to try it on eureka with some more complicated panoramas. A good thing I did: Spent hours investigating, but it seems that this is a bug in enblend 4.1 which occurs with 360° panoramas. I wasn't able to stitch a single 360° panorama correctly. Entered a bug report and wrote a description page.
Shutdown stupidity
Watching TV in the evening, and then for some reason wanted to look at something on eureka. Did that, then shut the machine down. teevee? No, eureka! What a pain. And the more I reboot eureka, the more idiotic this historical reliance on dereel, now a virtual machine, becomes. It took me over half an hour to bring the machine up again. There's no reason why the executables and libraries need to be on an NFS mount from dereeltomorrow I'll move them to a local file system.
Aligning panoramas, continued
More playing around with Hugin today trying to align the before and after images of Yvonne's office. Made some progress, but clearly it's getting to be time to investigate what all the different optimizations really do at a technical level. RSS can't display the comparisons. See the HTML version for more details. The real issue appears to be to find enough control points in the right places for nona to remap them correctly. Here the picture on the right and the curtain rails are OK, but on the left I couldn't find enough control points to completely align the two. It's also worth noting how much smaller the maximum crop has become.
Aligning panoramas
The photos of Yvonne's office aren't ideal: the before and after images don't line up. And the instructions in my alignment page don't help. If the focal length of the images are close to the same, the view alignment doesn't workthis is the background to one of the things that Thomas Modes changed, but it still needs clarification. This is going to keep me busy for a while.
Documenting Hugin, continued
A reply to my message in the Hugin mailing list this morning, from Thomas Modes, explaining a few things, but still a little astonishing: The wiki page are also used as help files and shipped with Hugin. If the new version would be shipped without the updated pages, it would also confusing. And we can't update all pages at once. So we started with the update of the wiki pages. The first beta release will follow in the next weeks. So there is a short time, where wiki and release are out of date.
Mail falling into black hole
I was expecting a lot of mail today, but somehow nothing much arrivedso little that I started to check. First in /var/log/maillog: Feb 11 00:00:00 dereel newsyslog[26227]: logfile turned over That's not very much. Why wasn't postfix logging? Tried sending myself a message locally. No log messages. Nothing in my inbox. Nothing in ~/Mail/backup, where I store everything that arrives, even spam. Panic time. Was this another problem with procmail? Took a look in the procmail log. Everything looked normal: mail arrived, processed, stored in /var/mail/grog.
More ports
Finished my port of tclap today, and finally committed it. Also updated the Hugin port to the latest releaseby no means too earlybut that's Vadim Dimov's baby, so I'll have to send it to him. At least things are looking tidier now.
Documentation: The newer, the better
After fixing the Hugin alignment page yesterday, I sent out a message to the Hugin mailing list asking for review. No replies apart for a thank-you, but when I went to look, I discovered that a Thomas with no further identification had changed itto reflect the current development version! So now, again, it doesn't work. Why do people do that? Admittedly, he did have one great simplification, but in general this just confuses people.
Traceroute to Star Wars
Somebody pointed me at this today: === grog@w3 (/dev/ttyp1) ~ 1 -> traceroute 216.81.59.173 traceroute to 216.81.59.173 (216.81.59.173), 64 hops max, 40 byte packets ...
Finally: aligning images
In March 2011 I tried in vain to align 3 images with Hugin so that I could compare them with mouseover image manipulation. The main problem was that one of the images was taken at a different focal length, so they didn't line up: I asked on the Hugin mailing list, but didn't get the answers I wanted. Today I finally worked it out and wrote a description of how to do it.
Yet Another X Hang
I've got to admit it: since building my last kernel, the X hang problem is back. Many times when I connect cameras or disks to the USB bus, I end up with this cursor jumping problem. It happened twice today. How can I fix it?
No wind any more
My weather station showed no wind at all for nearly 24 hours. Looking outside shows why:
Network improvement: coincidence
Yesterday's improvement in the network quality didn't last. Today wasn't quite as bad as two days ago, but it's still unacceptable. Still, yesterday's experience suggests that I can rule out heat as a contributing factor. Today I ended up in a situation where the modem was just losing and reconnecting to the same cell all the time: Feb 7 19:58:00 eureka fstats: Cell lost: 81e3 8fc48e8 (5) Feb 7 19:58:00 eureka fstats: Cell found: -> 81e3 8fc48e8 Feb 7 19:58:00 eureka fstats: Cell lost: 81e3 8fc48e8 (5) Feb 7 19:58:00 eureka fstats: Cell found: -> 81e3 8fc48e8 Feb 7 19:58:01 eureka fstats: Cell lost: 81e3 8fc48e8 (5) Feb 7 19:58:01 eureka fstats: Cell found: -> 81e3 8fc48e8 Feb 7 19:58:02 eureka fstats: Cell lost: 81e3 8fc48e8 (5) Feb 7 19:58:02 eureka fstats: Cell found: -> 81e3 8fc48e8 Feb 7 19:58:02 eureka ...
Network improvement?
Yesterday's network performance was by far the worst I've experienced since getting the UMTS link. I had multiple timeouts, not surprising with RTTs of up to 4 minutes. My long discussion with James at Internode support was interesting, but basically ended with We can't get Optus to do anything about it . So I wasn't expecting anything to change in a hurry, especially given my hypothesis that the problem might be related to the hot weather: today was the hottest day in the last couple of weeks, with a top temperature of 39°. And of course I had my problems. One disconnect, a firmware reset at 9:40.
VCAT sets a date
On the topic of the Radiation Tower, VCAT has finally set a date for the hearing: 24 April 2013, 10:00 to 13:00. I hope that the short duration of the hearing will mean that the result is a foregone conclusion. Then we could finally be rid of this horribly flaky wireless connection.
Network problems: worse than ever
My network problems continue to be catastrophic. Called up Internode Support and asked what was happening, and got a call back from James, clearly somebody who knows what he's talking about. It seems they've repeatedly supplied the information to Optus, who identified the rogue cell as one of the cells on the Rokewood tower, but they say that it's functioning normally. No explanation of the poor response times, which have now reached times reminiscent of RFC 1149: That's a worst-case response time of 234.833 seconds, nearly 4 minutes!
New system, old bugs
Things are up and running happily on my reshuffled hardware, but the past isn't completely gone. Today I had Yet Another case of the X hang bug that should have been fixed months ago. And again it happened while I was doing other things with the USB subsystem, this time reading in photos from SD cards. As if to confirm my suspicion that all is not well with FreeBSD USB subsystem, the second SD card didn't register. The reader I have reports multiple devices, normally something like this (the first card): Feb 4 13:34:14 eureka kernel: ugen6.12: <Myson Century, Inc.> at usbus6 Feb 4 13:34:14 eureka kernel: umass4: <Mass Storage Class> on usbus6 Feb 4 13:34:14 eureka kernel: umass4: SCSI over Bulk-Only; quirks = 0x4000 Feb 4 13:34:14 eureka kernel: umass4:12:4:-1: Attached to scbus12 Feb 4 13:34:14 eureka kernel: da3 at ...
Shutting down another machine
Most of my reorganization is now done. dereel has been demoted to a virtual machine, and my new graphics configuration finally works, though the last attempt at a change to the X configuration file didn't work: once again the position of the monitors change. Here's the layout in the config file: Section "ServerLayout" Identifier "Layout0" Screen 0 "Screen0" 0 0 Screen 1 "Screen1" RightOf "Screen0" Screen 2 "Screen2" RightOf "Screen1" Screen 3 "Screen3" RightOf "Screen2" ... You don't need to understand much of the configuration file syntax to understand what that means.
ABC: No iview for you
ABC TV reception continues to be abysmal, but there's a new series on TV, The Doctor Blake Mysteries, taking place in Ballarat, so I thought it might be worth downloading yesterday's first episode via ABC's iview service. Surprise, surprise: Warning: Due to copyright reasons this video program[sic] is available for download by people located in Australia only. If you are not located in Australia, you are not authorised to view this video. This isn't a warning, it's an error message. What it really means is You are not located in Australia, so you can't watch the video .
Eliminating GPRS
I've been grumbling for some time that my wireless Internet connection drops back to GPRS from time to time, and is hard to get back to HSPA. I read the manual looking for that capability, without success. And then Andy Snow came up on IRC and said it could be done. It turned out he was using a different kind of modem, but he found the right commands for my Huawei 1762 here and here: AT^SYSCFG=14,2,3FFFFFFF,2,4 The only important parameter is the first, but they all need to be specified: 14: Only 3G.
More config refinements
So my new setup is up and running relatively well. X server 1 is effectively what I want server 0 to be, but for photo processing it makes sense to have one display spread over 2 screens. OK, that's simple enough: that's what TwinView is for, and the config files were conveniently generated with this line for each device: Option "TwinView" "0" Option "TwinViewXineramaInfoOrder" "CRT-0" So I tried setting TwinView to 1. No difference, apart from the fact that the order of the screens changed yet again, and that two monitors came up in low resolution.
Of mice and modems
Back home, set up the mouse, which was relatively simple. It has 5 buttons and one scroll wheel, or, as the probe put it: Feb 1 17:06:06 eureka kernel: ugen5.10: <Logitech> at usbus5 Feb 1 17:06:06 eureka kernel: ukbd2: <Logitech USB Receiver, class 0/0, rev 2.00/24.00, addr 10> on usbus5 Feb 1 17:06:06 eureka kernel: kbd4 at ukbd2 Feb 1 17:06:06 eureka kernel: ums2: <Logitech USB Receiver, class 0/0, rev 2.00/24.00, addr 10> on usbus5 Feb 1 17:06:06 eureka kernel: ums2: 16 buttons and [XYZT] coordinates ID=2 Feb 1 17:06:06 eureka kernel: uhid1: <Logitech USB Receiver, class 0/0, rev 2.00/24.00, addr 10> on usbus5 There are two side buttons for the right thumb (bad luck if you're left-handed), which xev reports as buttons 8 and 9.
Still more upgrade fun
Into the office this morning to find a surprising message: Segmentation fault: 11 at address 0x800017 Fatal server error: Caught signal 11 (Segmentation fault: 11). Server aborting That was the X server 1. I couldn't find a core dump, but I did find an emacs.core dated only shortly before I came in, so it seems to have happened then. Why? Unless it happens again, I'll never know.
DxO screen refresh insights
Had to do some photo processing today, while still playing with X. For some reason I brought up my rdesktop window on another monitor. And the DxO Optics Pro screen refresh worked! It seems that the problem is related to the resolution: normally I run it on the 2560×1440 monitor. I wonder if the problem exists with higher resolution displays locally as well. I can't test it, because the monitor has only DVI input, and dxo, the Microsoft box, has only a VGA output.
New X configuration and other surprises
Started the day off with the task of getting X running correctly on my four monitors. Tried out the xorg.conf file that I had created yesterday, and how about that! All 4 monitors came up. Not in the correct order, and not at the correct resolution, but it was a good start. In addition, the OC monitor seems to be delivering EDID information again, and it's not the same as the EDID information I downloaded from the web two months ago. Something to investigate when I get the time. Back to look at the file, and discovered that I had a number of serious errors in it, in particular referring to non-existent devices.
Network problems without end
My network problems continue. This is completely unacceptable. It's been 10 days since I reported the problems and the issue of the non-responsive cell, and I've only had one response asking me to reinstall my software. I've already sent a message expressing my annoyance, but nobody bothered to reply. Called Internode support today and spoke to Goran, who at least contacted the specialists , who are too important to talk to me directly. It seems that they did report the problem to Optus (I wonder in what form), and that Optus claims that all is running well and there is no congestion.
The curse of Wendy McClelland
While writing my diary for yesterday, discovered a disconcerting problem with the display on my new 27" monitor: What's that? It stayed in the same place on the screen while I moved the window, or when I replaced it with a browser window, but it doesn't look like dead pixels. It wasn't until I iconified the screens that I saw what was on the root window: It's part of the now-removed news item from YouTube, and it was clearly bypassing normal X conventions.
Computer reorganization: taking the plunge
I've been planning to rearrange the machines in my office for months now, at least since I converted my main machine to amd64 over six months ago. There have been many reasons for the delay, but a prime one was the dread of the amount of work and the number of things that could go wrong. But I have new hardware for the machine which will finally allow me to run four displays again on a single machinemaybe. So today I finally reorganized, the first time in the 5½ years I have lived here. To my surprise, nothing serious went wrong.
Dereel residents want the Radiation Tower
Since Wendy McClelland got interviewed on TV a week ago, a number of things have happened, notably the ABC article on the subject. But we were still unhappy that the majority of the residents didn't have their say. Then Greg Nyary, a resident whom I don't know, arranged for the same team to come to Dereel and interview the proponents. It all happened at very short notice, and it wasn't publicized, but I heard about it from two different directions. Today, a workday, at 11:00, not the ideal time to get a crowd. But get a crowd we did: there must have been somewhere between 50 and 70 people there.
gnuplot POLA violation
As a result of the network problems, I haven't looked at my network link statistics page much recently. But when I looked today, the graphs were all blank. Why? Working with gnuplot is a real pain, but I finally got round to looking at it. Date calculations are particularly painful, not helped by the fact that gnuplot timestamps are seconds since 1 January 2000, while Unix timestamps are seconds since 1 January 1970, so there's this continual offset 946684800 (30 years) in the commands. Here's part of a command file I generate for one of the graphs: set xrange [412654938+39600:412669338+39600] plot "/var/tmp/3glinkstats" using ($1 + 39600 - 946684800):($2) \ title "link status" with lines, \ "/var/tmp/3glinkstats" using ($1 + 39600 - 946684800):($3) \ title "net connectivity (0 to 5)" ...
Internode support going downhill?
My network connection is flakier than ever, so much that I've given up looking at the statistics. Internode support don't seem to be doing anything about it. I've provided them with evidence that it's due to non-responsive cells in the wireless network, but they don't seem to think that that's a problem they can report to Optus. Why? Two years ago I had very similar symptoms, though not the ability to investigate the cause, they contacted Optus and got the thing sorted out pretty quickly. And Max, the technician at that time, knew what he was talking about.
Alternative to DxO Optics Pro
Peter Jeremy asked an obvious question today: why do I bother with DxO Optics Pro given all its problems? The answers are simple: I stick with it because the alternative means learning a new product with new bugs, and making comparisons to see which is better. But then Andy Snow suggested bibble, a program that I had once thought of using, but then not followed through, and which he says can do everything, including raw data conversion. That's simple enough: Bibble doesn't exist any more. It has been bought out by Corel and is now called Corel® AfterShot" Pro . And of course there's a free demo version, so downloaded that and tried it out.
Still more DxO strangenesses
House photo day again today. DxO Optics Pro converted them in fast mode133 images in 66 minutes, 22 seconds, almost exactly 30 seconds per image. While stitching ran into trouble with the garden north image: the control point detector couldn't link all the images. Further investigation showed surprising chromatic aberration, which I traced back to DxO: it had turned off all the corrections. Why? I've seen this beforeit's one of the issues I raised with my collection of error reports last year, and which they told me in no uncertain terms was because I was running in a virtual machine. Well, surprise, surprise, it's still here.
Serial console for virtual machine
As planned, investigated setting up a serial interface for a VirtualBox virtual machine today, according to the instructions Callum Gibson had worked out: In the VM configuration, enable a serial port and select Host pipe and Create pipe . We both put the pipe in /tmp. Create a file /boot.config an the guest, with the content -Dh (dual console mode, force serial console). This is described in boot(8). Boot the guest and attach a telnet to the pipe generated in /tmp.
Password security
I'm continually ranting about the stupid rules people make me use to create passwords on web sites. Today I found a site that does a security check on passwords. No idea how accurate it is, but it confirms my expectation that these rules aren't very useful. Here some times for typical passwords (none of which, of course, I use): abc123 instantly 4711 (typical PIN) instantly 4712 2.5 µs ...
How to put a Microsoft box to sleep
Despite the strangenesses with processing times, using a dedicated Microsoft box to process my photos is working out quite well. I put the box to sleep when I'm not using it, wake it up to process photos, and put it back to sleep again afterwards. Well, I try. I've set the power button to put the box to sleep, and discovered that it won't work if I still have an rdesktop session open. But it doesn't always work when I disconnect. Today I have come up with an explanation that may be correct: it only works if the (invisible) screen saver isn't enabled.
DxO random processing times again
I've already observed that the processing times for DxO Optics Pro are variable between extremely slow and glacial. Today I had more strangenesses in the processing times. Recently the times have been in the order of about 25 seconds per image, but today I converted 4 images, and it took 3 minutes, 32 seconds, or 53 seconds per image. Then I converted another two, which took 56 seconds28 seconds per image. Stupidly, I deleted them, and I had to reprocess them. Not easy: DxO doesn't want to do that unless I change some conversion parameters. So did that, then changed back to the original values, and converted them again.
Mail delivery strangenesses
Early this morning, Yvonne told me that she hadn't received any non-local mail since last night. On further investigation, neither had I. Went looking around and discovered that my fetchmail config sent the incoming messages to dereel, which then delivered to /eureka. For some reason, it seemed, this was failing, possibly due to NFS lock issues. It was relatively trivial to change the .fetchmailrc to point to eureka, so did that, and pointed Yvonne at her ~/Mail/backup file, where I save everything that comes in, just to protect against procmail issues. But that didn't work. The files landed in ~/Mail/backup, but not in /var/mail.
Internode: please reinstall your software
So a few days ago I sent traces of my UMTS network connectiona to Internode support showing that specific cells were associating but not accepting data. Today I got mail back. Here some excerpts, reformatted for legibility: Hi Gary, I can see in the ticket you mentioned you have done near all trouble-shooting, but the evidence we need are as follows. -download tests that show a drop in download speed (screencaps of this) - you can download any of the tests from www.internode.on.net/downloadtest -screencaps showing that the dongle works at another location.
Revirtualizing dereel
Spent some time carefully analyzing yesterday's disaster with virtualizing dereel.lemis.com. There were two main issues: the symbolic links to files mounted from dereel, and the status of the virtual machine if X crashes. After much investigation, discovered that there weren't too many executables run from dereel, but that the libraries were a different matter. On the other hand, at least for the time being, I need to run dereel anyway. I'm running a newer version of PHP on eureka, and it's too leet to run some of my older web pages, so I run a second web server on dereel to handle them.
Migrating dereel to VM
Today got round to the next stage of my computer restructure: test whether I could really drive my HDMI monitor via the HDMI output. I did that on dereel.lemis.com to avoid disruption to eureka.lemis.com, my main machine. After a bit of messing with the BIOS, the result: yes, I can. That's more than I can say for the DVI connection: That's not serious, beyond the fact that I can't test in that housing. But maybe I should move the motherboard to something more conventional.
Hacking ls, the discussion
My article about adding an option to ls a few months back aroused some interest, and Lim Cheng Soon asked for permission to publish it in Hacker Monthly, where he changed the title to Hacking ls -l . In the process discovered a very lively discussion about the article, all apparently dated the day I wrote it and long before the publication in Hacker News. Some are worth addressing: Some addressed the usefulness of adding the -, option in the first place.
Upgrading graphics cards
So before returning this incorrectly described graphics card to Mwave, I wanted to see whether I could use it to drive three monitors, including the HDMI connection. Tried to put it into dxo, the Microsoft box. No go: it's too wide, so I'll have to try it in dereel. But before I do that it makes sense to migrate what's left of dereel (32 bit FreeBSD 8.1) to a VirtualBox machine. And that required setting up disks, which took a while. Mañana.
DxO: Random processing times?
Lately my DxO Optics Pro processing times have been particularly good, at least in comparison to what they have beencloser to 25 seconds per image than the previous 45 seconds. Why? I have no idea. I saw this under VirtualBox as well, but there I thought that maybe it had something to do with VirtualBox. I'm beginning to think that it's riddled with heisenbugs. Certainly the screen refresh code is very dubious. Still, as long as it lasts, it's an advantage.
Video card: time to tidy up
The new video card raises an issue that has been looming for some time: I should both tidy up and rearrange my office. I haven't really changed anything in over 5 years, and it shows: The second photo shows the mess behind the monitors, where I can't get at it very well, looking down from above. The open chassis on the left is boskoop, my Apple, and on the right is the back of eureka.
New video card
It's been several months since I got my new monitor. And for that time I've had to split my X configuration across two machines, because the display cards in eureka can't handle all the monitors. I've been planning to replace one of the cards for some time now, but research is important, especially since the documentation of these cards is so terrible. I had more or less decided on an nVidia GeForce GT 640 as a good compromise between cost and number of monitors supported. But some of the cards don't have enough outputs. So last weekend I did some research and found a number of cards with the chipset.
Updating Microsoft, continued
Today was the start of a new billing month for my Internet traffic, so I was able to continue with my software downloads and updates. In the end I downloaded nearly 1.25 GB of data, including further updates for dxo, my Microsoft Windows box. When I postponed 10 days ago, there were three updates outstanding, none of them new. Today it changed its mind: I needed to download Service Pack 2, some 350 MB (or was that 45? It didn't seem to be sure). So it downloaded that, and then it told me that I needed to install another 66 important updates.
Lame mouse again
Into the office this morning to find my mouse cursor moving slowly and unevenly. Further investigation seemed to show that it was related to where I placed the mouse on the (active) mouse pad. It looks as if it is dying. After a bit of searching found another one with side buttons (from teevee) and used that for the day. But in the evening the thing was working normally again. What's wrong here? Should I care? A mouse costs nothing, but where do you find one with which you can simulate the middle button? Since people replaced the middle button with a scroll wheel, I've been remapping the side button as Button 2.
Google false positives
Spent a lot of time today trying to open the head of my Mecablitz, without success. The information I got yesterday wasn't really sufficient, and I went out looking for other information. Google is your friend, right? Well, up to a point. It seems that in the last few years the quality of the results has dropped. What would I like to find? Mecablitz 58 AF-1 service manual. But of the first 10 results I found there, only 3 even included the word service , and that out of context with manual . Why did I get the other 7? OK, the double quotes still work, so I looked for Mecablitz 58 AF-1 "service manual".
Network flakiness: new insights
My network connection is bad again. I get the feeling it happens when it's warm. Today it was not timing out, but I was getting impossibly bad connection quality. Went through the whole rigmarole of restarting the ppp process, popping the modem, even rebooting the machine. No help. Then it occurred to me to compare the throughput with the continual cell hops, so I ran a ping every 5 seconds. Bingo! 64 bytes from 203.10.76.45: icmp_seq=0 ttl=55 time=88.779 ms ... 64 bytes from 203.10.76.45: icmp_seq=6 ttl=55 time=130.933 ms Jan 15 17:53:59 nerd-gw fstats: Cell lost: 81e3 8fc48e8 (4) Jan 15 17:53:59 nerd-gw fstats: Cell found: -> 81e3 8fc8e4a Jan 15 17:54:57 nerd-gw fstats: Cell change: 81e3 8fc8e4a (4) -> 81e3 8fc48e8 64 bytes from 203.10.76.45: icmp_seq=10 ttl=55 time=59517.631 ms 64 bytes from 203.10.76.45: icmp_seq=11 ttl=55 time=54619.341 ms 64 bytes from 203.10.76.45: icmp_seq=12 ttl=55 time=49707.053 ms 64 bytes from 203.10.76.45: icmp_seq=13 ...
Your account has been disabled
Logged into the ANZ web banking application todayor I tried to: This Customer Registration Number has been disabled . Why that? I have a link to on a private page, but of course they don't allow you to save passwords, so it's possible I made a paste-o. Tried again on another browser, and sure enough, it worked. But why did I get the message? One thing's clear: it's imprecise. This CRN. Why doesn't the page repeat the number? That way it would be clear if you've just made a mistake in the number.
DSE web site: worse than ever
Another bad bushfire danger day today, and spent some time monitoring the DSE web site. It works better than the corresponding CFA site, but it's still terminally broken. To access any real information, you need to click on a link, which launches a Javascript function such as loadSummaryPageFromParent(): And this function appears to be broken, or at least unreliable. It's not a browser-specific problem, though I wouldn't put it past them to write stuff that only displays on Internet Explorer . But I tried it with Internet Explorer , and it didn't work there either.
More network disconnect problems
I've had several network disconnects lately, more than usual. Are they due to the hot weather? Certainly my signal strength seems less than usual, and dropping back to GPRS must be some kind of emergency action. I have adapted the /usr/ports/net/e169-stats/ port to log various events, so today I spent some time extending it to report RSSI before and after a cell switch, and also to report low RSSI (< 3). Bingo! Jan 11 16:50:02 nerd-gw fstats: Cell change: 81e3 8fc48e8 (7) -> 81e3 8fc8e66 Jan 11 16:50:05 nerd-gw fstats: Cell change: 81e3 8fc8e66 (2) -> 81e3 8fc48e8 Jan 11 16:50:06 nerd-gw fstats: Low RSSI: 2 Jan 11 16:52:27 nerd-gw fstats: Cell lost: 81e3 8fc48e8 (3) Jan 11 16:52:27 nerd-gw fstats: Cell found: -> 8fc48e8 6bbd13 Jan 11 16:52:30 nerd-gw fstats: RSSI: 6 Jan 11 16:52:40 nerd-gw fstats: Cell change: 81e3 8fc48e8 (3) -> 81e3 8fc8e66 Jan 11 16:52:48 nerd-gw ...
DxO on Windows 8
So my experiments with running DxO Optics Pro in various configurations have shown that there's not much difference beyond what has proved to be DxO's complete inability to display the Customize window on a remote desktop. It's still glacially slow. But that's a 32 bit system, and they claim it's faster on 64 bits (why?) . I still have a few days before the Windows 8 preview expires, so installed that on a disk and tried it out. It came up with a 640×480 display resolution, and I wasn't able to set a 16:10 aspect ratio, so ended up running at 1600×1200.
Microsoft update hell
I suppose I'm in a pretty unique position, being a veteran of the computer industry but having almost no understanding of Microsoft. In the last few days, that has changed, of course, and now I'm learning things that even beginners take for granted. Today spent some time bringing my new machine up to date. First I had to wake it from sleep , which I thought was suspend to RAM, but based on the time and disk activity it took to come back, it seems to have been at least partial suspend to disk. But the run light stayed on and blinked the whole time, which wouldn't have been necessary for that.
DxO processing speed: further investigations
As planned, continued my experiments processing photos with DxO Optics Pro . There were a number of issues that might affect the processing speed. Clearly DxO is very inefficient in a number of areas, and the display in use (local or remote) and the file system in use (local or remote) were the most obvious ones. Yesterday I had tried with both remote, and today I tried the other combinations. Here the results: File system Display Time remote remote ...
Completing the Microsoft install
In principle everything works on my new Microsoft box, which in a break with tradition I have called dxo.lemis.com (previous machine names were decidedly unflattering). In practice, though, I still have this issue with the display. I had these instructions to go by. They asked for safe mode, presumably because you couldn't see things otherwise. I expect they should work in normal mode too if you have a display. I had a display, but it was via rdesktop, and it only showed me details of the simulated display. So I had to reboot after all. What happened was rather unexpected: the machine came up with a GRUB boot menufor Windows 7 only!
First DxO run on new machine
So, the big question: how fast is the new machine? I've already established three problem areas with DxO Optics Pro : running under a virtual machine, running with SMB shares, and running on a non-physical display. Time to time each of them. Started a long conversion run using the photos I took last Saturday, all 188 of them, with rdesktop and the photos on an SMB-mounted file system. Observing the conversion showed a number of things: The extreme file system behaviour I saw a couple of days ago is not typical.
New Microsoft box
My new Microsoft box arrived today, the very first machine I have ever bought to run Microsoft Windows . Nice looking little Lenovo ThinkCentre , much smaller than I had expected, but showing signs of less-than-careful treatment in the deep scratches on the lid and the faint smell of tobacco from inside. Setting up Microsoft boxen has always been a pain, but today just about everything Just Worked. The machine comes apart nicely without tools: took the disk out to back it up, then added another 2 GB of memory I have lying around. I could put in even more, but now it has 4 GB, and the 32 bit system can't handle more than that.
New extension cards
I established some time ago that the new Ethernet card I bought for dereel needed to have the on-board (and defunct) chipset disabled before it would work. And then I discovered that I couldn't use the motherboard for cvr2 because of component placement. But I forgot to leave the Ethernet board in dereel. In the meantime I have also received a USB 3.0 adapter, so put them both in dereel to see what would happen. Not a success. The Ethernet board still doesn't work under FreeBSD.
Free Adobe Photoshop
I've heard from many different places that Adobe has released Photoshop CS2 for free. Just in time to try it with my new Microsoft box. Followed the link, but for some reason I couldn't access it. Then I found a statement from an Adobe employee: On behalf of Adobe Systems Incorporated ... You have heard wrong! Adobe is absolutely not providing free copies of CS2! What is true is that Adobe is terminating the activation servers for CS2 and that for existing licensed users of CS2 who need to reinstall their software, copies of CS2 that don't require activation but do require valid serial numbers are available.
Public Records Office Victoria wiki
One of the mailing lists that I am on receives regular informative mail messages from the Public Records Office Victoria. They continually release sensitive documents whose protection has expired, sometimes after as long as 99 years. My family has been in Victoria for 120 years, so I thought it might be interesting to take a look. To my surprise, they're running a wiki. It looked as if I had to sign up to have any access (misassumption on my part), so I tried that: Bloody Captchas!
More build machine issues
Into the office this morning to find my world and kernel build complete, so shut down, restarted the crashed version of the VM, installed and booted the new kernel, and tried to install the new world. No go: sys/conf/newvers.sh: dirname: not found I've seen that a couple of times before, always related to this kind of not-quite-normal installation. The last time I did a little research, which suggested that it only got run if sys/param.h was newer than osreldate.h.
Investigating DxO performance
My new Microsoft machine should be here shortly, so spent a bit of time investigating why DxO Optics Pro runs so slowly under VirtualBox, discussing with others on IRC. I've recently been noting the processing time estimates that DxO makes, and comparing them with actual elapsed time: Camera Estimate Actual Ratio Canon 5:33 ...
Virtual Machine pain
Continued with my installation of a reference new machine under VirtualBox. It kept hanging, and after a while I got panics related to disk space allocation. What went wrong there? I see I'm now using journaled soft updates. Is there some issue there where the file system is left in a broken state after recovery? Went back to an earlier snapshotmuch earlier, as it turned out: it didn't have any ports installed. That ran, so I decided to bring userland and kernel up to date, after whichhopefullyI'll be able to reinstall them on the newer snapshot and continue from there.
Catastrophic TV reception
In mid-afternoon I record Al Jazeera news and then watch it. Today there was a problem: the normal recording is 2.1 GB. Today I got 48 MB. And of course there was no content. Previously I have had trouble on ABC, but this was SBS, normally not a problem. It also wasn't a problem of SBS getting as bad as ABC: ABC was so bad that I had no reception whatever. Did some further investigation and discovered that I could barely receive anything at all. Rebooted the machine, which of course didn't help, but in the process discovered that the tuners were running very hot.
Network problems recur
It's been nearly a week since my last network interruption, a relatively long time for my recent experience. And I didn't get disconnected today eitherI just fell back to GPRS and stayed there. Discovered that I can force a reconnect without stopping the PPP connection by disconnecting the antenna, and sure enough, it returned to UMTS modefor a few seconds: Jan 7 14:07:16 nerd-gw fstats: +CGREG 1 81E3 142 Disconnect antenna, reconnect Jan 7 14:31:18 nerd-gw fstats: +CGREG 1 81E3 8FC48E8 Jan 7 14:31:31 nerd-gw fstats: +CGREG 2 Jan 7 14:31:33 nerd-gw fstats: +CGREG 2 Jan 7 14:31:33 nerd-gw fstats: +CGREG 1 F40 142 Jan 7 14:32:19 nerd-gw fstats: +CGREG 2 Jan 7 14:32:25 nerd-gw fstats: +CGREG 1 F40 142 By observation, the 3-digit IDs at the end of those reports are for GPRS cells, while ...
eBay conflict resolution
Last month I bought some horse accessories for Yvonne on eBay. They came from the USA, and the shipping cost an arm and a leg: $46.00. But that's (pretty much) what USPS Priority Mail International costs, so grudgingly I coughed up. The packet took a while to arrive. When it did, the reason was obvious: it was sent with First Class Mail, which only costs half the cost. OK, no worries. Contacted the seller and asked for a refund of the difference. But he (she?) came up with some cock-and-bull story about having to pay people to package the goods and take them to the post office, 20 miles away.
More work on system upgrades
Once again I've been dragging my heels on my system upgrade method. In principle amd64-stable now contains all the ports I asked for and a relatively recent version of FreeBSD 9-STABLE, but I still need to customize it, and then I'll be in a position for the first upgrade. Spent some time customizing /etc/group and /etc/master.passwd; the latter contains a lot of history, user IDs and passwords from people who must at at least one time in the last 20 years have accessed the machine. Should I remove them? It's somewhat nostalgic to have the IDs there, and they won't really do much harm.
A computer for Microsoft
I had intended to change over dereel (test computer) and cvr2 (TV receiver) and then using the ex-cvr2 to run Microsoft for DxO Optics Pro . That idea failed for no better reason than that the tuners wouldn't both fit in the motherboard. But then it occurred to me: this would require me to buy a new version of Microsoft ( Windows 7 or 8people recommend 7 because of the draconian licenses of 8) would cost me about $100. For that price I can buy a used computer with Microsoft on itcan't I? Did some enquiries and found that yes, I can. The cheapest machines on the market seem to come with Intel Core 2, 2 GB RAM and Windows Vista , and they start round $80.
Did you use your credit card?
Renewed the registration for lemis.com today, and paid by credit card. Within minutes I had a phone call: I'm Cindy from ANZ. Did you use your credit card to pay Gandi a while ago? . Should I answer? She didn't ask for any confidential details, and the fact that she knew at all suggested that she must have been well informed. But it's this kind of thing that lowers people's security thresholds. The banks should really have a way of authenticating themselves beyond knowledge of transactions (after all, somebody at Gandi could have done it too). But I was curious: why did she want to know?
More network problems
Another drop-back to GPRS mode on my network connection today: Dec 31 14:12:35 nerd-gw fstats: +CGREG 1 81E3 8FC8E66 Dec 31 14:12:41 nerd-gw fstats: +CGREG 1 81E3 142 That 3-character code in the last column appears to be an indication that the cell only does GPRS. The result is immediate: 64 bytes from 203.10.76.45: icmp_seq=74 ttl=54 time=88170.030 ms 64 bytes from 203.10.76.45: icmp_seq=75 ttl=54 time=87189.031 ms 64 bytes from 203.10.76.45: icmp_seq=76 ttl=54 time=86198.000 ms Tried restarting the ppp process, with only limited success: it came back in GPRS mode again, but soon changed to UTMS: Dec 31 14:17:46 nerd-gw fstats: +CGREG 1 F40 8FC48E8 Dec 31 14:17:52 nerd-gw fstats: +CGREG 2 ...
The new cvr2
It's been over a week since I got the new Ethernet card, a prerequisite to swapping the bodies of dereel (test machine) and cvr2 (TV recorder). The latter machine is much faster, just what I need to install Microsoft on and run DxO Optics Pro at a bearable speed. The problem is that the Ethernet chip on the dereel motherboard was damaged thanks to a Powercor power surge. Thus the new Ethernet card. Problem: it didn't work in the motherboard for which it was intended. It worked fine in cvr2, but that has a functional interface on the motherboard. Was it the difference between FreeBSD (dereel) and Linux (cvr2)?
Joining MPEG clips
Yesterday I took a couple of not-very-good video clips of Yvonne and Chris riding horses. Yvonne wanted to join them together, something that I've tried before with only limited success. Finally got round to writing a minimal script to do the joining, in the process determining that yes, indeed, there's some problem with the avidemux2 audio. So mencoder it is: joinmpeg () { RESULT=$1 TMP=/tmp/clip$$ shift cat $* > $TMP mencoder -forceidx -oac copy -ovc copy $TMP -o $RESULT rm $TMP }
Package installation complete?
Continued installing packages on my FreeBSD reference virtual machine today. With a couple of minor issues, it went very well, much faster than compiling ports. That's not only because I didn't need to compile: I also didn't need to answer configuration questions, nor address strangenesses in the build. And it used the best part of 2 GB of traffic. About the only hold-up was that postfix wanted me to answer a question about the default mail configuration. Things aren't over yet. A number of these packages printed out information, some possibly important, that scrolled off the top of the screen. A good thing that I've saved a transcript of the installation.
Control point detector or random number generator?
After my experience with Subhash's panoramas a couple of weeks ago, I was interested to see this thread in the Hugin mailing lists. Another case where somebody had extreme difficulties assembling a panorama. He made his images available, so I had a try. Once again, It Works For Me: But another person responded, also with an image: He had had more difficulties, but had managed to get past them. But his image is different. Yes, it's not cropped, but if it were, parts would be missing that are present on my image.
FreeBSD upgrade procedure, next attempt
After accepting the failure of my previous ways of trying to keep up to date with FreeBSD, continued today with the virtual machine approach. I had a base machine with no ports. How should I install them? There's this thing called PKGNG ( Package New Generation ) which should enable me just to download binary packages, and thus eliminate this eternal configuration that the Ports Collection requires. Problem: As a result of a recent security incident, no official packages are available. So for the time being, at any rate, I have to download binary packages the old way, with pkg_add -r. I already had most of the infrastructure for that in place, but discovered I had never put it to the test.
Copyright puzzles
I don't use the various file-sharing services on the Internet. I disagree strongly with the copyright holders' heavy-handed protection of their rights, but currently they have the law on their side, and I don't intend to break the law. But more and more it's becoming clear to me that the whole business is lopsided. I can, for example, buy a DVD or a CD with multimedia content. I own the medium, but not the content. Recent developments, of course, get rid of the medium, so I don't own anything. Either way, I am not allowed to give this content to anybody else, and that's what the file-sharing services do.
Sending the Christmas Letter
After writing our Christmas letter, the next thing was to send it, of course. The idea was to post it as status on facebook and also send it as email to a list of people we know. Yvonne sent me a list of her contacts, and then I added my own from my ~/.mail_aliases file. How old that is! There are people in it whom I haven't communicated with for 20 years, and sadly I know of at least 7 who are dead. The death of Dennis Ritchie is well known, of course, and at my age you'd expect people to gradually start dying off.
More weather station pain
It's been very hot latelytoday we had a top temperature of 41.3°, unusual for so early in the summer. But that's not what my weather software showed: in fact, it showed nothing. Further investigation showed that the external transmitter wasn't transmitting the humidity, and that one of the few functions I hadn't written myself, dewpoint(), wasn't handling 0 humidity correctly, returning NaN. So for the first time in well over a year I had to modify the software. It's not done: it seems that the station is also reporting random incorrect temperatures, over 10° from what they should be.
More panorama processing
Continued with my TIFF-based panorama processing today. Some of the numbers are amazing: === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/8) ~/Photos/20121222 266 -> du -scm . ../Hugin-build-eureka/ 41593 . 4216 ../Hugin-build-eureka/ 45808 total PID USERNAME THR PRI NICE SIZE RES STATE C TIME WCPU COMMAND 47437 grog 1 108 5 10971M 4488M CPU1 0 6:21 100.00% enblend 23871 grog 1 28 5 1063M 479M select 2 57:56 1.37% hugin That du output is in megabytes: the project used over 45 GB of disk, most of it in deletable TIFF files.
More TIFF processing
Last week my experiments with TIFF images in the intermediate processing of panoramas weren't overly encouraging, but I had this recollection of surprising sharpness in the details while processing the garden centre panorama. So today I decided to try it again. I thought that last week I had cleaned up most of the strangenesses in processing TIFFs, but today I found many more. The really frustrating one seems to be that ImageMagick's convert doesn't copy EXIF data for TIFFs. I can copy it myself, but it takes about 30 seconds per image, at least partially because exiftool copies the entire image, all 75 MB of it.
multimedia, technology
While going through TV programmes on cvr2 today, discovered I didn't have any programme data for PRIME7. That must have happened the last time I ran the channel configuration through Shepherd. Irritating, but no big deal. So I re-ran configuration, and then ran mythfilldatabase to get the data. Not quite what I expected: 2012-12-21 17:09:47.283 XMLTV config file is: /home/mythtv/.mythtv/.xmltv 2012-12-21 17:09:58.249 FAILED: xmltv returned error code 256. 2012-12-21 17:09:58.249 Error in 1:1: unexpected end of file 2012-12-21 17:09:58.249 Updating icons for sourceid: 1 2012-12-21 17:09:58.249 New DB connection, total: 4 2012-12-21 17:09:58.250 Connected to database 'mythconverg' at host: localhost 2012-12-21 17:09:58.250 No programs found in data.
New Ethernet card
Finally received the Ethernet card that I had bought on eBay nearly a month ago. Why Ethernet card? Thanks to Powercor, one of my motherboards (currently running dereel) lost its USB and Ethernet ports, and I'm running it with an ancient 3com 3C509 PCI card. But it makes sense to use it as a replacement for cvr2, the video recorder box, which has a much more powerful processor which I could use to run DxO Optics Pro natively, in the hope that it would then be considerably faster than in a VM. I don't need USB for cvr2, but I do need Ethernet and 2 PCI slots for the tuners.
GPS navigator strangeness
While in town, dropped in at Gays, coming from the direction of the Botanical Gardens. My GPS navigator went crazy. The route is pretty much straight down Gillies St, but it wanted me to turn left and head through Victoria Park. That was with the profile shortest route , which it clearly wasn't, so waiting at the lights crossing Sturt St I tried fast , and it told me to turn right, which is also clearly wrong. Carried on straight ahead and got there, and it still wanted me drive about 3 km in a circle and then come back to where I was.
Yet Another Upgrade Strategy
It's been over 10 years since I first tried to find a simplified way of staying up to date with FreeBSD. I still haven't succeeded. It's becoming an issue again: teevee is running relatively well, but the installation is about 18 months old, and it's running firefox 6.0. Not that much of a problem, but for reasons I don't understand it now pops up an additional Please upgrade tab every time I open a new tab. I can't upgrade from their site, because they don't have versions for FreeBSD, and I can't upgrade to the latest and greatest because I'd get caught in a dependency nightmare.
Open calendar project?
Mail from Julian Stacey, whom I know from my visits in München nearly 20 years ago. Though he's been living there for ever, and is married to a German, he remains somewhat British, and it seems that he's been maintaining a file /usr/share/calendar/calendar.british, which should be part of the FreeBSD calendar program that I'm currently looking at, but somehow it doesn't exist (/usr/share/calendar/calendar.australia, for example, does exist). The message was in reply to a message from Peter Tynan, who has been doing something similar for Debian Linux. But his file didn't look very Linux-like: /* * United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland * compiled by Peter R Tynan * * $FreeBSD$ */ I queried that, but it seems that Linux doesn't have its own calendar program.
Emacs highlighting: can of worms
So now I have this nice white space highlighting running with Emacs, and it's a great improvement. Only one problem: by default trailing white space is highlighted in red, which on the one hand is somewhat irritating, but on the other hand a real problem: a single space at the end of the line looks just like a cursor, and I kept trying to input data there. Time to change the colour. But how do you do that? GNU Emacs has changed a lot since I first installed revision 18.39 in late 1989, and it looks like there is a whole new infrastructure around the display.
Hardware failures: picking up the pieces
Spent quite some time attending to yesterday's hardware failures. In the case of the GPS navigator, there's an alternative to assuming the battery is dead: what if it didn't get charged? The indoor charger is a generic USB device, but the one I used wasn't the one it came with, and it looked a little anaemic. So I tried the correct one andit worked! One problem solved, one to go. Into town to buy a new disk. After some consideration, it made sense to buy a 2 TB external drive with USB 3.0 connection and use it for photo backups. It's becoming clear that eSATA is no longer a viable option.
Photo processing progress
Into the office this morning to continue with my photo processing. The remainder of the photo processing with DxO Optics Pro hat taken 6 hours, 12 minutes, and just copying the TIFFs and reinstating the EXIF data took 20 minutes. Processing with TIFF is really slow. I should do some comparisons to see whether it's worth it. This time I gave up and tried it with JPEG instead. Eventually got all but one panorama processed, the garden centre one, which suffered because of the light wind. Interestingly, the control point detection was even worse with JPEG than with TIFF, but at least one of the control points in the TIFF was completely wrong, half an image apart.
Multiple failures
As if the photo processing wasn't frustrating enough, a couple of other things ganged up to annoy me. After this morning's excursion, put the GPS navigator on to charge, and came back a little later to see the charge indicator showing purplenormally it's red (for charging) or blue (for charged). And the thing didn't work. More playing around brought a bright, uneven screen, which then died. Resetting helped enough to get the thing to start booting before crashing. And when I reconnected the charger, it didn't charge. All suggests a dead battery, which isn't user-replaceable. I've only had the thing 18 monthslooks like I need a new one.
Still more panorama experiments
The weather this morning was not good enough for my house photos, and I had planned to put them off until tomorrow, but by mid-afternoon things had picked up, and I managed to get them done. This time I had decided to create TIFF images, after a suggestion from Subhash. Not easy: I needed to modify most of my scripts, and there were all sorts of problems. DxO Optics Pro creates TIFF files which are dubious to say the least. Here's what ImageMagick's ambiguously named convert has to say: 20121215: Unknown field with tag 50341 (0xc4a5) encountered.
Emacs indentation progress
Continued playing around with my Emacs indentation macros today, and finally got not just what I wanted, but more. Now I can finally place the braces where I want them, indented with the block which they delimit: if (mytime.tm_year < 0) /* not a valid year, */ { basetm = localtime (&base); /* get base in struct tm format */ mytime.tm_year = basetm->tm_year; /* use this year */ hms = argv [*arg]; /* and reinterpret this value as hms */ } else hms ...
Focus stacking: how?
Lots of new flowers in the garden, but the weather's been pretty moist, so I took photos from the protection of the verandah. That means telephoto lenses, and that means focus issues. So I took two photos from the same place with different focus, intending to merge them to show both foreground and background in focus: The problem is that the images are of different size .
Emacs C indentation
I've been using versions of Emacs for ever, about half the history of digital computers. It's wired into my fingers. But Emacs hasn't stayed the same. One of the very first things I wrote for MINCE ( MINCE Is Not Complete Emacs ), in about 1980, was a set of functions for indenting C sources. When I got GNU Emacs, I hacked the indentation macros to match. And gradually the indentation functionality in the Emacs distribution increased, to the point that it became desirable to change to it. But how? I have my own style of indentation that nobody else seems to use, and my attempts to adapt to it ultimately came to nothing.
More Hugin experiments
I've been doing more thinking about the control point mismatches that have been plaguing Subhash (mainly) and me this last week or so. One unexamined clue was the problems I had in August, where the control point detectors discovered control points in exactly the same location on each image. Could this be a problem with the sensor, maybe dirt or flawed pixels? And conversion to JPEG would be enough to hide them, but TIFFs are too accurate a representation? Tried multiple conversions of August's images, using both CPfind and panomatic. Nothing. I couldn't reproduce it. OK, that's enough for the moment.
More hugin stitching issues
Subhash sent me his photos to look at overnight, along with a project file. The photos stitched perfectly! The project file, on the other hand, was a complete disaster. He described what he had done, and it all made sense. So what's the problem? He keeps all his images in DNG format, and converts them to TIFF before processing. I don't have the same tools as he does: I extract the raw image from the DNG using the Adobe tool and then process it with DxO Optics Pro . But I've seen problems with TIFF images and Hugin before. Could it be something similar?
Subhash's panorama problems, continued
Subhash is still having problems with Hugin, so I got him to send me his latest batch. He has asked me not to show them, but there's not much to see: It Worked For Me. Why not for him? More investigation needed.
More calendar pain
Spent most of the day looking at calendar(1). What I had expected to be a simple bug fix goes much further; partially code is missing, in many cases it's (almost) duplicated, and I'm left wondering whether to apply a band-aid or rewrite the parser. But then, there's always a tendency to reinvent the wheel. More thought needed.
Virtual hardware problems
I do my test building in a virtual machine, and today it hung. The console messages were unnerving: Dec 10 17:31:12 swamp: kernel: (ada0:ata0:0:0:0): WRITE_DMA. ACB: ca 00 ff bb 74 40 00 00 00 00 00 00 Dec 10 17:31:12 swamp: kernel: (ada0:ata0:0:0:0): CAM status: Command timeout Dec 10 17:31:12 swamp: kernel: (ada0:ata0:0:0:0): Retrying command Dec 10 17:31:12 swamp: kernel: g_vfs_done():ada0s1a[WRITE(offset=3917053952, length=65536)]error = 6 Dec 10 17:31:12 swamp: kernel: (ada0:ata0:0:0:/: got error 6 while accessing filesystem Dec 10 17:31:12 swamp: kernel: 0): lost device Dec 10 17:31:12 swamp: kernel: /: got error 6 while accessing filesystem Dec 10 17:31:12 swamp: kernel: (pass0:/: got error 6 while accessing filesystem Dec 10 17:31:12 swamp: kernel: ata0:0:0:/: got error 6 while accessing filesystem Dec 10 17:31:12 swamp: kernel: 0): passdevgonecb: devfs entry is gone Dec 10 17:31:12 swamp: kernel: g_vfs_done():ada0s1a[WRITE(offset=3917250560, length=16384)]error = 6 ...
More calendar fun
For various reasons, I've had more to do with the calendar(1) program than I would have expected, notably when Chris Yeardley tidied it up for a university project. And then at the end of last month I discovered this: 25 Nov* First Sunday of Advent (4th Sunday before Christmas) That's nonsense, of course. The earliest date for the first Sunday in Advent is 27 November. So what did it say for the real first Sunday in Advent, 2 December?
Why I don't like Facebook
Everybody uses Facebook today, even most of the people I know. And I spend a lot of time talking in IRC, which is arguably something very similar, and I also keep this diary. But try as I might, I can't get to like Facebook. Why? There are a number of reasons: The format is neither like a conversation (IRC) nor like letter-writing (email). It falls somewhere in between. Arguably there's nothing wrong with that, but I can't find a use for it.
Friends computers, more pain
While in town, dropped in to the Friends of the Ballarat Botanical Gardens with intent to attach an Ethernet cable for the third computer and a USB cable extension for Lorraine Powell, who hates fiddling round behind the computer. It turned out that the third computer already had a cableit looks like I had done it myself and forgotten. And I couldn't attach the USB cable because the computer only had two sockets at the back, and they were both in use. It's a funny looking little metal cube with strange controls on the frontI'm continually looking for the power buttonso I investigated and discovered a couple of secret flaps, one hiding a DVD drive, and the other a set of connectors, including two USB sockets!
Internode: 3 ADSL dropouts per day are normal
I've put in a ticket with Internode support about the continued poor quality of service I've had with my wireless Internet connection, which continues. I made the mistake of supplying not only the obvious information, like the remote termination requests, but also supporting information like the frequent cell hopping. So I get a reply saying that cell hopping is normal, and ignoring the real problem. From my reply to them: You also haven't addressed this part of the ticket: Apart from this, I continually receive remote termination requests: Nov 29 09:55:42 nerd-gw ppp[63956]: tun0: LCP: deflink: RecvTerminateReq(7) state = Opened Nov 29 09:55:42 nerd-gw ppp[63956]: tun0: LCP: deflink: LayerDown Nov 29 09:55:42 nerd-gw ppp[63956]: tun0: LCP: deflink: SendTerminateAck(7) state = Opened Nov 29 09:55:42 nerd-gw ppp[63956]: tun0: LCP: deflink: State change Opened ...
More X hangs!
While working on the panoramas, ran into an old enemy: the X hang with the cursor jumping between the screens. Not once, but twice in quick succession. I suppose I should report the bug, but they want me to log in, and I'm not sure I want to share my account details with them.
Fisheyes and stitching suboptimal panoramas
My investigation of fisheye lenses is on hold for the moment. The lens I was looking at fetched a record $532, far more than I had thought it was worth. But the discussion goes on, and on the Hugin discussion Erik Krause pointed me at this description of the projection of the Samyang lens. Much more to learn. On the German list a side topic sprang up: Subhash wanted a tutorial on using Hugin, and then ran into trouble with a series of photos not originally intended as a panorama and thus not taken with a panorama bracket. And he couldn't get them to stitch.
Captchamania
I hate Captchas! And they seem to be getting more and more prevalent. A couple of days ago I received a mail message from somebody@inbox.com and replied from an address different from the one he sent the message to. Bang! A reply with subject My spam filter requires verification of your email address . Not a problem; I suppose it really does help reduce spam. Follow the link, enter the detailsand fill out a particularly emetic Captcha! No, I won't do it. Let him do it if he wants mail from me. Then today I had the problem again. Yvonne is attending a training session in Rokeby with Robyn Hood next week.
eBooks: The pain
I've had to deal with eBooks before, and I wasn't very impressed. At the time the issues were more with the device than the medium. But now that Apple has started bringing out high-resolution displays, I don't suppose it'll be long before eBook readers do the same, and that would fix one of my biggest gripes. Today, however, I got an eBook from the State Library of Victoria. How do I display it? The library gave me three possibilities: view online for 10 minutes, extend for one day (without saying whether this extension would cost anything), or download the eBook and view offline for a week.
Computer education for the next generation
Next year Jashank Jeremy will finish school with the the Higher School Certificate or HSC. Today he complained about the quality of his textbooks, unfairly, I thought: Today most mobile phones include digital cameras, internet connectivity using both local 802.11 access points and 3G networks, Bluetooth and also GPS receivers. All these connectivity and other hardware features have resulted in an ever increasing number of innovative Apps coming onto the market. As he said, It's so badly structured, the grammar and spelling is typically terrible, all sorts of things are mentioned and never explained... .
dirname: not found
Mail from David Noel today, referring to a problem I had 1½ years ago: creating osreldate.h from newvers.sh /src/FreeBSD/svn/head/include/../sys/conf/newvers.sh: dirname: not found He asked how I solved it. I have no idea. I suspected it might be something to do with environment variables, but despite the verbosity of this diary, I managed to leave out the important part. The best I can find is that newvers.sh shouldn't be run at this point, which suggests some discrepancy in timestamps.
Gizmodo spam?
Strange message in the mail this morning: Date: Tue, 20 Nov 2012 18:31:39 +0000 From: "FDIC Alert" <barberriesn12@pacunion.com> To: gizmodo@lemis.com Subject: You reqired to install a new security version Message-ID: <50ABCC64.4020701@cbthomebank.com> Your Corporated and Business Online Banking Federal DepositInsurance Corporation Your ACH operations have been provisionally stopped in order to ensure your security, due to the expiration of your security version. We advice you to download ...
DxO: your fault after all!
Over a week ago I finally got DxO support to understand a problem report I had sent in, to stop claiming that it was all my fault, and admit that they had a bug that would be fixed sometime . It was the culmination of over two months of banging my head against a brick wall, including resubmitting the ticket twice, and it felt so good when it stopped. And then a couple of days ago I got a message asking if I was running DxO Optics Pro in a virtual machine. I was quite impressed that they had gone to the trouble to analyse the logs, which were months old.
Network access for the Friends
Last week I discovered that the Friends of the Ballarat Botanical Gardens are paying an arm and a leg for telephone and Internet access. They've somehow become lumbered with a telephone service with a whopping $44 per month rentalfrom Telstra, of courseand surprisingly high call costs. The result for last month, for very few calls, was a bill for nearly $60. And the Internet connection is just as bad: $40 for a line that, if I recall correctly, has a 512/128 kB speed and 3 GB cap. Why am I so vague about speed and traffic? Looking at the ncable.net.au transact.com.au web site, I can no longer find it.
FreeBSD compromise fallout
A couple of months ago somebody gained access to a couple of machines in the FreeBSD cluster, apparently by stealing an ssh key. There's no evidence that he did any particular harm, but everybody's taking it very seriously. In my case, I discovered I had private keys on two of the machines, like we all did in the Good Old Days. And it's quite possible they got stolen. So another round of generating new keys, the first in 10 years: -rw-r--r-- 1 grog lemis 683 30 Dec 2001 authorized_keys -rw-r--r-- 1 grog lemis 844 14 Oct 2002 authorized_keys2 -rw------- 1 grog lemis 736 28 Jan 2002 id_dsa -rw-r--r-- 1 grog lemis 612 28 Jan 2002 id_dsa.pub -rw------- 1 grog lemis 951 28 Jan 2002 id_rsa -rw-r--r-- 1 grog lemis ...
More gdb investigations
So why is gdb setting breakpoints in the wrong place? Why, is gdb setting breakpoints in the wrong place? Did some investigation which proved inconclusive. What I found was: On FreeBSD-CURRENT on the i386 platform, it sets the breakpoint correctlyif I don't include debug symbols. On FreeBSD-CURRENT on the i386 platform, it sets the breakpoint 17 bytes from the start if I include debug symbols. On 9-STABLE amd64 it sets the breakpoint on the entry point.
gdb: Your friend in need
Message in the mail today: I had managed to mess up my change to locale(1). It wasn't immediately obvious why, so I went through with gdb: (gdb) b main Breakpoint 1 at 0x8048b41: file /src/FreeBSD/svn/head/usr.bin/locale/locale.c, line 241. (gdb) r Starting program: /usr/obj/src/FreeBSD/svn/head/usr.bin/locale/locale charmap LANG= LC_CTYPE="C" ... Program exited normally. That first command was a breakpoint on main. It should have hit there before doing anything. What went wrong? Took a look at the entrance to main and found: (gdb) x/20i main 0x8048b30 <main>: push %ebp 0x8048b31 <main+1>: mov %esp,%ebp 0x8048b33 <main+3>: push %ebx 0x8048b34 <main+4>: push %edi 0x8048b35 <main+5>: push %esi 0x8048b36 <main+6>: sub $0x1c,%esp 0x8048b39 <main+9>: mov ...
More df work
As planned, more thinking about the changes in df today. The block size calculation was: /* * Convert statfs returned file system size into BLOCKSIZE units. * Attempts to avoid overflow for large file systems. */ fsbtoblk(int64_t num, uint64_t fsbs, u_long bs) { if (fsbs != 0 && fsbs < bs) return (num / (intmax_t)(bs / fsbs)); else return (num * (intmax_t)(fsbs / bs)); } No description of the parameters, of course.
Making df legible
Surprisingly there was little feedback on my changes to ls, so today I continued with df, adding a -, option: === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/14) /src/FreeBSD/svn/head/bin/df 22 -> df /Photos/ Filesystem 1024-blocks Used Avail Capacity Mounted on /dev/ada1p1 1952969248 1474989512 458450044 76% /Photos === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/14) /src/FreeBSD/svn/head/bin/df 23 -> df -, /Photos/ Filesystem 1024-blocks Used Avail Capacity Mounted on /dev/ada1p1 1,952,969,248 1,474,989,512 458,450,044 76% /Photos It's interesting to note that commas in sizes are standard in Microsoft's COMMAND.EXE.
More USB pain
Recently I've been having trouble with the wireless keyboard on teevee, my TV computer. For some reason it can no longer reliably communicate with the USB dongle. It's not the dongle, since the mouse has no difficulty. So yesterday I plugged in a cable USB keyboard. And then today I could no longer use the remote control! I've been moaning about lirc for years, but lately it's been running well, and I've forgotten how to debug it. Finally found irw and tried it out. No reaction. Ran ktrace against lircd. No input. Took another look at the running lircd process: USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TT STAT STARTED TIME COMMAND root 961 0.0 0.1 5336 608 ??
More panorama reprocessing
Continued looking at my photos of 27 November 2011 today. It seems that it's not a good idea to use the old project files for images that have been reprocessed. Here again the comparison between the original, the reprocessed version using the old project files, and the reprocessed version starting from scratch: Interestingly, the stitching results were not overly good.
Another X hang!
It's been well over a month since I installed the new nVidia driver for X and solved my X hang problems. I thought. Today it happened again, again under similar circumstances. The symptoms are not quite the same: It's slower now, and it's possible to move the mouse cursor a little from the edge of the monitor before it jumps back. But it's just as fatal. In fact, it would seem it was more. My C monitor came back in 1280×1024 resolution. Investigating the log files showed: (WW) Nov 12 14:47:47 NVIDIA(GPU-0): Unable to read EDID for display device CRT-0 ...
Researching Dr. Livingstone
A couple of days ago my daily cron job sent me a calendar entry that looked wrong: Nov 10 Henry Stanley asks David Livingston, "Dr. Livingston, I presume?" , 1871 Livingston ? That should be Livingstone shouldn't it? Checked in the source of all knowledge and confirmed it. But also that the date was 27 October 1871. OK, we can fix that, so I did, and committed it. This morning I had not one but 5 messages awaiting me from Marc Balmer, who had successively discovered that the German Wikipedia had 28 October, and that the entries for Stanley in both languages had 10 November.
DxO problem report: success!
It's been well over two months since I reported a problem to DxO: the Process tab of DxO Optics Pro now displays all images, taking a long time to do so, and they're out of order. After three attempts to get the support person to read the problem report, I got theincorrectinformation that there was no way to suppress the display. When I asked him yet again to address the issue of the incorrect sort order, he closed the ticket without any further answer. So I entered another ticket, this time in German to get a different support person, and got an inappropriate answer.
Radiation tower affects property values
One of the objections raised to the radiation tower in Bannockburn on 13 March 2012 was that the presence of the tower would greatly devalue the property. Elaine J. Stroud-Kaminski of 2895 Colac-Ballarat Road, Dereel, on the corner of Swamp Road, claimed the presence would greatly devalue the property, by between $60,000 to $100,000. That's clearly nonsense, since the online property valuations suggest that the property is only worth about $150,000, but possibly she believes it, since the house is now up for sale. The truth, of course, looks very different. Got a call today from a bloke who didn't give his name, but who was thinking of moving to Dereel and wanted to know what the current state of play was.
Pointy hat for grog
Into the office this morning: I was less than thorough on my last commit to ls, and Peter Wemm had cleaned up the mess. I had replaced space sequences with corresponding tabs everywhere. That's desired in indentation, largely irrelevant in comments, but it makes a real mess of format strings, and ls -l no longer lined up. Another pointy hat for my collection.
More source tweaks
Yesterday's FreeBSD commits didn't go unchallenged. Somehow my Emacs configuration has reverted to using spaces instead of tabs for indentation, and that's in violation of style(9). So another couple of cosmetic changes.
Unexpected issues with clang
The FreeBSD project is in the process of changing the C and C++ compiler from gcc to clang, mainly, I think, because of license issues. The transition is going relatively smoothly, and one day I might even get used to the horrible gaudy error messages. And maybe they'll get the compiler to run in less than 2 GB of memory. But today came a message on the FreeBSD-current mailing list: calendar(1) has stopped working . The last serious work on that was done by Chris Yeardley, coincidentally committed a year ago today. So I took a look: /usr/share/calendar/calendar.music:231:17: warning: missing terminating ' character [-Winvalid-pp-token] 12/16 Don McLean's "American Pie" is released, 1971 ^ That wasn't in colour, but it clearly comes from clang.
Finally: the commits
Finally I've got round to committing all the patches I have been collecting, and while I was at it also addressed the checklist I made last month. Some of it, anyway. I'm still thinking about the rest, and since the recent change of compiler from gcc to clang, I'm not going to bother about fixing gcc.
Completing the ls work
I've made a number of modifications to ls over the years: the -X option to display file names in hex, the -y option and also the LS_SAMESORT environment variable to work around the mandated breakage in the standards. Most recently I've added the -, option to break large file sizes with commas (or whatever your locale provides). But I still haven't committed any of them. I described the issues a while back, but it's been nearly a month since then. So finally I prepared the commit. First thing is clear: I have waited far too long. It's been nearly 4 years since I did the LS_SAMESORT stuff, and of course the sources have changed since then.
Mixing photos
Yvonne showed me a funny photo yesterday, a statue with holes in itclearly a montage of two photos. It was on here today, gone tomorrow Facebook, so I can't find it any more. I can do that too , I said, thinking of Hugin, so I set to to take some experimental photos. The first one didn't work at all well: the control points were all detected correctly, but the resultant image looked nothing like what I expected. At a guess took another series with a second image to the right: In principle I only need the first ...
Radiation tower: when?
As a result, did a bit of investigation about the state of Wendy's appeal to VCAT. Not good: according to this discussion the date for the hearing has still not been set, after over 6 months. It should have been heard (and dismissed) by now. And there are suggestions that NBN may then postpone the erection until 2015! Under those circumstances, I wonder if we shouldn't be looking to build somewhere else.
More network issues
For a change, I didn't have a network connectivity dropout today, though it was hard to tell: in mid-afternoon connectivity dropped to a minimum, with ping times as high as 20 seconds. Looking at my logs, I found: Nov 3 15:25:18 nerd-gw fstats: +CGREG 1 81E3 8FC8F2E Nov 3 15:25:23 nerd-gw fstats: +CGREG 1 81E3 142 1351916924 0.561693 5 # Sat 3 Nov 2012 15:28:44 EST 890.166 ms That's an interesting cell ID. All the ones I've sen so far are 8 digits, but this was only 3.
Photo processing speed
House photo day today. Together with the photos from the open gardens, a total of 168 photos to process. It was also the first day I've done any serious processing with DxO Optics Pro version 8, and some of the settings are different from version 7. Processed about 50 of the photos before it occurred to me that the settings I had weren't optimal, and I had to start again. And I'm back to 2 minutes per image processing time. Or am I? Later in the first, abortive processing it seemed to get faster. So I kept track of the creation timestamps of the output files.
DxO bug: solved
Mail from a Pascal at DxO support today. One sentence: Die Lösung sehe sie hier ( you see the solution here ). Further investigation shows that there was a video clip attached, showing how to set the sort order in the image browser. What's wrong with this picture? It's strangely out of focus, for one thing. But more to the point: It doesn't explain why it should be a solution. I think this may be my fault: DxO seems not to handle German support well.
DxO problem: worked around
A message from another DxO support person today, an English reply (judging by the name Olivier presumably from a Frenchman) to my German problem report stating once again that my Microsoft Windows XP system with 3 GB of memory was too wimpy to run DxO Optics Pro , independent of the processor. Never mind that the specifications say a minimum of 2 GB, nor that at the time the problem occurred the system had 2 GB of memory free, nor that the problem also occurs with the 64 bit version of Windows 8. In addition, despite many requests for trace output, he couldn't find it.
More DxO pain
My support issues with DxO Optics Pro are getting no better. The one problem that remains is the silly duplicate, incorrectly sorted display of images in the Process tab. I've asked four times for this to be addressed, without success, and now I just get the message This ticket is closed . Hopefully this is just the individual support person and not the company. Put in another ticket, in German in the hope that somebody else will get it. We'll see.
Still more photo processing
I had intended to play around more with Capture One Pro 7 today, but somehow I didn't get round to it. Instead spent some time looking at DxO Optics Pro release 8, in particular with regard to the problems I have had with release 7. In summary: 7.5.4 no longer processes files on SMB file systems. This problem was transient in 7.5.4 and 7.5.5, but I haven't seen it at all on 8.0. Can't save processing settings.
Trying Capture One
By coincidence, also received mail from Phase One, advertising their new (I think) release of Capture One Pro 7, which does many of the same things that DxO Optics Pro does, though in this case the Pro is really in contrast to a non- Pro version. Again I get a free trial, this time 60 days, so I downloaded it and tried it out. Where's the documentation? There's a user guide for release 6, but all I can find for 7 is a Getting Started guide. A bit more searching found an online guide with precious few images, whose rendering upsets firefox, but which with a bit of effort explains what you have to do.
DxO 8: first impressions
DxO Optics Pro release 8 is now available, so I downloaded it to try it out. In brief: it works, and so far it seems that the problems I have seen in the past haven't shown up. But I haven't finished my checks yet. Instead, revisited some comparisons I did 3½ years ago, before I started using DxO. At the time I had two views that caused significant problems. Today I triednot for the first timeto process them with DxO, and this time I completed the task. Here are the comparisons with the base image, the best I got at the time, and what I got today with DxO: ...
Network disconnect insights
After yesterday's power failure, I noticed that my wireless Internet connection was no longer doing any cell hopping, to the point that I started looking at my reporting software. It took over 24 hours before it started again: Oct 28 09:02:51 nerd-gw ppp[1679]: tun0: IPCP: myaddr 118.209.12.68 hisaddr = 10.1.0.1 ... Oct 29 09:14:52 nerd-gw fstats: +CGREG 1 81E3 8FC8F2E And then, of course, I had another remote disconnect: Oct 29 16:52:14 nerd-gw ppp[1679]: tun0: LCP: deflink: RecvTerminateReq(3) state = Opened Oct 29 16:52:14 nerd-gw ppp[1679]: tun0: LCP: deflink: LayerDown Oct 29 16:52:14 nerd-gw ppp[1679]: tun0: LCP: deflink: SendTerminateAck(3) state = Opened Oct 29 16:52:14 nerd-gw ppp[1679]: tun0: LCP: deflink: State change Opened --> Stopping Roll on the radiation tower!
Finding an alternative to DxO
So far my experiences with DxO Optics Pro has been very frustrating. It's slower than anything I've seen, full of bugs, and the support people do everything they can to avoid fixing them. Now I can install a new version and pay more money, and the only mention of fixes is that the display bug I reported (they call it a feature) will not be fixed. So: what are the alternatives? The obvious (and free) one is Olympus Viewer 2. After a bit of investigation, discovered that I first needed to install a version 6 months old and then use that to install the latest version.
DxO support: all your fault
My interaction with DxO support continues to be frustrating. They don't read the reports, and they continually blame the problems on my configuration that just meets the minimum requirements . They won't tell me why this is a problem with accessing files via SMB. Indeed, they don't know what that is: Please advise specifically what your issues are with access to shared (CIFS/SMB) file systems. Also please enlighten me as to the characteristics of these file systems, there are so many and I am personally unfamiliar with this specific terminology.
Scrambled display on hi-res monitor
I'm very happy with my new 2560×1440 monitor, but on three occasions now I've had a scrambled display when powering on: The first two cases were shortly after I got it, and the third was today. In each case I powered cycled it and it came up correctly, so I assume this is some kind of power-up race condition.
High definition: a matter of viewpoint
I'm still looking for a new video card for my computer. It looks as if the Zotac ZT-60201-10L might be the choice. It seems that it can feed two monitors with up to 2560×1600 dpi. High definition indeed, at least in part. Clearly it hasn't filtered through to the spec sheet:
NiZn batteries: more problems
The indoor part of the inside/outside thermometer has again had problems with the Nickel-Zinc batteries. Once again I noticed it because the illumination was weak. And once again the voltage of one of the batteries had dropped to just over 1.0 V. Looking at my records, I see it was the same one I had problems with last time. Here part of my records: Before After Battery Date ...
GIMP: It must be like that
Callum Gibson disagreed with my comments on GIMP from a couple of days ago. I've heard them before, both from him and from others. I still disagree. In summary (my comments in italics): gimp * is not the correct way to use GIMP. But only because it handles the situation so badly. I'm not convinced that there is a good way to use GIMP. GIMP is very powerful but complicated.
avidemux2: the pain
More discussion on IRC of the problems I've been having with avidemux2. There is no formal maintainer for the FreeBSD port, but Jürgen Lock has done some work on it recently. Did some more examination and discovered that I needed to install a second port, avidemux2-plugins. Why? One of the advantages of the Ports Collection is that this gets done for you. But it seems that there's an issue with the way newer versions of avidemux2 build, and that makes it incompatible with the Ports Collection. I'm sure there's a solution to that, but at the very least the port should print an appropriate message when it's done.
GIMP: The solution?
Yvonne has been using xv for her photo processing for some time now. It's 20 years old, and by modern standards it's limited. In particular, it doesn't handle EXIF data, because it didn't exist when it was written. So it occurred to me that she might be able to use GIMP instead. She had taken some photos today, so I got her to try them out. What a pain! She hated it, and I can't blame her. Workflow is terrible. With xv, she simply did: === yvonne@lagoon (/dev/pts/9) ~/Photos/20121020 55 -> xv * xv then presents the photos one by one.
DxO Optics: Not supported
The progress of my bug report about saving defaults with DxO Optics Pro was amazing. First it got folded into a different ticket about the problems that DxO has, apparently with CIFSa completely unrelated issue. Then today I got a response: Microsoft Windows 8 isn't supported. Problem: the ticket relates to Microsoft Windows XP. And he asked for traces, which I had submitted over a month ago. Clearly a problem with the work flow in support. But where did he get the information that I'm running (pre-release) Windows 8? It's not in the bug report: I wasn't able to select it, so I specified Windows 7.
Correctly identifying plants
Over the last few days I've discovered a number of errors in plant naming. I've already mentioned the shrub we bought as Cissus, which I still haven't identified. But by chance I've come across a couple of others. The ginger that I have called Hedychium coronarium is in fact Hedychium gardnerianum. Hedychium coronarium looks very similar, but the flowers are white. Here my Hedychium gardnerianum, then Hedychium coronarium from wikimedia: width="300" /> In addition, while tidying up today, I found a label for an Iberis sempervirens Winter glow , which proves to be what I have been calling Euphorbia Diamond frost .
More video copying
Continued with copying video tapes todayI had forgotten how long this can take in real time. In the process it occurred to me how many different video cameras I have had. In 1984 I borrowed one for a specific event, and in 1985, just before the birth of my daughter Yana, I bought my first own camera/video recorder combination. But that didn't last long: in late 1988, I think, I got a hand-held 8mm Sony camcorder, to be followed up with a second in late 1999. That one died in 1986, and since then we haven't taken any video, though I bought a second-hand Samsung recorder to copy the tapes.
Video processing software
Now that my old videos are gradually trickling in in digital format, it's time to cut them into individual clips. What do I use for that? Recently I've been using avidemux2, but this time I got a message I hadn't expected: OK, that's really for for AVI images, and this is MPEG. In the past I've used Project X, so I tried that again. But how do you use it? There's still no documentation, and I forgot. The only documentation I found was out of date and only addresses small parts of the program.
Diary topics revisited
About four years ago I made a change to this diary, adding topics , or categories . Nothing new; others have been doing it for years. But of course I wanted to do it My Way. Not too many categories; people will miss things like that. And preferably ones that are orthogonal. At the time, it seems that computers ( technology , for want of a better term), photography and multimedia were relatively orthogonal, but they're coalescing. All the more reason for a small number of categories.
Video online
I've been taking photos for over half a century, and I've spent a lot of effort over the last few years to put them on the web in a manner I consider appropriate. But in the early 1980s I was unfaithful: I first borrowed, then bought a video camera, and declared that from then on all my records would be on video. It took until about 10 years ago for me to reconsider. Videos can contain more information than photos, but watching them takes time. Even today I don't often look at YouTube videos, because my experience is that they're seldom worth the expenditure of time.
DxO bug reports
Finally got round to putting in a bug report for the problems I'm having with DxO Optics Pro . Their bug report site is only for customers, so here's the content: Since installing version 7.5.4 of DxO Optics "Pro", I have had numerous difficulties with the interface. In particular: The "process" window now shows the selected images, very slowly and out of sequence. In particular, the incorrect sequence is very irritating.
UPS problems solved
Another power failure at 3:21 this morning. Again only a brief failure, again the new UPS and the new power supply on eureka didn't help. Vented my anger on IRC, with unexpected results: gr00gle: Grrr. gr00gle: Another brief power failure, another system down. gr00gle: New UPS. New PSU. gr00gle: What can be causing it? callum: It's not plugged in to the UPS? peter: snap Darius: hehe callum: Seems the most obvious. callum: After all, you do have a messy desk. * gr00gle . o O ( For every complex problem there's a solution that is simple, elegant * gr00gle and wrong ) gr00gle: Still, worth a try.
More thoughts on NiZn batteries
A couple of days ago I noted that mixing different kinds of batteries is a Bad Thing after all, due to the possibility of passing more current through a discharged battery than it can handle. On that occasion the device was the indoor part of my wireless inside/outside thermometer, and I had put one Nickel-Zinc battery with one NiMH battery because two NiMH batteries weren't enough to run the illumination. So this time I put in two NiZn batteries, and sure enough, the illumination was wonderful. But that was 4 days ago. Today I looked again, and it was as dim as if I had had NiMH batteries in there.
Flowers in garden again
Garden flower photo day today, again without too much difficulty. The real issue was with DxO Optics Pro . I strongly suspect that a(nother) bug has slipped in in the last version. I can save my workspaces all I want, but when I load them again, it is still missing a number of settings. More experimentation needed, but for the time being I need to set all the parameters manually Every Time. The other issues I have are that DxO, Microsoft Windows 8 and VirtualBox all seem to be buggy enough that together they crash about one run in 3. And when I restart Windows , it doesn't reconnect the network drives, for reasons that aren't obvious to me.
More network disconnects
Three more network disconnects today, for once all clearly pointing at Optus: in each case I received a terminate request. But does that help? The Optus people who determine policy probably don't even understand the issues, and I'd probably still need to reproduce it with a different dongle. Is it worth it? Roll on the radiation tower.
More fun processing photos
House photo day today, without very much to report. The weather was moist, but I managed to get most photos done without trouble. The processing was a different matter. In the last few months I've changed the environment in which I run DxO Optics Pro . I used to run it on a Microsoft machine that Chris Yeardley lent me, until Powercor destroyed it with a power surge. Then I ran it on VirtualBox, first with Microsoft Windows XP, then with a 64 bit Windows 8 preview, since DxO claim it's faster that way. I've also installed a couple of new versions.
Yet Another ls option
Once upon a time, files were small. The First Edition of Unix had a maximum file size of 64 kB, and even today we see the effect of the ancient 2 GB limit in the Linux O_LARGEFILE flag to open. But the truth is much larger. I back up my systems to disk, and looking at them is something like: === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/14) ~ 29 -> ls -l /src/dump/boskoop/ total 168169 -rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 36211690564 Mar 20 2012 boskoop.disk0-1.bz2 -rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 16596907252 Dec 24 2009 boskoop.disk0.bz2 -rw-r--r-- 1 grog wheel 4173914809 Jul 20 2006 boskopp.tar.gz -rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 10273920512 Mar 18 2012 delicious-image -rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 80026361856 Mar 18 2012 old-boskoop-image -rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 28968755200 Mar 16 2012 root.tar What are those values?
Don't mix battery types
I've had mainly good experience with the Nickel-Zinc batteries that I bought last year. My only concern is that the high voltage (1.8 V) would be too much for some devices designed for conventional 1.5 V ZnC or alkaline batteries, so in many cases I tried mixing them with NiMH batteries to get voltages such as 3 V from one of each. People say you shouldn't do that. Why? They're in series, so the voltages just add up. But in practice, I've noticed that when they discharge, it's the NiZn battery first, and it shows alarmingly low voltages. The first time I thought it was possibly a defective battery, but it happened again today.
EDID: Good when it's right
Looking at the EDID information for my new 2560×1440 monitor was instructive, though I didn't really need to go into that much detail: the monitor Just Worked. But it was another matter with my Sanyo PLV-Z700 data projector: in the over 2 years I have had it, I haven't been able to get a really clean display at the native 1920×1080. Time to look at the EDID. What a surprise!
Efficient power supplies save power
I've now had my new Antec EA-550 power supply for over a week, and I've been keeping track of the power it uses: Reading Total Power (kWh) Date Time Power usage ...
Domain name renewal: for you, four times the price
The domain fbbg.org.au is coming up for renewal, and I got a reminder with typical content: The following domain(s) will expire on the date indicated unless renewed. Please visit http://www.transact.com.au/ to renew. Of course there's no information on domain renewal at http://www.transact.com.au/; it's far deeper. Took the search function and arrived at http://www.transact.com.au/en/business/products/web-hosting/domain-names. And the price was really good: $17 for two years. But how do you renew? There's no information there about renewal. In the end called TransACT up and asked. They didn't know either, but they got Steve McCulloch to call me back.
More network disconnects
Another network disconnect today, the first in nearly a week. Another of the kind that I suspect is a firmware reset, but this time clearly heralded by Optus network activity: Oct 4 15:39:50 nerd-gw fstats: +CGREG 1 81E3 8FC8E66 ... Oct 4 15:43:40 nerd-gw fstats: +CGREG 1 81E3 8FC8E4A ... Oct 4 15:48:08 nerd-gw fstats: +CGREG 1 81E3 8FC8E52 ... Oct 4 15:56:49 nerd-gw fstats: +CGREG 1 81E3 8FC48E8 Oct 4 16:00:46 nerd-gw fstats: +CGREG 1 81E3 8FC8F2E Oct 4 16:00:58 nerd-gw fstats: +CGREG 2 Oct 4 16:00:58 nerd-gw fstats: +CGREG 2 Oct 4 16:00:58 nerd-gw fstats: +CGREG 1 81E3 8FC48E8 Oct 4 16:04:04 nerd-gw ppp[1663]: tun0: Phase: deflink: read (0): Got zero bytes Oct 4 16:04:04 nerd-gw kernel: ugen0.2: <HUAWEI Technology> at usbus0 (disconnected) Oct 4 16:04:04 nerd-gw kernel: u3g0: at uhub0, port 1, addr 2 (disconnected) Oct 4 16:04:04 ...
Ballarat Gardens in Spring 2012
Spent most of the morning preparing a web page for Ballarat Gardens in Spring 2012, not too early. Somehow I need to wean the Friends from PDFs to proper web pages.
You have been endorsed!
Lately I've been receiving messages like this one, sent from LinkedIn: Date: Wed, 3 Oct 2012 19:41:31 +0000 (UTC) From: Tom Rhodes <member@linkedin.com> To: Greg Lehey <groggyhimself@lemis.com> Received: from maile-aa.linkedin.com (maile-aa.linkedin.com [69.28.147.164]) by w3.lemis.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 9CF323B74B for <groggyhimself@lemis.com>; Wed, 3 Oct 2012 19:41:32 +0000 (UTC) Subject: Tom Rhodes has endorsed you! Message-ID: <975062635.5112619.1349293291862.JavaMail.app@ela4-app2310.prod> Tom Rhodes has endorsed you! Greg, I've just endorsed you for skills & expertise! See your endorsements by clicking here: http://www.linkedin.com/e/d4m02c-h7uudz6c-4d/Jmg7x16irWb3uf_He_84g0mS/spe/true/eml-skills_endorsements-btn-0-new_teaser/?hs=false&tok=23qfpEuZat95s1 And yes, the & is in the original.
Kernel and module bloat
I noted yesterday that the nvidia driver module had got smaller. It certainly didn't get small. Once upon a time, UNIX kernels were really small, because they had to: === root@eureka (/dev/pts/6) ~ 73 -> l -rS /src/UNIX/Sixth-Edition/unix /src/UNIX/Seventh-Edition/unix -r--r--r-- 1 grog wheel 28684 Jul 18 1975 /src/UNIX/Sixth-Edition/unix -r-xr-xr-x 1 grog wheel 51274 Jun 9 1979 /src/UNIX/Seventh-Edition/unix We have more space nowadays, and kernels have increased dramatically in size since then. And why not? The Sixth Edition was designed for a machine with 128 kB of address space, so the kernel took up roughly 20% of the address space.
X hang problems: solved!
For well over a year I've been complaining about sporadic hangs with X, where the mouse cursor would get stuck bouncing between two screens. I've suspected blame on the part of the nVidia driver, the mouse driver, and even the FreeBSD USB stack. Today I got a message from Andrew Hout telling me that the bug had been identified and fixed. Only two weeks ago, as shown by this bug report, which includes a very good summary of the problem, which was in the nVidia driver after all. The latest version was released only earlier this week. And of course it had nothing to do with FreeBSD, as evidenced by the other reports on the web.
EDID information for the new monitor
The other thing that I had noticed was the EDID information for the new monitor. There's more than reported by the X server, but how do I display it? Went looking and found edid-decode. Installed it and ran it. No output: it just hung. Looked for the documentation. No documentation, anywhere, not even UTSL. The source shows that if started without parameters, it reads from stdin. The first parameter, if supplied, is a file name, and clearly it supplies the EDID information. But where does it come from? No idea. Even minimal documentation would help, but as it is, I really have no idea how to use it.
More monitor investigations
One of the things that was clear after rearranging my monitors was that :0.1 (later the right half of :0.0) did not have optimal display settings. Went off looking for web sites helping with monitor calibrations, but it wasn't until Andy Farkas reminded me that I found this LCD test site, which is really quite impressive. And it gave the new monitor a clean bill of health: the settings were as good as perfect. The only thing I couldn't check properly was the black level, because it requires a really dark environment. But that, too, seems to be OK. The most interesting test was the clock and phase test, which on the new monitor worked fine, as it did on the OC monitor, but both BenQ monitors showed significant flickering.
Fun processing photos
House photo day again today, and despite the filthy weather decided to do it today rather than tomorrow. But because of the wind took a different approach to the garden centre panorama: instead of HDR images made from sets of 5 exposures, took a single exposure with flash to lighten the relatively close dark areas. A combination of that and the unexplained increase in processing speed DxO Optics "Pro" (now barely 30 seconds per image) meant that I was finished much faster than usual, despite the expected problems with control points due to the wind. One thing I didn't expect was when masking one of the panoramas.
RootBSD: keeping it up
Through much of my life, keeping it up has been important. Forty years ago at UNIVAC, it was a particular challenge, because the technology of the day required routine maintenance. But the 1108 was a multiprocessor system, and individual components could be maintained without taking down the entire system. Then Tandem Computers raised the whole thing to an art form, and uptimes of over 12 months were commonplace, limited only by the requirement of software upgrades. Part of my job at Tandem was to ensure highest uptime, and I'm always very reluctant to reboot a machine if there's any alternative. Yet another reason to hate Microsoft.
X hang bug: more insights
While configuring X, Yvonne came with her camera and wanted files read off it. Last time I read the files on eureka, it triggered this horrible X hang bug, where the mouse cursor jumps back and forth between two screens. I'm gradually coming to the conclusion that this could be a FreeBSD bug after all. This time switched to a VTY before inserting the card. No luck. When I returned to X, it hung anyway. But at least it seems that I'm finding a way to reproduce it. Now I suppose I should try with a PS/2 mouse.
Reinventing my X configuration
So now I have my new monitor up and running well. That's the easy part. For well over 20 years I've been continually refining my X desktop for my personal taste. For at least 20 of those years it has been a multi-head setup, and I've gradually come to the conclusion that 4 monitors are enough. But now I only have 3 on eureka, and the fourth on dereel proves to be a pain, in particular because it has its own screen saver timer. So, the first thing should be to find a way to connect a fourth monitor to eureka.
DxO acceleration
I've been running DxO Optics "Pro" in a Virtual Machine with a prerelease of Microsoft Windows 8 for some time now, and haven't been exactly happy with the speed. DxO claim that the 64 bit version is significantly faster than the older 32 bit versions such as the Microsoft XP I was running before. That version was single processor only, and it took a little over two minutes to process an image. You'd expect it to take a little over 30 seconds running on all 4 CPUs. But the new 64 bit version with Windows 8 took about 80 seconds per image.
Power problems not resolved
The first power failure had another result: once again, eureka failed immediately, though the UPS showed that it had enough power for 45 minutes, enough to weather the failure completely, as nerd-gw did. So what's causing the failure? It can't be the UPS, and it can't be the power supply. I'm still guessing that it's some kind of transient, but why does it only affect eureka?
Matrix NEO 270WQ monitor: first impressions
After that harrowing experience, I should have known better than to try to set up the new monitor. After all, it has a somewhat restricted interfaceno other modes than 2560×1440 will work At All. And I didn't have any mode lines for the device. But of course, egged on by Michael Ralston, I did put it in there. It didn't start well: I pressed on the start button, and nothing happened. Not even when I held it down for a long time. It took me a while to realize that the buttons are underneath the monitor, and not even very well aligned with the markings.
System upgrade: the sharks
Continued with my reconfiguration today. After updating the system on dereel, I was able to load the nvidia driver with no further problems, and I got one monitor up and running in native resolution. Jürgen Lock suspected a mismatch between kernel and /sys. That's possible, though I didn't think so, but after rebuilding the system there's no evidence left. So: the next steps were to replace UPS and power supply and then integrate the new monitor. The UPS was a surprise: I had assumed it was defective, because minor power fluctuations killed eureka 3 weeks ago. But when I disconnected the power to the UPS, it continued to supply power on battery.
Preparing to install the new monitor
My new monitor has been on the table outside the office for over a day now, and I still haven't installed it, much to Michael Ralston's disgust. But I want to have a smooth transition. I'm reminded of this cartoon from xkcd (click to enlarge): width="250" /> The first thing is what to do with the fourth display in the short term. The obvious thing to do is to connect it to dereel, but for some reason the nvidia driver doesn't work on dereel, something I encountered and ignored months ago: === root@dereel (/dev/pts/1) /usr/src 35 -> kldload nvidia kldload: can't load nvidia: File exists That's what ...
New monitor
I've been following the progress of my new monitor for a few days. It was sent with DHL and arrived in Australia on Saturday, after only 38½ hours. That seems better than UPS, though I've never had anything sent from Korea before. It's difficult to know how long it would have taken end to end if it had arrived during the week, but as it was, this morning was the earliest practical delivery date. And indeed we found a notification in the letterbox: to be picked up at Napoleons CPO. They could have delivered it to the door, but I'm sure they have a valid excuse.
Saturday's photos, continued
The activities of the last few days have resulted in a significant backlog of photos to process. I still haven't written a web page for the flower photos of last Sunday, nor the house photos for Saturday. Continued with the latter today. The garden centre panorama was done with HDR, and because of the sun I had a number of images with my hands blocking out the sun. Tried the new method for merging the imagesall 66 of them. It found control points for all except one image, a particularly light component image that I was able to just get rid of.
Fixing my photos for tablets
Yesterday's rotated images on Steve's tablet were cause for concern. On IRC discovered that a number of people could reproduce it, and that it really did come from the Orientation EXIF tag. OK, that's simple enough, but how do I fix it? I had about 106,000 JPEG images to go through. How much traffic would it cost to upload the changes to my external web site? A short test shows that rsync handled the update pretty efficiently.
Web page rendering on tablets
While at Ron and Steve's, showed some of my web-based photos. Some came out rotated by 90°, something I've never seen before, such as this one: The issue appears to be this EXIF tag: Orientation : Rotate 270 CW That's a left-over from the way I took the images: camera mounted vertically, stitched together to make a landscape image, such as this one: I didn't know of any web browser that evaluated the EXIF data.
Web page rendering on tablets
While at Ron and Steve's, showed some of my web-based photos. Some came out rotated by 90°, something I've never seen before, such as this one: The issue appears to be this EXIF tag: Orientation : Rotate 270 CW That's a left-over from the way I took the images: camera mounted vertically, stitched together to make a landscape image, such as this one: I didn't know of any web browser that evaluated the EXIF data.
New power hardware
Then to CPL to pick up my power supply and yet another new UPS. An amazing place. A far cry from MSY: glossy, full of showcases, four people on duty doing I know not what. One of them served customers (2 in the 10 minutes we were there), another got the items, and the others sat in one of many offices. Despite the relationships, they were very slow. But I got my goods, and they look like what I wanted.
Network connection: registration hops cease
While investigating the cause of my Internet connection problems last month, I discovered a continual stream of cell hopping every couple of minutes. It continued through times of good and bad connection qualitybut this morning I discovered that it had stopped. The last hops were: Sep 21 15:11:01 nerd-gw fstats: +CGREG 1 81E3 8FC8F2E Sep 21 15:11:18 nerd-gw fstats: +CGREG 1 81E3 8FC48E8 Why did it stop? Why did it happen in the first place? The connection quality is still motley, but acceptable.
Printing web pages: the pain
We're off to Melbourne on Sunday, and I'll pick up the power supply from CPL on the way. I have the address in my GPS navigator, but to be on the safe side it made sense to print out the location info page. What a catastrophe! I don't know what it is about this page, but it took me about 10 attempts before I got anything even remotely resembling a copy of the page: Firefox created a file that was completely illegible.
Power supplies: more is less
Another thing I have bought is an Antec EA-550 power supply. It costs $115, and I could get a power supply that does the job for $35. But I don't know the efficiency of the el cheapo supply, only that it's under 80%, while the Antec does about 91%. I've been measuring the power consumption of eureka, my main machine, for a week or two now, and it uses between about 170 W idle and 250 W at full load. Assuming 70% efficiency, the power supply is delivering between 120 W and 175 W. To deliver the same power at 90% efficiency would consume 133 and 195 W, a saving of, say, 50 W, or 1.2 kW per day.
Finding a dual port, dual link DVI display card
So now my monitor is on its way: Date: Wed, 19 Sep 2012 18:40:44 -0700 (MST) From: "eBay Member: bigclothcraft" <bigclo05ne@members.ebay.com> I will prepare to make shipment. I will test monitor before shipping. It takes 1~3 more business days to inspect monitor. Then, 40 minutes later: Date: Wed, 19 Sep 2012 19:18:00 -0700 From: eBay <ebay@ebay.com> Your item is marked as shipped and tracking information is available. Note: Tracking information can take up to 48 hours to be updated after the order is shipped.
Alternative panorama processing sequence
Creating images such as my verandah panorama takes a number of steps: first I take 20 bracketed sets of 5 photos at 1 EV intervals (because my Olympus won't give me 2 EV intervals) at 45° intervals, then I process three of them with align_image_stack and enfuse to a tone-mapped image, and finally I stitch them together with Hugin. But there's a simpler way: Hugin can do the tone-mapping too. It's not easy to find out how. There are a number of tutorials, but none of them appears to address this particular issue. In fact, there is a tutorial there, with the unlikely name Creating 360° enfused panoramas.
Choosing a monitor, continued
More thoughts about a new 2560×1440 monitor today. The main question was: should I buy a version with HDMI and D-Sub connectors or just a basic one with DVI? It's not even clear whether my video cards (nVidia 9500GT) can generate 2560×1440 analogue outputs. My attempts failed, at any rate. In passing, it's interesting to note that I found a mode line for 2304×1728 in my configuration, a resolution of 3,981,312 pixels, 8% more than the 3,686,400 pixels that these monitors will do. The card itself is OK: the eBay item descriptions all include it in their lists, but that's with DVI, and I can only drive one of them with my cards.
Finding a high-definition monitor
So, do I repair my dead Sλmsung SyncMaster 2233SW monitor, or do I replace it? The first time it was replaced under warranty, but now it's way out of warranty. I could replace it with another 1920×1080 high definition monitor, but the writing is on the wall that higher definition is finally on its way. There are a number of surprisingly cheap 2560×1440 27" monitors available from Korea on eBay, and today I spent a lot of time investigating what is available. There's a lot of information available on the web, of course. It seems that all monitors use the same IPS panel from Lucky Goldstar, and most of them have only DVI inputs.
ssh POLA violation
One of the problems I had with avidemux2 was that it wasn't installed on lagoon, Yvonne's computer, and it's so down-rev that I can't install it. So we ran it on eureka. But she couldn't connect: eureka refused her ssh keys. Regenerated them, but no luck: Sep 16 14:16:19 eureka sshd[213]: error: Could not load host key: /etc/ssh/ssh_host_ecdsa_key What's that? I've never had that before, and it didn't happen when I tried accessing with my credentials. Searched on the web and found a large number of hits, mainly from Linux.
Joining AVI clips
Yvonne wanted to edit some video clips today for upload to YouTube. They come from the camera in AVI format, and with a bit of pain we were able to extract specific scenes with avidemux2. But why must this software ignore the current working directory and put you into a completely unrelated directory that you used 9 months ago? That was only the first part, of course. We ended up with 11 scenes which we wanted to convert to 2. Some formats, such as MPEG TS, allow simple concatenation, but AVI doesn't. We were in a bit of a hurry, but the stuff I found on the web wasn't very encouraging.
Another dead monitor
My Sλmsung SyncMaster 2233SW monitor died today, not for the first time: it just didn't power on. Given that this was a replacement for a monitor that had a similar failure, it seems that this is a generic problem with the model. Is it worth repairing? I'll find out. But it's now 3½ years old, so in all likelihood it means a new monitor.
Microsoft "Windows" 8 performance and licensing
My experience with Microsoft Windows XP yesterday was painful, more due to DxO Optics "Pro" than to Microsoft. The (virtual) machine only has a single processor, and it took about 130 seconds per image to process. But the Windows 8 installation uses all 4 cores, and DxO has advertised that the 64 bit version is much faster. So I ran that, and indeed VirtualBox showed it was using about 3 CPUs. The result? About 90 seconds per image, an improvement of only 30% with 3 times as much CPU power. Why is that? Virtual machine issues? I'm torn between buying a real, fast box just to run Microsoft, or giving up on DxO.
Slow photo processing
House photo day today, with almost ideal conditionsexcept that braindeath, Chris Yeardley's loaner Microsoft box, appears to have died. I'm not convinced yet, but for today at any rate I had to run DxO Optics "Pro" in a VM. And that takes forever, especially since the latest version of DxO has problems with SMB shares and I had to copy the files physically onto the virtual disk, causing it to overflow. The processing itself was OK, but it took all day, and I still wasn't finished.
NBN fixed wireless: first impressions
Yet another thing that Scott mentioned is that he now lives in Haddon, Victoria, and since a fortnight ago he has network access via NBN fixed wireless. He's described his experience here. The most interesting thing he has discovered is that the relatively low bandwidth of 12/1 Mb/s is per ISP, of which you can have up to 4. He also mentions rumours of a 25/5 Mb/s link coming in the not-too-distant future, which certainly makes things more interesting. Now if only VCAT would hear this complaint.
Where is the radiation tower?
Discussing my planned move of house on IRC today, and Callum Gibson asked whether I'd still be in the range of the radiation tower. The simple answer is yes . But looking at that map (which requires me to enter Dereel manually), I discover that it has changed in the last 6 months. At that time the map showed the tower (the orange marker with C for Commenced) rather inaccurately placed a little to the north-east of the correct place. We also noted that Chris Yeardley's house is covered, but other parts, including the plot of land she wanted to sell us, aren't.
More network pain
Came into the office this morning to discover that we have been off the network since shortly after midnight. Optus had sent a terminate request: Sep 14 00:59:00 nerd-gw ppp[87396]: tun0: LCP: deflink: RecvTerminateReq(13) state = Opened Sep 14 00:59:00 nerd-gw ppp[87396]: tun0: LCP: deflink: LayerDown Sep 14 00:59:00 nerd-gw ppp[87396]: tun0: LCP: deflink: SendTerminateAck(13) state = Opened Sep 14 00:59:00 nerd-gw ppp[87396]: tun0: LCP: deflink: State change Opened --> Stopping For some reason the ppp process didn't even try to reconnect, so we didn't get back on the net until 10:30.
More power pain
Into the office this morning to discover that both eureka and dereel had rebooted last night at 18:16. It appears to have been a power failure, but there was none. But at that time we blew a contact breaker on that circuit, which also supplies the kitchen. How I love underrated Australian power circuits!. Power stayed off for 30 seconds, clearly long enough to kill the UPS. What a pain these things are!
X hangs: more insights
One of the positive results of upgrading my computer system is that the new version now recognizes my USB flash card reader, which up to now I have had to use with the old (USB 1.0) Apple. Now I can get much higher speeds without firing up another machine. Well, almost. Today I put it in the machine, it was recognized, but I got the dreaded mouse hang. Nothing else was wrong: after shooting down and restarting X, everything worked. So is this maybe an issue with the FreeBSD USB subsystem?
Navman: improving user experience
Message from David Corkery of Navman today: We are currently undertaking Search Engine Optimisation for the NAVMAN website to make the experience even better. We noticed that you have a link on your site back to www.navman.com.au on the following URL: http://people.lemis.com/grog/diary-oct2011.php It's great that you've done this and we really value the reference you've provided. However, we would like to request a slight change to this existing link, if it's not too much trouble. The current link text is 'Navman' we would like you to change this to 'Navman GPS' OK, not a problem.
Lame mouse syndrome returns
Into the office this morning to discover that my mouse was limping again. The web has a number of hits for the problem, but nothing that's obvious. Now that I'm running 2 X servers, I was able to confirm that it hit both of them, and that there's no obvious connection with CPU time, though it's possible that some single process might be sucking it. Today I restarted both servers, not without difficulty: another issue is that the mouse is completely inactive when I start X, and I have to do it yet again. This is anything but reliable.
Finding the Emacs screens
It's been over two months since I switched from i386 to amd64 (32 bit to 64 bit) FreeBSD, and there are still a number of irritations that I haven't fixed. One is that Emacs windows are positioned outside the display. I haven't found a solution for that; I suspect it's less a FreeBSD issue than an Emacs or X problem. But at least I've found one way to retrieve them when using fvwm2: select them via the WindowList menu, which will bring them back to top left: I probably knew about this kind of thing decades ago, but I never found much use for it until now.
Rain gauge problems
So I've replaced the rain gauge on my weather station, it has rained and... nothing. What's the problem? This one doesn't seem to have any mechanical issues, and the electronic connection seems to be working: when I mounted it the vibration caused some false rain . So what is it? Do I care? It's very inaccurate anyway. But it would be nice to understand the problem.
Another power glitch
Mains power has been relatively reliable lately. The last failure was on 4 April 2012. This evening it looked as if we had another one, but it was the very briefest of fluctuations, and even my bedside clock, usually the first to reset, made it through. But my main machine eureka didn't! And it's on a UPS! What went wrong there? My best bet is that it was a massive power spike, but it didn't hit any of the other UPSs.
DxO Optics Pro under Microsoft 8
Back home and set to installing DxO Optics Pro on bigpain, the new Microsoft 8 box. What did I get? 64 bit version or 32 bit version? DxO have been advertising the speed advantages of the 64 bit version at some length, but there was only one image to download. Hopefully it includes both variants. Installation went relatively smoothly, but I couldn't activate it: it seems that there's an activation counter somewhere, and I had used it too much. Still, there's always the 30 day free trial, so tried that. Yes, pretty much the same as before. With 4 CPUs it promised to convert images on average every 30 secondspretty much the same as what I would have got with the 32 bit version.
Enfield radiation tower
On the way home, found somehting that I had been looking for for a while: the Enfield NBN radiation tower: It wasn't quite where I had been expecting it, but yesterday I looked through the area and saw nothing. Today I noticed it from a few kilometres away, so presumably it has only just gone up.
Microsoft 8: first impressions
So it looks like the virtual hardware I use to run DxO Optics "Pro" is too wimpy: they prefer 64 bit machines, and clearly I should have multiprocessor support, which my version of Microsoft Windows XP doesn't have. But there's a prerelease version of Windows 8 available, and I downloaded it a few weeks ago. Time to install. There's always something confusing about Microsoft. Their view of the world, particularly networking, is just plain bizarre. The first thing I had to do was to enter an email addresswhy not a normal ID? I'm not sure, but it seems that it might not have been a user ID at all, but an email for registration.
Microsoft world: the pain
While at the Friends of the Ballarat Botanical Gardens, Lorraine Powell showed me the proofs of the new Pictorial History of the Ballarat Botanical Gardens book. She had it on a USB stick, and she wasn't connected to the net, so we moved it to Genevieve's machine and tried to email it to me. Gmail wouldn't come to the party: it was over 25 MB. OK, what's ftp for? But how do you find it? This machine doesn't even offer to give you a Command Prompt : I had to find the Run window and start COMMAND.COM manually. And yes, ftp is still there in Microsoft machines, but the on-system firewall blocks outgoing ftp.
More DxO experimentation
As it happened, I have just received another 4 GB of memory for eureka, meaning I could replace the 1 GB DIMMs with 2 GB and thus increase total RAM to 8 GBjust what I need to increase the memory size of my VirtualBox machines. So after yesterday's suggestion to increase memory, I put smart back up to 4 GB. No difference. And looking at the task manager, it's not surprising: Despite their slowness, the DxO processes aren't that big.
More DxO fun
DxO release frequent updates of their DxO Optics "Pro" software, and I generally install them in the hope that something might speed it up. The latest version is 7.5.4, and I installed it a couple of days ago. Faster? Difficult to say: as soon as I try to process anything, all the images disappear from the image browser window, at least on the version I have running in VirtualBox. No message, just dead in the water. And it's not consistent. In one scenario, the program runs for about a minute, then all files disappear from the Image Browser. The correction preview also disappears.
New business cards
Since retiring, it's clear that I don't have business cards, but from time to time I want to give people something similar, more like what people used to call visiting cards . And from time to time I get a web advertisement with this offer from Vistaprint: 250 business cards, free. They're something like a free lunch. You only pay the postage. Letter postage for up to 500 g should run to about $3 and take between 1 to 4 business days to reach its destination. But this postage costs $7.85 and takes 21 days. You can have it faster, of course, but then it costs (much) more.
Network disconnects: more dropouts
Part of chasing last week's network problems was for Internode support to send me a replacement modem, by express (usually overnight) post. It arrived today, six days latera ZTE MF652: Aug 29 14:00:38 eureka kernel: ugen5.7: <ZTE> at usbus5 Aug 29 14:00:38 eureka kernel: umass1: <ZTE MF652, class 0/0, rev 2.00/0.01, addr 7> on usbus5 Aug 29 14:00:38 eureka kernel: umass1: SCSI over Bulk-Only; quirks = 0x0000 Aug 29 14:00:38 eureka kernel: umass1:8:1:-1: Attached to scbus8 Aug 29 14:00:38 eureka kernel: cd1 at umass-sim1 bus 1 scbus8 target 0 lun 0 Aug 29 14:00:38 eureka kernel: cd1: <ZTE USB SCSI CD-ROM 0001> Removable CD-ROM SCSI-0 device Aug 29 14:00:38 eureka kernel: cd1: 40.000MB/s transfers Aug 29 14:00:38 eureka kernel: cd1: Attempt to query device size failed: NOT READY, Medium not present Aug 29 14:00:38 eureka kernel: da1 at umass-sim1 bus 1 ...
Two months of marriage
Looked in on facebook again today, for the first time in a long while. The things that happen while you're away: Not only that, but a number of people who should know better like the marriage (in fact, I've been married for nearly 30 years). Showed it to Yvonne, who explained that she had been updating her profile and entered that she was married (presumably to me)and the software took that entry as the day of her wedding.
Interpreting the network logs
My network disconnect problems seem to have got better over the last few days. Since Friday I have only had a single disconnect: Aug 25 16:42:27 nerd-gw ppp[87396]: tun0: IPCP: IPADDR[6] 121.44.12.163 At the same time, the number of cell hops diminished greatly. In 18 hours I had only the following reports: Aug 26 15:19:18 nerd-gw fstats: +CGREG 1 81E3 8FC8F2E Aug 26 15:19:55 nerd-gw fstats: +CGREG 1 81E3 8FC48E8 Aug 27 01:29:19 nerd-gw fstats: +CGREG 2 Aug 27 01:29:19 nerd-gw fstats: +CGREG 1 81E3 8FC48E8 Aug 27 09:07:45 nerd-gw fstats: +CGREG 2 Aug 27 09:07:45 nerd-gw fstats: +CGREG 1 81E3 8FC48E8 Aug 27 09:13:55 nerd-gw fstats: +CGREG 1 81E3 8FC8F2E I still don't understand the link-level disconnects, but they're ...
Network problems: more insights
My network connectivity is getting better again, but it's clearly not perfect. The last two reconnects were: Aug 24 12:20:03 nerd-gw ppp[87396]: tun0: IPCP: IPADDR[6] changing address: 0.0.0.0 --> 118.209.122.167 Aug 25 16:42:27 nerd-gw ppp[87396]: tun0: IPCP: IPADDR[6] changing address: 0.0.0.0 --> 121.44.12.163 That's well over 24 hours, but more importantly, the addresses are located 1000 km apart: === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/10) ~ 138 -> host 118.209.122.167 167.122.209.118.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer ppp118-209-122-167.lns20.mel4.internode.on.net. === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/10) ~ 139 -> host 121.44.12.163 163.12.44.121.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer ppp121-44-12-163.lns20.syd6.internode.on.net.
Investigating the network disconnects
A couple more network disconnects today, becoming stable round midday. Probably things will be back to normal before the replacement modem from Internode arrives. But we discussed things on IRC, and with help I managed to find a little more information: the command AT+CREG=2 tells the modem to return status information when there is a change in registration: When <n>=2, and the cell information changes, the following will be reported: +CGREG: <stat>[,<lac>,<ci>] ... <stat>: 0 Not registered. The MS is not searching the new operators to be registered. 1 Local network is registered 2 Not registered.
Diganosing network problems
I had a number of disconnections of my HSPA network connection in the course of the day. I have a statistics page which is showing significant signs of neglect: the graphs no longer work, and the thought of debugging gnuplot scares me, so I've left it. It's not as if it helps much anyway: the amount of status information I get from this Huawei dongle is minimal, and I don't really detect disconnects well. As I write this, I have had the following reconnects: === root@nerd-gw (/dev/pts/3) ~ 16 -> grep "IPCP: myaddr" /var/log/ppp.log Aug 15 14:15:10 nerd-gw ppp[59859]: tun0: IPCP: myaddr 121.44.62.119 hisaddr = 10.1.0.1 Aug 21 06:49:36 nerd-gw ppp[59859]: tun0: IPCP: myaddr 118.209.86.244 hisaddr = 10.1.0.1 Aug 21 09:57:35 nerd-gw ppp[59859]: tun0: IPCP: myaddr 121.44.41.58 hisaddr = 10.1.0.1 Aug 23 11:02:55 nerd-gw ppp[59859]: tun0: IPCP: myaddr 121.44.104.207 hisaddr = ...
Bauhn 12MP Video camera
Yvonne takes a number of video clips with her Canon IXY 200F. They're nothing special, and only 640×480, so I was interested when this week's ALDI specials included a 12 Mega Pixel High Definition Video Camera for only $70. The great thing about ALDI is that I can return things if I don't like them, so I got Yvonne to pick one up. ALDI's technology things are a bit of a mixed bag. Some are good, some are not so good. Some are quite bad.
Installing conkeror
Jashank Jeremy asked me today if I had used conkeror, something I had never heard of. It proves to be an attempt to create a web browser with Emacs bindings. It's in the FreeBSD Ports Collection, so tried to install it. Not easy. First of all I need to find it. You'd expect it to be called www/conkeror, but no, for some reason it's called www/xpi-conkeror. Building it starts with the rather confusing message: conkeror is using libxul for gecko support, but you can change that by defining WITH_GECKO to the following values: libxul Doesn't that seem the wrong way round?
Open source rants: not just me
In the past couple of days I've had my attention drawn to a couple of rants about free software that I almost could have written myself. One of them was from an acknowledged Microsoft-centric person, and a number of people I talked to dismissed the article because of it. But despite his perspective he has a number of valid points. In his case, he was complaining that a specific Apache module, mod_rewrite. And its behaviour has changed between releases 2.2 and 2.4. The documentation doesn't tell him so, and the release notes are very vague about how he should recover from the problem.
More thoughts on power supplies
Peter Jeremy commented on yesterday's thoughts on power supplies. It seems that the 94%-96% efficiency applies only to the power factor correction. He pointed me at a certification site for power supplies with efficiencies over 80%. It's a bit difficult to navigate, and the legend for the tables is missing (or maybe just obscured by the markup errors): the last three columns only get displayed some of the time. But it appears to display the efficiencies at various loads, notably at 20% load. And the most efficient one is not quite 94% efficientat 20% load. There's a problem here, of course: all the el-cheapo power supplies are missing.
Power supplies: cheaper costs more?
The power supply fan on eureka.lemis.com (normal ATX) is getting noisy, and I'm considering replacing the power supply itself, which is now nearly 4 years old. Discussion on IRC: what to buy? eureka typically uses about 200 W, and I can get power supplies that deliver that (well, 460 W ) starting at $29. I can also spend up to $300. Why should I ever want to do that? Reliability might be one issue, but even the cheap ones last several years. If the $29 one lasts for 3 years, the one for $300 would have to last 30 years, by which time it would presumably be completely obsolete.
X bug: another lead?
Now that USB seems to be working better on eureka, tried inserting the card reader that never used to work, with an SDHC card in it. It does get recognized now, but X froze. I thought it had taken down the machine, but it proved to be another case of the dreaded mouse freeze. I wonder if it has something to do with the USB bus (the mouse is, of course, also connected via USB).
More scanner fun
More playing around with the scanner today, trying to get devd to recognize it correctly. Somehow I'm missing something here. In principle, this entry in /etc/devd.conf should do the trick: attach 100 { device-name "ugen.*"; match "vendor" "0x04b8"; match "product" "0x012a"; action "logger EPSON Scanner connected; chmod 666 /dev/$device-name"; }; But what I get is the output for the nomatch rule: Aug 18 10:27:18 eureka root: Unknown USB device: vendor 0x04b8 product 0x012a bus uhub7 Aug 18 10:27:18 eureka kernel: ugen5.7: <EPSON> at usbus5 I haven't found any documentation for the regular expression for the device ...
Scanner access: now easy!
Bram wrote a number of notes while he was here, conveniently on a document he couldn't leave with me, so I decided to scan it in. No problem, right? Wrong. It's on pain, my Microsoft laptop, and on starting the scanner program I got: This happened on attempting to start the scanner program. What does it mean? Where did it come from? I had used the scanner only this morning to scan the house plan, and since then the machine had only been suspended.
Chrome: three times no
Spent some time investigating why Chrome (or whatever it's called) didn't see my printers. Conveniently found this message on the xterm from which I had started it: 80520:209744896:3454719773244:ERROR:browser_main_loop.cc(157)] Gtk: IA__gtk_printer_is_accepting_jobs: assertion `GTK_IS_PRINTER (printer)' failed What does that mean? Still, it's an indication, and went searching for it. Finally came up with this bug report, closed as will not fix . Chrome wants a PDF printer and will accept no substitute. Potentially CUPS would do it, but that's another can of worms I don't want to open. So, echoing both some of the opinions expressed in the bug report and also Callum Gibson ( There are too many other things wrong with Chrome for me to use it.
technology, gardening
The Friends of the Ballarat Botanical Gardens have a machine for engraving plant labels such as this one: It had been sent for repair recently, and when it came back they couldn't get it to work. Came in after the General Meeting and took a look. There's a PC (Microsoft, of course) connected via the parallel port to an enormous interface box, and then by another cable to the engraver itself. Adele Thomas, the Engraver-in-Chief, showed me how to run the thing: basically the program prints to the Microsoft spooler, which talks to the interface box as a generic text printer.
Browser bugs
Finally got round to investigating the print mutilation bug in firefox that bit me last weekend. As I suspected at the time, it must be some configuration issue: I run multiple instances of firefox, all on the same system and from the same executable, and so far only one of them has shown the issue, though I haven't tried them all. So: off to look for about:config, a pseudo-URL that firefox doesn't honour when presented as a link, and found dozens of user set variables that I don't recall setting. Tried printing a page: success. The bug has gone into hiding.
TIFF panorama problems investigated
I was surprised by the poor results I got from using TIFF images for my panoramas on Saturday, and today I did yet more investigation. I had thought that I had had two different problems: one where the control point detector is all up in the sky, and one where they appeared to be OK, but the images were rotated. I concentrated on the latter one and found yes, some of the images were rotated, but I also had this up in the sky syndrome on others, where the control points were all in the sky and in the same place on the image, not related to what was represented there: ...
New pocket calculator
I first came in contact with electronic calculators at university, in about 1970. A huge thing from TI with Nixie tubes, so expensive that we only had one and had to share it. Only a few years later I got an HP 45, much smaller but also very expensive. Times have changed. A week or two ago I bought a small basic pocket calculator on eBay for $2.97, including postage. The days of expensive electronics are mainly gone. It arrived today, and it does the job (calculations in the kitchen). It even has sound for the key presses. But the documentation!
More TIFF processing
Spent much of today trying to process my panoramas, gaining more insight than success. Yes, the problems I had are clearly associated with processing TIFF images. Nearly all the 360° panoramas were badly broken, but using JPEG copies of the same images they worked fine. Here an example: The control point detectors found plenty of valid control points, but something caused Hugin to turn over some of the images, and I couldn't work out how to get it to accept the orientation: So I converted the images to JPEG, making no other changes, and things worked fine: ...
House photos: increasing the pain
Gradually I've got into a routine with my weekly panoramic photos of the garden ( house photos ), so clearly it's time to change things. My routine involves taking the partial images in raw format, converting them to JPEG with DxO Optics Pro , and then stitching them with Hugin. But today it occurred to me that it doesn't make sense to use JPEG for the intermediate steps: both DxO and Hugin understand TIFF, so I should convert my intermediate images to TIFF. The results remind me of the adage: for every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, elegant ... and wrong.
The revenge of firefox
Now that I have my printer running, it seemed to make sense to print out the real estate web pages I had been looking at. The result was abysmal: How can firefox possibly make such a mess? I've seen it before, and it seems to be some setting, but which? I can't find anything obvious, and it's not clear how firefox should have code in it to make this much of a mess in the first place.
Firefox: where's the documentation?
I've been using firefox for nearly 8 years, and I've been complaining about it for just as long. Why do I even bother? To misquote Jawaharlal Nehru, firefox is good. I say this because other systems are worse . Today I received mail from Volkan Yazici suggesting that I listen to Radio Swiss Classic. OK, select that and get the well-known question: OK, that's simple: click on Browse and type in the name of the helper application. But the latest version of firefox wants to save me the trouble of using the keyboard, and it gives me this window: This window was never good, but ...
Alternatives to DxO
I've been using DxO Optics Pro for raw image conversion for over 6 months now. It seems to do its job well, but at a completely unacceptable lack of speedup to 3 minutes per image. Recently Phase One have had a special offer on their Capture One software, so I thought I'd try it out. Like most photo processing software, it seems, there's a free trialin this case, two months with unrestricted use. I wonder how many people just reinstall every two months. In any case, the installation went smoothly, and once again I was presented with a grey tiled environment.
Google Translate: not Google Maps
Somebody pointed me to an interesting article today. The Malaysian constitution has an interesting clause that gives specific rights only to the Malays, one of many ethnic and religious groups in Malaysia. This has given rise to a certain amount of ethnic and religious tension, and in view of the increasingly radical nature of Islam it's nice to see a more balanced attitude from a Malay: Remember what Islam has instilled in you, not what Muslims have told you. The bio of the author was written in Malay, a language I once thought I understood.
Repairing laser printers
My old Brother HL2700-CN colour laser printer hasn't worked for years: it had extreme paper feed problems. That's a typical problem for devices without tractors, of course, but getting it repaired even looked at would have cost me a minimum of $80, and that was more than the price of a new black-and-white printer, so two years ago I bought one. Now that one has run out of toner, and of course a full toner cartridge costs more than a new printer, so here I am again. I'd like the flexibility of duplex colour printing, and the prices are now down to as low as $250 or so.
Bad time to track -CURRENT
For various reasons I still hadn't got swamp, my FreeBSD 10-CURRENT box, up to date. Today I finally managed it. Booted and got... panic: _mtx_lock_sleep: recursed on non-recursive mutex em0 @ /src/FreeBSD/svn/head/sys/dev/e1000/if_lem.c:881 And for some reason kgdb can't read the dump properly: Reading symbols from /boot/kernel/linux.ko...Reading symbols from /boot/kernel/linux.ko.symbols...done. done. Loaded symbols for /boot/kernel/linux.ko kgdb: kvm_read: invalid address (0x354540a) #0 0x00000000 in ?? () (kgdb) bt #0 0x00000000 in ?? () (kgdb) That should have given me a backtrace of the process that paniced.
X still hanging
You can never prove the absence of a bug, right, just the presence? I had been wondering how to decide whether the recent changes to my X configuration fixed the hangs that I have been having. Now I have proof, unfortunately: it happened again today, not once, but twice. How do I debug this kind of problem?
VirtualBox hangs and phantom processes
The make buildworld I started last night on swamp, one of my virtual machines, still hadn't finished this morning. It proved that the machine had hung. On further investigation, it wasn't the virtual machine itself but the host environment. I had to shoot down the entire VirtualBox system and restart. And then it happened again some hours later! What's wrong here? And how do I debug it? That wasn't the only strangeness I had today. Last night's backup failed because the backup disk was already mounted. But why? Tried umounting it, but something had it open: === root@eureka (/dev/pts/11) ~ 123 -> umount /backups/ umount: unmount of /backups failed: Device busy === root@eureka (/dev/pts/11) ~ 124 -> lsof /backups/ lsof: WARNING: compiled for FreeBSD release 8.3-PRERELEASE; this is 9.0-STABLE.
Reviving FreeBSD build boxen
It's about time I committed some changes to FreeBSD, and as a prerequisite for that I need a separate build box. In the good old days I used old computers, but now we have virtual machines, and some time ago I created a few of them. I use them happily enough for Microsoft, but for some reason all three of my FreeBSD boxen wouldn't boot. The problems were only marginally related. swamp came up, but I couldn't log in. When I tried, I got the message: login: root pam_nologin.so: no pam_sm_authenticate() pam_sm_authenticate(): unexpected return value 4 Login incorrect login: What's that?
Optus outage didn't just hit me
Peter Jeremy pointed me at a newpaper article today: it seems I wasn't the only person hit by the network outage. They don't go into great detail, but the fact that it affected mainly postpaid customers suggests that it's something to do with authentication, which fits my problem description. The negotiation died just at the point where I should have received an IP address. Looking at what I got for the previous connection, I see: Jul 19 14:48:42 cojones ppp[89600]: tun0: IPCP: myaddr 121.44.75.9 hisaddr = 10.1.0.1 Looking at the reverse DNS, I see: 9.75.44.121.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer ppp121-44-75-9.lns20.syd6.internode.on.net.
More upgrade pain
More playing around with FreeBSD inside VirtualBox today. Upgraded the virtual defake to the latest 9.1-BETA kernel and... it wouldn't boot. They've recently done a dirty trick and changed the name of the disk driver, so the boot disk became /dev/ada0 instead of /dev/ad0. The loader had no difficulty loading the kernel, but then the entries in /etc/fstab were wrong, and the root mount failed. That's OK: the loader enables you to tell it where the root file system is: mountroot> ufs:/dev/ada0s1a But that didn't work: Trying to mount root from ufs:/dev/ada0s1a []...
Interpreting Sipura dial plans
Calling Internode involved a small problem: I was downloading a CD image, and couldn't use VoIP. How do I get an outside line with the dial plan that I got for my SPA 3000 from MyNetFone? It reads: (*xx.|000S0<:@gw0>|121S0|151S0|181S0|[2-9]xxxxxxxS0|0[23478]xxxxxxxxS0|0011xxx.|1800xxxxxxS0<:@gw0>|1300xxxxxxS0|13[1-9]xxxS0|<#0,:>xxx.<:@gw0>|xxx.) And of course, there's very little help interpreting what this means, not even in the documentation. I have a link to a Dial Plan Parser, but it didn't help very much.
More network pain
Last night, just before going to bed, our network connection dropped. This happens from time to time, but this time it was different. The (wireless) link was reestablished, at least part of the authentication succeeded, but then... nothing. I couldn't be bothered last night, and hoped that it would clear up by the morning. It didn't. But when I restarted the ppp process, it came up immediately. So some error that ppp didn't think worth retrying. Reading ppp.log is a real pain. It's verbose and repetitive, and the meaning of some of the messages is really difficult to interpret. But now I have a log of the failure and a log of a successful connection, so I can compare them.
X and backups
I back up my machines religiously every night using a cron job. And I at least skim the output every morning to ensure that nothing went wrong. Or so I thought. Today, with the help of my X loop bug, I managed to blow apart a virtual machine disk. A clear case for restoring the disk from backups. And then I discovered my backups hadn't run for about 2 weeks. No messages in /var/log/cron. Entry in /etc/crontab OK. And you don't need to run crontab for /etc/crontab; cron checks the timestamp and re-reads automatically. So what went wrong? The timestamp! I had copied the file from dereel to eureka, using the -p (preserve permissions and timestamps) option, so it was still dated October last year.
enblend performance revisited
Yesterday I noted what appeared to be a 60-fold increase in the speed of enblend, but I wasn't quite comparing the same thing. In fact, not only did the panorama I took at the beginning of last month have more images: it was also much larger, in fact about 170 megapixels (26046×13023). So today I tried restitching it. That gave quite a different picture: enblend took nearly 58 minutes, still only about 20% of the time it took in 32 bits last month. The reason was clear: it had more memory to play with, and it used as much as it could get.
More DxO bugs
I've already commented on a bugfeature of DxO Optics Pro : if the EXIF data of the input image is changed in any wayeven in valid waysit may ignore it completely. In my case, I had put my name in the Author tag. There's a clear workaround there, one that makes sense anyway: don't put the Author tag in the raw file, just in the output JPEG. DxO will even do this for you, though I haven't found a way to get it to store the values, so I have to reenter them every time I start it; it's easier to use my script afterwards.
Full 64 bit Hugin
It's taken me over 2 weeks to get my Hugin installation to work correctly with 64 bit executables. That's a good thing too: the 32 bit version of enblend maxes out with a process size of 3 GB, and that's not enough for some of my panoramas. Today I experienced some of the largest memory footprints I've ever seen: PID USERNAME THR PRI NICE SIZE RES STATE C TIME WCPU COMMAND 86087 grog 1 108 5 5184M 2141M CPU0 3 4:21 100.00% enblend 87523 grog 20 103 0 8591M 3778M CPU2 2 12:20 102.25% java The most interesting thing, though, was the processing time.
Wine under amd64
One of the problems about my migration to FreeBSD amd64 that I knew about in advance is that wine doesn't work. And that's annoying, because I use it to run Ashampoo photo optimizer in my photo processing. The idea was to use a virtual machine instead. But one problem that I hadn't expected with virtual machines is that startup and shutdown isn't instantaneous. It can take up to a minute in a manner reminiscent of this cartoon: By contrast, wine does fire up essentially instantaneously, like any other program. But I can't even run it across the network because the performance goes to hell.
amd64 conversion pain not over
It's been over two weeks since I migrated to FreeBSD amd64, and I still have a long list of things that need fixing. Today managed to wedge the X server againhow I wish that would go awayand again had difficulty starting it. Then I discovered that my Emacs geometry problem, which I thought had gone away, is still with me. It seems that I didn't test it very well before. And somehow startx without parameters now wants to start server 1 instead of server 0. Why should that be?
The new enblendfinally!
My remaining problems with the enblend version 4 port related to the outdated version of texinfo that we have in the base FreeBSD source distribution. Investigating the subversion logs showed that it had been updated regularly up to about 7 years ago, and then nothing. On the other hand, we have a newer version in the Ports Collection. Why? Sent a message to the project mailing list and got a clear answer: about 7 years ago texinfo changed its license to the GPL Version 3, which is incompatible with the BSD license, so we could no longer include it in the base system.
enblend build problems: solved
Sent mail to the Hugin group today about the enblend build problems. Quickly got a reply pointing me at the Arch Linux repository with patches that look right. But why are they there and not in the enblend repository? It seems that they have been added to the repository, but only in the development version, and there's nothing at all on the site to point at the problem.
Hugin's linefind
My experiments with Hugin's linefind program haven't been very positive so far, so today I tried one panorama both ways, with and without linefind. The results weren't encouraging: without linefind, I had an average error of 0.9 pixels and a maximum of 2.8. With linefind those values increased to 1.6 and 18.8. And the results? Conveniently it lost the cropping, so these two images (first without, then with linefind) don't quite match: One thing's clear, though: the first image (without linefind) has better verticals.
The new enblend revisited
Photo day again today, and managed to take my panoramas with no particular problems. Yes, smart (the virtual Microsoft machine on eureka) is even slower than braindeath, but of course I was able to spread the processing across both machines, with the result that my first processing step was done somewhat faster. And then I ran into trouble stitching the equirectangular panoramas: enblend: info: loading next image: X00-230009.tif 1/1 enblend: out of memory enblend: std::bad_alloc enblend: info: remove invalid output image "X00-23.tif" gmake: *** [X00-23.tif] Error 1 That was despite allocating 3.5 GB of memory for the process, something it didn't come close to using.
bash: broken for 18 months
The other bug that I found yesterday was the completion issue with bash. Callum Gibson went off into the web and came back with a number of references indicating that it was introduced about 18 months ago, people agree that it is a bug, and nobody is doing anything obvious about it. This message probably sums it up. It's a sad day when such a central piece of software can have a bug of this magnitude for this long. But then, who uses shells any more? The web browser is the way to go, and they're all riddled with bugs.
PHP: What to complain about
Finally bit the bullet today and started work on a replacement for the phpMyEdit deep freeze list. It's been a while since I've done this, and I spent sometime looking in vain for an example. Finally I took the most likely candidate and went off to the PHP manual web site, which told me thatof coursethe MySQL interface I was using is deprecated. I should choose mysqli or PDO_MySQL. Did some reading about that and came to the conclusion that there wasn't much in it. So what interfaces did I have compiled in? That's in /var/db/ports/php5-extensions/options. And none of the interfaces were installed.
More PHP pain
Everywhere I go I find more fallout from decisions made in the latest version of PHP. As planned yesterday, got hold of the latest version of phpMyEdit and installed it. Ran the script phpMyEditSetup.php and got: Notice: Undefined index: db in /usr/local/www/data/phpMyEdit-5.7.1/phpMyEditSetup.php on line 65 Notice: Undefined index: tb in /usr/local/www/data/phpMyEdit-5.7.1/phpMyEditSetup.php on line 66 And that was all. For whatever reason, the generated page ended there. Tried again on dereel, still running the old version of PHP, and that worked. So I moved the generated file (freezer.php) to eureka and tried it there.
FreeBSD amd64: into the second week
The good news about my migration to FreeBSD amd64 is that it's almost over. Things are running more or less smoothly, and now I can address the things that I needed amd64 for in the first place. Yesterday I established that smart, a virtual Microsoft XP machine on eureka, was actually significantly slower than braindeath. Discussing it on IRC today, established that yes, Microsoft XP is multiprocessor-capable if it's installed that way, and that's the way it's installed on braindeath, which appears to have hyperthreading. That also confirmed that DxO Optics Pro uses both CPUs , so it was worthwhile investigating the situation on smart.
Migrating from braindeath
One of the reasons I wanted to move to FreeBSD amd64 was to have enough memory to run VirtualBox machines big enough for programs like DxO Optics Pro . Up to now the biggest memory I could get for smart, a Microsoft XP image, was about 800 MB. Today I tried again, once again running into problems with out of date driverswhy doesn't portupgrade upgrade them? But apart from that, everything went smoothly, and I was able to get up to 3.5 GB of memory. Installed the latest version of DxO and ran it. How much faster? The old machine has a 2.8 GHz Pentium D with 2 GB of memory.
Window manager bugs
Another issue I had with Hugin was the inability to drag the image in the fast preview Move tab. I had heard that it was a window manager bug, but that seemed unlikely. Still, it was worth checking, especially since there's an outstanding bug report against fluxbox reporting output from xev. I was able to reproduce it here with the 64 bit version of fvwm2. Without a window manager, or with the 32 bit version of fvwm2, a mouse click and release give the following events: ButtonPress event, serial 27, synthetic NO, window 0x8400004, root 0x501, subw 0x0, time 327962631, (115,111), root:(922,132), state 0x0, button 1, same_screen YES ButtonRelease event, serial 27, synthetic NO, window 0x8400004, root 0x501, subw 0x0, time 327962783, (115,111), root:(922,132), state 0x100, button 1, same_screen YES But with ...
Hugin and VirtualBox
Continued trying to get Hugin working on FreeBSD amd64 today, and with the help of the mailing lists finally made the breakthrough. The original problems (mainly crashing) have gone away. The single row panoramas that I had tried had worked, and the only problem I had was with the verandah centre panorama. While looking around, discovered that there is, indeed, good documentation for the control point detectors, where you'd expect it: Help. It fires up a web browser (how does it know which one?) with relatively complete documentation of the parameters, including the information for cpfind that should use the --multirow option unless you're doing big panoramas.
Still more migration issues
On with my various experiments with the FreeBSD amd64 migration today. The biggest discovery was how to find 32 bit shared libraries. I had already discovered that ldconfig ignores files with specific names, but that appears to be a bug in ldconfig. In any case, using the old (probably deprecated ) environment variable LD_32_LIBRARY_PATH works, so now I can run all my old 32 bit programs like kklondike and my version of xearth. More importantly, though, I can run the 32 bit versions of the Hugin programs.
ldconfig problems
One of the alternate possibilities I had while trying to solve the Hugin problem was to run the 32 bit binaries on eureka. For that, of course, you need the libraries, and they need to be located with ldconfig. Tried that, and for some reason it refused to accept the library /dereel/usr/local/lib/hugin: === root@eureka (/dev/pts/13) /home/grog 7 -> ldconfig -32 /dereel/usr/local/lib/hugin/ === root@eureka (/dev/pts/13) /home/grog 8 -> ldconfig -32 -r /var/run/ld-elf32.so.hints: search directories: /dereel/usr/local/lib/hugin/ There are 9 libraries in that directory, and (not surprisingly) hugin requires them all: === root@eureka (/dev/pts/13) /home/grog 9 -> l /dereel/usr/local/lib/hugin/ total 11 -rwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 122076 Jul 28 2011 libceleste.so.0.0 -rwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 24252 Jul 28 2011 libflann_cpp.so -rwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 9279544 ...
Getting Hugin to work on amd64
Spent nearly all day trying to get Hugin to work, with only moderate progress. The first issue was to install the latest version of Hugin, so checked that out and once again ran into this problem with tclap, compounded by the problem that I didn't understand where cmake was looking for the files. In the end gave up and unpacked them into /usr/include/tclap, a suboptimal place. But at least it should keep the builds quiet until I get it right. There is also a new dependency on SWIG, which was relatively trivial to fix. After that, tried again. No change. The first problem was just finding out why cpfind crashed: it logged to a window that disappeared as soon as it crashed, so there was no way to know what went wrong.
Chasing the hugin bugs
After the double reboot, at least I can now display the Hugin screens on eureka, and I confirmed that the trick with the two mouse buttons works. Spent some time investigating the strange behaviour of panomatic, which seems non-deterministic. In one case I found that it had put control points nowhere near each other (for example, one at the top of the image, the other at the bottom): Not only that: it claimed that the control points were very close to each other.
amd64 migration: the agony
So I more or less have FreeBSD amd64 running, but there are significant problems with Hugin, compounded by compatibility problems running the nvidia driver on dereel. After doing a couple of panoramas on Yvonne's machine lagoon, realized that I had a laptop with functional X on the desk to the right in my office. It is usually called pain when it runs Microsoft, but it also has a FreeBSD system, eucla, on the disk, so booted that, and sure enough, it worked. Problems: tiny 1024×768 display, and also the confusing names. I now have systems eureka (main machine) and eucla (laptop), not to mention the old echunga.
amd64 migration: even worse than feared
On with the migration to FreeBSD amd64 (64 bit version) today. It wasn't easy. I had expected the transition not to be smooth, but I had never expected it to be this bad. Much of it was related to photo processing, the reason that I started the migration in the first place. I had noticed that the 64 bit version of Hugin had problems that didn't occur on the 32 bit version, and sent mail to the mailing list. One of the replies suggested that this is a known issue that also occurs on Mac OS X, so maybe something will come of that.
Continued migration
On with my migration to FreeBSD amd64 today. A couple of mount problems on other machines because I had moved the file systems /src and /Photos from dereel to eureka, but nothing serious. The real problem was the weather software: it needed recompilation, after which it ran for a while. And then, after some other tweaks, it failed with a missing MySQL library. I had to compile it again. Where did the library go? But that wasn't the end of it. The weather station connects via USB, and the USB bus on dereel is dead. So I had to move the database to eureka.
amd64: biting the bullet
Today marks 14 months since I started planning to upgrade dereel, my main system, to a 64 bit version of FreeBSD. During that time I've always found reasons to procrastinate: the pain of migration is just too much, and it would be difficult to move back if something goes catastrophically wrong. But I've gradually come round to the idea of running a 32 bit machine and a 64 bit machine in parallel until it's done. And today I finally took the plunge, in the process taking both machines out into the garage and dislodging prodigious quantities of dust with a jet of compressed air.
More backup and migration problems
Into the office this morning to find the photo backup disk not flashing. Further investigation revealed: x Photos/grog/20111103/orig/PB036725.ORF x Photos/grog/20111103/orig/PB036731.ORFtar: Photos/grog/20111103/orig/PB036731.ORF: Read error: Permission denied tar: Photos/grog/20111103/orig/PB036713.jpg: Cannot stat: Permission denied tar: Photos/grog/20111103/orig/PB036715.jpg: Cannot stat: Permission denied tar: Photos/grog/20111103/orig/PB036732.JPG: Cannot stat: Permission denied I've seen that before, and I've blamed NFS. But looking more carefully, this is tar x (extraction, as the leading x shows). And of course there were no permission problems. What's causing this? In any case, it required me to continue with rsync. And then I discovered: === grog@defake (/dev/pts/1) ~ 57 -> df -i /Photos /photobackup Filesystem 1048576-blocks Used Avail Capacity iused ifree %iused Mounted on dereel:/Photos 1907196 1270951 617173 67% 450675 ...
jQuery extended attribute: a possibility?
This evening Jashank Jeremy pointed me to a HTML5 working draft titled Embedding custom non-visible data with the data-* attributes . That looks surprisingly like what I'm already doing with the lazy loading code I'm working on at the moment. As I thought, it seems to be a good idea. And it seems that it works already, so there's no reason not to accept something like that, even if the naming restrictions seem a little bizarre.
X font hell
For some time I've had difficulties with Wikipedia fonts. A typical example is this, from the article on Archaeopteryx: That etymology is supposed to be in a Greek font, but only the À in the second word is correct. The rest looks nothing like Greek. I've seen this before, and I assumed that it's incorrect fonts that are the problem.
Don't trust USB disks, part 2
I back up my photo disk separately from other data. There's lots of it, it's incompressible, and it makes sense to have a mountable file system. I keep two copies, one of which is always at Chris Yeardley's house in case of larger catastrophe. One of the disks has a USB enclosure; the other had one until it died (under warranty) last year, and MSY still haven't managed to replace it. Today I mounted the disk with the enclosure on lagoon, Yvonne's computer, using USB.
Don't trust USB disks, part 1
Into the office this morning to discover my backup disk LED flashing. After further investigation discovered that the monthly level 0 dump was still running after 11 hours. And still further investigation showed: Jun 26 11:17:37 dereel kernel: da0 at umass-sim0 bus 0 scbus5 target 0 lun 0 Jun 26 11:17:37 dereel kernel: da0: <ST310005 28AS > Fixed Direct Access SCSI-2 device Jun 26 11:17:37 dereel kernel: da0: 1.000MB/s transfers Jun 26 11:17:37 dereel kernel: da0: 953869MB (1953525168 512 byte sectors: 255H 63S/T 121601C) After the last connection, for no obvious reason, the disk had been detected as a 1 MB/s device.
Email: in a bind
Yvonne came to me this evening with a mail message that had bounced: This is the mail system at host dereel.lemis.com. I'm sorry to have to inform you that your message could not be delivered to one or more recipients. It's attached below. ... <chris@narrowin.com>: Host or domain name not found. Name service error for name=localhost type=A: Host not found Huh? localhost not found? Went to dereel and checked. Of course localhost was there. === grog@dereel (/dev/pts/6) ~ 19 -> host localhost localhost.lemis.com has address 127.0.0.1 But I couldn't bounce the message either: Jul 1 19:34:04 dereel postfix/smtp[77480]: D5E55DA856: to=<chris@narrowin.com>, relay=none, delay=457, delays=457/0.01/0/0, dsn=5.4.4, status=bounced (Host or domain name not found.
File hiding with Microsoft
One of my continual rants about the Microsoft space is that the file system hierarchy has been chopped apart and pasted onto windows. How do I find the window? Simple, it's on the screen in front of you. Oh, it isn't? Well, we have nifty search tools for you that will find all files matching specific broad attributes within a matter of minutes. Today I had the issue: I wanted to scan something, for which I currently still need to use pain, my Microsoft laptop. After installation it came with a popup asking me where to store the image. A while back, that got on my nerves, so I disabled it.
Improving the lazy load
It's clear that my lazy load code still leaves a lot to be desired. While looking at the issues, discovered that the pages I am now generating severely upset the W3 validator, in particular the data-original attribute. I'm not sure how to handle this. On the one hand, HTML prescribes specific attributes for each tag, and others aren't allowed. On the other hand, JavaScript not only allows them: it appears to make sense. To find out how to resolve the issue, I at least need to learn more about JavaScript and jQuery. Tried that and decided that my own PHP functions were too untidy, and spent some time trying to make them easier to understand.
Tablets: the down side for non-users
Earlier this week I returned the Android tablet to ALDI without even trying some of the features: it's so not for me that I couldn't be bothered. And the basic disadvantage (no keyboard) is so basic that I don't see myself trying another. But that doesn't mean that tablet pain is over. A few months back I took to adding this line to my .sig: Sent from my desktop computer. That was a direct reference to other messages I receive with the text: Sent from my iPad Note lack of full stop at the end of the sentence.
More lazy load stuff
The lazy loading of images was quite successful, but invariably there were issues. Peter Jeremy uses links, a lynx-like web browser with some graphics functionality. It doesn't do JavaScript, of course, so it was a good test for the code I wrote. It failed: The intention is that the image on the left (clearly a placeholder while I find something more amusing) should be replaced by the one on the right when it is loaded. But links showed both.
Lazy loading photos
My diary and other web pages contain a large number of photos, and they're generally larger than those on the average web page. This makes itself noticeable when loading diary pages for previous months: even the thumbnail images add up to several MB of data. That's particularly silly when I include a link like this one, which doesn't include many images. Nevertheless, the whole 5 MB or so of thumbnails gets loaded. This page is for the whole month of March 2011, and it's 5800 lines long. Clearly what's needed is to only load the images if they are to be displayed.
Microwave oven race condition
We have a Panasonic NN-ST666W microwave oven, now about 5 years old. When it's finished, it signals the fact with 5 loud beeps in 1 second intervals. Long ago I discovered that I could silence it if I pressed the Reset button during that time. Over the years, I've made a game of trying to hit Reset exactly when the first beep starts. It's not easy: hit even a small fraction of a second too early, and it stops counting down. Hit too late and you get a longer beep. Today, finally, I got it exactly on the end. And it reset the time of day clock!
USB stick recovery: the wrong way
Last night David Yeardley gave me a USB stick which Microsoft recognized, but which it didn't mount. At the very least probably some kind of data corruption. So I took it with me to see if I could recover it. Started off by putting it in dereel, my main machine. I should know better; I've had difficulties in this area before with that machine, which seems to have strangenesses in the USB subsystem. I had them again today. Somehow errors on one USB device affect the entire disk subsystem, and the machine gradually ground to a halt. Left it rebooting and moved on to lagoon, Yvonne's machine.
ImageMagick strangenesses
Part of the photographic processing was documenting things, of course. The comparison images I did of the Hugin fast panorama preview required cropping. For them to work right, they had to be exactly the same crop. Fine, that's what ImageMagick is for. And, not for the first time, I had the devil's own job to get it to crop the way I wanted. Somehow ImageMagick thinks differently from me. In principle, I wanted a 400×330 crop, so I entered: === grog@dereel (/dev/pts/10) ~/Photos/20120623 23 -> convert pano-preview-1.gif -crop 400x330+1190+400 pano-preview-1-detail.gif But, as the documentation tells you if you bother to read it, that doesn't change the size of the canvas, and you end up with a big, empty image with a small crop visible.
Elect a brainless spammer!
Received unusual spam today: Friend -- Iâ¬"m Andy Miller, campaign manager for Joe â¬SThe Plumberâ¬\\235 Wurzelbacher, who is running for Congress in Ohioâ¬"s 9th district. They say competition is good for everyone, so how about a friendly competition to see who wants a 15-term, far-left liberal out of office the most? Because thatâ¬"s exactly what weâ¬"re doing! Render badly? Yes, that seems to be deliberate. Look at the markup, in particular the nested <strong> tags with no displayable content: <meta content="text/html; charset=windows-1252" http-equiv="Content-Type" /> Friend -- <strong><strong><br /><br /></strong></strong>Iâ¬"m Andy Miller, campaign manager for Joe â¬SThe Plumberâ¬\235 Wurzelbacher, who is running for Congress in Ohioâ¬"s 9th district.
Android keyboard access
I've pretty much given up on this Android tablet. A couple of days ago I downloaded an eBook to it, only to discover that the PDF browser can't display images. In general, it doesn't do very much that I find useful, and the inability to load software on it makes it pretty much useless. But today, while looking for a lost microSD card, I found some accessories for it, in particular a USB adapter suitable for connecting a USB keyboard to the device. Tried it out, and surprise! it worked. And the browser even understands things like the Home and End keys.
OED access made easy
Years ago I bought a copy of the Oxford English Dictionary, which I still use frequently. As I observed at the time of purchase, It is very expensive. Even at the discounted price I found, it cost me over US $200. That makes it one of the most expensive CD-ROMs around. It is supplied with a browser for Microsoft only. It seems to be impossible to access it except via the browser. I never regretted the purchase. The once-off price is no longer a concern, but using Microsoft and a particularly emetic interface is.
Excel spreadsheets: enough!
So downloading the Friends' membership database as an Excel spreadsheet works, but the column widths are wrong. How do I fix that? Spent some time investigating Microsoft's web site and discovered enormous amounts of documentation, something I hadn't expected. Downloaded the Excel Binary File Format (.xls) Structure Specification and only then discovered that it was 40 MB in size and 1183 pages in length, probably the longest technical document I have ever seen. Is that complexity necessary? To play around a bit, downloaded the spreadsheet to dereel, where it didn't try to view it with Excel , and discovered that it was a tab-delimited document.
More friends computer stuff
Mail from Raoul Dixon today with some surprising information. Over the past couple of weeks I have done a significant amount of work to put the Friends of the Ballarat Botanical Gardens membership database online (and password protected, of course) and create mailing lists for various categories of members. And now I discover that he had given Genevieve a memory stick with an Excel spreadsheet of the membership list on it so that she could extract the email addresses. Somehow old habits die hard. He enclosed a copy of the spreadsheet in his message, which showed what could be expected: he had been maintaining his spreadsheet, but not the canonical database, and they were significantly out of sync.
Lost photo scare
Watching TV in the evening, I wanted to check on a photo I took of the mosque in Herat 45 years ago. And there were no photos! Further checks showed that they were there, but the list of directories had become corrupted. I keep the list with RCS, and a quick comparison showed me that the entries had got lost somewhere between revision 1.2800 and the current revision 1.2878. A binary search with diff finally found: === grog@dereel (/dev/pts/8) ~/public_html/photos 107 -> rcsdiff -wur1.2824 -r1.2825 dirlist | grep ^- > foo === grog@dereel (/dev/pts/8) ~/public_html/photos 108 -> wc -l foo 334 foo That tallied with the log, of course: === grog@dereel (/dev/pts/8) ~/public_html/photos 108 -> rlog dirlist | less ...
FreeBSD web browser pain
FreeBSD doesn't have it easy with web browsers. Yes, there are versions of all major free browsers for FreeBSD, but plugins are a completely different matter. Things tend to go something like this: To display the content, a plugin is needed. Shall I download it for you? . Yes . (Time passes) Sorry, I could not find a plugin for you . Most plugins can be installed with some effort: they're all individual ports, usually of the Linux plugins, in the Ports Collection, but the annoying thing is that this kind of interaction frequently doesn't tell you which plugin you need. In this case, though, it did: I didn't have Adobe flash support on teevee, my TV computer.
Google Maps: the pain
Yesterday's diary included a number of Google Maps to illustrate my point. Getting them in there wasn't easy. Yes, you can click on the and get HTML to embed, but it doesn't work. There are instructions online that tell you exactly the same thing. But what you get isn't quite what you expect. Here the screenshot that, in desperation, I finally used, and then the generated HTML: View Larger Map Following the View Larger Map link gives a map that does include the entire route.
SD card problems
While in Melbourne yesterday I took a photo of the new façade of Fleischer's with my old Nikon “Coolpix” L1. Reading it in today with my Apple, I got a message I hadn't expected: === grog@boskoop (/dev/ttyp9) ~ 3 -> mkdir Photos/20120612 === grog@boskoop (/dev/ttyp9) ~ 4 -> cp -p NIKON/DSCN0427.JPG Photos/20120612 cp: NIKON/DSCN0427.JPG: Argument list too long NIKON is a symlink to /Volumes/128MB/DCIM/100NIKON, the directory on the SD card where the images are stored. Further investigation showed that I could copy all the other images in the directory, just not that one.
Trust your GPS navigator!
We had a number of other destinations in Melbourne, so I let the navigator work out the best route. It chose Carba-Tec in Springvale, and suggested a route. 28 km, 38 minutes, closely resembling this Google Map: But David had been there before, and he had a different route: Google calculates that one as 40 km and 50 minutes.
Android tablet: some insights
I've more or less given up on this Android tablet, but I did some final checking and found this thread about it on Whirlpool. It's surprising how many people really dislike it for reasons that didn't worry me, but they did confirm that these Error -101 messages were due to Google Play and not to the tablet in itself. Maybe they'll fix it, but it seems that a large number of purchasers will have given the tablets back by then. I'm in no hurry, so I'll contact ALDI when I have time.
Checking facts
Talking to Yvonne about the orphaned Home and End keys this afternoon, and demonstrated my claim that firefox doesn't Do The Right Thing with those keys. I failed: it now does! Home takes you to the top of the page, and End to the bottom, just as I would expect. Further experimentation showed that it works on all browsers that I tried, with the exception of course of the Android. I wonder how long that has been going on, or whether it had something to do with the Northgate keyboards I used to use.
More Android fun
Tried a little bit more with the Android tablet. When I came into the office, I had a tcpdump running which showed me continual: 08:49:58.560381 ARP, Request who-has dereel.lemis.com tell flachmann.lemis.com, length 46 08:50:07.211430 ARP, Request who-has cojones.lemis.com tell flachmann.lemis.com, length 46 08:50:07.211457 ARP, Reply cojones.lemis.com is-at 00:10:dc:59:7f:6a (oui Unknown), length 28 08:50:07.211688 IP flachmann.lemis.com.dls-monitor > 10.0.0.1.http: UDP, length 7 08:50:07.280238 IP lns1.syd6.internode.on.net > flachmann.lemis.com: ICMP host 10.0.0.1 unreachable - admin prohibited filter, length 36 flachmann is the tablet, and cojones the Internet gateway. This was while it was suspended.
Getting apps for Android
After establishing that the built-in PDF reader on the Android tablet was sub-optimal, went looking for something else on the web. The first attempt brought me to this viewer, which, as they say, is in beta status and very slow. I can confirm that. Not what I'm looking for. Where's the Adobe offering? Another search then pointed me at Google Play. If I needed any confirmation that this tablet is a toy, this seems to supply some of it. So I tried that. First, I had to log in with my Google account. Since this tablet is going to be returned, I chose to add a new account.
Keyboard navigation through the years
My experiments with the Android tablet got me thinking. When I first came into contact with computers, a keyboard was effectively a (tele)typewriter keyboard. In the 1970s CRT monitors came into use, and keyboards gradually acquired keys to navigate the screen. In 1981, the IBM 5150 had the keys we still see on modern keyboards: 4 arrow keys, PageUp, PageDown, Home and End. The cursor keys still work. PageUp and PageDown do sometimes too, though programs like firefox don't always do what I would expect. And it seems that people have forgotten about Home and End altogether. Look at all those web pages with a link top of page .
More Android experience
The more I look at this Android tablet, the more I realize it's not for me. There are two separate aspects: most importantly, the whole idea of interacting with a device by rubbing my fingers over its surface disagrees with me for a number of reasons. In addition, this particular tablet seems to be a poor representative of its kind. The real issue remains the manner of interfacing with it. The most obvious problem is the lack of keyboard, though it goes beyond that. A couple of days ago I wrote that using a touch screen keyboard is 10 times slower than a real keyboard.
Android tablet: more experience
Spent a fair amount of time playing with the Android tablet today. I'm no closer to making friends with it. The small size is about the only good thing about it, and without a keyboard I find it extremely frustrating to use. It's certainly not helped by the fact that I can only get the touch screen to respond when I touch it with my finger. A stylus has no effect. It seems that the screen is capacitative and requires a larger object. I had thought that I was selecting by touching (only) with my fingernail, but it seems it was sensing my finger and giving unexpected results.
Android tablet: first impressions
Yvonne went shopping today and brought back an Android tablet which was on special at ALDI this week. It had only been on sale for a couple of hours, but she had to try all 3 shops to find the very last one available. Why do I want an Android tablet? Why, do I want an Android tablet? I don't know, but ALDI will give me two months to find out. The price is less than that of any laptop, and it might be just what we need in the kitchen to look up the contents of the deep freeze or display a recipe, and it has a 1024×768 display that would potentially be more suited to reading e-books than the dedicated E-book readers.
Viewing large images: an alternative
Callum Gibson was interested by the problems viewing my 440 MP JPEG images. They crashed web browsers, and even the old xv program had memory pressure with them. Callum discovered nip2, part of VIPS, which does much better. The interface appears strange, but I haven't explored it much yet. It certainly handles the big images well. Here's a comparison of memory usage for the three programs I've tried on the 56 MB image: Program Memory ...
More Friends computer stuff
Into town today to visit the Friends of the Ballarat Botanical Gardens. Chris Yeardley has done a design experiment for a plant database, and we wanted to show it to Yvonne Curbach, the new leader of the Growing Friends. She was interested, but more so in our examples than in the layout of the pages: the Buddleja globosa photos, she said, weren't Buddleja globosa at all, but Buddleja × weyeriana, possibly Sungoldand she dragged out a book to prove it.
Panoramas: done!
I had more or less tidied up my panorama stuff yesterday, so there wasn't really much left to do today, and I finally got it completed. It only took most of the day. The real issue is the sheer time it takes to process images of this size. My verandah centre panorama is normally about 9000×6000 pixels (54 MP), and this seems to be about the largest that current web-based tools can easily handle. The full-sized images were 26046×16811, or 438 MP, and I wasn't able to display even one of them on a web browser. firefox blew up to 1.8 GB of memory, with X increasing by another 2 GB of virtual memory, and the system ground to a halt until firefox finally crashed.
Still more panorama processing
Into the office this morning, and my big panorama had been stitched, all 1 GB of it: -rw-r--r-- 1 grog lemis 1078003761 Jun 3 00:56 X00-82.tif Only later did I discover the errors: Where did those stripes come from? They roughly coincide with the layers I took, but I haven't had problems like that before.
A day wasted with panoramas
The sheer processing time for my high-res panoramas yesterday meant that I didn't get them finished. Started today with the verandah panorama, which despite my fears closed pretty well, and started to stitch it round 9:00. nona ran for about 20 minutes for the 56 images, so enblend started at 9:20. It used over an hour of CPU time and ran for 4 hours and 40 minutes! Sat Jun 2 13:58:06 EST 2012 USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TT STAT STARTED TIME COMMAND grog 75510 61.4 33.0 1577968 1026852 ?? DN 9:20AM 61:45.92 [enblend] It produced a 1 GB TIFF output filewith the wrong dimensions!
Panoramas: can of worms
Today was the first day of winter, but the weather was very nice, sunny and windstill, ideal weather for panoramas. And tomorrow the monthly extra photos were due, so I decided to take them today instead. After getting SaladoPlayer working, it's clear that I need to refine my panorama schedule. I wanted a higher resolution version of the verandah panorama, and Callum Gibson wanted to see some other circular panoramas apart from that one. I chose the garden centre and dam panoramas. None of them were easy. I had multiple problems with the garden centre. Since I had enough space, I decided to locate the bottom row so low that parts of the tripod mount were visible.
Finally a use for tablets
When taking photos like today's comparative photos, it's good to have the original at hand to compare. In the past I've done things like printing out a hard copy or dragging a laptop around with me, but both are clumsy. Recently it occurred to me that my GPS navigator is really an adapted tablet, and it does have software to display photos (as long as you truncate the names), so today I copied the photos to the navigator and carried that around with me for the comparisons. Did it work better? Marginally. I can put the navigator in my pocket, but clearly not a laptop.
Backing up the Friend' computers
While in town, also to the Friends of the Ballarat Botanical Gardens to back up their computer. To my surprise, everything Just Worked: on plugging in the disk, I was offered a number of choices of what to do with it. Possibly out of embarrassment the option of using it as a backup disk was hidden beyond the end of the too-short selection window, but once I found it it was relatively trivial to set it up and start a backup. Next time I'm there I'll take a look at what it did.
More panorama fun
Into the office this morning with a firm resolve to do something else than play with panorama viewers. I failed. With a bit of comparison, it didn't take me too long to debug my scripts, and I even found a way to find the error in the configuration file. firefox complained about it: And after fixing that, Emacs indeed agreed that the data was well-formed. Gradually worked out other strangenesses, notably the tricks necessary to get Hugin to create correct equirectangular images: in the Stitcher tab you need to set the field of view to 360×180, and to set the crop to the complete image.
Updating Microsoft
While I was at it with Microsoft, finally paid attention to the warnings that kept showing up: Your computer is in danger. Automatic updates are turned off . I've always been afraid of automatic updates, but maybe they have a point. So I turned them on again and got 97 updates for braindeath and 111 for smart, the VM box. And after braindeath came back, I had no net connectivity. Given that I use rdesktop to access it, that's serious. Turned the KVM to the monitor output and saw a message saying Malware removed. Click here for more information , which disappeared before I could get the mouse there.
Cracking the Salado
My experience with SaladoConverter yesterday wasn't the best, but the promise of the rewards kept me going todayall day long. Clearly the problem I had with braindeath had less to do with Salado or Java than it did with the messed-up configuration on the box. I have another couple of Microsofts, including one in a VM, where I'm less concerned about messing things up. So I installed Java on it, and how about that! It worked! There are still a number of loose ends with the conversions. The SaladoConverter documentation states that I need an equirectangular projection, and that's easy enough to make with Hugin.
Java hell
Continued investigating my problems with SaladoConverter today. It looked as if I needed a CLASSPATH: === grog@dereel (/dev/pts/8) ~ 59 -> export CLASSPATH=/usr/local/jdk1.6.0/lib === grog@dereel (/dev/pts/8) ~ 60 -> java SaladoConverter.jar Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: SaladoConverter/jar ... At least part of it was just learning how to start it. It seems that the correct invocation was wrong. What I needed was: === grog@dereel (/dev/pts/8) ~ 67 -> java -jar SaladoConverter.jar === grog@dereel (/dev/pts/8) ~ 68 -> echo $? 0 The only problem was, it didn't do anything.
Animating panoramas
One of the things that Cartola suggested months ago was that I should use some kind of browser plugin to animate my panoramas. One of the more promising looking ones was SaladoPlayer, which I tried some months ago and with which I ran into documentation problems. Tried again today and got as far as being able to install and display the demonstration panoramas, but to run my own I had to convert the format, which involved the use of SaladoConverter, a Java application. I have Java installed, but don't use it, and the first attempts to run it were less than encouraging: === grog@dereel (/dev/pts/8) ~ 29 -> java SaladoConverter.jar Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: SaladoConverter/jar Caused by: java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: SaladoConverter.jar at java.net.URLClassLoader$1.run(URLClassLoader.java:200) at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method) at java.net.URLClassLoader.findClass(URLClassLoader.java:188) at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:306) ...
Retouching panoramas revisited
Interesting message about Hugin in the mail today: how to fill in untidy pieces of the panorama. Just what I need for the panoramas of the Botanical Gardens I took two weeks ago, and which I tried to retouch with very limited success last week. Bruno Postle posted a link to a tutorial. The trick is to include additional images (in this case copies of existing images) without control points, but it left a few questions open. After a lot of experimentation, found a way to do it. The rest of this entry will form the basis of a tutorial. First align the base images: Clearly the hands in the sky need to go away.
Don't trust The Complete FreeBSD
One of the reasons I wrote The Complete FreeBSD was to force myself to learn the things that I needed to document. And so, although it's coming on 10 years since the last edition, I frequently refer to it. Today I had the task of setting up access control for the private pages on the Friends of the Ballarat Botanical Gardens web site. Simple: it's on page 498 of the online version. Set up a .htaccess file, create a password with dbmmanage, and you're away. And that's how I did it in the past. Problem is, it doesn't work any more. I got messages like: [Wed May 23 04:58:40 2012] [error] [client 59.167.11.50] user grog not found: /mypages/ That's not a password mismatch: the server just couldn't find the user.
Close that tcpdump!
While looking around the server for the PHP problem, found this: USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TT STAT STARTED TIME COMMAND root 90550 0.0 20.4 135716 50768 p3- S 26Dec10 109:52.79 tcpdump icmp 19 months! Fortunately it was probably writing to the controlling terminal, which had gone away. I should keep a better eye on this box, though.
PHP: can't find preg_match
I've been dragging my heels on getting the membership lists for the Friends of the Ballarat Botanical Gardens online. It's a non-trivial amount of work, and I took the easy way out and used phpMyEdit to do the work. Put that up on the server and found: Fatal error: Call to undefined function preg_match() in /usr/local/www/data/pedit/phpMyEdit.class.php on line 2787 Huh? preg_match() is part of the base PHP installation, and has been for ever (well, since 4.2.0). Went and checked: my server is deliberately not up to date (that would require rebooting and destroying the current uptime of 1332 days), but it's not that old.
More hugin strangenesses
While playing around with hugin exposure blending, managed somehow to create a completely nonsensical stitching pattern: These were the same images as I had been processing all the time, and they lined up well. And this was just after reading in the .pto project file that had already lined them up correctly. What was wrong? After a bit of checking, discovered that during my EXIF copying experiments, I had accidentally copied the EXIF data from a panorama to one of its components.
avidemux2: the inflexibility of Microsoft under X
Yvonne wanted to upload a video to YouTube today, but it was too long, so she asked me to cut it into manageable pieces for her. Not a problem: I've been there before with avidemux2. So I fired it up, processed, saved it and... couldn't find the result. On further examination, I found: === grog@defake (/dev/pts/0) /Photos/yvonne/20120425 13 -> avidemux2_gtk Maureen-on-Morena-1 ************************* Avidemux v2.5.6 ************************* (hundreds of lines of debug output omitted) So the cwd was /Photos/yvonne/20120425. But there was nothing there. Tried again and looked at the save page and found: This horrible program has completely ...
More panorama experiments
Last week I did experiments with multiple alternate exposures from the same position and aligned together, but stitching only one version. That allowed me to make several panoramas with different appearance, and was particularly useful in the case of the garden SE panorama that includes the shade area and the sky. Today I looked at two other panoramas. One of the problems with the verandah panorama is the lighting in the back corner, so today I put a remote-controlled studio flash in the room next to it and let it fire on that area: On the whole, that didn't look particularly good.
USB problems software, not hardware?
For a long time I've had continual problems with a number of different USB devices on a number of different computers. About the only thing in commonmost of the time, anywayis the operating system: FreeBSD. Is there some problem there? Or are most USB devices just flaky? It's not as if I haven't had USB problems with other operating systems, after all, and the fact that it happens less often might just be due to the fact that I don't use them as often. Today I had a number of disk errors while backing up my photos. It could be the disk, of course, but there was something funny about them.
Backing up the Friends's computers
The real reason for my attendance was to complete some of the jobs I had with the Friends' computers: a new CRT monitor for one with a damaged LCD monitor, setting up an account for non-privileged users on their new laptop, and installing the new backup disk. The latter proved more difficult than I thought. Yes, it's trivial to install a USB disk, but the box said it contained backup software. So it did, too, an extended trial , after which you have to buy it. Somehow that's not my style, so I gave up. I'll have to investigate what we can use instead.
HTML mail revisited
While at the Friends, Genevieve asked me how to incorporate the FBBG banner in outgoing emails. Aaargh! HTML mail with gratuitous images! The horror! That's been my standpoint since HTML mail first came out, but I'm beginning to wonder how tenable it is. HTML is still an issue for email, and certainly I'd hate to see us send out messages only in HTML, but in some cases it makes sense. Is this one of them? Maybe. The typical Friend is probably used to it, and getting a message only in monospace text would probably appear unprofessional.
Backing up the Friends
While in the area, dropped in at the Ballarat Botanical Gardens to visit Genevieve Lowe at the Friends. It seems they have a new computer for the accounts, and there's no backup. Coincidentally Liz Gilfillan, the president, walked in, and I got authorization from her to buy a 1 TB USB disk for backups. Down to Officeworks, where the prices for external disks blew me awayup to $279 for a 2 TB unit, and the cheapest was $127. That's a big difference from last June, when the cheapest 2 TB unit was $98. Is that still the effect of the Thai floods last year?
Blood pressure monitors
While taking things apart, also took a look at my old blood pressure monitor. I'm pretty sure the inaccuracy is due to the too-fast release of pressure, and I suspected that it might be possible to adjust it. Found the release valve under the circuit board (on the right in the second image, connected by the blue cables): Unfortunately there's nothing there to adjust.
Electric collar: useless!
It's been nearly a month since we got a new remote control electric collar for Nemo. This one workedonce. The contacts to the skin look dubious, but the real problem seemed to be battery consumption. Since there were no instructions, and there appeared to be no way to turn the receiver off, I removed the battery after every use. Despite that, the battery was flat within an hour or two of use. So we bought a new one$7.50, a significant proportion of the $28 we paid for the collar. And it was drained in a similar time. So we ordered a pack of 8 from China (also about $7.50 for the lot), and they arrived today.
More photo experiments
It's mid-autumn, and it shows: I still have issues getting good shadow detail in my images. In the image above I went back to the HDR techniques I've been using earlier, but in general that doesn't seem to be the best choice. One of the main issues is that when taking panoramas, the canonical instructions are to give each component image the same exposure. That gives rise to images like this from the north view sequence (in this case without any further processing): Clearly that's completely underexposed (3 EV, in fact), but another image to the left is correctly exposed (for the highlights): ...
Keyboards: end of an era?
My new Sun keyboard arrived today (left). Not quite what they advertised (right): In particular, the Return key is completely different, and that was one of the aspects I looked at before ordering it. I'll have to see whether I can come to terms with it or not. In addition, it has British key caps (£ over the 3 key, for example), and there's at least one extra key to the left of the Z key, marked \ and |, but in the default map it produces < and >.
Computer crash
dereel, my main machine, crashed (or rather, hung) this afternoon. Nothing in the log files, which is normal enough. That's why I log remotely to another machine, in this case cojones, the machine that is connecting me to the Internet until the NBN radiation tower is finally complete. But something went wrong there: syslogd hung itself up a month ago and I didn't notice, so there's no evidence of what caused the hang. On the bright side, this happens so seldom that it's worth mentioning here.
NBN tower: the lunatic fringe continues
Bad news from Amy Boyd of the Golden Plains Shire Council: somebody (not yet known who, but we can guess) has put in an objection to the erection of the NBN tower. That means it goes to the VCAT to waste our time and their money. Now it's unlikely that it will be operational before Christmas.
Catching missing images
All this photo reprocessing brings a danger, of course: I could rename or remove an image to which I have referred on a web page. I already have a 404 document that sends me email if a page on my site refers to a non-existent page, and that has greatly improved things. But you don't get a 404 for a missing image. On the other hand, nearly all my images are generated by a PHP function, so it's (relatively) easy to check whether the image exists or not. The difficulty is mapping the URL to the local path name. I got that done, and I was still having it claim that the images didn't exist.
Spammers in glass houses
Recently I have been inundated with spam with subject lines like Employment you've been searching! and New job vacancy - see details. Much of it came from people I know, notably in the FreeBSD project, but even more came from me myself. The messages clearly come from combinations of user and ISP that can be broken in to, and about the only thing they have in common is a line matching the regexp please reply to .*@employmenteu.com,with, notably with a missing space after the comma. So, is somebody trying to discredit employmenteu.com? Looking at the whois data, it seems not: Domain Name: EMPLOYMENTEU.COM Updated Date: 04-may-2012 Creation Date: 04-may-2012 Registrant Contact: Jordan R.
101 uses for a dead computer
Once upon a time a computer was something expensive. Now we're throwing out computers that could still run rings round a CDC 7600, the supercomputer of my youth. Talking with Chris Yeardley after dinner and discovered that I had at least 20 computers, not counting motherboards, in and around my office, most of them functional and a number belong to Chris. Chris suggested that we should write an article 101 uses for a dead computer , so I brought out a handful of laptops and we started playing around: ...
Finally, a new keyboard
It's been three months since I started looking for a new keyboard. Surprisingly, my current one, now pushing 23 years old, has recovered somewhat and now no longer bounces as much as it did. In the meantime I've been looking for a cheap Sun Type 7 keyboard, which looks relatively similar and has a USB connector: In particular, there are 10 keys in 2 columns to the left of the main keyboard. Yes, I know, they have special functions under Solaris, but in the end they only generate scan codes, so I can modify a key map to get them to generate F1 to F10.
Forwarding and maintaining headers
Yesterday I had to admit I was wrong: most MUAs discard most headers when forwarding email, even mutt. Well, maybe. The real issue is what is meant by forwarding . There are three different approaches: Simply forward a message the way an MTA would do, putting in a Resent-From: header to show what has happened. In this case, of course, the headers are intact. Create a message containing the quoted text of the old message.
Another network hang
Into the office this morning to find us off the Net again, since nearly 9 hours. The ppp process was running, signal strength was normal, no messages in /var/log/ppp.log. But a ping gave me ping: sendto: No buffer space available. Restarted PPP, and things worked again. Somehow there are too many things that can cause link interruptions. When I started keeping records, it was to monitor ADSL line quality, and I had good metrics from the modem to help me. Now the problems can be this horrible flaky Huawei 1762 USB toy, the link itself, or the Optus network behind it. Once it gets to Internode, I have not (yet) had any further problems.
Email, gmail and other strangenesses
More playing around with the Friends of the Ballarat Botanical Gardens email today. Further investigation of the issue of headers in forwarded mail messages show that I was just plain wrong, and Sean is right: just about no MUA, not even mutt, preserves headers in forwarded messages. I was really thinking of bouncing, not forwarding, and that's something that Microsoft-space MUAs don't seem to understand. In the process, discovered things about gmail that were less than pleasant: apart from an inability to configure many things (like date formats, for example), I can't find any way to edit outgoing messages. Yes, it opens up a form on the web browser, but unlike most forms, I can't redirect this one to a real editor.
Unable to start X
Into the office this morning to discover my mouse limping. It moved relatively smoothly over the root window, but it kept sticking when moving over other windows. I don't understand the details of the mouse processing in X in any detail, but at the very least it needs to send messages to the window, as a quick play with xev indicates: MotionNotify event, serial 27, synthetic NO, window 0x6a00004, root 0x501, subw 0x0, time 2584229172, (128,68), root:(133,89), state 0x0, is_hint 0, same_screen YES Looking at my X server, it had been running for a while, and had hit nearly a gigabyte of memory: USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TT STAT STARTED TIME COMMAND root ...
Migrating from TransACT
Yesterday's experience made it clear that we should migrate email for the Friends of the Ballarat Botanical Gardens from TransACT to gmail as soon as possible. The first step, of course, is to forward the messages from TransACT until we can wean people from sending them there in the first placea problem not made any simpler by the fact that messages continue to be sent from that address without a Reply-To: header. But how? I couldn't find anything. So I tried calling TransACT technical support at 13 30 61. Optus regrets that the number you have dialled has been disconnected . Repeatedly.
Where does that malware come from?
After months of inactivity, the Friends of the Ballarat Botanical Gardens have come back to life. Today I got a number of mail messages from the mail address that I'm trying to close down: it's in the TransACT domain ncable.net.au, so not only does it not reflect our domain, but it also ties us to TransACT. The more I look at that, the less sense it makes. One of the messages looked very dubious: From fbg@ncable.net.au Tue May 1 11:28:06 2012 Received: from 203.208.114.27 (SquirrelMail authenticated user fbg@ncable.net.au) by webmail.ncable.net.au with HTTP; Tue, 1 May 2012 11:28:06 +1000 (EST) Message-ID: <49325.203.208.114.27.1335835686.squirrel@webmail.ncable.net.au> Date: Tue, 1 May 2012 11:28:06 +1000 (EST) Subject: Email update request From: "Friends of Ballarat Botanic Gardens" <fbg@ncable.net.au> To: groggyhimself@fbbg.org.au User-Agent: SquirrelMail/1.4.9a ---------------------------- Original Message ---------------------------- Subject: e-mail verifications From: ...
Back to the enblend port
I compiled and installed enblend 3 weeks ago. But I didn't update the port. On the positive side, the documentation has been greatly improved. But it changed in a manner which makes it very difficult to install, and the formalities of the FreeBSD ports collection don't make it any easier. As I discovered the first time round, the documentation is now formatted with texinfo. There's lots of that about, so much that texinfo is in the base FreeBSD system. But the FreeBSD version is ancient, and it can't convert the enblend documentation.
Goodbye Jorge, goodbye Samba
Sad news today: Jorge de Moya died a couple of days ago. For years he was the only breeder of pure Paso Fino horses in Australiauntil about 8½ years ago, when Yvonne somehow talked him in to giving her a pure-bred foal in exchange for a Paso Peruano foal out of her mare La Tigre . The foal itself was a story: Yvonne wanted to call her Samba , which I thought my friends at the Samba project would find inappropriate. So I said that if she wanted to call her that, she should first get approval from both Tridge and Jeremy. Fat chance, I thought.
Reinstalling scanner software
Finally got my office tidied up and moved the scanner to the desk to my right, where pain (my Microsoft laptop) is. Connected up, installed, and ran it. It works. But it doesn't work on braindeath. Why? I've deinstalled and reinstalled and rebooted and done all those Microsoft things, but it continues to have fatal errors. Is this some case of incomplete deinstallation? One difference suggests that it is: when I installed on pain, I had to accept the usual EULA stuff. When I reinstalled on braindeath, I didn't. That suggests that at least some information remains after deinstallation.
Still more NiZn batteries
My latest delivery of NiZn batteries arrived today, including not one, but two replacements for the failed AAA battery. That was nice, but also necessary, since another had failed since then. Charged the first lot (AA) with no incident. Taking photos later, the flash gun gave me a low battery indication. I had only just put batteries in it a couple of weeks ago, but fortunately I now had freshly charged replacements. On taking the old ones out, I noted the voltages: Battery number Before After 5 ...
More scanner woes
It's been a few weeks since I connected my Epson scanner to braindeath, the loaner Microsoft box I use mainly for photo processing. It has been flaky: much of the time it works, sometimes (far too often) it crashes. Today I was scanning some documents and stopped to look at something else. When I returned to continue scanning, the program crashed. And crashed. And crashed. Removing and reinstalling the software (if that's what really happened when I asked for it) didn't help. I'm dead in the water. How do you debug this kind of problem? I wish I knew. I suspect that some remnant software or configuration information is in the way.
DxO Optics Pro against Photoshop
About the only software I have purchased in the last 5 years or more is DxO Optics Pro . It wasn't an easy decision: it only runs on Microsoft, and it's glacially slow. It would probably run in a VM, but it requires so much memory that I can't do it in my current environment, so to run it at all I have borrowed a computer from Chris Yeardley. It also has irritating bugs features like not being able to handle EXIF data correctly, at least on my Olympus E-30, if the data has been modified in any way: it wants to be the first program to access the raw image.
gmail via my own server
One of the things that we decided at the Friends' meeting was that we should use gmail to run the general mailing list. That's not my style at all, of course, but it solves a number of problems in this particular case. Currently they're accessing a particularly complicated webmail system from TransACT, on whom we don't want to be dependent, and they tell me they can only access it from one computer in the Friends' George Longley Building. One of the things I want them to be able to do is for each authorized user to access it from wherever they want, so gmail sounds like a good option.
Water almost everywhere
Last week was really mild, but that changed, and the temperatures have dropped a lot. 4 days ago we had a top temperature of 25.5° and a low of 12.2°. Today's top temperature was 12.6°: And in the last 3 days we had over 20 mm of rainif you measure it by the old-fashioned rain gauge. According to my weather station there was no rain. I had already looked at the rain gauge, which for once was not blocked by cobwebs, and there's nothing obviously wrongmaybe a slightly stiff action.
Meeting with the friends again
It's been some time since I've had much to do with the computer setup of the Friends of the Ballarat Botanical Gardens, but it seems that they've been doing things, and they've run into trouble: Communication is the big word (and the reason why I didn't hear anything of the other issues). Like elsewhere in the Microsoft space, email communication is a big issue, so into town today to discuss face-to-face, also taking the opportunity to have a very overdue haircut. They now have a new paid assistant, Genevieve Lowe, who will end up doing a lot of the work. The meeting itself didn't really bring any new information.
Portable image formats
Subhash (apparently no surname) in Wien has been looking at the optical qualities of the Zuiko Digital ED 7-14mm f/4 wide angle lens, and he published some images processed from the raw image with Photoshop. There's clear chromatic aberration and probably other stuff that I didn't look at. So I asked him for the raw image with an intention to process it with DxO Optics "Pro" to see if it would do any better. But he didn't have the raw image any more. He had converted it to DNG format and discarded the original. And DxO wants to always be the first to touch a raw image, so I ended up with a now you see me, now you don't situation: It clearly displays the image at ...
Still more photo processing
Yesterday I noted that my real HDR images looked washed out by comparison with the pseudo-HDR images generated by DxO Optics "Pro", so today I did a little more experimentation. To make the HDR images, I take sequences of three images exposed 1 EV apart (the maximum that the camera offers in exposure bracketing). I set manual exposure so that the least exposed image (nominally -1 EV) is roughly correctly exposed or 1/3 EV underexposed. The result images look like this: I don't use the middle image at all; it's ...
eBooks in colour
By multiple coincidence, received this quarter's copy of c't Digitale Fotografie 2/2012 today, the focus is on HDR, and there are eBooks on the accompanying DVD, one of them written by Reinhard Wagner, the moderator of the Oly-E.de forums. So clearly I wanted to download it to the eBook reader. That wasn't as simple as it seems. The file on the DVD was a ZIP archive with a (presumed) Microsoft executable and a file in a format that neither file(1) nor my reader understood: === grog@dereel (/dev/pts/31) ~/Documentation/Photography 14 -> unzip -l phf.zip Archive: phf.zip Length Date Time Name --------- ---------- ----- ---- 98846170 02-27-2012 15:30 Profibuch-HDR-Fotografie-ct.dat 1843200 02-27-2012 15:30 Profibuch-HDR-Fotografie-ct.exe --------- ------- 100689370 ...
The advantages of eBooks
Mail from Oliver Herold referring to yesterday's article about eBooks. It seems that good eBooksclearly not including the ALDI one I havehave E-ink displays, which are not reflective or backlit. And the Amazon Kindles are really not that much more expensiveUS $79 for the Kindle compared to AU $69 for the ALDI reader. The biggest price differential is the postage for the Kindle. But what do I really get? Yes, it has E-ink, which looks better and uses less power (something Oliver didn't mention). But it's only black and white. And the resolution is still this ridiculously low 167 ppi, less than that of a fax.
Dog collar instructions
Sent off a message to the seller of the dog collar I received yesterday, and got a couple of very quick responses. Sorry, the box is still the old one, and it says 200 m range, but never mind, it's really 800. And yes, here are the instructions: Yes, what they sent were exactly these JPEGs.
eBook readers: a solution or a problem?
On the radio this morning the announcer mentioned a Kindle, something of which Yvonne had never heard. I've never thought much of them myself, but by chance, today ALDI had an eBook reader in their specials, for $70. The great thing about ALDI is that you have 2 months to try the things out, after which you can return for your money back with no questions asked. So I asked her to buy one. The reader bears a striking resemblance to my GPS navigator: No data on it, of course, but that was OK: it handles PDF, and I could download data from the web.
GUIs: Computer interfaces for illiterates
I've often compared modern computer usage with illiteracy. Icons and mice and things don't require you to read, and current development is going in that direction. But I was still amused to see an article on Al Jazeera news. In Bangladesh being illiterate isn't necessarily a disadvantage when using computers: it can be an advantage. This company is hiring illiterate people to scan sensitive documents. Since they can't read, the data is safe(r).
Importing Microsoftt Excel
We need to set up mailing lists for the Friends of the Ballarat Botanical Gardens, notably one for the membership. Currently membership data are kept in a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, arguably one of the worst tools for the job. So my plan is to import the spreadsheet into a MySQL database and maintain it there. Extracting the email addresses is then of course trivial. Spent most of the morning trying to work out how to import Excel into MySQL, not helped by the fact that I really, really don't get on with Microsoft at all well. As one of the documents I found told me, the first step is to save the spreadsheet in CSV format.
New dog collar: new low
Despite our previous bad experience, Yvonne continued to ask me to buy another remote-controlled dog collar for Nemo, so I finally ordered one on eBay with a claimed range of 800 m. Today it arrived: No instructions. Range stated on the box as 200 m, not 800. And a detached component that looks like a neon tube. Peter Jeremy confirmed, specifically that it's an NE-2.
The new enblend
Finished my port of enblend version 4.0 today in time to use it for today's panorama processing. Surprise, surprise: no particular problems. In one case I got a crash: enblend: excessive overlap detected; remove one of the images enblend: info: remove invalid output image "00-05.tif" gmake: *** [00-05.tif] Error 1 This was the house-e image, where I had accidentally taken two identical photos. That's always been a problem, and the error message tells you what to do. But it's still surprising.
NiZn revisited
Yesterday's NiZn batteries charged overnight, sort of. After completion, they had voltages of 1.828 V (OK) and 1.295 V (definitely not OK). The batteries are in parallel in the mouse, so the defective one had presumably pulled the good one down. But that's the second defective battery in a batch of 4, and so far I've had difficulty getting the seller to replace them. Hopefully this isn't a sign of the reliability I should expect.
More NiZn woes
In the evening, had problems with teevee: the mouse stopped working. I'm continually having problems with USBso much so that I seldom mention thembut this one seemed not to want to go away. And then the LED in the mouse went out. Further investigation showed that the batteries (NiZn) had voltages of 1.275 and 0.936 V. The discharge value should be just under 1.6 V, and this isn't a heavy current user. What's wrong here? Defective batteries?
Your computer has a Trojan
While playing around (painfully) with yesterday's breed standard documents, came across an interesting message: What's FBviewer.exe? Just some random file in my ~/Downloads directory, it seems. Potentially it is dangerous, and I just had it there (safely in FreeBSD) for examination. So I clicked Move to Vault, whatever that means, and it's now off dereel and (presumably) somewhere on braindeath, which is no safer for it.
Revisiting the enblend port
Spent some time in the afternoon looking at the port of enblend. First I needed to get the information for downloading correct. The link on the web site included multiple redirections: === grog@dereel (/dev/pts/21) ~ 32 -> ftp http://sourceforge.net/projects/enblend/files/latest Requesting http://sourceforge.net/projects/enblend/files/latest Redirected to http://sourceforge.net/projects/enblend/files/latest/download Requesting http://sourceforge.net/projects/enblend/files/latest/download Redirected to http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/enblend/enblend-enfuse/enblend-enfuse-4.0/enblend-enfuse-4.0.tar.gz?r=&ts=1334113120&use_mirror=internode Requesting http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/enblend/enblend-enfuse/enblend-enfuse-4.0/enblend-enfuse-4.0.tar.gz?r=&ts=1334113120&use_mirror=internode Redirected to http://internode.dl.sourceforge.net/project/enblend/enblend-enfuse/enblend-enfuse-4.0/enblend-enfuse-4.0.tar.gz Requesting http://internode.dl.sourceforge.net/project/enblend/enblend-enfuse/enblend-enfuse-4.0/enblend-enfuse-4.0.tar.gz How do you extract a URL from that? The original URL has the disadvantage that it doesn't point at a specific tarball; next update will point elsewhere, and the checksum will no longer match.
The new enblend
The most obvious real problem with my panorama stitching on Saturday was that the version of enblend was version 3.1, years out of date. The ChangeLog gives a date of 13 March 2008, over 4 years ago. Since then there has been a revision 3.2, and on 13 December 2009 version 4.0 was releasedwith documentation!if you can work out how to get it. It includes a 70 page detailed description and a number of articles I haven't looked at yet. It's been a while since I last built a FreeBSD port, and somehow the ground rules seem to have changed. Finally fetched the tarball and started trying a new port.
Hugin crash: solved?
When you get an obscure error message, Google is your friend. In this case the message I got yesterday was Mask is entirely black, but white image was not identified as redundant.. And the search pointed me to the Hugin FAQ, which tells me: Try to use the additional enblend parameter "--fine-mask" to get rid of the error. Note (Jan 2010): This should be fixed in the latest enblend 4.0 release. So I checked: yes, though I'm using a very recent Hugin, my enblend (which proves to be a separate port) is still version 3.1.
PTGui revisited
Despite all my attempts yesterday, I didn't manage to stitch one variant of my verandah panorama with Hugin. Is this the panorama or Hugin? By chance, on the German Olympus forum there was a discussion thread about stitching software. Karl Grabherr uses PTGui, which is closely related to Hugin. But it costs money, and he justifies that with the claim that it's much faster than Hugin. That's a valid reason. But then Dieter Bethke, who also uses it, states that he particularly likes the spherical panorama preview. That's presumably the panosphere in the Hugin fast panorama preview window. Presumably it hadn't been added when Dieter last looked at Hugin.
The joys of multimedia
Good Friday today, so I decided to listen to Bach's St. John Passion. I didn't already have it on disk, so I had to read it in from CD. That's a job for grip. Put the CD in the drive, started up grip, and read: Did a bit of checking there, but found nothing obvious. In particular I had the correct CD-ROM device, and it seems to work. Never mind, I had done this before with iTunes, and I had more or less worked round its myriad irritations.
You have too many computers!
Received an online survey today, asking me about what technical equipment I had. They clearly weren't prepared for the answer: I wonder how people come to these restrictive ideas.
Scanner software: Microsoft 1, Apple -3
After yet another abortive attempt to reinstall my Epson scanner software on boskoop, I gave up. No error messages, everything that could conceivably be replaced had been replaced, but the application just started and stopped without any message. This is just too much pain. But I have this Microsoft box on loan from Chris Yeardley, so tried installing on that. Surprise, surprise: it went very smoothly, and much faster. That could be due in part to the faster machine, but there were also fewer repetitive stops ( do you accept the license conditions for the documentation? do you really want to install the documentation? Please enter your password several times over).
Apple network nonsense: the explanation
Mail from Jashank Jeremy today explaining Apple's stupid .local pseudodomain. It seems that it's related to mDNS, a kind of pseudo-DNS used for the local network when no real DNS is available. And yes, from boskoop it works: === grog@boskoop (/dev/ttyp3) ~ 1 -> ping -c 1 boskoop.local PING boskoop.local (192.109.197.163): 56 data bytes 64 bytes from 192.109.197.163: icmp_seq=0 ttl=64 time=0.135 ms --- boskoop.local ping statistics --- 1 packets transmitted, 1 packets received, 0% packet loss round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 0.135/0.135/0.135/nan ms And netstat shows (inter alia) a listen on mdns: === grog@boskoop (/dev/ttyp3) ~ 2 -> netstat -afinet udp4 0 0 *.mdns *.* I had expected something ...
Port upgrade pain, continued
Spent some time investigating the causes of the ports problems I've been happening. Surprise, surprise: my fault. It's been years since I set up my CVS update scripts, and they work. But they include a cvsup run, so I didn't use them on defake because I was checking out of the repository on dereel. And when running cvs I forgot the options. As a result I didn't get the new /usr/ports/security/gnutls/files/ directory, which contained the kludges used to rename the shared library. After a checkout with the correct options, all was well. Well. Almost. Comparing with Peter Jeremy's source tree showed something interesting: groggy: -rw-r--r-- 1 root lemis 1910 Apr 2 10:43 Makefile peter: -rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 1981 27 Mar 00:32 Makefile Clearly his is bigger than mine.
System naming, Apple style
In passing, discovered that after reinstallation boskoop has decided to call itself greg-leheys-power-mac-g4-agp-graphics, which appeared at the top of the windows and also in log messages. How do you change that? Went looking and found nowhere obvious. Clearly I was looking in the wrong place: it should have been Network/Sharing. It's not clear why, since I don't share anything, and my concerns are in log messages and local windows, but clearly that's the Apple Way. So I went in there and found: OK, that's clear enough.
Apple software installation: so easy
These problems with FreeBSD ports are in stark contrast with the relative ease with which I reinstalled my Apple a couple of weeks ago. But as I said at the time, That's not an indication of the relative ease of installing MacOS X and FreeBSD, though: I do almost nothing on the Apple, so there's not much work. Today I wanted to scan some documents. I hadn't reinstalled the scanner software, just copied the directories in /Applications from the backups. Started up the scanner Application .
More ports build pain
Spent some time looking at yesterday's update disaster today. There were a number of issues: giflib refused to build: ===> mencoder-1.0.r20111218_1 depends on shared library: gif.5 - not found ===> Verifying install for gif.5 in /usr/ports/graphics/giflib ===> giflib-4.1.6 conflicts with installed package(s): libungif-4.1.4_5 They install files into the same place. A number of packages depended on this one and failed as a result: === root@defake (/dev/pts/1) /var/db/pkg 3 -> pkg_delete libungif-4.1.4_5/ pkg_delete: package 'libungif-4.1.4_5' is required by these other packages and may not be deinstalled: emacs-23.3_6,2 mencoder-1.0.r20110329_4 mplayer-1.0.r20110329_3 Arguably portupgrade should be able to deal with this one, particularly since one of the dependencies was mencoder.
Updating ports: back to portupgrade
I'm still dragging my heels on cutting across to the 64 bit version of FreeBSD. One of the reasons is the concern about getting everything to work properly. At least I should be able to update my ports with less pain than I've been experiencing. Yesterday I upgraded the system itselfthat went without any problems. Today I tried, once again, to upgrade the ports (765 of them, including dependent ports). I've been using portmaster recently, and I've always had trouble. The trouble may not be portmasters fault, but the habit it has of stopping on any error, and on insisting on input in the middle of the build, makes it very irritating.
NBN tower objections
There's more discussion going on about the NBN tower. Scott Weston has found the decisions of previous VCAT hearings, notably a complaint about the the tower built in Haddon, Victoria a couple of years ago. Like all such cases, the objections were dismissed, which in this case is interesting, because the applicant lived next door to where the tower was built, only 250 metres from the tower (as close as I can judge), and with a bit of effort she can see the tower from her house. By contrast, the objectors to the Dereel tower live 640 metres from the site (Elaine J.
Back on the net
Woke up early this morning pondering what could be wrong with my network connection. Everything pointed to the antenna or the modem itself, and it became clear that any damage there would take days to fix: everything came by post, and I don't know anywhere in Ballarat where I could find a replacement. But this horrible antenna connector seemed a good place to start. There's no way to attach it properly, and it ends up hanging off the dongle. I've put a cable tie around it to keep it in place, but clearly this is one of the worst connectors I've ever seen: Into the office, confirmed that, as expected, I was ...
Network problems again
My network connection has been quite good latelythe last real outages (more than 5 minutes) was on 17 January 2012. But today it was time again: Mar 29 21:29:28 cojones ppp[1709]: tun0: Chat: Send: ATZ^M Mar 29 21:29:28 cojones ppp[1709]: tun0: Chat: Expect(5): OK Mar 29 21:29:28 cojones ppp[1709]: tun0: Chat: Received: ^M Mar 29 21:29:28 cojones ppp[1709]: tun0: Chat: Received: NO CARRIER^M Mar 29 21:29:28 cojones ppp[1709]: tun0: Warning: Chat script failed That's different from what I received before, and it suggests that the problem is local rather than with the network.
NBN coverage maps and providers
Arjen Lentz published a link on Facebook today: the NBN rollout map, including a search function conveniently not linked to URLs. It's clear that they haven't ironed out the wrinkles yet. According to the map, work started on the tower last July, while in reality the planning approval was only granted two days ago. Presumably work includes planning. And on the View all communities in the rollout, Dereel doesn't figure at all, though Enfield does. Searching for Dereel brought this map: That's interesting because of the holes.
Rechecking old disks
After all the disk failures the other day, I began to suspect the USB external housing was the real culprit, so put the disks in defake on the PATA interface. Most of them ran perfectly. One had a single unreadable sector, the very first. Did the housing somehow mess that up? After writing the disk with zeroes, there were no further problems, anyway. So the real culprit must have been the housing, made by Ritmo, not known for high quality. To quote Daniel O'Connor on IRC: <Andys> nox: Ritmo = $30 ATX cases ....
Strange USB disk behaviour
Yesterday I set up the set top box to record two programmes onto a USB disk that I had borrowed from Chris Yeardley. Took a look today, and ran into a number of issues. First was mtools, the software for accessing FAT file systems: === root@teevee (/dev/pts/5) ~ 3 -> mdir Can't open /dev/fd0: No such file or directory Cannot initialize 'A:' Yes, I recall something about that. There's some config file, but where? RTFM time. But the man page doesn't go beyond mentioning the config file: ...
More USB disk pain
Tomorrow we have no less than 6 potential candidates for video recording tomorrow at 21:00. I only have 2 tuners in cvr2, so clearly it was time to get a functional USB disk in the external tuner, like I tried last week. At least now I knew how to build FAT32 file systems on the disks, and that went relatively quickly. But I tried 3 disks, and they all died, with different reasons. That makes a total of four dead disks, all of which I thought were OK. Somehow the problem must be elsewhere; I suspect the USB enclosure now, or maybe the power supply.
Completing the Apple reinstall
Continued with the reinstall of boskoop today, but much more slowly. Restored the tar archive I made last weekit appears to be complete modulo the unreadable files, and in the process I found all sorts of things I didn't know about, including lots of junk in the root file system, such as MP3 files and a directory called :home:grog, apparently an attempt to obfuscate normal path names) in the root file system. /:home:grog contained what appears to be something like downloaded DMG files. I wonder where the Finder claims it is really located. My home directory (/Users/grog/) was nearly 9 GB in size, most of it not put there by me: 1.4 GB of files gratuitously copied by iTunes (no thank you, ituNes, I do not want you to manage my music collection for me), and nearly 5 GB in ~/Pictures, 2 GB apparently by some program that was installed ...
Better network up times
My network connectivity is finally getting almost acceptable. The last outage was on 15 February 2012, 5 weeks ago, and the pppd connection was up for almost all that time, as a snapshot yesterday showed: Time online: 39D 20:32:26 Mode: HSPA / SRVST: 2 RSSI: -101 dBm (6) Total: 5535.78 MB / 5916.93 MB Now: 1222 B / 63.45 kB But this morning the connection bounced, though the process continued running (it was started on 24 January 2012), I didn't lose TCP connections, and my outage page didn't register the problem.
Reinstalling MacOS X
Finally finished backing up the reconstituted disk for boskoop, so put it in the machine and tried to boot from it. Nothing. No error messages, not even these silly 1980s images, just a greyer apple on a grey screen, with a twirling baton underneath. Where do you go from there? There were several possibilities: part of the boot blocks could be missing, or maybe it didn't like the fact that the disk wasn't the same size as the image. But wouldn't a bit of text help? Tried a number of things. Copied Chris' system disk (10 GB!) to a 20 GB disk and tried to boot from that.
More Apple disk recovery
On with the disk recovery today. The real issue is backups. I'm religious with backups, and I make backups every eveningon my FreeBSD boxes. With others it's not as simple, because they're not powered on all the time, and in the case of commercial operating systems, tar doesn't seem to be the way to go. So I've been making disk images, so that in case of failure I can just copy them to a new disk. And in between I make some half-hearted backup attemptstoo seldom, it seems. The directory /src/dump/boskoop was empty, and a locate boskoop found nothing of interest. Only later did I find that I had changed the spelling: Boskoop is a Dutch town famous for its apples, but the name is often called Boskopp in German, and when I got the box I didn't know about the Dutch town.
Repairing the Apple
More head-scratching about boskoop, my Apple, today. Why did the machine not complete the self test? I needed to find out whether this was a second problem or a consequence of the first, so over to Chris Yeardley's place to look at DELICIOUS, her almost identical machine (no idea why the name is shouted). It was powered down, but came up happily when I turned it on, though the display on/display off/display on behaviour occurred here too. The second display on was preceded by disk access sounds. Open up, disconnect the disk cable and... exactly the same behaviour as I had seen on boskoop.
Hardware failures continue
In this morning to check how the recording on the USB disk went. I didn't need to look. I could hear it: Wheee-CLICK Wheee-CLICK from the disk. It had failed. It wasn't the only thing. I think my backup of the Apple completed, but by the time I looked, the xtterms were gone. ruptime told me that it had stopped talking to the outside world last night at 22:28. That's the time of the power failure. Coincidence? It's not clear how it could be connected, though, since the computer is on a UPS. The machine was in fact sleeping, and I was able to wake it.
Disaster after disaster
Lots of things to record on TV tonight, and so I needed to use my external tuner for the first time in earnest. It has a USB disk interface, and though I was able to record something onto a USB stick a while back, it looked as if it wasn't fast enough, and in any case it wasn't big enough. Not a problem: I have piles of old PATA disks lying around, and with a little searching I found an external PATA/USB housing. Put an 80 GB disk in it. Confirmed in lagoon, Yvonne's FreeBSD system, that it was a Solaris partition, clearly not what the tuner wanted.
GUI progress
It's been some years since I wrote my What I want from a GUI rant. At the time I was getting extremely frustrated with GNOME, and this was a reaction. Since then, I've solved my GNOME problems in a simple and elegant manner: I stopped using it. But times have changed. I think I'll leave this page the way it is, and if I come up with anything new to say, I'll write a different page. In the meantime, a quote from Peter Jeremy sums it up: GUIs have advanced in the past 6½ years.
GPS and Google mapsaccuracy guaranteed
I've been bitching and moaning about the quality of online maps since before I moved to Dereel, but things haven't improved much. I started a Google Map of Google maps breakage round Dereel years ago, but so far they have only fixed some of the problems. Still, I have a GPS navigator, with maps from naviextras.com, who pride themselves on the accuracy of their maps, and stress that they do their own independent checksor at least they said last time I was able to find it on their web site. Clearly they wouldn't have the same broken data as Google Maps.
NBN tower: planning committee speaks
Off to Bannockburn with Scott Weston to the Golden Plains Shire Planning Committee meeting to discuss planning application P11-334: Development of Land for a Telecommunications Facility at Crown Allotment A4D, parish of Dereel (Colac-Ballarat Road), in other words the NBN communications tower. To my surprise, the part of the agenda for this item was printed 2 sided on A4, was 2 cm thick and weighed 500 g. It included all the submissions and their names and addresses, which was interesting.
Interest in Guardian operating system
Mail from Jonathan Lafleche this morning. He's studying Computer Engineering and wants to do a presentation on the Guardian operating system, and asked me for some suggestions based on my article in Beautiful Architecture. And, of course, he wanted some anecdotes. I already had one, but there are others that I hadn't written up yet, so finished the draft of the CPU failure at 16:04. Those were the fun days.
More photo web stuff
Still more photo work today. I've been dragging my feet on how to present video clips on my web site. As I've commented before, I'm no fan of sites like Flickr and friends, and I host all my own photos. But there are a couple of reasons to do it differently for video clips: firstly, they're big, and secondly web browsers don't handle them as well as they do still images. So it made sense to upload the clips to YouTube. The first step was to edit the clips. In the first clip my habits as a still photographer got the better of me, and I tried moving to portrait mode for better framing.
DxO Optics Pro : User causes product misbehaviour
Mail back from DxO support today. As I had reported, DxO doesn't handle EXIF data correctly for Olympus camerasat least the two I have hadif the EXIF data has been modified, even in accordance with the standard. In my case, I had added an Author tag, and this caused DxO to fail silently. But DxO support sees it differently: today I got a reply telling me that this was a user error, and that I shouldn't mess with EXIF tags if I don't know exactly what I'm doing. That's fine: I do. They don't explain why they don't detect this error, nor why they don't document this limitation .
House photos early
We're off to Geelong tomorrow for Nemo to take his Delta society test. That's normally the day I take my house (really garden) photos. So I had the choice of taking them today, tomorrow afternoon or Sunday. Despite the predictions of the Bureau of Meteorlogy, there was as good as no wind today, so it sounded like a good idea to take the photos today, in the afternoon. The sun was shining, however, so I had a couple of considerations: Verandah photos with the normal flash, and also with the ring flash.
Financial reporting software
Into town today to talk to Peter O'Connell about my investments. It seems that the visit last month didn't reset some timer they had, so we ended up doing it again. As a result, there wasn't much to talk about, but their computer person is retiring, so we discussed what they'd be doing to replace him, and I suggested that they should take the opportunity to review the problems they have with their reporting software. Once upon a time people wrote programs to do this sort of thing. But that's out of date. Now you buy a package, in this case Visiplan from Iress, that does exactly what the designers intended it to do.
Who believes in DVD region codes?
A few weeks back I recorded The Birdcage, an American remake of La Cage aux Folles, and not nearly as good. So we tried to find the original at the Central Highlands Regional Library. The results were predictable: There were a total of 13 suggestions, none of which even remotely matched the search term. So no go? No, there are plenty more libraries, but by (severe) default the web form only searches the local library. You have to press the Search ALL libraries button, and that really found something, though you have to recognize it: Il vizietto?
New web site with old computer documentation
While looking for information about the UNIVAC 1108 Master File Directory today, stumbled across bitsavers.org today. It's not new, andmost emphaticallyneither is the content. It includes documents that were old when I entered the industry 40 years ago. It looks as if there's a lot to explore there. My interest in the MFD was a supposition that it might have a relationship to the Unix directory structure. It doesn't. It is much more complicated, centralized, and has features that are rare today, such as file versioning at a basic level.
ALDI Set-top box
The third tuner on cvr2, my TV receiver box, has died. Yes, I can buy a new one, but a number of reasons speak for getting a set-top box , a modern word for tuner : the price isn't significantly different, you can use it to watch TV directly, it's a separate piece of equipment, so it probably won't fail at the same time, and it's kosher when calling up TV stations reporting reception problems: in the past when I've reported problems, they asked me what equipment I had, and when I told them it was a computer, they weren't interested in investigating.
DxO bug: found?
Yesterday's experiments showed that the EXIF data problem with DxO Optics "Pro" was limited to my images from my Olympus E-30. Even DxO's own images didn't trigger the problem. But why? What's the difference? Different firmware? That's hardly likely to change the image file format. Then it occurred to me: for each raw Olympus file that I read in, I perform (effectively): exiftool -overwrite_original_in_place -author="Greg Lehey" $i Could it be that? Tried adding an author entry to DxO's trial image and bingo! it (silently) didn't copy the EXIF data.
Tracking the DxO bug
Right from the beginning using DxO Optics "Pro" I had a problem that it didn't preserve the EXIF data from the original images. Not that big a deal: I wrote a little script to copy the data from the source. But after all, this is commercial software, and I am entitled to support, so I sent in a problem report and got a very quick response: It works for me . That wasn't a case closed situation, though: they gave me the source of an image to compare with, and a lot more details of how to report the problem. Today I (finally) got round to downloading the image, which wasn't easy.
wview: Mine is better than yours
About 2½ years ago I bought a Fine Offset WH-1081 weather station, which of course came with software only for Microsoft, and so even before I bought it, I had to find software that could talk to it. That was a set of patches to an old version of wview that ran only on NetBSD, an operating system that I no longer have running all the time, so I had a fair amount of work to do: apply the patches, migrate from NetBSD to FreeBSD, and update the patches to the latest version of wview. I never finished. Somewhere along the line I gave up and wrote my own software instead.
More Nickel-Zinc experiences
Changed the NiZn batteries in my flash gun today, and recharged them. Nothing unusual in thatalmost. I had forgotten to turn the flash gun off last week, and though it shuts down automatically after a while, it's a soft shutdown (it has a real mechanical power switch). But the voltages were interesting: before recharge, 3 of them were in a normal range, and the fourth was so low that the standards say it's defective. But they all recharged happily: Battery Charge date Before After ...
Finishing Chris' photos
Spent much of the afternoon working on Chris Yeardley's photos. In principle there's no hurry, but it required significant uploadsthere were a total of 575 MB of photos, which also overflowed the tiny disk we have available on the serverand today was the last day of our monthly ISP billing period. We had 1.2 GB (out of 9 GB) over, so it was clearly the day to do things. Lots of experiences in the process, mainly related to resetting the camera times. I've seen this before with the Hackers barbecue two years ago, and I wrote a program to do that at the time.
Ballarat Library: another false positive
While in town, also dropped in at the Ballarat Library to pick up a couple of DVDs I had requested. One was The Italian Job , coincidentally (in 1969) one of the first films involving computer-related crime. The web site couldn't find one in the Ballarat library, but that didn't stop it offering me 13 irrelevant titles. Finally I found one, and of course it was wrong again: it wasn't fiction. That's two out of three DVDs in the last couple of weeks that, thanks to inadequate documentation. Now that I have a few more tricks up my sleeve, took another look ( search all libraries ).
Garden photos with new software
While Chris was doing her thing, I took my monthly garden photos. They're a particularly good test for the new software, since there are about 150 of them, and they have names like Petunia-1 and Petunia-2, but those names are interspersed with other images. Managed to get that sorted out, and also used my first-ever HTML5 feature: the autofocus attribute to tell the browser where to position the cursor. All worked surprisingly well, but it also makes clear that I'm like the man who only has a hammer: every problem looks like a nail.
More photo processing
Chris Yeardley over this morning for a Nasi Lemak breakfast, and to continue processing her photos with my new, super-duper web forms. She brought a book on JavaScript with her. I suppose the best thing we can say is that she found my software better than the previous attempt. In the end she finished naming the things and left the conversion to menot unreasonable, considering that my software is not just undocumented, but under active development.
Another crash
dereel crashed today, out of the blue. There used to be a time when computer crashes seem to happen like this all the time, for no particular reason. But while that may still be the case for Microsoft-based machines (I really don't know), it's now very seldom on any of my BSD machines. I wonder if it's an indication of hardware problems (something that people love to blame software issues on). The thing that did get me was the time it took to fsck my photo disk. OK, it's 2 TB , of which 60% are in use, and it has over 400,000 files on it: Filesystem 1048576-blocks Used Avail Capacity iused ifree %iused Mounted on /dev/ada1p1 1907196 1137008 751115 60% 401226 688948 37% /Photos It took 2 hours, 40 ...
Limits of DxO Optics Pro
I've found that when processing garden photos with DxO Optics "Pro", they generally come out best with the HDR Artistic preset . There are limits, though, apparently when the contrast is very low.
Photo naming page: success
Today was the first day I used my new photo processing web page in earnest. It's still pretty bare-bones, but it includes one feature that makes life easier: a single , (comma) in a field tells the page to take the previous name (less trailing number) and append the next sequential number: after the image Bunnings-blockade-1, a comma will generate the name Bunnings-blockade-2. I can already see the use of a ! to say continue doing this until you find another specification . And I can see myself playing with this for some time to come.
Yet Another Useless Web Site
While in town, to the Ballarat Library, which had just informed me that the DVD that I had returned on Saturday was available for pickup. So was South Pacific , so I picked up that, and then discovered it was a BBC Documentary, not the musical I was looking for. This web site is really impossible! Last time I had spoken to them about it, they sang the praises of how good it was, so this time I asked to be shown how to do it and was helped by a Senior Librarian. First question: What is the PIN number of your library card? .
More contact prints and HTML insights
Yesterday's diary prompted more response. In particular, Edwin Groothuis pointed at the HTML 4 specification, which says: An HTML form is a section of a document containing normal content, markup, special elements called controls ... That's not quite the same as what the w3schools document, but on re-reading that document, it doesn't make it clear that the listed elements are the only ones allowed. Still, that's HTML 4, and one day we'll have HTML5 (and save spaces in the process) What does that say?
Contact prints page
Got various feedback from people reading this diary about how to make a single form to include all my <input> tags. The one I looked at, from Peter Jeremy, included <span> tags inside the form. That appears to work, but according to the definitions at http://www.w3schools.com/html5/tag_form.asp it shouldn't: The <form> element can contain one or more of the following form elements: <input> <textarea> <button> <select> <option> <optgroup> <fieldset> <datalist> <output> <label> This is for HTML 5, being the latest and greatest, but things aren't significantly different for other versions.
ALDI GPS receiver: a step backward?
Took a first look at the GPS receiver I bought from ALDI yesterday. It uses different software, and so far I'm unimpressed. The maps are as bad as ever. The street where I live is still not there (it's only been here for about 100 years), and the fantasy streets that have been added to the east in the last couple of years are still there: My house is in Kleins Road, roughly on the l of the Please tear off foil.
Setting names for photos
Chris Yeardley has been on holiday in ViÇt Nam, and I'm helping her bring her photos on line. One of the (many) reasons I don't do this with commercially available software is that I want to give titles to my photos, not names like 100_4984.JPG or even (shudder) 36836231@N00/2423055893. Yes, you can do that. I've tried it with various products, and you'd think that they deliberately make it as complicated as possible. My current method works much faster: a little script that displays image name and details and prompts for a name. It uses GNU readline, so I can copy the name I apply to one image and apply it to the next with a different extension.
More keyboard ideas
Mail from Ian Donaldson about my keyboard problems, suggesting I look at the Northgate Ultra Plus . I suppose the combination of the length of this thread and the description have obfuscated things. He found the information at http://www.northgate-keyboard-repair.com/, where the keyboard is really called Ultra Plus . But of course it's an OmniKey Plus, and it's identical to what I'm trying to replace: But he has a point.
Finding a new keyboard
Spent some more time looking for replacement keyboards today. The one must is a function key block on the leftas I discovered in Wikipedia, others agree with me: Early models of Enhanced keyboard (notably those manufactured by Northgate Ltd.) maintained the layout with function keys on the left side, arranged in two columns of six pairs. This layout was more efficient for touch typists but was superseded in the marketplace by that with F-keys along the top. But where can I find one?
Still looking for a keyboard
My current keyboard is a Northgate OmniKey keyboard manufactured in August 1989, 22½ years ago. It's no longer in the best of condition, but in all that time I haven't found anything that I would like to replace it with. Things are getting desperate, though. The r key, in particular, is bouncing badly. But it's not the only keyboard of that kind that I have, and in the past I've found that if I rotate between them, the bounce tends to recover. So today I went to see what I could find: two Avant Stellar keyboards, both with defective keys, and three other OmniKeys (I thought I had five, but I can't find the fifth), all with their own problems.
The spammer's apprentice
Received another unlikely looking spam today: From webmaster@vamrad.by Thu Feb 2 06:00:06 2012 Delivered-To: groggyhimself@freebsd.org Received: from mac.mir.by (ns.mir.by [93.125.59.1]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 7AFAB8FC18 for <groggyhimself@freebsd.org>; Wed, 1 Feb 2012 18:47:11 +0000 (UTC) Received: by mac.mir.by (Postfix, from userid 2077) id 4429CAD823B; Wed, 1 Feb 2012 21:37:34 +0300 (FET) To: groggyhimself@freebsd.org Subject: <? print $subject; ?> X-PHP-Originating-Script: 2077:helpus.php From: Frank Lincoln <flincoln777@gmail.com> Does nothing get tested nowadays?
Nickel-Zinc battery reliability
I've been quite happy with the Nickel-Zinc batteries I bought a few months back, and so I bought some more. They arrived yesterday: 8 AA size and 4 AAA size. It took me a couple of days to charge them: that's 4 loads (for some reason the charger handles only 2 AAA batteries at a time), and each takes 5 hours. And one AAA battery didn't charge properly. After the charge cycle was complete, one battery had 1.836 V, which is about normal, and the other only 1.699 V, which is definitely too low. In the course of time that dropped to 1.368 V.
Strange mount problems
Yvonne had trouble booting her machine this morning. On asking, she told me Could not mount /Photos . That's the photo disk on my machine, mounted on hers via NFS. And yes, I couldn't get it to mount. In log file I found: Jan 24 19:18:33 dereel kernel: WARNING: /Photos was not properly dismounted Jan 24 21:00:07 dereel mountd[1325]: can't delete exports for /Photos: Device busy Jan 24 21:00:07 dereel mountd[1325]: could not remount /Photos: Device busy Jan 24 21:00:07 dereel mountd[1325]: bad exports list line /Photos -alldirs -maproot Jan 25 07:23:56 dereel mountd[1325]: mount request denied from 192.109.197.134 for /Photos Jan 25 07:24:56 dereel mountd[1325]: mount request denied from 192.109.197.134 for /Photos The last two messages repeated every two minutes.
Web sources of garden information
So we've decided to transplant the citrus trees. How do you do that? My guess is to wait until winter, and then dig out as wide a section of the roots as possible. But what's the web for? https://www.google.com/search?q=transplant+grapefruit+tree+&oq=transplant+grapefruit+tree should tell me. And indeed, it comes up with http://www.ehow.com/how_5547756_transplant-grapefruit-trees.html: How to Transplant Grapefruit Trees ... 3 Obtain a young grapefruit tree in a container. Grapefruit trees are readily available from many nurseries. What does that have to do with transplantation?
More photo processing with DxO
Over the last few days, I've been reprocessing old photos with DxO Optics "Pro", sometimes with spectacular results. But there's a problem: most of the photos I took in the first year with my Olympus E-510 were taken only with JPEG format, and some of the DxO presets are intended for raw images only. Or are they? I tried the one-shot HDR preset, supposedly only available for raw images, and found that it works with JPEG as well. Probably not as well as with raw images, but the photos of the barbecue four years ago are amazingly much better: And that was the series of photos that eventually got me going the ...
CFA: We encourage unsafe networking
Finally got round to sending in the comments about the CFA web site that I described yesterday, and tried to send it off. What did I get? I need Facebook to submit comments to a government agency? Are they out of their minds? Well, not completely. I was given a choice: Get Satisfaction , Google Mail or Twitter. What happened to real email? And why does a government agency do this sort of thing? Considered sending it from my gmail account (yes, I do have one, because some broken sites insist; it just forwards to my real email). And, not surprisingly, I got a message: I most certainly do not approve; in fact, I disapprove strongly.
Disk recovery
Connected yesterday's defective disk to lagoon, Yvonne's computer today, with a USB connection. Yes, it required fsck. No, no other problems. So there's clearly something wrong with the eSATA connection to defake. Is it the newest version of FreeBSD? Or just the fact that fsck was required? The backtraces indicate memory allocation failures, though it looks more like this was a consequence of hardware problems, not the cause of the reported problems. Probably I should look at the driver in more detail. But not today.
Still more disk problems
After my photo processing today, started a backup. Or I tried: === root@defake (/dev/pts/0) /home/grog 2 -> mount /dev/ada0p1 /photobackups mount: /dev/ada0p1 : Operation not permitted That's mount's inimitable way of saying look at /var/log/messages to see what's up . As I feared, it said: Jan 21 18:40:19 defake kernel: WARNING: R/W mount of /photobackup denied. Filesystem is not clean - run fsck This is an eSATA drive. Did I forget to umount it before disconnecting it?
Environment pollution
I'm still playing around with my amd64 system, though soon I should start to cut over. One of the issues I've had for some time is that newer versions of Emacs don't respect the settings that I have been using for years, and use fonts that produce a window far larger than the screen. Of course I should look for the reason, and it's certainly part of what I need to do before I can consider my installation complete, but for the time being I've just been manually resizing the window. And today that didn't work! It wouldn't let me make it any smaller, though I could have enlarged it.
Shut down Wikipedia... to the idiots
The protests against SOPA are coming to a head: a number of prominent sites, in particular English language Wikipedia, went offline at 16:00 local time today (05:00 UTC): Or did they? The whole thing is implemented in JavaScript. Disable JavaScript and at least normal lookups are as good as they ever were, though I could imagine that editing pages would pose a problem. But why did they do it this way? Surely they knew this. My best bet is that they're leaving a back door for people in the know to get in anyway, in the assumption that people stupid enough to think that SOPA and PIPA will work will also not be able to work out how to access the site.
The build failures: caught
Continued this morning looking for the cause of yesterday's build failure. It's obvious once it's been found: MAKEFLAGS='-I ..' That's something I put in my environment about 3 years ago to enable me to have only one Makefile in the parent directory of my daily photos. And it seems that this one Makefile didn't reset it, so it went looking for files in the wrong directory. Remove it and all is well. Well, almost all: === grog@dereel (/dev/pts/4) ~/Photos/20080906 8 -> unset MAKEFLAGS === grog@dereel (/dev/pts/4) ~/Photos/20080906 9 -> make web make: don't know how to make web.
More network problems
My network problems still don't seem to be over. Today had a number of dropouts, and even when I was reconnected, I only got a GPRS connection, which is so slow that you couldn't tell the difference from being disconnected. But the RSSI was showing 16, which is 16 to 18 dB better than I normally have. Popped the modem and it reconnected with normal signal strength and HSPA. It looks like I had been connected to a tower with only GPRS (there's one to the east somewhere). Is this the sticky result of a failure on the correct tower, or is it the modem itself?
Building FreeBSD 9.0
So now I have finally built all my ports. But FreeBSD 9.0 has just come out, so it seems a good idea to install it before cutting over to 64 bits. How do you check out a new branch from the FreeBSD Subversion repository? I had it written down somewhere, a brain dump by Peter Wemm. But where did I put it? I couldn't find it in my HOWTOs (though it's there now). Went looking on the FreeBSD web site. Couldn't find anything there either. Should it be in the handbook? That's for end users, who don't have access to the Subversion repository.
linux.conf.au in Ballarat
Today was the first day of linux.conf.au, in Ballarat. I was involved in the organization at the beginning, but I dropped out, and I didn't go to the conference. Why not? Somehow it's difficult to accept, but my conference days are over. And times are changing. I think what really broke it for me was the discussion of the Code of Conduct. As I said last year, the necessity for something like that turns me off. And now I hear it's printed in the conference handbook. The programme isn't. What does that say? It seems I'm not the only one. A number of the regular visitors from the past are not going, including Rasmus Lerdorf, who once spent half his life going from one conference to another.
Ports build: done!
I have finally finished my ports upgrade. Building from scratch worked well, with ultimately only one port (flphoto) requiring to be fetched as a binary package. And now FreeBSD 9.0 is out. Time to start over again? In the meantime tried upgrading the build machine. Found a couple of 1 GB SIMMs lying around, so put them in the machine, and also an nVidia display card that I had been given recently. I had been told it was PCI, and I didn't really check, but on examination it's a 16 lane PCIe board. And it only has a DVI connector. And I don't have anything I can connect that to.
Problems syncing
That wasn't the only problem I ran into. While syncing my photos to the external web site, I got this: 20080719/tiny/swamp-3.jpeg 47916 100% 11.42MB/s 0:00:00 (xfer#203, to-check=0/262) rsync: stat "/home/grog/www.lemis.com/grog/Photos/20080719/small/.house-ne-old.jpeg.iMgm8J" failed: No such file or directory (2) rsync: rename "/home/grog/www.lemis.com/grog/Photos/20080719/small/.house-ne-old.jpeg.iMgm8J" -> "20080719/small/house-ne-old.jpeg": No such file or directory (2) WARNING: 20080719/small/house-nw.jpeg failed verification -- update discarded (will try again). 20080719/small/house-nw.jpeg 134732 100% 16.06MB/s 0:00:00 (xfer#204, to-check=99/262) WARNING: 20080719/tiny/browse-screen.png failed verification -- update discarded (will try again). 20080719/tiny/browse-screen.png 42526 100% 39.89MB/s 0:00:00 (xfer#205, to-check=64/262) WARNING: 20080719/tiny/folder-selection.png failed verification -- update discarded (will try again).
Unexpected results
I often see messages like this one: A database error has occurred. Did you forget to run maintenance/update.php after upgrading? See: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Upgrading#Run_the_update_script Query: UPDATE `user` SET user_touched = '20120114015610' WHERE user_id = '288471' Function: User::invalidateCache Error: 1205 Lock wait timeout exceeded; try restarting transaction (10.0.6.42) But this one was different. It was from Wikipedia. It wasn't repeatable.
System crash
While watching TV, teevee hung. NFS problems. It turned out that dereel had crashed, apparently because of still more USB disk problems. If only I could get this eSATA stuff working well!
FreeBSD dmr edition
FreeBSD 9.0 was released today (or yesterday in the USA; it wasn't intended to be on Friday the 13th). And for the first time I recall, it had a dedication: The FreeBSD Project dedicates the FreeBSD 9.0-RELEASE to the memory of Dennis M. Ritchie, one of the founding fathers of the UNIX" operating system. It is on the foundation laid by the work of visionaries like Dennis that software like the FreeBSD operating system came to be. The fact that his work of so many years ago continues to influence new design decisions to this very day speaks for the brilliant engineer that he was.
Ports progress
On with the ports very much in the background. With the help of locate found an old copy of the portsrules file that greatly helped fill in the puzzles. Nevertheless found one port that didn't build: ... Fl_Print_Dialog2.cxx:1839: error: expected primary-expression before ')' token Fl_Print_Dialog2.cxx:1839: error: expected `;' before 'w' *** Error code 1 Stop in /home/ports/graphics/flphoto/work/flphoto-1.3.1. This time it wasn't a CVS consistency issue. Clearly there's something wrong with the port. But it builds in the build cluster, so what's the issue? I can't be bothered. I wasn't even sure what flphoto is (it's a basic image display program, which I seem never even to have tried out), so I installed it from the package.
Network errors again
My Internet connection has been surprisingly reliable in the last few months. If I had known about it 4 years ago, I would have set it up then, but the threshold of installing new hardware for an uncertain outcome, combined with the terrible service I got from Telstra ensured that I didn't try it until I had confirmation from others that it was a viable alternative. I've been keeping a statistics page for the link, in line with older ones for satellite and ADSL. But it doesn't really give much useful information any more. Many short dropouts, including restarting the PPP process, go unnoticed, and others are due to issues beyond the ISP's control, such as this horrible Huawei 1762 modem hanging (solution: pop the modem from the USB slot, replace, wait for one failed connect).
Port build: take a break
In this morning to discover that my portrules file had been overwritten again with the last checked-in version. Do I have some hidden automatic checkout somewhere? I don't know where it would be. Fortunately I had a backup of the last version, so I was able to continue, but somehow this is all just too much pain, so the next time it stopped, I left it until tomorrow.
Ports build log
The ports build continued relatively smoothly today. multimedia/dvdauthor failed: ===> Applying FreeBSD patches for dvdauthor-0.7.0_1 Ignoring previously applied (or reversed) patch. 1 out of 1 hunks ignored--saving rejects to src/subgen-image.c.rej ... => Patch patch-src__subgen-image.c failed to apply cleanly. Typical reasons for that are out of date ports, so synchronized my repository, ran cvs up -Pd, and tried again. No improvement. Further investigation revealed: === grog@defake (/dev/pts/1) /usr/ports/multimedia/dvdauthor/files 2 -> l total 1 drwxr-xr-x 2 grog lemis 512 Oct 2 11:29 CVS -rw-r--r-- 1 grog lemis 1549 Oct 23 2003 README.FreeBSD -rw-r--r-- 1 root lemis 2867 Jan 11 14:10 patch-src__subgen-image.c -rw-r--r-- 1 grog lemis 2522 Jan 11 14:05 patch-src__subgen-image.c.orig === grog@defake (/dev/pts/1) /usr/ports/multimedia/dvdauthor/files 3 -> cvs update -Pd cvs update: Updating .
Building ports from scratch again
As planned, continued building the ports on defake with my old, incomplete build method. In principle it should work, but for some reason today the build died at the start because I had two rules to build X. How did that happen? Checked out the last version of the rules file again, and discovered it was already in there. My best bet is that previously the duplicate rules didn't do any harm, while now they caused the build to fail. What did do harm was checking out the rules file. It seems that in so doing I overwrote some changes I had made since the last checkin, and I was missing rules for a number of ports.
Recharging NiZn batteries again
It's been two months since I've paid much attention to the Nickel-Zinc batteries I bought in October. I haven't been demanding so much from the flash unit, but today it finally told me they were discharged. And indeed they were: the voltages were down to 1.549 V, 1.486V, 1.437 V and 1.381 V, the last one that I had already marked as not being quite up to the same level as the others. It's difficult to be exact, because it was clear that they were still recovering from the flash, and the voltages were gradually rising. Still, a long way below the 1.6 V in the specifications.
Portmaster: give up
Portmaster is finished! ===> Registering installation for poppler-glib-0.18.0 ... ===>>> Re-installation of poppler-glib-0.18.0 succeeded ===>>> Update check of installed ports complete That must be about the twelfth reinstallation of poppler, but it's finished. Well, it reinstalled poppler many times, but it removed xterm, and it's still gone. Why? What else is gone? It's been 5 days since I started this update. The intention had been to do it faster than a complete rebuild of the ports. But it doesn't seem to have been. What went wrong? Jürgen Lock suggests that the presence of the FORCE_PKG_REGISTER environment variable or the -C option (don't run make clean) that I had at the beginning might be to blame.
Upgrading ports, less pain
On with the ports upgrade today, without running into many problems. It wasn't until I rebooted defake that I discovered that I could no longer communicate with it: xterm had gone away. Why? That's the second program that just disappeared, after rsync. rsync wasn't to be outdone, though. It went away again! I don't understand that, since it happened when I thought I hadn't done anything. But I can't be bothered crawling through the equivalent of 5000 pages of log information to try to piece together what went wrong.
eSATA docking station
It's been two weeks since I received my hard disk docking station. The first experience wasn't good, and I didn't have a SATA disk handy to put in it; the only one was my 2 TB backup disk, and after seeing what happened with an SD card, I didn't want to risk that. Today finally got round to taking a spare SATA disk out of the external housing and putting it in the docking station, in the process discovering confirmation of what I had suspected, that the eSATA interface was only for the SATA drive: The SATA disk fitted better than the attempts with the PATA disk, and it powered up.
Port build pain continued
Didn't have much time for my ports build today, but that didn't mean things went smoothly. While building nmap, got this message: c++ -c -I../libdnet-stripped/include -I/usr/include -I../nbase -I../nsock/include -O2 -pipe -I/usr/include -fno-strict-aliasing -Wall -fno-strict-aliasing -DHAVE_CONFIG_H -DNPING_NAME=\"Nping\" -DNPING_URL=\"http://nmap.org/nping\" -DNPING_PLATFORM=\"amd64-portbld-freebsd8.2\" -D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2 NpingOps.cc -o NpingOps.o gmake[3]: *** No rule to make target `nmap.h', needed by `utils.o'. Stop. That wasn't a portmaster issue: it happened when I tried to build it in the normal manner. On three different machines. With two different versions of nmap. And on checking, discovered that there is no mention of nmap.h anywhere in that directory.
More photo experiments
Another windy day for the house photos, but managed to get most of them anyway. I've been taking these panoramas for over three years now, but I continually run into new experiences: A few weeks back I changed the use of flash in the verandah photos to use TTL flash for the first image, which meant taking the first image with flash, turning off the flash unit, taking the other two, turning the flash unit on again and moving on to the next position.
More ports pain
Continued with my attempts to update the ports tree today. More pain. First it died in libass, whatever that may be: ===> Configuring for libass-0.10.0 cd: can't cd to /home/ports/multimedia/libass/work/libass-0.10.0 env: ./configure: No such file or directory ===> Script "configure" failed unexpectedly. What's that? Took a look in the build directory, and sure, ./configure is there. But the directory name is libass-0.9.13, not libass-0.10.0. Why that? Did a make clean, built, and it installed. It went on, though, although I removed the C option. Later I got a crash after this message: ===>>> pkg-message for compat7x-amd64-7.3.703000.201008_1 ******************************************************************************* * ...
Ports build, continued
Continued with my ports build today. Came into the office and found an old acquaintance: cd x2p; LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/src/FreeBSD/ports/lang/perl5.12/work/perl-5.12.4 /usr/bin/make s2p make: don't know how to make s2p. Stop *** Error code 2 Stop in /home/ports/lang/perl5.12/work/perl-5.12.4. In summary: I still don't know how to build perl from the Ports Collection. Maybe if I blew everything away and started again, it would be better. But that's not sure, and it could be even more pain. As I did last time, I just downloaded the package, once I found it: === root@defake (/dev/pts/0) /usr/ports 90 -> pkg_add -r perl5 Error: Unable to get ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/amd64/packages-8-stable/Latest/perl5.tbz: File unavailable (e.g., file not found, no access) pkg_add: unable to fetch 'ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/amd64/packages-8-stable/Latest/perl5.tbz' by URL === root@defake (/dev/pts/0) /usr/ports 91 -> pkg_add -r perl Fetching ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/amd64/packages-8-stable/Latest/perl.tbz...
Migrating to amd64, next try
So far my experience has shown that DxO Optics "Pro" is quite a useful program. The only problem, apart from the fact that it needs Microsoft to run, is that it uses so much memory that I can't run it on VirtualBox on my 32 bit machine. I started trying to upgrade to amd64 (64 bits, without the memory limitations) nearly 8 months ago, and gave it up two weeks later because of X issues. I then tried again in August, but the pain of upgrading was just too much.
More photo processing comparisons
Spent much of the day with further reprocessing old photos. The results were quite useful. On 4 April 2009 I had another case where a panorama changed from useless to acceptable : If it hadn't been for the reflections of the sun in the lens, it wouldn't have been at all bad, though it's clear that it challenges the limits of the dynamics.
Reprocessing old photos
After getting the Olympus E-510 in August 2007, It took me quite some time to get good results from the postprocessing. Some of it was a learning experience, some was lack of suitable software. I've learnt a lot since then, and I've found ways to improve the quality of the images, but can DxO Optics "Pro" do better? Trawled through my old diary entries and got as far as three years ago, when I had serious issues with exposure and gradation. It proves that, for some reason, some of the images really were underexposed, but DxO brought much better results.
BSD on the desktop, 20 years on
One of the best forewords I've read was to the third edition of Evi Nemeth's UNIX® System Administration Handbook : Suddenly, managing a PC starts to lot a lot like administering a UNIX box: It's easy! Just click here, then you have to turn off the printer to use the network (select here, pull down this menu, and click on Disable and Apply ), then pull down this menu, then select the selector, type in your hostname here, then click here, here and double-click here (dismiss that dialog box, it always gives that, I don't know why...)
Parsley and the dead VoIP ATA
Things always fail at the most inappropriate time. Round midday I started work on the turkey stuffing, and couldn't find the parsley. Tried to call Yvonne, who was at the Yeardley's, and the phone started ringing immediately. Normally there's a one or two second delay while the VoIP network does its thing. Despite other failings, Telstra provides an apparently immediate connection. So clearly I was being connected via Telstra. Why? Closer investigation showed a very hot, non-responsive ATA. Power cycling didn't help: it was dead. Not the end of the world: I have two of them from the days when I worked (homephone.lemis.com and officephoqne.lemis.com).
More experience with DxO
Spent a lot of time playing with DxO Optics "Pro". Gradually I'm getting used to the idea of waiting 5 or 10 seconds to see if my mouse click had any effect or not. Why can't they give some visual feedback? Didn't really come up with any real new discoveries. Time to RTFM, all 141 pages of it.
Is my Microsoft pirated?
While bumbling around in a maze of twisty little menus, all different, on braindeath, Chris Yeardley's Microsoft XP machine, found a selection Is my copy of Windows[sic] pirated? or some suchI can't find it again to check. For the fun of it, selected it and got this page: Server Error in '/howtotell' Application. . The accompanying text relates to remote access, but I was accessing it locally. I wonder if it ever works. That wasn't the only problem. At some point I got this: What's that?
DxO conversions: preliminary verdict
I processed all the photos above with DxO Optics "Pro" and the realistic profile for the Single-shot HDR . It's a good compromise. In some cases, I think it would have been better without, but it reminds me of the first film I took in an Asahi Pentax “Spotmatic”, over 45 years ago. I didn't even need to print the negatives; compared to the results I got with my SV (despite exposure meter), everything just looked so evenly exposed that I was convinced. These results were similar. Went to some lengths to compare them in more detail, including writing another script to generate web pages, but it's clear that I need to do more than that.
Coming to terms with DxO
I returned Chris Yeardley's laptop to her yesterday, as promised. But that wasn't the best of ideas: now I have purchased DxO Optics "Pro" and don't have any machine to run it on, and that on the day of the month where I have the most photos to process. Over to Chris' place to borrow another machine, this one running Microsoft Windows XP. Setting up was amazingly easy compared to Windows 7, and I was going to praise it for ease of use until I discovered that this was a machine I had already borrowed and configured 8 months ago and been through similar pain then.
House photos with DxO
Hard disk docking station
Notification slip in the letter box today: a package had arrived for me. I've been waiting for a rotator for my camera, so went in to the post office to pick it up. And of course it was the other package, the eSATA docking station that I ordered at the same time. Sure, I want that too, but it wasn't nearly as important. Unpacked the device and discovered it wasn't exactly what was advertised. Yes, it has two disk slots, but one's for PATA and the other's for eSATA: The instruction booklet proved to be only to describe how to use the supplied software (for Microsoft only, of course) and the on-device firmware for hardware cloning , copying a disk in an unspecified direction.
Electric collars: useless
Nemo's electric collar was dried out today, and it works again. Went out for a walk to try it out. Not a revelation. The range seems to be about 10 metres when you're lucky, and you can't rely on it to work further away than 3 metresless than the length of the leash. Nemo noticed the vibrator when it was set higher than about 30%, and looked at us with interest. Certainly nothing to stop him in his tracks. If the shock works at all, he did a good job of ignoring it. There are two issues here, of course: is this particular device a good example of its kind, and does an electric collar make any sense for dog training?
Fixing RSS markup
Callum Gibson still wasn't happy with my copout in serving the RSS of my diary. It seems that there were two issues: relative URLs (a problem I've had to deal with again and again) and the onmouseover functionality. If I solved the first issue, I could at least display the before image, though experiments showed that onmouseover still broke the rendition in newsfox. Ended up writing a function to do the switch in HTML and just show the former image in RSS. I suppose Callum's happy now.
Google Chrome: amazing!
Chris Yeardley had some concerns about web site security related to Google Chrome. They were clearly unfoundedbut how many times do I say things like that only to be proven wrong? Clearly it's worth trying out to be completely sure. Since I still have her laptop, tried installing Chrome on it. The download page I got was amazing: I'm amazed. What's clever about clicking on a web link?
RSS: limiting expression
Callum Gibson is the only person I know who always reads the RSS version of my diary. He had problems with my report on photo stuff yesterday. It proves that the JavaScript tricks I'm doing with the photos are incompatible with RSS, so I had to remove them and replace them with a link to the diary. I never did like RSS.
More photo comparisons
Spent much of the day playing around with methods to compare software, and finally came up with a set of pages showing comparisons between the four corners and the centres of photos processed in two different ways. It was a lot of work, and it's not perfect, but it shows a surprising number of things. Firstly, the DxO HDR function makes so little difference that it's barely recognizable. I spent about 10 minutes trying to work out why my mouseover function no longer worked, until I realized that the images were effectively identical (though with careful examination minor differences were apparent). The following discussion uses features that are not available in RSS.
Nemo does another runner
Yvonne returned from the morning walk this morning without Nemo: he had done another runner into the lagoon, and returned later with proof that there's still water in the lagoon. Clearly he hasn't learnt from his experience in the Wimmera last month. Time to put the electric collar into actionif he will pay attention to it. Tried it out, and it wouldn't register with the remote control: it was full of water. That's a clever construction. Took the collar apart to dry it out; hopefully it will still work when it's dry again.
Yahoo!: Why should we care if you get spammed?
Another unsolicited mail message today: Date: 19 Dec 2011 10:22:48 -0000 From: saopun Moderator <saopun-owner@yahoogroups.com> To: groggyhimself@lemis.com Subject: Welcome to the saopun group Message-ID: <1324290168.511.9229.w8@yahoogroups.com> I've added you to my saopun group at Yahoo! Groups, a free, easy-to-use service. Yahoo! Groups makes it easy to send and receive group messages, coordinate events, share photos and files, and more. Description of the group: ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ebey4qk1012u04ge8u1 Complete your Yahoo! Groups account: ... The description is enough to know that it's spam of some kind. The correct thing to do with this should be to send it to abuse@yahoogroups.com, and they should deal with it.
Playing with DxO Optics "Pro"
Spent some time this morning considering how to compare the results of DxO Optics "Pro" with other image processing methods. Came up with a relatively mechanical system where I take two trees with files with the same name and generate 5 crops from each: top left, top right, centre, bottom left and bottom right. Then I created a web page with each image, using the established technique of mouseover image switch to show a direct comparison of each image. The first attempt was simply a single line per image (old and new), so it's not immediately clear what part of the original image it represents.
DxO Optics "Pro" 7: first impression
So finally I got Microsoft to the point where I could install DxO Optics Pro, another 200 MB of package. It downloaded relatively quickly, and once again I was left scratching my head as to how to use it. But it's user friendlier now: it now allows you to select files instead of projects , like all other programs in the Microsoft space by clicking on silly icons. For the test I had chosen the photos I had taken on 10 December 2011, all 371 of them. And of course it had to display icons for all of them, which took about 5 minutes.
Coming to terms with Microsoft "Windows" 7
DxO Labs have come out with a new version of their DxO Optics Pro package, which I tried some months ago, and which I had ultimately found too slow for serious use. The new version, they claim, is up to four times faster ( a remarkable speed ). But, again, it only runs on Microsoft and Apple, and the Apple version always lags the Microsoft version. So tried once again to borrow the computer that Chris Yeardley lent me last time. Surprise: I already have it, and I'm running my Internet gateway on it. But this is just for a testI must really get the 64 bit version of FreeBSD running on dereel so that I can run Microsoft in a VirtualBox with sufficient memoryso she offered to lend me her main laptop, with 4 GB memory, until the end of the week.
Computers or technology?
I have divided my diary entries into 10 different categories, regarding various things I do. Many blog systems have an order of magnitude more, but I think 10 are enough; in general it makes more sense for people to display all and skip stuff that doesn't interest them. But the titles of these categories awake certain expectations: the term computer increasingly leaves out large areas of digital technology. I also have photography and multimedia , and frequently the topics overlap. That's OK, since I can choose as many topics as I like, but maybe the tag computer is misleading for many topics.
Governments and technology don't mix
In Australia we've had to put up for years with incompetent legislators interfering in the network infrastructure. Twelve years ago they brought out the Broadcasting Services Amendment Act (BSA), designed to stop filth on the Internet, or some similarly vague idea. It was passed, implemented and forgotten. And somehow it seems appropriate that the Government web site with the text of the act should be overloaded on a Sunday morning: Today I can't even easily find a clear reference to what it was intended to do.
More house photo pain
House photos again today, and once again problems. For one thing, it was windier than I would have liked, making merging HDR images difficulthow I wish people would come out with digital sensors with a higher dynamic range. I also managed to take most of the photos with the focussing rail set off by a couple of centimetres, which in fact didn't make as much difference as I had feared. In addition, discovered what looks like a firmware bug in my Olympus E-30. I'm taking the verandah photos in groups of three, and only the first is supposed to have flash.
Reach out and touch someone
We've been considering a remote controlled electric collar for Nemo for some time. The idea is to give the dog a mild electric shock if it is disobedient. Traditional dog trainers are, of course, horrified about the idea of giving the dog an electric shock, and it took us some time to accept the idea. From a purely training point of view, of course, most trainers accept that animals must be punished for disobedience, though rewards for good behaviour are much better. But in general punishment requires the proximity of the animal. Horse trainers can sing a song about that one.
Chasing the reception problems
Once again TV reception is terrible, at least on some channels. Over the months I've eliminated a number of causes, including poor cablesI thinkand cross-talk between the tuners. And more and more it seems to relate to specific channels and specific times of the day. But at the moment it seems to be happening all the time on some channels. At the very least, I need to find a way to monitor what's going on. One starting point is the program femon that I looked at a few months ago. It's like tzap, but it works when MythTV is running. The output is a little hard to interpret, but I can change thatif I could find the sources.
What use are gardening books?
So now I have a total of 13 books from two different libraries about bulbs and other like plants. I've already established that one of them doesn't show any corm that looks even remotely like this one: What about the others? The plants I know are Watsonia and Chasmanthe floribunda. I finally found the answer: the third kind is Crocosmia. But the books didn't help much, beyond showing some flower images that I can correlate with my older photos.
Still more TV recoding problems
TV reception is still very flaky. I'm becoming more and more convinced that it's interference. Today I found a recording floundering round 900 MB after an hour of recording . Clearly it was toast, but it was worth trying recording on other tuners. Tried recording the same programme on another tuner, and a different programme at the same time on the third.
eBay status messages
Bought a strange device on eBay today, a combined flash card and SATA disk docking station: I'm not convinced that it will work well, but it wasn't expensive, so we'll see. But what got me was the quick shipping: Date: Sun, 11 Dec 2011 18:46:15 -0700 (GMT-07:00) From: eBay <ebay@ebay.com> To: groggyhimself@lemis.com Hi groggyyourself, We are writing to inform you that we have shipped the item 110786777659 to you! Normally the shippment to worldwide is used to take 8 to 25 business days,because it is a Cross-border transactions.
Recharging Nickel-Zinc batteries: how fast?
After discharging the (Nickel-Zinc) batteries in my flash unit, had a chance to see how they recharged. I haven't measured the charging time, but I guessed it to be about 5 hours in the fast charger, quite a difference from the 2½ maximum stated on the Wikipedia page. Confusingly, that refers to a document published by the maker of the charger: Fault conditions: Stop Charge [sic] if any of the following conditions occur: Total charge time exceeds 2.5 hrs.
No supplies from MSY
While in Geelong, dropped in at MSY to replace my external disk enclosure. Yes, it's under warranty, so they'll send it off, and at some time I'll get a replacement. But they didn't have any eSATA enclosures, so I left with nothing. I wonder if it's worth going there any more.
Electromagnetic radiation causes cancer!
Probably the main objection that Wendy McClelland has to wireless communications is that they cause cancer. Nothing we can say can prove otherwise. One of the problems, of course, is that electromagnetic radiation, in sufficient dosage, really does cause cancer. How much? As I've noted previously, the presentation of the data doesn't make it easy to compare. I established that the maximum radiation from the NBN tower would be about 41 ¼W/m². But what's the level of solar radiation? Discovered a new word, Insolation , along with some typical values: about 1 kW/m² in bright sunshine. There are more specific pages at Aussie RV products, which shows an average of 5.1 kWh/m² per day in Melbourne, and the Bureau of Meteorology, which shows a map of Victoria showing a current insolation of about 33 MJ/m² per day.
NBN info day, the aftermath
Call at 8 am this morning from Prue Bentley of ABC local radio regarding Wendy McClelland and the topic of the NBN info session yesterday. She wanted me to participate in a news programme on the subject, but unfortunately I didn't get to the phone on time, so she followed up with an email: I tried your home number but it wasn't working... do you have another phone contact? . I replied, but didn't hear back from herclearly it was too late. The ABC did publish an article on the web site, though. It's interesting that they don't mention DATA , only A couple who live at Dereel, south of Ballarat, is considering taking legal action...
NBN fixed radio: the details
Off to the Dereel Hall this afternoon for the information session about the NBN fixed wireless tower. Wendy McClelland, her husband and one supporter were standing outside, I think distributing pamphletsthey didn't offer me oneand exposing themselves to strong electromagnetic radiation, one of the few sources that is, indeed, proven to cause cancer: the sun. I had expected the session to be some kind of presentation, but in fact it was much less formal: a series of posters talking about different aspects of the project. Met Scott Weston for the first timehe came in just after meand spent some time talking to him and Peter .
More network issues
Came back in from the garden to find that we were off the network. No signal strength issues, but no connectivity. I'm used to this now: more often than not it's not an issue with the connection, but with this horribly flaky Huawei USB modem (there, USB again). So popped the modem and reconnected it. ppp process redialled, established connectionand still not connectivity. Stopped and restarted the ppp process, and it worked. Do we have software issues here instead of (or as well as) hardware issues?
Another disk crash
Coming into the office this morning, the first thing I noticed was the disk access light on dereel: full intensity. The system was still running, but further investigation showed that the disk subsystem had hung itself up again. The log files showed a similar problem to the one I had last month: Dec 4 21:24:38 dereel kernel: ahcich2: Timeout on slot 19 Dec 4 21:24:38 dereel kernel: ahcich2: is 00000000 cs 00080000 ss 00000000 rs 00080000 tfd 1d0 serr 00000000 Dec 4 21:25:37 dereel kernel: ahcich2: Timeout on slot 27 Dec 4 21:25:37 dereel kernel: ahcich2: is 00000000 cs 08000000 ss 00000000 rs 08000000 tfd 1d0 serr 00000000 Dec 4 21:27:35 dereel kernel: ahcich2: Timeout on slot 8 Dec 4 21:27:35 dereel kernel: ahcich2: is 00000000 cs 00000100 ss 00000000 rs 00000100 tfd 1d0 serr 00000000 Dec 4 21:28:41 dereel kernel: ...
Removing strawberries
More work on the middle of the eastern garden today. Planted a number of bulbs, I think Hippeastrum, in what was once bed number 2, and set to to remove the remaining strawberry plants, which proved to be carrying a significant number of worm-eaten fruit. I must have collected 50 plants of various sizes, and there are still a number to be done. Sent out a message on Freecycle, which their software showed (almost) correctly in the preview window and then wrapped unappetizingly in the final post.
Removing strawberries
More work on the middle of the eastern garden today. Planted a number of bulbs, I think Hippeastrum, in what was once bed number 2, and set to to remove the remaining strawberry plants, which proved to be carrying a significant number of worm-eaten fruit. I must have collected 50 plants of various sizes, and there are still a number to be done. Sent out a message on Freecycle, which their software showed (almost) correctly in the preview window and then wrapped unappetizingly in the final post.
Strange weather for summer
Since writing my weather station software, now a couple of years ago, I've been continually monitoring the results for errors. So this one caught my eye today: On checking, though, it's correct. The highest temperature of the last 5 days was 23.9°, at 0:53 on 30 November 2011. I'm continually amazed how variable the day's temperatures are.
A new view of the origins of Unix
Warren Toomey has written an article entitled The strange birth and long life of Unix . It's good reading, and it gave me an insight that I didn't have before. I know Warren has researched this stuff carefully, and even apart from that it also has a ring of authenticity about it. An excellent addition to the collection of Unix history.
More TV recoding errors
I've been following the TV reception problems for some months now. I'm gradually coming to the conclusion that there are several issues, few of which are related to my hardware (which is what I originally thought). In particular, there are some recurrent programmes that consistently fail, while others record well. Many recordings are fine most of the way, and then suddenly fail catastrophically, and it seems to be at least somewhat related to date and time. All this points to some kind of interference. At some point I'll move the information to a database and do some analysis. But things aren't that simple.
USB and eSATA: more pain
Started a routine backup of my photos today. I back up to an external disk, which should be connected by eSATA, but I've had trouble with that: hot plug doesn't seem to work The disks also have USB interfaces (of course), but I've had trouble with that too. So until I sort out the eSATA hot plug issues, I've been backing up to a system where I don't care so much if the system crashes. Currently that's Yvonne's system, lagoon. But today things didn't work as expected: Dec 2 11:19:16 lagoon kernel: da0 at umass-sim0 bus 0 scbus0 target 0 lun 0 Dec 2 11:19:16 lagoon kernel: da0: <ST2000DL 003-9VT166 > Fixed Direct Access SCSI-2 device Dec 2 11:19:16 lagoon kernel: da0: 40.000MB/s transfers Dec 2 11:19:16 lagoon kernel: da0: 1907729MB (3907029168 512 byte sectors: 255H 63S/T 243201C) Dec 2 11:19:16 ...
The lunatic fringe wakes up
It would have been too much to expect that the new NBN tower would get erected without a fuss. Wendy McClelland is up on her hind legs again, and has distributed another set of fliers (though not to me) warning of the microwave radiation tower , and again naming the owners of the property. It's very low on content, even less so than earlier ones; apart from the facts (the NBN will be giving information sessions), the only statement of any relevance is: ...and have connections to it by pulsing microwave radiation out at the people which radiates us all.
Pain and OED
My copy of the Oxford English Dictionary requires Microsoft to run. And pain, my Dell Inspiron 5100 laptop which ran Microsoft, became very unreliable a while back, so I moved the disk to another Inspiron (1150). FreeBSD ran happily on the new platform, but Microsoft crashed. Presumably this kind of error recovery is in violation of their EULA anyway. So no OED. Since then, I've blown out the cooling channels of the 5100 with compressed air, and on putting the disk back in, things seem to be working again. But where's that CD? I had removed all plug-in components from the laptop, and in the mess in my office, it took a while to find the DVD drive.
NBN information sessions
Heard from Peter about the planned National Broadband Network installation in Dereel. As he told me, there will be an information session (two, in fact) on 6 December 2011, a week today. That'll be interesting; I wonder how to tame the lunatics. Spoke with Scott Weston and we now have a survey on the dereel.com site, currently showing 100% in favour of the facility.
Disk recovery
Set to to replace the disk involved in yesterday's hardware problems. Fortunately, found a spare 1 TB disk, but of course it was USB. And it wouldn't probe; nothing. After a bit of messing around, discovered that the cable had lost its insides (left cable): Or so it seemed. In fact, the insulation is just black. But for some reason, it no longer makes contact. It's difficult to see whether all the contacts are there or not, but it's also not worth worrying about.
Disk crash
I've been trying to read these badly scratched DVDs I borrowed from the Geelong Regional Libraries, but teevee couldn't read them. They're borderline, so it's not clear that another reader couldn't read them. Tried in dereel and had disastrous consequences, which don't seem to be related to the attempt: Nov 22 15:04:27 dereel kernel: acd0: FAILURE - REPORT_KEY ILLEGAL REQUEST asc=0x6f ascq=0x04 Nov 22 15:04:27 dereel kernel: acd0: FAILURE - REPORT_KEY ILLEGAL REQUEST asc=0x2c ascq=0x00 Nov 22 15:06:51 dereel kernel: ahcich2: Timeout on slot 17 Nov 22 15:06:51 dereel kernel: ahcich2: is 00000000 cs 00020000 ss 00000000 rs 00020000 tfd 1d0 serr 00000000 Nov 22 15:07:44 dereel kernel: ahcich2: Timeout on slot 10 Nov 22 15:07:44 dereel kernel: ahcich2: is 00000000 cs 00000400 ss 00000000 rs 00000400 tfd 1d0 serr 00000000 Nov 22 15:08:27 dereel kernel: ahcich2: Timeout on slot 31 ...
Command line: older than I thought?
My article on command line yesterday provoked some investigation, and Callum Gibson came up with the sh(1) man page for the First Edition of Unix, dated (presumably) 3 November 1971, conveniently almost exactly 40 years ago. It contains text like: DESCRIPTION sh is the standard command interpreter. It is the program which reads and arranges the execution of the command lines typed by most users. It may itself be called as a command to interpret files of command lines.
Optus Rokewood tower
On the way home went down to see how the Optus Rokewood tower is getting on, in the process picking up the first hitch-hiker I've seen in years: his car had broken down. Optus built the tower almost exactly where I thought it would be 8 months ago, next to the Telstra phone line (though it's not clear what use that it): It's not in service yet, though.
NBN comes to Dereel
Phone call from Peter of Daly International today. He was one of the team that visited me on 13 January 2009 to investigate the then proposed Optus mobile phone tower. Wendy McClelland put paid to that, but he's now working on the National Broadband Network project about which I heardbrieflyfrom Bryan Scott in August. It seems that there will be a community information session on 6 December 2011, and with any luck we might end up with connectivity mid next yearif the lunatic fringe doesn't find that fixed wireless, too, is dangerous, and put in some kind of protest. And what will it look like?
Command line utilities
Almost without me recognizing the fact, a new term has crept up slowly over the last couple of decades: Command line . Everybody knows what it means, but why? It has taken until today for me to realize that it's a neologism that we never used to use. Instead we talked of job control, command interpreters or shells. Why the change? Clearly it has come from the GUI Generation and emphasizes one of the differences between a point-and-grunt interface and real language. Is it a valid usage? I'm not really opposed to it; after all, it snuck up on me, and I found myself using it almost without thinking (there's GUIs for you), maybe by way of command prompt .
Wasting time with bad cameras
Into down today to pick up various giveaways, including a PCIe video card, a box of assorted cables and a 10 metre antenna mast that I might be able to use for better TV or network reception. On the way found a nice garden arrangement in the middle of a roundabout, and made the mistake of taking photos with the Kodak M1093 IS. Yes, it has a higher resolution than the Nikon “Coolpix” L1, but what help is that if you can't tell until later that the image was taken out of focus?
We want your opinion, maybe
Being the opinionated kind of person I am, I participate in many online surveys, some of which even offer payment . Today I got one on a topic I forgetcat food maybebut it seems that they don't want to know from people of my age group: I wonder who thinks up these surveys, and if there's any kind of debug process. The surveys themselves seem to be based on foregone conclusions ( Why do you give your cat foopussy? To give it a reward?
Power failures: the 20 minute rule
In the afternoon we finally got a little rain, and the temperature dropped a bit. So, of course, did the electricity supply, at 16:27, while I was watching TV. My new 1000 VA UPS couldn't handle the 187 W load of the Sanyo PLV-Z700 projector and gave up, screaming. It required to be turned off and on again before it would continue. That's not protection: it's worse than no UPS at all. OK, we know that UPS manufacturers lie through their teeth (1000 VA, or 600 W. Don't connect devices with a Power factor below 0.95). It took me 20 minutes to get the system back up again (running fsck on 2 TB of data).
Communicating in the Microsoft space
A few days ago I sent out a request to Freecycle for fish and plants for our new pond. No replies, so Yvonne planned to buy some goldfish in town today. And after she had left, I got a message: Date: Tue, 15 Nov 2011 22:59:42 -0000 Hi, just wondering if you are still interested, if you are let me know asap, so that we can send you pictures for you to see if you will take what we have to offer That sounded good, so I replied (Wed, 16 Nov 2011 10:46:46 +1100) and got a reply back within 5 minutes: Date: Tue, 15 Nov 2011 18:50:43 -0500 check your email to see if you got the link i sent with pictures via petlink, waiting ...
Stealing electricity supply
Out to the letter box today: two letters, one for next door with the wrong street number. It's not the first time that's happened, and I was considering going and telling them so, but decided just to put the letter in their letter box. The other letter was from Red Energy, our electricity retailer: Are you doing the right thing for you? [sic] Talk to us first . It goes on to day We've recently received a request to transfer your energy account to another retailer... . That's the first I had heard of it. Rang them up and spoke to Shane, who first wanted my address (in the phone book, as I told him) and my date of birth (Google) to know who he was talking to.
New USB hubs
Received a couple of new USB hubs from an eBay seller in Hong Kong in the mail today. 7 ports, powered. For a total of $1 each, if you neglect the $4.40 postage. And? They seem to work, at least as well as other USB devices. About the worst thing about it is that they have clearly moved part of the purchase price to the postage.
Committing again
It's been literally years since I committed to the FreeBSD source tree. A number of reasons have held me back, including just plain laziness, but the biggest was probably my uncertainty after we changed from CVS to Subversion. In the past, I had kept a local copy of the CVS repository and committed to the central repository, but there are issues with subversion. It can be done, as described in here, but you end up with discrepancies in the revision numbers. So for a long time I put this into the too hard basket. In the meantime, though, I've switched to checking out from the central repository, so it seems that this is no longer an issue: svn commit does the right thing.
The Economist : machine whisperers
Since the deaths of Dennis Ritchie and John McCarthy a subtle change has occurred amongst those people on Facebook who are my friends : they're beginning to understand the relative importance of Jobs, McCarthy and Ritchie. This particular image has popped up in so many places that I don't know where it originally came from: Today Greg Woods published a link to an article about McCarthy and Ritchie in The Economist . I consider The Economist to be one of the best non-technical publications, but this was not one of its best articles.
computers, opinion, gardening
The latest edition of Wellingtonia has been published, without resolving the formatting issues. I didn't get any answer to the questions I sent by mail. I'm left with the feeling that people don't care, and I said so to the committee. The response I got was illuminating. It's clear that gardeners and computer people don't overlap much, and I've never expected the people to know much about computers. But it seems that even answering questions by email is too difficult. One of the first things I asked for when we created the committee was that people copy mail to everybody on the committee, so that we know what's going on.
Strange screen refresh issues
While editing my photo files today with Emacs, discovered a strange patchiness on the display: It happened several times with different kinds of smudge. I suppose this is an Emacs issue, but I haven't seen it before. Running the text cursor over the area recreated the text, so it's clearly a refresh problem, but what made it happen right now?
How to steal credit card details
The business with American Express got me thinking: to steal enough details about a credit card to access the account by phone, that's all you need. As a checkout person in almost any retail outlet, you do: Find a credit card number, for convenience with an unusual name, say, GREG LENEY (a name American Express invented for me in the past) or FAUSTO D'AMBRO. It doesn't really matter which brand of card.
Weather station problems
The weather station reported an outside temperature of -3276.7° again today, for a considerable period of time. This time I looked at the internal unit: it was displaying --, suggesting that it couldn't communicate with the external unit. So maybe -3276.7° is its way of saying no signal received . That's got to be batteries, right? Changed the batteries, and it worked againfor a while, about 3 minutes. Then I lost communication again. Tried to reset the internal unit by removing and replacing the batteries, but it didn't respond. Further investigation showed that it, too, had flat batteries. After replacing them, things worked normally again.
Another firefox crash
Since I gave up using windows with firefox, it crashes much less frequently. The last one I recorded was on 21 July 2011. Today was another case: -rw------- 1 grog lemis 1031749632 Oct 26 09:16 firefox-bin.core Program terminated with signal 11, Segmentation fault. (gdb) bt #0 0x83ea5147 in kill () from /lib/libc.so.7 #1 0x83ea50a6 in raise () from /lib/libc.so.7 #2 0x824d3dfa in XRE_InitChildProcess () from /usr/local/lib/firefox/libxul.so #3 <signal handler called> #4 0x8354fa42 in js::MarkContext () from /usr/local/lib/firefox/libxul.so #5 0xb1bd06c4 in ?? () #6 0xbfbf8bec in ?? () #7 0x00000000 in ??
Laptop installation, postponed
Over to Chris Yeardley's place this morning to complete the installation of the nVidia driver. It had failed: no kernel sources. Brought the thing back home, installed sources and driver, and it still froze. What a good advertisement for FreeBSD! I suppose the next step to getting it running on this laptop is to reinstall X. That will take time, and Chris doesn't have timeshe has an assignment which depends on it due in this week. So put a disk together in my test machine (the one with the broken USB bus) and took that over there for her.
Windows no longer broken, just scratched
As a result of the problems with rebooting Chris' laptop, I was presented with the Windows 7 boot screen for the first time. They've done away with the broken window emblem and the my display panel is broken bloom that earlier versions used, and instead introduced a number of scratches on the surface. I wonder if I'm the only person who sees it that way, or whether even somebody in Microsoft is doing it as some kind of joke.
Installing FreeBSD on Samsung laptops
Over to Chris Yeardley's today with the USB disk for her laptop. In principle it should have been plug in, frob a couple of config files, and we're done . But it didn't work like that. First, the laptop has big problems withwait for itUSB. I'm not sure why, but in many cases it didn't recognize the drive. We thought it might be a problem with the cable or one of the slots, and moving things around seemed to help, but even then it doesn't honour the boot sequence (first USB, then DVD, then internal disk) unless I first go into the BIOS and then out again.
Friends' newsletter, impasse
Helen Vincent sent me a copy of the newsletter draft in PDF format today. What a disaster! I really, really don't understand what's going on here, and I'm not sure that I want to. So far we have been blaming the low resolutions on the low resolution images stored in the document, but that's clearly not the only issue. Here's an image as extracted from the document with unzip, and the way it looks in the PDF: That's original size in each case. But the quality!
More TV recording problems
I've been running ceeveear with three tuners for over a week now. Time for the USB tuner to give up on me, and indeed it did. One recording hung up completely. I caught it in the middle, shut down cvr2 (which runs Linux, where I haven't been able to work out how to hot-plug USB devices), unplugged the tuner and continued (recording on the first of the PCI tuners). The remainder of the recording wasn't particularly good, but it was readable. Why do I have so much trouble with USB? It's not the operating system, and it's not a specific device.
USB installation, final part
I've been taking my time with the installation of FreeBSD on Chris Yeardley's USB disk. The last status was that I had copied all the data acrossI think. I had turned off the machine before checking. Today I fired it up again and discovered some serious issues with the disk partitioning: c partition went beyond the bounds of the slice, probably a result of trying to copy the partition exactly from the other system, where the slice was larger. So, blow it away and start again. Not a problem. Or was it? The partition table included 3 partitions: a and d, both 20 GB, and e, the rest of 1 TB.
Photo backup pain
Ran my photo backup today. I write to an external disk, and until I get eSATA working properly, I've been using a USB connection. And from time to time the system (Yvonne's lagoon) freezes up. On one occasion it has reported I/O errors before doing so, but on others there has been no indication of why. Today I finally finished fsck and found 4 files in lost+found, so deleted them (the backup will put them back in the correct place), andthe system froze again! Why do I have so much trouble with USB? Why do I even try? Put the eSATA card in defake and ran the backup from there.
Looking for a new keyboard
While writing my diary for yesterday, discovered I could no longer reformat paragraphs. Stopped Emacs, restarted it, no change. Then I discovered that the q key wasn't working, and the command is bound to M-Q. You can get keyboards almost anywhere, and they're not expensive. They're also not what I want. For me at least, the keyboard is the most important interface to the machine, and it must be exactly the way I want. In particular, that means not having to look at the keyboard when typing (thus the complete unsuitability of touch pad keyboards). But you need to look at a keyboard to find the function keys in their current position, somewhere off the top of the main keyboard.
Apple Pages : pain itself
Today Yvonne picked up a USB stick from Helen Vincent with a draft of the Spring edition of Wellingtonia. Helen uses Apple Pages , and in the past we've had significant problems understanding it. In this case, she was unable to send me a copy of the document by email, because it proved to be 26 MB in size, and her ISP has a hard limit of 20 MB. How do normal computer users move files around? She could upload them to the server, of course, but she doesn't know how to use scp. Thus the USB stick. And stupidly, I asked for the file only in Pages format, and not in anything that would show me the layout (such as PDF).
Installing FreeBSD, revisited
When it comes to installing FreeBSD, I wrote the book. I've been doing it on a regular basis for over 15 years. So today when Chris Yeardley wanted to install FreeBSD, it should have been a breeze, right? Well, no. She downloaded a DVD from the web and burnt it herself, and her laptop told her it wasn't bootable. So she sent it over along with a USB disk drive to install to. That requires a dedicated machine (or a VM, which I didn't even want to try). And only three machines have DVD drives: dereel, teevee and Yvonne's computer, lagoon.
Nickel-Zinc batteries: first real experience
Today was garden photo day, and the first time that I did the verandah panorama using Nickel-Zinc batteries in the flash unit. Everything went well for the first 20 flashes or so. The recycle time was under 3 seconds the whole time (with NiMH batteries it's between 5 and 6 seconds). Then the unit didn't recharge. Looking at the display, it showed a flashing symbol. Low battery already? I waited a few seconds, but there was no change, and since I didn't really need the flash for the last few images, I just took them anyway. After I had finished, took the batteries out.
Playing DVDs
Once upon a time TV was easy. You turned on a TV, found a channel and watched it. Then video tapes came, and you could record things, so you were independent of the broadcast time. Then pre-recorded tapes came, and with them licensing restrictions, notably the don't copy restriction which I personally find stupid. I can understand that the license holder wants to sell as many copies as he can (though nowadays they don't necessarily try), but that's only indirectly related to copying. Nowadays it's DVD DVDs and Blu-ray with all their stupid copy protection, which really only upsets the innocent, while the pirates know enough to circumvent the issues.
Backup pain
As if that wasn't enough, my weekly backup yesterday failed: === root@dereel (/dev/pts/14) /var/tmp 39 -> mount /backups mount: /backups: Device not configured The device node was there, of course, which in FreeBSD (with devfs) means that it has been detected. And I was able to look at it, but it still claimed not configured : === root@dereel (/dev/pts/14) /var/tmp 41 -> bsdlabel da0s1 # /dev/da0s1: 8 partitions: # size offset fstype [fsize bsize bps/cpg] c: 1953520002 0 unused 0 0 # "raw" part, don't edit d: 1953520002 0 4.2BSD 2048 16384 28552 === root@dereel (/dev/pts/14) /var/tmp 42 ...
Still more teevee pain
In the course of the morning, discovered I couldn't access teeveeagain! Brought it into the office and recovered things and watched it for a while. No particular problems. But I've changed everything except the memory, so swapped that too with Yvonne's computer. We'll keep an eye on it, but so far there have been no further crashes. There's another irritating thing with teevee: since the new motherboard, I no longer get remote syslog messages. They're very useful if something crashes, and the only way I saw the disk errors last week. Why did they stop? Did a lot of playing around and discovered that it would work if I restarted syslogd (newsyslog wasn't enough).
Nickel-Zinc batteries: first impressions
Finally my Nickel-Zinc batteries have arrived. I bought them nearly 3 weeks ago, and received the confirmation: Date: Tue, 27 Sep 2011 18:32:59 -0700 (GMT-07:00) From: eBay <ebay@ebay.com> Your item(s) has been shipped out from Hong Kong today: 1807051126501 8 AA NiZn Rechargeable Battery + Charger PowerGenix New Why so long? The envelope explains: That's a delay of nearly 2 weeks. And the voltage?
More teevee pain?
While watching TV in the evening, teevee froze again. I've replaced everything except the memory, which I had tested separately. Is it really the memory? Or something on the disk? The latter seems unlikely, since I wasn't using it. To be observed.
Open source class assignment
Chris Yeardley over this afternoon to talk about installing FreeBSD on her new laptop. She has a class assignment to contribute to some open source project, and of course I encouraged her to do it with FreeBSD. Chris isn't ready yet to take the plunge and install the ultimate anti-virus, FreeBSD alone on the disk. So how do you install FreeBSD as one boot option on a laptop? Well, I wrote the book, but that was years ago, and in general I don't do dual boot.
Ironing out the wrinkles in teevee
So teevee is working well enough with the new hardware, it seems. But I still don't have the gigabit Ethernet running. Did a little investigation, and it seems that FreeBSD doesn't believe that the chip set can do gigabit Ethernet: nfe0: <NVIDIA nForce MCP61 Networking Adapter> port 0xd480-0xd487 mem 0xfaefd000-0xfaefdfff irq 20 at device 7.0 on pci0 miibus0: <MII bus> on nfe0 rlphy0: <RTL8201L 10/100 media interface> PHY 0 on miibus0 rlphy0: 10baseT, 10baseT-FDX, 10baseT-FDX-flow, 100baseTX, 100baseTX-FDX, 100baseTX-FDX-flow, auto, auto-flow According to the motherboard instructions, though, it should do gigabit: It wasn't until I checked the specs, though, that the truth came out: Asrock make two very similar motherboards, the N68-VGS3 and ...
Dennis Ritchie's legacy
The accolades for dmr are pouring in, as well they should. Today I had my moment of glory with the postponed interview on ABC 702 Sydney radio, and of course they asked me about Dennis' importance. How do you answer that, especially to an audience of people with no particular computer background? Yes, I mentioned Unix, I mentioned C, like everybody does. But for me, the outstanding legacy of Unix is the file system, or at least the underlying concepts. It's such a masterpiece of simplicity, clarity and power. And nobody really seems to appreciate it. Certainly those who came after didn't understand the concept of a directory, or they would never have come up with this silly word folder.
New teevee
Back home, put together the new machine. This time the processor is really a Sempron LE-145 and not the Athlon II that I got last time. You couldn't tell from the packaging. Here the chip of two months ago, then today's: Brought the machine up, ran fsck andit hung in exactly the same way as it did last night. Further investigation showed that it was the old soft updates bug with background fsck.
MSY: strangling their outlets?
At MSY in Geelong, discovered a very poor selection of hardware. In the end bought a AsRock N68VS3 motherboard, a Sempron LE-145, exactly the same components that I bought two months ago. Also a power supply for $48, more than either the processor or the motherboard. Why so expensive? That's all that the branch can get. According to the pricelist, they have at least 12 cheaper suitable power supplies, starting at $17. But the Geelong branch can't get them. And even if customers order in advance, they don't get delivered. I sensed a bit of frustration from the salesman. MSY makes their money by being cheaper.
To Geelong for hardware
Did some further tests on teevee this morning, and got it to a point where it wouldn't get through the POST with nothing connected to the motherboard. There was an extraordinary amount of dust in the heat sink, so blew that out with compressed airfinally an impressive cloud of dustbut how did it get in there in only two months? Checked the memory and the display card in Yvonne's computer, and they were both OK. So: processor, motherboard or power supply. Dragged out the receipt for the hardware, was about to put the machine with assembled motherboard into the car when it dawned on me.
Death of teevee
I wasn't kept idle during that time. Started watching TV, and then found something extraordinary: A SIGSEGV out of ls looks highly suspicious. At the same time, I got repeated reports on the (remote) system log: Oct 13 19:36:33 teevee kernel: ad4: FAILURE - READ_DMA48 status=71<READY,DMA_READY,DSC,ERROR> error=4<ABORTED> LBA=816716546 Oct 13 19:36:33 teevee syslogd: /var/log/messages: Input/output error Oct 13 19:36:33 teevee kernel: g_vfs_done():ad4p5[READ(offset=364471697408, length=131072)]error = 5 Shortly after that, the system froze and I wasn't able to reboot.
dmr interview
Call from Susan Atkinson of ABC 702 Sydney radio, asking if I would do an interview about the death of dmr on this evening's Evenings program with Robbie Buck. It seems that she found me by quite a roundabout way: for some reason they rang UniSA and were connected with Ben Close, who put them on to me. Nothing to do with the messages I sent to various newspapers. Evenings runs from 19:200 to 22:00, and my part was at 21:30, but at the last minuteapparently after announcing the interviewthey postponed.
Goodbye dmra real giant of the computer world
I've made a number of comments about the recent death of Steve Jobs, and expressed my surprise about the personal sadness that many felt. Also the reactions to rms' comments, which my wife Yvonne found so good that she sent him a personal congratulation. But what got me the most was how people claimed that Steve was a technical innovator, a giant . And then today I heard the sad news that Dennis Ritchie died on Sunday. And it has taken the world this long to find out. Rob Pike seems to be the first to have reported it, less than two hours ago if I interpret Google's time-zone-less time specifications correctly.
More network problems
While working on the HTTP redirect stuff, noticed a significant drop in network performance: the modem was stuck in UMTS mode again. Again popping the modem fixed it, but it's getting irritating.
Outsmarting web crawlers
Stephen Rothwell and more recently Martin Schwenke have been complaining about the number of hits I get on our communal web server. One of the big issues are the web crawlers that index this diary in particular. The images are the issue: each image contains a link to a different sized version of the same image, which might look like http://www.lemis.com/grog/diary-oct2011.php?imagesizes=11111111111112#Photo-13. That indicates that it's the 14th photo on this month's diary, that it should be size 2 ( small ), and that all before it should be size 1 ( tiny ). If I follow it, I get a new link to http://www.lemis.com/grog/diary-oct2011.php?imagesizes=11111111111113#Photo-13, and so on.
Resource problems
While watching TV, tried to look up something on Google, as you do. But this time I got an error message telling me that it wasn't available. Tried my (local) home page, and was told that it didn't exist. Panic time? Into the office, where I found lots of messages like this: Oct 11 19:33:31 dereel kernel: pid 7409 (pbzip2), uid 0 inumber 519112 on /: filesystem full Oct 11 19:33:33 dereel kernel: pid 7454 (pbzip2), uid 0 inumber 519114 on /: filesystem full The processes gave the lie to what had happened: I only use pkbzip2 for backups.
St. Ignucius vs. St. Steven
I'm truly amazed by the number people who take the death of Steve Jobs as a personal loss. On Facebook many people have replaced their photo images with a sad Apple face, and acccolades continue to pour in. But many of these are the same people who complained about Apple's predatory behaviour, both against its customers and against its competitors. So many people complained about the locked-down nature of Apples smaller devices. Now rms pitches in, in his typically tactful way, writes (quoting Harold Washington) I'm not glad he's dead, but I'm glad he's gone . Predictably, many Apple fans are up in arms, and a number have quoted this article with the truncated URL by Joe Brockmeier, titled Why FSF Founder Richard Stallman is Wrong on Steve Jobs .
New GPS navigator
Yvonne returned from walking the dog with a small electronic box that she had found in the forest. It proved to be a Navman N196, a model so old that Navman no longer want to know anything about it, not even for map updates (in its turn a good reason to avoid Navman). But it works, and I was able to find a Home POI in the maps. That's in Ballarat, so we'll drive past next time we're in town and see whether it's really theirs. Otherwise Yvonne needs a GPS receiver, so this could do the trick.
Testing hugin
I finished my amd64 build of the latest version of hugin yesterday, and was going to send it to Cartola when I remembered the old joke It builds! Ship it! . Guilty as charged. So I tried it out: === grog@defake (/dev/pts/1) ~ 1 -> hugin The program 'hugin' received an X Window System error. This probably reflects a bug in the program. The error was 'BadValue (integer parameter out of range for operation)'. (Details: serial 233 error_code 2 request_code 142 minor_code 3) (Note to programmers: normally, X errors are reported asynchronously; that is, you will receive the error a while after causing it.
Hugin on FreeBSD amd64
Compiling hugin on FreeBSD is currently a minefield. The latest version has removed one of the dependencies, tclap. While that's almost certainly the correct thing to do, FreeBSD currently doesn't have a tclap port, and I don't particularly feel like making one. So I had to replace the bits in the build tree. The problem there is that a make clean removes it all again, so it's very fragile. In addition, Cartola had asked for a binary for amd64, which I'm still not running on dereel, so brought out the old teevee, the one with the Ethernet interface damaged by a power surge three months ago.
Backup causes system crash
After processing my photos, backed up to the USB disk. More problems. After some time of backing up, got a lot of these: Oct 8 16:02:24 lagoon kernel: (da0:umass-sim0:0:0:0): AutoSense failed Oct 8 16:02:24 lagoon kernel: g_vfs_done():da0p1[WRITE(offset=1802329030656, length=131072)]error = 5 Oct 8 16:02:24 lagoon kernel: g_vfs_done():da0p1[WRITE(offset=1802329161728, length=131072)]error = 5 Yes, those enormous offsets are valid: they're just shy of the 2 TB size of the disk. But that proved fatal. lagoon crashed completely. fsck workedit thinks. I really need to get my eSATA interface working.
Another net outage
Once again I've been disconnected from the net. It's standard procedure now to pull the modem out of the USB slot (more carefully than last time) and replace it. And today that worked. How I hate flaky USB devices!
More panorama experiments
More investigation of Qt's qmake today. The manual states: The following is a list of environment variables available to choose from when setting QMAKESPEC: aix-64 hpux-cc irix-032 netbsd-g++ solaris-cc unixware7-g++ aix-g++ hpux-g++ linux-cxx openbsd-g++ solaris-g++ win32-borland aix-xlc hpux-n64 linux-g++ openunix-cc sunos-g++ win32-g++ bsdi-g++ hpux-o64 linux-icc qnx-g++ tru64-cxx win32-msvc dgux-g++ hurd-g++ linux-kcc reliant-64 tru64-g++ win32-watc freebsd-g++ irix-64 macx-pbuilder reliant-cds ultrix-g++ win32-visa hpux-acc irix-g++ macx-g++ sco-g++ unixware-g hpux-acc irix-n32 solaris-64 unixware7-cc The environment variable should be set to qws/envvar where envvar is one of the following: linux-arm-g++ linux-generic-g++ linux-mips-g++ linux-x86-g++ linux-freebsd-g++ linux-ipaq-g++ linux-solaris-g++ qnx-rtp-g++ It doesn't say so, but it looks as if for FreeBSD I need to set QMAKESPEC to freebsd-g++.
More panorama software
I've been in contact with Cartola (Carlos Carvalho), who is very active in panorama photography, especially 360° panoramas. He was (probably rightly) surprised that I didn't have any web-based software for interactive display of my panoramas, and pointed me to a couple of programs that help: Salado Player and Panini. While searching, came across another, krpano. Decided to take a look today. None are in the FreeBSD Ports Collection, so the first step was to build them. krpano proved to be a dead loss: it's commercial software. That in itself wouldn't be reason for rejection, but it's not available for FreeBSD.
Compressed air cleaning
We've established that Yvonne's camera problems were due to dust, and I suspected that the old camera had the same problem. I'm also wondering if the spontaneous shutdowns on pain, my Dell Inspiron 5100 laptop, were not due to overheating because of dust buildup. To the garage with both camera and laptop and tried blowing compressed air through them. Nothing very exciting happened. The camera works most of the time, but it did give up on focusing on one occasion and had to be power cycledwhich presumably could dislodge dustand the amount of dust that came out of the laptop doesn't suggest that it was a problem.
Goodbye Steve
It seems that everybody in the world is commenting on the death of Steve Jobs. Yes, it's sad, to me especially since he was considerably younger than I am. But some of the accolades I've seen tend to confirm the opinions I voiced a couple of months ago: the computer industry is no longer technology-driven but market-driven. Steve Jobs managed to market things that others had failed to do. He made a cult out of mobile phones, something that was beginning to stagnate. He brought out business models with things like iTunes, really a front end for the iTunes Store, something that upsets both free software advocates and people like me who just want a program that doesn't tell you how to live your life.
Firefox: starting profiles again from scratch
My firefox configuration is the result of years of bumbling, made easier by the lack of documentation and clear migration paths. Lately I've noted that the size of headings has changed, for no apparent reason. And then Jashank Jeremy told me about the awesome bar on the new firefox, something that I don't have. Do I want it? The name sounds so stupid that it's reason enough not to use it. But it occurred to me that maybe I'm missing out on something useful too. So how about starting reconfiguring it from scratch? Did that, with a new profile called Cold-turkey, and in deviation from firefox's obfuscatory directory names (can you remember 7v0n6ir5.Default User, with a space in it?)
Another net outage
I've had pretty good network connectivity over the last few months, but today I ran into more trouble: the modem went into UMTS mode and stayed there even when I was trying to download large quantities of data. We've seen that before. It seems to need physical removal and replacement of the modem in the USB connector. Did that, didn't get connected until the third attempt, and it dropped the connection immediately. Further investigation showed that the antenna connector had become dislodged.
Panasonic: we don't do digital cameras
Finding a definitive link to the DMC-FT1 proved almost impossible. Even Google couldn't help on the Panasonic web site. Finally ended up at a page that tells me: That's with no restriction on the search. What a broken site! And of course their lists of digital cameras show only current models. Finally tried their support pages, but even there I couldn't find it. Maybe this is a perspective-dependent model number, like Canon's: it differs depending on where you look at it from.
To the Friends again
The Friends of the Ballarat Botanical Gardens have a problem: their printer isn't working. And I have taken it upon myself to look after their computer stuff, though it's all old Microsoft-space stuff. Spent the morning preparing: collecting seedlings for Hebes and Betula pendula. Into town, got rid of my seedlings, and to look at the printer: Presumably you don't need to be a computer expert to see that the thing is out of ink. And for that I came into town.
More Hugin building
I've heard from Carlos Eduardo G. Carvalho, better known as Cartola, who's very active on the panorama scene. He's also yet another FreeBSD user in the Hugin communityall the more surprising that the latest version doesn't build under FreeBSD. Spent some time looking at the instructions that I had put up on the Panotools wiki. They're completely wrong. And despite the volume of this diary, I didn't describe the method in sufficient detail when I did it.
Microsoft making life difficult
As I've noted on many occasions, I don't have a completely functional laptop. I must have about 7 of them, but the most recent is 6 years old, and only two seem marginally functional: the Dell Inspiron 5100 which seems to be shutting down more and more frequently, and the Inspiron 1150 with the dead USB bus. Currently only the 5100 has a functional disk. But for things like visiting the Friends of the Ballarat Botanical Gardens I don't need USB: I can just move the disk from the 5100 to the 1150. Tried that, and FreeBSD came up with almost no problems.
We're too lame for reverse lookup
Chris Yeardley is flying to Queensland with Tiger Airways, an el-cheapo subsidiary of Singapore's el-cheapo airline of the same name. It's so el-cheapo that the Civil Aviation Safety Authority suspended their license for 5 weeks earlier this year due to safety concerns. Presumably they're now satisfied of their safety, but there seem to be other issues. It seems that you need to get your ticket by email and print it out yourself (or, presumably, find another method that costs more). Chris tried that, but the ticket didn't come through: Oct 1 07:23:13 w3 postfix/smtpd[35444]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from unknown[202.172.235.32]: 450 4.7.1 Client host rejected: cannot find your hostname, [202.172.235.32]; from=<itinerary@tigerairwaysnews.com> to=<cyeardley@narrawin.com> proto=ESMTP helo=<crsmail1.tigerairways.com> Oct 1 07:23:37 w3 postfix/smtpd[35453]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from unknown[202.172.235.32]: 450 4.7.1 Client host rejected: cannot find your hostname, [202.172.235.32]; from=<itinerary@tigerairwaysnews.com> to=<cyeardley@narrawin.com> proto=ESMTP helo=<crsmail1.tigerairways.com> ...
A new organ
Yvonne discovered an electronic organ on Freecycle the other day, and yesterday the owner called up to say we could pick it upin Clunes, 75 km away. Borrowed Chris' Yeardley's Landcruiser and off, not helped by my GPS navigator (or, more accurately, the maps), which are extremely inaccurate in Clunesthe house we were looking for was decades old, but the maps don't know the house number. Found the place anyway, and had no particular difficulty transporting it. Put it in 4 , the room opposite the lounge room ( 3 ). It's has two manuals of 3 octaves each, the upper with 6 stops, the lower with 3, and a one-octave pedal with two stops: In addition, of course, there are lots of electronic special effects which don't seem to add ...
3 years and counting
Three years ago, at least in UTC, I booted my external server: Wed Sep 28 23:00:13 UTC 2011 11:00PM up 1095 days, 29 mins, 1 user, load averages: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00 USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TT STAT STARTED TIME COMMAND root 11 99.0 0.0 0 8 ?? RL 28Sep08 1320690:02.75 [idle: cpu1] root 12 98.5 0.0 0 8 ?? RL 28Sep08 1337418:49.99 [idle: cpu0] I've spent my life with high-availability systems.
Next power failure
As if to prove Kevin right, had another power failure at 16:42, while I was watching TV. Once again the UPS on the projector cut out; I'm going to have to put something bigger there. And the one on Yvonne's computer also failed. It's over 4 years old, and I suspect the batteries have reached end of life. Still more expenditure required to protect ourselves from Powercor.
Metz speaks
Nobody on the lists seems to know anything about Nickel-zinc batteries, but everything I've seen suggests that they're worth trying. Bought 8 batteries and a charger on eBay. I'll try them out on my power-hungry Nikon “Coolpix” L1, which wouldn't pose such a problem if it were to die. Also finally got round to sending an enquiry via their web form, which displayed about a quarter of the short text: Peter Jeremy has pointed me to the triangle at bottom left of the input field.
More USB disk problems
Yvonne into my office this afternoon to say that the cursor on her display wasn't moving. After confirming that she had tried a bigger hammer, checked and found that the system had frozen. After reboot, /var/log/messages showed lots of: Sep 27 13:47:11 lagoon kernel: (da0:umass-sim0:0:0:0): AutoSense failed Sep 27 13:47:11 lagoon kernel: g_vfs_done():da0p1[WRITE(offset=1318222561280, length=131072)]error = 5 Sep 27 13:47:11 lagoon kernel: g_vfs_done():da0p1[WRITE(offset=1318222692352, length=114688)]error = 5 That's from my USB-connected photo backup disk. I thought the USB problems were over and done. High time to debug the hot plug issues with the eSATA adapter that I bought months ago, but in the meantime needed to do a backup.
A use for smart phones after all?
I've mused about smart phones a couple of times recently, and I've had a pretty active discussion with various people, notably Tom Maynard. I don't need a smart phone, and others can't live without them. What are the real issues? On the positive side, they're an incredible amount of computing power, and particularly communication power, in a small package. People on the move can do all sorts of things with them. Tom uses them for navigation (of course), looking up bank balances, restaurant critiques, weather forecasts, and even for making phone calls. But I can do all except the last without a smart phone.
Facebook crash
I've had a browser running for some days now, displaying the Facebook home page. This afternoon I looked at that screen and saw: Nothing that unusual, I suppose, but it's the first time I've seen a web application crash.
Installing the Friends' ADSL modem
Next off to the Botanical Gardens to set up the ADSL modem that I had picked up on Tuesday. There was really not much to set up: this appears to be a really bare-bones modem. Enter user name and (new) password as given to me on the phone, press Connect . Got a message saying Connecting in 30 seconds , counting down until 0, then the message You are ready to connect. Press Connect to connect . Same again. And again. Looking at the modem display, the PPP LED was out. Was this the modem's way of saying PPP authentication failed ? What a pain!
Smart phones: first contact
I've already mentioned why a smart phone is nothing for me. But Chris Yeardley has just bought one, a Samsung <mumble>. I had lunch with her today (it's amazing how expensive the university cafeteria is) and she showed it to me. Talked about the complete lack of security in my contacts with TransACT, so decided to show her the whois entries. That's not easy, for reasons unrelated to the smart phone: getting plain whois information on line is not easy, as I discovered while writing yesterday's diary entry. The majority seems to be oriented towards selling domain names at three times the going rate rather than giving information.
Back to school
To the University today to attend my first lecture in decades, and possibly the first ever about Computer Science. Sasha Ivkovic is doing a class on Open Source , and Chris Yeardley suggested I came to listen. First, though, to Gays to buy some timber and shade cloth for the planned shade area in the garden. Paid a total of $75, which seems more than reasonable. Getting from there to the University proved much slower than I had expected. It's less than half an hour from Dereel, and I was expecting about 5 to 10 minutes, but in fact it took 25, and I was late (something I hate).
TransACT support: the security
Called up TransACT support again today, starting at round 11:00, when you'd think that they'd be relatively quiet. Once again I progressed in the queue to the next available representative after about 1 minute of waiting. And once again I got the Due to an unprecedented influx of calls we cannot answer in a timely manner. Press 1 to leave a message . It took them 40 minutes to answer my call. That's clearly too long, and they apologized. It seems that the other support person is studying law and had to go for an exam But what's a reasonable time? I think that it would have to be under 10 minutes, probably under 5.
To the Friends again, with surprises
In preparation for going to the Friends of the Ballarat Botanical Gardens this afternoon, spent the morning removing birch seedlings (Betula pendulis) from the garden, in total about 30 of them. Also took a seedling of the Cathedral tree and both a seedling and a branch of another mystery plant: On the way into town, nearly drove into the back of the car in front of me when he suddenly stopped while leaving the roundabout in the middle of Sebastopol.
More firefox rendering strangenesses
I've only just come to terms with the strange way that one of my firefox profiles prints web pages, and now I find that the same profile has developed other issues: the display fonts seem to have changed. The larger fonts on my diary have shrunk. Here before and after : This isn't due to explicit differences in settings: the old version is the profile that I derived from what has now become the new version a week ago for teeveethus the difference in format.
More firefox rendering strangenesses
I've only just come to terms with the strange way that one of my firefox profiles prints web pages, and now I find that the same profile has developed other issues: the display fonts seem to have changed. The larger fonts on my diary have shrunk. Here before and after : This isn't due to explicit differences in settings: the old version is the profile that I derived from what has now become the new version a week ago for teeveethus the difference in format.
Ballarat Gardens in Spring
So finally the (PDF) brochure for Ballarat Gardens in Spring is complete, and it's up on the web site. And, apart from a brief mention on the home page, that was all. There's a general feeling amongst the that PDF documents are enough, but it's clear to me that the web is for web content, so set to writing a couple of pages. That's not as simple as it sounds. The current home page for the friends has a number of validation errors, and as an HTML file it needs to contain all its invariant markup as well.
Smart phones: just what I need
Mail from Tom Maynard today, suggesting a solution to my problems identifying plants in the greenhouse: use a smart phone and a web browser to display my diary in the greenhouse. At least it would get around the breakage with web browser print output. But why a smart phone? Because I will have some mobile coverage in the greenhouse. Theoretically I could use a laptop, but then I wouldn't be able to make phone calls with it. In fact, I don't have mobile coverage in the greenhouse, thanks to cranks like the Dereel Anti-Tower Alliance . I do have 802.11 coverage, and I did consider using a laptop.
Firefox PDFs analysed
My article yesterday about printing out web pages from firefox aroused some interest. After some investigation, it proved that yes, indeed, there's something in my profile that causes this horrible distortion. With a vanilla profile, it produces legible output. It even fills the width of the page by enlarging the text accordingly: Now, instead of the tiny 7 pt text that I got from Apple, I get enormous 14 pt text.
PHP insights
One of the things that I haven't been able to do with PHP is to conditionally process page text. Part of this relates to the display of individual topics. For example, this entry starts with: <?php pubdate ("2011-09-17T01:45:41+00:00"); ?> <?php texttopic ("c", "PHP insights"); ?> texttopic() checks the topic ("c" in this case, for computers). If it isn't set, it suppresses the article. That could be simple: <?php if (ontopic ($topic)) print <<< EOF <p> One of the things that I haven't been able to do with <a href="http://www.php.org/">PHP</a> is to conditionally process page text.
Gardening documentation
Over the last few weeks I have bought a number of plants and also planted seeds and propagated other plants. With spring coming, it's time to decide where to plant them. In the past this has meant going into the greenhouse, looking at what's there and deciding where it might go. The problem with this approach is that I don't have an overview: not all plants are in the greenhouse, and I don't have information about the conditions they want or how big they will get. I have all this information in my diary, for example for the plants we bought at the market at the end of last month.
2011: The year of no fun
It's only been a couple of days since I noted that programming is no fun any more, and observed how bloated modern libraries are. That's nothing new, of course, but it seems that more and more people are sitting up and paying attention. Today the draft schedule for next year's Linux.conf.au was released, and I found a paper by Rusty Russell: Bloat: How and Why UNIX Grew Up (and Out) . He takes the example of ls(1): in the Sixth Edition it was 4920 bytes, on the current version of Ubuntu it's 105776 bytesand he hasn't mentioned the dynamic libraries. Looks like a presentation worth visiting.
More reception issues
Why does turning the bedside light on improve the reception of the bedside radio? It can't be the light. So I checked that: remove the globe and try again. Yes, it still improves the reception. Why? About the only conclusion I can come to is that the active (live, phase) conductor runs through the house and acts as an antenna. When the power is on, this allows the wires to act like a secondary antenna. That's still a little confusing, since the switch is in the cable, not on the wall, but it seems to make sense. Maybe it's the lampstand itself which works like an antenna.
Ironing out the wrinkles on teevee
More playing around with the configuration on teevee today. I'm getting there: firefox now works correctly, though it still keeps telling me that it's out of date. But I've run into something very strange: the fvwm move window function now latches. On other systems, and previously on teevee, I can move a window with the combination c-a-mouse-3. Hold button 3 down, move the window, release. But that no longer works on teevee: instead, it latches, and nothing happens until I release the button. Then I can move the window and click somewhere when I'm done. Why? I'm very sure I haven't changed anything this area.
Firefox: up to date or not?
Took another look at my problems with firefox on teevee today. Apart from this irritating double window opening, there are lots of settings that I don't want to have to change again, not to mention saved passwords. Possibly there's a point-and-click way to import them from another instance, but I don't know how, and I'm not sure I want to know. Instead took a look at the files that firefox maintains. They're in a directory ~/.mozilla/firefox, and include at least the file profiles.ini contains an overview of the available profiles. By default it contains something like [General] StartWithLastProfile=0 [Profile0] Name=display-0 IsRelative=1 Path=7v0n6ir5.horrible_broken_firefox_with_no_understanding_of_UNIX The Path starts with some random character string, in this case 7v0n6ir5.
Firefox: so nice, so nice, we do it twice
There's another new thing on teevee: firefox now behaves strangely. It's the latest and greatest firefox, release 6, and somehow I've managed to lose the old configuration. So I get the default, lots of unrecognizable icons and the Home icon way off to the right. And at least for the moment I'm putting up with tabs, because that way firefox doesn't crash nearly so often. But when I click on the Home icon, I get both the home page and another tab with, apparently, what firefox thinks I need. Here before and after a single click (this really needs to be enlarged): That's without the Ctrl key.
teevee upgrade reviewed
I'm still trying to understand what I've done wrong with the upgrade on teevee. Yes, it works, and I can watch TV somewhat better than before. The previous processor and graphics card had difficulties with 1080i material and sometimes with 720p as well: the images were sometimes jerky. I don't get that any more. But there are other things. It looks like every time I reboot the machine (daily for this one), I have to unload and reload the sound driver. If I don't, mplayer just hangs. Why? In general when I'm watching TV I don't feel like kernel debugging, so so far I'm just putting up with it.
No fun any more
A few days ago I woke up in the middle of the night with a realization: writing programs has become so complicated that it's no fun any more. I was about to write a comment at the time, then I discovered that Eric Allman had beaten me to it. At least it was a confirmation that I'm not alone. Once upon a time programming was easy. You had an idea, you wrote it down, you debugged it, and it usually worked. But those were simple, kiddie programs, right? To do anything serious you need lots of code, and what's easier than to use code that somebody has already written for this purposea library?
NetBSD under VirtualBox
Chris Yeardley is doing a university practical about contributing to Open Source projects, and I had an idea which would span the BSDs. It occurred to me that I don't have any NetBSD system running. Downloaded an ISO image and set up a new virtual machine under VirtualBox and tried to install under it. The nice thing is that you can define the image as the CD-ROM device, so there's no further messing around. Of course it has this horrible graphic tree-climbing interface, but that's modern. Installation was less that successful: the installer crashed into the kernel debugger, apparently as the result of a failed system call.
Volume control problems revisited
A couple of days ago I had trouble with mplayer resetting the volume when I pressed any key. The suggested remedy was to set sysctl hw.snd.vpc_autoreset to 0. I set that, both immediately and in /etc/sysctl.conf, and it made no difference. But that was a couple of days ago. Since then I have rebooted teevee, and now the volume control works as expected. So: is this a thing that has to happen at boot time? Or at some other time which I didn't pass? I suppose it's too late to find out without investing a fair amount of effort to repeat the situation.
Facebook: get modern
I've been on Facebook for at least two years, and I've never found any use for it. But then, in many ways it's like IRC, and lots of my friends use it, so today I decided to leave a window open and watch things go by. I still don't understand what it's good for. One of my objections to most web-based forums is that it's in reverse chronological form, which destroys just about any connection between the articles. If you're reading this in what appears to be reverse chronological form, it's not my fault. I write this diary in chronological order.
Moving files to teevee
A couple of days ago I did my first-ever measurements of file transfer speed from ceeveear, the TV tuner box, to teevee, the projector driver, using gigabit Ethernet. The results, about 47 MB/s, were only about 4 times as fast as using 100 Mb/s. There was also a significantly larger variation in speed. There are a number of reasons why this might be, including disk speed, buffering and encryption: I was using scp. Edwin Groothuis suggested that I would get faster results without encryption, so today set to to find out how to do that with Linux (which is what cvr2 runs).
More modem flakiness
Because of the weather I took my weekend photos yesterday, and was able to get the processing done by midday today. And again they went up to the external site at a snail's pace. Once again the modem had fallen back to HSDPA mode. Again, looking at the network stats, it's easy to guess that it started earlier in the morning (where the red peaks fall below the bar):
Solving the teevee volume control issue
On IRC, discussed the volume control problems that I reported yesterday. One possibility appeared to be the sysctl hw.snd.vpc_autoreset, which, I'm told, is new. To quote: <AlephNull> And FreeBSD now always resets sound volume on open to match leenux brokeness. There's a sysctl to fix it but I don't recall the name. <callum> hw.snd.vpc_autoreset=0 <callum> I think <Darius> sysctl hw.snd.vpc_autoreset=0 <AlephNull> mplayer closes & reopens the sound device all the time. <Darius> depends if it closes the mixer device or not That sounded reasonable, and I confirmed that hw.snd.vpc_autoreset was set to 1, so set it to 0 to see what happened.
Completing teevee
Finally got round to the remaining work that needed to be done to install the new version of teevee, my projector driver (or front end in MythTV-speak). It wasn't much, but it was still irritating. First found a disk to put the production version on: I want to keep the current version for updates. It proved that about the only drive I had was the old photo disk, with 1 TB. That left plenty of space on the /home file system for videos, so moved all non-films to there. Now I have plenty of space, nearly 50% free: === grog@teevee (/dev/pts/5) /spool/Images 22 -> df -t ufs -c Filesystem 1048576-blocks Used Avail Capacity Mounted on /dev/ad4p2 19832 16286 1959 89% / /dev/ad4p4 19832 0 18245 ...
Open files: alternatives to lsof
Discussed the extreme number of opens on IRC today, and Callum Gibson pointed out that there's also fstat, part of the base system. And it tells a very different story: === grog@dereel (/dev/pts/16) ~ 36 -> lsof | grep ^firefox | wc -l 15157 === grog@dereel (/dev/pts/16) ~ 37 -> fstat | grep firefox | wc -l 212 It also shows file descriptor numbers, so I can confirm that this process really does have (almost) this many files open: === grog@dereel (/dev/pts/16) ~ 38 -> fstat | grep gam_server | wc -l 1871 === grog@dereel (/dev/pts/16) ~ 39 -> fstat | less USER CMD PID FD MOUNT INUM MODE ...
Catching open files
Mail from Michael in South Australia today, asking why I didn't use lsof to inspect the file opens during yesterday's problems. Simple: I didn't think of it. Tried it out today and got some interesting results: === root@dereel (/dev/pts/10) ~ 35 -> lsof | grep ^named | wc -l 161 === root@dereel (/dev/pts/10) ~ 36 -> lsof | grep ^firefox | wc -l 14656 === root@dereel (/dev/pts/10) ~ 37 -> P=`lsof | awk '{print $1}' | sort -u` === root@dereel (/dev/pts/10) ~ 38 -> for p in $P; do echo -n $p; lsof | grep ^$p | wc -l; done | sort -n -r +1 firefox-b 14646 httpd 2130 gam_serve 1887 mysql 1551 mysqld 1530 console-k 702 xterm 573 plugin-co 462 VirtualBo 416 emacs ...
National Broadband Network: Fixed radio
So we could see fixed wireless from the National Broadband Network here in the foreseeable future. The coverage map stops just short of here, but it's very much on the cards that we'll get something here too. But what is it? Scoured the NBN web site and found no mention of the technology. Finally called their Solutions Centre on 1800 881 816 and spoke to Steven, who confirmed that I wouldn't find anything on the web site. Apparently the wireless would be comparable to current 3G wireless, 12 Mb/s (never mind that Telstra advertises 28 Mb/s, something he didn't know). So will that really buy us anything?
Too many open files!
Into the office this morning and tried to reply to a mail message. But I got an error message, something like Can't create temporary file . Sounded like a full file system, something that doesn't often happen. What does df say? === grog@dereel (/dev/pts/18) ~ 4 -> df /libexec/ld-elf.so.1: Cannot open "/lib/libutil.so.8" That looked bad. Had I destroyed the contents of /libexec? === grog@dereel (/dev/pts/18) ~ 5 -> ls /libexec /libexec/ld-elf.so.1: Shared object "libutil.so.7" not found, required by "ls" Interesting that there are two different versions of libutil there. How do you debug something like that?
Internode doesn't talk to Wikipedia
Got some timeouts while trying to access Wikipedia today. A bit of checking proved that it was not so much a routing problem as extreme congestion, and that it was limited to my connection to the net, via Internode: a traceroute stopped at this point: 6 te0-3-0-938.bdr1.lon1.internode.on.net (203.16.211.97) 379.576 ms 420.108 ms 379.563 ms 7 linx.lhrx.hgtn.net (195.66.224.194) 389.673 ms 398.889 ms 389.633 ms Called up, left a message that I was having problems accessing Wikipedia, but not other web sites, and that I could access Wikipedia from other places.
Stitching the Statuary Pavilion panorama
Back home and attended again to the panorama that didn't work yesterday, inside the Statuary Pavilion of the Ballarat Botanical Gardens. Nothing I could do would get anything close to proper stitching. In fact, the preview window looked even worse than the image I stitched yesterday, the mean error was 19.1 pixels, and the maximum was 42.5: Finally, in the assumption that one of the images must be wrong, started in the middle with just the third and fourth of these individual images: The URLs of the full-sized ...
Panoramas of Botanical Gardens
While in town, to the Ballarat Botanical Gardens to take some photos. The weather was right, and there were few people around, though not as few as I managed to get in my panoramas. Back home, the processing once again took forever. In addition, I had made a mistake with one of the panoramas, and another one, for some reason, just wouldn't generate control points. Nothing looked wrong with the images, but the result was completely ridiculous: What caused that?
mplayer insights
To write my diary entry for yesterday I had to make a number of screen shots of mplayer screens. It wasn't easy: I only had working versions on particular machines, and running mplayer across the network caused significant delays. On one occasion I had a completely different image displayed for the time and file position in the on-screen display. On that occasion mplayer told me that it had a 6 second discrepancy between audio and video. And that's a clue: the file positions I report are the position of the last block read. They get buffered internally, so what you see isn't what appears at that position in the stream.
Fixing mplayer fonts
Continued my search for the reasons behind the mplayer font problems today. What I wanted were fonts like the ones I use at the moment: Instead, what I got was this, about 4 times the size: Reading the mplayer man “page” (currently 9151 lines, or about 153 pages), it's clear that the fonts should be in ~/.mplayer/font: -font <path to font.desc file, path to font (FreeType), font pattern (Fontconfig)> Search for the OSD/SUB fonts in an alternative directory (de- ...
Installing Adobe Flash on FreeBSD
While trying the new TV machine today, checked something that I had noticed earlier: Flash wasn't working. It seems that my ports infrastructure checked for the presence of the wrong file. That's straightforward enough, and within a few minutes I had Flash installed. Well, it was on the machine. firefox still claimed that it wasn't installed. It seems that the port installation only does part of the job. The important incantation to tell firefox that it's there is missing: nspluginwrapper -v -i /usr/local/lib/npapi/linux-f10-flashplugin/libflashplayer.so That's version-specific, of course.
How the times change
Started a shell today and got the following fortune: Just about every computer on the market today runs Unix, except the Mac (and nobody cares about it). -- Bill Joy 6/21/85 Now isn't that ironic?
Network problems, not Optus' fault
Finally finished my house photos today and started uploading them to the external site—at a snail's pace: 20110820/big/garden-centre.jpeg 7350157 100% 12.88kB/s 0:09:17 (xfer#15, to-check=33/50) 20110820/big/garden-n.jpeg 6976128 100% 14.29kB/s 0:07:56 (xfer#16, to-check=32/50) 20110820/big/garden-path-ne.jpeg 6622813 100% 13.50kB/s 0:07:59 (xfer#17, to-check=31/50) 20110820/big/garden-path-se.jpeg 6999010 100% 14.18kB/s 0:08:02 (xfer#18, to-check=30/50) Normally I would get about 60 to 100 kB/s upload. Looking at my net statistics, it seems that this had been going on for about 36 hours: Discussing it on IRC, Jürgen Lock thought I might be stuck in UMTS mode.
Patching mplayer
While I was waiting, finished patching mplayer and tried compiling. Surprise! It worked. The only issue is that the font sizes aren't what I wanted: they're far too big. But that may be as simple as installing the correct fonts.
Weekly photos: the time it takes
In the past couple of weeks I've been trying a new approach to my weekly photos: I take them in raw format and use Olympus Viewer to convert them to JPEG, in the process correcting chromatic aberration and lens distortion. The results are clearly better: now all my control points get a “very good” rating. But the time! Today I started the photos at 9:05, stopped for breakfast, and was finished by 9:52. Then I had to read the files in, all 5.6 GB of them, which was done by 10:19. Then extracting thumbnails from the images, making “contact prints” to confirm what I had taken, and ran another script to choose which photos to merge and what to call them.
Apple Pages : forensics
For yesterday's diary I was about to write, of “Pages”, that it uses a proprietary format. But that's prejudice, and it's a good thing to check. So I read a “Pages” document into Emacs, and to my surprise got: M Filemode Length Date Time File - ---------- -------- ----------- -------- ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------- -rw-rw-rw- 437 18-Aug-2011 14:31:48 buildVersionHistory.plist -rw-rw-rw- 29009 18-Aug-2011 14:31:50 .iWTrash/00000001 ... -rw-rw-rw- 8688 18-Aug-2011 14:26:02 MARIA-1.jpg -rw-rw-rw- 101363 18-Aug-2011 14:31:48 QuickLook/Thumbnail.jpg -rw-rw-rw- 415712 18-Aug-2011 14:31:48 QuickLook/Preview.pdf -rw-rw-rw- 1585057 18-Aug-2011 14:31:48 index.xml - ---------- -------- ----------- -------- ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2613045 26 files %%- Spring-2011.pages All (31,0) (Zip-Archive Narrow)--11:08AM 1.21 Mail------------- ...
Patching mplayer
Finally drummed up the courage to start applying my patches to mplayer today, after finally locating what I think is the correct version. They're against version 1.0pre8, and what I have now is 1.0rc2: after 11 years it is asymptotically approaching release 1.0. I decided to apply the patches manually rather than using patch, and this proved to be a good choice. That way I had the ability to review the code itself, not to mention changes in the base mplayer code. They have almost discovered one of my patches: the length of the on-screen display was too short. So my patch had: +#define OSD_TEXT_LEN 128 static void update_osd_msg(void) { mp_osd_msg_t *msg; - static char osd_text[64] = ""; - static char osd_text_timer[64]; + static char osd_text[OSD_TEXT_LEN] = ""; + static char osd_text_timer[OSD_TEXT_LEN]; ...
Updating Yvonne's computer
Back home, got round to switching Yvonne's computer to the new motherboard. For once, things Just Worked. Change the Device entry in /etc/X11/xorg.conf, and we're away. It's nice that some things work so easily.
Writing newsletters with user-friendly software
After lunch went to visit Helen Vincent, who does the newsletter for the Friends of the Ballarat Botanical Gardens. I had already prepared for that by putting my ssh keys on a USB stick. There's a problem there: what file system? Clearly UFS is out of the question for non-BSD systems, including Apple I suppose, so I formatted it as FAT32. But FAT doesn't have permissions. So what I got was: === grog@boskoop (/dev/ttyp4) ~ 2 -> ssh-add /Volumes/GROGSSTICK/.ssh/id_rsa @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ @ WARNING: UNPROTECTED PRIVATE KEY FILE! @ @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ Permissions 0777 for '/Volumes/GROGSSTICK/.ssh/id_rsa' are too open.
More teevee progress
Continued working on the teevee upgrade today. For some reason, the machine was coming up without NFS-mounted file systems, which really messes things up. Put a mount -t nfs -a in /etc/rc.local, to no avail. Then I put in a second, with a sleep 5 in between. Success! Somehow it takes the NIC several seconds to come online, as the link state changed to UP indicates. That wasn't the only NIC problem: while testing, copying between cvr2 and teevee (the old machines) ground to a halt. After rebooting teevee (with the old dc0 NIC) to no avail, changed back to the old 100 Mb/s switch, but cvr2 didn't want to know—not even after a reboot.
The Myth of DPI
As lPart of the discussion about the low-resolution images in Wellingtonia, Jenny Burrell came up with an interesting link about the The Myth of DPI. The word should get around more.
More teevee progress
Somehow I can't get myself to continue with the installation of the new teevee, but I have to do something. Managed to make a bootable GPT disk, which requires a separate boot partition. Wrote a script to do my default partition. The whole thing looks like this: gpart destroy -F $DRIVE # Create GPT gpart create -s gpt $DRIVE # p1 gpart add -s 64k -t freebsd-boot $DRIVE # Install boot loader. Note that -i is the partition number :-( gpart bootcode -b /boot/pmbr -p /boot/gptboot -i 1 $DRIVE # First root file system, p2 gpart add -s 41943040 -t freebsd-ufs $DRIVE # Swap, p3 gpart add -s 10g -t freebsd-swap $DRIVE # Second root file system, p4 gpart add -s 41943040 -t freebsd-ufs $DRIVE # /home file system, p5 gpart add -t freebsd-ufs $DRIVE ...
Feeding Nemo: the web approach
I'm participating in an online survey (really a 9-day “diary”) on how we feed our dog Nemo. The question of feeding is important, and almost nobody does it right. Yvonne has been following a book Give Your Dog a Bone by Ian Billinghurst, which advocates food as close to what wild dogs would eat. That means no cooking, no processed food, bones (clearly), and fresh vegetables. Yvonne feeds him like this: 13:00: A lamb leg bone. He eats it all.
Replacing teevee: the next unsteady steps
I've been dragging my feet on the new replacement teevee, and I know why. I really don't want to have to look into the mplayer code again, and the prospect of patching lirc doesn't fill me with joy either. But there are other things to do. Currently I've been building and testing things on defake.lemis.com, a clone of dereel.lemis.com that I've dedicated to keeping one step ahead of the real machine. And as a result I've pointed it via NFS to the same /home file system. That proves to have its issues: I've already come to the conclusion that “system” files that belong to a specific machine should be on /home and not /usr (in my case, the root file system), so I've split the subdirectories of /var (also on the root file system) between /var and /home/var, depending on whether they relate to the operating system or the installation.
Friends resolution problems explained
I've established that the resolution problems in Wellingtonia, the newsletter of the Friends of the Ballarat Botanical Gardens, were due to some processing step, but what? Andy Snow came up with the answer: When the image quality is set to best, the resolution of images isnt scaled down. When the image quality is set to better, images are downsampled to 150 dpi. When the image quality is set to good, images are downsampled to 72 dpi. 72 dpi! What's “good” about that? Even low-resolution faxes have 99 dpi.
Firefox: What You See Is More Than You Get
Finally got round to packing up the possum and rat traps to send them back. Printed out the return address from my eBay messages. Well, a good part of it. firefox adapted to my output format and printed a whole lot of nothing on the left and truncated both the right margin and the end of the message. I can't show that detail because it contains confidential information, but the following section illustrates the problem. The display format is bad enough, but the print format is useless:
Analysing the Friends' PDFs
The Friends of the Ballarat Botanical Gardens put out a quarterly newsletter, currently only in PDF form. It really should be in HTML, but so far I've met with some resistance to the idea. But this quarter's edition had problems with image resolution. I have a copy of the original images, and they're pretty tiny. For example, this one (on the left) was only 320×240. That's full size below. I was going to say “don't shrink your photos so much, use a larger image”, but looking at it, it didn't look as bad as when it was printed. So I took another look at the PDF, something with which I have little experience.
Ballarat Gardens in Spring, from the inside
For the past two years we've visited the Ballarat Gardens in Spring, but this year I seem to be involved in the organization. Today I received a PDF for proof-reading from Elizabeth Gilfillan, who also wants it on the Friends of the Ballarat Botanical Gardens web site. That's a problem for an unexpected reason: currently the home page is fairly strongly structured, and there's no place for this sort of thing. Spent much of the day playing around with the home page, which didn't pass the W3.org validation test, and also put together a Google map of the locations. Now to work out how to put the stuff up on the web.
Progress with lirc
Somehow I don't have the courage to open the cans of worms that are lirc and mplayer. With lircd, checked what I had on teevee. It wants startup parameters: lircd --driver=dvico --device=/dev/uhid0 Tried that, and there were no error messages any more. But irw still didn't return anything, though ktrace clearly showed that lircd received key events: 83716 lircd CALL read(0x8,0x7fffffffe0d0,0x3) 83716 lircd GIO fd 8 read 3 bytes 0x0000 01fe 5b |..[| Tried the version I have on teevee, which surprisingly didn't have any library dependency issues.
Yahoo! login again
Why didn't Yahoo! let me log in yesterday? This morning I tried again with the same user name and password, and it worked. And that before my 24 hours enforced lockout had expired. What can I say?
Getting multimedia software to work
Finally my ports are all built on the new machine. I gave up on perl yesterday, and on Chromium (or is that chrome?) and nmap today, and the rest built, with some help. mpg23.el claimed to be broken: ===> mpg123.el-1.52 is marked as broken: does not fetch. *** Error code 1 That's wrong. Presumably at some time or another it applied, but after removing the BROKEN line from the Makefile it fetched and installed with no problems. I installed perl and nmap from packages, and since I don't use chromium, I just took it out of the build.
Yahoo!: We don't want you
The current global economic turmoil had many of us watching the stock markets closely, and one of the sites I looked at was http://au.finance.yahoo.com/. Following some links that ultimately proved uninteresting, I found I had to sign in. Not a problem: I have a Yahoo! login, and the password is stored in my browser. But that didn't work. Invalid password. Did I have my CAPS LOCK turned on? Clearly not, since the password included lower case letters, but that didn't stop me getting the message. So I went to password recovery. “What's your alternate email address?” Huh? I don't have one.
Friends' Internet connection
Finally got round to finding out what kind of Internet connection the Friends of the Ballarat Botanical Gardens have. That proved to be completely different from what I had been told: $39.95 for an ADSL line (512/128, 3 GB traffic limit), $17.60 for web hosting (I had been told about $50) and $5.50 for DNS hosting. Clearly we can get rid of the last two. But what about the ADSL connection? That sounds very expensive for such a slow line. But then I see that we're only using about 200 MB per month. And looking at Internode, their cheapest ADSL connections start at $49.95.
System upgrade: the pain continues
On with the system upgrade today. Took the disk out of the housing and installed it in the machine, in itself not an easy action: the power supply didn't have any SATA connector, so I had to change it. Then on, and once again I ran into trouble with perl: cd x2p; LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/src/FreeBSD/ports/lang/perl5.12/work/perl-5.12.4 make s2p make: don't know how to make s2p. Stop That's exactly the same as yesterday. But this time I didn't have anything installed, and the entry was present in /etc/make.conf. I really don't know what this is, but I consider it a bug.
More system installation pain
Started putting together the new hardware for teevee today. And right at the outset there was a surprise. I bought a Sempron 145, as the package and packaging clearly show: But when I brought it up, the BIOS claimed it was an Athlon II . So did FreeBSD: CPU: AMD Athlon(tm) II X2 4450e Processor (2812.81-MHz K8-class CPU) Origin = "AuthenticAMD" Id = 0x100f63 Family = 10 Model = 6 Stepping = 3 Features=0x178bfbff<FPU,VME,DE,PSE,TSC,MSR,PAE,MCE,CX8,APIC,SEP,MTRR,PGE,MCA,CMOV,PAT,PSE36,CLFLUSH,MMX,FXSR,SSE,SSE2,HTT> Features2=0x802009<SSE3,MON,CX16,POPCNT> AMD Features=0xee500800<SYSCALL,NX,MMX+,FFXSR,Page1GB,RDTSCP,LM,3DNow!+,3DNow!> AMD Features2=0x37ff<LAHF,CMP,SVM,ExtAPIC,CR8,ABM,SSE4A,MAS,Prefetch,OSVW,IBS,SKINIT,WDT> TSC: P-state invariant ...
Web browsers: frustrated window managers?
I've been using tabs with firefox now for some time. I still don't like them, but there isn't much choice. It's clear that firefox no longer handles windows even marginally well: it uses much more memory and crashes frequently. Tabs are irritating not just because of their nature but also the implementation: in particular, the tab bar is pretty useless when you have more than about 10 tabs. But there's a solution, a drop-down menu of course: And that doesn't look bad.
Establishing real focal lengths
Olympus is not very accurate about reporting focal lengths in its EXIF data. My Zuiko Digital ED 12-60mm F2.8-4.0 SWD doesn't even report some integer focal lengths, such as 25 mm: there's nothing between 24.0 and 26.0 mm. That's a particular problem with wide angle lenses such as the Zuiko Digital ED 9-18mm that I use to take my panoramas. But Hugin calculates the real focal length when presented with a 360° panorama. How accurate are the calculations? I wondered if the discrepancy (reported focal lengths less than the 9 mm minimum of the lens) might the difference in aspect ratio.
This message sent from my real computer
Lately I've been getting messages from people using mobile phones to send email. You can tell because the .sig contains the line Sent from my mobile device OK, I can do that too, so I added this line to my .sig: Sent from my real computer Tom Maynard didn't like that and thought it snobbish. Maybe he has a point.
ABC supports Real Audio again
A few months ago I discovered that the Real Audio links on the ABC Classic FM radio web site no longer worked: they just timed out. Talking to a representative on the phone, discovered that they were planning to drop Real Audio, but the links are still on their web site. And now it works again—almost. The transmission rate is so slow that you can't listen online (the intention) but have to save it to disc first (probably not what they like).
Webmin as an MUA
Chris Yeardley has been sending messages to Yvonne using Webmin, mainly because it's the only option open to her some of the time. And Yvonne has been complaining that the text is truncated. Sure enough, it was. Looking in the mail spool, I saw, all on one line: Oh crap!!! Dann schmier Dir mal was von der gruenen Pferdepaste auf die Rippen. Und ein Ibuprofen oder zwei werden auch nicht schaden. Ich hab auch eine aua Stelle auf dem rechten Rippenbogen (von gestern Abend). Aber mein Koerper ist da etwas haerter im Nehmen...
New hardware for teevee
As a result of last night's failures, off to Geelong today to buy new hardware. Things are getting cheaper all the time. Got an AsRock N68VS3 motherboard, a Sempron LE-145 and 2 GB memory (the smallest they have!) for a total of $101. Also a display card in case the on-board graphics aren't good enough for teevee (otherwise Yvonne gets it) and a 5 port gigabit switch, the first ever. Back home came the question: how do I do this? The old teevee still works, but the version of FreeBSD that it runs is 3 years old, and there's a good chance that some of today's new hardware is not supported in that version.
More USB death
Doing my photo backups this afternoon was a problem. On connecting my external USB drive to teevee, I got lots of: Aug 4 16:37:24 teevee kernel: uhub1: port 3 reset failed Aug 4 16:37:55 teevee last message repeated 29 times Aug 4 16:39:56 teevee last message repeated 114 times I had to connect to a different USB connector before the drive was recognized. That wasn't all, though. In the evening had trouble with the remote control, which was generating incorrect events, and the mouse started wandering round the screen.
Another day of photo processing
Carried on with my panorama experiments again today. And it took another whole day! Part of that was just moving files around (and getting it wrong a couple of times), but also discovered another mistake I had made yesterday: I had not set the lens to its 9 mm focal length. The EXIF data tells me 10 mm, but which Hugin tells me was 10.38 mm. I'm assuming that Hugin gets this value from the relationship between image size and the total (360°) width. It starts with the value supplied by the EXIF data, but after alignment it changes the value.
More reception problems
So, I had finally decided that my reception problems lie in the antenna system, and I'm wondering whether to approach it myself or get somebody in to do it for me. What speaks against the latter is the suspicion that they won't necessarily do it well enough. It looks as if Barry Robinson positioned the antenna incorrectly when he installed it. But that doesn't seem to be the only problem. Came in this morning and found one “recording” completely empty, and a second one still “recording”, having stored nothing. Both were on GEM, so it looked like a smoking gun. Tried recording the same programme on another tuner and—it worked.
More panorama experiments
As promised, the weather was better today, and I was able to take my weekly “house photos”, a term that I need to improve: they're mainly of the garden. Did a number of experiments today: Differently spaced panoramas During some of my tests last week, I discovered that I could get almost acceptable panoramas with only half the images. The test was on the verandah, which is stitched together from 24 images: two rows at 30° intervals. The trouble with going to 60° is that the height is lessened, and in practice I've found that 45° is just about enough for panoramas taken in landscape mode.
60 years of commercial computing
Last year I noted that it had been 64 years since ENIAC was first demonstrated. But it wasn't for another 5 years that computers came out of the closetlaboratory and UNIVAC (later called UNIVAC I), confusingly called a “commercial computer” (something later reserved for non-scientific computers) was “delivered” to the United States Census Bureau. That was just over 60 years ago, and closer examination shows that it wasn't actually shipped to the Bureau until the following year. Looking at the intervening time, a couple of other important milestones occurred in a year ending in 1: in 1971, after a third of the intervening time, the first microprocessor was delivered, and in 1981, after half the time, the IBM 5150 was announced.
Reception problems narrowed down
Yvonne back with a tiny “set-top box” (in other words, a TV tuner) from ALDI today. I bought it in the hope that it might shed some light on my continuing TV reception problems, and indeed it did. First I connected it at the end of the antenna daisy chain, behind the two PCI tuners, and checked the reception. Pretty much identical to the problems that I've been having lately: in particular, ABC1 was very poor. Played around with the contacts at the antenna amplifier power connector and it got marginally better, barely enough to suggest that it was an improvement.
Inconclusive image processing
Spent a lot more time today trying to process images in different ways and compare them. It took all day and was inconclusive. I suspect that somewhere I have confused the output of two different processes, but it's difficult to tell. Still, I'm spending too much time on this. If I have to sit in front of a computer, I could at least finish my weather station software.
The captcha to end all captchas
I hate captchas, especially the fuzzy ones. But today I found one that completely blew my mind: who can write ¦²? At first I thought it was a joke, but I filled it out (with some difficulty) and sure enough, it was accepted. Maybe the hk should have been subscripted, but it accepted it without that. But how can they expect people to enter that kind of text?
Panoramas with distortion correction
After converting my photos with Olympus Viewer yesterday, I had 32 GB of images to process. The converted images were TIFF format, which required some changes to my scripts—fewer than I had expected. Spent most of the day playing around with them, in the process noting the good fit of most of the images. Went back and compared with the old ones, and discovered that, although the fit was different, there wasn't a really clear advantage of the new ones.
Hugin development version
I've been subscribed to the Hugin development mailing list for a while now. Quite a bit is happening: Yuval Levy, the chief developer, has spent the summer adding lots of new features and at least one bug, and since he's going back to university in the Swiss autumn, it's liable to stay like that for a while. But how to find the bug? On some machines, notably Microsoft, but also some Linux, opening the fast preview window causes the process to loop, and they're still looking for the reason. Decided to jump in and see if I could see anything. That involved minimal work with Mercurial, not as bad as I had feared.
Olympus Viewer 2
Olympus have brought out a new version of Viewer , their program for image processing. I hadn't installed the previous version on smart, my Microsoft-in-a-VM, so did that today. But they wanted a machine with between 1 GB and 2 GB of memory, and I've had trouble getting even 1 GB in the past. Today was no different: the maximum memory I could set was a little over 800 MB. Made a copy of the disk to be on the safe side, created a new VM to use it, but wasn't able to start it: the copy had the same UUID as the one from which it was copied, of course, and VirtualBox refused to accept it.
Copying DVDs: the simpler way
Discussing yesterday's efforts to copy DVDs on IRC today. There should be a simpler solution. To quote H. L. Mencken: For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong. In this case, Callum Gibson asked why I couldn't just copy the DVD with dd and use mplayer to play the image. I've known for a long time why not: the DVD decryption takes place when reading the data from the DVD, so the data that dd reads is not the data that libdvdcss reads. But of course, there's a simple way to prove or disprove that: try it out.
Hunting down the reception problems
There were three things to record concurrently tonight, so put the third tuner back in ceeveear. I've been concerned that this might be part of my ongoing reception problems, so after putting it in I started recording the same programme on SC 10 (the channel with the worst reception, and fortunately also the worst content) on all three tuners at the same time. Playing them back showed clearly that the problems were not confined to one tuner. In this image, the left side of the announcer's forehead has been torn out on all three recordings: That was typical of nearly every such artefact, but it's difficult to keep the players in sync ...
New Friends' web site
I haven't got much feedback from the Friends of the Ballarat Botanical Gardens about the web site, so decided that today was the day. The new site is online, and the transition was completely smooth. Now we just need to get round to closing down the old one, which is no longer accessible.
Copying DVDs
Two weeks ago I borrowed a DVD from the Geelong Regional Libraries. teevee.lemis.com, my TV computer, doesn't have a DVD drive, and the machine is located where a DVD drive wouldn't make any sense. So to watch the DVD, I first need to copy it to disk, one of the most primitive operations you can perform with a computer. We've been copying data since computing began. But both the media industry and “clever” programmers have made copying DVDs a minefield. You can mount a DVD on the computer and access the files with no difficulty. By definition, they're in the subdirectory video_ts: === grog@dereel (/dev/pts/6) ~ 66 -> l /cdrom/video_ts/ total 5656 -r-xr-xr-x 1 root wheel 12288 Jan 1 1970 video_ts.bup -r-xr-xr-x 1 root wheel 12288 Jan 1 1970 video_ts.ifo -r-xr-xr-x 1 root wheel ...
Food Safari 13, Groggy 1
After commenting on the French Food Safari last week, I followed up with a somewhat milder comment on the web site: Looking at the big firm cheese with the big holes in it at the beginning of the episode, I thought it was (Dutch) Maasdam. But looking more carefully, it appears to be a French copy of Swiss Emmental. Why did you show that? I'm sure it wasn't because the French hosts wanted you to. And I see you still talk about "Speck" as if it were a French word (it's German).
Redirecting web pages, the right way
Yesterday at the Friends Mike Sorrell asked me how I got the nickname Groggy. I went to a computer, brought up my home page, and followed the link to the page. But I got: Brought it up manually—strangely, that worked—and left the investigation until I got home. Here, everything worked correctly. So I tried with Microsoft “Internet Explorer”. Failure. Where's the bug? After a bit of investigation, I found that the link was incorrect: grog.html instead of grog.php.
Administering the Friends' computers
Somehow spent all day today with the Friends of the Ballarat Botanical Gardens. In the morning, various preparations, mainly writing and trying to get Jenny Burrell's public key. That was yet another case of working around “user-friendly” software. Basically, all I wanted was for her to generate a pair of RSA keys and send me the public key. Completely straightforward: $ ssh-keygen $ mail groggyhimself@lemis.com < .ssh/id_rsa.pub And indeed, that worked. Almost. I never got the key. It's presumably sitting around on Jenny's machine waiting for her to configure the MTA.
More GPT pain
So now I have all three 2 TB disks set up: one as my /Photos file system, and two for backups. Only one problem: the first of the backup disks was still partitioned with MBR. That's a problem not just for consistency, but also because the partition name is different, so I can't mount them from entries in /etc/fstab. That's OK: I still have two other backups (the other one is the old /Photos disk, which still barely has enough space, and which is still online), so I wiped the MBR disk and partitioned with GPT instead. This time it had other surprises in store for me.
Still more reception problems
The reception problems aren't going away.
Firefox 5: better?
One of the things that I had to do to live with firefox release 4 was to give up using multiple windows, because firefox crashed frequently if I did. What about version 5? I had a couple of cases where it looped for a considerable period of time (in the order of 10 seconds CPU time, frequently using more than 100% of a processor): PID USERNAME THR PRI NICE SIZE RES STATE C TIME WCPU COMMAND 45155 grog 22 44 0 879M 757M ucond 3 6:26 103.96% firefox-bin On one occasion it went on so long that I had to shoot it down.
Reception problems: further deterioration
Somehow investigating my TV reception problems doesn't make them go away. Today was worse than ever. After restarting the new firefox, I discovered that a recording I had started had only recorded about 500 MB in over an hour. Looking at it confirmed: it was broken beyond recognition. Why? Did a number of tests, with little results except to confirm that something was very wrong. Tested the cabling, but in contrast to earlier attempts, wasn't able to provoke any particular change—with one exception: the USB tuner (number 1) stopped working altogether, and I had to reboot to get it to work.
Installing Firefox 5
I've been less than happy with firefox release 4—not that I've ever been very happy with firefox—but it seems to be the only game in town. Were the developers also unhappy with it? Given that firefox 4 was the current released version for all of a month or two, you might get the impression. Still, there are issues that came in with release 4 that I might hope would be gone in release 5, so today set out to install it. The good news: I haven't seen any problems with release 5 yet, and it's possible than one problem I've had (incorrect repositioning after enlarging photos) might have gone away, though it's too early to be sure.
Working around the last GPS navigator bug
Finally got the file update that I needed to eliminate this bug on my GPS navigator: As I had already discovered, the file is stored in an archive branding.zip, and indeed, it's present. So “failed to open” probably refers to a bad language use of the word open, in this case presumably “process”. They sent me a new branding.zip which was considerably smaller than the old one: -rw------- 1 grog wheel 4276234 Jul 14 10:10 /src/GPS/ScanFast-7020-current/iGo8/branding.zip -rwxrwxrwx 1 grog 502 17348163 Jun 10 13:02 /src/GPS/ScanFast-7020/iGo8/branding.zip Further investigation showed that the file poi_brand.spr was missing.
FETCH does key-based authentication
Got a reply to my message to FETCH support. Yes, it can do key-based authentication, as a bit of an afterthought: you still need a (dummy) password, which you can store, but you can't store the pass phrase for the key. Or you can start ssh-agent, of course. But how do you do that on an Apple?
More insight into reception problems
More investigation of the recording problems today, for the last few days. It's proving useful to present this data in tabular form; clearly the next thing to do is to store it in a database, so I can do correlations between the file size and the number of errors (an obvious one) or time of day (less obvious).
More image alignment experiments
Google Groups has finally agreed to deliver my mail, after somewhat more than 48 hours, and a couple of people have responded on the thread. Some seem contradictory, but there was a bit of a sense there that the focal length could be part of the issue. The focal lengths of the two images were given as 21 mm (44.72°) and 23 mm (41.18°). The EXIF data reports a maximum of one focal length value between these two--maybe. Maybe there's nothing at all between the two values. If Hugin is relying on this information, there's a good chance that it will be wrong.
New navigator data
As promised, received a 4 GB microSD card today with newer maps: Australia WhereiS 110126 NZ WhereiS 110125 The serial number seems to be a truncated release date, i.e. 26 January 2011, interesting because it was a public holiday. The data is still pretty inaccurate: Enfield is still a couple of kilometres to the north, and the town centre of Dereel is placed at the junction of the imaginary roads I noted a month ago: That was looking south, and the following map is oriented north, but there are still massive errors, as a comparison with ...
TV reception: back to two tuners
Clearly my current TV reception isn't good enough. It got worse when I put in the third tuner, though the deterioration applied to all tuners. I don't need a third tuner for some time (only about every couple of weeks), so took it out again and tried some recordings on the problem channels, 7TWO and 7mate. And, indeed, the results were better: Programme Start End Daisy chain ...
Aligning time-sequence images, revisited
A few months ago I spent some time trying to align multiple images, without success. Since then there has been a lot of activity on the Google hugin-ptx forum about this kind of topic, so posted my own question (why can't I use email? I don't get any error messages, but it never arrives), and got at least one suggestion. It seems that once again Hugin does different things depending on how you ask it. If you use the “Assistant”, you get seriously sub-optimal results, like the ones that I had in March.
Improving firefox
Anybody who reads this diary could be excused for believing that I'm an old fart, out of touch with reality, who refuses to accept progress. Sometimes I wonder if they're not right. My complaints about firefox are an example: why would anybody want to let the window manager manage firefox's windows when firefox, not a window manager, offers tabs, a less useful substitute? I've been using tabs for several weeks now, and firefox is much more stable for it. It also uses less memory, which I have suggested is related. It's also a pain, though I'm coming to terms with it.
Apple: insecurity through obscurity
I'm still working on a way to make the upload of files to the Friends of the Ballarat Botanical Gardens web site both secure and easy for non-computer people. Previously it seems that the files got uploaded via a web interface that at least uses https, but I didn't really want to implement that. What's wrong with good old scp? Jenny Burrell, so far the only person who updates the web site, knows more about computers than most gardeners, and fortunately she uses an Apple, so scp should be available. But it seems that Jenny didn't use this interface after all.
Powercor eats computers
First thing this morning, as I walked past the lounge room, I saw an unusual sight: the disk access light of teevee.lemis.com, the computer that runs the TV projector, was shining brightly: heavy disk access. Never mind that it shouldn't have been on at all—I had not been able to turn it off after yesterday's power failure—why was it accessing disk at all, let alone so heavily? Some investigation showed a number of depressing things: It was apparently stuck in an fsck/reboot loop.
More reception problems
As planned, backed up my mythconverg database and re-scanned the channels. There seems to have been no change in the reception parameters, but some of the channel names have changed, in some cases subtly: for example, “7MATE ON PRIME” has become “7mate Ballarat”, and “7TWO ON PRIME” has become “7TWO Ballarat”, enough to confuse MythTV. One of the programmes I had wanted to record was “Electric Dreams” on 7TWO, but for some reason MythTV insisted on trying to record it from 7mate. Trying to record manually only added to the problems. The log file shows it trying to record once only, interrupted by the power failure: 2011-07-10 14:00:03.443 Started recording: Electric dreams "Sun Jul 10 14:00:00 2011": channel 2063 on cardid 1, sourceid 2 2011-07-10 16:04:42.795 Started recording: Electric dreams "Sun Jul 10 14:00:00 2011": channel 2063 on cardid 1, sourceid ...
More TV reception pain
My TV reception is going through a bad phase again, but it's clearly related to some stations, notably 7TWO. Last night I had the following recordings: Start End Daisy chain Number of time time Channel ...
eBay: The power of negative feedback
It's been two weeks since I picked up the replacement GPS navigator in Melbourne. At the time, Maurice promised to get me new maps “soon”. I wasn't overly surprised that I hadn't heard back from then, but we needed closure, so I sent them a message, including: Please supply up-to-date maps and file by CoB on Friday, 15 July. Otherwise I will leave the following negative feedback: Software and maps seriously out of date, missing files, promised updates missing That worked.
Backup disk failure and eSATA
Yvonne reported boot problems on lagoon, her machine, today. That proved to be a failed mount of the NFS file system /dump: my backup disk (on dereel) has died. That's nothing that serious; disks die. But it occurred to me that keeping two backups on the same disk is sub-optimal. I really should find a way to alternate between two different disks, like I do with photos, so that I'll have at least one backup if a single disk fails. Took the drive out, in the process rejumpering the eSATA adapter that I bought last month for external connections. That showed some difference: lots of disk activity, to judge by the disk lights, but no reaction from the operating system.
Wondo Gonseff lives!
Decades ago I had a colleague called Wondo Gonseff. He was a good bloke, but he was somehow ashamed of his name and preferred to call himself by an anagram, Geoff Snowdon. I was reminded of him by yet another question about why I call myself groggy, and went googling for him. He's back! He has come out of the closet and is now on LinkedIn. Hopefully I can reestablish contact.
Recode or transcode?
Peter Jeremy had a query about the term “recode”, which I use for describing the transformation of my MPEG transport streams to program streams. He preferred the term transcode. Which is right? Both terms are in use, but if you believe Wikipedia, transcoding is a repacking of the data into a different format, while recoding maintains the format. But the examples they give are not very convincing. I need to think about this one, but “recode” sounds more logical to me than “transcode”.
Migrating the friend's web site
So now I have all I need for migrating the web site of the Friends of the Ballarat Botanical Gardens, so did so. Well, at least we now have two web servers running in parallel, though www.fbbg.org.au is still the old site. It's obvious that the friends are not particularly technical, and the last thing I want to do is to have things go wrong somewhere. But—so far—everything works as it should. About the only issue is going to be migrating from ftp to scp for updating the site. In itself, that's not a problem, of course, especially since Jenny Burrell, the only person who actually does the updates, uses an Apple.
More reception problems
On the whole TV reception hasn't been bad lately, but last night was an exception which might teach me something. On cardid 2 (the PCI tuner) I recorded a programme on SBS 2 from 19:32 to 20:37, and a programme on 7TWO from 20:37 to 00:30. Concurrently on cardid 1 (the USB tuner) I recorded a programme on SBS 1 from 20:27 to 22:00. The recordings on SBS 1 and SBS 2 recoded without any error messages, though I found massive error reports for the SBS 2 recording in the log file—I guess. The log message format doesn't state the process ID, so in general I can't be 100% sure, though in this case it was the first recording of the day, so it's pretty clear that it must have been that.
Transferring the fbbg zone
I've been dragging my heels on the fbbg.org.au web site, at least partially because I don't understand the web-based interfaces. Got hold of the registry key and put myself in the whois data as tech contact, but still couldn't find a way to get hold of the zone file (I was sure there was only one). Yes, I can change the name servers, but I'd have to guess at the content. In itself, that's not difficult, since there wasn't much more there than the web site, but it's untidy. Spent a lot of time looking round the TransACT web interface, which showed me nothing, and spoke to people who know their way round TransACT, all to no avail.
Boat people and the web
Australia has been a leading country for immigration since the second world war, and to a certain extent immigrants are welcome and often actively solicited. But the bureaucrats have to make the decision, and as in other countries, one thing that greatly lessens your chance of being accepted is to arrive without a visa. I've been there, done that. But what if you have no choice? The US aggression in the Middle East has created millions of refugees, and in Africa, without US help, ethnic violence has been just as bad. So lots of people arrive in Australia by boat with the “help” of people smugglers.
More Internet infections
Just before leaving for the Dilleys, got a call from Hazel at “E Protection”, a company in North Sydney (aren't they all?), telling me that my computer had been infected by the Internet. I asked for the phone number, but she said only registered users were allowed to have the phone number. Unfortunately I didn't have time to string her along any further, and just hung up. Somehow I feel guilty.
Importing Trapster to iGo 8 GPS navigators
Last week Peter Dilley had found many more speed cameras with his BlackBerry than I had with my GPS navigator, and I've been doing some investigation since then. It seems that the most reliable and up-to-date source of data is Trapster. But that's really for Garmin and TomTom navigators, which use different formats. I've spent a lot of time trying to find out details of the formats that my navigator uses. It's made by Nav N Go, and for a long time I thought it was called iGO 8, but it seems this is somewhat generic term, and my particular version is called iGO My way.
Australia's Urban Broadband Network: not National
One of the projects that the new government brought in when they came to power was the “National Broadband Network”. It was a welcome move: prior to that, a couple of rival companies, first and foremost Telstra, who owns all the copper, had stifled competition and thus progress. By putting the national infrastructure in the hands of a company who did not compete in the retail market, and which would ensure coverage for all of Australia, we could only have advantages. But that didn't happen. Paradoxically, Australia is one of the most urbanized countries in the world. According to Wikipedia, 89% of the population lives in cities, and over 50% of the population live in the 3 cities Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane.
YouTube markup: Still more issues
So yesterday I finally thought I had got my markup for YouTube videos right. But the W3 validator disagreed with me: Line 5187, Column 31: "allowfulscreen" is not a member of a group specified for any attribute allowfulscreen> So I removed that, and the page validated. And, surprise! I still had the full screen functionality. So that invalid keyword is also unnecessary. And both YouTube markup suggestions are invalid. That wasn't all, though.
Embedding YouTube videos, continued
After some discussion with Callum Gibson, found that YouTube is not consistent in its suggested markup. When I uploaded this clip, I got a URL http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cajZMd9HkVM and this code to embed it (after reformatting): <object width="425" height="344"> <param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/cajZMd9HkVM?hl=en&fs=1"> </param> <param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param> <param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param> <embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/cajZMd9HkVM?hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"> </embed> </object> The problem here ...
More GPS navigator games
More playing around with my GPS navigator today. One bug relates to finding petrol stations: And yes, the message is correct: the file doesn't exist, and the navigation application stops and you're back in the start menu. I thought I could fix that by using the POI (Point of Interest) file from my old navigator, which worked correctly. Copied it across, but it didn't make any difference.
Spam from Oracle
Spam is getting bad enough as it is without big companies getting in on the act. I recently received the following message: From SEMA-CR-3-1YQOMMH@bounce.oracle-mail.com Fri Jun 24 14:00:11 2011 Return-Path: <SEMA-CR-3-1YQOMMH@bounce.oracle-mail.com> Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (unknown [IPv6:2001:4f8:fff6::34]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 0B6EA106564A for <groggyhimself@freebsd.org>; Fri, 24 Jun 2011 03:48:14 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from SEMA-CR-3-1YQOMMH@bounce.oracle-mail.com) Received: from acsinet52.oracleeblast.com (acsinet52.oracleeblast.com [141.146.5.52]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id B43DC8FC12 for <groggyhimself@freebsd.org>; Fri, 24 Jun 2011 03:48:13 +0000 (UTC) Received: from amts748.us.oracle.com (amts748.us.oracle.com [140.84.104.66]) by acsinet52.oracleeblast.com (8.14.4+Sun/8.14.4) with ESMTP id p5O3OKDi020518 for <groggyhimself@freebsd.org>; Fri, 24 Jun 2011 03:24:24 GMT Date: Thu, 23 Jun 2011 20:24:20 -0700 X-Mailer: Siebel EMS 80 [EMS 2017] main/201012131828 Sender: "Oracle" <reply@oracle-mail.com> Subject: Oracle Webcast: ReJAVAnate Your Enterprise Client ...
More playing with GPS navigation systems
Spent some time playing around with files on my GPS navigator. Added the newer maps and some voice files from my old navigator, and to my surprise they worked. The maps I bought last September work in the new navigator, but they didn't work in the old one, and I had suspected that there was some incompatibility. Just how slow is the navigator? Took a look at the test of motorbike navigators in c't, where they tested the time to calculate two journeys: one from Hamburg to Königsdorf, and the other from Tromsø to Cadiz. Now that I have European maps in the system, I could compare it.
1000 days and counting
One of my external servers (not http://www.lemis.com/) has now been up for 1000 days, the longest I've ever had a machine up and running: Sat Jun 25 23:24:36 UTC 2011 11:24PM up 1000 days, 53 mins, 2 users, load averages: 0.00, 0.01, 0.00 That's a virtual machine, what's more, and both host and guest are FreeBSD. I worked with and for Tandem computers for 15 years, but I've never seen an up time like that.
The next firefox crash
Since switching from multiple windows to mainly tabs, my firefox processes have become much more stable. It ran from Wednesday until today, and I noted that the memory use was much less, only about 700 MB instead of 1 GB. But today it reached 1 GB and crashed again, though in a different place from usual. So it's still not clear whether the improvement was due to lack of race conditions in window handling, or some issue with the memory size itself. And how do I like tabs? I still hate them. Yet another instance of the “there can only be one” mentality.
The end of the world, part 4711
Chris Yeardley sent me a URL for a description of why the world will end at the end of next year, being swallowed up by a black hole. I don't believe a word of it, of course, but there was nothing (apart from typical lack of substantiation) that I could point to to disprove it. It's not until you go to another page on the site that you realize that yes, indeed, the information on the site is correct. It'll be interesting to see what effect this has.
External viewfinder monitor
Earlier in the week I read an article describing a Sony monitor for displaying the live viewfinder or monitor images of a DSLR. In itself, not very interesting (and the links are in German), but what got me was the size and resolution of the device: 5", 800×480 pixels. That's the resolution of my new GPS navigator, which is 2" larger, and it has an aspect ratio of 15:9 (or 5:3), which no video or still camera has. Clearly the thing wasn't originally designed for cameras, which have aspect ratios like 3:2 (most SLRs and 35 mm cameras), 4:3 (compact, Olympus), or 16:9 (wide screen video).
Getting the Youtube videos right
Last week I finally got Youtube videos to display in this diary, using the <embed> tag. It was very clear that that's not the way to do it: <embed> is not standards compliant. The W3 validator gave explanations and pointed me to a page that claimed to make “flash satay”, though I don't understand the analogy. It's a mess, as the author confirms, made necessary (it seems) by Microsoft “Internet Explorer”. I've simplified things, which, it seems, means that people using “Internet Explorer” will have to wait until the whole file has been loaded before it starts playing. See if I care.
New navigator
Then down to Clayton to pick up the new navigator, not helped by Google Maps' complete lack of understanding of the street numbers in the Prince's Highway, just one of Australia's main highways; it put the address in the middle of a main highway junction. It's interesting to see the other side of an eBay operation: a couple of young blokes in a room in an industrial area. Changed the unit pretty quickly, and confirmed, yes, the power connector is OK. The Microsoft “Windows CE” is also the English version, and one of the blokes (Maurice; the other is Ken) showed me how to get the spoken street names.
Navigator problems: cause identified?
Somehow it seems funny that the problems I'm having with both GPS navigators are so similar. In each case, the only problem is charging them. And in each case they charge via the micro-USB port. Went to take a look at the port itself. The results were informative but somewhat disappointing. Here's the socket on the new navigator: One pin missing, one bent. I wasn't sure how many pins were supposed to be there—it's at least hypothetically possible that pin 5 isn't always needed, so I bent the bent pin back to shape and tried again, still with no success.
GPS navigator: disaster
While in town, picked up my new GPS navigator. Compared to the old one it's enormous: Headed back home via the back roads, and the navigator happily told me to leave the main road and take a detour through a paddock, something that not even the old one did. Like the old navigator sometimes did, it didn't show a charge light much of the time—I wonder if there's a software problem there. The software itself looked almost identical to the software on the old navigator, and I had no difficulty using it.
Upgrading the friends' computer infrastructure
Into town today to meet with some of the committee members of the Friends of the Ballarat Botanical Gardens. They've discovered my computer background and have asked to take their computer infrastructure in charge. That looks like it'll be fun, and hopefully not too much work.
Firefox with tabs
My firefox problems are getting no better. People keep telling me I should be using tabs, not windows (Window manager? What's that?) . I have my reasons, some of which are more philosophical than practical (why should a web browser want to be a window manager?) , but it seems worthwhile reviewing the situation, especially in view of my suspicion that the crashes are related to the number of windows open. So today I reconfigured things for tabs, and I've been trying to live with it for a while. The problems with tabs are real: on the one hand, I want to be able to have a page load in the background and work in another.
Youtube: the pain
For a couple of reasons today I had to deal with YouTube. Firstly, I wanted a link to the video of the GPS receiver that I mentioned yesterday, and secondly Yvonne wanted me to put some videos up on YouTube. How do you reference a video on YouTube? I still don't understand completely, but you can embed a video player in a page like this:
BranchOut... and fall over?
More copious mail from BranchOut today. I'm obviously not professional enough to understand it. So far I haven't found the text of any of the messages I was informed of, not even the ones I wrote myself. In fact, I can't remember having written any messages, but they tell me I did. Maybe I'm just getting senile, which would also explain why I can't navigate this site—it looks different every time I go there. On one occasion I was asked if I wanted to get to know Doug Rabson (already one of my “friends” on Facebook), and on the same page, not far away, I was asked to endorse him.
We don't need no steenking testing
From time to time bugs, even big ones, sneak into development projects. The biggest usually get caught immediately during testing. But in some cases it seems that not even the minimum of testing gets done. It's a commit to fix a single-character mistake: @@ -348,7 +348,7 @@ case "$DISTRO" in ln -s /usr/lib/mesa/ld.so.conf /etc/alternatives/gl_conf rm -rf /etc/alternatives/xorg_extra_modules rm -rf /etc/alternatives/xorg_extra_modules-bumblebee - rm -rf /usr /lib/nvidia-current/xorg/xorg + rm -rf /usr/lib/nvidia-current/xorg/xorg This one is a variant on a classic UNIX mistake. One character wrong, and you delete your entire /usr hierarchy.
Buying a navigator on eBay
Spent more time today comparing GPS navigators. It's almost impossible: even last year I noted that the manufacturers think that their raison d'être is as MP3 players and games, and that trend has continued (now they're MPEG-2 players too). The descriptions I get hardly address my requirements at all. Here they are again: - FM transmitter for voice instructions - Hungarian? - Speed cameras - Free map update The “Hungarian” is an indirect requirement: of course nobody tells you what applications software the thing runs (the best is “Windows” CE), but I'm guessing that any receiver that has a Hungarian language option uses the Nav N Go iGO 8 software, which comes from Hungary.
Facebook branches out
Yes, I have a Facebook account, for reasons I don't really understand. I look in about once every month or two to see who wants to be my “friend”, and then leave again. Today, though, I got a mail message: From: "Facebook" <notification+ysrrnwrr@facebookmail.com> Subject: Max Khon posted on your Wall. Max wrote: "" To see your Wall and reply to posts, follow the link below: http://www.facebook.com/n/?permalink.php&story_fbid=2053361701260&id=1402575842&mid=4658b895G6714702G291bcdbG1&bcode=2v1J2ZKJ&n_m=farcebook%40lmeis.com OK, what did Max have to say? Was it really nothing, or did Facebook mess up? Went to take a look.
More firefox experiments
The firefox crashes continue unabated—if anything, they're getting more frequent. Today tried setting up a completely neutral profile to see if they still didn't happen, in the process discovering how many things you depend on in the profile. Some don't appear to be settable any more, and the continual change in font sizes really gets on my nerves. Why do so many web programmers think they know better about how big characters should be? Anyway, it didn't crash. It hung. And when I tried to restart it, the profile no longer showed up in the startup menu. What a pain!
eSATA: The solution?
Finally my eSATA adapter has arrived. It must be one of the smallest boards I have ever seen: It's also the first board I've seen in a very long time which physical jumpers on it. It came with cables and a mini CD with drivers, presumably for Microsoft. In the afternoon, got round to putting it in dereel, and discovered that the cables supplied were SATA, not eSATA—the adapter (4 port) has two SATA and 2 eSATA connectors.
LiIon pain
Later in the day I wanted to look at something on my GPS navigator. Not for the first time, the battery had drained while in “sleep” state. Connected it up to a power source. Nothing. Connector problems? Cable problems? No idea. Finally connected it via a USB cable to dereel—just what I didn't want to do. And with good reason. It started to charge, and I turned it on. Then: Jun 16 15:03:09 dereel kernel: ugen0.2: <vendor 0x1941> at usbus0 (disconnected) Jun 16 15:03:09 dereel kernel: uhid0: at uhub0, port 2, addr 2 (disconnected) Jun 16 15:03:09 dereel kernel: ugen5.2: <JMicron> at usbus5 (disconnected) Jun 16 15:03:09 dereel kernel: umass0: at uhub5, port 1, addr 2 (disconnected) Jun 16 15:03:09 dereel kernel: (da0:umass-sim0:0:0:0): lost device Jun 16 15:03:09 dereel kernel: (da0:umass-sim0:0:0:0): Synchronize cache failed, status == 0xa, scsi status == 0x0 ...
LiIon pain
Later in the day I wanted to look at something on my GPS navigator. Not for the first time, the battery had drained while in “sleep” state. Connected it up to a power source. Nothing. Connector problems? Cable problems? No idea. Finally connected it via a USB cable to dereel—just what I didn't want to do. And with good reason. It started to charge, and I turned it on. Then: Jun 16 15:03:09 dereel kernel: ugen0.2: <vendor 0x1941> at usbus0 (disconnected) Jun 16 15:03:09 dereel kernel: uhid0: at uhub0, port 2, addr 2 (disconnected) Jun 16 15:03:09 dereel kernel: ugen5.2: <JMicron> at usbus5 (disconnected) Jun 16 15:03:09 dereel kernel: umass0: at uhub5, port 1, addr 2 (disconnected) Jun 16 15:03:09 dereel kernel: (da0:umass-sim0:0:0:0): lost device Jun 16 15:03:09 dereel kernel: (da0:umass-sim0:0:0:0): Synchronize cache failed, status == 0xa, scsi status == 0x0 ...
More USB pain
Came into the office this morning to find dereel dead in the water. Further investigation showed a far-too-common syndrome: Jun 15 22:21:18 dereel kernel: (da0:umass-sim0:0:0:0): AutoSense failed Jun 15 22:21:18 dereel kernel: g_vfs_done():da0p1[WRITE(offset=1699643392, length=131072)]error = 5 Jun 15 22:21:18 dereel kernel: g_vfs_done():da0p1[WRITE(offset=1711505408, length=131072)]error = 5 Jun 15 22:21:18 dereel kernel: g_vfs_done():da0p1[WRITE(offset=1716944896, length=32768)]error = 5 Jun 15 22:21:18 dereel kernel: g_vfs_done():da0p1[WRITE(offset=1728184320, length=81920)]error = 5 By the time I got in, the only thing that it could do was to respond to a ping. So: USB is still not ready for prime time on FreeBSD, though I don't know which of the two is to blame.
Why I hate USB
Took some photos for Yvonne today, then in to read it in to my computer. It didn't work. Instead, it crashed the system. It seems that there was some interaction between the flash card and the USB disk. This time I got a photo of the messages: High time for the eSATA adapter to arrive.
TV Reception problems: better or not?
Since setting the fine tune flag on cvr2, I haven't had any serious problems with TV reception—until today. Then I found, while recoding: Recoding 2032_20110614212700.mpg (The-Beat-My-Heart-Skipped-2011-06-14-2127) 2011-06-15 13:16:10.087 2.9% complete 2011-06-15 13:16:10.282 Deadlock detected. One buffer is full when the other is empty! Aborting *** Failed, status 232 It died right at the beginning, like it sometimes does with terminally corrupted images. Took a look at it, and it didn't seem that bad. I suspect that this deadlock issue occurs with particular and relatively rare kinds of corruption, so the more corrupt the image is, the more likely it is to happen.
Goodbye MBR
Today I got round to installing the second of the 2 TB disks I bought last week. For decades now, there has been the One True Way to partition disks, so much so that it doesn't have a qualifier: Master boot record. There's also a program that goes with it, fdisk, which has been around as long. But gradually the time has come for change: MBR stores information about the disk as cylinder, head and track information, long after that kind of addressing has lost any meaning.
Firefox crashes, more of the same
Today's firefox crash was once again the same: #4 0x8322f682 in js::MarkContext () from /usr/local/lib/firefox/libxul.so #5 0x0d873744 in ?? () #6 0xbfbfac7c in ?? () #7 0x00000000 in ?? () This is no longer news; I'll keep information on a separate page.
Publishing video clips
Yvonne has been asking me for some time to prepare the video clips from her camera for publication on the web. I've been dragging my heels, and I should be ashamed of myself. That's almost a basic copy operation. The real problem is the sheer size of the files: -rwxrwxrwx 1 yvonne home 357399582 May 24 09:29 MVI_0093.AVI That's a 3 minute clip in 640×480 format. Why is it so big? It's clearly far too large to publish (and if I did, it would use up 4% of my monthly traffic quota).
Today's firefox crash
The firefox crashes seem to be converging. This is the third day that it crashed in the same place: #4 0x8322f682 in js::MarkContext () from /usr/local/lib/firefox/libxul.so #5 0xa4267ac4 in ?? () #6 0xbfbfac7c in ?? () #7 0x00000000 in ?? () It's interesting that frame 6 again shows the same address on the stack. Maybe there's some trampoline in the previous stack frame, and it's normal that the remainder of the trace is invalid. Another thing that I noted was the number of threads: one initial thread and 23 others.
Daily firefox crash: a pattern emerges
Today's firefox crash backtrace had a certain sense of déjà vu: #4 0x8322f682 in js::MarkContext () from /usr/local/lib/firefox/libxul.so #5 0x950e5244 in ?? () #6 0xbfbfac7c in ?? () #7 0x00000000 in ?? () It's not identical to the previous one, but the trap occurs at exactly the same location, 0x8322f682 in js::MarkContext (). I suppose it's about time to take a look at the source, but not today.
eSATA: worth the trouble
I've now fixed my backup script, and it no longer uses compression when writing to local disks. Even with a USB connection, that gave a threefold speed increase. But a number of people, including Peter Jeremy and Rick Owens, have confirmed that it was worth paying a few dollars more to use eSATA instead of USB. Rick tells me that he has had a sevenfold speed increase over USB. I don't see this happening to me, but we'll find out once my eSATA controller (delayed by the Dragon Boat Festival) finally arrives.
Photo storage: why not ZFS?
Mail from Rick Owens today, asking if I had considered using ZFS for my photo storage. Yes, I have, but decided against it: I don't know ZFS, and to get to know it would involve some effort. ZFS belongs to Oracle, a company I seriously distrust. It's available for free now, but that could change. One of my concerns about using UFS was related to the long-term viability of the FreeBSD platform.
Email: more nails in the coffin
Somehow people seem to be trying to outdo each other with bad email. Today it was eBay: Date: Thu, 9 Jun 2011 12:09:34 -0700 (MST) From: ebay_invite@survey.ebay.com To: groggyhimself@lemis.com Subject: groggyhimself, Please Answer 3 Questions about your Recent eBay Purchase! ----------------------------------------------------------------- eBay sent this message to Greg Lehey (groggyhimself). Your registered name is included to show this message originated from eBay. ... <html> <head> <title>eBay Research</title> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"> <STYLE TYPE="text/css"> <!-- A { text-decoration: none; } That was a genuine message from eBay. They seem to have taken the HTML and converted the markup to HTML entities and stuffed the whole lot in the text version of the message.
Reliable map data
Call from Peter Dilley in the afternoon, reminding me of the books he lent me. Off after lunch to bring them back. I've never been there before, but I had the address, in Camms Road. That's what I have a GPS navigator for, of course. But, just as it doesn't know Kleins Road, where I live, it doesn't know Camms Road. It does know Cahills Road, a tiny little dead end forest road just across the road from Chris Yeardley, and offered that. Was the address correct? Difficult to say. Decided to check the address in the (online) phone book, but that didn't work either: there's no “Dilley” in there.
Installing the new disks
So now I have a new photo disk and two backup disks, all 2 “Terabytes”. First put one in one of the particularly cheap and nasty external enclosures, in the process coming across this gem on the power supply: It's bilingual German and English. In German, the input is rated at 100-240V ~, and the output is 12 V DC at 2 A, while in English the input is 50-60 Hz at 1 A (where does the rest of the power go?)
Today's firefox crash
I'm beginning to see some sort of pattern in the firefox crashes. First, they all come out of the signal handler, so the first four stack frames are always the same: (gdb) bt #0 0x845a8147 in kill () from /lib/libc.so.7 #1 0x845a80a6 in raise () from /lib/libc.so.7 #2 0x823cb55a in XRE_LockProfileDirectory () from /usr/local/lib/firefox/libxul.so #3 <signal handler called> My guess is that the XRE_LockProfileDirectory () frame is saving the configuration before accepting the inevitable and re-raising the signal (in this case SIGSEGV). But once again it was in JavaScript code, and once again the backtrace terminated abnormally: #4 0x8322f682 in js::MarkContext () from /usr/local/lib/firefox/libxul.so #5 0xac6176c4 in ??
Still more disks
While in Geelong, went to MSY and bought 3 “2 TB” drives (really 2×10¹² bytes, or 1.82 TB of 2¿¿ bytes). With a couple of eSATA enclosures I ended up paying $316, $22 more than I would have paid for three external drives at Officeworks. I hope the eSATA interface is worth the extra money.
General public illiteracy
I've offered the old dish washer and vacuum cleaner on Freecycle. The dish washer in particular got considerable attention. Freecycle members have no particular computer-related qualifications, of course, but you'd hope for a certain amount of general literacy, and clearly the ability to use email is an advantage. The replies I received showed that a number of people had neither. Here a number of replies: do you still have this available as we are moving to Mt Mercer this week!! Would love this if u still have it !! I would love this dishwasher, I am a little handy with tools and could probably fix this unit.
Reception problems: config issue?
I've been keeping notes of less-than-perfect recordings lately, and gradually I'm seeing a pattern: they seem to be quite dependent on the channel. Most of the recent ones have been on two frequencies out of 5 (7 and Nine). Then it occurred to me: there's a column finetune in the configuration database. Was it maybe not set? No, it wasn't. Anywhere. All the rows had it set to either 0 or NULL. So I set it to 1 for all of them. Now to wait for the results.
Officeworks for computer supplies
While in town, also dropped in at Officeworks to buy some DVD+Rs. I'm planning to go to Geelong tomorrow, and while I'm there I'll probably buy some new 2 TB disks at MSY. But it's always good to compare prices, and to my surprise Officeworks had 2 TB external drives for $98. The cheapest ones at MSY, a real low-price company, are $99. That's quite surprising. Unfortunately, all their disks were USB-only, and I wanted eSATA, so I didn't buy anything.
Another firefox crash
The next firefox crash happened under similar circumstances to the last: I was trying to leave feedback on eBay. Is this also JavaScript? It's not in member functions, but it still appears to be JavaScript: (gdb) bt #0 0x845a8147 in kill () from /lib/libc.so.7 #1 0x845a80a6 in raise () from /lib/libc.so.7 #2 0x823cb55a in XRE_LockProfileDirectory () from /usr/local/lib/firefox/libxul.so #3 <signal handler called> #4 0x831dcfae in JSCompartment::wrap () from /usr/local/lib/firefox/libxul.so #5 0xbd5c3048 in ?? () #6 0x00000000 in ?? () #7 0xbfbfa798 in ?? () #8 0x82cba12d in xpc_LocalizeContext () from /usr/local/lib/firefox/libxul.so
Another firefox crash
Firefox continues to crash at far-too-frequent intervals. I'm collecting stack backtraces. This one was much shorter: (gdb) bt #0 0x845a8147 in kill () from /lib/libc.so.7 #1 0x845a80a6 in raise () from /lib/libc.so.7 #2 0x823cb55a in XRE_LockProfileDirectory () from /usr/local/lib/firefox/libxul.so #3 <signal handler called> #4 0x8322f682 in js::MarkContext () from /usr/local/lib/firefox/libxul.so #5 0xb5ff1fc4 in ?? () So again it seems to be in JavaScript. This one was an eBay page.
64 bit FreeBSD: the next attempt
The real problem I have in migrating my system to 64 bits is that I don't want any significant downtime on my main machine. Today I thought of another way to attack the problem: migrate Yvonne's system first. She's currently running FreeBSD 8.1, about a year old, so it's time for an upgrade anyway. Set off to do that: the first step was to add a new disk: for some reason I had forgotten to put a spare root partition on the system. But first to boot the system. Connected up the external USB drive with the 64 bit system and tried to boot.
Dying firefoxes
Firefox continues to crash. Today I ran ps -l against the process every second, and caught the output when it died. An extract: UID PID PPID CPU PRI NI VSZ RSS MWCHAN STAT TT TIME COMMAND 1004 54918 54586 0 44 0 1038764 741776 ucond S 7 41:01.34 /usr/local/lib/firefox/firefox-bin 1004 54918 54586 0 44 0 1038764 715868 - T 7 41:01.98 /usr/local/lib/firefox/firefox-bin 1004 54918 54586 0 44 0 1038764 727948 - TL 7 41:02.03 /usr/local/lib/firefox/firefox-bin 1004 54918 54586 0 44 0 1038764 727672 - TL 7 41:02.10 /usr/local/lib/firefox/firefox-bin ...
More Hugin games
There are a number of new features in the latest version of Hugin. One of them—I think—is a direct display of various projections in the fast preview window. I've looked at various projections before, but I recalled it being quite a pain. Now I can select projections and look at them almost immediately.
Against the light panoramas and new hugin
Photo day again today, and again it was sunny. Took my photos as usual, and while converting them installed the latest version of Hugin, in the hope that the mask processing would be better. I wasn't completely disappointed. I can now reshape a mask by dragging on the corner points. Previously this moved the entire mask, not quite what I was looking for. But I still can't get include masks to work, and the mask boundaries are always shown in white, which makes them almost impossible to detect in my situation, where I'm working around the brightest parts of the image: And wouldn't it be nice to have the same mask for two images, one as an exclude mask and one as an include mask?
Why copy zone info file?
On most UNIX-like systems, the canonical way to install a time zone file is simple: # cp -p /usr/share/zoneinfo/Australia/Melbourne /etc/localtime But why? An obvious reason is that /usr is usually a separate file system. That's not the way I do things, so I could equally well do: # ln -s /usr/share/zoneinfo/Australia/Melbourne /etc/localtime That would arguably make things easier when updating time zone files, which seems to be happening a lot lately.
Seamless system downgrade
I'm still puzzling about the problems starting X on the AMD-64 image for my machine, but it's not the highest priority. Today I saw another minor issue: the statistics program for my 3G modem counted bytes in 32 bit integers, and currently I have transferred about 3 GB (“-997 MiB”) since last starting PPP. Clearly a case for widening the integers. But what's the name of the program? It should be e169-stats, but I've been playing around with it, and for no particularly good reason the current version is called fstats. Went looking for it and didn't find it where I thought I should.
Firefox surpasses itself
I've been watching firefox crash with regular monotony. I wonder if it's running out of some internal memory space: it seems to hit about 1 GB in size and then crash. Just before it does, top shows it in STOP state: PID USERNAME THR PRI NICE SIZE RES STATE C TIME WCPU COMMAND 80977 grog 21 44 0 1030M 897M STOP 0 30:17 16.65% firefox-bin If it's a memory limit, it's complicated: I've seen larger process images.
Cutting over to 64 bits
Carried on with the next step of the 64 bit upgrade today: upgraded the system to the latest FreeBSD 8-STABLE, built a new, custom kernel and booted as dereel.lemis.com. The system is (currently) on an external USB disk, so the cutover involved moving the disk to the correct system and rebooting. How did it work? Here are the things that I should have done before rebooting, some of which I really did do as described: Move /var/log and /var/squid to /home/var.
Reboot solves Microsoft problems
Another strange thing happened during processing the images. A while back my wine emulation of Ashampoo photo optimizer started to hang. I found a workaround, but never the cause. Now, since yesterday's reboot, things are back to normal. I wish I knew why. It seems to be the Microsoft Way to solve problems by rebooting, even prophylactically, but this is almost certainly a FreeBSD issue, and it shouldn't happen there.
Strange camera problems
Yvonne asked me to take some photos of her riding Carlotta, so out onto the road. Carlotta is gaited, so it made sense to take some high-speed sequences. In all photos I used manual focus, because I can't count on the autofocus to do the right thing so quickly. I have a “focus once” function button on the camera, which performs an autofocus when in manual mode. Pressed that and took some photos. First took a single photo, then switched to high speed sequence. Here the first (normal mode) and the first of the sequence: Not only was the complete sequence out of focus, but it was overexposed by 2 stops.
Another USB crash
Somehow these USB disks aren't really reliable enough. I don't seem to lose any data, but there are continual strange messages that suggest things aren't all going well. Today the message was very clear: once again I froze the entire system. That's enough. From now on I revert to doing my backups over the LAN to some other machine that doesn't need to be up all the time. While the system was down, put in the 4 GB of memory that I recently received. Now I have 6 GB, of which I can only use 3 until I finally get the machine running in 64 bit mode.
64 bit upgrade, one small step
Yvonne off to dog training this morning, so continued with the upgrade to 64 bits that had got interrupted last week. Things didn't work too much better today: got as far as checking out some configuration files when I got interrupted by Real Life. This is taking for ever, even though I'm nearly finished. I dread getting X up and stumbling.
More USB problems?
Backing up photos today was less than reassuring. Lots of messages like: rsync: recv_generator: failed to stat "/photobackup/Photos/grog/20090321/housephoto-notes": Device not configured (6) rsync: recv_generator: failed to stat "/photobackup/Photos/grog/20090321/makejpeg": Device not configured (6) rsync: recv_generator: failed to stat "/photobackup/Photos/grog/20090321/n-to-house-w-to-house.pto": Device not configured (6) rsync: recv_generator: failed to stat "/photobackup/Photos/grog/20090321/n-to-house-w-to-house.pto.mk": Device not configured (6) rsync: recv_generator: failed to stat "/photobackup/Photos/grog/20090321/verandah-e-verandah-se.pto": Device not configured (6) It wasn't repeatable: after aborting the backup, disconnecting and reconnecting the USB cable, all was well. There were also no console messages, but I wonder if I shouldn't migrate to some more reliable method of backup, maybe eSATA.
Goodbye PDP-11
Spent most of the day loading the PDP-11, documentation, disks and software into Alastair's car: He had a trailer for the cabinets, but wanted to put the hardware in the back of his car: That required significant dismantling, and it took its time.
Picking up the PDP-11
In April 1997, while we were in the process of moving from Germany to Australia, Hartmut Brandt gave me his PDP-11 (really an LSI-11/73). Despite the best of intentions, I never got round to powering it on, and well over a year I offered it to Alastair Boyanich. That was the background to the Hackers' barbecue that we held last year. But Alastair didn't show: he had trouble with the old car he was restoring. He finally made it here today with his father George to stay the night and take the computer tomorrow. Much fun was had by all:
More eBay pain
Two weeks ago I accidentally bought the wrong camera for Yvonne on eBay. Discussed with the seller, who wanted a $15 restocking charge, which I paid, so I though that the matter was over. Not so. On Friday I received a mail message from eBay in typical obfuscated form. Hidden in the mess was: eBay opened an unpaid item case for Canon PSA3100IS Digital Compact Camera A3100 IS SILVER , because jrandomseller either hasn't recorded your payment or didn't receive it yet. Clearly a misunderstanding, and I sent a message to the seller, who didn't respond.
Ports build complete
Managed to complete the ports build today, modulo some problems: wget failed with a configuration problem: ===> wget-1.12_3 GNUTLS and OPENSSL are mutually exclusive, enable at most one of them. All well and good, but why didn't the configuration dialogue notice that? gimp tried to install twice.
Too windy for photos
Today should have been garden photo day, like every Saturday, but it was too windy. I should have done them yesterday: the weather forecast was correct, and they're forecasting more wind tomorrow and rain on Monday. Still, did some photo processing, notably the egg photos. And for some reason the Ashampoo photo optimizer didn't want to run. It just hung there, and when I aborted with ^C, I got the message: err:module:attach_process_dlls "winspool.drv" failed to initialize, aborting What caused that? I really have no idea. Tried a new version of wine, but got the same problem I noted on 18 March 2011: ELF interpreter /libexec/ld-elf.so.1 not found Abort trap: 6 This appears to be related to the value of kern.maxdsiz, ...
New system build, continued
Carried on running the ports build of the amd64 system in the background all day long, in the process modifying my method somewhat. Many years ago I changed the layout of my file systems. Traditionally the systems are /, /usr, /var and maybe /home. I have incorporated /usr with / and split /var between / (system-related directories such as /var/db and /var/run) and /home (user-related directories such as /var/mail, /var/spool and /var/tmp). Over the years I've increased the size of the root partition. In the last edition of “The Complete FreeBSD” I recommended 4 to 6 GB. My current machine has 10 GB, and for the new machine I chose 20 GB.
Installing AMD64
Yvonne off with Nemo this morning to visit Jenny Judson near Myrtleford, leaving her computer behind for me to play around with. The plan was to boot with my new 8.2-RELEASE bootonly disk and then build a STABLE kernel from sources. It didn't quite work out that way. It seems that this “bootonly” disk contains, well, only /boot: the kernel and a couple of helper files for the bootstrap. And it's 50 MB in size. Well, what's on the CD is. It's a lot more once it's properly installed. The bloat of ages looks like this: # du -sk /boot /src/UNIX/Sixth-Edition/rkunix 326962 /boot 28 /src/UNIX/Sixth-Edition/rkunix A modern kernel with helpers is over 10,000 times the size of the kernel of the Sixth Edition of Unix!
More 64 bit upgrade preparations
I can't actually start installing my amd64 version of FreeBSD until tomorrow, because I need Yvonne's computer to do the bootstrap, and she's not leaving until tomorrow. But I still had some time to prepare the disk I was going to use. I have a surprising number of external USB disks: three 1 TB and one 500 GB. I use two of the big ones for photo backups and currently the little one for other backups, but both that disk and the third 1 TB disk contain older copies of my /src file system and various other junk. My intention was to move the backups to the third 1 TB disk and use the 500 GB disk as a bootstrap disk for amd64.
Preparing for 64 bit upgrade
Yvonne is off to the High Country on Friday for a weekend playing with dogs, and in that time I hope to be able to upgrade at least her machine to AMD64. Last time I did an upgrade I ended up downloading lots of tarballs, and by chance my monthly traffic quota runs out tomorrow, so it made sense to upgrade defake, my background installation VM, to the latest and greatest kernel and ports. That worked fine, but I was still amazed to note that I managed to download 1 GB of tarballs, including another version of this amazingly large Qt Everywhere, for which the canonical site is apparently still under construction: -rw-r--r-- ...
Localizing USB flakiness
Yesterday I established beyond reasonable doubt that my Huawei E1762 USB modem doesn't work reliably with the new 5 m USB cable. But who is to blame? According to the standard, the combination should work. We've established that it's not the motherboard, since it happens with two different ones, including the one where it has been running relatively reliably for months. The new component is the cable. So, let's connect some other device with it. First I tried a disk drive. Complete failure: May 18 13:22:44 dereel kernel: usb_alloc_device: set address 2 failed (USB_ERR_STALLED, ignored) May 18 13:22:46 dereel kernel: usbd_req_re_enumerate: addr=2, set address failed!
Upgrading to 64 bit
Finally found some cheap RAM for dereel, 4 GB for $40. Now I can increase memory from 3 GB to 6 GB, which means upgrading to 64 bits. Downloaded a boot-only amd64 ISO version of FreeBSD (in the record time of 5 minutes, 56 seconds), and planned to boot it on cojones. The boot failed with the message “kernel doesn't support long mode”. Further investigation showed that this was a masterpiece of obfuscation: it means “Hardware doesn't have a 64 bit mode”. Why kernel? Looks like a bug to me. Tried another machine, which I also thought did 64 bits, but no luck.
USB reliability
Received a 5 m USB extension cable in the post today. That's just what I need to connect my 3G modem to dereel, my main machine: the antenna cable is too short, and an extension would weaken the signal still further, so it made sense to use a digital connection. Things worked out of the box: disconnect the modem on the cojones, the other machine, connect to dereel via extension cable, and start PPP again. It worked so well that my TCP connections didn't even drop! Well, for a while. Then I discovered: May 17 13:03:10 dereel kernel: ugen5.2: <HUAWEI Technology> at usbus5 (disconnected) May 17 13:03:10 dereel kernel: u3g0: at uhub5, port 4, addr 2 (disconnected) May 17 13:03:10 dereel ppp[31895]: tun0: Warning: deflink: Unable to set physical to speed 0 May 17 13:03:10 dereel ppp[31895]: tun0: Warning: deflink: tcsetattr: ...
Correcting underexposure
I took two photos at the Buninyong Botanic Gardens: the first time round I discovered I had the camera set to manual exposure, which proved to be 3.7 EV underexposed: Not a problem, since I noticed it and took a correctly exposed version. But it's interesting to see what my software can do. Tried DxO Optics "Pro" and Ashampoo photo optimizer, both individually and in combination. The results, though not as good as correct exposure, and surprisingly good given the extreme underexposure.
Web browser crashes: state of the art?
Over the last couple of days I've noticed a surprising number of segmentation violations on my system. Most are from my weather station software, which continues to die in nasty ways inside the USB stack, but there are a surprising number of browser-related crashes: May 10 12:00:03 dereel kernel: pid 29151 (npviewer.bin), uid 1001: exited on signal 11 (core dumped) May 10 15:16:41 dereel kernel: pid 28882 (firefox-bin), uid 1001: exited on signal 11 (core dumped) May 10 18:46:07 dereel kernel: pid 16828 (firefox-bin), uid 1001: exited on signal 11 (core dumped) May 11 11:10:35 dereel kernel: pid 81847 (firefox-bin), uid 1001: exited on signal 11 (core dumped) May 11 14:08:08 dereel kernel: pid 1799 (hald-probe-volume), uid 0: exited on signal 6 (core dumped) May 11 14:08:08 dereel kernel: pid 1800 (hald-probe-volume), uid 0: exited on signal 6 (core dumped) May ...
Olympus Viewer 2
As planned, did some playing around with Olympus Viewer 2 today. It's amazing how much reading I need to do for any of this stuff. Somehow the whole approach is different. I won't complain about the file name selection any more; all commercial software has that problem. But according to the help (which only showed up when I downloaded a 12 month old update—why didn't I get that version from the web site?) , I need to process every image individually. Maybe that's what they mean by this silly word “develop”—they're still thinking in terms of darkrooms and chemicals.
More raw conversion comparisons
I still haven't got my head (or my stomach) around Olympus Viewer 2, but I do need to do some more comparisons before my test license for DxO Optics "Pro" runs out. In particular, I haven't done any comparison of lens distortion yet. I know from past experience that my Zuiko Digital ED 12-60mm F2.8-4.0 SWD, otherwise an excellent lens, has severe barrel distortion at full wide-angle and close up. Here's an example, taken about 20 cm from an A4-sized test chart: Running the cursor over the image shows what DxO makes of it: much better.
eBay: Make it even more painful
As a result of the camera purchases, I was involved in eBay's horrible messaging system much more than I would have liked. I got mail messages (in eBay's barely legible format) from two of the vendors and sent them replies. eBay refused one of them: Oops. We weren't able to send your message to some-vendor, because the email address you used to send this message, gurgle@lmeis.com, isn't linked to your eBay account. To keep eBay safe, we need you to send messages from a registered eBay email address. This will prevent your messages from being blocked in the future.
DxO and Olympus "Viewer 2"
Coincidentally to my investigation of DxO Optics "Pro", I found an article about raw converters in the c't special Digitale Fotografie 02/2011. This is a different article from the one I mentioned last month, and it pays more attention to the kind of operations you'd expect from a raw converter, notably correction for lens aberrations. It seems that there aren't many converters that do this kind of correction, but the article mentions that the Olympus converter (not tested) is one of them.
Backup strategies for photos
Mail from Michael Hughes today, asking how I back up photos. That's certainly an interesting topic. Digital technology has made many things easier than before, but it's also easier to completely lose images. Paradoxically, it's also easier to keep multiple backups, and that's what both Michael and I do. I've been backing up my computer for ever, of course. In the days of CP/M and MS-DOS I used floppies. They were slow, expensive and unreliable. Later I used tape, both QIC and some strange format that I now forget. It was slow, expensive and unreliable. About 18 years ago I moved to DDS storage, which proved to be a little faster, have a little more capacity, but it was still expensive and unreliable.